![]() In fact, more than once I’m ashamed to say these slurs ushered forth from my own mouth. It was not uncommon to hear racial slurs about Mexicans. These Hispanic classmates were, to be more specific, Mexican Americans. There were, I think, two Black kids and two Asians I went to school with. And all of us white kids bussed into Castroville and met up with our Hispanic counterparts. This neighborhood was not quite suburban, for there was no nearby “urbanity,” nor was it quite “rural” in the sense of a desolate wilderness road, or a dusty lane bordered by bucolic strawberry fields-although this did literally exist less than a mile away. The bus then meandered the neighborhood’s thoroughfare past my neighbors’ gardened lawns and steep driveways to suck up the other children through the doors that yawned open. The school bus pulled into my neighborhood from Highway 156 and picked me up from where I waited at the curb under a two-hundred-year-old coast live oak, in a lot filled with golden brome. The other white kids lived near me, in my housing development, with their parents and their siblings, in the nearly-uniform three-bedroom, two-bath houses that sat on half-acre lots. ![]() Almost all of my classmates were Hispanic, the children who shared rooms in the one- or two-bedroom ranch-style homes that make up the raft that is Castroville awash in its artichoke sea. My schools’ (elementary, middle, and high schools’) demographics were Hispanic, White, and Other. ![]() My school sat amidst Castroville’s tiny houses. We lived in a housing development between these artichoke fields and the hills of the eastern mountains.Īs all American children are required, I attended school, and there was no school in my housing development. ![]() I am white, and my parents did not work the artichoke fields. Those humans are almost exclusively of the Hispanic ethnicity. The humans who work the artichoke fields live in Castroville. Though I grew up near it, I did not live in Castroville. A mile to the west sit Salinas River State Beach’s sand dunes, blasted by the Pacific Ocean’s waves, and inland, over the slightly rolling hills, the artichoke fields carry to the foothills where they merge with strawberry fields and blend into the Gabilan Mountains, six miles to the east. I grew up on California’s Central Coast, near a tiny town called Castroville, the self-proclaimed “Artichoke Center of the World.” The homes that line the blocks and house Castroville’s just-over-five-thousand-inhabitants cluster together like a raft that floats upon a green sea of artichokes. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |