Gay-Tex-Mex: Autoethnographic Vignettes

Texans Are Taught

Texans are taught—literally—in school to be proud of living in the Lone Star State. In the 1960s, Mrs. von Rosenberg told us second graders that Texas was the biggest state in the union, until one of the boys in class asked her, “But, isn’t Alaska bigger than Texas?” You could see the shock on Mrs. von Rosenberg’s face as she realized she was wrong.

Texas Cowboy Culture

Texas has a unique outline shape as a state. It looks bold, vast, and rugged. The state’s famous anti-littering campaign slogan, “Don’t Mess With Texas,” was embraced by its arrogant citizenry. In many parts of the state it was pure cowboy culture—kick-ass, hell-raising, shit-kicking, tight Wranglers, rodeo, country-western line dancing, barbeque, potato salad, chicken fried steak, Lone Star Beer, Austin City Limits, football games every goddamn weekend, and Baptist brimstone, hellfire, and damnation on Sunday mornings followed by family dinner at Luby’s Cafeteria.

Texas Hispanic Culture

But on my side of town—98% Hispanic—it was fiestas, quinceañeras, Mariachi music, with tortillas, fideo, arroz con pollo, borrachos y pachucos y puro chiflada, piñatas on your birthday, La llorona crying by the river at midnight, hiding when a stranger knocked on your front door, cleaning other people’s houses and doing other people’s laundry, women wearing veils to Catholic mass on Sunday mornings, reciting the rosary every day, and lighting candles or burying raw eggs in the back yard and saying a prayer over them when someone was sick.

Mí amá

I was proud of our family’s surname—Saldaña—because I was the only one in my elementary class who had a mark over one of the letters in his name. My mother, mí amá, told me it came from Spain and that I should always put it over the n in Saldaña. The tilde was different—and it made me feel different, special, and unique.

In the 1960s, there was hushed talk in my neighborhood about a very strange man who liked to dress up in women’s clothes. I walked in on my mother and aunt talking about it in shocked and disapproving tones. My mother looked at me, realized I had overheard the adult conversation, pointed her finger at me and said, “Johnny, don’ you ebber turn out like that!”

I loved my mother’s thick Spanish accent. She was born in Spain, yet raised in Mexican American culture. My parents didn’t teach me Spanish as I grew up because they had become more fluent in English by that time. But mom would still have problems pronouncing certain words like “frerijerater” or “compooter,” and when she got mad at another driver for taking a parking space in a lot she’d yell from her car, “You son of a beesh!”

Mí apá

My father, mí apá, was quite the do-it-yourself man, hardened from picking fruit and cotton in the fields and manual labor as a carpenter and a cook most of his life. When I was nine or ten years old I was helping my father fix the car—or rather, standing next to him holding a wrench he would later need as he tinkered under the hood. He chatted to me about this and that as he worked, which most likely bored me to no end, but then stopped with a brief pause, looked at me and said, “Johnny, don’t ever trust the white man.”

“Saldaney”

My seventh-grade P.E. teacher was as Texas redneck as they came—a man who reeked of cigar smoke and sweat. Probably ex-military and probably never going to be anything more than he was at the time. He called all of us “lads” by our last names, but he called mine, “Saldaney.” I told him it was pronounced “Saldaña.” But for the rest of the school year, it was said with outright defiant redneck mockery and a shit-eating grin on his face: “Saldaney.”

Wetback

A “wetback” is a demeaning ethnic slur, referring to a Mexican who swims across the Rio Grande River to enter the United States “illegally.” After a long morning of high school marching band rehearsal outdoors in the hot Texas sun, we would all come back to the band hall to put our instruments away. The perspiration that was always on the back of my shirt was a running joke among my White friends. They would smirk and pat me gently on the back over and over saying, “Hey Johnny, your back’s wet, your back’s wet!”

Theatre

The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Drama was one of the biggest—of course—in the nation. And there, for the first time, my closeted self was surrounded by openly gay people—theatre queens with bitchy attitude imitating Bette Midler and singing songs from Cabaret. Like we said in Texas at the time, “You can’t swing a dead cat in here without hittin’ a queer!” We called it “theatre” while the lesser educated of rural east and west Texas called it “thee-AY-ter.” There was a wild Texas boldness among my classmates—a post-1968 college radicalism that was avant-garde and protest theatre and fuck-you-in-your-face experimental art. Being gay there was not a sin, as Catholic Church had taught me. Being gay was a status symbol. Being gay was a badge of honor. But still, it was something never to be spoken of in the presence of my oh-so Hispanic Texas family.

Student Teaching

During my senior year of teacher certification, I taught one semester at Stephen F. Austin High School, where the old money families sent their children. I asked one of the young White teens if he was going to audition for my play production, and he told me to my face, “No. I don’t want to work with a Mexican.”

My next student teaching assignment was at David Crocket High School, where the young cowboys from surrounding farms and ranches attended. I walked cautiously down the school’s hallways, noticing how these tall, lean young men in straw cowboy hats, rattlesnake skin boots, and brown leather belts with huge gold buckles would stare at me with a look that suggested, “You ain’t from around here, are you, boy?” I’d try to butch it up by walking with my legs spread wide and talking in a deeper than normal voice to fit in.

In the Closet

It was the mid-1970s, right after Cesar Chavez and Luis Valdez had made names for themselves with their Chicano social activism. It was right after the Stonewall riots and the birth of the gay pride movement. But there was a good ol’ boy Republican state senator—his name escapes me—during my college years, who honestly believed and publicly stated that there was no way there could be gay people living in Texas.

I never told my parents I was gay. There had been too many messages and enculturation growing up from the 1950s to the 1970s that it was not acceptable—not acceptable in Texas, not acceptable among Hispanic families. My father eventually passed, then my mother, eight years later. Yet never a word to them about my identity and beginnings of a long-term relationship with a man in another southwestern state.

In the early 2000s, I had a long-distance phone call with my niece who had grown up in my Texas hometown and who chatted frequently with my mother at the kitchen table before she passed. My street-wise niece figured out that I was gay, for she has an open and loving spirit. And over the phone one night, I confessed to her that I always regretted never telling my mom about being gay. Then she confessed to me, “Uncle Johnny, she knew—she just never told you.”

The Cowboy’s Ethos

A running joke among Texans is that there are only two states in the United States—Texas, and the rest of the country. Texas can be a hard place to live in. There are people with gritty outlooks, toughened up and emboldened from the pride that comes naturally from living in the Great Lone Star State. Not everyone is a cowboy, but you adopt the cowboy’s ethos—his leathered spirit, his sunburnt soul. I guess—or rather, I reckon—that living and growing up there has toughened me up, too. I’ve made it this far in life, and that’s good. I’m not a cowboy by any means, but ah know hauw t’ drop a Texas drawwwl as good as eny of ‘em—y’all.

Don’t mess with Texas. And, don’t mess with me.