Being Hispanic in old-time Phoenix
As a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant guy who grew up in Minneapolis in the 1960s and early '70s, I knew nothing about Hispanic people. All I'd seen had been stereotypical views, like the Frito Bandito, and a comedian who used to say, "My name: José Jimenez", which apparently was hilarious, at least to the grownups. My high school had mostly Scandinavian people, like the Soderquists, or people like me, of mixed nationality but white, and of course the black kids, like Prince Nelson (I never met him, he went to a different high school than I did, and apparently spent a lot of time riding his motorcycle around Lake Minnetonka).
The first Hispanic person I ever met was my friend Miguel, who went to ASU with me. I found his world to be very strange, and very interesting. He had been born in Mexico, had worked in the fields as a kid, and was the first in his family to go to college. I loved looking at Phoenix through his eyes!
But that's the best I can do, try to see it through someone else's eyes. And as I write this I know that people will wonder what right I have to to try to describe the Hispanic experience in old-time Phoenix. So I'll just tell you what I know, and hopefully someone better qualified than me will take it from there.
Of course, in old-time Phoenix the word "Hispanic" wouldn't have been used, or "Latino". I'm not exactly sure when "Chicano" came into use, but in old-time Phoenix if you looked a certain way, you would simply be described as Mexican. Over the years things have changed, and the word, like Oriental, is usually best used to describe food, not people. Of course it all gets very confusing, because someone who is Mexican is a citizen of that country, but people could call me Italian, and that would seem to make sense. These are not races, they're nationalities, but I can remember when my friend Miguel had to check "white" on the census, and said to me, "Hey, I ain't no darned white guy!"
Time-traveling back to old-time Phoenix to find discrimination and segregation, you really don't have to go very far. The laws changed quickly, but people have changed slowly. And the harsh feelings between the two countries of the United States and Mexico, which goes back many generations, doesn't help people of Hispanic heritage in Phoenix. I don't know what Phoenix was like in the 1930s, but I've seen old movies that use the term "Spanish food" in place of "Mexican food", which tells me something of the tension.
As someone who is interested in Phoenix history, I've found precious little about the day-to-day life of people that today we would call Hispanic. What I have found tends to be outrageous and cartoony, extreme stereotypes one way or another. But I know who these people were, they were like everyone else in Phoenix, who lived there, raised families, and helped build the city that I love.
Image at the top of this post: Little girls and a dog in Gold Alley, Phoenix, Arizona.
You need not look far to see and feel discrimination in old time Phoenix against Chicanos, or whatever other term you choose to use, some of which were downright ugly. In the late 1890's when roughly 2/3rds of the population was Chicano a stir and then a near riot occurred over whether to teach Spanish as a second language in the schools. Even then English as the first and only language was emphasized by the press and a portion of the populace despite the heavy concentration of Spanish speakers in the community.
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