Midland

As I get closer to finishing the novel, I’ll share more with you about the premise, the characters, the synopsis, etc. Really. I swear. But I’ll share this with you now.

I set the novel in Midland, my hometown, for several reasons. Primarily because the name itself “Mid-land,” was too perfect to pass up. The novel is about six members of a Mexican-American family in West Texas who are dealing with generational and cultural shifts.

Today, I’m revising a chapter that takes place during Lee’s annual homecoming game. I was googling for the high school football schedule. I think my search was “homecoming + midland + lee” or something like that. Somehow an excerpt from a book about Laura Bush came up in the search results. The book is called The Perfect Wife and the author is Ann Gerhart.

A few paragraphs caught my eye, but this is the one that really stood out:

“The black population of Midland is and was small. During the 1960s, when the town had a population of about fifty thousand, perhaps five thousand blacks lived in the neighborhoods south of Florida Avenue. When I called to set up an appointment with Dr. Viola Coleman, a proud and determined physician still practicing in her eighties, who led the fight to desegregate the schools, she told me wryly: ‘Now, I'm black, so you know I live on the other side of the tracks.’ As I talked with other people around Midland, who were unfailingly helpful with questions about Laura, they always would ask where else I had been. And when I told them I had been over on Florida Avenue, their eyes would widen, and they would wonder what in heaven's name I could have been doing over there. Or they would look at me quizzically when I mentioned the spanking new Supermercado, with its tortilleria baking fresh tortillas daily on the premises and its shelves studded with calabaza and mangoes. It was a huge place, with bright purple and yellow walls, over past Big Spring Highway, but many in Midland seemed to have never noticed it, let alone gone inside. When I mentioned this to Dr. Coleman, she just smiled. ‘Even today, there are people who don't know there is anything past Big Spring,’ she said of the neighborhoods west of the highway, where the youngster George Bush once lived with his parents, that are now primarily Hispanic. ‘It is a community that remains invisible.’"

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/excerpts/2003-12-23-perfect-wife_x.htm

The father in my story owns two grocery stores very much like the Supermercado. This paragraph reminds me exactly why I’m writing this book. For some reason, this community, the one I grew up in, still somehow manages to remain “invisible” to a large percentage of Midland’s residents, even as Mexicans and Mexican Americans grow closer to becoming the largest minority (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) in the U.S.

There are other disturbing passages in the excerpt. Including this one:

“When Laura and George Bush hosted her high school class reunion at the Governor's Mansion in Austin in 1997, they threw open their doors to Laura's fellow graduates of Lee High School as well as to the members of the 1964 class of Midland High. Some five hundred people ate barbecue and drank Lone Star beer and twisted the night away, marveling how far the pretty girl with the twinkly smile had come. Nobody even thought to invite the members of the class of 1964 of Midland's third high school, all-black George Washington Carver. ‘Nobody even remembered,’ said someone who attended. ‘Isn't that incredible? Isn't that awful?’”


I don’t expect my book to change the world. I don’t even expect to change anyone’s opinion. I just hope to inspire people to look beyond their own preconceptions. No group is invisible or forgotten unless others let their ignorance blind them.