On Blogging - 1st Anniversary Series

Sitting here in front of computer, I really should be focusing on finishing my book - but I feel the intense desire to write down many ideas. There is much I have seen in my middle-aged lifetime - I have been lucky to know about so many different sides of our society.

Blogs are good for circulating stories. A professor of mine once told me that people are never interest in the author's own story. I think he is right most of the time... but in a blog, it can be different depending on how the stories are told.

You probably guessed that I like to tell stories. In fact my work/research is all about that. I analyze stories - told by people, in books, in newspapers, in songs, on tv. The blog is a great outlet for all the stories I encounter.

In the meantime, maybe a few things that appear in dreamacttexas will help in developing a more in depth history of Texas and the United States, how we came to be under the thumb of Bush and Cheney - and how in 2008 our economy went into a tail spin. This may seem ambitious - but I believe that most every story is part of history. The present is only real if combined with the past.

---



My childhood was spent in a Jim Crow town. My first year in high school was when Blacks were integrated into the student population. Mexican Americans had been there for decades, but were not taken very seriously, especially since many of the students didn't start school until the harvest was over.

I went to Catholic School through 8th grade. (Yes, I can tell you about the nuns )- where most of the students were of Czech descent. My best friend's last name was Kubena, her Dad owned a cotton gin in a small town nearby named Guy.

For the 1950s and part of the 1960s I saw the migrant workers come in their trucks to our town. There were so many, I couldn't count them all. Those were the days when you would go down a farm road and see loose cotton all over the place. That stopped a long time ago. Now the men that come work construction. In fact they are the heart of the Texas construction industry. Some cross without documents, some have been here for decades, have married, had children, and regularized.

Photo by M.T. Hernandez, Houston 2007

My Dad had a business and was also a notary. Lots of people came by. Many had been in Texas for generations, working the land for other people. A good number were from Mexico. By the time I was 13, I had met people immigrating from Guanajuato, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, San Luis Potosi, Mexico City - and many other places in Mexico that I can't remember. My Dad also helped people file their income tax. After about age 15, I started doing "short forms" for many of the workers living in town. I couldn't speak very much Spanish, but somehow I managed. I know many of the workers did not have their own social security numbers, and the IRS had withdrawn hundreds and hundreds of dollars from their checks (ultimately thousands) - Since the accounts weren't in their name, the money was lost for them, lost in the black hole of the social security system, only to be swallowed up by all the aging baby boomers.