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Chicano-Indian American Cultural Center miscellaneous newsletters, 1977-1978
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5 NOTES on the National Chicano/Latino Conference October 28, Friday 11 a.m. on I-35 South to San Antonio, Texas. Route 218. David, Nufe, Mike, Teresa, Sylvia, Miguel, Adele, and me. One-thousand, seventy-five miles or twenty-one hours to attend this National Conference. San Antonio outskirts now. Extensive housing development. Selma City Hall just off the interstate exist. A famous speed trap. THP (Texas Highway Patrol) catch everyone doing even one mile over 55. "That's how they make their living, " Nufe tells us. "You go by their law!" Drive for several minutes. Another speed trap. "They just don't know better ....... out of towners!" (I begin to squirm. What the hell does he think we are!) A booming suburban industry out here. Rock quarries and lime industry. Three mammoth smoke stacks and huge storage houses. Like Iowa silos but ten times as big. Another trio of smoke stacks in the distance yet still visible. That big! Hm. Nufe switches on the radio. Un vato que esta hablando at about two hundred words per second. Fade into La Sonora Santanera. An interminable row of electrical power line structures. Billboards: Sauza Tecquila, Jose Cuervo, Montezuma. Then the Hemisfair Needle. Site of the 1968 World Hemisfair. San Antonio at last! Back on the radio the DJ's going nuts. "Just like Chicago, verdad?" Ranting, mindless raving, desgraciado baboso. It goes: "ParacomprarestebuentrinculoUsstedesdebenquepresentarsusboletosyluego...BUY ONE GET ONE FREE...nomasdiguanUstedesalcamerero ..." and cut back without missing a single breath into una racherita. Incredible, as we breeze into downtown San Antonio. 70[[degree symbol]]F reads the Main Back Time/Temp display board on Lexington I struggle to strip off my sweater. Palm trees everywhere. Modern downtown architecture. El Tropicano Hotel, nestled between tall business offices. We park and as we approach the hotel drive way and entrance, a husky muscular Chicano looks at us. There is a patch on his shoulder and some lettering on the back of his jean shirt. National Chicano Pinto Assoc. We enter an interior walkway where, all along the left wall made of rock, are fountains with red, orange, and green lights to color the surface of the bubbling water. A beautiful garden outside the walkway on the Hotel grounds enclosed by formosas, shrubbery and other plants of every variety. A brimming creek or brook runs adjacent to the garden walkway. A brisk resonance of water tumbling and rushing. This is all Exotica. Resplendence. This is where registration for the National Chicano/Latino Conference on Immigration and Public Policy is to take place. We wait for an hour. Registration is late. More and more people begin arriving. The array of people is fabulous. Beautiful women of every age and kind dressed in fabulous clothes. And we are inordinately insultingly dressed in jeans and overalls. And the Latino men! Bigotes of every imaginable variety: the longshoreman look of Antonio Rodriguez's moustache--thick steel wool bristles, Juan Pena's grisly black beard--a D.H. Lawrence, the limp aristocratic debauched look of Jose Angel Gutierrez's moustache. Innumerable bigotes! Holy the Bigotes! Holy the raza of goatees, Van Dykes, Moses' whiskers! The influx of people from New York, Colorado, New Mexico, Haiti, Mexico, et al, continues and I become stunned by the dashing figures of women and men from all over the world. It is evening now. Nufe and I have just returned from a preliminary conference meeting. I am numb with fatigue and mental pain, the meeting having been sometimes angry, always divisive outpouring over the dimensions of the conference. Person after person, in a room crowding over 150 easy, on their feet, their arms stiff or waving to be recognized. Mario Compean, the chief organizer of the conference, chaired the conflictive meeting, allowed person after person to make impassioned speeches about la migra, this-or-that state resolution, everything but the conference to get underway rationally, systematically. What happened? I kept asking myself as we all made our way to the San Antonio Memorial Auditorium for the big rally. My m ind ran ahead and slowed around the prospect, slight though it was, of meeting Hugo Blanco. (I interject here because my anger--some of it self directed--over the proceedings and direction of the conference was insufferable. My first and only interest upon arriving at registration was to try and get
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5 NOTES on the National Chicano/Latino Conference October 28, Friday 11 a.m. on I-35 South to San Antonio, Texas. Route 218. David, Nufe, Mike, Teresa, Sylvia, Miguel, Adele, and me. One-thousand, seventy-five miles or twenty-one hours to attend this National Conference. San Antonio outskirts now. Extensive housing development. Selma City Hall just off the interstate exist. A famous speed trap. THP (Texas Highway Patrol) catch everyone doing even one mile over 55. "That's how they make their living, " Nufe tells us. "You go by their law!" Drive for several minutes. Another speed trap. "They just don't know better ....... out of towners!" (I begin to squirm. What the hell does he think we are!) A booming suburban industry out here. Rock quarries and lime industry. Three mammoth smoke stacks and huge storage houses. Like Iowa silos but ten times as big. Another trio of smoke stacks in the distance yet still visible. That big! Hm. Nufe switches on the radio. Un vato que esta hablando at about two hundred words per second. Fade into La Sonora Santanera. An interminable row of electrical power line structures. Billboards: Sauza Tecquila, Jose Cuervo, Montezuma. Then the Hemisfair Needle. Site of the 1968 World Hemisfair. San Antonio at last! Back on the radio the DJ's going nuts. "Just like Chicago, verdad?" Ranting, mindless raving, desgraciado baboso. It goes: "ParacomprarestebuentrinculoUsstedesdebenquepresentarsusboletosyluego...BUY ONE GET ONE FREE...nomasdiguanUstedesalcamerero ..." and cut back without missing a single breath into una racherita. Incredible, as we breeze into downtown San Antonio. 70[[degree symbol]]F reads the Main Back Time/Temp display board on Lexington I struggle to strip off my sweater. Palm trees everywhere. Modern downtown architecture. El Tropicano Hotel, nestled between tall business offices. We park and as we approach the hotel drive way and entrance, a husky muscular Chicano looks at us. There is a patch on his shoulder and some lettering on the back of his jean shirt. National Chicano Pinto Assoc. We enter an interior walkway where, all along the left wall made of rock, are fountains with red, orange, and green lights to color the surface of the bubbling water. A beautiful garden outside the walkway on the Hotel grounds enclosed by formosas, shrubbery and other plants of every variety. A brimming creek or brook runs adjacent to the garden walkway. A brisk resonance of water tumbling and rushing. This is all Exotica. Resplendence. This is where registration for the National Chicano/Latino Conference on Immigration and Public Policy is to take place. We wait for an hour. Registration is late. More and more people begin arriving. The array of people is fabulous. Beautiful women of every age and kind dressed in fabulous clothes. And we are inordinately insultingly dressed in jeans and overalls. And the Latino men! Bigotes of every imaginable variety: the longshoreman look of Antonio Rodriguez's moustache--thick steel wool bristles, Juan Pena's grisly black beard--a D.H. Lawrence, the limp aristocratic debauched look of Jose Angel Gutierrez's moustache. Innumerable bigotes! Holy the Bigotes! Holy the raza of goatees, Van Dykes, Moses' whiskers! The influx of people from New York, Colorado, New Mexico, Haiti, Mexico, et al, continues and I become stunned by the dashing figures of women and men from all over the world. It is evening now. Nufe and I have just returned from a preliminary conference meeting. I am numb with fatigue and mental pain, the meeting having been sometimes angry, always divisive outpouring over the dimensions of the conference. Person after person, in a room crowding over 150 easy, on their feet, their arms stiff or waving to be recognized. Mario Compean, the chief organizer of the conference, chaired the conflictive meeting, allowed person after person to make impassioned speeches about la migra, this-or-that state resolution, everything but the conference to get underway rationally, systematically. What happened? I kept asking myself as we all made our way to the San Antonio Memorial Auditorium for the big rally. My m ind ran ahead and slowed around the prospect, slight though it was, of meeting Hugo Blanco. (I interject here because my anger--some of it self directed--over the proceedings and direction of the conference was insufferable. My first and only interest upon arriving at registration was to try and get
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