How Journalism Helped Me Fight Against the White-Washed Texas I Grew up In [View all]

I still remember my last high school football game on the Red Oak Hawkette drill team.

I was 17, and our dance group had spent hours rehearsing in our maroon leotards and bright white ankle boots with mini silver bolo ties on the side. We wore nude dance tights and white hats with matching maroon lipstick. Big white smiles, rosy cheeks, and fake eyelashes.

That was my favorite uniform.

I loved the way I could swing my hips side to side and feel the fringe on my legs during high kicks to rival any Dallas Cowboy’s cheerleader. The sequins and sparkles refracted the glow from the Friday night lights.

That last game of the season, our varsity boys played at the old Dallas Cowboys’ Texas Stadium in Irving. It was the first time our varsity football team had made it to playoffs in at least a decade, and it seemed like the whole of Red Oak — then population 7,000 — was in the stands. We lost the game, but those memories stayed with me.

As a Latina and a child of immigrants, I didn’t always feel like I belonged in my small, mostly white town. But in that uniform, I did.

I grew up just south of Dallas, and my parents — who were originally from Mexico and Guatemala — turned to assimilation for survival. My mom and (step) dad taught me to blend in and to embrace being Texan. Not Mexican. That was hard for a brown-skinned girl who didn’t look white passing at all.

I remember the look on my parents’ faces when I told them I was dating a Mexican kid from band class instead of a white church boy like my sister.

Now I see that they were trying their best to protect me: It was normal to see confederate flags on lifted pickups in the high school senior parking lot. At lunchtime, the kids at school self-segregated. Just last week, the Supreme Court made it legal to discriminate against people who speak Spanish or look brown.

In grade school, kids are taught that Texas rebels stood their ground at the Alamo. But not that Mexico invited Texas settlers onto their land under the promise that the colonists wouldn’t enslave people — a promise they broke. Despite the myth that Alamo defenders valiantly fought to the death (to defend the right to own slaves), historians now agree that many, including Davy Crockett, probably surrendered and were executed.

https://thebarbedwire.com/2025/09/16/journalism-helped-me-fight-against-the-white-washed-texas/