It's no good to be white anymore

 It's no good to be white anymore!

      South Gate's intellectual experience was not like Oxford or Harvard unless you are talking about Oxford, Mississippi and Harvard, Nebraska. When the city began to turn brown there was the expected reaction by lots of plain folk with little experience with the world outside Atlantic, Alamdeda, Firestone and Bullis road. The area once known as Home Gardens was comprised of 100% white folk with some "nice" Mexicans sliding in because they owned businesses or sent their kids to Catholic school. These same residents who could count their Gate roots way back to 1946 seemed to think they came over on the Mayflower and racial slurs were fairly common around Tweedy boulevard. There were three Jewish families, a handful of hispanic homeowners and the real estate was redlined. It wasn't like it was a sundown town officially but it was in spirit. Little did I know that my classmates and good pals like Gomez, Miranda, Lopez and Garcia were different and would be treated without the respect we took for granted. If black kids from across Alameda showed up at the South Gate Plunge their presence would be reported and SGPD showed up to check intentions, assuming they were there to steal bicycles. I only saw a couple of black kids until my Dad forced me to sell programs at the Coliseum where there was almost nothing but black kids. I left all of this behind me when I went off to college and attended UCLA with lots of Jews, Chicanos, African-Americans, Orientals and even some Indians from India. The purpose of a liberal education was to learn about the rest of the world and I did but still had a lot of muddled racism in my bloodstream. When the bottom fell out of my life in the mid-1970's and Timo took me in at Club Virginia I was back where I started from with a piece of paper from the Regents of the University of California. At first I just moped around but living with a Balderama we began to notice the town turning brown. The white flight taking place around LA was sending xenophobic Gate families out to Orange County or Long Beach as my parents did in 1972. The same BS heard today was in the air like the foul smell from Vernon that drifted over the western part of the Gate. The mayor's wife spoke to a Mexican-American group and told them they were welcome...as long as they kept up their yards nice. Floyd Wakefield was leading a charge for the "return" to a white Southeast. As the fearful whites fled, Mexican families crossed over Alameda and started buying properties and starting businesses in "the New South Gate" or La  Ciudad de South Gate as Billy Hogan and I called it. Our neighbors on Virgiania were country Mexicans and even slaughtered a goat in their back yard but they were good people who just did not know the new way of the gringos. Still, there was only one hispanic name on the South Gate city council and the rest of the group were as white as a Kennedy family picnic. So it was that I was standing at the butcher's case in Ashton's Market waiting to get a pound of hamburger, listening to an old redneck complain to the dumb as hell Scottish butcher named (surprise) Scotty. The old redneck, probably a guy who has put in many years at Schultz Steel or Continental Pipe moaned over the counter "It's no good to be white anymore" The number of Hispanic members in Congress was in single digits, up from one in 1950 and the mayor of South Gate was a guy named  Sheehy.