The Prince of South Waco
American Dreams and Great Expectations
by
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We were playing alone in the huge sandbox under the shady tree when my kindergarten classmates ran toward us. They were whooping and hollering the way we always did when we played cowboys. I don’t think they understood that we didn’t want to play because they grabbed us as if Gloria and I were pretending to be the cattle rustlers. They next thing I knew they were strapping the nooses around our necks. I was accustomed to playing hang-the-rustler, but Gloria wasn’t. And she panicked. She screamed and fought trying to escape, and her fear was infectious. Suddenly I was frightened, more because she was than any other reason. She was hysterical, breaking into tears as I tried in vain to assure her that there was nothing to fear.
“It’s okay, Gloria,” I said in Spanish. “They’re just playing.”
“No! It’s real! They’re going to hang us!” she screamed. “Don’t you hear what they’re saying?”
I strained to listen to what my classmates were hollering.
“Hang the Mexicans!” They shouted. “Hang the Mexicans!”
It sounded just like all other times we played. “Hang the rustlers!” we would yell. Or: “Hang the murderers!”
But this was new. I didn’t know who the Mexicans were.
“That’s us!” cried Gloria. “We’re the Mexicans!”
Praise for Tony Castro’s
Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America
“Brilliant … a valuable contribution to the understanding of our time.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America is a magnificent tour de force and masterpiece of contemporary American history -- as close to a Chicano Iliad as we will ever have.”
—Carlos Guerra, San Antonio Express News, co-founder La Raza Unida
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About the Book
In an ideal universe, theirs might have been the perfect love story from two separate worlds. But in the heart of the Bible Belt South, in America of the mid-twentieth century, their young love was forbidden because of their skin color. She was white, lovely, and privileged, growing up in a Tara-like Victorian home. He was Latino, dark-skinned, and working class—the grandson of a Mexican revolutionary who had fought with Pancho Villa. And an innocent waltz at a school May Fete—a waltz that they were not permitted to dance together—came to symbolize their society’s racial divide.
In The Prince of South Waco, author Tony Castro narrates his sensitive rite-of-passage memoir of growing up Latino in the segregated South in an age when being different in America often brought the cruel, hard reality of the time, along with heartbreak and despair. He recounts how, as a child in an era before bilingual education and affirmative action, he overcame speech and learning disabilities and an inability to speak English to become an honor student with a penchant for literature, the classics, and writing.
Throughout his youth, he remained discreetly close to the teenage ballerina who had captured his heart. All the while, he encountered ugly warnings of violence and harm—against the two of them—should they see each other and defy the ages-old prohibition in the South against interracial relationships.
A story taking place before the enactment of civil rights legislation, The Prince of South Waco provides insight into the issue of racial discrimination and hate of the times.
About the Author
Tony Castro is the author of two critically acclaimed books, the civil rights history Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America (E.P. Dutton) and the biography Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son (Potomac Books). He is a graduate of Baylor University and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Formerly a staff writer for Sports Illustrated, he is currently working on a biography of Ernest Hemingway. Castro lives in Southern California with his wife Renee LaSalle, their sons Trey and Ryan, and their black Labrador retriever Jeter.
Tony’s Website: TonyCastro.com