Copyright by Joel Huerta 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Joel Huerta certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Red, Brown, and Blue: a History and Cultural Poetics of High School Football in Mexican America Committee: __________________________ Robert H. Abzug, Supervisor __________________________ José E. Limón, Co-Supervisor __________________________ Emilio Zamora __________________________ Ricardo Ainslie __________________________ David Montejano Red, Brown, and Blue: a History and Cultural Poetics of High School Football in Mexican America by Joel Huerta, B.A.; M.F.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2005 This otherness, this "Not being us" is all there is to look at In the mirror, though, not one can say How it came to be this way. A ship Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor. --John Ashbery Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. --Raymond Williams Red, Brown, and Blue: a History and Cultural Poetics of High School Football in Mexican America Publication No. ___________ Joel Huerta, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Co-supervisors: Robert H. Abzug; José E. Limón High school athletics played an important role in the social, cultural, and political life of 20th century Texas. Football was especially popular. In south Texas, a region with a majority Mexican American population, school athletics served to maintain segregation between white and brown students and also to test its limits and viability. Small town institutions like the football team and the marching band were some of the first areas to experiment with inter-ethnic mixing. For the most part experiments proved successful. They helped pave the way for more substantive social and educational reforms. In the second half of the century Mexican Americans gave their own inflection to the football game. They blended traditional Mexican verbal arts forms like jests and playful insults with more conventional sports discourse. In the Lower Rio Grande Valley fans also composed corridos, traditional Mexican ballads, in honor of town and team. In this dissertation I use two major strategies: historical research and ethnography. Data have been collected from archives, newspapers, school yearbooks, interviews, fieldwork, and radio. This dissertation contributes to American and Chicano studies by presenting data and analysis from largely unexplored areas: the role of youth sports in the civil rights process and the formation of identity; and the expressive culture and folklore of Mexican American sports fans. v Contents Introduction 1 Part I: History Chapter One: Early Sport in Texas 33 Chapter Two: Modern Sport in the New South Texas 59 Chapter Three: Friday Night Rights, The High School Game and the Struggle for Equality 85 Chapter Four: The Golden Age of Football and the Break of Segregation 122 Part II: Ethnography Prologue: 140 Chapter Five: Good Game 142 Part III: Verbal Arts and Folklore Chapter Six: The Electronic Backyard Barbecue: Fans, Radio, and the Poetics of Place 189 Chapter Seven: With his Cell Phone in his Hand: the Football Corridos of South Texas 219 Chapter Eight: Conclusion 255 Appendices Appendix One-A: Football Scoreboard Transcript (Spanish) 270 Appendix One-B: Football Scoreboard Transcript (translation) 274 Appendix Two: Football Corrido Lyrics 278 Appendix Three: On Doing Ethnography 285 Notes 299 References 313 Vita 329 vi Introduction ...culture inspects our dreams also. --Emerson Football, el deporte de las tacleadas; el deporte que reúne a las multitudes!1 --Hugo, radio commentator On the eve of the 1998 gubernatorial election candidate Garry Mauro challenged then Texas Governor George W. Bush to a political debate. When the governor chose October 16th for the match, a Friday night in the fall, Mauro responded by saying: “If I was governor, and 25 to 30 points ahead, I’d want the biggest audience so I could show off a little bit. I usually reserve Friday night for high school football, but if Governor Bush wants to debate on high school football night, I’ll be there.”(Gaar 1998) In Mauro’s coy (and surely scripted) invocation of Friday football, we see an attempt to put the governor’s authenticity as a Texan into question. The gibe frames Friday night as a sacred, civic rite, corrupted only by carpetbaggers, elites, or both. The challenger’s comment also draws a parallel between the football arena, where Coach Bush’s Republicans were four touchdowns ahead and “can show off a bit,” and the governor’s race where Mauro and his scrappy Democrats stood prepared to take them on. The football game remains a key symbol and metaphor in Texas’s peculiar nationalism; it constellates with cowboys, longhorns, oil, the Alamo, Tex-Mex food, and 1 the loaded half-ton pickup truck. Major college and professional football overshadow the high school game in glamour and visibility, but Texans like Mauro view the local ‘schoolboy’ version of the game as it purest and most Texan articulation. Bill Farney, Athletic Director of the University Interscholastic League, the organization that governs high school competitions, explains: “I think Texas football is unique because Texas is unique. We’re a broad-shouldered, bustling society. We identify with our communities. We like to say, ‘Our town is better than yours. Our football team beat yours.’” (Maher 1994) Writers and filmmakers like John Steinbeck, Larry McMurtry, Harold Ratliff, John Toback, H.G. Bissinger, Geoff Winningham, Don Howard, and Richard Linklater have also sited the Texas soul on the small-town gridiron--celebrating it, deriding it, pondering the contradictions and symbols. For the ranks of Texas-Mexicans who have embraced the game, Lone Star football is more ambivalent a symbol. In small and medium -sized cities, the high school team and band have long been cherished and storied symbols of place and people, but issues of race and class always enter the picture. People share wounds and victories. This is especially true for that generation that came of age before the social reforms of the 1960s and 70s. For them, sentiment for dear alma mater is tainted by memories of personal encounters with institutionalized white supremacy. Thus, to invoke King Football or participate in the football outing is also to hold a dialogue with the ghosts of 2 white supremacy in Texas. Town football is about statistics, records, bragging rights, and school spirit. For Mexican Americans, however, it is also a symbol for modern masculinity, a liquid metaphor for conflict and struggle; a coda to a decades-long drama of racial conflict and conciliation, gains, and disappointments. It is all this, and it is also (informants repeatedly reminded this researcher) just football. With its bake sales, improvised songs and verse, dances, prayers, and pageants, small-town football sometimes comes across as quaint, traditional, unchanging, pure, and simple. In some ways it fits these labels, and it often deliberately cultivates them. At the same time the production is jarringly modern and bureaucratic: it is a carefully choreographed and monitored show played out on a large numbered grid. It is a display of town and school performed by youth, engineered by adults, and consumed by all age groups and classes. As season, spectacle, and contest, football holds what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has called ‘cultural gravity’. It is a place of and tied to the world, but it also a world unto its own, where forces “pull away from the formation of large-scale ecumenes, whether religious, commercial or political, towards smaller scale accretions of intimacy and interest” (1994:324). The rites of the Valley football spectacle are not unique or novel, they are familiar Texan, Southern, and American stuff. At the same time their articulation here is undeniably Mexican and/or Tejano (Texas-Mexican). Here and there spectators stand 3 absorbed; they’ll yell ecstatically; they’ll sob. Most of the football experience is mundane, however. Fans thumb through programs, eat Frito Pies, gossip, network. They daydream: headlights streaming on the highway; insects swarming around the violet floodlights. They chuckle at the awkward kid. They wave to an old neighbor. They contemplate whether they’ll eat at the Whataburger or Ciro’s after the game. They look here and there...the band, the dancing mascot, the yawning junior ROTC guard, the phalanx of bus drivers smoking cigarettes along the fence. In the student section they yell for their team, for their school, they want blood. Other moments they poke fun at ‘how stupid this all is’, and how they can’t wait to get the hell out of this place--well, maybe not the town, but high school anyway. They sip mom’s vodka from flasks, maybe sneak a dip of Skoal tobacco. They court and glance; they date; they drop the ball; they score. Some of them make plans to cruise the strip in their second-hand cars, others to watch "the new Austin Powers," for the sixth, no, seventh time. All the while in the distance plastic crashes, boys grunt, whistles blow; it could be a stockyard. Others concoct plans for international travel: a hop over to Mexico where an adolescent can drink and dance till dawn. Mom and dad don’t have a clue. The younger kids watch the high-schoolers from the periphery--so this is coming of age on the border. Some folks will leave the game early to get the barbecue bote going and to prepare garnishes for the crock pot menudo before the guests arrive for the post-game 4 party. Some will walk down to the thick grass of the field when it is all over, mumble, “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be they name,” along with the kneeling athletes, coaches and their families.