Ethnic Identity and a 1950s Bus Trip through the South
Extract from the book, Feeling the Unthinkable: author, Don Gutierrez
In early January of 1958 my wife Marlene and I left Berkeley, California, on a Greyhound bus trip to New York City where I was to begin a new life as a professional Librarian armed with a University of California Berkeley Master of Librarianship degree. Marlene in turn hoped to expand in her development as a young modernist artist in the energy and stimulation of the New York art scene. We were both weary of Berkeley and the Bay Area after seven and a half years there, and New York seemed attractive in being over 3000 miles East and in being, well, New York. We had to travel by bus because we had no car and little money, and Greyhound was then the cheapest way to get anywhere. Choosing the southerly route turned out to be a significant mistake but it certainly dramatized for me the maze of ethnic and personal identity.
Had we taken a northerly route, my experiences via bus might perhaps have been markedly different and less disturbing, but we decided to go South, through the Southwest, Texas and the Gulf Coast states partly to avoid bad Winter weather but also to say goodbye to Marlene’s parents who lived in Inglewood, a municipality southwest of Los Angeles. After spending a day or two with her parents, we got on the bus, outfitted with a straw bag bulging with Marlene’s mother’s sandwiches, fruit, pickles, crackers and cheese. Taking this bag might also have been a mistake, as it made us look suspiciously poorer than we were.
When we reached San Diego and got off the bus to stretch our legs, I was approached by an official looking middle-aged man who asked me for identification. I was so surprised and offended by this unexpected and unwelcome intrusion on my privacy that I angrily refused to cooperate with the request, instead, just walking away. The man, apparently an immigration official, curiously didn’t persist and I boarded the bus with feathers a bit ruffled but my identity still unscathed, so ruffled feathers was a mild reaction given the circumstances—so far. 3I had undergone bouts of high anxiety during my seven years at U.C. Berkeley. On one occasion I had fled from a class on Shakespeare of perhaps over 100 students despite sitting in the front row perhaps ten yards away from a distinguished Shakespeare scholar, and experienced a major panic attack in 1957 during my bus trip down to the Oakland Draft Board for possible induction. Consequently the thought of possibly feeling trapped and thus panicky on a bus for well over 3000 miles might have left phobias circulating in my inner self like snakes possibly preparing to strike.
A more sinister questioning of my identity occurred the next evening in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Texas, a place that by its drabness, meanness and ugliness suggested an appropriate setting for lynchings. Marlene and I had gotten off the bus during its coffee-break stop to take a walk around the block and get a little exercise. The block was littered with non-descript houses and vacant lots full of weeds, the sort of place T. S. Eliot might have had in mind for some of those dreary poems of modern urban, spiritual desolation written early in his career.
When we reached the fourth side of the block, we suddenly became aware that an old black pickup was slowly following us, actually driving down the desolate street on the wrong side so as to be close to us, perhaps four-five yards away. A tall, middle-aged Black male was at the steering wheel; at his side was another male, probably middle-aged and Mexican. The latter began speaking to me in Spanish. Not knowing Spanish (despite having Central American parents), I didn’t understand what he was saying, but his tone sounded somewhat derisive, perhaps a tad challenging or even menacing. However, I couldn’t be sure. Was he, driven by envy, verbally assaulting or insulting me (“Mexican” Don) for accompanying a White Woman? Was he, instead, warning me like an ethnic comrade against the grave danger I was running by strolling along in public with a young, blue-eyed blonde? Decades later, when I mentioned the encounter to a liberal colleague at my southern New Mexico college who had once lived in the deep South, he said I indeed could have been attacked, even killed in both the South and Texas for this association (reminiscences of the violent treatment accorded young Mexican males by the Texas Rangers came to mind later, one young “wetback” drowned in a river while in Rangers custody). Glancing a second time at the front car door, I noticed the top of the barrel of a rifle by the window side of the Black man. After a few minutes, the car drove slowly on ahead of us, disappearing around the corner, to my relief. When Marlene and I reached and entered the bus depot, we saw the Black man. He either didn’t see us or did but ignored us.
What did this road encounter mean? What did it say about an external perception of me, or of anyone? Of course, as with all stereotyping, one’s inner or complex personal being is reduced to a few traits, hardly personal or individualized; rather, one becomes victim of a minimalist depiction that is not a self but a derogated or despised type. Were these two men, both members of minorities savaged in America, trying to protect me, or even us? They obviously didn’t know—how could they?--that I was an American-born citizen of Nicaraguan and Guatemalan ancestry with two college degrees from a distinguished university. So what? All that was brutally clear—if anything was clear in the somewhat sinister murkiness of the moment, situation and national atmosphere--is that I was a Brown young man walking with a White young woman in a region probably rabidly hostile to even the mild association of us two strolling along together. I had come from Berkeley and the Bay Area, a cultural milieu in which it was taken for granted that Brown, White, Black, Yellow, Red were all equally acceptable colors. Certainly this ideal was often enough not achieved in the Bay Area but at least it embodied a general cultural consciousness and ideal probably not readily found in this Texas town, in the South and for that matter in other parts of the United States North as well as South.
So instead of having my self-identification confirmed as an individualized libertarian radical and young fellow with intellectual aspirations whose ethnic identity was not a central issue or concern in my daily life, I now had a dark perception on the road South that I could instantly be regarded as an outlaw figure. Emmit Till, the fourteen-year-old Black lad from Chicago, had been brutally beaten and murdered in Mississippi just three years earlier in Mississippi for whistling at and briefly flirting with a White Woman on a bet with friends and my colleague at Western New Mexico U. had said I could have been murdered for my proximity to my wife, my wife. So there--possibly? probably?--was a very serious gap between my customary “Berkeley” sense of self and the “Texas-Southern” sense or definition of “Mexican Don,” which, if not ethnically accurate about me, nevertheless bore all the reality thrust of a hard smack to the side of the head. As Robert Caro mentions in his formidable biography Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, Mexican males at the time were being told “We don’t serve Mexicans,” in barber shops in southern Texas while at the same time being told who they had to vote for in the senatorial race won by Lyndon Johnson.
But there was another conundrum of identity.
At our next stop, in New Orleans, I was again approached by an immigration officer or border cop or at least someone official-looking flashing his credentials and asking me for an I.D. This time I complied, simply showing my driver’s license, and thus ending the queries. Some might say, well, that’s what you should have done all along, without any resistance or emotional fuss about it. That probably would have made things neater, simpler, clean-cut emotionally. Yet surely not only people of color resist or resent having their identity questioned or challenged. The issue of identity obviously goes far deeper than skin color or whatever misguided essentialness we attach to our particular ethnic or racial being. But when the challenge to prove our identity appears to question our ethnic or racial aspect in a way that also invades our deeper sense of our self, we might almost feel—rightly or wrongly—that psychic survival is at hand, that our ethnicity or race is not only as basic as blood but as the very cells of the body.
I certainly had not felt challenged on that fundamental level, but how do we measure the depths to which ethnic or racial identity define us? For that matter what is our most essential being, or deepest individual (if it is individual) essence? Is it ultimately psychic, instinctive, even physiological? Put another way, when do we cross from our individualistic being into the rudimentary complexity of our physico-chemical-electrical-fluidic components that comprise our organic essence? Perhaps I could have felt grateful to these questioning officials in their inadvertently driving me to experience the gamut from my ethnic sense of self to my elemental being; I felt no gratitude, though, and curiously, little anxiety and no panic.
Deciding to partake of the Big Easy’s popular culture, we boarded a New Orleans street car where I encountered a more subtle form of ethnic ambiguity, semi-comic in retrospect. Getting into the car, we noticed that there were “front” and “back” sections: front, Whites; back, “colored.” Now, that sectioning posed some problems and soul-searching, not for my wife who is German, but for me, with my GuatNic ethnicity. The crux of the matter was skin color; I was neither black nor white, but sort of in-between, brownish, reminding me later in life of the graduated racism of “White-all right, Brown-stick around, Black-stay back.”
My dilemma resulted from both a certain lack of confidence about myself psychologically and racially as well as a sizable sympathy for and identity with Black people and their atrocious treatment by White institutions and individuals. I couldn’t sit in the back Black area, not being Black (not to mention my blonde, blue-eyed wife), yet I felt guilt at sitting with the Whites. Possibly the best thing to have done under these confused and confusing circumstances, would have been to exit the streetcar, but that didn’t occur to me, and Marlene would likely have opposed it.
So I made a “compromise.” We sat in the White section seat adjoining the Black section, almost a kind of border. However, it was not border enough. A relatively young Black woman sat right behind us, and, as I put my arm around my wife’s shoulders—thus unintentionally crossing the border—my left arm was suddenly and rather violently knocked forward. The woman behind us had abruptly put up her “Colored Only” seat sign, knocking my arm off of her territory. I’m darker than some Blacks but to this woman I was “white” or at least not black and my intrusion was fair game for a little payback, whatever my attempt at compromise, which she couldn’t have known or, likely, cared about.
Back on the road the next day, our bus stopped for a meal break in Mobile, Alabama during the evening. After all us passengers had consumed our “Eats” Restaurant fare, and gotten on the bus and everyone including the driver was ready to hit the road again, the driver suddenly turned the engine off and opened the door, allowing another person onto the bus. My first reaction was—well, just another late passenger. But the man was somewhat formally dressed (tie and coat) and seemed bent on a mission. In fact, looking at him more carefully, I began to feel he was not coming towards but to me. I was his mission.
Again, after the badge display bit, he asked if I was a citizen of the United States. When I said yes, he requested an I.D. Looking carefully at my now frequently-handled Driver’s License, he still wasn’t satisfied and asked when or if I had been in Mexico. This seemed an odd question in view of my showing a valid American identity credential and I regretted afterwards that I lacked the presence of mind to challenge the propriety of the question. After all, what business was it of his when or if I had been to Mexico?
I wondered why I hadn’t challenged him; was it lack of presence of mind? Was it some kind of anxiety or fear that if I didn’t co-operate with his question, there could be unpleasant consequences, perhaps even being “detained”? Was I being too compliant? Was my own sense of identity, of my rights, citizen or personal, dissolving? Or was my co-operation based on not wanting to hold up the other passengers, surely eager to get on with their trip—thus my community-spirited side emerging?
It’s hard to be sure—almost fifty years later—what my real motivation(s) were, but it made me wonder whether those Americans who take their civil liberties so for granted would find their layer of citizen self-assurance much thinner if confronted by hostile or even physically violent interrogation by “detainers.” (I should add, to do journalistic justice to that incident that Marlene to this day insists that I was taken off the bus and questioned outside. This scared her, because she thought I could be separated from her out in (again) “the middle of Nowhere—a sense of place not just Blacks might have felt about southern Alabama in the Fifties. I don’t recall being taken off the bus, and thus a long-standing matrimonial disagreement about the past.)
Surely, many Middle-Eastern Americans today must feel intensely exposed and nervous about their fundamental identity and even the security of their person. They must worry about how that identity is perceived by the hostile American authorities, let alone the average American. For an innocent person (but who is innocent? And in regard to what?) to be seen by some authoritative individual or institution as an outsider, an alien, possibly an enemy, even a suspect Terrorist, is a radical attack not only on one’s self but on one’s deepest sense of being.
My last border/immigration challenge occurred in Jacksonville, Florida, hardly an international border town. This suggests again (as did the stop in Mobile) that my confrontations by officials might have had less to do with a concern about illegal immigration than with something else. It later occurred to Marlene and I that perhaps Cuba had something to do with my being questioned on our trip east. Fidel Castro about a year later overturned the Batista regime; perhaps Washington was already on the lookout for Fidelista agents flooding the States disguised as poor post-college travelers. But maybe not. Perhaps Marlene was a coyote cleverly using the Greyhound Bus instead of a van for the trip North.
When we finally arrived in cold, wintry New York, I experienced a deep sense of relief. New York being New York, I felt no one here would care who I was, when I had last been in Mexico, or where I was going. The main concern one picked up in the pulsating, brutal yet exhilarating atmosphere of Manhattan was to get out of people’s way—they had to Get somewhere, and if you fell down or had a heart attack, just don’t block their path. This attitude, common enough in New York, was for the time being liberating to someone uncertain and uneasy about what identity others would project on him. It was a strange and unsettling kind of liberation but liberation it was. I now walked down the cold, blackened-snow streets of the most callously indifferent city in the United States feeling like a free man.
Free—but how free? Two years later in New York I applied for a job as the Head Librarian in the private and posh University club on Fifth Avenue. I was offered the job, a professional position, but was told that—unlike the Club members (Senators, CEO heads, university and bank presidents, etc.)—I would have to enter the Club by the back door of the regal building. I turned the job offer down.
Donald Gutierrezwas a member of the University of Notre Dame English Department faculty from 1968 to 1975, then joined the English Department at Western New Mexico University in Silver City. He retired from WNMU in 1994 and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, Marlene Zander Gutierrez. He received a "New Mexico Eminent Scholar Award" in 1989. Gutierrez has published six books of literary criticism, two of which focus on D. H. Lawrence and one on Kenneth Rexroth. Since retirement, he has published over fifty essays and reviews, most of which concern social justice and American state terrorism abroad. The book is available from