the southern end of the city where the Hispanic families seem to concentrate. In no sense do they form a standard immigrant concentration; many of their families lived in Texas a hundred or more years before the first Caucasians arrived. They are the social elite of the city, or behave as if they were, living by their own patterns and too often refusing to send their children on to college.
I found in that section a remarkable Hispanic woman, Amelia Vargas, to help as my housekeeper after my wife died. She has proved a jewel, and we were passing our days quietly in my house in the university/residential area, ignoring the turmoil in East Austin, until the morning when she came to work in tears. Her seventeen-year-old grandnephew, a wonderful boy with a winning personality and good marks in school, had been killed by shots fired at random from a car passing through his neighborhood. Thus the social disarray in the ghetto area intrudes into even the more tranquil parts of our city.
Dallas, our sister city to the north, has its own ugly version of the confrontation between the affluent residential area—to the north in that city—and the ghetto, which lies to the south. A policeman explained it: ‘A pair of unemployed black youths steal an ordinary used car, say a Ford or a Chevy. At dusk they start prowling the center of the city where businessmen work, trying to spot the wealthy fellow who drives a Mercedes or a Porsche or one of the very expensive new Italian cars. Inconspicuously they trail him to his home in north Dallas and watch as he drives his car to the detached garage well to the back of the mansion.
‘As he gets out to park his car, they jump him, wrestle him for the car keys, steal his car and take off, one driver in the big car, the other following in the car stolen earlier that night. They whisk both vehicles to a secret shop that specializes in taking cars apart and shipping them illegally to South America or theCaribbean. Two days later the Mercedes or Porsche may be on its way to Colombia or Venezuela.’
When I remarked to the policeman that this was an unbelievably clever tactic, the trailing of a big car to its destination and an easy spot at which to make the heist, he said ‘Well, a Texan who’s bought a big car won’t give it up easily. Often the owner puts up a fight and gets shot.’ He said the police were giving lectures to the owners of big cars: ‘Don’t drive that buggy into the middle of town. You’ll be inviting them to chase after you.’ So in Dallas, as in Austin, the ghetto can invade the quiet residential areas.
Not only whites but the black community, too, must work to solve its problems. Theft and vandalism where they live are rapidly destroying their neighborhoods.
I have twice been peripherally involved when a chain store with a branch located in a ghetto area decided it had to close down the branch to concentrate on areas that were more stable and better policed. In one case it was a five-and-dime store, in the other a branch store of a large grocery chain that did a huge business. In each case the local managers, one of whom I knew as a family friend, told me that profits were impossible because of the thefts by African Americans roaming through the aisles. The grocery manager said: ‘They come in, rip open the tops of our boxes and have lunch right here in the store. We cannot afford to stay open.’
In each case there was public protest when the branches announced they were closing. Civic leaders shouted that the stores had to remain functioning because poor people deserved to be served as well as the rich. An ugly note was introduced in the debate when comparison shoppers proved that the grocery chain not only off-loaded its damaged goods or inferior products onto its branch store in the ghetto, but even charged higher prices for these inferior goods than it did for undamaged goods in the morefavored branches. Public protest at this injustice proved to be irrelevant
I found in that section a remarkable Hispanic woman, Amelia Vargas, to help as my housekeeper after my wife died. She has proved a jewel, and we were passing our days quietly in my house in the university/residential area, ignoring the turmoil in East Austin, until the morning when she came to work in tears. Her seventeen-year-old grandnephew, a wonderful boy with a winning personality and good marks in school, had been killed by shots fired at random from a car passing through his neighborhood. Thus the social disarray in the ghetto area intrudes into even the more tranquil parts of our city.
Dallas, our sister city to the north, has its own ugly version of the confrontation between the affluent residential area—to the north in that city—and the ghetto, which lies to the south. A policeman explained it: ‘A pair of unemployed black youths steal an ordinary used car, say a Ford or a Chevy. At dusk they start prowling the center of the city where businessmen work, trying to spot the wealthy fellow who drives a Mercedes or a Porsche or one of the very expensive new Italian cars. Inconspicuously they trail him to his home in north Dallas and watch as he drives his car to the detached garage well to the back of the mansion.
‘As he gets out to park his car, they jump him, wrestle him for the car keys, steal his car and take off, one driver in the big car, the other following in the car stolen earlier that night. They whisk both vehicles to a secret shop that specializes in taking cars apart and shipping them illegally to South America or theCaribbean. Two days later the Mercedes or Porsche may be on its way to Colombia or Venezuela.’
When I remarked to the policeman that this was an unbelievably clever tactic, the trailing of a big car to its destination and an easy spot at which to make the heist, he said ‘Well, a Texan who’s bought a big car won’t give it up easily. Often the owner puts up a fight and gets shot.’ He said the police were giving lectures to the owners of big cars: ‘Don’t drive that buggy into the middle of town. You’ll be inviting them to chase after you.’ So in Dallas, as in Austin, the ghetto can invade the quiet residential areas.
Not only whites but the black community, too, must work to solve its problems. Theft and vandalism where they live are rapidly destroying their neighborhoods.
I have twice been peripherally involved when a chain store with a branch located in a ghetto area decided it had to close down the branch to concentrate on areas that were more stable and better policed. In one case it was a five-and-dime store, in the other a branch store of a large grocery chain that did a huge business. In each case the local managers, one of whom I knew as a family friend, told me that profits were impossible because of the thefts by African Americans roaming through the aisles. The grocery manager said: ‘They come in, rip open the tops of our boxes and have lunch right here in the store. We cannot afford to stay open.’
In each case there was public protest when the branches announced they were closing. Civic leaders shouted that the stores had to remain functioning because poor people deserved to be served as well as the rich. An ugly note was introduced in the debate when comparison shoppers proved that the grocery chain not only off-loaded its damaged goods or inferior products onto its branch store in the ghetto, but even charged higher prices for these inferior goods than it did for undamaged goods in the morefavored branches. Public protest at this injustice proved to be irrelevant
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