Whenever my mama and I drove to Compton, she would instruct me to lock our doors and make sure our windows were sealed shut as we drove across the train tracks on Alameda Street that served as a natural border between the brown community that I lived in and the black one we were driving into. Walter Thompson-Hernández’s “The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland” tells a grand story in granular detail. Both stereotypes were rooted in deep misunderstandings and false images projected by the media.īooks Review: The cowboys of Compton, first a curiosity and then a legacy Black folks often blamed Mexican immigrants for stealing jobs and taking over their neighborhoods, while Mexicans - who sometimes arrived in these neighborhoods with their own preconceived ideas about blackness - often scorned their black neighbors for not working hard. At the same time, Mexican immigrants fleeing dwindling economic markets in Mexico were slowly migrating to the same communities that black folks were leaving, which sometimes caused racial tensions. Gang violence often led to high murder rates, the crack cocaine epidemic was destroying families, and rising unemployment rates were forcing black families to leave the area en masse in search of jobs and affordable housing in cities outside of Los Angeles. If you lived in Watts or Compton, located about ten minutes away, you were more likely to hear an N.W.A record like “Express Yourself” or the soulful sounds of Teddy Pendergrass coming from an old head’s flashy Cadillac.īack then, South Central and the city of Compton were in complete upheaval. If you lived in our neighborhood, chances were the Chicano rapper Kid Frost’s hit song “La Raza” was playing loudly on someone’s boombox or car speakers. It was 1991 and we were living in a three-bedroom home that we shared with my grandmother, two aunts, uncle, and two cousins. Weekends were sometimes the only time when my mama and I got to see one another. As a result, I spent lots of time with my aunts, who worked close to our home. When she wasn’t reading or writing or completing her coursework, Mama worked as a valet parking attendant at a fancy hotel in Santa Monica. I was six, and my mama and I were driving to the Compton Swap Meet one Saturday afternoon. student in literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.Īll this added up to real confusion when I first learned about the black cowboys in Compton. The incident landed me a two-week suspension but an emphatic high-five from my then twenty-six-year-old mother, who was active in many social justice circles as a Ph.D. I was the type of kid who chose to disrupt our annual schoolwide Thanksgiving celebration in the third grade by jumping on a table and yelling that Christopher Columbus was a “murderer” and killed thousands of indigenous people throughout the Americas. Cowboys, I would later learn, were white men who rode through towns with reckless abandon and left a trail of destruction behind them. It felt like we were celebrating the lives of men who had often terrorized their way through native communities in the West. Little did I know there were groups in nearby Compton who were actively trying to reinsert black cowboys into the history books.īut something always seemed a bit off. The history of the West until that point had appeared exclusively white. Sanders, a black woman and my favorite teacher, never once mentioned black cowboys. We were taught that they rode through trails, herded cattle, and occasionally got into gunfights with bandits and Native Americans. The only cowboys we learned about were white. I always wondered why I never learned about black cowboys in any of my elementary school classes in Huntington Park, a city in Southeast Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times Book Club is reading: ‘The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland.’ Here’s an excerpt.
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