Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

55. Tony Cano's Marfa

✥ 55 ✥ Tony Cano’s Marfa Sev eral w eeks ago I wrote a column about the Big Bend’s secret history, the story of the Spanish-speaking communities here, and I mentioned a couple of recent books that threw some light on the history. Now Tim Johnson of the Marfa Book Company has called my attention to a third book, Tony Cano’s autobiographical novel, The Other Side of the Tracks, published in 2001 by Cano’s own Reata Press in Canutillo, Texas. Cano grew up poor in Marfa in the 1950s. His father was a fine cowboy and was a ranch manager on Wayne Cartledge’s 9K Ranch on the Texas-New Mexico line, but he was a heavy drinker. Cano’s mother left him when Cano was in the first grade, moving to Marfa with her three children and taking a job as a waitress. She had a difficult time making ends meet. In a recent phone interview , Cano told me that sometimes he and his brother would come home from school for lunch and there would be nothing in the house to eat but cornflakes. Marfa’s elementary schools were segregated in the 1950s, and, like all Mexican American children, Cano went to Blackwell School. But when he reached the seventh grade he enrolled in Marfa Elementary, the Anglo-American school whose graduates went on to Marfa High School. The Other Side of the Tracks grew out of the prejudice that Cano experienced there and at Marfa High, and out of the ways that he and a small group of friends decided to fight it. The novel is about the adventures of a group of Mexican American teenagers who called themselves the Chinglers, a word derived from a Spanish verb that cannot be 216 ✥ translated in a family newspaper. The book is a frank and unflinching picture of what it was like to be poor and Mexican American in Marfa in the 1950s. It should be required reading for every newcomer to Marfa, because it explains some of the tensions that still underlie the idyllic images of Marfa and its arts community that have recently appeared in national publications. The Chinglers broke a taboo by secretly dating AngloAmerican girls. Fifty years later, Cano still remembers the sting of that particular prejudice. “You couldn’t date Anglo girls,” he told me. “You couldn’t even talk to them in the hallway. We did it because they told us we couldn’t.” He told me about one Anglo boy who was in love with a Mexican American girl. He and a Mexican American friend had an arrangement by which they would pick up each other’s dates, then meet and exchange girls for the evening, meeting again before taking their respective nondates home. Another unspoken rule was maintaining a racial balance on high school athletic teams; in the novel a coach is fired for playing an all Mexican American basketball team, even though it is a spectacularly winning team. Cano puts his finger on the farreaching ramifications of high school athletics in a small Texas town; something else that some newcomers to Marfa may have a hard time understanding. The book is more memoir than novel. The ending is somewhat clumsy, and Cano told me that was the only part that did not really happen; all of the other incidents are factual. He said that he cast it as a novel “for legal reasons.” When word got out in Marfa that he was writing a book, several people threatened to sue him if he used their names in it, and that put him on guard. Cano told me that he wrote the novel “as therapy.” Even as an adult, he said, he had a lot of anger about the way Mexican Americans were treated in Texas. “Writing the book took a monkey off my back. I learned to put the past behind me,” he said. The Other Side of the Tracks is not Cano’s only book. He and his wife, ✥ 217 poet Ann Sochat, have published a Dutch oven cookbook and a book of poems and ranch reminiscences, Echoes in the Wind. Their most recent collaboration was Bandito, a biography of Cano’s great-grandfather, the revolutionist and bandit Chico Cano. The Other Side of the Tracks, however, was a solo effort on Cano’s part. He told me that he credits his self-confidence as...