|
COPYRIGHT 2005 Texas Monthly, Inc.
FOR MANY YEARS, colleagues suggested that I was missing a bet by ignoring San Antonio as a subject for my work. It's ripe for the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil treatment, they would say, but I couldn't see it. John Berendt's best-seller about idiosyncrasy and mayhem in Savannah was written by an outsider. Growing up so close to the narrative, I spent most of my time in San Antonio plotting my escape. Back then, I was intent on facing forward, envisioning a future that included an apartment in Greenwich Village, subway rides, city blizzards, and big-time intellectuals-things that swiftly lost their appeal once I actually began experiencing life on the East Coast. Still, I didn't go home. I chose Houston instead, which, I enviously tell friends who are natives, is the most underrated city in the world. When critics counter that San Antonio is so beautiful and gracious, I offer my stock treatise on opportunity and openness--for me, San Antonio had neither-and change the subject.
I've come to see in midlife that I have been playing an exile's game with this uncharacteristic lack of introspection. While I thought I was just marking time in San Antonio, I now realize I was indelibly marked by the place. It's just taken me a very long time to understand how--and to understand why, in turn, I no longer spend much time there.
When I say "San Antonio" I am talking about a place that, unless you are over forty and grew up there, you probably wouldn't know. The city's image makers have done a stellar job of shaping its modern identity, touting the River Walk, Sea World, Fiesta Texas, and two very pricey spa-golfresorts. The local industries, like SBC and Toyots, are good, clean citizens, It's a big city--the nation's eighth largest, bigger than Detroit or San Francisco. That is not where I grew up. My San Antonio was an overgrown small town, socially stratified and inbred, controlled by a handful of old, wealthy families who clustered in oak-shaded mansions in suburbs just north of downtown, not far geographically but otherwise light-years removed from the Mexican American enclaves on the south and west sides. The winding streets of the city had an inogic that could leave a newcomer in tears--North and South St. Mary's occasionally runs east and west--but I never felt lost. My life was circumscribed by what were then the city's most prosperous neighborhoods: Olmos Park, where my mother was born and raised; Terrell Hills, where I spent my childhood; and Alamo Heights, where I lived until I went away to college and where, twenty or so years later, my parents sold the house and moved about a mile away to a high-rise condominium.
In those days, it seemed to me that everyone knew everyone else and weirdness was an accepted part of life. You had to appreciate eccentricity--no one thought it odd that the gowns worn by local royalty during Fiesta week cost upward of $5,000 in the sixties--and you needed a tolerance for duplicity, which I saw most frequently in the exceptional number of closeted gays among the city's upper class. Most important, however, was San Antonio's relationship with its past, which had to be perpetually preserved, protected, and polished to perfection: There was the Alamo; there were the other missions and the...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
