24.02.10
Dunne was 16, an Army brat raised in Italy and Texas. His founder was Irish, or so he thought; his mother Latino. Dunne was unsure what that made him.
So were residents of 1960s Tracy. The uncultivated, pre-commuter village of 18,000 was, Dunne writes, "totally flat and literally cut off from the rest of the world."
High discipline was divided into "cowboys, sporties and Mexicans." He fit neither. Rednecks called him the n-chat. Cowboys brawled with Latinos. "I felt lost," he writes.
With attachment for Tracy, where Dunne lived for decades, he hilariously recounts the Tracy Compress grandly running a page-one story about a new traffic illumination.
"Folks were impressed, looking at the shiny new lights and exclaiming, 'Yep, there it is. Lovely green, bright red. Look at that yellow. Ain't that nice?' "
As a summer job, Dunne worked in the fields. He observed braceros' grueling labors. He witnessed exploitation by Latino contractors and one-sidedness by whites.
Source: Stockton Record