Where Have You Gone Sylvester Murray?
The College World Reporter
Connecting Worlds: Inside Latin America
By Dr. Filemon Zamora, Ph.D.
September 2010
Filemon Zamora, Ph.D.
What I am about to tell you happened in the early eighties and had a profound impression on me. I had gotten a job at the San Diego Public Library in San Diego California through a Summer program for unemployed youth and after the end of the program the city had hired me part-time as library aide. For me it was a big success, imagine working in the library with so many books at the reach of your hand! At that time I had big dreams of being someone and I had no doubt I was on the right track.
That Summer I didn’t want to go back home in the Yuma Valley -about 200 miles of distance in the desert- to work in the agricultural fields with my parents. I had been doing that since I began college in San Diego in every chance I had and I was tired of the three digit temperature in the Summer and the freezing temperature in the winter. Most important of all was that I needed to be exposed to English since I was failing in college and experiencing cultural maladjustment due to language problems (when I asked a professor to allow me in his class he had told me bluntly: ” I don’t take students whose native language is not English”). I felt that the experience of working the fields did not help me at all since the language spoken there was a 100% Spanish. Also when one of my bosses found out I was in college he was bitter and would ridicule me, for example he would say (in Spanish) “Give me that, you don’t even know how to handle that shovel! Don’t they you that in college?”
In any case, no matter how modest my job was at the library, I felt a winner. There I was practicing English, I was reading a lot and learning about “high culture”, for example in the department of arts and music I was exposed to Beethoven, Mozart and other great composers.
San Diego, California is a city that resembles paradise on earth. When I first arrived to San Diego I approached it from the North. I was traveling in a Greyhound bus and it drove through beautiful beaches where I saw beautiful girls in bikinis. I thought I was going to enjoy living there, instead I had to work hard to survive and came to know not the best but the worst parts of San Diego: the Mexican and the African-American neighborhoods. I realized that for Mexicans and African-Americans enjoying the best of San Diego was far away. When I heard that the city was going to hire an African-American as the city manager I couldn’t believe it; I was happy because I considered African-Americans to be in the same situation as Mexicans. The man that was about to take the job as city manager symbolized my dream of being someone coming from the bottom going all the way to the top.
Even though San Diego had been part of Mexico until 1848 and had had a Spanish speaking population since it became part of the U.S. through war(actually the true owners are the native Americans who had been living there before any other group)there has never been a Mexican-American mayor or City manager. The only Mexican-American that had served in the city council -Ubaldo Martinez-had been removed from office because he had been using city funds to eat in good restaurants. (I may have done the same thing since seldom I have enjoyed good restaurants!)
The public library was a microcosm of the power structure of San Diego. There has never been a minority city librarian. There was only one African-American and a Mexican-American librarian in the system and they were working in their respective ethnic communities.
I was glad when we were told the new city manager was going to visit the library and to meet its personnel. I was especially glad the person in charge of giving him the tour was a lady who I suspected had racist tendencies ([she had to put up with a minority above her][I want to clarify that with only a couple of exceptions I never perceived any racism against me working at the library]). I was working in Social Sciences when this lady arrived with the new city manager. When she introduced him to us I immediately when to him to shake his hand.
He took position of his job and I was glad, but shortly something happened. In Miami, Florida the African-American community had rioted as a result of police brutality and our new city manager had been asked his opinion on this matter and then the unthinkable. He had said (something to the effect): “sure I know how it is growing up as a young man in Miami and being exposed to police brutality that’s why now that I am city manager and I am the Police Department’s boss it feels like having an orgasm.” This was the end of Sylvester Murray as the city manager of San Diego. San Diego is a very conservative city. Sure I understand his resentment, but until now U.S. society does not want to hear past injustices: it spoils the pie they’ve been enjoying.
About Filemon Zamora, Ph.D.: Dr. Zamora was born in México, immigrated to the United States in the late seventies and worked in the agricultural fields of Arizona, California and Oregon. He received an High School Equivalency Diploma in Oregon. He was accepted at San Diego State University in San Diego, California where he completed his BA, and MA in Spanish. He remained in San Diego and enrolled at the University of California, San Diego where he completed his Ph.D. He has worked at community colleges and four year colleges in California, Arizona, and Vermont and now serves as Assistant Professor of Spanish at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas.
Contact Information:
Email: Filemon@CWRMagOnline.com
Blog: CWRLatinaAmerica.WordPress.com
