I’m a Chicano (Mexican-American). I grew up in the West End part of a small Texas-German town. Five Black families lived in our barrio. I watched Tarzan movies on a black-and-white fuzzy TV screen with my Black friend, Gregory. If the white savior wasn’t swinging from the trees in the jungle to save an African from a lion, he was saving the tribe from evil white men. Beyond the barrio’s border that separated minorities from whites, was the jungle that evil white men had staked out as their territory with graffito. 

I could have written a song about all the posted “white only” signs that greeted us when we ventured beyond our borders. There were “white only” signs at the park’s Olympic pool, at privately owned restaurants, and even at the Saint Peter and Paul Catholic Church. Everywhere we looked there were signs that said, “Don’t do this, don’t do that!” The school hallway signs read “No speaking Spanish!” The sign posted inside the Brauntex Theatre directed Chicanos to the top balcony.  However, Gregory, like a faithful pet dog, had to wait outside the theater door till we came out, because the sign at the entrance read “No Negroes beyond this point.” At the downtown Woolworth store, I could sit at the counter and enjoy my malt served in a glass cup, but I had to carry Gregory’s malt to him in a throw-away styrofoam cup. Everywhere we went, I had to serve Gregory “outside.”  Having a white complexion had its advantages. Like Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility. I often went unnoticed in “white only” establishments. 

At 19, I left Gregory behind when I boarded a prison bus. In 1974, prisoners were segregated. There were no women guards, and if there were Black guards, I don’t remember seeing one. In clear violation of state laws that prohibited prison officials from using inmates as guards, prison officials were using inmates as guards.  They armed these prison guards with knives and baseball bats. The brutal inmate-guard, or building tender (BT) system as it was called, was composed of thousands of turncoat inmates who had betrayed their fellow prisoners to serve the white racist administrators. The top echelon of the BTs were composed of whites, and the lower end composed primarily of Black BTs, and a handful of Latino BTs. …

To God, “All lives matter,” for He said, “I wish all men to be saved.” But we were not saved. It was nothing personal when I stuck my aggie blade into a Latino BT’s head, or when I stuck my steel rod into a Black BT’s gut.  It was just the law of the jungle. To us, the lives of those turncoats who had betrayed their race and sided on the wrong side of a cause, didn’t matter. So, not all Latino and Black lives matter!