In the early 1970s, Union City was experiencing a state of wrenching transition. But it still had the look about it here and there of an old western town with swaths of broad dusty fields that baked hot in the summer sun. Elsewhere subdivisions erupted like rows of breeding dominos gobbling up open spaces and old farms. Industrial buildings, low-slung and enormous, devoured more land. The old Alvarado town center, referred to as the barrio by local Chicanos, stood huddled against sweeping change like some old western relic trying to withstand a volcanic eruption of people flowing around it.
When I arrived in 1970, the Union City Leader was trying to describe the change and survive the harsh political rancor that ultimately led to street riots and seething hatreds. I walked into the news office of Paul Kinney, the young editor, plopped down my resume, and asked if he needed a writer. He spent a few moments reading about my very young career, and then grinned and said, "Tonight there's a school board meeting, and I'm going to throw you into the breech."
When I arrived at the meeting, there were already more than a hundred people milling about, most of them whispering and looking about suspiciously, handing out papers and agendas and leaflets. The committee itself gathered in the front of a large cafeteria behind a long line of lunch tables. The crowd included many angry teachers, many angry Chicanos, many angry white folks, nearly all of them glaring at each other. The school committee was sharply divided but in recent months had gained a conservative, white majority that had set about trying to ban books, cut teaching positions, eliminate bilingual education, and instill a new back-to-basics movement that would, in effect, halt years of liberal programs and foster neighborhood schools that minimized racial mixing.
One of the more excruciatingly divisive symbols brought to board meetings by the new majority was a mandatory salute to the flag at the beginning of each meeting. Many of those who resented the new policies refused to join in the salute, and instead sat sullenly as the rest stood and placed hands over hearts in a loud, rousing, and defiant pledge.
As a reporter trying my best to be neutral, I was faced with an immediate conundrum. If I stood to salute the flag, I would be considered part of the conservative forces, a shill from the right. If I stayed sitting, I would be considered just "another liberal reporter," not to be trusted and effectively cut off from the people wielding the power. Meanwhile, the larger context included bitter divisions on a national scale over President Nixon's policy of continued bombing in Vietnam and the frequent display of American flags by ultra-conservatives as emblems of support for Nixon and by leftists who wore flags in political mockery or sometimes burned them in effigy. Saluting the flag in this setting was not the same as it had been in my first grade class under the stern eye of Miss Frye. This was symbolic war.
On this first night I stood, took notes, sat, took notes, looked around, broke out in a sweat and tried to avoid the heated glares as more than a few people tried to size up the new reporter from the Leader to guess how this night's adventure might appear in print. In future meetings I stood to the side taking pictures, sat to fix my recorder, stood and scribbled in my notebook, and busily covered the salute as part of the larger event.
The meetings were utter chaos. Bitter speeches from both sides about books, censorship, the failure of bi-lingualism, various potshots about the school contract and budget, accusations of racism, neglect of children, and the destruction of education in Union City issued by both sides to cheers, jeers, hoots, hisses, and the pounding gavel of the school board chair, an insurance salesman with a round pink face and gray suit who threatened from time to time to clear the hall but was clearly out of his league as the point man for change, pressed by forces far bigger and fiercer than he was.
My first story about this brouhaha caused a great stir in town among those close to the political pit. I tried to quote everything notable that was said, and turned in a story that was probably the longest ever published in the Union City Leader. Paul Kinney, who sympathized with the Chicanos and teachers, was actually relieved to receive phone calls from both sides for a change, some angry, some delighted, and it was here that I first learned the lesson that high praise was unwelcome and dangerous flattery to most reporters and much less preferable than universal, across the board irritation. There's an old saying among journalists that if everybody is angry at you, you must be doing something right. Everyone wanted to use the press, and this was a town that had no middle politics, no safe neutral territory, no "objective" perch upon which the press could sit. Every moment from then on was like the national anthem with all sides glaring.
Nonetheless I tried to develop sources on various sides. I sometimes hung out with the police and was one time taken on a cock-fight bust, a precursor to today's frenetic TV saga "Cops." Union City's police swooped in with badges raised and guns ready as roosters ripped at each other's throats, and happily gambling, suddenly horrified Chicanos fled into the arms of the law.
I tried as well to develop sources among the Chicanos to try to understand their distress at losing their town, their power, their autonomy, and their culture to a new population who emerged from huge subdivisions--most of them white, blue-collar or middle class, and with little interest in Spanish culture, some of them overtly racist, most of them simply wanting to exercise power in new haphazardly planned communities.
As tension built in Union City, distrust displaced any sense of caution or diplomacy. The cops, many of them very decent men and women, became more cynical and more harsh in their treatment of Chicanos. Chicanos, meanwhile, glared angrily as police cruisers swept through the barrio in what seemed to them overt demonstrations of force and supremacy. I don't recall now what in particular caused the riots to begin, but one night Molotov cocktails started flying, then tear gas, then barricades, and police crashing through them. These sorts of flare-ups were common at the UC Berkeley campus where tear gas was part of the natural ecology, and Ronald Reagan waged war against students over a little public park populated by dope-smoking street people. So it was no surprise, really, that the tensions in Union City would erupt in somewhat similar form, but these were race riots with none of the mock theater and gamesmanship that characterized the battles in Berkeley.
The morning after the first outbreak, I headed to the old Alvarado town center, where hostilities were most intense. Soon after I arrived, a police car screeched into the town square, Molotov cocktails were flung from alleys, the police shot tear gas, and I started taking photos. A Chicano man rushed at me, grabbed my camera which was strapped around my neck and started yanking very harshly, presuming perhaps that I was working for the police. Across the street a young Chicano man I knew from school board and city council meetings hurried toward us shouting in Spanish that I was okay. "Leave him; leave him," he shouted, running toward us at some risk as the police car careened our way. I regained my camera and started shooting photos of the police car, tear gas smoke wisping and curling in the strong wind from a half dozen swirling canisters. Dust from the nearby fields swept through the empty streets like brown fog, and for a moment the town square looked desolate and defeated, the old Spanish architecture drab and run-down. The police car squealed away, and for a moment everything was silent, leaving a lasting image in my memory of a place sadly doomed to a long, painful struggle.
The forces of change and growth simply overwhelmed Union City, its population doubling in the previous decade. The Bay Area was growing nearly as fast, turning farm lands into a vast urban migration and changing everything for those who once lived there. By the time I left in 1972, Union City was truly a city with over 25,000 people, a growing chunk of the vast Bay Area sprawl, linked north and south by freeways, speed, and growth.
Paul Kinney left as editor to become a legislative aide, so I stayed on for a time and pondered running the paper on a permanent basis. Union City was fascinating turf, a very rich place for a young journalist. But I was a New Englander at heart, as was my wife, and we decided to head back East. We liked California and the Bay Area, but when you come from the Northeast, you need four seasons, not two, or you begin becoming strangely uneasy as if time has stopped and you are always waiting around for something urgent you can't quite grasp. But after thirty years as a journalist and writer, I'll always remember Union City as a place where I could easily have stayed and enjoyed.
Despite the strife that created so much hostility between people, nearly everyone I met I liked. It was as though the city were experiencing an immense family fight. As an outsider, they spoke to me differently. They would stop snarling for a few minutes, and though a bit edgy around a snoopy reporter--as they should have been--they would seem transformed, pleasant, perfectly likeable during one-to-one interviews. But once back in the fray, things turned ugly again, and the feud raged on.
Clearly times have changed in Union City, now more than double its size when I was there, its school system now widely admired, an award-winning community. I experienced the dark days during excruciating growing pains. Now more settled, more capable of controlling its growth while protecting its heritage, Union City seems to have grown up and embraced its ethnic diversity, eventually refusing to be torn apart. For a reporter looking back, that's good news and a good story.
Peter Owens worked another dozen years as a journalist, reporter and editor before returning to graduate school where he earned his masters and doctoral degrees at Harvard and became a journalism and professional writing professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He has since designed computer software for teaching journalists young and older, free-lanced for magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian in London, and taught at Nottingham Trent University in England. He founded a Web site called KidNews that has published writing by more than 10,000 young authors around the world. He has recently completed a novel, titled Rips to be published this year by America House. For information about any of his work, he invites visits to his own Web site at http://www.powens.com/
Copyright Peter Owens, 2000 |
