Writing Archive

"THIS IS A TINY TOWN!
AND WE DON'T WANT YOU COMIN' 'ROUND!"
—Dead Milkmen

While reading John Bodnar's The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Indiana UP, 1985), I remembered my 1970s Fisher Price Tiny Town. It was a portable, foldable, plastic city-square with a handle that could be spread out into a strip-mall-style Main Street, complete with firehouse, theater, barber shop, post office, and jail cell. I think there might have even been a second-floor penthouse of sorts, and other such roof-top vistas of the little people in my small-town kingdom.

My imagination and experience weren't enough as an eight-year-old to plan tiny-people raves and riots, as I instead re-cast Tiny Town like a good urban planner in the mold of my hometown, La Feria, Texas. Back then we were 3,000 people, and so Tiny Town was not too far off from my real-life strolls down quiet palm-tree-lined avenues around the core of LF's sleepy shops and markets bounded by irrigation canals and citrus fields.

While feverishly searching for proof recently of my pre-pubescent sojourns in Tiny Town, I googled into the Fisher Price Wild West, complete with a black-top-hat-wearing mayor who looks typically "frontier" evil in a melodramatically twisted moustache, ready to sell Wild West Town out to the big ranchers and railroad developers. And of course, Wild West Town isn't complete without little cowboy and Indian people.

I hate to think of what massacres and bloodshed kids have reenacted around the country in their sugar-fueled rampages through the li'l Wild West.

In my Tiny Wild West, there would be no lynching.

But at least in my Tiny Town back in Texas, I treated everyone equally. Well, everyone except the ugly, angry kid. He had a mean look on his freckled face and a cap twisted to the side, like bad-attitude-style. There were no gangbangers, really, in 1970s La Feria for me to deal with, and so I couldn't understand why the kid had such an angry look on his pocked, frowning face. No experiential amalgam yet for that kind of homely rage.

He's the one I'd put in jail.

If I remember correctly, the vast majority of Tiny Town's little people were white. I mean, really white. There was only one black little guy, and no brown people. It never occurred to me to put the black guy in jail, and no one else seemed to be asking for it, so the scowling white kid was the logical choice.

The cell door would twist with a crank as I put him on the hard, plastic bunk and left him to rot in the can while the rest of Tiny Town took in a karate flick at the movies or a cook-out on the penthouse deck with one of those camper grills sporting eternally roasting steaks and weenies.

Sometimes the angry kid would escape, and so he'd get run down by someone — usually the dalmation — and sent back to the slammer. I guess even the dog was treated better than that freckled sucker, and maybe my mini-metropolis needed an outsider or untouchable to languish and toil at the bottom of Tiny Town's invisible hierarchy.

Yes, the dalmation definitely was in charge of Tiny Town, maybe because he struck a strange subconscious resonance of self-identification in my developing ideas of race and caste. At least, he was the definite "underdog." Maybe he was on top because he had the biggest smile in Tiny Town.

Maybe he reminded me of my own funny face, brown and out-of-place in Tiny Town.

Analyzing my adventures in Tiny Town would of course take many years and a master's degree, but I've been re-thinking my roots back in La Feria as those of an urban immigrant family's. But that's only because I don't have a Tiny Town to play with anymore.

And so I remember La Feria and living literally just off Main Street on Oleander Avenue, the nexus of town biz, across from the supermarket and down the way from a post office, bank, and the cafe that fed us enchiladas regularly. (Mainly hamburgers.) Around the corner from the one-room tortilla factory, cotton gin, and railroad. Not too far from City Hall and its illustrious drunk tank.

La Feria of course headquartered The Ortiz Shoe Shop, housed in grandpa's modest building that was cut into apartment rows where we lived, where grandpa worked and we took our place next to other small-town shop owners at the parking-lot heart of LF.

In The Transplanted, Bodnar's "children of capitalism" included shopkeepers like my grandpa, who couldn't keep stores open and make money amid Mexico's graft. Like Bodnar describes, grandpa made the calculated, pragmatic decision to move and thus pursue a greater stake of economic gain for his family, by opening a shoe-repair store across the border in 1920s Texas.

That's how we became Americans. And how my Tiny Town became a microcosm of my small understanding of the world growing up in La Feria.

Much later, I would jam Dead Milkmen on my ghetto blaster in high school and think about how much their song "Tiny Town" nailed my beloved home, as I learned how to mock smallsville like a hipster goofing hicks, intuiting LF's forgotten cruelties:

WE GOT OURSELF A SHERIFF AND HIS NAME'S BOBBY JOE/ ONE DAY HE SAID TO ME 'THEM PUNK ROCKERS GOTTA GO'/ SO WE HOPPED INTO HIS PICKUP TRUCK WITH A GUN RACK ON THE BACK/ AND WE BEAT UP ON THEM PUNKS AND WE BEAT UP ON THEM BLACKS!...

But that story's for another journal entry...along with my sordid tales of trying to make Weebles un-wobble, executing action figures in the trash compactor of my mini-Death-Star, and torturing Spock in the transporter-room of my portable Enterprise, &c.

"I BELIEVE IN SWORDFISH!"