Barbara Reneaud Gonzalez is a consultant for the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, TX. More of her writings can be found online.

When I was fourteen in 1968, my father moved my family to Cactus, Texas, where I began high school in Dumas. I was the only Latina in the freshman class at the time.

My father had decided on the eyeblink of a town across the border from Oklahoma because of the flourishing economy created by the many migrants who arrived in the summer to work in the agricultural fields. A former sharecropper, my Tejano father got a good job working construction, and he and my mother bought a four-bedroom home that had been remodeled from former World War II barracks.

The Panhandle where I grew up is famous for its cottonfields, tornadoes, and racism, all equally bountiful. Every day that I went to school there for eight years I was chased, ridiculed, trashed, scarred for being mexicana. We were a minority, not even 5% then, but I survived, though most of my friends didn’t. My brother Jorge is in prison because of it.

How times have changed, people say, but I don’t think they’ve changed at all. Cactus, an extreme land of hailstorms and sandstorms, has made the national news because there are now too many brown people. Recently more than 1200 Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants were caught in a six-state Homeland Security sweep at the Swift meatpacking plants that included Cactus, part of the largest-ever workplace crackdown in history.

And the brown people are being watched: A “virtual border watch” has just passed its stress test, as eight cameras along the Texas border recorded over 27 million hits. More cameras – perhaps as many as 200 – will eventually record immigrants crossing the border, drug smuggling and who-knows-what. By that time, in 2008, Texas will get 6000 more Border Patrol agents now recruiting near my house at Crossroads Mall in San Antonio as part of an anti-terrorism legislative package.

In Farmers Branch, Texas, one of the Dallas upper-class suburbs, a city resolution recently barring landlords from renting to illegal immigrants is the first of its kind in Texas, but, I suspect, not the last. Thirty percent of the people in Farmers Branch are Latinos.

Now we Latinos are easily 40% of the Texas population, everywhere, and, still, nowhere. If you come to the RiverWalk in San Antonio where I live, you’ll see people from all over Texas and the world feasting on our fajitas, margaritas, nachos and tamales. But the people serving that food, washing the dishes, cooking in the kitchen, are all brown. Some of them have papers, some of them don’t, of that I’m positive.

Has anyone told the tourists and the governor and the Border Patrol if they know who’s going to butcher their meat for their favorite meals with all those arrests in Cactus? Believe me, the people here like to chow-down. Maybe they know someone besides immigrants who want to do that dirty job, you think? Well, this is Texas, where now we have mayors and movie stars who speak Spanish, and gringos eat more tacos than me. But nothing has changed, and I don’t know when it will.