Lessons Learned in the Bible Belt
My early childhood experiences occurred in Dallas, Texas in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
During the economic recession of 2008, my dad lost his job. My family already financially struggled, but during the recession, it was impossible for my parents to keep up with the high cost of living in an expensive city like Dallas.
So, during my freshman year of high school, my parents decided to move to a small farming community in rural Texas.
I was excited about this move. I imagined quaint family farms, vast landscapes, and friendly faces. However, the reality of living in a small town would be very different than what I imagined.
The Reality of Small Town, U.S.A
I’ll never forget my first day of high school. I sat next to a girl who seemed shy. I began talking to her. She informed me that her family raised rabbits.
“Oh, so you keep them as pets?” I asked.
The girl looked at me and with a completely straight face, she said:
“No. We eat them.”
At that moment, I knew that I wasn’t in Dallas anymore.
I struggled to make friends during my freshman year. Everyone at the small high school had known each other since they were toddlers. Their parents and grandparents had lived and worked in the town as farmers for decades.
Everyone had a shared history that I was excluded from.
No matter how hard I tried to fit in, I was always treated as an outsider from big city Dallas. Due to the reputation that Dallas had, I was perceived as being wealthy or cosmopolitan. Girls often made snide comments about me to my face, implying that I was snobbish even though they knew nothing about me.
Something else that bothered me about this new environment was that everyone was homogenous.
In Dallas, I grew up with kids of different ethnic and religious backgrounds than me. However, in this small town, everyone was white and Christian. Specifically, they were Southern Baptists.
Although I was raised Christian, I never found it strange that my peers in Dallas believed in a different religion than I did. I thought that we all had different ways of worshipping the same God. I assumed that all Christians felt the same way about other faiths.
Within this small town, I learned pretty quickly that if you did not believe in the town’s particular brand of Christianity, then you were excluded from any social activities.
I was regularly slut-shamed because I refused to wear a purity ring that all the other girls at my high school wore.
I tried my best to fit in, although I could never accept the overt racism, sexism, and homophobia that I witnessed every day.
When we moved to this small town, it was the first time I had ever seen a Confederate flag. I was confused by this unfamiliar symbol. I asked my mom what the flag represented, and after she told me, I was even more confused.
Why would someone be proud of being a racist and losing the Civil War?
Additionally, my family is Mexican-American on my mom’s side, and within this small town, there was no shortage of anti-Mexican hatred. Residents of the town believed that the Mexican people had “taken their jobs”. According to the locals, the entire population of Mexico was solely to blame for all of their problems.
After four years of living in that small town, I graduated high school and moved to Austin, Texas where I worked full time for a few years. I eventually moved to the Western United States and graduated from a university there.
Although the West is far from perfect, I much prefer it to the South. The West is still relatively new compared to the rest of the United States. In the West, there is no bitterness over how the Civil War turned out. There is no longing for an antebellum utopia that never existed.
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