The wife and I found ourselves in Downtown Oxnard with an hour to kill before we saw Pirates of the Caribbean (AWESOME!!!) last night. It was too hot for a coffee, we were too full for an ice cream and we were too early to just go in and enjoy the air conditioning. So we drove around a bit to see some of the, ahem, "sights"
We ended up at Heritage Square, a downtown city block where they have relocated a bunch of historic Victorian and craftsmen homes, a church and an old watertower that now house a few businesses, a theater and a restaurant. They are all centered around some nice landscaping and a red bricked square smack dab in the middle. It's a nice little place and the houses are very fancy and it is obvious that the people who take care of the square are very proud.
But we couldn't shake the strange and unsettling feeling that the square really should have been called White Center. When you stand in the middle of Heritage Square, you are hard pressed to know that you are still in Oxnard. It feels like the whites saw all the Mexicans coming and decided to circle the wagons and take this one block in the city for their own and are now defending it by making it whiter than white.
So if you ever find yourself in Oxnard and start to feel threatened because suddenly you are a minority in your own country, remember that there is a white embassy downtown that will help you feel superior again. As for me, Heritage Square made me want to run away as fast as possible. I find whites who long for the good old Victorian days much scarier than even the biggest gang banging Mexican.
3 comments:
Oxnard is the name of the Mexican family whose ranch used to encompass all the land that is now the city. Same goes for Camarillo.
When I lived in Burbank, I always considered outlying areas like Oxnard to be mainly white-dominated anyways.
I was a security guard for that place before it opened. Long time ago.
I was so pathetic then that I didn't even have a car. I was dropped off for a 12-hour shift watching dirt and old buildings. In the rain. All night.
There was (I think still is) a liquor store about a block or two away that was the only thing around.
I walked down to it hoping to find a magazine or something to read.
The only they had that was even reasonably interesting to me was Lowrider.
That was one of the worst jobs I ever did in security...
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