“What if the red I see is not the same as the red you see?” I know. It sounds like one of those late-night, sleep deprived, substance driven kind of conversations that you have when you think your mind is open and you’ve suddenly tapped into the source of the universe. Still, it makes me think. How do I know that what I point at and call red has the same hue and saturation as what you see? We’ve all seen various computer monitors and television screens that skew things just a bit, so what if each of our eyes and brains are all wired just a little bit differently. It’s not far-fetched.
So suffice to say, it works the same way when we view the world through cultural lenses. In short, we all see things differently. We see things through our own slants, upbringings, biases, place in history, geographic location, relationship to the protagonist, etc.
I say all of this as I sit down to write and research historical events that took place in Dallas in the 1970s. But how do I write it? What slant do I take? How much poetic license is allowed? The deeper I go into the story, the more distortion I see. Everyone has a distinctly different viewpoint. People remember things differently and have a different vantage point as to what took place and what is significant. And with each interview, I get contradicting information. So what really happened? Or rather, does it really matter?
The facts are simple and they don’t change: In 1973, two Hispanic boys, David and Santos Rodriguez (13 and 12) were picked by Dallas police for allegedly burglarizing a gas station vending machine and stealing $8. Roy Arnold reported seeing three boys run from the gas station. He fired a gun in the air, but the boys fled the scene. A call was made over the radio. Around 2:30 A.M., Arnold and responding officer, Darrell Cain, went to the Rodriguez household, roused the Spanish speaking grandfather, arrested and handcuffed the brothers and put them in a squad car to question them. They drove the boys to the scene of the crime. Cain put a .357 magnum to Santos's head. He pulled the trigger and the gun clicked as he yelled at the boys. (In court, Cain swore the gun wasn’t loaded and he was only trying to coerce a confession). The second time, he blew the kid's face off. When a nearby cop took the gun from Cain just seconds after the shooting, the gun was fully loaded except for the one empty chamber that had discharged the bullet. Evidence later showed that the prints found at the scene of the robbery did not match those of the two boys. Later, a downtown demonstration and rally for Santos turned violent and caused riots in the streets of Dallas.
Now what? Newspaper articles from the Dallas Morning News during the time paint Cain as a good ole American white cop who really was sorry, swore it was an accident and was the real victim in the story. Facts show that Cain had shot and killed an eighteen-year old African American just a few months earlier. Santos, actually, was the third victim he had shot and killed in the line of duty. The defense attorney for Cain tried desperately to paint the two boys as low-level thugs. Their mother was in prison for killing her boyfriend in a domestic dispute where she claimed he tried to kill her. Her reputation among the citizens of Little Mexico in Dallas was not favorable. The boys were living with a family friend described as their grandfather. Cain was found guilty of murder with malice and got a sentence of 5 years and $25. He only served two and a half. Arnold was never indicted, but was removed from the police force for failure to report discharging his weapon in the initial pursuit.
When interviewing a former mayor pro tem and high profile Dallas Hispanic lawyer close to the case, he described Little Mexico as a police state where shootings and police brutality was common. He says kids in little Mexico used to make sport of throwing rocks at patrol cars. However, another political activist who helped organize the rally downtown says that the lawyer has a knack for over exaggeration. At this point, everyone runs in their own direction with the story. Most tried to use the events as some sort of rallying point to get what they wanted by exploiting the event. The brown berets and even black panthers tried to spur this into a catalyst for a Hispanic Civil Rights movement of sorts but there was no organized structure to make that happen. Hispanics were viewed as white without rights and didn’t have the history behind them that the SCLC or SNCC had at their disposal. There was no Martin Luther King in Dallas to make that happen (although many would disagree). The mother wanted money. She sued the city for damages but the case was dismissed. Some say she tried desperately to attempt movie and book deals. She even mounted an effort a couple decades later to get Pike Park renamed after her son. The city finally decided that he wasn’t a hero and that Pike Park was too closely tied to Mexican-American heritage in Dallas to be renamed. His mother insists he was never given the chance to be anything, much less a hero. The brother David had his own struggles growing up and the family was never too far from tragedy. Others are still not sure if Santos and his cousin Herman (who is oddly left out of the story) might have actually broken into the gas station. A coroner reports stated that when the autopsy was done on Santos, there was a lot of candy in his system and he had eaten within the hour. Where would a poor Hispanic kid get candy in Little Mexico at one or two in the morning? The boys had been in trouble for theft before. It still does nothing to justify why Cain pulled his gun in the first place. Both boys were handcuffed. For twenty years after the event, it was often talked about in Hispanic circles. Every conversation at birthday parties and gatherings seemed to come back to Santos. But then again, everyone remembers it a little differently. And how does one distinguish the facts from the legends? It’s a ghost.
So here’s the challenge. I want to write a story that is intriguing. I have the shooting of a troubled kid in a police car by what appears to be a racially motivated officer. It caused a protest. Many say it was a rallying point for the Hispanic movement in the United States, but it never materialized. Santos’ death never captured the national stage the same way the slaying of Emmett Till did for the movement in the sixties. It’s mostly just a forgotten event.
Who were these kids? They don’t appear to be heroes. They were just kids. It could have been anyone. Was the cop a racist? Depends on how I paint him, I suppose. How do I characterize the mother? And is any of it right? Who’s the hero of the story if there even is one? When I sit down to write this story, how much truth and how much dramatization and much license do I have? And with an event that is almost forty years past, what is truth? As I said, we see things through our own slants, upbringings, biases, place in history, geographic location, relationship to the protagonist, etc.
I guess I will just embark on the journey. Stephen King describes writing as unearthing some great archeological find. You have to keep working at it. The story is there somewhere and with each chip of the rock, it should reveal itself. The best advice I’ve gotten comes from Michelangelo: “I saw the angle in the marble and carved until I set him free,”
There’s got to be a story in there somewhere. Until then, it still just remains a ghost.
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