Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

Smith chooses the Mexican-American sculptor and painter Rudy Salas, Sr. to open the narrative. Salas provides a bitter personal and historical take on the harsh division between the Los Angeles police and people of color. Defiantly proud of his Mexican heritage—his grandfather “rode with [Pancho] Villa,” fighting the “gringos” in Chihuahua—Salas Jr. claims to harbor no resentment for the “rednecks” and “peckerwoods” who obliged him to “put out my big Mexican flag out of my van” (1, 4). Yet he runs through a lifelong personal history of anti-Mexican discrimination in the schools and racist brutality perpetrated by the police. In first grade, when “they started telling me I was inferior because I was Mexican,” Salas “realized I had an enemy and that enemy was those nice white teachers” (2). Years later, now in his teens and “running around as a zoot-suiter,” Salas endured a savage beating by four cops, who took him into a locked room and kicked his head so hard that they fractured his eardrum, leaving him temporarily deaf (2-3). The bitterness has barely receded over a half century and, even now, Salas finds himself snarling about “‘[t]hese goddamned peckerwoods’” every time he scans the headlines at the breakfast table (4).