ROUTE 66 AND THE SUNDOWN TOWNS
“N ..., don't let the sun set on you in this town”
“No Mexicans after sunset”
“Whites only within city limits after dark”
—Signs at the entrance of towns and cities on Route 66
August 16, 2020. We were attending a meeting of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Garfield Park in South Pasadena, California, when a young artist and activist spoke from the microphone referring to the so-called "Sunset Towns" (Sundown Towns). I have lived in Pasadena, neighboring South Pasadena, for more than two decades, and this was the first time I had heard the term “Sundown Towns.” I must have heard it long before. But no. It was the first time. The young woman briefly mentioned what it was about: cities where no black person was allowed to live, and in most cases no one of Chinese, Mexican, Jewish origin, or anyone who was not considered “white.” They could work during the day in various trades within the city limits, but as soon as dusk began they had to leave, at the risk of being forcibly expelled by the police or the vigilantes.
Making the connections I saw that this still open chapter of American racism tries to be made visible in the film The Green Book, directed by Peter Farrelly, which won the Oscar for best movie of 2018 for its portrait of an Italian-American chauffeuring a black musician as they travel along Route 66 giving classical music concerts in Southern cities of the US. After exploring the history of the Sundown Towns, one can see that the reality is much worse than described superficially and accommodatingly in the film. The book on which the film's plot is based was a travel guide, The Black Motorist Green Book, which helped black travelers know which hotels, restaurants and recreational sites they can go to without facing brutal rejection. The guide's publisher, African-American Victor Hugo Green, published new editions periodically with updated instructions for a journey that exposed travelers to the crudest and most ruthless racism. The film makes no mention of Green's book, thus concealing a fundamental truth of this story tied to the Jim Crow laws of segregation and exclusion.
The Sundown Towns achieved notoriety as a result of a national project to build a highway that would facilitate travel from Chicago to the Pacific shores of Southern California. It was named Route 66 and eventually became the most famous highway in the United States and a symbol of freedom and progress for the white population. Numerous books can be read exalting the greatness of the United States through the natural and urban landscapes of which it was popularized with the name of The Mother Route. It's the highway in Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath and the nomadic hippies of the sixties. But as is typical in the official narrative, all this celebratory imagery of the manifest destiny concealed the dark side of racism suffered by anyone who was not accepted as part of the “true American” identity, that is, all those who were not part of the Anglo-American population.
On the outskirts of thousands of towns and cities in many states, including those through which Route 66 passes, there were signs like the ones I mention in the epigraph. South Pasadena, Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, Arcadia, Azusa, Fontana, are just a few of many cities in Southern California that were part of this and other forms of racial and ethnic discrimination and segregation, which included disappearances and lynchings. Some people say that all of this is part of a past that is now over. It is not true. There are still towns in the United States that are still Sundown Towns, like Norwood, a neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio; or Sapulpa and Broken Arrow, in Oklahoma, and countless other cities, which the reader can find searching the internet. Or watching the documentary The Injustice Files: Sundown Towns, one of the most revealing about the existence of this racist practice in the United States today.
But a city or town in the United States does not need to be specifically a Sundown Town to be classified as such. The segregationist effects and practices against minorities remain latent in multiple areas of the country's life such as education, work, and the demographic and physical distribution of neighborhoods. It is clear that the police are more protective of the neighborhoods where Anglo-American people live, while criminalizing and persecuting people in the neighborhoods where the black and Latino population live. Racism exarced from the White House, is evidence that this is one of the most persistent evils in the country. One of the key functions of the Black Lives Matter Movement is to uncover these historical iniquities, name them, describe them, and work to dismantle them. And that was the mission of the young woman who spoke in days past in Garfield Park in South Pasadena.
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This week I recommend two books: Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture, by Ed Morales, Nuyorican, professor at Columbia University, New York, on the growing demographic, political and social importance of the more than 60 million Latinos in the United States. Hispanic, Latino, Latina, Latinx, are some of the terms to try to encapsulate in one word a diverse population that is currently the second largest group in the United States and that in a few decades will become the majority of the country. Available in English. The other book is the novel Natural History, by the Costa Rican writer Carlos Fonseca, who, after living for many years in Puerto Rico and on the east coast of the United States, now lives in London. An experimental novel that collects an iconoclastic tradition, in the manner of the novels of the Argentine Macedonio Fernández, and going through a century of literary and artistic postmodern transgressions.
