A NEW COMANCHE IN TOWN

When I first walked about Guadalupe Street in Austin I felt really strange. It was in January 1975 and the second semester had just started in the University of Texas. I walked aimlessly thinking about how the Comanches used to look at Austin from the nearby hills in order to plan the next raid against the white men, who without permission and too much arrogance, were beginning to build a town. A town that later on would become the capital of a new state and that'd happened not too long ago,

because Texas's history is short when compared with Europe's. There were two theaters in Guadalupe Street, one was an R-rated movie theater not far from the University Baptist church; and the other was the Varsity cinema with newly released movies, before becoming an specialized place for foreign films and old black and white pieces of art from Hollywood. In between, those two theaters there were different kind of stores, I used to browse books in the University Bookstore, and their neighbors's well-stocked bookshop named Gardner and Smith; with such a good section of history, philosophy and literary cristicism. They always had the up to day titles in everything. It was a marvelous place to find a refuge for the mind, with classic music always in the background.

I felt like a Comanche ready to raid the city for new experiences. It was like being a mutant among an

unknown civilization. People were unaware of your presence because you were almost invisible. A ghost walking and driving through the white man's city. Was I white? What was to be a foreigner after so many years of being a plain working class young man speaking the same language as anybody else and keeping the same ID card as millions of others? It meant a new rebirth and a new reinvention of myself when facing so many different situations and challenges and landscapes. Yes, I was a new Comanche in town, ready to reconquer what was mine at a time when nothing was there but the grass, the forest, the rattlesnakes, the squirrels, and the wild birds. Back to a time of an almost absolute beginning in an untrodden territory with a wide river to cross and fish and swim. Up the hills and looking at the sky I went straight to my English class down the corridors of Parlin Hall as a new student eager to learn my new language and my new world.