By Daniel Acosta Jr.
Memories of a Mexican Boy from El Paso: So You Want to Be a Pharmacist
My two years of pre-pharmacy studies at Texas Western College went by quickly. Academically, I was ready to begin pharmacy school at the University of Texas in the fall of 1965. Although I thought I was prepared to do well in my pharmacy classes, I had never worked in a drug store; I learned that many of my white classmates from small towns in Texas had grown up knowing a lot about pharmacy, especially regarding the many drugs that they personally saw the pharmacists filling. I had some catching up to do. While I was going to pharmacy school, I found a job in a drug store, and was able to learn more about what it took to become a pharmacist.
As a Mexican boy from El Paso, I had never lived in an environment where whites outnumbered Mexicans or Chicanos. I grew up in a mixed neighborhood of Mexicans and Anglos, and never thought much about my situation in El Paso because Mexicans were the dominant race in El Paso. I saw racial discrimination in El Paso, but because I was one of the top students in my grade school and high school years and because I had fair skin, I didn’t see as much overt discrimination directed at me as my brown friends and classmates experienced. When I began my studies at the University of Texas, this changed. I saw how people of color were told by some whites that they were not American enough. I was excited to be at UT, but by the end of my first year in pharmacy school I began to have doubts if I really wanted to be a pharmacist for the rest of my life. However, a career in pharmacy was my ticket to getting out of El Paso with a stable and secure job. I was willing to wait to see what it’d be like in the summer of 1968 when I graduated.
Having grown up in El Paso where the majority of the population was Mexican, I was not as comfortable living in Austin and attending classes at a university that was mostly white. There was a small group of pharmacy students from the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, and El Paso who had a Mexican background, and I quickly made friends with several of them. A good number of students in my pharmacy class were white; they came from smaller towns in Texas, but there were also many from larger cities like Dallas and Houston. Unlike many of my pharmacy classmates, I did not have any relatives nor family friends who were pharmacists. I was coming into pharmacy cold without much knowledge of the profession. I had chosen pharmacy as my major, based on research that I found in books at the library and with brief conversations I had with druggists at the corner drugstore. While I was growing up, our family experienced some hard times; my father, who was a carpenter, had periods of unemployment when the construction business was slow. Pharmacy offered me a route to a secure job with a reasonably good salary. It was later that I decided what I really wanted to do with my life. Pharmacy would be a part of the solution; I learned about different options available to one who had a pharmacy degree.
My father dropped me off one hot September day at the El Paso airport in the family’s only vehicle–a beat-up blue Chevy truck he used for his work as a carpenter. The airport had adobe, Mexican-like architecture, and desert plants in front of its entrance. The Austin airport, in contrast, was nondescript and lacked character. The John Denver song comes to mind–“all my bags were packed” but my escape on a jet plane was not as poignant and sad as a guy leaving his girlfriend for the first time and wondering when he would be back again. I was just another smart Mexican boy who had to leave his family, trying to make it at the big, white university in Austin. I got a taxi at the Austin airport, a few miles from campus, and made my way to the Whitis Co-Operative, a place for about 25 male students to sleep and eat. Everyone had to help with the maintenance and cleaning of the Co-Op, and the cooking of the meals. The color brochure that I had received from the Co-Operative had some great photos of the living room, the dining area, the kitchen, the study hall with solid desks and chairs, and the sparkling bathing area, with guys laughing and talking to each other. Not surprisingly, the sleeping area was not in the brochure. The Co-Op looked much different in person. The living room was a mess with magazines and newspapers scattered on a huge coffee table and a battered sofa was situated near the front door. There was always a record playing on a turntable during the lunch hour. Often you had to yell to be heard.
After two weeks of this organized chaos, I decided to find another place to live. I was in luck because there was a boarding house up Whitis Avenue from the Co-Op. To not stiff the Co-Op out of its monthly dues from me, I came to an agreement with management to continue to pay for my meals but not for a bed. At the intersection of 27th and Whitis, there were three buildings which, to me, represented the rigid white and economic class structure at UT during the 1960s: the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house; the Scottish Rite Dormitory for the daughters of affluent parents; and the venerable All Saints Episcopal Chapel. Every morning I walked up Whitis Avenue, passed the fraternity house on the corner, and crossed 27th Street to attend my pharmacy classes a few blocks away.
My first days at the University of Texas began each morning with a guy I had met at the Co-Op. Walking up Whitis Avenue each morning to reach my pharmacy classes was made easier because Bob showed me the ropes during my first semester. Here was a white boy from a small town in Texas with his cowboy boots, cowboy shirt, and Wrangler jeans, being nice and friendly to a Mexican boy from El Paso who wore new slacks, a white shirt, and tie. Although I changed my sleeping arrangements from the Co-Op to the boarding house, I had meals with the guys at Whitis. In retrospect, I much appreciated those early days; I saw white students manage their college expenses by scrimping and saving, like I did. That first semester I saw the extreme contrast between guys like Bob and me and those mainly white boys who lived in the huge, white-painted fraternity house at the top of Whitis Avenue.
My first year of pharmacy school was a major challenge to see if I could compete with the elite at the University of Texas. I concentrated solely on my studies and not work as I had done through high school and my first two years at Texas Western. During my first semester at pharmacy school, I hooked up with a couple of guys from El Paso, Nick and Ray. They both had rooms at a boarding house further up Whitis from the Co-Op. We often had lunch together at one of their rooms which had a hot plate, heating up cans of Campbell soup that we bought at a local 7-11. Not knowing what to expect in our pharmacy classes, we shared class notes and studied at the library together. We expected that our first tests would be difficult, and we wanted to be as prepared as possible.
Our plan was simple; each of us separately took notes from our lectures as quickly as possible and captured as many of the points made by the professor in the one-hour lecture. In between classes, we went to a majestic reading room we found away from the regular library; it was in the Main Tower building, a block away from the pharmacy school. There were massive oak tables and chairs, wooden wall panels, and quotes from classic authors high up the walls near the ceiling of the room. It took us one hour to rewrite our shared notes from each lecture. We used different colored ink to highlight important topics from the lectures. It was tedious and arduous, but in the end, it paid off when we studied for our major exams.
There was one notorious course that all first-year pharmacy students knew was especially tough, and the professor seemed to have a grudge against the students because he was assigned by the chair of the department to teach this beginning course—Inorganic Pharmaceutical Chemistry. The first test was extremely hard and no one in the class made above “30” on the exam. As he handed back the tests to the class, he was literally laughing about how badly we had performed. I made the highest grade in the class with a “28”. By the end of the semester, he had to curve the grades to the more traditional 70-80-90 range. The rest of the year continued in that same vein, but there were opportunities to have some leisurely relaxation. After studying late on Friday nights, Nick and I took in a midnight movie at the Texas Union to have a break from our studies. We also found several good Mexican restaurants, walking distance from campus, and we were able to have our fill of tacos and enchiladas. Our favorite was “El Patio” because it served saltine crackers and salsa, instead of tortilla chips and chili sauce. It was different and made it stand out from the rest of the Tex-Mex restaurants. By the end of my first year in pharmacy school, I knew I’d make it at the great University of Texas.
While I was at the University of Texas, I had to work for my food and other living expenses. My answer was to work about 25 hours a week in the kitchens of exclusive private dorms for rich co-eds whose parents demanded the best living arrangements for their daughters and to work at a discount pharmacy in downtown Austin. I began to see more signs of discrimination at UT and in Austin. As I walked to these dorms past fraternity houses, I often heard catcalls and taunts from frat boys yelling at me “to go back home where you came from”. Fifty years later I still hear these unoriginal insults, but which now may lead to attacks and injury to people of color and people thought not to be American enough.
I saw these rich girls eating and associating with each other at these dorms I worked at and saw how easy it was for them to live in such an exclusive environment and not show any interest in us kitchen workers as we served them food, bussed their trays from the dining room, washed the dirty dishes and pots and pans, and mopped up the kitchen after they had finished eating their delicious meals.
I was able to observe these girls more closely because the student help was allowed to eat in the same dining hall as the girls, unlike some of the other dorms where the kitchen workers ate at a table in the back of the kitchen. As I ate many times in the dining hall, I heard these rich girls denigrate the Vietnam protests happening around the country. The Vietnam War was not popular with young people, especially college students, and protests were increasingly happening across the country. However, the University of Texas was not a hotbed of protests, but there was still a growing discontent even in Texas. One evening in early June as I was carrying a tray of my dinner to an open table, I saw the news of RFK’s assassination on TV in one of the lounges at the dorm. Several of the girls were clapping and cheering the announcement of his death.
In the fall semester of my second year of pharmacy school, I decided to grow a beard as a mild protest to the political climate in the US about the Vietnam war and civil rights for Black Americans. Most of the pharmacy students were conservative by nature, coming from rural towns in Texas or from affluent neighborhoods in Dallas and Houston. 1968 was a very traumatic time in American history: the assassinations of MLK and RFK occurred; there were major race riots in several large cities; there was the resignation of LBJ because of the Vietnam War; there were massive protests at the Democratic Convention in Chicago to decide who ran in place of LBJ against Richard Nixon; and there was the rise of the Chicano movement. Many young Chicanos were actively protesting what was happening to Mexicans in the Southwest and California, and I began to learn more about my Mexican heritage.
I started to read the local radical newspaper, called The Rag, which highlighted the protest movements against the war and the treatment of Blacks. I became familiar with prominent authors in the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper’s, and the New Yorker, who were intellectually protesting the war. I definitely did not want to be drafted, but I knew if I were drafted, I would not leave the country for Canada. In my heart, I knew that I did not want to spend my life as a pharmacist in a local drugstore. A couple of my professors encouraged me to think of graduate school and to have a career as a pharmaceutical scientist. They were very optimistic that I’d receive a graduate student deferment. I shaved off my beard before I had to take my physical at the local draft board in Austin as the first step in the assignment of one’s draft status. I learned soon after that I was given a 1-A classification. If I did not receive a draft deferment for graduate school, I’d be drafted after I finished my degree in pharmacy.
Ward’s Cut-Rate Drugs
I finished my last year in pharmacy school, working at a second job as a drug clerk in a discount pharmacy, along with my dorm kitchen position. I was able to save some money as I worked my two jobs, hoping that I’d have enough to buy a car before I graduated. During the mid-1960s, downtown Austin was still somewhat disreputable with its bars and nightclubs on 6th Street, an attraction for university and high school students, alike. This discount pharmacy matched the seediness of the area around 6th Street. Working at a discount pharmacy with its focus on making a buck by selling large quantities of OTC drugs and brand-name cosmetics at reduced prices was not a place for an idealistic pharmacy student to work at. A few discount pharmacies were starting to pop up after WWII; they were considered to be a negative blot on the more respectable retail pharmacies that had dominated the profession for years. One particular discount pharmacy chain opened up its first drug store in downtown Austin in the 1930s. By the 1960s, it was still one of the few discount pharmacies in town. Even its name was insulting and distasteful to pharmacists–Ward’s Cut-Rate Drugs– which was notably located on Austin’s most famous street, Congress Avenue, looking down the throat at the Capitol a few blocks away.
I thought that Congress Avenue with its famous view of the Texas Capitol would be a dignified street, especially for the 600-900 blocks, closest to the Capitol grounds. Instead, those three blocks were lined with several seedy-looking loan stores, a couple of run-down jewelry stores, a few optical shops, and some cheap diners, with Ward’s right in the middle of these establishments. There weren’t any nice boutique shops or clothing stores, banks, and expensive restaurants, as one sees today on Congress Avenue. Ward’s overall appearance contrasted dramatically with the traditional and clean aspects of the retail drug stores in town. It reminded me of a hole-in-the wall type store. Ward’s did not have separate spaces for the products that it offered its customers when they walked through the front door. It was essentially a large main room where tobacco and cigarettes were sold near the entrance and the rest of the cosmetic and drug products were scattered throughout the store. This made it easy for downtown customers who quickly wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes and leave the disorderly and somewhat dirty store without any fuss. These patrons, mostly men, did not want to be jostled by other people, mostly women and older people, who wanted to buy cosmetics and non-prescription drugs at a discount, which were scattered throughout the store in a somewhat random fashion.
The more experienced shoppers knew exactly where to find the antacids, laxatives, analgesics, vitamins, etc. on sale and knew their prices from the ads in the local newspaper. There were no signs indicating where to find the products on sale that week. None of the products had sticker prices. Instead, the prices of the items were marked on brown masking tape and placed on the edge of the shelf where the product was located. Ward’s also offered good prices for prescription drugs and there was a steady influx of customers who came in throughout the day to get their special deals on their prescriptions. One could not see the pharmacist filling the prescriptions nor the pharmacy where the drugs were stored. Actually, the prescription area was against the back wall with an extruding small ledge with enough space for a typewriter to prepare the prescription labels and for a counting area to fill the prescriptions. That space had room for only two people, the typist and the pharmacist. The rest of the back room served as storage area for the prescription drugs, sales items, and for the many cosmetic, tobacco, and OTC product deliveries that occurred during the day.
Finishing Up
Because of my excellent academic record in pharmacy school, I was awarded a full scholarship for my senior year. In the 1960s when a student was given an academic scholarship, a check was mailed to your address where you lived, whereas today a student’s scholarship funds are electronically sent to the university for payment after showing proof of registration for one’s classes. A student never sees that money; it just disappears into the vaults of the university. By
the summer I had saved enough money through my two jobs to consider buying a new car. I was still short by about a thousand dollars. The check I received in the mail got me over the top to buy a cool, sky-blue ’67 Mustang. I had to continue to work the two jobs to pay my living expenses, tuition and books, and my new expenses for gas and car insurance. That summer I took an elective course on the top 100 drugs in the country. It was a really practical course because these drugs were a favorite topic on the Texas Pharmacy Board Exams for licensure to practice pharmacy in the state. One of my classmates, who was taking a full summer load to graduate ahead of time from the rest of the class, often invited me to her dorm room to study. Hilda was innocent about dating as I was, and one thing led to another–we saw each other several times that summer. She was from a small town in Texas and was trying to get away from her overprotective parents. It was more of a friendship, than a true romance.
Before I bought my car, I used a bus to get to Ward’s, and when it closed at 9PM, I had to scramble to catch the late bus back to campus. Now that I had a car, I took long rides at night on 2222, a scenic road that led out into the hill country of Austin. Those drives cleared my head and got me ready to continue my studies into the night. When I did not have a car, I went straight back to my apartment or library to study. But now I often took a break and saw a late movie around 10 or 11 PM at the Union or at the Catholic and Jewish Student Centers. It was there that I began to appreciate foreign movies–400 Blows, Last Year in Marienbad, Hiroshima, The Ipcress File, A Man for All Seasons, Elvira Madigan, Alfie, Georgy Girl, La Dolce Vita, etc. With a car I no longer had to take a bus or walk to move about/around the city.
I spent my last year in pharmacy school, shadowing some of my professors in their laboratories, and I applied to several departments of pharmacology for admission into their graduate programs. I took the GRE and applied for several fellowships to cover my tuition and living expenses. Then I waited to see if I would be given a draft deferment for graduate school. The good news was that I got my deferment and received a very prestigious fellowship from the National Science Foundation to attend a graduate program of my choosing. On the recommendation of my favorite professor, who was the only Mexican American professor at the college, I chose the University of Kansas and its graduate program in the pharmaceutical sciences after graduation from pharmacy school in June of 1968.
To celebrate my graduate deferment and fellowship, I decided to take a break and catch a movie at the Texas Union. There was a driveway near the Union (with “No Parking” signs); I parked the car and quickly ran into the Union to buy advance tickets for the late movie, thinking I’d be out in a few minutes. But as I returned to the car, I was stopped by the UT campus police. One of the two officers seemed to be younger than me and had a chip on his shoulder. He knew I was a UT student but asked for my ID and driver’s license. With a smirk, he said that he’d only give me a verbal warning and waved me away with his hand. After so many years thinking about this incident, I now believe that he sorta looked like a young George W. Bush. Their smirks were the same. As I returned to my apartment a few blocks off campus I noticed that the UT police were following me, even though they were no longer on campus. There were no flashing lights, but it really irked me that they were doing this on purpose. Stupidly, I stopped on a side street near my apartment, got out of my car, and walked towards their car which had also stopped. They were so surprised when I asked if I was doing anything illegal. They promptly said no and drove off. If I had done that today as a person of color, my encounter with the campus police may have turned out differently. I was glad that I’d soon be leaving Texas; I hoped that Kansas would be a different experience for me.
After I graduated first in my class, I drove away from Austin in my Mustang to begin my graduate work in toxicology at the University of Kansas. I knew I could not work as a pharmacist for the rest of my life; working at Ward’s made me think of a different career path. However, a month later I learned that my deferment had been canceled and I was inducted into the army. Two years later, I returned to Kansas. Eventually I became a professor back at the University of Texas, then a dean of a school of pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, and in my final five years of my professional career as a senior administrator at the largest research center at the Food and Drug Administration.
Dan Acosta is a first-generation Mexican American, whose mother and grandparents emigrated from Mexico. He is a former professor, research scientist, and administrator, who retired in 2019 at age 74 and lives in Austin with his wife. He writes about his experiences in white America, especially the role that discrimination and racism still plays in the U.S. His stories have appeared in The Acentos Review, Sky Island Journal, Somos en Escrito, The Rush, and Toasted Cheese.