Book details

  • Genre:biography & autobiography
  • Sub-genre:Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / Hispanic & Latino
  • Language:English
  • Pages:516
  • Paperback ISBN:9798317819774

A Coconut's Journey

By Christopher Anthony Chavez

Overview

As a child, I thought I was white; everyone around me was white. I was completely immersed in the culture. Junior high was a reeducation camp that was a torturous, racist gulag. The world I had grown up in became unfamiliar and threatening. Neither Anglos nor Mexicans saw me as one of their own. The Mexicans saw a Pocho; can't speak Spanish and too assimilated into the white culture. The Anglos saw a wetback; someone who would never be an equal. My career was filled with optimism, advancement, and success; until I found myself in the Cradle of the Confederacy, where Anglos silently smirk or laugh at our truth while blocking advancement and extinguishing careers because we have the wrong racial pedigree. Anglos will never understand how we see them in power; they neither believe nor accept our reality, a reality frequently filled with concealed racism and arrogant disdain. In the end, there is no redemption, no comforting justice for us, only the quiet echo of inequality. There are many good people on this earth to whom I owe much. But there are just as many—if not more—evil, morally corrupt Peckerwoods ready to limit us to cleaning their toilets and tending their fields.
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Description

I cannot imagine a more idyllic childhood than growing up on the California Central Coast. Rolling hills filled with one-hundred-year-old oak trees, beaches wrapped in the hot rod and surfer cultures of the time, Beach Boys music in the background, and weather like no other place on earth. Childhood summers filled with adventures that sometimes involved running through lush green lawns and sprinklers. Adolescence was a real life “American Graffiti” existence. But as I approached my preteen years, I was introduced to the town’s dark underbelly. A blackness concealed under the Norman Rockwell veneer. My memories struggle with this paradox; a loving, beautiful place, together with sometimes overwhelming intolerance. After the Army my work took us throughout the United States, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The racism of my youth was seldom seen, until we found ourselves in the Cradle of the Confederacy. I found that decades of hard work and preparation meant nothing. I was met with what amounted to the shrugging of shoulders and a raised middle finger; my government career was dead. In the end, there is no redemption, no comforting justice, only the quiet echo of inequality. I longed for the simple times and simple things of the Central Coast.

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About The Author

A 36-year veteran of working within the international arms transfer community, as a government program manager, a defense contractor, and as a senior advisor to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Air Force and Air Defense, Chris Chavez has held numerus positions within the international security assistance ecosystem. After leaving the Army, he spent nearly a decade supporting US combat forces in Europe and the United States as a weapon systems technical advisor. He later performed on-the-ground oversight of air and missile defense Foreign Military Sales programs in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, receiving Department of the Army recognition for fielding PATRIOT to the Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces. He later created and led a PATRIOT and THAAD contractor advisory team for the UAE for almost a decade. He founded a security assistance consulting firm—Strategic Consultants Group, Inc—after his return to the States. He and his wife live in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

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