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| Jean
and Louis Bustos with their two sons, Stephen and Ricardo |
"I
got married in June '52 to an American airman from Burtonwood, we
met at the Locarno dance hall, just someone swept me off my feet,
I wouldn’t call it romantic really! I was only 17, and I couldn’t
get permission to get married so everybody was eloping at the time
in Dublin.
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| Steven,
Ricardo, Anita and Jeanette. Jean's children |
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| Muirhead
Avenue, Liverpool. Jean and Steven, 1953 |
"We
came back to Liverpool for a while. We shared a house with somebody
from West Derby. I had my eldest son and when he was nine months
old we went to Texas. We flew from Burtonwood then we went by train
from New York to Texas. It was quite a nice house. We were on the
Gulf of Mexico in Brownsville.
"It
wasn’t too bad down there, but it was when we got up into the panhandle
of Texas, it was very bad. It was a very prejudiced country, very
bigoted, very narrow minded, very uneducated people, 'red neck'
country.
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| 5th
June 1952, Dublin. A week before they were married. |
"It was tough as I was married to a Mexican, although he was
an American, born in Texas.
"We
were stared at in supermarkets.
One time going down on the bus to southern Texas, we were taken
off the bus by the border patrols. All our luggage was taken off
the bus.
"They
wanted to see our marriage certificate. I didn’t know what was going
on and I had a nine month old baby with me. Everybody on the bus
was complaining because they had to take every single suitcase off
the bus.
"I
said to my husband, ‘what’s all this for?’ and he said ‘you’ll have
to get used to this’."
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