No Dancin' in Anson: An American Story of Race and Social Change By Ricardo Ainslie.  Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 1995.

Reviewed by Richard Kilgore, Ph.D.

In No Dancin' in Anson Ricardo Ainslie focuses on a seemingly idiosyncratic event in the life of a small West Texas town. Through this event he explores the complex psychology of many of the ethnic, racial, and economic tensions creasing the face of America. His method is a blend of anthropological field study techniques and contemporary psychoanalytic thought combined with an engaging narrative literary style.

Ainslie is director of the Counseling Psychology Training Program at the University of Texas at Austin and is on the faculty of the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1987 he rolled into the farming and ranching community of Anson, Texas, to begin a small study of rural social change. He unexpectedly found the town in turmoil over the attempts of the Footloose Club, a small group of parents, to legalize dancing. Public dancing in Anson had been outlawed since the 1930s, and these parents wanted their children to be able to have a high school prom, just like millions of other teenagers. Ainslie eventually made nine trips to Anson over five and a half years. He interviewed over 60 people for this warm and insightful look into the lives of those at different edges of the conflict.

The author views the Anson dance fight as a symptom of underlying conflicts erupting in a community that had not come to terms with the dramatic social and economic changes of the previous 20 years. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and modern farming methods combined to change the ethnic demographics of Anson. In a little over two decades, a town that had been rigidly segregated along racial lines prior to 1964, became nearly 35% nonwhite with a shrinking population and a troubled economy.

Readers familiar with the work of Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles and his "Children of Crisis" series will find Ainslie's a congenial voice. This book, however, does not have the judgmental edge characteristic of Coles's work. Ainslie crafts rich, complex narratives of the life stories of individuals with diverse backgrounds, wounds, and triumphs.

The first part of No Dancin' in Anson is the story of the fight over dancing and that fight's connection to the underlying tensions in the community. The second part, which is the main body of the book, explores the personal worlds of a number of the participants: among them, spunky Mercy Torres, who led the Footloose Club, and her husband, Salvador, the community physician; amiable former racist Jack Hornsby and his Mexican-American wife, Bea, who ran Bea's steakhouse, a social meeting place for the community; Veronica Garcia, in her early 20s, and her parents, struggling over the conflict between mainstream success and the call of comforting traditions; and P. B. Middlebrook, a fundamentalist missionary seen as a complex man who paid a high social price for grappling with his preconceived notions of "the Other." The author offers well-crafted, respectful, and often poignant portrayals of these individuals, as well as others.

Ainslie's basic premise in No Dancin' in Anson is that "powerful psychological processes, which complicate human relations immeasurably, are at work in the area of ethnic and cultural difference" (p. xiv). He sees these psychological mechanisms, and rightly so I believe, as common self-protective cognitive patterns that also result in prejudice and, at the extremes, in racial hatred and a dehumanizing of "the Other." He does not stint. "The mechanisms at work in prejudice are alive in each of us" (p. xv), he writes.

Ainslie may have found the soul of a fragmenting nation in a small West Texas town. No Dancin' in Anson is a fine, deeply human piece of work deserving of a wide readership struggling to understand the great social and ethnic conflicts of our day–from urban and corporate America to the tragedy in Bosnia.

Richard Kilgore, Ph.D. is a member of the Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology and maintains a private practice providing individual and couples psychotherapy, consultation to organizations, and executive development.  Dr. Kilgore may be reached by e-mail richard_kilgore@worldnet.att.net

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