Tough treatment and good memories mix at newest national site dedicated to Latinos

In the second half of the 20th century, Mexican and Mexican-American children in Marfa, Texas, were educated in an adobe-style building in classrooms that alumni describe as barracks.

They received secondhand textbooks and were paddled for speaking Spanish instead of English in a school where Latino students were segregated from Anglos by law and practice, just as whites and Blacks were separated in the South. But the principal of the Blackwell School also created an interscholastic league specifically for “Mexican schools,” and alumni remembered their friends, shared laughs, and kind teachers when they gathered in Marfa on Saturday, at the start of Hispanic Heritage Month, to celebrate the Blackwell School becoming the newest national park.

At a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony for the newest national site dedicated to modern Latino history, former Blackwell students, neighbors, friends and politicians visited the original schoolhouse and a smaller building that served as the band hall. Inside, photographs, memorabilia and interpretive panels featuring quotes from former students and teachers show the imprint left by a school that once stood as an example of the racially divided education system that defined de-facto segregation in the country from 1889 to 1965.

At the ceremony, a mariachi band played exactly as the ribbon was cut. The 100 people in attendance also enjoyed a ballet folklórico performance and traditional border music of the Chihuahuan desert played by the band Primo y Beebe. Alumni also had the opportunity to write on a whiteboard what the Blackwell School meant to them.

“I am glad that it wasn’t torn down,” Betty Nuñez Aguirre, a former alumni and director of the Blackwell School Alliance said. “It will show the next generation that it was not always easy for their parents or grandparents to get educated.”

Many alumni see Blackwell — first built in 1909 and closed 11 years after the landmark 1954 court decision, Brown v. Board of Education — as more than just a symbol of America’s history of racial inequality. It’s a symbol of Latinos triumphant over adversity.

In 2006, Joe Cabezuela, 80, was at a local restaurant celebrating the reunion of the 1960 Blackwell class. That’s when he learned the Marfa Independent School District would demolish the Blackwell school. Cabezuela said he knew immediately that something had to be done to stop the demolitions, so he went straight to the superintendent’s office.

“That is not going to happen,” Cabezuela told the superintendent. “It’s part of Hispanic heritage, a history that we need to save.”

The superintendent then invited Cabezuela, founder and former president of the Blackwell School Alliance, to give a presentation to the school board on why the building needs to be preserved. Cabezuela and other alumni eventually allied and worked with a local artist on a sketch of what the preserved school should look like.

Soon after, the Marfa school board agreed to a century-long, $1 building lease to the Blackwell School Alliance, under the condition that the building would be demolished if the building’s preservation stalled for more than 25 years.

Small fundraisers were started every year to pay the electricity bill, keep the water on and repair damages.

Authorized by the Blackwell School National Historic Site Act, which President Biden signed into law in October 2022, the school became an official part of the National Park system in July.

“This site is a powerful reminder of our nation’s diverse and often complex journey toward equality and justice. By honoring the legacy of Blackwell School, we recognize the resilience and contributions of the Latino community in our shared history,” Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said in July, when the site was formally established.

Out of 429 National Park sites, only two recounted modern Latino history before Blackwell: the Cesar Chavez National Monument in California and the Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso.

Tony Cano, a member of the Blackwell School Alliance, attended the Blackwell School for three years starting in the fall of 1952. During his time there, he remembers the teachers making students write Spanish words on paper, place those papers in mini coffins out of hats or cigar boxes and bury “Mr. Spanish” in a symbolic funeral in front of the school’s flagpole.

“They were trying to get us to speak English only on campus and in the classroom,” Cano said. “A lot of kids rebelled. Once you rebelled they spanked you three times with the paddle.”

Cano said he remembers one girl who was spanked went home with bruises and did not come back to school for three days. Cano said that now that he is older he realizes, no matter what they did to them back then, “they can’t take my heritage away from me.”

From 1920 to 1947, Principal Jesse Blackwell, who is Anglo, transformed the school by creating an interscholastic league specifically for “Mexican schools,” where kids in the region could compete against each other, said historian Cristobal Lopez. For his contributions, the school first known as the Ward or Mexican School was named after Blackwell when he retired.

“He took the fundamentals and elevated that to the next level to ensure that the students, even though they were in a segregated school house, received the proper education that they needed,” said Lopez, who is a Texas field representative with the National Parks Conservation Association.

“Mexican schools, and when you look at segregated education, some of the things that stick out — the physical abuse, the emotional abuse — that did happen at Blackwell,” Lopez said. “But the alumni really came together and changed the narrative and really made it into a story of resiliency, perseverance, success.”

Despite the negative associations with “Mexican schools” discouraging the Spanish language, alumni have held on to memories of teachers, their friends, small gestures and laughter.

“I think at Blackwell, they just cared so much for us,” Cano said, “even though some of us were tough to handle.”

In fifth grade, Cabezuela recalls, he and his classmates received new playground equipment when then-principal Henry Ward showed up with a duffel bag full of brand-new baseball bats. Cabezuela said it was one of his best memories while at the school.

Cabezuela said he is happy and proud that the school was able to be preserved but the best part of having the Blackwell school named a national park site is that those who walk through it are going to see their grandparents and learn more about their history.

Now, he said, “our grandkids, great-grandkids will go through that building. Even when I am gone, they’ll go there and they’ll probably see something about me and they’ll say look at granddaddy.”

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Fernanda Figueroa, The Associated Press