Texas Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month With a New National Park
The Blackwell School National Historic Site tells the tale of a fraught cultural history.
When most people think of Marfa they think of its minimalist art scene, or the mysterious dancing lights. But last weekend, in a particularly poignant kickoff to Hispanic/Latine Heritage Month, community members and former students of Marfa’s Blackwell School gathered at a ribbon-cutting to commemorate the newest symbol of their fraught cultural history. Specifically, the Blackwell School National Historic Site, the nation’s 430th national park, officially established on July 17.
Starting in the late 1880s, “Mexican schools” were established across the Southwest as parents of Mexican-origin demanded that their children deserved the right to a free public school education. The government's solution was these schools. They were separate, but by no means equal, as they received less funding and resources than their white counterparts. By the 1940s there were more than 120 towns in Texas that had segregated schools for students of Latine origin, but today very few structures remain.
At a simple adobe house down the street from Marfa’s Border Patrol station, the celebration—with ballet folklórico performance, a mariachi band, and traditional music of the Chihuahuan desert—somewhat belied the complicated history of the school. From 1909 to 1965 Blackwell School was the sole public education institution for the city’s Latine population. In its tenure it served 4,000 segregated students, a separation “written by prejudice, but not by law”.
“Blackwell School NHS is a tangible reminder of the period during which the doctrine of separate of equal dominated education and social systems,” National Park Service’s David Larson tells Thrillist over email.
There were good memories, too. The school had a terrific marching band and football team, with money raised for uniforms and instruments by an active multilingual PTA. In a USA Today article former student Mario Rivera, who attended the Blackwell School in the 1950s at 7 years old, says he just thought of it as a normal school. "We were never told that there was another school for the white students across the tracks," he says.
It might have been because it seemed normal. At that time, segregation of the Latine community from whites was pervasive, and interactions between the two groups were often violent. Prior to integration in the 1970s West Texas separated schools, barber shops, and movie theaters (unofficially). Three cemeteries in Marfa are still segregated with fencing dividing white and Hispanic residents by race.
At the Blackwell School the experience was one of forced assimilation. Alumni describe the school as “barracks.” On a display in the school titled “Burying Mr. Spanish,” students recount having mock “funerals” for the Spanish language, pledging their allegiance to English, and writing “S-P-A-N-I-S-H” on a piece of paper to be stuffed in a cigar box to be buried. If they spoke their home language, they received a paddling. (The paddle is also on display. It is called “Sputnik.”)
“A lot of us forgot our language and didn’t want our children to speak Spanish,” former student Jessi Silva said in a statement to the AP. “But also today, we are in danger of forgetting our history. The Blackwell School is part of our history, in Marfa and beyond.”
It was the work of Blackwell alumni that got the ball rolling towards National Park status. In 2006, a former student named Joe Cabezuela was at a local restaurant celebrating the reunion of the 1960 Blackwell class when he learned that there were plans by the school district to demolish the last remaining buildings of the Blackwell School. He banded together with fellow alumni to visit the Marfa Independent School District and implored them to preserve the building. It was a historic artifact. The school district agreed. Now on the books, a 99-year lease with the Blackwell School Alliance, reports Larson.
The school was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2019 and in 2002 President Biden signed the Blackwell School National Historic Site Act into law. Two years later the paperwork was in order and the new national park was established. It is just the third national park site dedicated to telling modern Latino history (out of 431 total), joining Cesar Chavez National Monument in California and the Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso. Larson doesn’t know whether there is a movement to preserve other Mexican schools in Texas.
“Many other segregated schools for Mexican Americans have either been demolished or have not been preserved,” he says. “The goal with the Blackwell School NHS is to allow more stories similar to this one to be told. We hope with its new establishment BLSC will allow others with similar experiences to come forward and tell their stories, or their family’s stories.”
The Blackwell School is open Saturdays and Sundays noon to 4pm. There are plans to have a 3-D imaging virtual tour in the future for those who cannot physically visit BLSC.