“We had attended family funerals before, so we understood that a funeral was being held there. What we didn’t know was why”… Or who.
So remember Jessi Silva that morning in 1954 when she found herself in her school yard, surrounded by other students, looking at a newly dug hole.
It was there too Maggie Marquez, who at that time was in fourth grade. As soon as she entered class, she had realized that the day was not going to be like any other.
“When I got to the classroom the teacher gave us pieces of paper and asked us to write on them: ‘I will not speak Spanish neither at school nor during recess,’” he told decades later to StoryCorpsan American nonprofit organization whose goal is to record, preserve, and share stories.
Obediently, they followed the instructions to the letter. The teacher grabbed all the pieces of paper, folded them and put them in a cigarette box, just like the rest of the teachers at the center had done.
This was followed by a procession to the courtyard, where the case was introduced into the hole dug next to a flagpole on which the American flag was flying.
Burial of Mr. Spanishthey called the ceremony, “The burial of the Spanish lord”.
From that moment on, the language of their ancestors, the mother tongue of these two women, who are now 76 and 80 years old, was prohibited in the facilities.
Marquez, however, remembers that he rebelled at the symbolic burial of the Spaniard.
Back in the classroom, she told her classmates: ““No one is going to make me stop speaking Spanish.”.
“What I didn’t know was that he had the teacher behind him, and she took me to the principal’s office,” he said.
The day ended with some whippings.
It happened in the Blackwell Elementary School, Marfaa desert town in Texas located about 95 kilometers from the border with Mexico.
But it could well have happened in any of the other exclusive schools for children of Mexican descent that existed in the southwest of the United States from the beginning of the century until the early 1960s, as part of a de facto segregation whose consequences—according to experts and various investigations—are still felt today.
Separated but… equal?
Unlike the discrimination suffered by African Americans, especially in the southern states, where the motto “separate but equal” prevailed, the applied against Mexican-Americans was not legally mandated but a common practice.
School districts decided whether or not to separate students of Mexican descent or Latinos of other origins, and many did. in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas.
In this last state, by the 1940s, there were the so-called Mexican Schools (“Mexican schools”) in more than 120 cities that remained until 1965, when integration was achieved.
Thousands of students from first to eighth grade passed through Blackwell Elementary School, founded in 1889; students of Mexican origin who studied with fewer resources than their white peers, with materials discarded by them, in classrooms with second-hand furniture.
And the Spaniard’s burial was not the only memory of discrimination.
Another day, a student was forced to bathe another student with darker skin because she was considered “dirty.”
In the 1950s, Blackwell footballers were considered good enough to team up with minor Anglos, but not good enough for them to share locker rooms.
“In Marfa I learned what racism was,” Jesusita Williams Silva, who began studying at Blackwell in 1956, told Texas Monthly. “(I learned it) By seeing my mother being rejected in the store because she was Hispanic, by seeing that my father did not earn enough for being Hispanic, by seeing people humiliate my parents in front of his children.”
Back then, there were signs on the door of some restaurants that said “Neither dogs nor Mexicans.” In the cinemas, they could only sit on the upper balconies and swim only on Mondays, when the water was dirtiest, in the municipal pools.
The inevitable assimilation
In segregated schools, along with the policy that required communication only in English, justified on the basis that it was necessary to provide students with “linguistic deficiencies” with effective training, educators used pedagogical practices and promoted activities that imposed white values and ideals and middle class.
The goal was for them to be as “American as possible”he wrote in his book Culture, language, and the Americanization of Mexican children (“Culture, language and the Americanization of Mexican children”) Gilbert G. Gonzálezprofessor at the University of California and pioneer of the discipline of Latino and Chicano Studies.
Assimilation was, in many cases, inevitable.
“I didn’t want to speak Spanish, I didn’t want to dress like a Mexican,” Janie Martínez, who attended one of those schools, told Lilliana P. Saldañaresearcher at the University of Texas-San Antonio.
Saldaña included his case in an essay that addresses the traumas suffered by a series of Mexican-Americans in the segregated educational system and how that led them to train as teachers.
“During her university years she did everything possible to get rid of everything that characterized her as Mexican and, When she graduated, she asked for her diploma to say ‘Janie’ instead of ‘Juanita’. He also didn’t teach his children Spanish.a decision that he regrets today,” writes Saldaña.
“How the teachers treated them, how the school system changed their name or made them change it, how it made them feel ashamed of being poor and Mexican, from the neighborhood… These were reasons why they made the very conscious decision to to be teachers in their own community and to promote bilingualism,” Saldaña tells BBC Mundo.
There were also more generalized reactions, such as the creation of the so-called “little schools”.
“They were common in many border communities. Mexican-American families established them, sometimes in one of the houses, after collecting funds among themselves,” explains Saldaña.
“They were independent, managed by the families themselves, they were not under state control, and they recruited teachers in Mexico, who spoke Spanish but also had experience as educators,” he continues.
Segregation and subsequent assimilation also had costs at different levels, consequences that continue to be felt today and that several studies have tried to portray.
According to a Pew Research Center study published last year, 75% of Latinos in the US say they can maintain conservation in good or very good Spanish. But among those of the third generation, they are less than a third those who are capable of it.
Integration and disinterment
In a ruling known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the The US Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional..
Although integration took years to reach all corners of the country, and in many cases it required federal intervention.
He arrived in Marfa in 1965, with the opening of a new primary school that welcomed both the students of the old school for children of Anglo-Saxon descent and those of Blackwell.
The latter still stands today, one of the few examples of segregated schools that have not been demolished.
Although it once consisted of several buildings, today it stands alone, white and discreet, in the southern sector of the small city and surrounded by modest adobe houses, a block of social housing and the headquarters of the sector’s Border Patrol.
After years of work by a group of alumni and community members, grouped under the Blackwell School Alliance, On October 17, 2022 it was designated a National Historic Siteand now houses a museum and community center with photographs, various objects and the recreation of a classroom.
“In the catalog of National Historic Sites there are few sites that speak to modern Mexican-American history. So “Blackwell is really at the forefront of starting to tell those untold stories.”Daniel O. Hernandez, the president of the Alliance, tells BBC Mundo.
“We cannot understand the racial and ethnic dynamics of America today without knowing what happened before, how people were treated, how Anglo-Saxon society justified that treatment, and what consequences it had,” wrote his predecessor, Gretel Enck.
Those who studied at Blackwell are today 60, 70, even older.
In 2007, a group of them gathered at the old school, for an event inspired by the burial of “Mr. “Spanish”.
In the center was Maggie Márquez, who pulled out a Spanish dictionary from a small plywood coffin that had been buried specifically for the ceremony.
Among cheers, he raised it and exclaimed: “I have Spanish!”.
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