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.