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Why do I care?
The Destruction of the Segundo Barrio is Very Personal
by David Dorado Romo
“The Segundo Barrio is sacred space.”
—Enrique Medrano, attorney & South El Paso historian
I HAVE LIVED all over the world. I went to college at Stanford University in California, a campus where my father had worked as a garbage collector before I was born. I've lived in Jerusalem where I studied the Bible in the original Hebrew. I also spent five years in Europe going to school and working as a journalist. But each time I came back to my hometown of El Paso—I was raised near Our Lady of the Light Church on Delta Street—I invariably ended up in the Segundo Barrio.
This small slice of geography in South El Paso has seared itself into both my personal and collective identity. I know I'm not the only one that feels this way. In fact, I've encountered people from Los Angeles, Austin, New York and even the Canutillo area where I live today—about a twenty minute commute to downtown—that feel very much like I do.
Part of this identity has to do with family history. My grandmother Maria Dorado went to school at the Sacred Heart Church elementary school around 1910. My great aunt Adela Dorado, who told us stories of having to be bathed and disinfected at the Santa Fe Bridge during the Mexican Revolution, lived in an apartment building on Oregon Street that today houses a furniture store, a hardware shop and a small bookstore. (This building is currently under the threat of demolition because—reminiscent of what the Anglo elite did a hundred years ago in South El Paso with their adobe demolitions, sanitation and delousing campaign—the proponents of the Paso Del Norte plan also want to “clean up” and “sanitize” the “filthy, roach-infested” barrio today). My tia abuela used to take me to Templo Calvario Assembly of God Church every Sunday, a couple of blocks down from her apartment, where some of my first memories were of heavily perfumed church ladies who spoke in tongues. My father, Jesus Romo—who worked his way up from farmworker, to sanitation department worker, to butcher—bought a gas station in the Segundo Barrio (on Paisano Street) in 1965. As a kid, I would make a couple of bucks worth of tips on weekends by pumping gas and cleaning windshields. Many years later—while I was the director of the Bridge Center for Contemporary Art in downtown El Paso—I also helped him manage the station. Today, our family business is one of many locally-owned businesses under the threat of demolition by the Paso Del Norte plan.
MY PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION with the Segundo Barrio also comes from having worked with that community for more than two decades. I've always been reluctant to talk about this mostly because I think it's always best to let one's actions speak for themselves. I do so now, however, only because it might help people understand why the destruction of the Segundo Barrio is more than just an abstract issue for me. In the early 80s I was part of a group of UTEP students who volunteered with the farmworker union under the leadership of Carlos Marentes. We helped him pass out flyers along El Paso Street every night until about 4 a.m. during a strike for better wages. We helped run food programs and classes for the migrant workers. In 1987, I also helped conduct a farm labor market study documenting the need for housing for migrant workers. The survey was organized by Marentes' Farmworker Union, by Carmen Felix's Centro Chicano and by Motivation, Education and Training, Inc. To this day, the City of El Paso has never acted on this need. Both Carlos Marentes and Carmen Felix have been tireless defenders of migrant worker rights and South El Paso residents for almost four decades. City reps Susie Byrd and Robert O'Rourke accuse these community leaders of “supporting the status quo” and refusing to “roll up their sleeves” and work for the common good simply because they oppose the Paso Del Norte Group demolition plan. These statements are insulting and degrading to Mr. Marentes and Ms. Felix. The truth is that these South El Paso leaders are not opposed to change. On the contrary. They have been working for change before O'Rourke and Byrd had even started elementary school.
Between 1986 and 1990, I helped start an after-school tutorial center called the Southside Educational Center. We received federal funds to pay high school and college students to work as after-school tutors and cultural arts instructors. Muralists Carlos Callejo painted his first mural in El Paso on the walls of the Southside Educational Center as part of a summer youth employment project. One of the youth employment programs we came up with—together with Carmen Felix's Southside Low Income Housing Corporation—was the creation of parks in the Segundo Barrio alleys. It was an innovative and exciting urban project that we felt had a lot of potential. Barrio youth were paid to design the parks together with an architect and were directly involved in setting up playground equipment, benches, planters and basketball courts in the alley parks. The alley parks flourished for about a couple of years. Artists painted murals along the walls and kids and families used these self-made parks to play and gather. Unfortunately, the City never dedicated any serious funds for the maintenance of these parks. It was just one of a multitude of grassroots efforts for neighborhood improvement by Segundo Barrio residents that the City has either quashed or failed to support in the recent past.
In the 90s, I taught chess, music and theater at the Sacred Heart gym as part of a Americorps-funded program called Proyecto Orgullo. I started the Southside Knights, a chess group made up of barrio kids who hung out at the gym. During the ten years that I taught chess in the barrio, my students—who had been labeled “at-risk” by the schools—consistently took top prizes in chess competitions at the local, state and national levels. Father Rafael Garcia, who today is one of the many community voices speaking out against the Paso Del Norte plan, provided the Sacred Heart gym for these activities. The gym is still used for a tutorial center, a boxing gym, a computer room, a classroom space for citizenship and English as a Second Language classes and as a tortilleria business run by barrio women. The church-owned gym is also under the threat of demolition. Father Garcia, who was an architect before becoming a Jesuit priest, has shown me blueprints of his urbanistic visions of the barrio. Among other things, he envisions the creation of a placita—a small public square—to be built in some of the empty lots near the church. It also includes the closure of the street immediately in front of the church for a series of red-brick water fountains that would blend with the Sacred Heart architectural style. Of course, Father Garcia's plans were totally ignored by San Francisco consultants who developed the Paso Del Norte group plan. The PDNG plan does not call for the incorporation of these kind of community-inspired visions. Instead, it calls for their demolition.
RECENTLY I SPENT four years exploring the history of South El Paso during the turn of the twentieth century. The result of this four year investigation was a book titled Ringside Seat to a Revolution. The book deals with the crucial role that South El Paso played in helping to spark the Mexican Revolution. It focuses, however, on such a limited slice of geography that I never thought it was going to find much of an audience beyond a small group of local history buffs and maybe a few South El Paso viejitos. Few people are as surprised as I am by the national attention it has received so far. It has won a couple of national book awards and has been featured in the Dallas Morning News, NPR, Latino USA and the LA Times. Even more amazing, this book mostly about the history of South El Paso is currently being used as a textbook not only in local high schools and UTEP, but even in places like UCLA and the University of Arizona. I think part of the reason for the book's surprisingly widespread reception is that the Segundo Barrio has historically served as a kind of Ellis Island for the Mexican American community throughout the United States. This is where so many Mexicanos in the United States began their multigenerational journey. I think people throughout the country are finally beginning to appreciate this.
Yet in El Paso, the major player behind the Paso Del Norte plan, William Sanders, thinks the heart of the Segundo Barrio is mostly a lot of junk that should be swept away to make room for “big-box” retail stores and parking lots. “Look at that,” Sanders recently told downtown businessman Enoch Kimmelman as he pointed out the Segundo Barrio from his Chase Manhattan offices. “That's a pile of shit down there. I would be ashamed to have a business there. It should all be razed. All of it.” According to local architect Geoffrey Wright, Sanders expressed similar sentiments to him as well. “There isn't a single historical building inside the redevelopment zone,” the multibillionaire landlord asserted. “Our consultants have already checked. We can't save a building just because Pancho Villa had a couple of drinks there.”
There you have it. If Mr. Sanders says there ain't no history in the Segundo Barrio, then gosh darn it, there ain't no history there. It's all a pile of shit.
I TAKE PERSONAL offense at the Paso Del Norte Demolition Plan. I am offended by the lack of respect for our culture, our history, our people. I'm offended by its hostility, its paternalism, its arrogance. I'm outraged by its intent to disenfranchise us, strip us not only of our land, but even of our identity. Ultimately, it's the underlying structure without which their plan will never work—the weapon of eminent domain for private enterprise—that I find most enraging. They're aiming a gun at our foreheads. They say they'll only use it as a last resort. They consider themselves courageous and very macho for picking up this gun. Dialogue with us, they say. Why don't we play a board game? Pretend the Segundo Barrio is uninhabited territory and draw pictures of what you would like to see there. Let's pretend we're Pilgrim settlers taking over virgin land (especially once the Indians were displaced and exterminated, of course). Let's sit down and chat over a cup of tea, with decorum and civility. All the while they're pointing their gun straight at us.
I guess everyone has a different reaction to looking down the barrel of a gun. Some will throw up their hands and give up their money. Others might remain silent. Others might plead their case, sit down with their assailant and dialogue. Others will flee. But that's not my reaction.
This gun aimed at my forehead only infuriates me. I won't give in. In fact, I can't. I'm too stubborn, too stupid and have too much pride to do otherwise.
I take this all very personally.
(David Dorado Romo is the author of Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez, 1893-1923. Recently, Councilman O'Rourke stated publicly that Romo's current residence in the Canutillo area strips him of the right to oppose the destruction of the Segundo Barrio. This essay, in part, is his response to Mr. O'Rourke's assertion.)
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