An American Family
It was 1914. The Mexican Revolution had turned their world upside down. They made a momentous decision, a decision millions had made before them. They would move to America, to begin a new life.
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Once a month the family would travel to La Coste, close to Castroville in nearby Medina County, to the shrine of El Niño Perdido (the Lost Child) to pray for an end to the pain in Mama Rose’s chest and shoulders. This Sunday picnic-pilgrimage was like a holiday, the only time the family left the barrio together: Cecilio driving the old sharp-nosed Studebaker; Mama Rose with the food; in the back seat, Walter and his sisters and usually one of the devout aunts fingering her knotted beads on silver wire. As Indians made pilgrimages to the Hill of Tepeyac, where the Virgin of Guadalupe had appeared to the Indian Juan Diego in 1531, so barrio families made trips to shrines honoring saints like San Martín de Porres, a humble mulatto who loved the poor, whose shrine is in Weslaco; El Señor de los Milagros (the Lord of the Miracles), whose shrine is near El West Side; or Nuestra Señora de Juan de los Lagos, whose shrine is in San Juan, Texas. There is even a shrine in Falfurrias honoring the famous curandero (healer) Don Pedro Jaramillo.
The saints serve to individualize abstract religious teachings. Saint Anthony is the patron saint of San Antonio, Saint Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes. San Martín Caballero was a pagan Roman soldier who became a Christian and dedicated his life to preaching the gospel to the poor. Many barrio businesses have his image placed near their front doors as a reminder to treat the poor with respect. Almost every barrio home has a family shrine, usually in the living room, where pictures of the deceased and the saints, flickering candles, and sometimes milagritos—gold, silver, or bronze charms of parts of the body—are all grouped together. Many homes have yard shrines to Our Lady of Guadalupe, surrounded by plastic roses (when the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego she gave him roses) and lighted at night.
A Personal Destiny
Like his father, Walter attended Sidney Lanier High School and worked at a pharmacy after school, a job Cecil got him through his friend Jesse Comacho, who owned Dellmar Pharmacy. In his junior year Walter participated in the one militant activity at Lanier during the tempestuous sixties, a sit-in to call attention to student demands for an end to the ban on speaking Spanish, more college-oriented and fewer vocational-technical courses, and more Mexican American teachers. The students held a press conference at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church and were partially successful in getting changes adopted: students could speak Spanish but not in the presence of a teacher.
Walter Martínez had no problem keeping out of trouble. There wasn’t much time left after participating in school activities, working at the pharmacy, and helping Cecilio repair cars, getting his hands black with grease and oil, his neck and wrists noosed with dirt from the dust raised by trucks delivering cattle and pigs to the slaughterhouse scarcely a hundred feet from their house. Walter loved high school. He had many friends, felt comfortable there, made acceptable grades. He decided to stay another year instead of graduating with the class of 1969. Cecilio and Mama Rose understood. More than anything, he wanted them both to see him graduate in the spring of the new decade, May 1970.
The Christmas of 1969 was a good one. Most of the family gathered for this special holiday, the one time during the year when everyone came to the old home for a big dinner, holiday tamales, and Mexican hot chocolate. Walter’s sister Rosemary came from California where she was living with her mother. Gloria, his other sister, arrived from Chicago, where she had been working and was about to be married. His mother visited and brought gifts, as did Cecil. The remaining aunts, uncles, and cousins dropped by. Everyone agreed it had been a good year.
Walter was awakened at one in the morning a few nights after Christmas by Mama Rose, breathing heavily and complaining of a sharp pain near her heart. She was sitting on the couch in the darkened living room, her bent body outlined by the flickering candles near the saints on the mantel above. Cecilio was sick, so Walter put her in the Hillman Huskie station wagon for the trip to Lutheran General Hospital on Zarzamora Street, a mile or so west. The cold air burned in his throat as he started the car and raced to the hospital. The nurse on duty wouldn’t take Mama Rose. “No emergency room, no doctor here right now, you must try Baptist Memorial Hospital downtown.” Another nurse realized that Mama Rose’s condition was critical and rode with Walter down Buena Vista Street, giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He ran a red light and picked up a policeman who led the way to the emergency room at Baptist, lights flashing, sirens wailing. Baptist’s admitting nurse said they had to wait. Walter and the policeman grabbed a stretcher, the nurse from Lutheran called the orderlies, but Mama Rose lost consciousness along the way and was in a coma. The last thing she had seen in her life was the streetlights on Buena Vista flashing by in the cold December night. Mama Rose, Cecilio’s wife of 43 years and the woman Walter considered his real mother, died 72 hours later, on New Year’s Eve.
It was Cecil who determined the direction of his son’s life after Mama Rose’s death. After graduating from Lanier, Walter and his friend Willie Martínez attended Tulane University on a grant-scholarship arranged by Cecil, but Walter returned to the West Side after one semester, still shaken by his grandmother’s death. In 1972 a friend of Cecil’s, attorney Joe Hernández, decided to run for the state legislative seat representing the West Side. Cecil managed the campaign and asked Walter to help. Walter found he loved the organizational work, the rallies and debates, the nuts and bolts of campaigning. His enthusiasm and sincerity overcame his shyness. People listened to him, and he discovered he enjoyed trying to persuade strangers to vote for his candidate. After Hernández’s victory Walter became his administrative assistant, commuting to Austin daily during the 1973 legislative session and running the Democrat’s small district office on Buena Vista Street behind Centeno’s Supermarket. Walter wanted his lifework to be politics; he wanted to work within the political system to improve conditions on El West Side. He would prove the error of what the younger ones said, that the only good system is the San Antonio sewer system and even it is clogged up most of the time.
The Other Minority
Until recently efforts to improve the lives of Mexican Americans have been feeble. They share with blacks the disadvantages of economic insecurity and discrimination. The Mexicans brought with them three things that insured prejudice: a different-colored skin, a foreign language, and an unpopular religion. In general they have had little representation at any level of government. They fall well below other minorities on almost every measure of acculturation. In educational attainment Mexican Americans rank substantially lower than blacks and way below Asians. Their family incomes are higher than those of blacks, but their per capita income is far lower, a consequence of high fertility rates and large families.
Ironically, despite the miserably poor living conditions and the isolation of its Mexican American population, San Antonio has many more appointed and elected Mexican American officials in local and state offices than Los Angeles or any other city in America. Two groups on the West Side are largely responsible for this phenomenon: the Catholic Church and an activist organization, Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), that headquarters 29 of its 32 chapters in churches.
Almost from the beginning, social activism and the Catholic Church have been one and the same in the San Antonio barrio. The area was colonized by religious orders—Augustinians, Jesuits, Oblates, Claretians—who were interested in using the Church to better their parishioners’ lives on earth, a tradition that reaches back to the Franciscan missionaries who arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth century. This goal is quite different from the traditional Catholic emphasis on giving the sacraments, saving souls, and combating personal rather than institutional evil. Often in the past the Church had preached that poverty was a virtue, not something to be ashamed of. The more one suffered, the greater one’s chance to enter heaven. The need to suffer was inside the soul, like a bird pecking away inside an egg. Si Dios quiere (if God wills it) was a credo followed by many on the West Side. But their priests embraced a more liberal theology, based on their conception of Jesus Christ as the liberator who had confronted all forms of institutional and personal oppression, domination, and injustice.
Many West Side priests take an active role in secular affairs: for example, Father Edmundo Rodriguez of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a founder of COPS, and Father Albert Benevides, pastor at St. Mary Magdalen’s, grew up in a West Side housing project as one of six sons of a packinghouse worker, and also works with COPS. San Antonio’s first Mexican American archbishop, the spiritual leader of 550,000 South Texas Catholics, is Patrick Flores, son of migrant farm workers from Ganado and an outspoken leader in social causes. Before being named archbishop, Flores served as auxiliary bishop at Immaculate Conception, one of the churches in the West Side Coalition, a group of six parishes that work with COPS to solve neighborhood problems. Over the past five years they have won many battles to improve the physical landscape on the West Side and inner city. Now COPS and the churches are working with the San Antonio Development Agency (SADA) to build 120 new homes on the West Side in Colonia Santa Cruz, an old neighborhood near Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. Homes also will be built or rehabilitated in three more colonias: Amistad, Concepción, and St. Alphonsus. The corrales and shotgun shacks will be replaced with houses. West Side groups have gotten Apache Creek cleaned up and rechanneled, built parks, and opened a badly needed clinic. They are working to get a police substation and more police officers for the West Side.
Despite the poverty, the unpaved streets, the crowding of houses onto a single lot, the West Side has never been a slum. The barrio has its stark landscapes: weedy, dangerous vacant lots choked with garbage and roamed by half-starved, un-leashed dogs; water-filled ditches and sumps; burned-out buildings hiding tramps and junkies; and perilous bars like El Molino near Lanier High School. But the West Side also has shady streets, porches full of houseplants, narrow lawns enclosed by rickety fences, and the full-blown street life of children playing, families holding barbecues, and men home from work visiting with their wives on front porches, all lending a villagelike quality to the area.
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