Perla's With Chef Larry McGuire 
Texana
Food for Thought
The closing of a Mexican restaurant in Alpine says a lot about how West Texas has changed— and even more about a family’s evolution.
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By the mid-twenties Pete Senior had a family. He wasn’t poor—he had a telephone, a significant status symbol, as early as 1927—but the restaurant wasn’t bringing in enough money. For a time he tried trucking with his brothers, but eventually he went back to ranch work. This meant that he had to live on the ranch, and while the rancher would provide housing for his family, his children would have no way to get to school. All across Texas, generations of Hispanic children grew up uneducated under this patrón system. But in 1935, when Pete Junior was ten, his father moved back to Alpine so that his kids could go to school. (In Fort Stockton, Elena’s father would soon make the same choice.) He reopened his restaurant in a larger adobe—eight tables this time—as the Green Cafe. The name was literal: The exterior of the cafe was painted green. There were no street signs on the Mexican side of town, so the color enabled customers from across the tracks to find it. The staff was entirely family members; Pete Junior waited tables, raised chickens, and slaughtered goats.
In 1944, while Pete Junior was serving in the Pacific theater during World War II, Pete Senior died. Relatives kept the restaurant going until Pete Junior came home to take it over. By 1949, two years after he married Elena, it was apparent to him that the restaurant was too small. When the Marfa Army Air Field closed that year, he bought the long, narrow mess hall, transported it to the barrio, painted it green, and made it into a new Green Cafe. On the day it opened, the local radio station did a live broadcast from the cafe, and students from Sul Ross State Normal College provided live music.
For the next twenty years the Green Cafe was Alpine’s favorite hangout. High school and college students had parties there. Aspiring politicians gathered around tables pushed together in the front of the restaurant. The extraordinary length of the building made it a favorite trysting place; in the slow hours of the afternoon, married men met their girlfriends there, seeking the privacy of dark booths with individual jukeboxes toward the back of the restaurant. Pillars of the community who were self-proclaimed teetotalers dropped by for “coffee,” and Pete Junior kept their coffee cups filled with beer poured from a coffeepot. In 1959 he was elected to the school board with the help of friends on the north side of the tracks.
The camaraderie at the cafe notwithstanding, Alpine was still divided. Its two elementary schools, like its two Catholic churches, were organized mostly according to ethnic lines. The barrio’s Centennial School had no Anglo students and no Mexican American teachers. “We started keeping track of the students who went through,” Elena said. “Forty kids would start; only one would graduate from high school.” At 68 she still smolders over ancient wrongs. As a fifteen-year-old in Fort Stockton attending a segregated school, she became separated from her classmates while walking to a movie. “My hair was almost blond,” she recalled, “and when I tried to buy a ticket to sit in the balcony, the lady wouldn’t sell me one. She said I couldn’t sit with the Mexicans, I belonged downstairs.” Elena bought a ticket for the lower level under protest, only to be forcibly removed from the theater by the manager, who recognized her because he was also a teacher at the school. When she told her father about the incident, he strapped on his gun, marched to the theater, and announced that if his daughter couldn’t watch the movie, no one else was going to. “And no one did,” she said. “The theater was closed for the rest of the day.”
Like many Hispanic businessmen of the post-war generation, Pete Junior returned to his community determined to change it—but because he had Anglo customers, he wanted to change it in a nonconfrontational way. For ten years he pushed his colleagues on the school board to integrate the elementary schools, and for ten years they politely stalled. In 1969 he ran out of patience. “[T]he time has come,” he wrote his fellow members, “and we must take action on it now. . . . I will not consider any partial solution to this problem.” The board proposed a bond issue to build a large new school, but appallingly, the chamber of commerce opposed it, and it was defeated.
That fall the south side parents refused to register their children at the Centennial School and joined together to enroll them at the north side school instead. The school district gave in, but the north side retaliated. Young Pete Gallego, age eight, got his first exposure to politics then. He remembered an angry man storming into the Green Cafe and shouting at his father, “I’ll have the shirt off your back!” All of a sudden, longtime customers from the north side stopped coming to the restaurant. “No one ever said anything about a boycott,” Pete Junior said, “but that’s what it was. One day we did $3.50 worth of business. We had to move to the highway to survive.”
Gallego’s restaurant opened in 1971. No radio station broadcast the event. No band came to play. Pete Junior made no attempt to recreate the Green Cafe. Unlike the old place, Gallego’s had no bar, no late hours, no atmosphere, and no extensive menu of American dishes to draw a north-of-the-tracks clientele. (In recent years, to compete with the influx of fast-food franchises, it instituted a buffet lunch.) Gallego’s was a way to make a living—a good enough living to see two children through law school and another through medical school and to build a new house north of the highway below Sul Ross.
Pete Junior disappeared into the kitchen and reemerged with dinner. The star of the show was the chile relleno. The deep-fried long green pepper was the shape of a burrito, long and round and hefty, and it was as squishy sweet as a ripe peach. A subtle, savory red sauce covered the enchilada. It ranks among the best No. 1 dinners that I have ever had.
After dinner Pete Junior and Elena escorted me to the almost-empty parking lot. In the flawless evening sky the Hale-Bopp Comet loomed bright and close above the redbrick buildings of Sul Ross. At the main entrance to the campus stood the handsome new headquarters for the Museum of the Big Bend—a new Gallego contribution to Alpine as the restaurant passes into history. Pete Gallego the legislator got a state appropriation to refurbish Lawrence Hall, the former dormitory on whose steps his father and mother first met in 1946. But young Pete still has to fight some of the same battles his father fought. Sul Ross has had one tenured Hispanic faculty member in 75 years.
I asked Elena how she felt about Alpine after, as she had put it earlier, “everything that has happened.” She folded her arms against the advancing chill of a high desert night. “It is my home,” she said. “People who have lived in Alpine, if they must leave, it is with a broken heart.”
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