A Monument to Genocide?
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PLEASE READ BEFORE JOINING!!!
WE ARE BROWSING ALL THE PROFILES AND INVITING PEOPLE IN THE EL PASO AREA....
WE ARE SEEKING PEOPLE WHO WANT TO GET ACTIVE
AND FIGHT AGAINST THE CITY GOVERNMENT FOR
WANTING TO EVICT PEOPLE AND LEVEL 130 ACRES OF SEGUNDO BARRIO
FOR OUTSIDE FINANCIAL INTERESTS.
IF YOU FEEL THIS IS NOT FOR YOU PLEASE DENY OUR FRIEND REQUEST AND BLOCK US.
We're not keeping track of who we invite, and don't want to bother people with repeated friend requests!!
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ALL OTHERS THANK YOU FOR JOINING THE FIGHT!!
WE WILL SEND YOU BULLETINS CONCERNING UPCOMING EVENTS, FESTIVALS, AND MEETINGS.
WE WILL ALSO LET YOU KNOW HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED
IN THE DIRECT ACTION!!
THANK YOU!!!
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américa estúpida, recuerda aquel chicanito
que reprobó matemáticas e inglés
él es el picasso
de tus estados del oeste
pero morirá
con mil piezas maestras
colgando sólo de su mente
“Stupid America,†Lalo Delgado 1969
Translated from English by Selfa Chew
It has often been said that el Segundo Barrio is the heart and soul of El Paso. Generations have made their lives there and for many years the barrio was the most populated area of the city. El Segundo Barrio is a vital and historical neighborhood, a living community. It is an area that has struggled against tremendous odds, yet it holds a history of activism, art, and beauty.
El Segundo Barrio, or the Second Ward, is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, preceded only by the barrio Chihuahuita, or the First Ward. Although the land along the Rio Grande had been a place of settlement by the Manso people for hundreds of years, the area known as Chihuahuita began in the early 1800s as people from Chihuahua began to cross the river from El Paso del Norte (present-day Ciudad Juárez) to build their homes.
Beginning in the 1840s, Mexicans built jacales or adobe homes in what is now South El Paso and by the 1880s, el Segundo Barrio was made up of hundreds of one story high adobe homes. When the railroad arrived in 1881, the city, and el Segundo Barrio, began to grow quickly. The Mexican population of El Paso grew from 321 to over 8,700 between 1860 and 1900, largely as a result of the railroads and the economic development of the region.
The history of el Segundo Barrio is the history of movements of people across the border. In the 1880s, U.S. businesses began to recruit Mexican workers to work in the expanding Southwest economy. As the city began to grow, Mexican workers came to help build El Paso. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 brought more people into El Paso, and el Segundo Barrio. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, violence, intimidation, desperation, deportations and repatriation pushed people out of el Segundo Barrio and across the river into Mexico. And so it went throughout the twentieth century-- migration back and forth across the river, between Mexico and the United States, into and out of el Segundo Barrio.
As the city began to grow in the early twentieth century, Mexican and Mexican American men, women, and children worked in construction, in agriculture, on the railroads, and as domestics and laundry workers. Some opened restaurants and grocery stores, serving the people of el Segundo Barrio. People were born and died, fell in love, went off to work, worshipped, and lived their lives in the barrio.
In the 1880s, as the city of El Paso and el Segundo Barrio began to grow, the people of the Barrio began to solidify their community. In 1893, El Sagrado Corazon Catholic Church was dedicated, and it remains central to the people of the Barrio still. In 1887, the Spaniard Olivas Aoy began teaching Mexican children who were excluded from El Paso’s public schools. A year later the school became part of the school district and in 1899, the Mexican Preparatory School (later Aoy Elementary School) was built at the corner of Kansas and Seventh.
Soon other neighborhood institutions appeared. Alamo School, Bowie (1923), Sacred Heart School (1892), San Ignacio School (1925), Lydia Patterson (1914), and others served the growing population of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant children. In the decades from 1900 to 1940, the “Mexican Y,†Club Anahuac, and the Goodwill Boys’ Club (now the Boys and Girls Club) emerged, geared towards the youth of the barrio. Rose Gregory Houchen Settlement House was built in 1893 at the corner of Fifth and Tays Streets, providing basic medical services and Americanization programs. In 1921, the Freeman Clinic was built by the Methodist Church. Other schools, churches, and clinics followed.
The people of el Segundo Barrio have faced many challenges-- poverty, neglect by the city, crowded living conditions, absentee landlords, health concerns, and segregated schools-- yet out of these struggles have arisen hope and action. In the 1960s and 1970s new institutions, such as the Southside Low Income Housing Corporation, Centro Chicano, and Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe were created by and for the people of the barrio. In the 1980s, the Sin Fronteras Border Agricultural Workers Project was founded, eventually building el Centro de Trabajadores AgrÃcolas. These organizations tackled the problems of el Segundo Barrio.
The barrio has survived many attempts to destroy it. Demolitions occurred in 1910, 1913, 1916, 1925, 1931, and 1947. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the repatriations of Mexicans and their U.S.-born children left so many tenements empty that the City took the opportunity to condemn buildings in el Segundo. In the 1970s, urban renewal threatened the barrio, as in many other cities across the Southwest, and la Campaña Pro Preservación del Barrio fought successfully against the removal of families from the area.
Throughout the city of El Paso and across the United States, many people trace their family histories to el Segundo Barrio. If El Paso is the “Ellis Island of the Southwest,†then El Segundo is the welcoming port for thousands. People’s love for the barrio is evident. Many El Pasoans return there regularly to visit family and friends, to shop, to work and to go to church. And for the people who live there, el Segundo Barrio is their beloved home.
El Segundo Barrio is a living community with deep historical roots. In its buildings are embodied the history of the region, the great migrations of Mexican people to the United States in the early twentieth century, and the urbanization and economic growth of the Southwest. El Segundo Barrio has produced poets, doctors, musicians, lawyers, and artists.
A Day is Coming
A day is coming
in which misery will end.
A day is coming
in which poverty
will open bank accounts
in every nation.
A day is coming.
From “A Day is Coming†by Abelardo “Lalo†Delgado, 32 days of Abelardo, (1994).
EDMUNDO MARTINEZ TOSTADO...
'DON TOSTI'
'EL PACHUCO TOSTADO'
DON TOSTI AKA 'EL TOSTADO' Y PACHUCO BOOGIE
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Please see blog for his story!!
