The “Mexican School”
A History of Segregation in San Marcos
By Daniella Carrera
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SAN MARCOS, Texas – When Francisco Lucio Contreras Jr. was in the first grade, his teacher changed his name to Frank. She told him his given name was too long.
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It was 1940 and Contreras was one of 600 students attending Southside School, where students were not allowed to speak Spanish and the 13 teachers only spoke English. Only a few students spoke English while many, like Contreras, were fluent only in Spanish when they started attending school.
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Southside School opened in San Marcos in 1925 to serve children of Mexican heritage because the students – regardless of citizenship status – were not allowed to enroll in the city schools. The building lacked water and only had four classrooms.
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Hispanic was not yet a term used to describe Mexican individuals or others ethnic groups descending from Latin America.
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Contreras was one of 50 students in his first grade class and was forced to sit on empty apple crates.
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“We didn’t have enough desks,” Contreras said. “We didn’t have enough books; we didn’t have enough materials.”
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A new building for Southside School was was constructed and desegregated in 1948 after members of the community petitioned to the school board to end segregation in all San Marcos schools. In 1965, Southside School received a name change to Bonham School.
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The Bonham School building still stands today as a non-profit community center where people can go to learn about Hispanic heritage through their library, art gallery, museum and public programs.
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Contreras, who now 86 years old, is one of the few students from that era who still live in San Marcos; other San Marcos natives, like Rosina Ruiz Valle, had parents who experienced unequal schooling. Inequality is the uniting experience that motivated both Contreras, Valle and Mariana Zamora, a former student at Bonham School, to receive a higher education.
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Learning in a foreign language
Before Contreras started his first day of school, his older siblings sat him down to explain what the teacher would ask him and how he had to respond. They trained him to say his name when he heard the words, “What is your name?” since he only spoke Spanish and did not understand English.
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“I didn’t understand those sounds,” Contreras said in Spanish. “When I got to school and the teacher asked me ‘What’s your name?’ my mind went blank because it was something very strange.”
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Despite speaking English fluently, Contreras said he still finds it easier to speak in Spanish.
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Contreras was born in 1934 in San Marcos, and came from a migrant farmworker family who picked cotton throughout the state. They only spoke Spanish in their home, something that many of his other classmates also experienced.
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Migrant farm work was common among the Mexican community because businesses in San Marcos did not hire Mexicans. Families would migrate to different parts of the country depending on the crop that was in season.
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Farm work resulted in many Mexican children not starting school until mid-December which caused enrollment to increase from 113 students to 600 once the migrant families had returned.
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“How could a student like me learn when I didn’t know any English?” Contreras said. “There were a few [students] that understood English, [and] at recess I would ask the student ‘What did the teacher say? ’”
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Many students that belonged to migrant families could not begin school in August because the farm owners would take a portion of their pay that would only be returned once all of the crops got picked. It was not until he was a senior in high school that Contreras attended an entire school year.
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Luis Urrieta Jr., a professor of cultural studies in education at the University of Texas, said experiences like Contreras’ are a common story throughout Texas. Mexican children were not allowed access to a full year of education, which could lead them to leave school before graduating and continue farm working.
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“That ensured for these farmers with large farms and crops to harvest, the labor force that they could depend on, not just in the current generation, but also in future generations of children,” Urrieta said.
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It took students at Southside four years to complete the first and second grade because of a categorization system that split those grade levels into two-year sections.
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“Once you got to junior high, you already had a beard,” Contreras said in Spanish. “That is another consequence of what society does to you.”
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After graduating from elementary, Contreras attended an integrated junior high and later high school. However, attending a segregated elementary school made Contreras feel inferior to his Anglo peers to the point where he was embarrassed to play Spanish music in his integrated high school.
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"It's very demeaning," Contreras said. "I had to fight it for the longest time to feel that I was equal or better to the [Anglos]."
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Lillie Ruiz was born in 1927 and was the only one of her seven siblings to graduate from high school.
Photo courtesy of Rosina Ruiz Valle.
Dr. Rosina Ruiz Valle’s family legacy
Rosina Ruiz Valle is a program coordinator for the University College at Texas State University. She remembers her mother’s stories about what it was like to be part of a small group of Mexican students to attend San Marcos High School in 1948.
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The high school was integrated, but that did not mean Valle’s mother, Lillie Ruiz, would receive equal treatment.
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Valle recalls her mother telling her father “I want my children to learn English correctly because I don’t want them to be made fun of like I was.”
Valle’s father, Ruben Ruiz Sr., was the first Mexican-American elected to the San Marcos City Council in 1961. She recalls her father receiving calls from people complaining about the poor neighborhood conditions.
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The predominately Mexican neighborhood where the Southside School resides lacked street lights, trash pick-up, main delivery and sidewalks.
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Both Lillie and Ruben Ruiz used their experiences to encourage their seven children to use education as a tool to improve their lives, but Valle was ignored by her teachers when explaining the college application process.
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“I can remember sometimes just being overlooked or… the information wasn’t shared about, not even junior college, which I thought was sad,” Rosina said.
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Valle eventually completed her Ph.D. at Texas State University, and throughout the program, she used her dad’s words of encouragement to motivate herself to complete her studies.
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“My dad, he used to tell us since we were little, he said there’s no excuse not to go to college,” Valle said. “It’s in your backyard.”
From Southside School to Bonham School: Mariana Zamora’s experiences
Zamora said her experiences at Bonham School were all positive, but she acknowledges the inequality that her relatives, who are from Brownsville, experienced.
She remembers conversations with her grandparents who described treatment similar to what Contreras experienced in San Marcos. They recall being excluded from the lunchroom, reprimanded for speaking Spanish and not being provided college admissions counseling.
Zamora was a student at Bonham School in 2000, and she only learned of the school's history of segregation through her involvement in the League of United Latin American Citizens and Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos.
She remembers having one week dedicated to learning about the civil rights movement in her high school history classes. San Marcos has a history of segregation against the Black and Mexican community Zamora later learned, but she her history classes made it seem like the civil rights movement did not occur in Texas.
Photo courtesy of Mariana Zamora
“There’s so much history here that we’re not being told and that’s not being passed down,” Zamora said. “That’s something I really wish I had had as a young person and didn’t have to wait until adulthood to figure those things out.”
Through conversations with her grandparents, who are from Brownsville, Zamora learned that her grandparents were excluded from the lunchroom, reprimanded for speaking Spanish and were not provided college admissions counseling, similar to what Contreras experienced.
Photo courtesy of Mariana Zamora
Zamora said her experiences at Bonham School were all positive, but she acknowledges the inequality that her relatives, who are from Brownsville, experienced.
She remembers conversations with her grandparents who described treatment similar to what Contreras experienced in San Marcos. They recall being excluded from the lunchroom, reprimanded for speaking Spanish and not being provided college admissions counseling.
The resilience of her grandparents continues to inspire Zamora, who graduated high school a year early and received a master’s in social work from Texas State University. While Zamora experiences at Bonham Elementary School were all positive, she said conversations about segregation are needed individuals can feel connected to their past and understand their history.
Photo courtesy of Mariana Zamora
“Although I’ve only heard stories, I could never know what it's like to walk directly in their shoes,” Zamora said. “But I appreciate everything that they have had to overcome, because it has inspired me and given me the strength that I need.”
Photo courtesy of Mariana Zamora
Preserving San Marcos History
Gloria Salazar is the program coordinator for the Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos which used to house the Southside School and later Bonham School. Salazar said she and four other women were searching for a space where Hispanic culture could be celebrated and preserved.
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By 2009, the Bonham School pre-K program had moved, leaving the building empty. Salazar and the other four women saw the importance of preserving a building that was made for Hispanics, and converted the building into a community center.
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The goal was to turn the building from a place where many children had negative experiences into a place where Mexican culture could be preserved and celebrated.
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“They can feel the welcoming, they can feel the love, they can feel the positive nurturing things that are happening here, that are a total opposite of what was happening when they were coming here as children,” Salazar said.
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Through being involved and listening to Hispanic leaders, Zamora has been able to learn the history of San Marcos that was excluded from the classroom. While it may be difficult to talk about the discrimination against Hispanics, Zamora said she has learned a lot from listening to others share their stories and through participating as the board of directors president for the Centro Cultural.
“It's so important that we preserve this history that we continue to tell it,” Zamora said. “I'll be the first person to say I don't know it at all. I have I learned so much from Frank and from Gloria and Rosina, and other people in our community who I look up to.”
From student to teacher: Francisco “Frank” Contreras returns to San Marcos
Fifthteen years after starting first grade at Southside School, Contreras graduated from what is now Texas State University with a degree in education. Contreras initially sent job applications for teaching positions in San Marcos and New Braunfels, but he was told that they did not hire Mexicans.
He eventually found a teaching position in Del Rio, but after six years, he was hired to be a fifth grade teacher at Crockett Elementary. In 1965, Contreras returned to Bonham School as the principal, a position he held until 1971.
After becoming the principal, Contreras said he noticed that student teachers from Texas State were not being sent to Bonham School as they were to the other schools in the district.
“I wanted them [student teachers] because it would increase the number of teachers per classroom,” Contreras said. “It would help the students.”
Contreras spoke with the head of the education department at Texas State, resulting in student teachers being sent to Bonham School. During his time as principal, Contreras went to create the second bilingual education program in Texas.
Six years after being principal, Contreras went on to work as the chief consultant for civil rights at the Texas Education Agency to ensure school districts in Texas were following desegregating schools.
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