New National Park Site Spotlights School Segregation in Texas
The Blackwell School was once Marfa’s only public school for Mexican and Mexican American students
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From 1909 to 1965, Mexican and Mexican American students in Marfa, Texas, attended classes in a one-story adobe building called the Blackwell School. During this period of de facto segregation, they were taught separately from their white peers and punished for speaking Spanish.
Now, as the country’s newest national park site, the small, unassuming structure will help tell the often-overlooked story of how school segregation affected Hispanic communities.
“A complete history of America must include everyone’s story,” says Chuck Sams, director of the National Park Service (NPS), in a statement. “The designation of the Blackwell School National Historic Site is an important step in telling a more diverse and inclusive history of the Mexican American experience in our country.”
President Joe Biden designated Blackwell School as a national historic site in late 2022. Earlier this month, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland made it official by formally establishing the Blackwell School National Historic Site. Officials spent the last two years finalizing the transfer of the land from the Marfa Independent School District to the NPS.
Blackwell alumni and their descendants have been fighting to preserve and protect the historic school since 2006, when the district considered demolishing it. The structure is located on a dusty, half-acre lot in a residential part of town.
“If they’d torn down the building, our history would’ve disappeared,” Lionel Salgado, who attended Blackwell in the 1940s, told Texas Monthly’s Sterry Butcher in 2019. “We’re holding on to that little piece of history. This happened. It’s part of Marfa.”
The national historic site encompasses the original 1909 schoolhouse, as well as a smaller building constructed in 1927 called Band Hall. The campus used to have additional buildings, but they were demolished in 1969, four years after Marfa schools were integrated. The schoolhouse currently houses a museum featuring original desks, photos, interpretive panels and memorabilia.
Marfa is located in West Texas, roughly 60 miles north of the Mexican border. In recent years, it’s become a contemporary arts destination, with exhibitions, galleries and large-scale installations by artists like Donald Judd, John Chamberlain and Matt Johnson. It’s also served as the backdrop for movies like There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men.
But in the early 20th century, Marfa was heavily segregated “by prejudice rather than law,” as the NPS puts it. The state laws that segregated Black and white residents did not apply to Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas. Even so, they were frequently barred from Marfa’s theaters, churches, barbershops and other spaces that white residents visited via de facto segregation.
Blackwell School, in particular, was a “symbol of resilience as the town’s Hispanic residents struggled to maintain their culture amid racist treatment and unequal educational opportunities,” per the NPS. Originally called “the Ward” or “Mexican School,” it was renamed in the 1940s after principal Jesse Blackwell. It was the only public school for the town’s Hispanic students, who were able to study there up to ninth grade.
Though few remain in existence today, schools like Blackwell were once common across the Southwest. They were often “overcrowded, under-resourced, [and] were run by mostly Anglo women, many of whom spoke little to no Spanish,” Jonna Perrillo, a literary scholar at the University of Texas at El Paso and the author of Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands, told Marfa Public Radio’s Annie Rosenthal in 2022.
Students at Blackwell spoke very little English, but their white teachers forbade them from speaking Spanish. If the students slipped up, they were given demerits or forced into the closet as punishment. Teachers took the language ban so seriously that they even organized mock funeral ceremonies, during which students had to write down Spanish words and bury them, “vowing not to speak the language again,” per Texas Highways’ Kaiya Little.
“We had gone to family funerals before, so we understood that there was a funeral going on, but we didn’t know why,” said former Blackwell student Jessi Silva in a 2017 StoryCorps recording. “Everybody was really quiet when they buried ‘Mr. Spanish.’”
With the addition of Blackwell School, the United States now has 430 national park sites. According to Texas Monthly’s Will Bostwick, the school is the second national park site dedicated to modern Latino history, along with César E. Chávez National Monument in Keene, California.
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