Texas State Historical Association - My Texas

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School Days

I attended pre-primer at Alamo School. I followed the bigger kids along the railroad tracks, past the Roundhouse from beyond Fair Park at the loop in Brown Addition. We passed el tanke de chapopopte, crossed heavy traffic at Las Cuatro Esquinas, turned left for a couple more blocks, and arrived at the school. It was a scary long walk.

School was a monstrous two-story building shedding layers of white paint. Transportable buildings in the rear housed the younger classes. Miss Murphy was my teacher. I became class interpreter the first day; Mother had taught me some English and made me practice writing the ABCs. In vain, neighbourhood children flattened noses against the window screen asking if I could play.

Mother was skeptical when I explained that we weren't allowed to write cursive in school, we printed. Describing curriculum and method caused me problems with Mother all through school. Educated in Mexico, she couldn't understand why I wasn't allowed to write on both sides of the page, or the value of recess, singing, and participating in plays. Why didn't they teach serious subjects? And she terrified me with maths lessons taught in Spanish.

Our teachers had difficulty pronouncing and translating names such as José María, Angel, Jesús, Salvador, and others. These were Anglicized. As the teachers didn't speak Spanish, which was our first language, our cultural outlook was changed by what we observed through the contact with the outside world they represented. We became aware of our poverty, our nakedness.

Free milk and school lunches redefined us to ourselves. In other words, we didn't know we were poor until somebody told us! Movies had shown us the wealthy, the ricos, but that was just another fantasy until we started school.

We carried our lunch in brown paper bags or tin lunch boxes. I always had an apple butter or Kraft cheese spread sandwich. Others took tortillas with fried potatoes and eggs, or beans. We enjoyed swapping, and Mother never found out. Rarely did anyone take fruit for lunch.

There were signs of poverty. Among beribboned pigtails, starched frilly dresses, and cowboy boots, there were also scratched bare feet and dirty or torn clothes. But we were still too young to discriminate. Nor did we see these differences as terribly important. For example, we all loved our teacher and thought Miss Murphy was beautiful in spite of her having one blue and one brown eye. Boys argued that she had a glass eye but that made no difference to us.

It was intimated that students from large families were somehow odd. We learned this from the expressions of amazed teachers, who didn't realize what they reflected and taught us about ourselves. When children of migrant labourers named the Labour Camp as their home address, and their excuses for tardiness involved the late arrival of school buses, we were further distanced from them, although we couldn't have explained why. They followed the crops around the country. We saw the children of migrant workers at school on an average of three months per year.

When free milk and school lunches were introduced, Mother insisted on knowing which parents had no pride and had signed the forms qualifying their children for this handout. She refused to sign. On wet winter days, given twenty-five cents, I got to eat with these blasé recipients of free hot lunches, in the school cafeteria.

By then we were no longer at Alamo School. "Westward" was completed in the neighbourhood of "El Mexiquito." Students were transferred; we voted and named the school after Thomas Jefferson. A housing project was built nearby, providing many students with new homes. All but three students were of Mexican descent. Most of our teachers at Thomas Jefferson Elementary were very young. All but two spoke English only.

I loved my new school, and it still occupies a special place in my heart. I was fortunate in having such great teachers! One of those who inspired and helped form my life was my second-grade teacher Miss Dawson. It was she who said, "I'll keep your scrapbook for the day when you become a famous artist." She later taught one of my children. By then she was Mrs. Norton.

My fourth-grade teacher, Miss Canas, was one of the best teachers and nicest human beings I've ever met. She urged us to look beyond the obvious for answers, to analyse. We were in fourth grade!

David Crockett Elementary was built next, and sustained a more homogeneous group of students, but no Spanish-speaking teachers. The older students, children of migrant workers, still attended classes sporadically. Adolescents with deep voices and rounded breasts studied in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade with the rest of us. At sixteen years they were legally allowed to quit school. By then many had lost all interest in studies. Embarrassed at being considered burros for being in classes with small children, they were eager to leave school and start working. Why not? They'd been wage earners for years! Whenever a teacher left the room, while younger boys threw erasers, these older kids outdid each other comparing the weight of cotton loads they had picked, what crops they'd worked, how far they'd travelled. With no other skills to define their future, they'd likely marry and have children to follow the pattern of their own lives.

My luck held at Vernon Gay Jr. High. Soft-spoken Mrs. Bryson encouraged us to read extra books, thus earning bonus points in social studies, nurturing my love for reading, for playing with words, and for history. Her answer to most questions was "Look it up in the dictionary." And my beloved speech teacher, Miss Wydette Gerard Hart, encouraged all students, but Mexican Texans in particular, to get the best education possible, leave the Valley, and aspire to the better things in life.

Alma Iris Ramirez
Adelaide, South Australia
Published: November 14, 2005