By Arden Berry | Staff Writer
In the early 20th century, the Calle Dos neighborhood grew along the Brazos River. The streets were filled with Hispanic-owned businesses — St. Francis on the Brazos served the community, and families gathered around and received water from La Pila, a fountain essential to the community.
Urban renewal has since demolished many homes and buildings in Calle Dos and Sandtown, another Hispanic neighborhood, but the inaugural Hispanic History Month Walking Tour aimed to bring them back through storytelling.
The tour, held Saturday morning, explored significant spots for Waco’s historic Hispanic community. Adrienne Cain Darough, Institute for Oral History assistant director and clinical associate professor, and Sylvia Hernandez, outreach and instruction librarian, planned and led the tour.
The tour began and ended at St. Francis Catholic Church, built in 1924.
“There’s always been Catholic tradition, but as more of the Catholic Hispanics move into Waco, they need a place to worship,” Hernandez said. “They were worshipping at St. Mary’s just down the street over here, but it was segregated, so they were secretly worshipping in the basement of the church.”
However, the church burned down four years later. The current building was built in 1931 by the help of loyal parishioners.
“That’s really cool for those people to worship in this place that they’ve built with their own hands,” Hernandez said. “Generations after generations of people have gone to church here, have been married here — I mean, my parents themselves were married here.”
Hernandez’s parents also attended the tour, along with a group of students, staff and other community members. In total, Cain Darough said about 60 people RSVP’d.
“It was really fascinating,” Wichita, Kan., senior Halle Seiler said. “My favorite [part] was Sylvia Hernandez and all of her family history incorporated into it.”
Hernandez said she hoped the tour would allow other attendees to share their own stories.
“There’s several oral history interviews that exist of people who actually lived in these neighborhoods, and so this is a really good way to promote those, but it also perhaps encourages people to still share those stories if they have them,” Hernandez said.
The tour featured several stops, including one on Austin Avenue, which Hernandez said is significant because it has been home to Tito’s Downtown Barbershop since the 1960s and it was where Ernesto Fraga published the bilingual Tiempo newspaper starting in 1982.
“Ernesto realized that there were parts of the community that were only Spanish speaking [and] only literate in the Spanish language,” Hernandez said. “He wanted everybody to have the same knowledge, whether it was in English or Spanish.”
Cain Darough discussed on the impacts of urban renewal on these communities.
“It was a nationwide effort, and this effort was to clean out the so-called slums of different neighborhoods and different cities,” Cain Darough said. “Those slums were mostly communities of color that had very valuable land [which] was wanted for other purposes.”
Cain Darough said Waco carried out the largest urban renewal plan in Texas, with even Baylor participating.
“If you’ve been on Baylor’s campus, the whole [was] neighborhoods where people were displaced because of urban renewal,” Cain Darough said.
Other stops included the remains of La Pila, which is now concrete and cinder blocks mostly buried in dirt, the Waco Public Health Building where farm labor camps were during World War II and the Waco Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Cain Darough and Hernandez discussed the “mutualista,” or mutual-aid society, the Arvizu v. Waco Independent School District court case and historical Hispanic figures in Waco, such as Jacob De Cordova.
Cain Darough said this walking tour is built upon the Waco Black History Walk, another walking tour that she planned, and that she hopes to someday have a walk that represents the history of all Waco communities.
“With that, my goal has always been to expand the tour to reflect the different people that are here in Waco and the histories that are here in Waco,” Cain Darough said.
Cain Darough said anyone unable to join the tour can download the Waco History app, co-created by the Institute for Oral History and the Texas Collection and University Archives.
“You can see photographs, listen to excerpts of people’s oral histories on all kinds of places and spaces and people that are in Waco’s history,” Cain Darough said.
