María Concepción Martinezⁱ

In a small apartment in the front part of a house her parents rented at 7631 Avenue L in Magnolia Park, Maria Concepción Martínez was born on December 8, 1927. She was the fifth child born to Felix and Zapopan. The growing family then consisted of five girls and their parents (Pura, Socorro, Esther, Geneva, and now María). Geneva had been the first one born in Houston as the family had spent its first few years in Lockhart working the fields of a cotton farm. There, the family shared a large field worker house with many of their cousins who had also migrated from Coahuila. In 1925, a Central Texas drought ruined the crops and Felix moved the family to Houston to eke out a living as a contract laborer.ⁱⁱ The family would continue to work the cotton fields of Central Texas until 1934 and spent some winters in Houston where other family members resided. Mary’s sister Dora was born in 1929 and her brother José in 1931, in Lockhart and Caldwell, respectively. For many years the children looked back with fond memories of life on the cotton ranchito where they cohabitated with cousins and played with farm animals. In 1934, however, Zapopan persuaded Felix that they should settle in Houston so the children could get a better education and be exposed to a life that was more financially stable and predictable.

By the time school started in the fall of 1935, Mary, Geneva, and Dora went to the still relatively new school for Mexican children, Lorenzo de Zavala Elementary School. Her older sisters, Pura and Socorro, went to Milby High School but soon quit for jobs at local stores that would help supplement the family income. Attending school in Houston was hard for the Martinez girls as they had limited exposure to English. Like most children, they listened carefully and quickly started picking up bits of the language here and there from classmates. Classmates who had successfully learned English also helped them understand English words and phrases. They soon learned, however, that they were forbidden to speak Spanish at school, and doing so resulted in punishment. In the third grade Mary switched schools and started going to Immaculate Heart of Mary school. While the nuns were kinder than the teachers at De Zavala, the students were still not allowed to speak Spanish. Mary was very self-​conscious about her limited English vocabulary and Spanish accent, so she remained quiet in school. Although she loved reading and math, she rarely volunteered to answer questions or to raise her hand. When students were required to read reports to the class, Mary asked a friend to read her work because she was embarrassed of her accent.

The Martinez family developed an expanded community around the church and school, one beyond their aunts and uncles, many of whom had returned to Mexico the same year that the family settled in Houston. While Mary was close to her sisters, especially Geneva and Dora, attending church events such as the bazaars held to raise funds for the church and forge community among church members, gave them a chance to meet and play freely with friends in the neighborhood without worrying about speaking English. When money wasn’t tight, Zapopan would make cakes to donate for the cake walks and staff booths to assist.

Among Mary’s best friends were Mary Fernandez, Mary Lou Hernandez, Delfina Villagomez, Gloria Reyna, Clarabelle Rivera, and Alice Garza, all of whom lived nearby. They would often go to the Rusk Settlement House after school, and in the scorching summer days they would play games. Here, they also learned to dance to popular songs. In the 1930s and 1940s, a full house of nine children was its own entertainment; it had to be as money was scarce. A radio was out of the question for many years and television was for the middle class. To entertain themselves, the Martínez kids played hopscotch and jump rope outdoors with other kids in the neighborhood and with each other. They played jacks, pick-​up sticks, hide and seek, and made paper dolls. At night, they played games, cards and checkers. When they moved to a small two-​bedroom house, the second bedroom was for the older girls and the younger kids slept in the living room and on a screen-​enclosed back porch. The oldest daughter Pura would bring home pretty greeting cards that were out of season at the department store where she worked. Pura liked to call herself sister #1. Before she was old enough to find a job, the second oldest, Socorro, would make sugar candy at home to sell to neighbors. She also would find or make things to hold a raffle as a way to earn money. With a large household, chores were required from all children. Mary washed dishes, swept the floors, hung clothes handwashed by her mom, and ironed clothes for her father and brother.

At a young age, Mary and Dora would get up extra early and go to mass together every morning at Immaculate Heart of Mary church. They both loved the solemnity and serenity that going to church brought to them as they prayed for the safety and well-​being of their family and a better future. Dora was fascinated by the nuns at church and loved their habits. Starting at a young age, she began imagining a time when she could join a religious order. In the late 1940s when she had completed high school and was working as a secretary at a downtown business, Dora devised a plan to join the convent of the Sisters of Immaculate Heart of Mary, which had a convent in Houston. She kept her intent to join a secret with the exception of telling Mary. Despite her commitment to join, she feared telling her mother because when Dora had once expressed an interest in the convent her mother had been very upset and discouraged her. She wanted her daughters, all of them, to have a life full of the love of a husband and children. Dora understood her mother’s desire but her definition of happiness for herself was different and included advanced study, a commitment to God, and teaching young children, which she had always dreamed of doing. Knowing that she was going to join when she reached legal age, Dora began packing a suitcase of clothing and other items she would take with her. She kept it under the bed in the room she now shared with Mary and Geneva. She had visited the convent and learned all she needed to know about joining the order and she prayed diligently for the strength to tell her mom about her decision. When she did, her mother burst into tears and pleaded with her not to go.

Dora didn’t waver and she entered the novitiate of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary in late 1947. She assumed a new name, Patricia, that symbolized her devotion to God and a new life. She was to be called Sister Patricia by family, friends, and students alike for the rest of her life. She fulfilled her dream to be a teacher and to travel. Although she was stationed in a number of schools, churches, and shrines throughout South Texas, she traveled to trainings and conferences throughout the United States, visited the home of the order in Beziers, France, and went to the Vatican, as well as Scotland.

Upon completing elementary school, Mary attended Edison Middle School for seventh and eighth grades and then graduated to Milby High School, a few miles walk from home. In the summer between ninth and tenth grade, Mary started working at La Moderna, a local grocery store. She was 14. There she waited on customers. She worked from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and was paid $15.00 per week. Since the family was in dire need of money, all but three dollars was handed over to her mother each payday. For entertainment on the weekends, Mary enjoyed going to the movies, skating, or renting a bicycle for a dime an hour and riding to the park to watch a baseball game. There at the park, the girls would watch their boyfriends play as they represented their social group. This social group was called Magnolia Club. They held many parties. “One year,” Mary recalled, “we worked very hard to save money to be able to make a trip to Wharton, Texas, in order to play in a baseball tournament. We made the trip and lost but we still had a lot of fun. As we were about to leave, we decided to stop and eat, prejudices were part of the culture and when we entered a restaurant the manager approached us and said, ‘We don’t serve Mexicans around here.’ So, we found another restaurant in a Mexican neighborhood that served us.”

Money was so scarce that holidays gifts were non-​existent in the Martinez family except for what Zapopan could get delivered from Goodfellows, a holiday charity started in 1911 by the Houston Chronicle city editor, George Kepple. Mary recalls:

In high school, Mary joined the drill team. She loved the dance routines, the uniform, and most of all the twirling and tossing of the baton. She also played the bugle. And every Friday they had a game and they had to figure out how to get to the game near downtown. Most of the time she took a bus with a large group of kids. They went out of town to play a few times but her mother never let her go on those trips. She did play in parades in downtown Houston. Around the same time, when she was 15, she started using lipstick. Her mother taught her how to sew so she could make her own drill team uniforms. Later, she would learn to embroider from her mother as well. Mary and Joe’s relationship evolved from friendship to dating in high school. They would go on picnics, to the movies, or dances. While they enjoyed traditional Mexican music, they also liked the big band sounds of Harry James, Glen Miller, and Nat King Cole. Mary graduated in 1947 and began working full-​time in Sears’s credit department as a clerk at the Harrisburg and Wayside location. When she and Joe married in 1952 and moved to a nearby neighborhood, the one where I was sixth-​born in 1960, they were one of the first Mexican American families in Denver Harbor. By the time I was a pre-​teen, white flight had left the neighborhood majority ethnic Mexican with a few whites and African Americans. In many respects, this was a phenomenon that characterized the transformation of the inner city and the development of the suburbs resulting from post–​World War II GI Bill redlining by the banks and the housing industry. From my parents’ perspective, they saw Denver Harbor as a “newer” neighborhood just three miles south of Magnolia Park and three miles east of downtown Houston; although it had once been labeled Podunk, Texas by Anglo residents of the neighborhood because of how much they felt isolated from the rest of the city. According to a 2007 Houston Chronicle article “The whimsical name faded long ago as the working-​class white population filtered out and a working-​class Hispanic population filtered in.”ⁱⁱⁱ Upon the land, where temporary housing for war veterans was placed, McReynolds Junior High was being built. This brand-​new school opened its doors in 1958. Resurrection Catholic Church with an elementary school was also just a few blocks away. In the years to come, both of these schools would be important sites of education for their children.

Image 16

    Mary Mendoza Milby High School graduation picture, 1948. Mendoza family archives.

José Mendoza, Jr

María and José Mendoza adapted well to life in Magnolia when they settled there in the early 1930s. After living in a couple of places in the neighborhood, the Mendozas bought a small wood framed three-​room shotgun house at 7925 Canal St. in the mid-​1930s. The house was near a railroad track, and beyond the track was the Ship Channel where the Mendoza family could see the jumbled masts of ships and hear the deep sonorous bellows caused by the trains and ships as they navigated the narrow paths to places where they would be unloaded and reloaded to serve the industry of a port that was quickly growing to be one of the largest in the country. The Mendoza boys would often play in the field next to the house. Their mother allowed them to wander the small open field but forbade them to ever cross the street. Her fears for their safety were later borne out when Joe was in elementary school. One day his eight-​year-​old cousin Robert, who went to school with him and lived on the other side of the tracks off Navigation Boulevard, was crossing the tracks to go to school. The shortest path of travel required that he cross the tracks. Sometimes they were confronted with an unmoving train that was waiting in line to be loaded or unloaded. When this occurred, they either crawled under or over the train. One day as he was crawling underneath a train stopped on the tracks, it started to move and cut off his leg. He wore an artificial leg for the rest of his life, but he had a successful career as a truck driver.

Despite the futility of his earlier efforts to be an altar boy, José Jr maintained his closeness to the Catholic Church. He enjoyed the somber, almost mystical feeling produced by the mysteries of the faith and the fervent mumblings of the faithful in the pews. He found the lessons learned from biblical stories and the message of the priests’ sermons suited his experience of life—​it could be hard, but if you persevered through challenges, struggles, even unfairness, it could be glorious. Perhaps because he seemed more serious and inclined to order and self-​discipline, José found himself thinking about the kind of life he wanted. He saw life as an obstacle course to be overcome. While he wasn’t yet sure what profession he would pursue, he thought often of the journeys his parents had taken to arrive where they were. His mother spoke about her parents with deep love and respect. She was sad when she spoke of her childhood home in Parras de la Fuente. For a while, during her childhood, they had led a charmed life in a peaceful but important town of the region. Her father had been a respected driver for the Maderos, an important family in the region who had sacrificed a son for the benefit of the nation, and they were surrounded by family members. His father’s story was much vaguer and more unclear; there were no known relatives on the Mendoza side.

José’s mother had let him know that she and her sisters had been sent to the north for a safer and better life. While they worked hard to provide that for their children, María wanted success for her children, and she felt her children would be the real beneficiaries of her parents’ vision of her life in the United States. While she found life in the United States confusing, especially outside of Magnolia, María did try to instill a strong work ethic in their children. While she wasn’t certain what kind of financial stability a good education might bring, she did know from her father and her husband that with a strong work ethic, much was possible. When any of her children were past sixth grade and no longer wished to go to school, she did not discourage them from quitting so long as they went to work. To add to the family’s pantry, María raised chickens and grew orange and pear trees in their yard. During the Depression, Joe and Mary recalled that because their houses on Canal were near the docks, day laborers who sought work but didn’t get any would go by and ask their mothers for something to eat. Their mothers would make them a taco with whatever they had available: potatoes, chorizo, or beans.

María recognized that each of her children was very different; each had their own interests, sense of fashion, and way of interacting with the world. They all kept their hair neatly coiffed. Joe liked a formal style and so he dressed in suits and ties when the occasion called for it. He never thought of himself as better than others so even if he was dressed in a suit, he liked to stop and talk to the pachucos^iv hanging out at the doors of nearby cantinas as well as other men coming home from work with their clothes all soiled. It was a habit he formed when in middle school when he would go to mass on Thursday evenings for Holy Hour, which he would attend regularly. He said, “I would walk from home to the church and there were guys hanging around 76th St. outside the cantinas. I used to stop and talk to them there and they knew that I was going to go to church, so when I would leave, they’d say ‘Joe, pray for me too’.”

José saw early on that one had to approach the world with one’s eyes wide-​open. Life with family and friends could be relatively easygoing, but there was always a sense that outside the house, other forces were at work. Speaking English and learning from English language books in which the complexity of the world, its various cultures, and languages were not present, made him feel invisible sometimes. After a few years in school, José became Joe, just as his sister Margarita became Margaret, and his brothers Juan, Roberto, and Jesús became Johnny, Robert, and Jesse.

He and his brothers saw the weekends as a time to make money, be it shining shoes at stores, at the park where Spanish-​speaking baseball teams competed, finding a particular corner as evening approached and nighttime revelers were just heading out and still had a few pennies for a shine. With his father’s help, José made himself a shoebox out of scrap lumber. It was just big enough to hold cleaning rags, brushes, shining cloths, some shoe wax, and a few color dyes. Between this and selling newspapers in many of the same venues as where he shined shoes, José and his brothers managed to bring in a few dollars every weekend. With the exception of a few coins that they were allowed to keep, their profits went to their mother to help with household expenses. Joe got his first hourly job at a grocery store where he stocked the shelves and made deliveries on a store-​owned bicycle. The job made him feel important, especially when food was so precious to people in hard times and employment was inconsistent. Even though times were hard, in the summer of 1941 his mother took him and his brothers to visit her family in Parras. It was only the second time she had returned since initially arriving, and the first with her children. They traveled by bus, train, and car. The boys thought it was an adventure; Parras seemed so small compared to Houston. When they returned, Joe (as he was mostly called in school these days) was happy to live in a much larger city where life seemed more interesting and opportunities to advance one’s station in life seemed more abundant than in Parras. Parras had been beautiful, but people seemed to get by on so little money and food. Priests would only show up to town every few weeks and medical attention was almost nonexistent except in the most dire circumstances.

In search of a way to make something happen to help their family survive the Depression, Joe and his brothers went to the docks looking for jobs. With the USA’s entry into World War II in December of 1941, the shipyards and train yards exploded with activity on behalf of the war effort and many men enrolled as soldiers. My dad said, “I was only about 13 years old, and I went over to the shipyards. And they asked me, ‘How old are you?’ I said ‘17’. They didn’t ask to see ID. You told them you were 17 and they would hire you. No proof needed. It was hard work. Hot as could be inside the ship where things were tossed down to us and we packed the ship. I did that several summers during the war when school was out.” Joe’s oldest brother Johnny quit school to work full-​time in the shipyards.

Magnolia Park coming of age

Following the lean years of the Depression, the population of ethnic Mexicans in Houston increased in the early 1940s, as war-​related jobs drew Mexican Americans to Houston from across the southwest. The Ship Channel, the railroad industry, and manufacturing boomed as a result of the war effort. Mary recalls that though they sometimes went downtown, they mostly stayed in Magnolia to shop and socialize where there was plenty for them to do with youth clubs, volunteer work, recreational activities at Mason or Hidalgo Park, church activities, and dancehalls. This had the added benefit of minimizing the chance of conflict with Anglos in parts of town where Mexicans were not welcome and might encounter stares or slurs. The Mexican population only grew by 5,000 between 1930 and 1940. According to De León, however, while population growth was minimal, cultural growth abounded. He notes that by 1940, Magnolia Park was a self-​contained barrio where residents could find anything they could in Houston’s downtown commercial district (De León, 1989).

Joe attended Milby High School and graduated in May 1948 when he was 19 years old. He was the only one in his family to get a high school diploma. In high school he had friends from many different backgrounds. While some white kids taunted him, he chose to focus on “turning the other cheek,” and staying out of trouble. Even as a teenager, he took his appearance seriously and tried to dress nicely without being too outlandish. In his junior year he joined the yearbook committee. When he turned 18 in December 1946, Joe promptly registered for the draft as he was required to do. Although World War II was over, conflict in East Asia was brewing and he felt certain he would be drafted. As he registered, he vowed to join the service of his choice before being drafted took any semblance of choice away from him. He decided he would join the army soon after graduation. The veteran benefits would help him pay for college and buy a house when he was ready. Eager to show their loyalty to the USA despite racial taunts and whispers by Anglos that they were not real Americans, many, many young men of Mexican descent joined all branches of the US military during World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam.

Image 17

    Joe Mendoza, Jr. Milby High Senior Photo, 1949. Mendoza family archives.

Over the years, since junior high school, Joe had become friends with Mary Martinez from down the street. They had also attended elementary school together and now that they were in high school, he wanted to date her. He found her sweet and pretty, if not a little shy. Over the years, he often saw Mary and her sister Dora at church and they would walk home together—​first, by default, by virtue of going in the same direction, but then they began talking and joking with each other. While his was mostly a family of boys, Mary’s was mostly girls with one younger brother. Walks to and from school eventually led to weekend dates with Dora serving as their chaperone. Mary had been hesitant to say “yes” when it was clear he was asking her on a date because she wasn’t sure it was right to date someone younger than her. He had been born in December 1928 and she more than an entire year sooner in early December 1927. Joe even appealed to her younger brother, also named Joe, to convince him to help get Mary to say “yes.” With her brother Joe’s and sister Dora’s approval, alongside her own judgment of his character considering he went to church on his own, she figured he was good and trustworthy. Unlike many, Joe’s parents had a car and he had learned to drive it and was allowed to use it on the weekends when his older brother, Johnny, didn’t get to it before him. Going to the movies and afterward to James Coney Island for hot dogs was one of their favorite dates. Once, when he had a weekend off, he took Mary and her mother on a picnic to the San Jacinto Monument just on the other side of Deer Park. He forgot to look and, on the ride home, he ran out of gas! He dealt with it right away by getting out and hitchhiking a ride to a gas station. While this was very embarrassing, his future mother-​in-​law was impressed with his calm demeanor and the speed with which he addressed the problem. On Fridays Joe would drive Mary, her mother, and one of her sisters over to her sister Esther’s to watch wrestling matches on TV.

Image 18

    Joe and Mary Mendoza circa 1950. Mendoza family archives.

Joe was inducted into the army on December 8, 1950. He was honorably discharged still on active reserve on December 7, 1952. He had been fortunate enough not to be shipped overseas as part of the Korean conflict. While he went to Fort Benning in Georgia for basic training, most of his time was spent stationed at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. Joe’s intelligence and organizational skills led him to be assigned as a supply sergeant. In this job he ordered supplies and maintained his regiment’s stock of food, ammunition, clothing, and other supplies. While he was never overt about it, he liked the authority this position gave him to help ensure the troops were ready for any contingencies that might arise.

Image 19

    Joe Mendoza in uniform at Fort Hood, circa,1951. Mendoza family archives.

When he had long leaves, he would hitchhike home to visit Mary and family. In letters to Mary, he often talked about them getting married and his dreams for the future. After a long and slow courtship throughout high school, Joe and Mary were married on July 13, 1952 at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church. She was 24, and he was 23. Mary had been nervous that Joe was taking so long to propose, so earlier that year she had delivered an ultimatum to him that they would either get married or break up. That weekend he got a ride to Houston from Fort Hood in Killeen and proposed! Unlike many other men who married when they joined the military as a way to express their commitment and intentions to their fiancée, Joe had always been concerned with being in the best position possible to provide for his new wife and family that was sure to follow. It was a fairly big wedding with Mary’s sisters and best friends serving as bridesmaids. That night as they made plans to travel to San Antonio the next day for their honeymoon, David Castillo, the husband of Mary’s older sister Socorro, came by the party being held at Mary’s parent’s house on Canal and told Joe that he had rented them a room at the swanky Shamrock Hilton Hotel near Hermann Park as a wedding gift.^v

Image 20

    Joe and Mary Mendoza, wedding day, 07/​13/​1952. Mendoza family archives.

When Joe returned from the army in the fall, he and Mary searched for a home right away in a neighborhood not too far from their parents where many young couples from Magnolia were looking to start their families. With a $500 down payment that they had both saved up for, they bought a two-​bedroom house at 935 Hoffman Street. To afford it, they had to assume a mortgage and get a second one to pay a previous owner, so for several years they had two mortgages for a combined total of $65 a month. At that time, Mary remembers that she was making about $40/​week as a clerk at Sears. Joe worked at the post office sorting mail, and he was going to night school to acquire bookkeeping skills. He felt that this built on his skills he had developed as a supply sergeant in the army. The next year, he got a tip from an acquaintance about a job with NL Baroid, an oil testing and materials company.

Initially, his job was to keep track of costs associated with product development. After a few years, he decided he wanted to go work for the accounting department in the main office. He mentioned this to his supervisor who told him to go see the comptroller. He did so and a week later he was reassigned to a job in the accounting department. There, he was fortunate enough to meet Cliff Wall, a man who trained him and with whom he worked for much of his 44-​year career at Baroid. Joe’s pursuit of a degree in accounting at night school ended when he felt it necessary to heed Mary’s plea for more help at home in the evenings. Years later Joe would lament not finishing his degree. He witnessed many newly minted certified public accountants get higher paying jobs than him. He was the person often assigned to train these young graduates. He often noticed how they were unable to communicate their ideas in writing and he would tell his children how important it was to be able to express themselves clearly in writing.

When Joe began his job at NL Baroid in 1952, he recalls being the only non-​white person in the office. While he said he experienced very little outright discrimination, there were definitely microaggressions by support staff and peers. His primary way of dealing with these was to simply ignore people’s behavior. He remembers one female staff member who used to make faces when he came around. This lasted, he said, for many years until she realized he was not going away, and he gave her no reason to continue her behavior as he maintained a polite and professional demeanor. Mary’s brother-​in-​law worked as a salesman at Baroid and they both recalled that he experienced overt and covert discrimination.

Mary shared a story of how her brother-​in-​law responded to being called a stereotypical name: “He said some of the guys there would start calling him Pancho, and he said: ‘Look, I have a name my name is David and I want to be called by my name not by any other name.’ And so, once he said that, they stopped calling him Pancho because he told them right from the very beginning that he didn’t want to be called that.” To this story, my father added: “Yeah, they tried to call me Juan, but I looked at them right in the eye and I said my name is Joe. Can you pronounce Joe? Can you pronounce Joe? He didn’t know what to say! Hahaha!” Mary also recalled various anti-​Mexican microaggressions she experienced.

To this anecdote from Mary, Joe responded: “They used to say things like that without thinking. I remember one time when a guy would say something about Mexicans and all that and I looked at him and said, ‘Do you have a problem with that?’ ‘Oh no, no, I was just mentioning.’ And you know, when you would put them on the to spot like that most of the time they stopped. You had to be direct and talk like that.”

On another occasion, Mary almost lost her job when the woman who supervised her went on vacation. While her supervisor was gone, her substitute, a man, moved Mary from her position with no justification and assigned an Anglo woman to that role. Mary was sad and confused, but when her female supervisor returned, she gave Mary her job back because she thought she excelled in that role.

Confronting the source of aggression was difficult and risky. Mary also shared the following:

To this, Joe replied: “It wasn’t necessarily discrimination but just the way they talk to you or … You could sense it, you know?” While Joe and Mary acknowledged racial microaggressions and outright discrimination from some businesses and people, they also acknowledged that there were many good Anglos who supported and befriended them. Mary’s recollection of her mother’s admonition that she should not cause trouble was likely an important strategy for survival. Being evasive, if not invisible, was a way to avoid undue attention to oneself and, in this manner, one avoids conflict, legal trouble, and potentially dealing with the psychological and physical violence inflicted on them.

Mid-​century Houston

Despite being a war based on racial injustice, ethnic Mexicans in Houston found that they faced intensified racial discrimination in the workplace during World War II. Advocacy groups such as LULAC used a rhetoric that took the moral high road to critique companies that had discriminatory pay and hiring practices.^vi Houston’s first World War II victim on the battlefield was a Mexican American, a naval fireman from the northside. Two warships built at the Houston shipyard were named after Mexican and Latin American statesman, the SS José Navarro (a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence) and SS Benito Juarez.

In the post–​World War II period, the Cold War brought suspicion of anyone critiquing social policies or employment practices, including that of Jim Crow. Conformity and consensus went hand-​in-​hand with conservatism. The result was that Mexican Americans faced severe pressure to yield to mainstream culture even as they maintained an attachment to their culture.

From 1940 to 1960, Houston’s Mexican descent population almost quadrupled from 20,000 to 75,000 (De León, 1989). By 1960, only 9 percent of Houston Mexicans were foreign-​born. Mexican barrios began growing in several other parts of the inner city that were an expansion of or adjacent to barrios in the north and east. Denver Harbor was one of these.

In his book-​length studies of Mexican Americans in Houston, historian Arnoldo De León asks important questions about the path and rate of acculturation of Mexican immigrants in Houston and the degree to which variables such as urbanization, economic opportunity, and Americanization influence everyone in a community similarly. De León responds to these questions by stating that his book demonstrates that the “Houston Tejano community has historically exhibited diverse, sometimes conflicting nationalist, class, and ethnic sentiments. Cultural change does not affect everyone in the same form. Degrees of acculturation have ranged a wide gamut.”

In considering the status of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans in mid-​twentieth century Houston, the Mendoza and Martinez families provide a good barometer for the obstacles and opportunities available to first-​generation immigrants. At least some family members in each of their families had earned a high school diploma. My father and his sister were the only ones in their family, while his siblings went on to join the air force, the navy and the army and entered the work force as an appliance worker, a security guard, and a dock worker. Margaret secured a job at the luxury department store, Sakowitz, in downtown Houston. In Mary’s family, three of the nine children finished high school and two went on to college.

As the children of immigrants, the Mendoza and Martinez children were fulfilling their parents’ dreams in getting better jobs, often ones that were less hard on the body than the physical work of the mines and fields. As they got married and began their own families, they were all able to buy homes. While many of them stayed in neighborhoods near Magnolia, others ventured further away to Houston suburbs outside of the inner city. Their decisions about where to move as they started their new families were guided by several factors: (1) a “good” neighborhood, one that had good schools, and where they could feel safe and connected to their neighbors; (2) proximity to their parents; and (3) affordability as determined by their ability to get financing.

Historically, residential planning in Houston has been something of a hodgepodge of policies. On the one hand, Houston is notorious for its lack of zoning policies to separate home and business spaces. On the other hand, it has a long history of allowing laws that have limited where certain people can or cannot live. A July 2016 Houston Chronicle article (Babinck, 2007) notes that “Houston remains the only major city without a zoning ordinance to regulate which pieces of land can be used for what purposes, despite three major attempts over the past century to bring it in line with the rest of urban America.”^vii A closer examination of redlining and deed restrictions reveals how these practices may have started out with noble intentions but became tools for social control. During the Great Depression, the federal government created the Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to assist homeowners struggling to keep their homes during the Depression. By 1933, when HOLC was founded, half of all mortgages in the USA were in default. “The agency was charged with bailing out homeowners at risk of default on their mortgages, and, by 1936, more than one million loans had been issued” (Rogers, 2016). See also Guillen (2019) and Schuetz (2019). To assist it in making decisions about the feasibility of loans, in 1935 HOLC created what they called Residential Security Maps. The goal of the maps was to “graphically reflect the trend of desirability of neighborhoods from a residential viewpoint.” Below is the visual key used to describe the status of various neighborhoods.

According to Susan Rogers, the author of “The Maps and Loans Behind Houston’s Segregation,”

Hillier writes: “On the one hand, HOLC provided assistance to a million homeowners, across race and ethnicity, who were desperate to save their homes. On the other hand, [it] created security maps in which race was used to signify risk levels.”

The 1940 HOLC-​generated map of Houston shows how the “redlining” of Houston’s real estate map operated in defining for generations to come the potential worth of various neighborhoods. The circled area is Magnolia Park. The area in a rectangle is Denver Harbor , a neighborhood that evolved from the combining of two preexisting neighborhood additions, Harbor and Denver. Most of the remaining areas identified as red, or definitely hazardous, are mostly populated by African Americans. These neighborhoods include the Fifth and Sixth Wards as well as Cottage Grove and the West End.

Image 21

    “Mapping Inequality.” 1940 HOLC Map of Grades of Security of Houston neighborhoods. Enlarged map legend is to left.

Since the creation of these maps, Houston has tried several times to institute zoning laws, but these efforts have been met with fierce resistance by people who viewed it as government meddling, calling land-​use restrictions “socialistic and communistic.” The negative impacts of these maps on loans and suburban planning that led to white flight was further compounded by those who saw how they could be useful in creating deed restrictions that limited transference and purchase of property by race. Although race-​based restrictions were struck down in a US Supreme Court ruling in 1948, they have contributed to housing disparities that exist today and still remain in many older associations’ documents.^viii These^ix maps also played a prominent role in protecting the value of property in white neighborhoods in other ways. For instance, when decisions regarding the placement of interstate highways were being made, it was determined that the best way to protect high-​value neighborhoods was to route the highways through the poorer neighborhoods occupied by African Americans and Latinos (Susaneck, 2018).

***

Racial covenants: Though they varied in wording there are numerous examples of language restricting the occupation of a dwelling by non-​whites. Below is one example.

***

Like many Americans in the post-​War era, the Mendoza family thrived in a strong economy. Joe and Mary became deeply involved in Resurrection Parish as active churchgoers, supporters of the church through their weekly gifts, parents of children attending elementary school there, and participating and assisting in church activities such as bazaars to raise funds for the church or school. A year after their marriage, their first daughter was born and christened Rosemary. Two years later, a second daughter, Mary Ann, was born, followed by a boy in November 1956. Two more girls, Beatrice Marie and Mary Margaret, followed by a second boy Louis Gerard, were born in 1958, 1959, and 1960. A child was stillborn in 1962, and then a fifth daughter was born in June of 1963, Cynthia Marie. Sometime around 1965 Mary miscarried another child when she fell off a bench when the family was visiting Six Flags of Texas in Dallas. Finally, the family was rounded off with the birth of the sixth daughter and eighth child, Mary Gilda, in January of 1967. After the birth of Mary Margaret, who was called Margie within the family, the family needed more room for their growing family, so they moved from the house on Hoffman to a larger house at 615 Zoe St. Around this time, Joe taught Mary how to drive. With five kids and a sixth on the way, the likelihood of needing to drive kids to the doctor, to school, or to go shopping during the week was high.

When Joe and Mary began having children, they discussed their dreams for them, and how they would raise them. One issue that arose that caused some tension with the in-​laws was their decision to not raise their children to speak Spanish. Zapopan was more understanding than María. In fact, she had sent her youngest daughter to a different school, one with less Mexican American students, so she could learn to speak English without an accent. María argued with Joe about this decision and lamented that they would not know their mother tongue and would only have a limited ability to communicate with her since she did not speak English fluently. Having survived taunting and humiliation and the shame of not speaking English in schools, Joe and Mary wanted to spare their children this traumatic experience. Perhaps even more importantly, in the 1950s, President Eisenhower’s Director of the INS, Joseph Swing, designed and implemented Operation Wetback to deport undocumented Mexican immigrants.^x Using military style tactics, Operation Wetback successfully deported more than a million people to Mexico, many of whom had legal status in the United States as citizens or visa holders, even though recruitment of Mexican workers continued in the agricultural and manufacturing industries in the Southwestern and Midwestern United States (Rhinehart, and Kreneck, 1988). This followed and coexisted with the Bracero Program (1942–​1964) that recruited Mexican laborers to deal with a labor shortage in the agricultural and railroad industries in wartime. Under this program, special visas were issued to allow Mexican migrants to come and work in the USA.

Although they were fully bilingual, Joe and Mary feared that if their children spoke Spanish first and English with an accent they would be targeted by public officials or treated as second-​class citizens. Years later, as Spanish gained prominence as a language of commerce and business, they expressed regret for this decision, but they did what they thought was right at the time.

Joe and Mary kept the house on Hoffman and rented it out for supplemental income for the next 55 years. Joe also purchased some other rental units in the near North Side on Gano St. but found that repairs and chasing down tenants who could not pay the rent was not to his liking, so after a few years, he sold them. Mary had quit working when the children entered their lives. She returned to work when the kids were old enough to help around the house. She worked at local department stores, and the neighborhood public library. The latter she did for many years as a reference librarian, where she came to be known by many of the friends of her children. Years later, one of daughter Mary Ann’s friends laughingly said that Mrs. Mendoza was Google before Google existed because you could either call in or go visit her in the library and ask her anything and she would look it up and give you an answer right away.

Civil rights, social change, and neighborhood transformation

In the 1960s, Houston youth immersed themselves in the Chicano Movement, much to the chagrin of immigrant families who worried that protests, rallies, boycotts, and strikes would put the community in a bad light. Papel Chicano, a Chicano Movement newspaper with offices in Magnolia Park, reported on area activism in the 1970s, and in 1971 women of the Magnolia Park YWCA hosted the Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza.

Life in the Mendoza home was fairly sedate. Joe and Mary strove for routine and predictability with expectations for meals, school performance, and household chores made clear. As a family, they watched the news and mourned when JFK, MLK, and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. They watched the news of grim reports on Viet Nam and of the body count of infantry and Viet Nam civilians skyrocketing. They listened to accounts of civil rights and women’s rights protests, rallies, and civil disobedience. While Mary and Joe rarely spoke directly about these events, they did not speak against the brazen youth who protested the “man,” inequality, and the denial of equal justice for all. Their children participated in small ways in the countercultural movement of the time via their fashion, hair styles, and musical tastes.

Joe and Mary were involved and observant parents as much as they could be with eight children. Homework was critical and each report card required a discussion with Joe as he asked about areas where performance might be low. They did understand that not all of their children were academic high performers but more than anything they wanted their children to have an opportunity to go to college. Joe always told his kids they could be anything they wanted to be, and not to settle for less than that because work was going to be an important part of life. They also wanted their children to work indoors so their bodies would not have to deal with the harsh outdoor climate of Houston. Each evening in the Mendoza household, dinner with the family was mandatory, as were prayers at each meal and church attendance on Sunday. Following lunch on Sundays, family visits to each grandparent ensued. Chores were required throughout the week and especially on Saturday mornings. While some watching of cartoons on television was not uncommon on Saturday mornings, nothing else could be done before all chores were completed. The work was often divided along traditional gender lines, with the girls doing indoor chores like washing dishes, sweeping, mopping, dusting, and vacuuming, and the boys maintained the lawn, painted the house as needed, and raked leaves or washed the car. When Joe was making house or car repairs, one or other of the boys was often drafted as his assistant and, in this way, they picked up car and house repair skills that would last them a lifetime.

Image 22

    Visiting grandpa and grandma Mendoza, circa 1964. Mendoza family archives.

The house on Zoe Street was home to the family for 20 years. The block was full of kids who played mostly well together. In the evenings as supper time approached, among the sound of cicadas or frogs chirping in the streets, one could hear the whistles of various tones as parents called their children home to eat. In the early 1970s, Joe and a group of friends added an upstairs to the three-​bedroom house. This two-​bedroom addition allowed the older girls, Rosemary and Mary Ann, now in high school, some privacy; the two boys, Bobby and Jerry, took the other room.

A number of scholars have noted that the civil rights movement in Houston was relatively peaceful compared to other sites in the South where resistance to Jim Crow laws was met with fierce violence and vitriol. One example marking this contrast is the violence college students faced in many parts of the southern United States outside of Houston when they held lunch counter sit-​in protests. Students from TSU took the lead in advocating and protesting for desegregation. They held sit-​ins at restaurants in diners like Woolworths and at the city hall cafeteria. Interestingly, perhaps because they wanted to avoid conflict or because they believed in the cause, many merchants did not resist the sit-​ins and served the protesting students. Although the mayor at the time was not supportive of desegregating public facilities, many members of the City Council advocated for desegregation. Additionally, “the Retail Merchants Association, an organization of white business owners, started a campaign to desegregate private businesses throughout Houston. The Retail Merchants Association contacted local Houston businesses with literature outlining not only how it was both economically healthier to desegregate, but how doing so would prevent future violence from developing.” (“The East End Then and Now”) According to B. Chapman of the Houston Business Journal (Chapman, 2007), the city managed to peacefully desegregate lunch counters, hotels, restaurants and movie theaters through a carefully planned process that began in the summer of 1960.

Joe and Mary watched desegregation and were happy to see it take effect. They had always felt uncomfortable having privileges that African Americans did not, even though some businesses applied Jim Crow regulations to Mexicans. Catholic doctrine persuaded them to believe that all people were God’s children and disallowed them to see themselves as better than others based on something as superficial as skin color. Joe recalled reading about the sit-​ins and how the students stayed put all day, and then a few weeks later, they were being served. He said he did not recall the details, but he did remember that the police stayed out of the fray. He said that in the early 1960s, one slowly started seeing desegregation practices end for restaurants, theaters, water fountains, and pools. Joe was highly involved with the church as a member of the Knights of Columbus and as a volunteer accountant for church fundraising events like biannual bazaars and weekly collections from parishioners. He was also a founding member of the group that helped start the church’s credit union for parishioners. In the late 1970s, Senator Edward Kennedy campaigned for president of the United States and he stopped by Resurrection Catholic Church. Joe took a photo.

Image 23

    Ted Kennedy campaigning at Resurrection Catholic Church in Denver Harbor, circa May 1980. Mendoza family archives.

Joe and Mary could not afford to take the family out to restaurants or go on long vacations, but they did go to Galveston or Lake Houston frequently. Joe loved to travel early and would often get the family up in the dark with the refrain “Rise and Shine, the sun is up and the day is wasting!” Once the kids were treated to a day at the Six Flags of Texas in Dallas. There was also a trip or two to Mexico to visit family who were otherwise unknown to the kids. At least a couple of instances when returning from a short trip, the family came home to find that their house had been broken into and robbed. While there were not many valuables in the house, the television and stereo would be gone, and a huge mess created as thieves sought more valuable items perhaps hidden in closets or in pantries. Joe and Mary were very present in their children’s lives, but they were not ones to express affection to their children either verbally or physically. The Mendoza children recall with fondness two kinds of indirect intimacy, the annual ritual of looking for piojos that Mary conducted before the start of each school year and being carried to their beds when they had fallen asleep in the car or on the couch. Each of these were rare (even as they were routine) moments of tenderness that they reveled in.

The four sides of Denver Harbor were bordered by railroad tracks. Settegast was to the north, Fifth Ward to the west, Port of Houston to the east, and Clinton Park to the south. The high school designated for students from Denver Harbor was Phyllis Wheatley High School on Market Road in the Fifth Ward. Having sent their children to Catholic Elementary school, the Mendozas then sent them to Catholic high schools. When Resurrection Elementary school stopped offering 7th and 8th grades, those who were of age attended Mc Reynold’s Junior High before attending Catholic High School. The girls went to Incarnate Word Academy and the boys to St Thomas College Preparatory School. Tuition was a challenge and as each family member got a job when in high school, they were required to contribute to their tuition. Although not in typical fashion, eventually five of the eight Mendoza children earned college degrees. The three others attended, but for a variety of reasons did not complete their studies.

As the girls came of age, several marriages occurred in the 1970s and grandchildren soon followed. While the Mendoza children took advantage of birth control measures that were not easily available or accepted by their parents’ generation, all in all Joe and Mary were to have 18 grandchildren and 16 great-​grandchildren. In the 1980s, they moved out of Denver Harbor to Woodforest, a suburb near Channelview, Texas, near I-​10 East and Beltway 8. Joe and Mary took advantage of retirement to travel, but they remained active churchgoers and volunteers in a number of community organizations until they were no longer able to drive. They were generous, kind, and big-​hearted and even when they had a full house of eight children, they opened their homes to several foster children from Catholic charities. After moving to Woodforest, Mary took a job at a local elementary school serving lunches to the children. In the mid-​1980s, when her last child, Gilda, left the house to attend college, first in San Angelo and then in San Antonio, Mary experienced a strong case of empty-​nest syndrome that lasted several years, and which was accompanied by feelings of isolation and underappreciation. As her numerous grandchildren became old enough to spend time with them, these feelings lessened.

Joe retired for good from NL Baroid Industries in 1996 after working there for 44 years. Around the same time, Mary quit working at the local elementary school in Woodforest where she worked a half-​day in the cafeteria. In retirement they kept busy and volunteered as advisers to married couples through a church program, and Joe delivered bread and groceries to elders in the area for a local food pantry. In his 80s, Joe was diagnosed with early-​stage Alzheimer’s. Though he remained highly functioning for many years, his short-​term memory was tasked. In 2016 his children made the difficult decision to take away his car for fear that he would have an accident or forget how to find his way home. He was very upset about this and reacted angrily and kicked them all out of the house when they told him that they had sold it. By the next day he had forgotten about the conversation. From that point on, his children and wife simply told him the car was at the mechanic’s being repaired. Although he went looking for it at neighborhood auto repair shops from time to time, this mostly placated him. He loved to drink wine in the evenings and play dominos or checkers with his children and grandchildren.

When Covid arrived in 2020, Joe and Mary stayed home and isolated with only their caretakers allowed to visit them. The six daughters who lived in Houston worked hard for many years to provide for them and visited often as well as taking care of their own family needs and careers; doctor’s visits and other responsibilities kept them very busy and the sisters often used vacation and sick days to attend to their parents’ needs. Prior to the pandemic, their son Bobby drove in from San Antonio to spend at least one weekend a month with them. Mary had long suffered from osteoporosis and weak bones. In fall 2020 her doctor informed her that her upper jaw bone was decaying and needed a graft. On the one hand, he was very concerned with the risks involved in this procedure, and especially concerned with the heightened risk of exposure to Covid she would face in a hospital. On the other hand, if she failed to get the operation there was an increasing risk that the wound in her jaw would go septic. She decided to have the operation, but it was postponed because of scheduling complications. In January of 2022, Joe and Mary were put under hospice care at home. Soon afterward they were diagnosed with Covid. In addition to their children, many grandchildren visited to say their final goodbyes. Their sons, Bobby and Jerry, were in town and spent the night with them so that their sisters could get some rest. While Bobby slept for a few hours, Jerry could see his mother’s breathing becoming labored and anticipated her death so he played a recording of a mass, and some of her favorite music, such as Ave Maria and Volver, in the hopes that this would give her comfort. Mary succumbed and died in the early morning hours of Sunday, January 24th. Joe had not been exhibiting any signs of illness, but once Mary was put in a hospice, he refused to eat and began sleeping on a couch near the hospital bed that had been set up for Mary in the den. At her death, he seemed aware of what had transpired and kept saying he was OK as tears rolled down his face. The next morning, slightly less than 24 hours after Mary died, he passed away. Many of his children believe that he willed himself to go with Mary. He had been saying for years that he was planning on living only as long as Mary did so he could be there for her.

Image 24

    Joe and Mary Mendoza, circa 1952. Mendoza family archives.

Image 25

    An extended family gathering at Mason Park in the late 60s. Most of my siblings and many cousins are in the picture. I am the one kneeling on the left. Mendoza family archives.

After Joe and Mary passed, the family went through their personal items and a letter from Joe to Mary was found that confirmed his intention to stay by her side to take care of her.

In a note to Mary in July 2011 on their fifty-​ninth wedding anniversary, Joe wrote to Mary:

Mary and Joe lived through the Great Depression, and they saw Houston expand from a small city to become Texas’s largest and the nation’s fourth largest city with only New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago surpassing the population of Houston. They witnessed the exponential growth of the Latino population. Whereas the Mendoza name in Houston once only occupied an eighth of a page in the phone book, it filled many pages by the end of the twentieth century. They experienced the development of running hot water in their homes, the rising popularity of their first radio, then B&W TV, then color television and phones, then cell phones, and then the internet. They saw assassinations and assassination attempts at presidents, presidential candidates, and civil rights leaders. They saw the USA on the brink of World War III with other superpowers. They saw the development of technology that allowed space travel, trips to the moon, and other forms of space exploration. Throughout all of this, they never ceased to be amazed but also believed that nothing was more important than family, God, and treating one another with love and respect.