Remembering La Gloria:
Heart and Soul of the West Side Barrio
An interview with Mary Agnes Rodriguez
By Yolanda Chávez Leyva
MARY AGNES RODRIGUEZ is a community activist and artist who was involved in the 2002 fight to save La Gloria, the “heart and soul” of the Westside barrio of San Antonio, from demolition. Her work is known for the profound way in which it reflects her personal experience and that of her community. To stop the bulldozers, Mary and another woman, Joleen Garcia, chained themselves to La Gloria, one of many acts of bravery that she has documented through her art. We offer a short interview with her, conducted January 2, 2007, at the Gallista Gallery in San Antonio, surrounded by her sketches and paintings of the beloved building. Through her creativity, Mary keeps alive the struggle to rescue this landmark of Mexicano history in San Anto as well as the memories of generations of West Siders.
Mary Agnes Rodriguez was born and raised on San Antonio’s West Side. Her family has lived there for generations and like La Gloria, their presence spans the 20th century.
My grandfather had a little store [on the West Side] named Rodriguez Grocery Store. They’d sell sodas, candy, beer, canned goods, potato chips, bread, grandma cookies, pickled pig feet, pickes, and pickled eggs. The front part of the house was the store, and then they had a little warehouse where they kept the sodas and paper bags. It was on Leal Street where I live now. On that same street there was Aguilar who’d sell meat. If you wanted just a slice of bologna, they’d sell it to you. There were a lot of small mom and pop businesses. My grandparent’s names were Simon Torres Rodriguez and Rosa. My grandfather passed away at 99. Then my two aunts took over the grocery store for a while. My aunt decided to close it when they pulled a gun on her. It was a man in a three-piece suit. And all they sold were soda waters! They lived near a creek and they saw him run down the creek.
La Gloria, built in 1928, was the third of four businesses founded by Señor Matilde Elizondo. According to his granddaughter, Patti Elizondo, La Gloria was an architectural first for her time. A large sturdy building, a 100 foot long by 30-foot high pillared portico greeted motorists as they made their way to and from Mexico on what was then Laredo Highway. The building included 8 gasoline hand pumps, an automotive garage, a silent movie theater, and an oven for pan de dulce. La Gloria also housed other services: a neighborhood credit union, money transfer services to Mexico, and international shipping. However, it was the rooftop dances, initiated by Mr. Elizondo during the Great Depression, which people most remember. It is said that during her prime, a thousand people could be found dancing the Charleston or the tango under the stars. Entire families attended the bailes on the rooftop of La Gloria.
Over time, La Gloria changed—by 2000, the once vibrant building housed a car parts store. Over time, ownership changed as well. When the owner, Tony Limon, requested a permit from the City to demolish the building in 2001 to make way for a diesel repair shop, the community galvanized to stop the demolition. During a November 2001 City Council meeting, the Council heard numerous recommendations to designate La Gloria as historic, saving her from destruction. Advocates included City staff, the City’s Historic Preservation Officer on behalf of the Historic and Design Review Committee, members of the Elizondo family, a staff person from the Texas Institute of Texas Cultures, and a spokesperson for the San Antonio Conservation Society. Councilperson David Garcia, who represented the West Side district, made a motion to reject the historic designation in favor of “economic development.” Ultimately, the City Council of San Antonio refused to protect La Gloria as an historical landmark, opening the way for the building’s owner to demolish the beloved building.
City Council member David Garcia had his office here in district 5 but he lived in Alamo Heights so whatever happened [to la Gloria] we didn’t think he would care that much. He was an attorney. At the time, I wasn’t that involved but I remember meeting Patti Elizondo because she was looking for support and then I started getting more involved. We knew that Garcia was important because he had the ability to say, “This is an historic landmark.” It was in his district. There were Mexicanos on both sides. Some were not interested in preserving buildings. Things disappear, all the traditions. I did feel sad; we were depressed.
I got involved when I met Patti Elizondo, the granddaughter of Matilde Elizondo. Once Patti saw it come alive again [with all the people interested in La Gloria], she didn’t want it demolished. The building had gone through other owners. The current owner, Limon, had decided to demolish it and build an 18-wheeler repair shop. Patti tried to get publicity for the building and we were trying to buy the building back. We were trying to get different organizations together—San Anto Cultural Arts, La Esperanza, the Southwest Workers Union and the San Antonio Conservation Society. We created the Westside Heritage Coalition. San Anto wanted to renovate it and restore it back, have their office, maybe have a gallery, maybe bring back the dance floor. We wanted to create a museum. That was our goal. At the last minute, we got the money. We fundraised on the streets. We were working on it for some time. The owner started raising the price more and more so we couldn’t afford it. Everybody got involved, all the San Anto people and of course people with different organizations. We collected stories from people who went to la Gloria, trying to raise money to buy it back. The media would show some but they censored a lot. The ones who would show more [of what we were doing] were the Spanish stations.
Thousands of San Antonio residents arose in protest to the demolition of La Gloria and the City organized public meetings to hear comment. Supporters of La Gloria worked to keep attention focused on saving the landmark.
When anyone would hear there was going to be a meeting where Garcia was going to be, we would make signs and follow him. The Southwest Workers Union used more direct action. The first meeting we went to was at Kennedy High School. We said “let’s go” and we made a lot of signs. We were kind of rowdy going in. There was one police officer and he told us it was full inside. It was early. We went through another door and it was empty. It was a public hearing but you had to write down your questions. They told us, “Write down your question, and we’ll select the ones we want.” That’s when Danny [one of the activists]got mad. Everyone got up and started chanting. There was a priest there who was going to speak, to quite things down. Mr. Garcia pulled the plug on the microphone. He didn’t want him to speak. By the end of the meeting, there were about 20 cars of police to escort us out. We got kicked out of the building. We couldn’t be on school property so we stayed on the sidewalk.
La Gloria’s supporters used myriad strategies to save the building, from seeking legal remedies to signing petitions and raising money to buy the building through one dollar campaigns and grants.
When we were out in the streets raising money, we had signs “Honk 4 la Gloria.” We had petitions. They announced it on the radio. A lot of people came with their stories when they came to sign the petitions. We thought we need to collect all these stories. We were trying to get a restraining order [to stop the demolition]. We got the first one. They didn’t allow any cameras in the court but I was sketching. That’s when one of the preservation officers said that there was a 35-mile radius within which they restore buildings. Outside of that, they don’t care. It came out that they discriminate against the West Side. Preservation was only for tourism.
The City’s Preservation Officer, Anne McClone, testified in court that preservation agencies had neglected the West Side and that this neglect was racially motivated. She also acknowledged her long held assumption that Chicanos didn’t care about historic preservation, based on conversations she’d had with some Chicano organizations that, according to one report, “pushed for new buildings, not preservation.” After seeing the work of so many Chicanos and Mexicanos trying to save La Gloria, McClone began working with La Esperanza and other organizations to save several West Side historic buildings in 2003 and 2004.
While volunteer lawyers worked to get an injunction against the demolition of La Gloria, organizers used a variety of strategies to delay the destruction, which had begun illegally.
We did get a restraining order the first time around. We did a delaying tactic while we were waiting for the order…we did a human chain. We tried to delay until the person with the restraining order came in. After that, we switched and we chained ourselves to the building. We were trying to do whatever we could because the bulldozers were there. The first one was Jolene. She was on Laredo Street. She was the first to be chained. I was on Brazos further down. They said “you’re next” and I sat down so they put the chain. It was really tight. Just when he clicked on the lock, the guy with the restraining order ran by but no one had the key to unlock me. I was looking in the direction of where everyone was. Then, I turned around and the cameraman was filming me chained to the building. Finally, they went and got the key and they unlocked Joleen and they unlocked me.
They had already started demolishing the building illegally. That’s why we spent the night several times to stop them from illegally demolishing it at night. That’s when the man with the van, Glory, painted like the American flag, parked his van and said “If La Gloria goes, my Glory goes with her.” That was another [successful] delay tactic because they had to tow the van. He was a man that lived right there in the neighborhood.
When another injunction failed, and the building’s owner refused to take the check for the full asking price, which community organizers had managed to raise, the demolition began on April 1, 2002. Mary Agnes remembered him saying he couldn’t accept the check because he didn’t “know if the check was good or not.” Many supporters could not face the trauma of seeing La Gloria destroyed and stayed away. Others, wearing masks to protect them from the towering clouds of dirt as the bulldozers did their work, stood and watched as the bulldozers began ramming the sturdy 75 year old walls of La Gloria. Poet and cultural worker Vicki Grise documented the destruction in her poem, “This is Cultural Genocide”: “Each time the bulldozer/ hit the building/ I felt it/ in my heart and/ I remembered…/ I remembered my own history.”
It was such a solid building that we knew we could do something with it. I was there when they demolished it. The bulldozer hit it and jumped. It didn’t break anything. Only the ground shook and it took about three or four times until it finally did a little something to it. The organizations that were involved had brought an architect who said it was built solid, like a freeway. The dance floor could hold a 1000 people. It took two days to demolish it. They thought it would take two hours but it took two days.
La Gloria was still making history in our trying to save it. I felt sad watching the demolition even though we struggled, and used a lot of effort. It was just a few days shy of 75 years old. Everybody was crying who stayed to watch the demolition. It felt like somebody died. The struggle, part of our past, of the people. We could have brought it back alive in a different way.
The decision not to declare La Gloria a historical landmark, and the ultimate destruction of the important community treasure, raised critical issues regarding so-called economic development at the expense of the cultural and historical needs of the Mexicano/ Chicano community in San Anto. As artist and community organizer, Deborah Vasquez wrote after witnessing the demolition of La Gloria, “Orale Mi Gente, you now know how the powers in San Antonio feel about our history…” Another witness to the destruction, Manuel Diosdado Castillo, Jr., commented on the race and class elements of the destruction. “If La Gloria were in King Williams, Alamo Heights or Terrell Hills this would not have happened…City ‘leaders’ listen and sell their souls, our blood and our water to faceless out of town corporations whose only concern is making money on the backs of the poor.” Thousands of San Antonians experienced the demolition as a profound act of disrespect for the Chicano/ Mexicano community and our history.
Stories like the one that Mary Agnes tells also provide us important lessons about the politics of destruction, and of the ways in which a community can rally together to save the physical embodiment of its past. As Mary declares poignantly in one of her paintings, although La Gloria has been demolished, she continues to make history. The struggle to save La Gloria, even in the face of her devastation, held the seeds of hope. In the years since the bulldozers first smashed into the well-built walls of La Gloria, many in San Antonio’s Chicano community have begun working to save other historic structures on the West Side, now conscious of how those buildings hold our history and our memories. As Mary Agnes says, bitter sweetly, “Even though La Gloria got demolished, it made me more aware of the issues as well as thousands of other people, young and old.”
[Click here to see short documentary "Tributo á la Gloria"]
[Click here to see Mary Agnes Rodriguez's work]
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