 UTEP student (right) Javier Perez protests the planned demolition of 30 acres of his neighborhood.
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STUDENTS WITH BARRIO ROOTS OPPOSE DOWNTOWN PLAN
Daniel Collins
UTEP Prospector
THE APPROVAL OF the Downtown revitalization effort by city council over three months ago made the possibility of relocating families in the Segundo Barrio and Downtown areas of El Paso a closer reality. But opposition to the plan continues, with many events to that effect being organized by UTEP students. One such recent event was “Communities Under Seige,” held on campus last week. The two-day film festival screened documentaries that focused on the alleged abuse of eminent domain and the trouble of urban displacement. The films- “Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story”, “Villa”, “Tributo a la Gloria” and “Everyone Their Grain of Sand,” were shown in the Business Administration and Education buildings over last Thursday and Friday evenings.
Student organizers hope that the obvious parallels between the communities documented and El Paso will inspire greater cognizance of our own city’s future.
“I think it’s really important that college students here at UTEP understand what’s happening with the Downtown plan because it’s going to affect their community.
“Where will it end? It could be your house next,” said history doctoral student Antonio Lopez. “I think it’s important that college students understand that they are invested in this community also and Segundo Barrio is the heart of El Paso.”
Lopez, along with fellow UTEP students Teressa Sotelo and Cynthia Renteria, worked to organize this event as part of their activities with Downtown plan opposition group Paso del Sur. Young members of the group were responsible for demonstrations in front of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and over the summer hosted Saturday cultural events in a Segundo Barrio park.
“We held demonstrations whenever we could,” said Sotelo, graduate student in interdisciplinary studies. “We were there with the city council saying this plan doesn’t speak for us. This isn’t our plan. This is a destruction plan; not anything that will actually be fruitful for the local community, for the people that actually live there. Where will they go?”
The summer events featured musicians, poets and speakers and hoped to provide a venue to speak about the issues surrounding the Downtown plan. Also passed out at these events were chat books about Segundo Barrio’s history. These were originally created by UTEP’s history department and a third edition has just been completed to distribute at other upcoming events by Paso del Sur.
“Historians know the value of that neighborhood and also because we’ve seen the same thing happen so many times in the past 50 years of the evolution of Mexican American communities,” said Paso del Sur founding member and UTEP history professor Dr. Yolanda Leyva. “We’ve been very lucky to have poets, to have artists, to have very creative people affiliated with this group so we could get out the message in many different formats.”
Diverse membership
A great number of the members people are UTEP students who joined the group after more media attention and lectures on campus focused on the plan. UTEP students active in the group represent a diverse sampling of studies, including history and education students from undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels.
“The students make up a very critical part of Paso del Sur; an increasing role,” Leyva said. “I think it’s important for the students to get involved for several reasons. For one thing I think it’s important for the students to really take what they’re learning here at the university and put it to use in the greater community. I love seeing students do work in the community and use their skills and their knowledge.”
Leyva, with the support of existing students involved in civic engagement, hopes to create a Young Scholars for Justice group on campus. The inspiration for the group comes from another activist group in east Austin known as PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources). This Austin group has a similar program made up predominately of high school students.
Leyva hopes that this nascent group will also participate in creating a series of historical public works projects in the Segundo Barrio and Downtown areas that would include more murals and unofficial historical placards detailing the area’s achievements.
“We have so many great students here that somehow I really think we can create a more formal group of young scholars for justice,” said Leyva of the idea, which is still in its infancy. “We would have university students mentor high school students to see how you could use education to better your own community.”
Mural depictions
One of the next events to be hosted by Paso del Sur is a dedication festival for the mural painted at Sacred Heart Church on Father Rahm St. and Mesa. This location would have previously been included in a possible demolition zone, until the revised Downtown plan selected it, and other properties, safe from such construction. The mural at the church was made by local artists and painted largely by Bowie High School students. It depicts Downtown and South El Paso’s contributions to Southwest culture and history. The free festival, to be held all day Saturday, Feb. 10 will also include a scholastic chess tournament, car show, live music and a Lucha Libre Poetry Slam. Speakers at the event will include California State University at Northridge’s Dr. David Diaz, author of “Barrio Urbanism: Chicancos, Planning and American Cities,” Bowie High School Principal Leonel Rubio, Father John Stowe, vicar general of the Diocese of El Paso and Dr. Leyva.
Speaking out
According to members of Paso del Sur, this event, set in Segundo Barrio, would allow for more voices from within that community to be heard than were previously allowed at city sponsored forums. One of the group’s principle concerns over the plan remains perceived lack of representation on the part of the community set to be revitalized.
“It was going to be community dialogue, but it wasn’t,” said history major Cynthia Renteria of previous city meetings to discuss the use of eminent domain. “People would ask questions and more often than not the answer would be ‘we are not discussing that at this time.’ We would keep going to these meetings, after a while the microphone would not come to us. They would know who we were.”
Renteria and members of the group charge that officials purposefully set meetings in locations and at times that were inconvenient for working class members of Segundo Barrio to attend.
“You have to take into the consideration that these are people with jobs working 40 hours a week, and they don’t have time to participate in these events,” said UTEP sophomore political science major Javier Perez.
Until very recently, a resident of Segundo Barrio, Perez was there to gauge the community’s reaction to the plan.
“At the beginning, they were being told that they were getting an improved life,” Perez said. “They thought they’d have more stores near by until we told them that their homes would be used for the parking lot. Once we told them they turned against.”
Barrio Roots
Perez lived in Segundo Barrio his entire life and graduated from Bowie High. He also currently works for the Farm Workers Center’s Border Agricultural Worker’s Project and got involved in opposing the plan when he feared this location would also be set for demolition. Perez and students like him believe that on top of the area’s historical worth, Segundo Barrio continues to weave a personal, existing history that has to be respected.
“I might not live in el Segundo Barrio but my grandmother does and I have memories of being younger and being there,” Sotelo said.
Students in Paso del Sur contend that one thing the community does not want are the types of businesses being offered as part of the Downtown plan and would hope that the city would focus more on attracting larger corporations to the Sun City.
“The types of jobs that they’re bringing that are in that plan are service industry jobs; there’s restaurants, there’s bars, and I’m sorry but as a college student I don’t plan to use my degree being a waiter or selling drinks in a club,” Renteria said. “I don’t see how that’s going to keep college kids in El Paso.”
She worries that continued support for the Downtown revitalization effort would set an unwanted land grab precedent in El Paso. “How do we know that a year, two years down the line, they’re not going to be looking at our homes and say ‘oh, that’s blighted’ and take that away,” Renteria said. “That’s something that’s going to affect all of us in the long run. When all this stuff starts happening, we’re all going to be affected.”
Daniel Collins may be reached at dcollins@utep.edu.
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