![]() “Out there, it’s just my brothers and sisters, all Hispanics.” “I hadn’t really mixed with whites, because I come from the barrio,” he says. Mario Rivera, who grew up in Marfa, recently gazed around the building’s two small rooms and remembered when he was an elementary student there, a time when this town of just a few thousand people was still heavily segregated. Segregation of Hispanic students in Texas and the southwest often happened without laws requiring it Built in 1909, the building is all that remains of what used to be a more sprawling campus. The school sits on a dusty lot in a quiet, residential part of Marfa. The moment is the culmination of years of work by Blackwell alumni to preserve the school’s history and to obtain formal recognitions for the site. Now, the old adobe building is set to become a national historic site that supporters say will explore the often untold story of how school segregation played out in this corner of the U.S. The Blackwell School in tiny Marfa, Texas, was just one of many segregated schools across the southwest where Hispanic children were taught separately from their white peers. That was the rule that teachers instituted at a small West Texas schoolhouse near the United States-Mexico border in the 1950s, even though Spanish was the native language for many of the Mexican-American children there. ![]() Students were not allowed to speak Spanish at school. ![]() The Blackwell School in Marfa, Texas, pictured in May 2022. ![]()
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