The Burial of Mr. Spanish

In 1954 Evelyn Davis, a seventh grade teacher at Marfa's Blackwell School, had her pupils write on slips of paper that they would not speak Spanish. The slips went into a cardboard coffin, and the school gathered at the flagpole to bury it in the flower bed. The ceremony was not marking an old rule, it was imposing a new one, on a campus that had run a Spanish speaking branch of the Interscholastic League in the 1930s. By Davis's own written account of it, the funeral came apart at the graveside: two pallbearers who had not rehearsed began pulling against each other, argued, and let off a volley of Spanish curses.

Blackwell taught Marfa's Mexican American children from 1909 until 1965, in a system segregated by local custom rather than by any Texas statute. Anglo children had their own school from the first grade through the eighth; high school was the one place the town did not divide. Former pupils remember being paddled for speaking Spanish. Many fell behind for a different reason: families followed the cotton harvest north of town in the autumn, and children often did not come back until after Christmas.

Former students are why the place survived. They formed the Blackwell School Alliance in 2006, held reunions and took a ninety nine year lease on the building from the school district. At the 2007 reunion they bought a Spanish dictionary in El Paso, buried it under a wooden cross reading Spanish, and dug it straight back up. Congress authorised the Blackwell School National Historic Site in October 2022 and the land transfer completed in 2024, making it the only unit of the National Park System devoted to the segregation of Mexican American schoolchildren.