Tough treatment and good memories mix at newest national site dedicated to Latinos

An adobe-style Texas building educated Mexican and Mexican-American children in classrooms that alumni call barracks. They got secondhand textbooks and were paddled for speaking Spanish instead of English. Latino students were segregated from Anglos just as whites and Blacks were separated in the south. But the principal of the Blackwell School also created an interscholastic league specifically for ‘Mexican schools.’ And alumni remembered their friends, shared laughs, and kind teachers when they gathered in Marfa on Saturday, at the start of Hispanic Heritage Month, to celebrate the Blackwell School becoming the newest national park.