Growing Up Mexican in Houston: Felix Fraga Remembers the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s
Felix Fraga was born in Houston in 1929. When he looked back on his childhood decades later, he remembered a city divided by lines that Mexican children understood even when nobody had to explain them.
Mexican families were concentrated in a few parts of Houston. Felix remembered Second Ward, Fifth Ward and the Northside, and First and Sixth Wards near Washington as the principal Mexican communities. Your friends lived there, the girls you met lived there, and very often the person you married came from that same small Mexican world.
Some lines were almost literal. Near Navigation, Felix remembered one side of a street as Mexican and the other as Anglo. Mexican families simply did not live on the other side.
The schools reflected the same separation. Mexican children in his neighborhood attended Rusk Elementary. Later, many went to Marshall Junior High and Davis High School, even though Jackson and Austin were closer. Felix remembered the closer schools as being in a more Anglo neighborhood and “not as inviting” to Mexican youngsters.
One childhood memory says more about that Houston than almost any statistic could.
Felix’s older brother Frank once brought home a photograph of himself standing beside an Anglo boy who was his friend. Felix remembered staring at it. It was the first time he could remember seeing a Mexican boy and an Anglo boy together as friends.
The Fraga boys also worked.
They shined shoes outside Our Lady of Guadalupe Church when people came out on Sundays, and they sold newspapers downtown. On Congress Street, Felix remembered four or five blocks that amounted to a little Mexican downtown, with a Spanish-language movie theater, a drugstore and a newspaper.
Movies were part of childhood. The boys went almost every Sunday, no matter what was playing.
On December 7, 1941, Felix was sitting in a theater when the movie stopped. An announcement told the audience that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.
Then the movie resumed.
Felix stayed and watched the rest of it. When he got home, the radio was still talking about the attack.
Soon the war entered the Fraga household. Joe served with an Air Force ground crew in Italy. Frank joined the Navy while still a teenager and entered the submarine service.
But before the war there had been the Depression, and poverty was part of childhood.
Rusk Settlement House offered recreation, sports, preschool, and free movies. Felix remembered watching Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges there, sometimes in old silent films where children had to read the words at the bottom of the screen.
Rusk also fed children.
Felix said some of the first real meals he remembered eating were the noon meals served there.
By the time Felix finished ninth grade, he expected his schooling to end. His older brothers had left school, and in a poor household another working son mattered more than another diploma.
Workers at Rusk heard Felix talking about quitting school. They made him an offer: they would give him a job if he stayed in school.
Felix accepted.
When he finished high school, the people at Rusk went further. They told him they could help him attend the University of Houston and continue working. His mother had expected her son to go to work full time, so people from the settlement house came to the family home to discuss college with her.
Felix graduated from the University of Houston in 1952.
By the early 1950s, the Houston he had known as a child was beginning to change. Mexican families were moving into neighborhoods that had once been German or Anglo. Felix remembered some becoming the first Mexican families on their blocks.
His own life was changing with the city. He went into social work and returned to the neighborhood-center system that had helped keep him in school. The Mexican boy who had once gone to a settlement house for a meal was now helping other families through those same institutions.
Years later, Houston Community College built an academic campus bearing his name in the East End.
Its location carried meaning. The Felix Fraga Academic Campus was placed only a couple of blocks from the neighborhood center where Felix had spent so much of his life working with the people of the East End.
It made a remarkable circle.
Felix Fraga had grown up in a Houston where a Mexican boy knew which neighborhoods he could live in, which schools welcomed him, and even which buildings he could enter.
He lived long enough to see a college built in that same neighborhood with his name on the front.
