Every Texan Should Know What Happened at Edgewood

Mexicans don’t need to go to school.

That’s what Manuel Garza, Edgewood Class of 1969, remembers a boss telling him before his freshman year of high school. As we sat together in the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center Latino Bookstore, in the heart of the historic Westside, he recounted how he was fired from a market after he asked his boss for a day off to register for class.

Now in his seventies, Garza turns every conversation into a lesson. And after we realized he worked alongside both my aunt and her ex-husband in the Westside during the 1970s and 80s, he seems more like a primo or a tío, taking every opportunity to make sure I know the stories and struggles our families went through.

You don’t have what it takes to go to college.

That’s what Mario Compean, Edgewood Class of 1960, says his high school counselor told him. Compean was someone I learned about in my college courses and at family gatherings. He was one of the five St. Mary’s students who started the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), a student group dedicated to advocating for economic independence, local control of education, and political representation. He was also the signed witness on my aunt’s marriage certificate.

Compean is now in his 80s. He needed me to pick him up for our interview. I turned the music off in the car so I could hear his quiet voice. I kept pinching myself, barely able to believe I was sitting next to one of the stalwarts of the Chicano Movement, the Mexican American community’s expression of the Civil Rights Movement.

His gentle nature contrasted with what I expected from someone who once ran for governor of Texas. Yet his voice shook with emotion as he recounted the harsh words he remembered from his youth.

As I conducted more interviews with former students, school board members, and scholars, I heard them share similar stories. They all pointed to a belief many people held at the time: education was only meant for some children.

At Edgewood in 1968, that belief was reflected by the school itself.

The books were old and tattered. The air conditioning was nonexistent. The building was crumbling in places. Many of the teachers were not certified. Instead of the college prep courses offered at other schools in San Antonio, the students took vocational classes. Few dared to speak in Spanish, the predominant language in many of their homes.

“They would turn in your name if they heard you speaking Spanish, and then you’d be called to the office,” says Diana Herrera, Edgewood Class of 1968. “My mom refused to teach her four children Spanish because she had suffered in elementary school.” A dirty language, says Herrera—that’s what these students were told about the words their parents taught them.

Herrera’s account was not new to me. That was the same story my mom told me when I asked why we were some of the only cousins who didn’t speak Spanish. “Your grandma made a choice she thought would protect us,” my mom told me.

For these students in the 1960s, the Westside was their whole world. But thanks to a program called Upward Bound, a group of twenty-two students started leaving Edgewood and visiting schools in white, wealthy parts of town. Suddenly, their world of crumbling buildings and vocational courses seemed to cave in on itself.

“I met a lot of students from different schools, and in talking, we realized that the [college prep] classes they were taking … weren’t offered at our school. And that was an eye opener,” says Herlinda Sifuentes, Edgewood class of 1968.

Why did they have to share deteriorating, decades-old textbooks when Brackenridge High School had new copies for each student? Why did Alamo Heights High School have college prep courses and certified teachers? Why did schools in those neighborhoods have better teachers, better school buildings, and better classes? And why was no one doing anything about it?

The Edgewood students decided to take matters into their own hands.

“My junior year, the student council went through the homerooms, and each homeroom wrote down the things that we felt needed to be taken care of. And we produced a document that’s a good inch thick,” Garza says. The list included requests for accredited teachers, advanced courses, and better maintenance and cleaning of the school building.

“We started meeting after school at the different houses of the different student council officers,” says Rosendo Gutierrez, the senior class president in 1968. “There were about 13 of us at that time, and we started drawing up a plan to figure out how we were going to accomplish change.”

The students weren’t alone. They were joined every step of the way by parents, priests, and college students from MAYO. The whole community was ready to change the narrative about who deserved an education.

Finally, on May 16, 1968, when the first morning bell rang, a new story began. Students piled out of the doors and climbed out of the windows. Teachers tried to block kids from leaving their rooms—Gutierrez says he was locked inside a closet by his teacher. The ones that made it out were met by MAYO students who handed them signs holding phrases like “Our education in your hands, teach us!” and “College, not Vietnam.”

As they made the march down Old Highway 90 to the superintendent’s office, the air rang with the sound of their singing.

In his interview for our documentary, Garza breaks into song as he recounts the story: “Amen, amen, amen, amen, amen! All the way down we sang that hymn together.”

Each amen was a prayer and a declaration: We have worth. We have potential. We will not be ignored.

Five years after the walkout in 1973, the Edgewood parents continued what their kids started and brought the issue of school funding to the Supreme Court. They lost. The Court ruled there is no constitutional right to an education.

Twenty-one years after the walkout in 1989, they tried again and finally won at the state level in a new ruling that instructed the Texas legislature to make funding more equal from one district to another.

It was a step forward. But it did not bring complete repair.

Today, Texas is the eighth largest economy in the world, yet it ranks 46th in educational spending per student in the U.S. Students continue to experience different educational opportunities and outcomes based on which neighborhood they live in.

I thought I would walk away from these interviews for the documentary energized and inspired. But after the first week of filming, I found myself on the hardwood floor of my living room. Tears streamed from my eyes, and my three cats stared at me with a mix of wonder and annoyance.

The story of Manuel, Diana, Richard, Rosendo, Mario, Herlinda and so many other community members was my story, too.

It’s the story of why my grandmother didn’t teach my mother Spanish. It’s the story of my high school counselor telling me I was top of my class but also commenting, “I didn’t know you were that smart.” It’s the story of my friends wondering if I deserved my college acceptances or if they were just affirmative action.

Edgewood is the story of every student and child who has been told they are not good enough or smart enough because of who they are or who their family is. It’s the story of our collective struggle to invest in education and every student’s future.

But stories can change when we commit to seeing and knowing our neighbors.

Each amen was a prayer and a declaration:
We have worth. We have potential.
We will not be ignored.