The Ranch Schools of Starr County

Roma Remembers the Schools No One Remembers Anymore

On a rainy Saturday morning in Roma, Texas, a dozen guests crowded together at the Roma Birding Center and became students again.

Dora Perez Villarreal hosted "School Years Out in the Ranch," a traveling exhibition covering sixty years of Starr County educational history that exists in no archive, no curriculum, and no official record. Sponsored by the City of Roma, the event drew residents into a conversation about ranch school life between 1897 and 1957, a stretch of time that shaped generations of families along the river and left almost no paper trail behind.

Villarreal is a self-taught historian from Guerra, Texas, a ranching community in Jim Hogg County, and a former student of the era she documents. She founded a museum in Guerra before taking her work on the road, building her traveling exhibition "Walking the Footprints of Our Ancestors" from personal memory and collected testimony. "School Years Out in the Ranch" is the latest chapter in that ongoing project, focused specifically on the ranch school system that educated children across Starr County before consolidation erased it entirely.

After the Pledge of Allegiance, an excerpt from Jovita González's 1930 master's thesis, "Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties," was read aloud as Villarreal's introduction. González wrote that thesis documenting the same communities Villarreal grew up in and now intimately recounts.

Ranch schools operated before school buses, before any of the infrastructure defining public education today. Children learned in buildings that no longer stand, taught by teachers whose names appear in dwindling pages that cannot hold up against time. Students faced hardships just getting to school, crossing arroyos on foot before the first bell ever rang. Once they arrived, each student had an assigned glass with their name on it. A hard boiled egg and a refreshing glass of water was their snack.

That kind of history is something most students today do not understand, but there were those in attendance who are especially fond of it.

Francisco Guajardo, CEO of the Museum of South Texas History in Edinburg, attended and situated Villarreal's work within a longer tradition of regional preservation. He pointed to Florence J. Scott, who published a regional history in 1937 that, in his words, "to this day continues to carry a lot of weight." He cited Carlos Castañeda, a historian from Camargo, Tamaulipas, who "spent 50 years collecting the history of the Catholic Church" before producing a multi-volume treatment of the region, earning a library named in his honor at the University of Texas at Austin.

"Jovita Gonzalez was from Starr County," Guajardo said. "Jovita Gonzalez would become a very important... renowned folklorist, a worldwide folklorist."

González was born in 1904 on her grandparents' ranch in Roma. She became the first Mexican American to serve as president of the Texas Folklore Society, conducting fieldwork across Cameron, Starr, and Zapata counties. Her 1930 master's thesis at the University of Texas, "Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties," documented the border communities she grew up in at a time those communities were not considered serious academic subject matter by the institutions she was navigating.

González also co-wrote a novel during the 1930s and 1940s, one publishers rejected and the world would not read for decades. Caballero: A Historical Novel, sometimes called Texas's Gone with the Wind, was coauthored with Anglo writer Margaret Eimer, who wrote under the pseudonym Eve Raleigh. Set near Matamoros at the time of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the novel follows Don Santiago Mendoza y Soría, a Spanish-descended landowner whose family is undone by the U.S. military occupation and the arrival of English-speaking Americans into territory his ancestors had held for generations. Submitted to MacMillan, Houghton-Mifflin, and Bobbs-Merrill, the manuscript was unanimously rejected. Both authors eventually abandoned the project and parted ways. The manuscript surfaced among González's papers after her death in 1983, and Texas A&M University Press published it in 1996. Scholars now recognize it as a landmark of Mexican-American literature for its engagement with the ethnic, gender, and class conflicts defining Texas history.

Guajardo drew a direct line from González to Villarreal. "Roma and Starr County are really kind of like the harbingers of what happens in storytelling in the state and in the nation," he said. "People look for places where the good, grounded, and the narrative. This is one of those places."

He was pointed about what disappears when history goes unattended. "It saddens me, to be sure, to see so many old buildings that are abandoned," Guajardo said of Roma. "The borderland is America. And if we let it go, we're letting go part of the soul of America."

Villarreal, he argued, is doing the work preventing exactly that. "What Dora is doing is a very organic preservationist and researcher," he said, "and I think it's very, very important."

The kids who crossed arroyos on foot to sit in a classroom were given a glass of water and sometimes a boiled egg to get through the day. Villarreal closed the event the same way ranch school teachers once closed out a hard day. She fed everybody. Her guests enjoyed a sack lunch, a boiled egg, and memories that have nothing to do with food.

@Santitos

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