Hispanics describe campus environment decades ago

Hispanics describe campus environment decades ago

BY CECILIA BALLI
Special to the Rice News

Through an ambitious
student-history project, members of the Hispanic Association
for Cultural Enrichment at Rice (HACER) have launched a
long-term campaign to recover the story of their predecessors
here.

Leaders of HACER
say the task is crucial for a university that produces some
of Houston’s top professionals but still needs to link
Hispanic alumni to current students.
The project also speaks tacitly to a history of what sometimes
has been a difficult adjustment to Rice for minority students.

Before a room
of some 70 Hispanic students, alumni and staff Oct. 19,
Alberto Roca, chair of HACER’s history committee, played
a tape recording of Primitivo Niño, a Mexican native
who migrated to one of Houston’s predominantly Hispanic
neighborhoods in the 1920s and graduated from Rice in 1928.

Niño
was a member of Los Buhos, a Rice organization through which
students could practice their Spanish, but other than that
group, he had no cultural or ethnic-based support on campus.

“We just
kept to ourselves,” Niño said on the recording.
“We just attended our classes and came back [home].”

Flashing several
yearbook pictures on an overhead projector, Roca hinted
at a campus atmosphere that was not sensitive to ethnic
differences.

In a 1924 shot,
members of the architectural student group Archi-Arts Society
painted their faces brown for an Aztec-themed dance; in
another, a racial slur was used to describe a black athletic
trainer. The audience gasped when Roca showed a 1922 yearbook
picture of the university’s student Ku Klux Klan. Roca
also noted that the school’s original charter prohibited
blacks from attending.

But another
speaker attested that Hispanic students nonetheless were
successful. Recounting the experiences of the five women
in his life who attended Rice, 89-year-old Edmundo Gonzalez
proudly bragged about his wife, who he said was valedictorian
of the Laredo public high school she attended before entering
college.

Maria Ana Barreda
went on to receive her bachelor’s degree from Rice
in 1929 and then earned a master’s in math in 1931.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa honor society, she graduated
magna cum laude and tutored the university’s football
players, recounted her granddaughter Ana Gonzalez, a Rice
graduate herself.

Today, Rice has
almost 300 Hispanic undergraduates, or nearly 11 percent
of the student body, a dramatic improvement over Barreda’s
times.

HACER’s
history committee intends to survey Hispanic alumni, students
and staff about their experiences at Rice and also plans
to make tape recordings of early graduates to house in the
university’s library. A recording of Gonzalez already
is stored in the Woodson Research Center of Fondren Library.

“A lot
of this history and information is being lost as those students
are passing away,” said Roca, a staff adviser to the
organization and a postdoctoral fellow in the biochemistry
department.

HACER also hopes
to strengthen Hispanic alumni involvement at Rice and raise
funds for the group’s activities, which include events
such as a posada, or traditional Mexican Christmas celebration,
and a welcoming reception for incoming Hispanic freshmen
and their parents.

Group members
even hope to encourage student scholarship about the life
and history of Rice Hispanics.

Maricela Alarcon,
president of HACER, already has taken the initiative. A
sophomore from San Antonio, she is investigating the reasons
why, even today, some Hispanic students prefer to live off
campus.

Renamed in 1984,
HACER has about 40 active members. The group first was formed
as the Rice Association of Mexican-American Students in
1972 by Richard Tapia, a math professor and currently associate
director of minority affairs for the Office of Graduate
Students.

— Cecilia
Balli is a graduate student in the Dept. of Anthropology.