Published: October 31, 2009 05:44 pm      

Cementerio San Pedro: 100 years

Looking ahead while still healing from vandalism scars of the past

San Marcos — It’s been six years since the crime spree. Two young men, for reasons that remain unknown, spent hours desecrating more than 200 graves at two local Mexican American cemeteries located miles apart.

The crime shocked and saddened the community and, once the grave sites were cleaned up, necessitated the re-consecration of land at both the Guadalupe Cemetery on Post Road and Cementerio San Pedro at the corner of Old Bastrop Highway and Posey Road.

That physical and emotional damage has mainly faded to memory now, but the work of families to clean-up and decorate the grave sites of their loved ones goes on.

Many families will be tending to that chore today or Monday, as part of Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) — but others will be returning next Saturday as well, for the 100th anniversary of Cementerio San Pedro.

The event is a function both of the cemetery’s mutual aid society and Dr. Ana Juarez of the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University. From 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 7, Juarez’ students will be on hand to take oral histories and view documents, photographs and other memorabilia that families provide.

When the cemetery was founded in 1909, segregation by “race, class and ethnicity” was widespread, Juarez said. To ensure that they would have a place to bury their loved ones, the cemetery’s founders formed a mutual aid society that helped people with burial expenses and, later, collected money from local Mexicans and Mexican Americans to buy two acres of land.

Juarez said the society elected Antonio Sanchez president; Pablo de la Rosa secretary, Alejandro Rodriguez treasurer and caretaker, Jose Guerrero vice president, Ramon Rivera substitute secretary, and Rosendo Arredondo collector.

The society’s by-laws list 47 men as founders of the cemetery. By 1915 the society had grown to ore than 300 members, and in 1933 they purchased an additional two acres.

“Based on the by-laws, the association wanted to preserve the right for persons of all means and all faiths to bury their loved ones,” Juarez said.

In the years after World War II, when ethnic and racial barriers had begun to break, the cemetery received little attention; however, it was “revitalized” in the 1960s. “Now, the San Pedro Cemetery Association is one of the few surviving mutual aid societies in Texas and the U.S.,” she said.

Association member Amelia Cruz’ parents, brother, sister and niece are all buried at San Pedro, along with other relatives.

The 2003 vandalism broke one of the family’s tombstones, Cruz recalled, but the family “sort of put it back together.” Now, she says, “We visit the cemetery very often and we’ve been up to date on all the situations the cemetery has suffered up to this time. Now we’re very happy that it’s been maintained thanks to the efforts of people who have been in charge.”

San Marcos native and lifelong resident Eva Rodriguez’ family was luckier. “Thank God,” she said, “it (the vandalism) stopped right around where my mother was. They didn’t touch it.” Rodriguez says she frequently visits her mother’s beautiful monument, always kept clean by her father before he too was laid to rest. It’s important, she said, to have “a clean cemetery where we can go back and remember them, remember what they meant to me.”

For more information, call Juarez at 245-8272 or visit http://www.txstate.edu/anthropology/centers/Cemetery/San-Pedro.html