I have heard “old men die, and young men forget.” In the pursuit of preserving cultures and heritage, it is often the intangible elements such as memories, traditions and skills that receive the least attention and are forgotten. The challenge is how does one keep these elements alive for our children?
Enter Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos, which opened their doors on Sept. 18, 2010. With the mission of serving as a community beacon for the “preservation, development, promotion and celebration of the Hispanic arts, culture, heritage and values.”
Among the need for preservation is the story of thousands of locals who made the trek to west Texas to perform the backbreaking tasks of stoop labor; the economy of west Texas was carried on their backs. Death by death, the cultural and heritage of the area migrant workers from the San Marcos-Martindale-Maxwell-Reedville-Staples-Fentress Corridor who followed the harvest of cotton across Texas is being lost. For example, if a person were born in 1950, they would be 70 years old now in 2020; and when harvest by hand was replaced by mechanical harvesting around 1960, they would have been ten years old.
