Retired Mercedes school district administrator Sylvia Flores calls it “a widening” of knowledge when a younger generation learns about those who came before them. 

“Every generation has been different,” said Flores, who recently turned 90. “It’s important for the younger ones to know that their ancestors had to go through a lot of problems to pave the way for them like those that came before us.”

Flores was among those who recently gathered at the Dr. Hector P. Garcia Memorial Library in Mercedes to collect what a University of Houston professor called a “History Harvest.” The professor, Dr. Carlos Cantu, hopes to replicate these efforts in other Rio Grande Valley cities. 

Cantu is a Mission native who currently teaches and conducts research at UH’s downtown campus. He is adept at collecting oral histories based on the accounts given by local residents via informative interviews. He has done so in Houston, using a grant to purchase the equipment needed for the interviews and combining it with his historical acumen and interests to get the stories recorded.

These are the stories of everyday people whose accounts are often overlooked but whose knowledge of their communities is deep-seeded and thorough, Cantu said.

“They’re the kind of stories you would hear in a diner or a restaurant or in someone’s living room,” Cantu said. “By collecting these types of stories and putting them online and in an archive for everyone to see, we can fill in some of those gaps that haven’t been included in textbooks, lectures and libraries.”

Hometown Stories 

Flores has plenty of stories to tell.

She grew up in the Mercedes of the 1950s. Flores says school desegregation efforts were in their beginning phases. Flores recalled that in the seventh grade Hispanic and Anglo children were put together for the first time in physical education classes and she wondered, “where did all of these people come from?”

Flores recalled it as an era where “if you got trouble at school, you got in trouble at home,” when parents were notified of a problem and saw to it that corrective actions were taken. She went on to graduate from Mercedes High School in the mid-1950s and set off to a career in education which would include serving as an assistant principal and principal at local schools.

The Mercedes of today, Flores says, is growing but is still a town where “if you know someone you know everyone.” The connection to the community is such that her daughter will say, “mother, I don’t want a history, just tell me if you know them.”

Professor Cantu and local library director Marisol Vidales conversely want all that Flores is willing to share. Vidales says local historical accounts are crucial to learning where a community is coming from as it grows and moves forward. 

“We’re losing history,” Vidales said. “We have so much history and knowledge from people in our community and we never capture it.”

Creating Content 

The work of gathering oral histories is done over time with the recent kickoff at the Mercedes library intended to be a starting point.

Eventually, as he has done in Houston, Cantu hopes to create digital archives of the oral histories and make them available at no charge on the city’s and/or library’s website and other regional platforms. He says college students and researchers who study borderland history utilize oral history archives to learn about people and their accounts of living in the Valley of previous decades.

“What we’re doing today is creating content and a primary source with these stories that scholars can use and that researchers and advocates can seek when collecting information,” Cantu said. “This is learning about history from the people who have lived here.”

Gabriel Ozuna, the chairman of the Hidalgo County Historical Commission, was in Mercedes to assist in the gathering and facilitation of the oral histories that were recorded. He says the oral histories “fill in the gaps.”

“You’re piercing together histories that aren’t found anywhere else,” Ozuna said. “It’s hard to tell the story of a community in a few books.”

Cantu is collecting the oral histories at no charge to the city of Mercedes and says it’s his way of giving back to the region where he grew up – and he hopes to do more.

“I would love to do these sorts of histories throughout the Valley,” he said. “All cities have their own histories, when the railroads came to their towns, the vision of cities and what they looked like and how people lived.”