ALFONSO LOPEZ SITS on the edge of his bed. His left arm rests on top of his crossed thin legs. He’s holding a copy of an old photograph of himself surrounded by teammates and friends.
“Wow,” he says. “I’ve never seen this.”
He has always been quiet and uncomfortable with attention. His 92-year-old voice isn’t as strong or as clear as it was when he cheered for those teammates from the dugout.
Sitting here, inside his corner bedroom on the first floor of an adult foster home about as far west in Texas as one can get before the El Paso land becomes New Mexico, he’s lost in thought. He holds the photograph delicately. Beneath wrinkled skin his hands are all bone, and a cobweb of veins.
“Where’d you get this?” he asks, staring at the 17-year-old version of himself.
“It’s from the 1950 Bowie High School yearbook,” I tell him. But he doesn’t hear me, or my words aren’t strong enough to pry him from his dance with memories.
“Wow,” he says again.
He lets out a soft laugh. He says he remembers details from long ago — like how he drove a 1951 Mercury and repainted it a light-colored green as its original dark blue began to fade — and sometimes he’ll repeat a story minutes after he has told it.
“This photo,” he says. “I’m going to frame it.”
The photograph is from June 1949, taken two days after he and his teammates won Texas’ first high school baseball state tournament. Nine of them, along with the coach, William Carson “Nemo” Herrera, are standing in the picture, and seven are kneeling. In their best clothes — most of them in button-down shirts tucked into dark-colored slacks — they’re posing in front of the bus that took them from El Paso’s Segundo Barrio to Austin and back. Just about all of them, even the always-serious Coach Nemo, are smiling. From that day forward, they would be called the Bowie 49ers.
Alfonso is there, a sophomore pitcher and outfielder, kneeling. So close to the trophy that if he reached out his left arm, he would be able to touch it. The photo is similar to a poster-sized one that rests against the wall at the foot of his bed, but that one is more formal. Everyone is wearing a baseball uniform. They’re all looking straight into the camera, and none of the Bowie 49ers are smiling.
“That was really something,” he says. “We got the first.”
He wonders what happened to the trophy. He wonders what has become of everyone else in the photograph. “Don’t ask me where they are because I don’t know,” he says.
I tell him he’s the last one. He looks up. Even if he has heard it before, the words seem to stop the music in his head.
“Really?” he asks. “Son of a gun. We were close.”
A few minutes later, he looks at the photograph again. He smiles and gives a soft laugh. “You will never see a championship like that,” he says.
He asks me, again, whether I know what has happened to the other boys in the picture.
IN EARLY JUNE 1949, on a baseball field that no longer exists, next to the Colorado River and across from downtown Austin, eight teams meet in the first Texas state high school baseball tournament. Lubbock and Denison, Stephenville and Waco, Marshall and Beaumont, Austin — the host and favorite — and traveling the furthest, 575 miles, Bowie High School from South El Paso. Each of them a regional champion, competing for three days in a single elimination tournament.
Baseball is still the national sport, just over 9% of homes have a television and “Riders in the Sky” is the most popular song. Harry S. Truman is president during these short years between World War II and the Korean War. Jackie Robinson is in the midst of an MVP season for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
From the westernmost part of Texas, Bowie’s baseball team rides a bus borrowed from a used car salesman. El Paso is so far from the rest of the state, its history is closer to the Mexican Revolution than to Texas’ own. The city’s Mexican school was named after James Bowie, the slave trader and landowner who died at the Alamo. When the school opened in 1922 as a grammar school, the local Ku Klux Klan chapter controlled El Paso’s school board.
Whenever the baseball team plays away from El Paso, the players carry their belongings inside paper bags. Along the way, they see restaurants with signs reading, “No Mexicans or Dogs Allowed.” At some games, fans of the opposing teams sing “South of the Border.” The team stays quiet.
Bowie wins its first game, beating Stephenville, and its second, against Waco. It plays small ball, getting on base through bunts, sacrifice flies, stealing bases or anything else it needs to get in scoring position. In the final, it surprises everyone and beats the Austin High School Maroons. With the final out, Austin’s pitcher cries. Until then, he has only lost twice during his high school career. The Bowie team celebrates near home plate. Someone jumps on Coach Nemo and the rest of the team follows.
La Bowie, as its players and students call it, has Texas’ best baseball team. The victory is so unexpected that Austin’s newspaper calls it David versus Goliath. “Axe falls on Maroons,” the headline reads. They also describe it as a sort of cross-border attack which, for some Mexicans and Mexican Americans, evokes dark memories of the past: “Amigo, the Bowie Bears have come and gone. And they have taken with them the state baseball championship.”
There is no ceremony after their win. Just a quiet baseball field with 2,700 stunned fans. The Bowie 49ers don’t get a handshake. They are handed the trophy and return to their bus, riding away as rocks bounce off it.
Years later, Coach Nemo’s son, Charles Herrera, worked at Austin High School as a student-teacher while attending the University of Texas. “You’d go down the hallway, and it was lined with trophy cases,” Herrera says. “They won everything and that’s what hurt them so bad.”
Coach Nemo passed away in 1984 in a San Antonio nursing home. He left his son a recording of the three phone calls he made to El Paso sportscaster John Phelan after each Bowie win in 1949, recounting the action.
Phelan asked Coach Nemo if they’d visited the Texas Capitol yet. “Yes sir, we visited the Capitol and the university campus here,” Coach said. “We’re staying at the stadium.” he added in passing.
“You can hear him; that’s his voice,” Herrera says of the recordings. At 88, he’s now four years older than his father was when he died. He has looked everywhere he can think of, but they’re the only trace he has found of his father’s voice. He once gave a copy of them to each of the Bowie 49ers.
IN 1949, BENEATH the bleachers of the University of Texas’ Memorial Stadium, there are two rows of green-colored Army cots. It’s early June, so Austin’s days and nights are so thick with humidity it feels like you’re breathing through a wet shirt.
The cots are lined up next to each other with several steps between them. Because no hotel in Austin will have them, they’re also where the Bowie team members will sleep for as long as they win. Out with the bats, mosquitos, snakes and other central Texas wildlife. Out where, if they need a bathroom, they have to use the field house. We’re staying at the stadium.
During road trips like these, when they go deeper into Texas, Coach Nemo warns his players of things they’ll hear. He was born in 1900, in Brownsville, also on the Texas-Mexico border, and he heard all the slurs. By the time he coached Bowie, he had lived through the anti-Mexican violence that occurred along the border from 1910 to 1920 known as La Matanza.
“Focus on the game,” Coach Nemo tells his team. “Don’t let what you hear get in your head.”
At the end of the two rows of cots, the team has split itself into two groups. They’re going to race and use the cots as hurdles. “Ready, set, go,” someone shouts.
They’re running. They’re laughing. They’re undaunted.
“When you’re young, you don’t give a s—,” Alfonso says, remembering the free food more than the cots and recalling the feel of that confidence they had together, that joy they felt no matter the odds or the conditions.
HE WAITS HIS turn to get on the bus. It’s a Monday morning in mid-September, and he’s headed to the dialysis clinic.
Around 2017, when it became clear he could no longer live alone, Alfonso developed a urinary tract infection. He didn’t complain of the burning sensation. He said nothing of the fever and chills that made him shake.
“He didn’t take care of himself after my aunt passed away,” Yvonne Zamora says of her uncle. Since his wife, Leonor, died in March 2012, Alfonso lived alone. Whatever emotions he dealt with after 55 years together, he also kept to himself.
Alfonso and Leonor met soon after he returned from living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had been there a couple of years because Andy Morales, another Bowie 49er, was playing football at the University of New Mexico and convinced him to use his GI Bill to enroll. That was after they both served in the Navy during the Korean War.
“I couldn’t stay away,” Alfonso explains of his return to El Paso.
He met Leonor at a dance. Everyone called her Leo. She was talkative and sentimental, hard of hearing, so she spoke with a loud voice. He was quiet and stoic. But they connected over their love of dancing and music. They got married in 1957 and soon after bought a house near the hospital and the mountains in El Paso.
The house was a couple of miles north of Segundo Barrio and the train tracks that had turned El Paso from a small Mexican town of 800 people in 1881 to a burgeoning city of more than 10,000 seven years later. That sort of thing can alter the identity of a place. Those train tracks cut across the city, parallel to the Texas-Mexico border. And back when Alfonso was a teenager, north of the tracks felt like a different world. It was whiter. It didn’t flood when it rained. The roads were paved. The schools weren’t overcrowded. In 1971, a lawsuit from South El Paso parents said the El Paso Independent School District had been running a segregated system since its founding two years after the train tracks came, noting that schools north of the tracks were in what was called the “American District.” The “Mexican District” were the schools south of those tracks. Parents also alleged the district gerrymandered attendance zones to maintain the segregation. In 1976, the U.S. District Court sided with the parents.
Alfonso and Leo never had children. His siblings and nieces and nephews checked in on him after she was gone. His youngest sister, Mary, found him as the urinary tract infection had begun to shut down his body. He was hospitalized and his kidneys never recovered.
For a while he lived with Mary. As years passed, she also needed the type of help she’d given him. So for about two years, Alfonso has lived in the adult foster home where every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning, he’s picked up for his 10 a.m. dialysis appointment.
“I don’t mind it because I have to do it,” he says. His arm has a bruise so purple it’s almost black where his surgically implanted valve gets hooked up to the machine that does what his kidneys can no longer do. Three hours at a time, three days a week, he feels time pass away. He sometimes reads the bible as he waits. Other times, he just sits.
El Paso’s triple digit heat has retreated for another year. The green grass, in the few places where it grows in the desert, has started to turn brown. Mornings are cool now, and Alfonso Lopez wears his blue and white Bowie High School windbreaker. It has his name in cursive on the left part of his chest and “Class of 1951” beneath it.
He takes small, careful steps up the bus. You can see a circular patch between his shoulders on the back of his windbreaker. It has the silhouette of a baseball player in the middle and around it the words: 1949 Texas State Champion.
INSIDE AN EL PASO restaurant where the walls were covered with images of the Mexican Revolution, the Bowie 49ers would sit, eat and talk. In the years and decades after winning their championship, they would gather there for breakfast every week or two.
After high school, just about every Bowie 49er served in the military during the Korean War. In the years after the local newspapers covered their historic win, the triumphant headlines were replaced by the somber sort; listing the names of El Pasoans who were missing or dead in Korea. And because a disproportionate number of Mexican Americans died in the Korean War — just as they had in World War II before it and in the Vietnam War after — in El Paso, many of them had attended Bowie High School.
The Bowie 49ers returned from Korea a little quieter. Some parts of them just never made it back. When they gathered for breakfast, they shared war stories they couldn’t tell others. They talked about the children they were raising and later, the grandchildren who grew up way too fast. And since no other high school in the county would win a baseball state title for 60 years, they talked about what they did back in 1949.
They’d talk about the impact Coach Nemo had on their lives. They laughed remembering leaving for Austin, and the home economics teacher and students sending them with a bag full of hard-boiled eggs so they’d have something to eat on their long bus ride. They’d joke how they won because they had huevos.
They weren’t the type to complain but you could hear subtle regrets. They never got a chance to defend their title because another high school opened two miles east of Bowie and took some of their best players. Teammates left, started lives elsewhere, and the distance between visits grew. As some of those teammates died — some unexpectedly, some of natural causes — they realized decades had passed.
They could feel their accomplishment slowly being forgotten. The memory of their championship dying with them.
“They were these little kids that came back with the Texas state trophy and life went on,” Terri Morales-Valenzuela says. Her father, Andy Morales, often organized those breakfasts. He told her once that he thought the championship trophy was placed in a box and put away.
Before the end of each breakfast, the Bowie 49ers would throw a couple of dollars in a pile for whoever needed help. Then a week or two later, they’d return and do it again. Any time they wanted, their room was reserved inside that restaurant between the highway and airport. But somewhere along the way the breakfasts stopped. The restaurant closed years ago.
“I had breakfast with them for about two months,” Reyes Mata III says. He’s a journalist, and back then, he was the president of Del Pueblo Press. Born and raised in El Paso, he was surprised how little he knew about them. This was around 2009, and only 10 Bowie 49ers remained then.
“I was just sitting with them, talking with them, learning their stories,” Mata recalls. “One of the things they mentioned was that there had never really been a big commemoration for what they had done.”
IT’S AN EARLY Friday afternoon in 1949, and the Bowie 49ers’ bus has just arrived back in El Paso. The night before, the newly crowned baseball state champions stopped to eat and sleep a couple of hours away in Van Horn. The restaurant wouldn’t let them inside, so they ate on the bus.
This afternoon, they have a police escort. And each side of their bus has a banner that reads: Bowie High School State Champions.
It’s a modest parade with a few hundred people. The mayor isn’t there, though the players thought he would be. He sends his alderman. Bowie students hand them flowers. A few school officials shake their hands and congratulate them. The team gathers and poses for a photograph where just about all of them are smiling. The photograph will be included in the 1950 Bowie High School yearbook. It’ll also run in the newspaper, though one player’s last name is spelled wrong.
From the crowd, a man walks up to Coach Nemo. He looks important, like a city official. He hands the coach a small box. When the football coach at the high school north of the train tracks won a district title, he got a car as a celebratory gift.
Surrounded by his players, Coach Nemo opens the box. Each summer he takes his family with him as he makes extra money working as an umpire in the Mexican baseball leagues, so he’s gotten his hopes up thinking this year they’ll do it in a new car.
“A token of appreciation for the team’s victory,” the man says to him. Coach looks inside the box. He laughs, shakes his head and walks away.
The box held only a neatly folded shirt.
ON A BUSY Sunday morning, not far from an elementary school named after his old coach, Alfonso sits in a Mexican restaurant. His nephew, Manny De Avila, sits across the table, eating pozole while Alfonso eats a menudo too spicy for his taste.
As the children of the Bowie 49ers grew up, they heard stories of the team. Those stories would later be told to nieces and nephews, grandchildren and great grandchildren. But Manny didn’t grow up hearing those stories.
“All I knew was Bowie won that state championship in 1949, and he was part of it,” Manny says of his uncle. “But he just wouldn’t talk much about it.”
Alfonso talked so infrequently about it that when Sports Illustrated wrote about the team in 2011, he didn’t participate much. Apart from a caption, he isn’t even mentioned. He’s not even in the photograph where what was left of the Bowie 49ers posed inside a dugout.
But as he got older, that changed. And as Manny, 54, got older too, he’d ask not so much about the game but the world in which they won. Like how most of the players lived in the Segundo Barrio where Alfonso would sometimes bathe in the Franklin Canal. Some players lived in tenements where they shared a bathroom with everyone there. And once inside Bowie High School, they’d get in trouble for speaking Spanish.
“That’s the way it was,” he remembers.
The Bowie 49ers were in the middle of what historian Mario T. Garcia calls the Mexican American generation. From the 1930s to 1950s, they were the children of those who migrated from Mexico. They grew up feeling the effects of the Great Depression, including the deportation of up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans. That generation fought in wars. All of it molded an ethnic identity that recognized, while their parents may have once wanted to return to Mexico, for them the U.S. was home. To stay meant to assimilate. And many thought that would be easier if they emphasized their citizenship and spoke only English. Apart from that, the Bowie 49ers grew up in Texas’ segregated school system. In a twisted bit of circumstance, at the end of World War II when Nazi scientists worked on the V-2 rocket program at Fort Bliss in El Paso, their children attended the white schools and got a better public education than most Mexican Americans there. That’s the world Manny is most curious about.
“What would Grandma Chole and grandpa say when you’d go?” Manny asks of those games away from El Paso. For most of the team, it was the first time away from the county. Away in a part of the world where they felt the limits of assimilation.
“Just go, vete,” Alfonso answers in his usual mix of English and the Spanish he never lost. “They didn’t care too much about sports. The old man never played. He wasn’t the type.”
“Back then it was just work, no?” Manny asks.
“Work, work, work,” Alfonso says of his father, Eutimio, who was from Parral, Mexico. “Then he’d come home, sit in the backyard, smoke and drink.”
Talking of the past helps his mind. It’s a form of therapy that slows the fading thoughts. And since he’s now the last Bowie 49er and with renewed attention on the team and on him, his family is thankful he is alive to see how important they were.
“We got another function in late October,” Manny tells him. “The Bowie Hall of Fame is going to honor you guys.”
“Wow, another free meal,” Alfonso says with his typical dry humor.
“It’ll be fun,” Manny says. “It’s important for people to remember what happened.” As a teacher and former coach, Manny knows El Paso’s young students and athletes need examples of what’s possible, and the Bowie 49ers are proof.
“What about my teammates?” his uncle asks. Manny responds the same way he has since August 2018 when Ruben Rodriguez died and left Alfonso as the last Bowie 49er. No matter how many times Manny tells him, it still hurts to hear it.
Quietly, in the middle of a restaurant during its Sunday breakfast rush, he reaches across the table for a napkin. He looks toward the ground and wipes tears from his eyes.
THE OLD BOWIE High School doesn’t exist in the same way it once did. The place which Alfonso and his teammates attended is still there but it’s now Guillen Middle School. It’s named after Ambrosio Guillen, a former student who was among the last casualties of the Korean War. The school is between a couple of city blocks of warehouses and the U.S.-Mexico border. You must drive deep into Segundo Barrio to see it.
The current Bowie High School is impossible to miss. Not if you’re crossing the Cordova International Bridge connecting El Paso and Juárez. Not if you’re on Paisano Drive, which was once the demarcating line where south of it, the majority of Mexican and Mexican Americans in El Paso lived. Not if you know the land on which it was built had been disputed territory between the U.S. and Mexico for over a century.
When the new Bowie High School opened in 1973, a small, simple plaque commemorating the team was placed near the entrance. It has their names in alphabetical order and the year they won.
“I saw it the first time when I was a sophomore,” Rudy Reyes says of the plaque. He’s 65 years old, grew up in Segundo Barrio and graduated from Bowie High School in 1978. “I said, ‘Wow, man, that’s a long time ago. That’s great.'”
The plaque left an impression because he always loved history. Ever since his grandmother told him she and his grandfather came to El Paso from Zacatecas, Mexico, because of the Mexican Revolution. She had been a nurse, and he was a soldier in Pancho Villa’s army. When his would-be grandfather heard a group of men wanted to kill him, they fled across the border and settled in Segundo Barrio.
For over 30 years, the memory of the plaque lingered somewhere in Reyes’ mind. “I forgot about it,” he says. When another baseball team from El Paso County — Socorro High School — won a Texas state championship in 2009, he suddenly remembered.
Reyes is a photojournalist for the local Fox television affiliate. He’s been there since 1997. In 2009, when he’d hear colleagues say Socorro High School was El Paso’s first baseball state champion, he’d correct them. “No,” he’d say. “Bowie did it in 1949; they were the first.”
Reyes and a reporter interviewed the remaining Bowie 49ers. They recorded a television segment of their breakfast meetings. By coincidence, it was around the time Reyes Mata III had joined them for breakfast and left feeling like every El Pasoan should know their story. He also wanted to commemorate the team for winning the state championship, even if 60 years had passed and several of the players were gone.
“I wanted to give them the recognition that had long been denied to them because they were a group of Mexican American boys,” Mata says.
He helped organize an event at Bowie High School. Mata also helped raise $20,000 to cover costs and get the remaining Bowie 49ers a championship ring they’d never gotten. State officials attended the ceremony and recognized Bowie High School as Texas’ first baseball state champions.
“We’ve been waiting 60 years for this,” Tony Lara, the first baseman, told the local newspaper. He called the event bittersweet because it brought back good and bad memories. “I try to ignore the bad,” he explained. Among the bad was a story he’d tell of how his teammate Fernie Gomez once got so angry with fans calling him a “dirty Mexican,” he grabbed scissors from the first aid kit and yelled for them to say it to his face.
Lara passed away in January 2014, a week after another Bowie 49er, Gus Sambrano, died. Guillermo Gomez said what the five remaining teammates could intimately feel: “We are disappearing.”
Reyes covered the 2009 ceremony as a journalist and as a Bowie alum. His grandmother raised him to be proud of who he was and where he came from. And that night, as he watched each of the surviving Bowie 49ers, now in their late 70s, stand in front of a packed auditorium — some with tears in their eyes — get their recognition and championship rings, he felt it.
“I was full of pride,” Reyes remembers. “I was in awe, not only because of the history but that they were still the guys from Segundo Barrio.
“I could see myself in them.”
ON A SPRING afternoon, Bobby Mares stands in the dugout like he’s done since he was 4 years old. The only difference was back then he was a player, and now he’s a coach. He’s there as he was 15 years before, as Socorro High School’s star pitcher, he stood listening to the Bowie 49ers tell them of what’s possible.
“It’s a little lonely up top, we’d like to see somebody else win,” Andy Morales would tell the team. Since Morales coached Socorro’s coach, Chris Forbes, at El Paso’s Austin High School, the old baseball players came around. Their presence increased as Socorro advanced further into the 2009 state playoffs. When they won it all, some of the Bowie 49ers were even at the game.
In some ways, that win gave the Bowie 49ers a second life. At the Bowie High School ceremony, the 2009 Socorro team was not only in attendance, but they’re the ones who presented the Bowie 49ers with the championship rings.
Mares doesn’t want to be the guy who talks of high school glory days, so he rarely mentions them. He gave his championship ring to his mom. His older brother, Arturo, is the one who brags. He’s the head coach of a team of 12-year-olds, and Mares is his assistant. Older brother is the one who tells them of what his little brother once did. Mares is the one who tells the team, which includes his nephew, to enjoy the game.
“There’s going to be a day where you won’t have this,” Mares tells them. “You think you’re going to be friends forever, and then life happens.” He hasn’t seen some of his teammates in years.
“You won’t remember some game on a Tuesday night,” Mares continues, “but you’ll remember the moments you had with teammates and friends.”
Standing in the dugout, talking, a lineage of baseball history moves through him. From Coach Nemo to Andy Morales, then to Chris Forbes and coach Mares. Onward to one of his young players and whatever comes tomorrow.
THERE’S A BOX Manny keeps in a lockbox inside the closet of his bedroom. It’s so small it fits in his palm. It was once jet black, but its color has faded to a dark gray. It helps protect his uncle’s championship ring.
There are no gemstones or diamonds on the ring. Just a baseball engraved on its head with “Bowie Texas State Baseball 1949 Champions” circling it. The ring’s left panel has the Bowie Bear mascot beneath the school’s name. The right panel has “Coach Nemo Herrera” etched above “Team of Destiny” and above them both it simply says “Lopez.” And inside the ring’s band there’s a small inscription that reads: Special thanks Del Pueblo Press.
Soon after this new school year began, and you could see the days getting shorter, one of Manny’s twin daughters took the ring to her high school. A sophomore class project asked students to present a cultural token that meant something special to them.
She showed the ring to her classmates and teacher. She told them about where it came from, her great uncle, and the team he once played for.
If Manny didn’t grow up hearing stories from his uncle, and most of what he’s discovered about him has come as an adult, whatever he’s learned gets passed on to his children, nieces and nephews. He wants them all to know more about the old man they all call Uncle Holo though no one knows where the nickname came from. The old man who they all see walking slowly and sitting quietly at every family gathering.
Because it’s easier to be indirect about certain things, Manny says he’s just taking care of the ring. He’s holding it so it doesn’t get misplaced. But perhaps because living so long changes one’s relationship with the inevitable, Alfonso is unflinching in his honesty.
“You can keep it,” he told Manny when he handed him the box. “I’m going to die, you’re going to keep it longer than me.”
DAVID DORADO ROMO says the ghosts of history roam around Bowie High School and the Segundo Barrio. They’re in the stories passed on from one generation to the next. They’re in the murals of those who once lived there. They’re in the shadows cast from the border wall that falls over them.
“You can feel something pouring out the ground,” Romo, the preeminent El Paso historian, says. “It’s a steam, a vapor, a spirit. Bowie and the Segundo Barrio has a resonance that people can sense. But unless you dig very carefully, you don’t know exactly what you’re sensing.”
His grandparents lived in the Segundo Barrio. As a child he grew up hearing family stories of how they too had fled the Mexican Revolution. Of how they were among the countless Mexicans deloused at the border with toxic chemicals like Zyklon B because the era’s eugenics movement said they were dirty and carried disease. As an adult, he returned to Segundo Barrio to teach chess at Guillen Middle School. Then later, he led walking tours around the South El Paso areas, passing on the history he learned during his years when he dug carefully through decades-old newspapers and archives.
“Teresita Urrea lived here,” he’d say, pointing at an old, unassuming building. She was a folk saint and faith healer who the Mexican government exiled because, years before the 1910 revolution, she inspired an uprising.
“This is where Pancho Villa stayed,” he’d say, pointing to a general area because Roma Hotel doesn’t exist anymore. It got demolished for a fast-food restaurant and its parking lot.
“This is where Mariano Azuela wrote ‘Los de Abajo,'” he’d say about the 1910 building still there. In the novel — “The Underdogs” — a peasant revolutionary and his rebels are hunted by the government. When the end comes and it’s just him, alone, he keeps fighting because of pride.
Romo sees Segundo Barrio and Bowie High School as a microcosm of El Paso’s history. It’s the countless Mexican migrants who passed through there, making it the Ellis Island of the Southwest. It’s the school walkouts demanding dignity when, among other things, students said white teachers belittled their Mexican parents. It’s the highway running in front of the school that destroyed parts of the community when it was constructed. It’s the people from there who died in wars, often serving in segregated units. It’s the lawsuit filed against the Border Patrol, alleging agents would come to Bowie High School and physically, verbally and sexually harass students, teachers and staff while asking for proof of citizenship. (In 1992, a federal judge sided with Bowie High School.) More recently, it’s the gentrification. And because it’s where the Bowie 49ers lived and played, they’re part of those spirits that pour from the ground.
“It’s just a sports story, yes, but it’s a sports story of a particular place and in a particular historical context,” Romo says of the Bowie 49ers. “For a team from the Segundo Barrio to win a championship, not only defied the racist expectations of what they thought working class Mexican kids were capable of doing, but it’s something more symbolic,” Romo continues. “Because no matter how much the school system tried to down and segregate and silence who these kids were-even when they internalized the racism, even when, to some point, they accepted the indoctrination-they still carried who they are with them.”
Romo, who despite growing up hearing stories of Segundo Barrio, hadn’t known about its championship team until he was an adult, says the Bowie 49ers also symbolize what it meant to be barrio kids in El Paso, in Texas, and in the United States.
They were, as he explains, “what it meant to be Mexican American with all its contradictions.”
THERE’S A GROUP of fans standing past the outfield’s chain-link fence. It’s 1949 again, before the state title, this time in Odessa, where when the wind blows a certain way, the smell of oil’s boom or bust is in the air.
Even from inside the baseball field, it’s obvious the group is there to watch Bowie play. And more than anyone else, the team knows it. It sees and hears the fans clap and cheer whenever they get a hit, score a run, or get an out. They recognize them even if they’ve never seen them. They know them, if by nothing else than by that familiar voice. Either the Spanish they couldn’t talk in certain places, or that accented tongue forced to speak English.
Standing past the outfield is a group of Mexican fans, five years before Brown v. Board of Education desegregated public schools in the United States. A ruling that didn’t mean changes were immediate because some places just ignored the Supreme Court’s decision. In Texas, the attorney general called the ruling unconstitutional and warned of violence if desegregation happened faster than by “gradual adjustment.”
In Odessa, the so-called adjustment would last until 1982, when the U.S. District Court forced the closing of Ector High School, with its majority Black and brown students getting bussed elsewhere.
Between innings, members of the Bowie baseball team walk toward the outfield fence. Coach Nemo would sometimes tell players they were there to play a game, not fight discrimination. As the only coach to win Texas state titles in two different sports, at two different schools, whatever level of acceptance he gained had come through sports. Even if somewhere in that, back when he was a young athlete, his name got changed to Nemo because it was easier to pronounce than Memo, short for Guillermo, the Spanish equivalent of his legal name. And yet, when you’re young, sometimes you ask questions or say things because you don’t know.
“Come in and cheer for us,” one of the Bowie players tells the group of Mexicans standing on the other side of the fence.
They tell the players they aren’t allowed inside.
AN OLD BASEBALL player lays in bed, fighting off the effects of a flu shot from the day before.
If this were a movie of the Bowie 49ers, this is the part that comes after the clichés and the single game’s worth of triumph over racism. The part where Alfonso Lopez’s teammates, friends and wife disappeared. The part where he tries to reckon with the distance between the face he sees in the mirror as a 92-year-old, and the one in a photograph from 75 years ago. The part where most days, it’s him in his room during the quiet, long winter of his life when the music doesn’t play as often or as loud as it once did.
You live that long and the things that once didn’t matter begin to look different. You see how home changes. Segundo Barrio is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. El Paso’s population has more than quadrupled since 1949 and since almost 82% of the city’s population is now Latino — largely of Mexican heritage — the once-predominantly white neighborhoods have changed. And yet, in that long life, you also see the changes that take longer. You see how in the past five years, groups from South El Paso have had hunger strikes and filed a lawsuit against El Paso Independent School District, claiming discrimination as neighborhood schools were shuttered.
“I don’t mind it here,” Alfonso says of living in his room surrounded by memories of his past. The scrapbook from earlier this year when he threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the start of another El Paso Chihuahuas season. The Bowie baseball caps hanging from nails on the wall. A certificate of congratulations and resolution from the Texas House of Representatives, from when the Bowie 49ers got recognized, crammed into a picture frame hanging above his bed.
He lives a sort of parallel existence. Living in the present but surrounded by repeating memories of a fading past. He alone carries those memories which sometimes shine bright and at other times flicker. Living a life where he sometimes says he just spoke with an old teammate and at other times he knows it was just a dream.
I remind him who I am whenever I see him. He says he remembers me and that he enjoys our talks. I believe him. And as we talk, he increasingly asks about me. Where I’ve been, what I’ve done and, since the short answer says so much, he asks the question everyone has when meeting someone from here: What high school did I attend?
“Did you also live in Segundo Barrio?” he asks.
“No,” I say, “but when I was young, I spent a lot of time there.”
I tell him my brother and several cousins were born in a Segundo Barrio community clinic. That my grandfather and great grandmother spent their final years living there, in a small one-bedroom apartment. And that behind those apartments was a mechanic’s shop where my father worked. I tell him that years later, my father also went to war and returned quieter than when he left.
“I found the 1949 trophy,” I tell him. “It’s at Bowie High School.” I show him a picture on my phone.
The trophy is the centerpiece of a permanent wall-sized memorial inside the school’s fine arts building. The memorial was designed by Pete Flores, who graduated with Alfonso and, as of mid-September, was in hospice care. After decades inside of an old box in a warehouse, the trophy is now the color of an old penny. It looks like if you held it, the way the Bowie 49ers did 75 years ago, it might leave your hands smelling of copper.
Somewhere between then and now, it was broken. The baseball player who once stood atop it now lays next to it on top of a bed of soft purple fabric inside a glass case on a pedestal.
On the wall to the left of the case is the same team photo Alfonso has in his room.
Underneath the photo are names of the Bowie 49ers.
Rodolfo Garcia, Carlos Macias and Xavier Holguin.
Jose Corona, Fernando Gomez and Gus Sambrano.
Tony Lara, Guillermo Gomez and Coach Nemo.
Ruben Rodriguez, Trini Guillen, Lorenzo Martinez, Jose Galarza, Ramon Camarillo and Ruben Porras.
Ernesto Guzman, Andy Morales and Heriberto Ramos.
And Alfonso Lopez is there too, next to his teammates, some of whom died thinking their accomplishment was forgotten. All of them, together here, under the glass.
“It’s nice,” he says.
And still lying in bed, still wearing his windbreaker, the last Bowie 49er asks me quietly, “How did it break?”