[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 154 (Friday, October 14, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H6970-H6974]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            THE BARRIO BOYS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Reyes) is recognized for 
30 minutes.
  Mr. REYES. I would like to pay tribute to a group of young men that 
won the 1949 baseball championship in Texas and overcame many, many 
obstacles and overcame the odds that at the time existed. When I read 
their story, you will appreciate their accomplishment.
  This is from a story written by Alexander Wolff from Sports 
Illustrated that appeared in the June 27, 2011, edition. It's entitled, 
``The Barrio Boys.''
  In 1949, El Paso's Bowie Bears, a team of poor Hispanic players who 
were too unworldly to be intimidated by their more affluent Anglo 
opponents, came from nowhere to win Texas' first high school baseball 
championship.
  You'd saw off a broomstick for a bat. For a ball, you'd beg spools of 
thread from the textile plant, enough wrap to create a wad that you 
could seal with carpenter's tape. You'd go back to the factory for 
cloth remnants to sew together for a glove, which you'd stuff with 
cotton you picked at the ranch on the fringe of the barrio. That's what 
you did as a kid of Mexican blood in El Paso during the 1940s to play 
the game that, more than anything else, the traditional American game 
which would make you an American--baseball.
  But to become a champion at that game, to beat all Anglo comers in a 
world that belonged to them, how could you possibly do that?
  Borders are shape-shifting things--sometimes barriers, sometimes 
membranes, sometimes overlooks from

[[Page H6971]]

which one people take the measure of another. If you were to transport 
yourself to the El Paso of 1949 and take up a position as far south as 
possible by the north shore of the Rio Grande, in a nether land not 
wholly of the U.S. but not of Mexico either, you'd be a cutoff throw 
from Bowie High School, the only public secondary school in the U.S. 
then dedicated to educating Mexican Americans.
  The people of south and east El Paso dealt every day with two kinds 
of borders. The geographical one at their backs reminded them of their 
Mesoamerican heritage. The aspirational border just to the north, which 
was an east-west highway through downtown, was a tantalizing gateway to 
their country of choice.
  Andy Morales, a member of the 1949 Bowie High School baseball team, 
used to walk the eight blocks from his home up to Alameda Avenue, which 
was the local stretch of U.S. Highway 80, the artery that ran from San 
Diego, California, to the Georgia coast. Beyond the avenue lay the 
Anglos' turf, where a Mexican American would think twice before 
entering that space. Instead, they focused on the road. My friends and 
I, we'd compete counting out-of-State license plates on Alameda Avenue. 
Morales, says: I set the record one Saturday, counting 39 in a 2-hour 
period. Plate-spotting gave Morales and his buddies a chance to glimpse 
the energy of a country ready to burst after the end of World War II, a 
place where they gradually came to believe they belonged.
  They would owe the awakening in large part to the game they loved. 
Bowie High School didn't field a baseball team until 1946, when a wiry, 
energetic man of not quite 5 feet, 6 inches tall arrived from San 
Antonio. He started the first team. Three years later, the Bowie team 
included: Morales, the wisecracking second baseman who never took a 
book home from school because there simply wasn't enough light to read 
in his home; Javier ``Lefty'' Holguin, the pitcher with a knuckleball 
that was so crazy that nobody would play catch with him; Jose ``Rocky'' 
Galarza, the smoky-eyed third baseman to whom Bowie coeds dedicated 
yearbook pages; and Ramon Camarillo, the catcher whose hunches came to 
him in his dreams.

                              {time}  1600

  Despite the poverty that made them scrounge for equipment and wonder 
if they'd ever have enough food to eat, and despite discrimination that 
subjected them to stinging slurs and other indignities from Anglos, 
these boys and the other 11 players on the 1949 Bowie Bears would win 
the first Texas high school baseball tournament ever staged.
  Bowie High sat in El Paso's Second Ward, or Segundo Barrio, which was 
home to the city's leach field and sewage treatment plant. A smelting 
operation, stockyards, and a meatpacking company further fouled the 
air. Nowhere in the U.S. did more babies die of diarrhea. The barrio 
had no paved streets, much less sidewalks, streetlights, or parks, and 
50,000 people packed themselves into less than 1 square mile in this 
part of El Paso. This is about twice the population density of New York 
City.
  Those not living in adobe hovels were warehoused in presidios like 
the ones in which Camarillo and Bowie first baseman Tony Lara grew up 
in, where as many as 175 families--at least 700 people--were shoehorned 
into a single block of two-story tenement buildings with one communal 
cold-water commode serving each row of two-room apartments. Compared 
with Anglo El Paso, the Second Ward was, as Camarillo would say, ``like 
another country.''
  One might have expected Bowie's '49ers to be cowed by their more 
affluent, better equipped Anglo opponents, but, Lara says, ``We were so 
dumb, we didn't know how to be intimidated.'' This obliviousness was 
carefully calculated. Bowie's baseball coach made sure his players 
didn't wallow in want and ethnic victimization, diverting them instead 
with such requirements as daily classroom attendance, executing the 
hit-and-run, and mastering the nuances of English by speaking nothing 
else around him.
  ``With Nemo, there were no heroes,'' says Gus Sambrano, a shortstop 
on the 1949 team. ``He was the leader. His message was, `You have 
leadership; follow.' We were the followers.''
  William Carson ``Nemo'' Herrera was a fronterizo, a child of the 
borderland like his players, and he probably knew them better than 
their parents did. He was born in Brownsville, Texas, in 1900. His 
father, Rodolfo, had immigrated after losing his landholdings in the 
political unrest that would lead to the Mexican Revolution. And his 
mother, Carolina, had roots in the Canary Islands. The family moved to 
San Antonio when Nemo was 7, and by the age of 13, he had become the 
bat boy of the San Antonio Broncos of the Texas league. He steeped 
himself in the game. His speed and tenacity served him well in 
basketball as well as baseball while he attended Brackenridge High 
School. He would excel at both sports at Southwestern University in 
Georgetown and play semipro baseball during summers.
  After graduating, he became the head basketball coach and assistant 
football coach at Beaumont, Texas High School. For a year, he worked as 
the coach before joining Gulf Oil's subsidiary in Tampico, Mexico. 
There, he progressed from pipeline work to payroll department while 
playing second base on the company team.
  In July of 1927, during his fourth year in Tampico, Herrera was 
spiked during an industrial league game and wound up in the town's 
American hospital. Within a month, he had married the head nurse on the 
floor, Mary Leona Hatch, an Anglo who had been orphaned as a girl near 
Opelousas, Louisiana. A year later, Herrera took a job as baseball and 
basketball coach at Lanier High School in San Antonio's west side 
barrio, where he would spend 18 years, including all of the Depression.
  His basketball teams rarely had much size, so much so that he 
introduced what later generations would recognize as a full-court 
press. ``Only we called it a man-to-man, all-over-the-court defense,'' 
one player would say later.
  Herrera would say five times his teams reached the State final four, 
winning titles in 1943 and 1945. He acquired enough of a reputation for 
Texas A&M to offer him its basketball coaching job. However, he turned 
it down for the stability of public school work. And in 1946, Bowie 
High School came calling, offering a better salary and the benefits of 
a desert climate, which Mary Leona, who suffered from hay fever, and 
Bill, one of their two sons who also had asthma, benefited from.
  Herrera's new high school belied the squalor of the Segundo barrio. 
When the city expanded the school in 1941 onto what had once been a 
slag heap, a complex of athletic fields girdled by cottonwoods and elms 
bloomed in the floodplain of the Rio Grande. Signs throughout the 
school warned students to speak only English, and special pronunciation 
classes walked them through phonemes and diphthongs. ``I once asked the 
girl sitting in front of me for a piece of paper in Spanish,'' Sabrano 
recalls. ``I got suspended, and my mom and dad said that was the first 
and last time that you will be guilty of speaking Spanish.''
  La Bowie, as it was called, was a temple of assimilation. When 
President Franklin D. Roosevelt federalized the all-Hispanic Company E 
of the Texas National Guard's 141st Infantry Regiment late in 1940, 
half of the soldiers had been Bowie Bears. Forty former Bowie students 
gave their lives during World War II, most of them as members of 
Company E, whose ranks were steadily thinned through the Italian 
campaign, from Salerno to San Pietro to the slaughter at the Rapido 
River, where over 2 days in January of 1944 German soldiers killed, 
wounded, or captured virtually every GI not swept to his death by the 
current.
  At the outset of the 1948-1949 school year, Bowie dedicated a 
memorial to its fallen 40 and an ROTC color guard concluded each day 
with a retreat ceremony, lowering the flag that flew above the school.
  Herrera worked to make baseball one of Bowie's tools of 
Americanization. He set up a summer league in the barrio and placed 
kids on American Legion and commercially sponsored teams. Then he bird-
dogged the games, nudging prospects he liked to go out for the Bowie 
varsity the following spring. A decade later, after Brown v. Board of 
Education forced El Paso to close all-black Douglas High School, 
Herrera enticed a bilingual African American kid

[[Page H6972]]

from the south side to enroll at Bowie. This was the future NCAA-
champion basketball coach Nolan Richardson, who would also be a star 
for Nemo in hoops as well as in baseball.
  El Paso was a military town, much as it is today, and eventually Nemo 
took his guys to play teams at Fort Bliss and Biggs Field, where they 
often outperformed their older, bigger, and stronger hosts. ``We went 
out there on the field against those base teams not knowing any 
better,'' says Morales, attributing many of Bowie's boys' victories to 
Herrera's enforced obliviousness. Always the Bears ate at the mess. And 
Morales remembers fondly, ``Those were the only days we'd get three 
square meals.''
  The school newspaper, The Growler, could have taken its name from the 
sound in a Bowie student's stomach. Mary Leona Herrera would send her 
husband off to work each day with extra sandwiches and burritos, which 
he left in plain sight so they could be ``stolen'' by his famished 
boys. As their stomachs filled up, so did their heads. Molding his 
baseball team in the image of basketball squads, Herrera played small 
ball before it, too, had a name. ``We used to work on some plays for 
hours and hours,'' says Morales. ``We won games on details, not because 
we hit the ball out of the park.''
  Herrera spent Saturday mornings chasing down truants. He'd say to me, 
``I'm gonna kick their butts if they're not back in school on Monday,'' 
remembers Bill Herrera, who today is 77, and who would accompany his 
dad on those rounds. But back at Bowie, Nemo would just as doggedly 
plead the cases of those same kids to Principal Frank Pollitt.
  The coach treated his baseball diamond like a drawing room carpet, 
picking stray pebbles off the infield. And he encouraged teasing for 
its democratizing effect. One day, first baseman Lorenzo Martinez 
showed up at practice with a new glove which he had bought across the 
river in Juarez. ``It smelled like a dead salmon,'' Morales recalls. 
``Nemo said, `You paid for that?' The madder Martinez got, the more 
Nemo encouraged us to razz him because that made him a better player.''

                              {time}  1610

  ``Nemo had a wide nose with huge nostrils, and when he got mad, he 
looked liked a raging bull. We used to joke that we should all get 
toreador capes.'' One day, as a few of the Bowie Bears nursed beers in 
a Juarez cantina, Herrera walked in. They literally, and figuratively 
reached for their capes. Nemo, in typical fashion, said, ``I'll tell 
you the truth boys; I'd rather see you guys drink beer than soda pop. 
Soda pop will ruin your health.''
  If a Bear took only one thing from his coach it was a credo that 
became an incantation, and it read, ``It's not who you are or where you 
come from,'' Nemo would say, ``it's who you become.'' The last of those 
words synched with the striving of the postwar generation, with the 
American Dream, with all those cars whizzing east and west on Highway 
80.
  By the spring of 1949, the new coach's spadework had begun to pay 
off. A San Antonio sportswriter noted ``the wonderful spirit'' of the 
Bowie baseball team, ``the way the pitchers bear down, the sharp 
fielding and baserunning reminiscent of the old St. Louis Gashouse 
Gang.''
  The Aztec, which was the Bowie yearbook, had already gone to press by 
the time the Bowie Bears edged El Paso High, which was the Anglo school 
on the North Side. There they won the district title. So beneath a team 
photo the editors of the Aztec had written, ``Good luck to you, team, 
and when these Aztecs reach you, may you have lived up to those early-
season forecasts.''
  When the Bears reached Lamesa, Texas, for the best-of-three bi-
district playoffs against Lamesa High School, their appearance on the 
sidewalks caused gawkers to pour out of storefronts. ``You'd think that 
the circus had come to town,'' Sambrano recalls. Some people made 
cracks like, ``Why don't you speak English?'' And ``Remember the 
Alamo,'' while others called the players ``hot tamales'' and ``greasy 
Mexicans.''
  Herrera found a restaurant that would serve the team, but not in its 
largely empty dining room. Tables and chairs were hastily set up in the 
kitchen. The Bears' coach rarely brought up the discrimination that his 
boys faced, for fear they might be tempted to use it as an excuse. 
Herrera regarded prejudice as the problem of the prejudiced, Sambrano 
says, best met with an even temper and devotion to the task at hand.
  Bowie's Ruben Porras three-hit Lamesa to win the series opener 9-1. 
The next day, Trini Guillen scattered five hits in an 8-0 shutout that 
clinched the bi-district title. ``Those guys were big,'' Sambrano 
remembers, ``but we had what they didn't: speed.'' Against the Golden 
Tornados, the El Paso Herald-Post reported the Bears ``made a race 
track out of the diamond.'' In the first inning of each game, Bowie 
scored a run on a lone hit and either an error or a walk. By sweeping 
Lamesa, Bowie earned a trip to Austin for the single elimination 
quarterfinals of the state tournament. ``If memory serves me right,'' 
Lara recalls today, ``there were eight teams and we were rated 10th to 
win it all.'' Large odds by anybody's calculation.
  Racial segregation still prevailed in Texas during the 1940s, but 
Mexican Americans confounded the easy dichotomies of black and white. 
In Lubbock, where the team made a rest stop on the way to Austin, a 
sign in one window read No Dogs or Mexicans. ``I remember seeing two 
drinking fountains, one marked Colored and the other marked White,'' 
Morales says. ``Me being brown, I didn't know which was for me. So I 
asked a husky Anglo guy which one I was supposed to use.'' Morales took 
the man's reply (``I don't give a `s--' '') as permission to use the 
white one.
  In Austin, while most of the other visiting teams stayed in hotels, 
the Bowie Bears had to sleep on Army cots that were set up beneath the 
stands of Memorial Stadium, the football field on the Texas campus, and 
they had to make the long slog across the field to the Longhorns' field 
house to use the bathroom. But to Herrera's naive boys, the unusual 
accommodations only heightened their adventure. They lined the cots up 
like hurdles and ran races. When Hispanic businesses and social 
organizations back home sent telegrams of support, the Bears delighted 
in seeing the spectacle of a Western Union messenger driving his 
motorcycle up the stadium ramp for deliveries.
  One day, four players ventured downtown to see a movie, and they were 
bewildered when they were told, ``Mexican have to sit upstairs.'' So 
what did they do? They waited for the usher to turn the corner, and 
then they scrambled into the seats of the orchestra in the dark. They 
recalled that they watched The Streets of Laredo with William Holden.
  Facing Stephenville High in the quarterfinals, Bowie made another 
display of first-inning resourcefulness, scoring three runs on two 
hits. The press had expected Herrera to start his ace, Guillen, who was 
7-0 for the season. One reporter wondered why the Bowie coach, instead, 
gambled with his number two pitcher.

  In typical Herrera fashion, he said, ``Number one, number two, who 
can tell?'' leaving unsaid that Guillen had just spent 4 days in the 
hospital with strep throat. Porras, ``the dark-skinned right hander,'' 
as the American-Statesman described him, struck out six, while limiting 
Stephenville to two hits in the 5-1 victory.
  The wisdom of using his ace sparingly became clear the next day in 
the semifinals against Waco High School. The game lasted three hours. 
Guillen held up until the fourth, when Waco touched him for two runs. 
And that's when Herrera brought in Porras as relief.
  With the score tied at two in the sixth, Rodriguez stole third, then 
sprinted home on a long fly ball. ``I would have scored easily tagging 
up and that would have won us the game,'' Rodriguez remembers. ``But 
me, like a dummy, forgot that there was only one out. The ball was 
caught and I got doubled up. Nemo almost strangled me, he was so mad.'' 
He always reminded us, ``Keep your head in the game. Pay attention to 
details.''
  The score remained tied at two until the 10th, when Waco loaded the 
bases with nobody out. Suddenly, Herrera yelled in Spanish, ``Watch the 
guy on third. He's gonna steal.'' Camarillo

[[Page H6973]]

called for a pitchout, and they picked the runner off. It was the only 
time that any '49er of the Bowie Bears can remember Herrera addressing 
his players in Spanish. Camarillo then cut down another runner trying 
to advance to third, and during the rundown, the next batter was caught 
trying to steal second.
  In the following inning, Bowie center fielder Fernie Gomez, his back 
to home plate, preserved the tie by running down a long drive with a 
catch that his teammates would recognize later as Willie Mays' famous 
World Series play 5 years later.
  But in the top of the 12th, Waco took a 3-2 lead on a double and 
Morales' two-base error. That might have doomed the Bowie Bears had 
Morales not delivered a reversal of fortune in the bottom of that 
inning. With Bears on second and third, Morales hit a grounder that 
eluded the Waco second baseman to tie the game. Then the fates squared 
accounts with Rodriguez, too: His quailing single dropped into short 
center field to send Gomez home for the game-winner.
  Neither of El Paso's daily newspapers sent a reporter to the 
tournament, so people back home followed Bowie's progress through the 
collect calls that Herrera placed to the local radio station, KTSM. His 
boys, Herrera said in his call after the Waco game, ``just don't know 
when to quit. They're eating well and hitting that ball, and that wins 
ball games.'' Surely it's one of the few times that a coach has ever 
credited a victory to eating well.
  In the final, Austin's Stephen F. Austin, had the tournament's number 
one seed. They enjoyed more than a home field advantage. The Maroons, 
as they were called, hadn't lost to a single high school all season, 
even beating the Longhorns' freshman team. They had swept Robstown in 
their bi-district series by a combined score of 36-1, and in the 
semifinals eliminated Denison 12-0. The Boston Braves would soon sign 
the Maroons' ace, right hander Jack Brinkley, to a $65,000 bonus. 
Brinkley had allowed only one hit in his quarterfinal start, a 2-0 win 
over Lubbock.
  In the final, Herrera intended to counter Brinkley by pitching 
Guillen, but before game time he asked his catcher, Camarillo, for his 
thoughts. Camarillo nominated Lefty Holguin, arguing that the 
knuckleballer would keep the Maroons off balance. Camarillo later 
confessed that he volunteered Holguin because he had dreamed that the 
Bears could win the title with him on the mound.

                              {time}  1620

  Herrera agreed--Guillen could still barely speak--and Porras had 
pitched 15 innings in 2 days--with the proviso that Holguin would get 
the hook if he became wild. ``When you've got just one left,'' Herrera 
would say later, ``that's who you pitch.''
  During Austin's half of the first inning, each Maroons hitter 
returned to the dugout with the same verdict: Holguin was ``just a good 
batting-practice pitcher,'' as one told his coach, according to the 
Austin American-Statesmen. They always said, ``we'll get him next 
inning.''
  The next inning came, and the next, and the next, yet Austin couldn't 
muster a hit off Holguin. Meanwhile, Bowie seized a 1-0 lead in the 
usual fashion, jumping on a couple of first-inning errors. But after 
Holguin walked two Maroons in the fourth, Herrera was true to his word, 
lifting Lefty for Guillen. In the sixth inning, Bears right fielder 
Ernesto Guzman tripled, and two infield errors on a grounder by Lara 
allowed both Bears to cross, putting Bowie up 3-0.
  In the last inning, Austin finally kindled to life. Brinkley, the 
pitcher, led off with a single hit and advanced to second on a walk. 
Guillen struck out the next man, but Brinkley scored after Galarza 
misplayed a slow roller, leaving runners on second and third. The next 
Austin hitter sent a single to right to knock in a second run, and as 
the Maroons' third base coach waved the tying run home, the favorites 
looked like they were going to seize their chance.
  That's when all of Bowie's preparation--the harping on details, the 
numbing repetition, the many games against the military-base teams 
around El Paso--paid its biggest dividend. From right, Guzman sent the 
ball on a line. Morales, the cutoff man, let it go through to 
Camarillo, who fixed a tag on the Maroons' base runner for the second 
out.
  On the play at the plate, another Maroon, also representing the tying 
run, made his way to second base. An infield hit edged him to third, 
whereupon the next Austin hitter slapped a sharp ground ball.
  At least some of the 2,700 fans there that night must have wondered 
what the Bowie shortstop was thinking, dropping to one knee. He simply 
explained, ``I was ready to block it, just in case,'' Rodriguez says. 
``I said, `This damn ball's not going through me.' '' He caught the 
ball cleanly, stood up and whipped it across the diamond. Cradled 
safely in Lara's borrowed glove, the ball made the urchins of El Paso 
lords of all of Texas.
  True to form, there was no celebration when it was over, Morales 
recalls. ``We took it as part of how Nemo raised us. We just picked up 
our belongings and walked out of there.''
  The Bowie players don't recall ever shaking hands with their 
opponents. Their opponents simply walked away from them. And though the 
Bears received a trophy--``I mean, it must be about 3 feet high,'' 
Herrera marveled in his collect call that night--there was no formal 
presentation or other official act recognizing Bowie for having won 
Texas' inaugural baseball championship. The Bears had scratched out 
nothing but unearned runs to win the final, and to a typical Texan of 
that time, it must have seemed that an alien team had seized the title 
by alien means. The Austin American-Statesman reacted as if Pancho 
Villa had just led a raid over the border: ``Amigo, the Bowie Bears 
have come and gone. And they have taken with them the State baseball 
championship. They took it Wednesday night through a weird assortment 
of hits, errors, jinxes and other sundry items which ultimately meant 
Bowie 3, Austin 2.''
  After the Bears had packed up for the ride home, much to their 
surprise, a few rocks hit their bus. ``There were two cops there who 
didn't do anything,'' Rodriguez recalls. When a restaurant near Fort 
Stockton, which was 240 miles away from home, wouldn't serve the Bowie 
party, Herrera ferried food from the restaurant to the bus.
  Around noon the following day, as the team rumbled along Highway 80 
over the El Paso County line, a sheriff's deputy on a motorcycle 
flashed his lights to pull the bus over. One player wondered if they'd 
hit somebody. When the officer stepped aboard, it was to inform the 
driver and the students that Bowie students were affixing a State 
champ's banner to the side of the bus and that he'd be providing a 
police escort to the terminal. ``As the bus approached downtown, there 
were people lining both sides of the street,'' Latta recalls. 
Remarkably, ``a lot of Anglos were cheering for us as well.''
  Later, the minor league team El Paso Texans threw a Bowie Night that 
weekend, and the Bears were feted with several banquets the following 
week. ``We can't give them anything,'' one city official told the local 
paper, ``but we can sure feed them.
  Still, the Bears sensed that even in their hometown, they were given 
a second-class celebration. Instead of the mayor meeting them at the 
bus station, as had been announced, an alderman did the honors. ``At 
the depot, some guy came up to Nemo and gave him a box with a shirt in 
it,'' Morales remembers. ``When El Paso's Austin High won the district 
in football, their coach got a brand new car.''
  None of the players stopped by the terminal's baggage room to claim 
luggage. ``We all carried paper bags with our stuff off the bus,'' 
Morales says. ``I walked a mile, hopped the streetcar, then walked the 
eight blocks home.''
  The night before the team had left for Austin, students in a Bowie 
home economics class stayed up late preparing hard-boiled eggs for the 
players to eat on the trip. The Bears had won, one of those coeds would 
say at a Bowie reunion years later, ``porque jugaron con huevos.'' 
Because they played with eggs--that is, with balls.
  Sixty years would pass before another team from El Paso County 
claimed a state baseball title. In 2009, Socorro High, a school with a 
Hispanic enrollment of more than 95 percent, ventured to the Austin 
suburb of Round Rock to beat Austin Westlake and Lufkin for the Class 
5A crown. Early in the semifinal a knot of Westlake supporters unfurled 
a Confederate flag, chanted ``We speak English!'' and waved their ID's. 
``If we can have something like that

[[Page H6974]]

in our day and age,'' says Jesus Chavez, Bowie's current principal and 
a former Socorro administrator, ``I can't even imagine what they went 
through in 1949.''
  A month after their victory the Socorro players visited Bowie to 
present championship rings--not awarded in 1949--to the eight surviving 
Bears. A new Bowie High sits on an old melon field that in '49 was part 
of Mexico but in 1963 passed into the U.S. as part of the Chamizal 
Settlement between the two countries.
  If the borderland remains its protean self, in one respect it's as 
hard as a barrier can be: While Juarez becomes an ever more Hobbesian 
hell of drug violence, in which more than 8,000 people have been 
murdered over the past three years, El Paso remains virtually immune. 
Bowie nonetheless serves the second-poorest zip code in the U.S. The 
annual median income in the Segundo Barrio languishes below $20,000, 
and 68.8 percent of the children in Bowie's catchment area are 
considered at risk. Chavez says, ``This school is about facing 
adversity, moving forward and beating the odds.''
  The 1949 Bears and their young counterparts from Socorro gathered 
near the commemorative display in Bowie's Fine Arts Building, where a 
visitor can punch up audio of Nemo Herrera's collect calls back to KTSM 
Radio. The 400 people on hand included Peter Contreras, assistant 
athletic director of the state's University Interscholastic League, the 
high school sanctioning body that hadn't seen fit to properly lodge or 
honor the Bears 60 years earlier. That Contreras is Hispanic is only 
one of uncountable examples of how times have changed. As for the old 
slights, the '49ers were ``always very restrained how they responded,'' 
says Reyes Mata, the South Side native who helped organize the event. 
``They always maintained their dignity.''
  What did they become, Nemo Herrera's barrio boys from El Paso and San 
Antonio? Judges and produce barons and big-city postmasters. Mechanics 
and firefighters and civil servants. Opticians and claims adjusters and 
veterans, many of them decorated. An outsized number chose Nemoesque 
professions: teaching, educational administration, coaching.
  Rocky Galarza, the old third baseman, put an open-air boxing ring 
behind his South Side tavern. He plucked kids off the streets, and if 
the streets pulled them back, as they briefly did eventual WBF 
lightweight champ Juan (Ernie) Lazcano, Galarza would simply wait until 
they returned, wiser, to the sanctuary of his ring. The best ones 
ultimately made their way to L.A. or Dallas or Houston, where someone 
else cashed in on them; Galarza, in cowboy boots and jeans, his black 
hair flowing as he worked a guy out, simply turned to the next kid to 
save. One night in 1997 one of Galarza's barmaids shot and killed him 
in his sleep. Seven years later, on the eve of a title fight in Las 
Vegas, Lazcano told Bill Knight of the El Paso Times, ``Sometimes, when 
I'm asleep, I still see him, still hear him. He's telling me, `Come on, 
Champ, don't give up. Feint. Don't just stand there. Move your feet.' 
It's nice to know, isn't it, that if you do something special for 
people the way Rocky did, that you live on through them?''

  Andy Morales, the license-plate-spotting second baseman, also ``went 
Nemo,'' as the old Bears put it. After winning a football scholarship 
to New Mexico and serving in Korea with the Navy, he became baseball 
coach at El Paso's Austin High. There, in the early '70s, he taught the 
game to an Anglo kid named Chris Forbes, who grew up to coach Socorro 
to that 2009 state title. Morales followed the Bulldogs as they made a 
familiar way east through the draw, to Midland and greater Austin, as 
excited as he had been as a Bowie Bear. He was amazed that a dozen 
spirit buses would make the trip from El Paso for the final.
  As for Herrera himself, he remained at Bowie until 1960. ``The 
[Bowie] boys knew little of fundamentals,'' he said upon leaving, ``and 
I was told I couldn't teach them. But I did.'' He took a post at 
another barrio high school, Edgewood of San Antonio. After one year 
Herrera--by now known as el viejo, the old man--returned to El Paso to 
coach baseball at Coronado High, a new, largely Anglo school on the 
outskirts of town. ``I couldn't get those guys to do a damn thing,'' he 
would say. ``They had a car in the parking lot and a gal on their 
arm.''
  Upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70, he returned one 
last time to San Antonio, working as director of civilian recreation at 
Kelly Air Force Base for 10 years before retiring again. He died in 
1984. Herrera remains the only Texas high school coach to have won 
state titles in two sports, and his name can be found throughout the 
barrios of the two cities: on a scholarship fund, an elementary school 
and a baseball field in El Paso; and on a scholarship fund, a 
basketball court and the Kelly Air Force Base civilian rec center in 
San Antonio. ``It's almost a competition between the two cities to see 
who can honor Nemo the most,'' says his son Charles, 75.
  Of the eight members of the 1949 Bowie Bears still living, the five 
in El Paso gather for breakfast every few months at a Mexican 
restaurant on the East Side. Listen in, and you'll hear the sounds of 
baseball: chatter, needling, kibitzing, stories that reach across the 
years and often involve their old coach. Not that it matters 
particularly, but the banter is much more likely to be in English than 
in Spanish. And just so you know, Morales says, ``For 60 years we've 
never lost a conversation.''
  I know my time is up, Mr. Speaker.
  I wanted to read the story of the 1949 Bowie Bears into the Record to 
celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month. This is the end of Hispanic Heritage 
Month, and I thought that would be an appropriate way to end the month.
  I thank you for your indulgence.

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