Baytown Mexican School

The plaque's last line names La Típica, and the girls' orchestra deserves more than a line. Humble Oil hired Antonio Bañuelos, a Spanish-born, German-trained musician who also played with the Houston Symphony, to teach its employees' children, and some instruments came from a disbanded company band. Humble and the parents shared his salary until the school district took it over. During World War II the girls played war bond rallies at the refinery gates and veterans' hospitals in Temple and Houston, and a 1946 tour carried them to California, where the older players declined a Hollywood audition.

What the plaque says

Baytown Mexican School Established in 1923 by the Goose Creek Independent School District, Baytown Mexican School was the first educational facility for Mexican American children in the community. The very modest beginning of the school in 1923 had a profound effect on the city of Baytown as a whole. Students of the 1920s later confirmed that school was held in the Mexican community recreation hall owned by Humble Oil and Refining Company. Instead of having professional teachers, the school was staffed by female students from Robert E. Lee high school, and the school mission was to receive young Spanish-speaking children and transition them to English. In 1927, land was purchased for the construction of a senior high school building and Mexican grade school building. The three-room building at 3010 Magnolia Street opened for classes in 1928. The first teachers in 1928 were Miss Jessie L. Pumphrey (principal), Miss Bertie Walker and Miss Celeste Dashiel. The teachers developed a very short list of English words in the 1930s. A new elementary school was built in 1992 at 305 tri-city beach road. From 1970-1972, the Mexican school building was used as a head start program building after the school closed in 1969. The cornerstone for the Baytown Mexican School is now on display at the Baytown historical museum. The original building was demolished in 1995. In 1938, the name of the school was changed to de Zavala for Lorenzo de Zavala, interim vice president of Texas (1836). One of the school's teachers, Elizabeth Burrus, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1961 for expanding the short list of English words into a 400-word book. In 1937, Antonio Banuelos started La Tipica all-girls orchestra, a legend in the local Hispanic culture. (2014)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 7.8 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Space Center Houston — 15 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• Emancipation Park — 25 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 25 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.

More markers nearby

• City of Baytown — 1.1 mi
• Ashbel Smith, M. D. — 1.3 mi
• George Washington Carver High School — 1.4 mi
• Lee College — 1.5 mi