Southside School
San Marcos, Hays County, Texas
Marker Inscription
During the first half of the 20th century, San Marcos, like most communities across the United States, segregated its school facilities. Mexican-American children were first taught in a school building previously used by the community’s African-American students in 1901. During the next thirty years, students were educated in several structures around San Marcos. In the summer of 1948, the city approved a bond that would build a new facility for Mexican-American children. That same summer, members of the Mexican American community petitioned the board of trustees to integrate public schools, believing the new school building would perpetuate segregation. In spite of this protest, Southside School was completed in 1949. Designed by Harvey P. Smith of San Antonio, and built by J.M. Odom Construction Company, the school was built of vertical cell clay tile with a stucco-like appearance. The seven-classroom school not only educated students, it eventually housed programs designed to provide all children with opportunities for success regardless of their heritage, economic status, home language, or disability. The school also provided adult education classes at night, including an English language course. In 1965, the school’s name was changed to Bonham. The following year, it became one of the first schools in Texas to offer a bilingual education program for students, regardless of race. In the 1980s, Bonham School began to educate exclusively for pre-school aged children and adopted a program for children with disabilities in the 1990s. Since 2009, the building has housed the Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos community organization. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2011
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
For the first half of the twentieth century San Marcos, like most American towns, segregated its schools, teaching Mexican American children in a succession of separate buildings. When the city funded a new segregated school in 1948, members of the Mexican American community petitioned to integrate instead, arguing the building would only entrench division; Southside School opened anyway in 1949. In time it became one of the first Texas schools to offer bilingual education, and today houses a Hispanic cultural center.
Why it matters
It documents both the reach of school segregation beyond the Black-white divide and the early Mexican American organizing that pressed for integration and bilingual learning.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
For the first half of the twentieth century, San Marcos did what most American communities did: it separated its schoolchildren by race and heritage. Public schooling in this period was shaped everywhere by segregation — sometimes written into law, sometimes simply enforced by custom — and Texas towns maintained separate facilities as a matter of course.
What this marker makes vivid is that segregation in Texas was not only a matter of Black and white. Mexican American children were educated separately too, moved through a succession of buildings over the decades. Tellingly, in 1901 they were first taught in a building the community's African American students had used before them — a hand-me-down that speaks volumes about how these systems ranked and shuffled the children they were meant to serve.
By the late 1940s, the ground was shifting. This was the era just before the great national reckoning over segregated schooling, a time when Mexican American communities across the Southwest were beginning to organize and to challenge, through petitions and the courts, the idea that separate could ever be equal. San Marcos was part of that awakening.
People & events
The heart of this story is a decision the community made in the summer of 1948. The city approved a bond to build a new facility for Mexican American children — and in that very same summer, members of the Mexican American community petitioned the board of trustees to integrate the public schools instead. Their reasoning was clear-eyed and ahead of its time: a brand-new segregated building, however nice, would only lock segregation more firmly into place. Better schooling was not the same as equal schooling.
The protest did not prevail. Southside School was completed anyway in 1949, designed by Harvey P. Smith of San Antonio and built by the J.M. Odom Construction Company, its seven classrooms rising in vertical cell clay tile finished to look like stucco. But the community's argument did not disappear, and the building's own later history bent toward the very inclusion its founders' critics had demanded.
Over time the school became a place of opportunity rather than exclusion. It housed programs meant to serve all children regardless of heritage, income, home language, or disability, and it offered adult night classes, including English-language instruction. In 1965 it was renamed Bonham. The next year it became one of the first schools in Texas to offer a bilingual education program open to students regardless of race. By the 1980s Bonham focused on preschool-aged children, added a program for children with disabilities in the 1990s, and since 2009 has housed the Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos.
Its place in the American story
Southside School matters to the national story for two reasons, and they pull in tension with each other in a way that is deeply American. First, it documents that school segregation reached well beyond the Black-white divide that dominates the popular memory of the era. Mexican American children were segregated too, and their experience is an essential part of the country's civil-rights history.
Second, and just as important, it preserves the memory of early Mexican American organizing. The 1948 petition to integrate — made at the very moment the city was spending money to keep schools separate — is a small, local instance of a movement that was gathering across the Southwest in those years and that would help push the whole nation toward the principle that separate schooling is inherently unequal.
The building's afterlife carries the story forward. A school born of segregation went on to become one of the first in Texas to teach bilingually across racial lines, and eventually a home for a Hispanic cultural organization. That arc — from a symbol of division to a center of shared culture — is a hopeful, hard-won version of the larger American journey, and it's why the site is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
If you visit
Take a moment, first, to look at the building itself. It was built of vertical cell clay tile finished to resemble stucco — a modest, well-made mid-century schoolhouse of seven classrooms. It isn't grand, and that's part of its power: this is the everyday architecture where the real history of American schooling happened.
As you stand before it, hold both halves of its story in mind. Picture the summer of 1948, when members of the community stood before the school board and argued that a new building was not the same as a fair one. Then remember what the same walls came to house — bilingual classrooms open to all, adult English classes at night, programs for children of every background. The place changed, and reading it in that light turns a quiet building into a lesson.
Today the building carries a new chapter as the home of the Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos, so it continues as a community gathering place rather than a museum. On a visit to San Marcos, it makes a thoughtful stop for anyone interested in the fuller, more complicated history of civil rights in Texas — a reminder that the story includes many communities. Please be mindful that it is an active community site, and enjoy it as such.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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