Tag: Texas

From Migrant Farm Worker to Educator, a Principal Unites His Community With Quinceañeras

Gilbert Galván, principal of San Benito’s Veterans Memorial Academy with student. (Courtesy Avenida Productions)

When there’s a problem in San Benito, Texas, Gilbert Galván often comes to the rescue.

San Benito is a close-knit city of approximately 25,000, located near the center of the lower Rio Grande Valley – nearing the southernmost tip of Texas. Just as San Benito physically touches Mexico to its west, in the same way, the people and culture of both lands intertwine.

Gilbert Galván, who turns 68 this month, has played in integral part in maintaining the union of the two neighboring countries. As mayor of San Benito in the early 1990’s, he was instrumental in the building of the Free Trade International Bridge at Los Indios which provides easy access to the Mexican border cities of Matamoros, Reynosa and Valle Hermoso, and Monterrey.

And more recently, as the principal of San Benito’s Veterans Memorial Academy for the past seven years, he is known as the “Quinceañera guy.” A quinceañera is an elaborate party, resembling the American “Sweet 16,” which celebrates the transition in Latino culture from childhood to young womanhood. When he overheard some female students saying they couldn’t afford one, he decided at that moment to provide this opportunity for every teenage girl in the town who didn’t have the resources for one. The event has now become an annual town celebration, which grew from four, its first year, to nearly 75 young ladies, and five boys, being honored this past year.

Gilbert Galván, and his son Gilbert Galván Jr., at the Panamanian International Film Festival in Los Angeles.

This community event has been so impactful, one of Galván’s three children, Gilbert Jr., an attorney in the entertainment field, played a role in making sure this legacy was captured on film – along with Avenida Productions. The award-winning documentary, “Our Quinceañera,” directed by Fanny Veliz Grande will be screening next at CineSol Film Festival in South Padre Island, Texas, on November 23rd and 24th.

Galván’s very first quinceañera he volunteered to throw was as a freshman in college in 1972.

“We were 10 brothers and sisters, and I did one for my little sister,” says Galván. “I am always ready to help people. [And now,] my goal to make my students happy…I tell the students I do all this, because they are our future. We need to encourage our youth to be bold and not be afraid – to challenge the world.”

Galván says one of his greatest challenges working in education, for the past 42 years, has been dealing with the community to change the future of its students.

“Latinos have come up and improved and improved. I love that,” says Galván, explaining he has always been hands-on his whole life. “If there are problems on the bus, I ride the bus. I go to students’ homes and talk to their parents. They ask me, ‘Do you really love us?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ I tell them every time I see them that I love them.”

Galván understands the importance of these gestures, because he didn’t have an easy childhood himself.

“My grandparents came here from Spain,” he says. “They traveled from Spain to Cuba to Mexico, and finally to Texas through a grant.

Once in the U.S, Galván and his family became migrant farm workers moving from state to state depending on the harvest seasons.

“We picked cotton and okra in Michigan, Ohio, and California, and we picked apples and strawberries in Oregon,” recalls Galván about his farm laboring days which lasted until he was in the 10th grade. “We learned responsibility and money management, because my dad gave us money, and we had to buy food for the year…I was the first out of 10 to get a college degree, and when I did, my dad hugged my diploma for a week, or two, and that inspired me to help others in the community.”

Today, as a high school principal, he uses the money management skills he learned at an early age to plan out the intricate quinceañeras he throws.

“I had one for my daughter – it is quite expensive. We have dresses that cost $1,000 or $2,000 and they’re only worn once. [For the school quinceañeras], almost everything is donated to the girls,” says Galván, explaining that the local bakery offers to bake the cake, the dry cleaners and seamstresses offer their services for free, and a conjunto (band) volunteers to play the music.

He says he also takes advantage of the excitement that the quinceañeras ignite in order to have meetings, with the students, and talk about college and careers.

“I tell them how to have a better future so that they can be prepared,” says Galván. “I consider our community like a family, and this is a way to help. It makes them feel very important…and now when I’m out in the mall, they call ‘Mr. Galván!” and they thank me, and they say, ‘We have to take care of you when you get older.’ I love them all.”

https://youtu.be/0eSnxxlGDmw

The people of San Benito have garnered so much attention since hosting these unifying celebrations that other cities have started to take notice.

“Other school districts have called me for guidance,” says Galván humbly. “Houston already started them…The most important thing is the happiness and success that result. People start helping in many ways and communities come together.”

“I mainly want people to learn that there’s always hope, and dreams can come true.”

November 23, 2019
Award-winning author celebrates 60 and how writing saved her from her emotions

“I always wanted to jump out of a cake,” says Sandra Cisneros. (Photo/Tracy Boyer)

On a typical day, Sandra Cisneros likes to wake up gently, without an alarm clock, around 9:30am. She stays in her pajamas until 1pm, and then starts writing on her covered terrace until sunset, while surrounded by her five small dogs. Her peaceful lifestyle mirrors her delicate demeanor.

Sandra running on her birthday in Mexico. (Photo/Macarena Hernandez)

This past Saturday night, however, was a bit out of the ordinary. Cisneros went out on the town dressed up as a cake.

The award-winning author of several books, including “The House on Mango Street” and her most recent “Have You Seen Marie,” explains this behavior is unlike her normally introverted self, but she was celebrating an important milestone — turning 60.

“I have never felt younger or happier – now I can take care of me,” she says. “It’s a good time.”

The Chicago-born Mexican-American has always lived a very busy, even if quiet, life.

“I started writing when I was in middle school,” remembers Cisneros about how it all started. “I was in the Chicago Public Library looking through the card catalog. You could tell which cards were fingered more often than others. I was looking at a very soft dogeared card. I thought, ‘This book must be very loved.’ I wanted my own card to be loved and dirty from people touching it – from so many readers looking for it – it was very clear from a young age.”

She says she’s not sure she she chose her life-long career, but it found her.

“It was always inside me,” says the graceful Cisneros. “It was a way in dealing with my emotions. I didn’t have a way to handle all the stimulus before that. I didn’t see it as a career it was more of medicine.”

Cisneros explains that ever since she was a young child, she often felt overwhelmed by stimuli around her.

“I can’t go, to this day, to a supermarket,” she says. “I can’t filter things the way other people can. I didn’t realize that my experience was not common. My mom used to say I was a baby and used to make me feel bad. The only one who understood it was my father.”

She explains although she often felt like an outsider in her exterior world, she says she always had a rich interior world, and writing made her feel less lonely.

“When I don’t have art, my machine stops – it helps balance my life,” says Cisneros, who received her first national award by the time she was 30.

She says thanks to her mom who thought she would become a secretary (her father thought she would marry and become a housewife), she took typing in high school.

“I knew that I couldn’t depend on marrying somebody,” says Cisneros who never married or had children. “Women need to control their money, and they need to control their fertility. It’s your body, and it’s your life. Nobody should get in the way of that.”

In addition to earning an MFA in 1978 and becoming an accomplished writer, Cisneros has held various creative writing teaching positions around the country, and founded two organizations that serve writers: the Macondo Foundation (now administered by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center) and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, which she recently closed down.

After struggling with her emotions throughout her life, she made it her mission to help students going through the same.

“I tell students – the ones that are sensitive – that they have a very important job to be artists,” says Cisneros. “It’s a wonderful thing, and someone needs to be able to translate that for those who cannot.”

She says her sensitivity has not diminished as an adult.

“I have to not be around a lot of people, except when I have to be,” says Cisneros. “I have to rest before I go in public…It drains me.”

After living nearly three decades in San Antonio, Texas, and the past two years in Mexico, Cisneros says she has finally sold her house in Texas and is looking for a new house to be based across the border — where she says she feels the most at home.

“Part of me living in Mexico is finding my retreat to be more private, and do more writing,” says Cisneros, who just finished writing a personal collection of stories called “A House of My Own,” which will be published in October 2015. “It’s all about finding what I need…I know my needs now that I’m older. I think i’m going to be traveling more globally and collaborating with different people. I want to grow.”

And what is the most important piece of life advice she would give her younger self?

“I would tell my younger self not to get so hung up on the men in my life,” says the author. “I had so many men in my life, and now I wish I had more, and I would not get all hung up on one. They are such babies. I didn’t find men who were very mature…You have to find someone where you are the beloved. That’s the only way to settle. Forget about the others. I always take their age and divide it by two. I need to find someone who is 100 years old!” [laughing]

December 24, 2014
93-year-old former plumber memorializes toilet seats through art

Barney Smith (Courtesy Facebook)

Barney Smith is a retired master plumber from Alamo Heights, Texas. At 93, he still treasures the trade that was passed down to him from his father by memorializing damaged toilet seats.

Every day, Smith goes to work in his garage to create art on toilet seats. He houses all of his works of art there as well, as he refuses to sell any. There are so many currently in his garage, that it is now known as the Toilet Seat Art Museum.

“Number 1,156 is the one I’m working on now. I’ve been working on it for several days,” says Smith who spurts out the toilet seat pieces by number, as well as the significance of each, with ease. “I have a catalog, but I have memorized many…”

Smith has made toilet seat art with everything from state license plates to sea shells. He gets inspired by experiences he wishes to remember, and the materials he has available at the moment. Sometimes visitors come by and bring him materials to work with. He says once he even had a visitor came from Seoul, Korea who stayed for three days.

“I get a bunch of stuff, and I say, ‘Okay, what am I going to do here?’,” says Smith, saying his latest project developed because a scooter club member walked in with a light bulb and some spark plugs.

Smith says joyfully that it takes him anywhere from 20 to 200 hours to completely adorn one toilet seat cover.

“It took me 200 hours to find rocks in the Rio Grande River and polish them,” remembers Smith as sharply as if it were yesterday. “My wife and I spent hours on those rocks. We went all the way to Laredo to try to find some pretty ones.”

He says he’s traveled a lot – from NYC (for appearances on “The Today Show,” “The View,” and “The Montel Williams Show”) to the Auschwitz concentration camps in Poland.

“I wanted barbed wire from the concentration camps,” says Smith. “I put it in my pocket and took it home, and put it on a toilet seat – that was in 1995. In 1996, we went to Germany and saw the Berlin wall, and all the way down to Austria. We saw the mountains from ‘The Sound of Music’…I picked up a rock and nail from the Berlin Wall and two flags, and I put a piece of the rock from one side of the wall, and the piece of barbed wire on a toilet seat. I’ve got a lot of history hanging up in the Toilet Seat Museum.”

Smith says he got the idea to use toilet seats as his canvas when he was still a plumber. He had gone to the plumbing supply house to purchase materials for a job and noticed a pile of slightly damaged toilet seats that were going to be discarded.

“I took about half a dozen toilet seats to my apartment,” remembers Smith. “I went back to the job, and when I got through that night, I started my artwork. I went back and showed the manager of the store what I was doing, and he told me I could have them all. So I had almost 50 seats to start out with.”

Until this day, Smith says he calls plumbing supply houses for damaged seats. Sometimes, people even bring them to him.

Smith says he gets so many visitors that he now only opens up by appointment only.

“I can’t afford to open up every time someone passes by in their car,” he says, taking his work seriously. “I got someone saying they want to come by this weekend from Georgia.”

Smith says he still has lots of energy to keep making his art, and if he is lucky to still be alive in May, he will be making his 94th birthday seat.

Barney Smith’s birthday toilet seats. (Courtesy Facebook)

“I have two decades worth of birthday toilet seats,” says Smith, who tries to fit all of his birthday cards for each year on each birthday seat. He has three daughters, seven grandchildren, and 12 great grandchildren.

If he had one piece of advice to give his younger self, what would it be?

“I have been married for 74 years. I lost my wife a year ago,” says Smith, adding he met her at the age of 18, and she was 17. “I advise to keep God in the arrangement. Anything that comes your way, ask the Lord if this is His will, or don’t do it. That will keep you together..If God is in the arrangement, you will want to stay together. Our long-lived marriage is because of God in the arrangement. That is my advice to anyone.”

December 16, 2014
70-year-old nurse practitioner, and teacher, remembers her most humbling moment

Beth Farren (Photo/Richard Posey)

Beth Farren, 70, continues living her life doing what she loves most – nursing, teaching, and fitting in the time to play tennis.

Originally from Chicago, she has lived in Dallas for the past 33 years, where she volunteers as a nurse practitioner at a nearby clinic, teaches nursing online at Texas Tech, and sits on the board of the North Texas Nurse Practitioners – where she helps raise money for social causes.

“I have lovely days,” says Farren, in her kind, soft voice. “Some days, I diagnose and treat women’s health – pelvic exams, breast exams, pulmonary exams…I also work in the neurology clinic and dermatology clinic. Both have specialty doctors, and I’m their nurse.”

Farren says she started teaching way before she became a nurse practitioner – a career which requires advanced coursework and clinical education beyond that required of a registered nurse.

After getting her bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Farren says she started to think about getting a masters.

“The new dean of the nursing program called me and asked me if I wanted to come teach,” she remembers. “I told her I only had a bachelor’s degree, but she told me they didn’t have enough people with master’s degree, so she was asking those with bachelor’s degrees to do clinical teaching.”

So Farren made an arrangement with her then husband where he helped with their little boys in the morning.

“I started, and I loved it,” says Farren about her first teaching experience. “I taught for them for 10 years.”

During her time in Tennessee, she also worked with women who didn’t have access to prenatal care.

“They were just learning about premature births at that time,” says Farren who took a course in working with premature babies. “I learned that some babies would not have been premature if the mom had just had good prenatal care. I began to be passionate about it.”

So while working on her master’s, she decided she was more interested in prevention and taking care of patients that would benefit from education.

“I mentally left the hospital and pursued courses,” says Farren. “Nowadays, practitioners have a great variety of roles, but when I became a nurse practitioner, we worked outside of the hospitals trying to prevent people from going to the hospital.”

After earning her master’s degree, she moved to Texas for a job opportunity, and there she also earned her doctorate degree.

“I always volunteered one night a week, when my boys were older, at the free clinic,” says Farren. “I’m nothing special. They were just opportunities I had.”

Some of those opportunities included going to Poland and Romania, who were moving away from communism, to teach standards of practice; as well as working at a Cuban refugee camp in Wisconsin one summer.

“In the early ‘80s, Fidel Castro let a bunch of people from psychiatric facilities in Cuba come to America, and all these people showed up in Miami on boats and rafts, and the Army started taking them to different bases to try and take care of them,” says Farren. “The fort I was in was considered a family camp with a lot of pregnant women and children…a number of my patients told me they had been in prison, and I strongly believe a lot of them were political prisoners.”

Perhaps the most impactful moment of her long career, she says, was the moment she thought she might lose her son.

“About 15 years ago, my son had a very serious emergency, and I wound up taking him down to the county hospital here in Dallas,” recounts Farren about her son’s gastric bleed. “One of my students was in the emergency room. She looked up and saw me, and said, ‘Dr. Farren, I’m going to take care of this.’ I realized in that moment that I was able to tell her how much blood he’d lost, and she was able to believe me, because she knew who I was.”

The next day, she says another one of her students took care of him.

“It’s just one of the most humbling things,” says Farren about the whole experience. “I had just done my job to teach these girls, and there they were when I needed them. It wasn’t anything special I did – just the rhythms of life.”

She says her piece of advice to the younger generation is:

“Remember to do what you love, and trust that it will all be ok,” says Farren. “We all worry so much, thinking, ‘Can I make a living doing this?’ ‘Is it even doable?’ I got my doctorate as a single mom, while I worked full-time and did part-time jobs on the side, and nobody in their right mind told me it was a doable thing, but it was.”

September 10, 2014
Tejano sculptor says he’s always ready for his next challenge

Armando Hinojosa (Photo/David Hinojosa)

Armando Hinojosa is a proud Texan, born and raised in the southwestern city of Laredo. His family has inhabited the Lone Star State as early as 1755.

He calls himself “a Tejano,” because his father came from Mexico and married his American mother, who was a direct descendant of the founder of Laredo, Don Tomas Sanchez. But perhaps what makes him even more proud, is the fact he dedicates each day to carrying on his late father’s work as an artist – and he does so with love and careful attention to the slightest detail.

With more than 40 years of experience, the 70-year-old has sculpted bronze pieces for Sea World, Boy Scouts of America, as well as the largest monument at any state capitol in the nation – the 11-piece, life-size, Tejano monument in Austin. On September 6, his statue of Gil Steinke will be unveiled. He was the head football coach at A&I University for 22 years and the first to recruit Black and Hispanic players, according to Hinojosa.

Hinojosa working on the Tejano Monument. (Photo/David Hinojosa)

“I love all my projects, and I put my whole heart in each one, but the one that has given me the most respect is the Tejano Monument,” he says. “Three-fourths of the Tejano Monument is made up of Hispanics…We were here before any Anglos were here. We’ve been here for 500 years.”

The energetic Tejano says every project he receives is a new challenge for him. Although, he loves every piece he works on and puts his full attention on each one, he never dwells on the past once he’s done.

“I gotta move on,” he says. “I gotta work for the future now. I’m ready for something new.”

Hinojosa excitedly mentions the Cotulla Convention Center in South Texas has already booked him to make a life-size sculpture of the city’s founder, Joseph Cotulla.

“I do everything in clay,” says the busy sculptor. “You can buy it green, grey, or brown. Then I send it to the foundry where they make a mold…a five foot statue will cost about $30,000 and three months to make, but it’ll last forever.”

He explains it took him 12 years to finish the Tejano Monument, because it took that long to raise the funds.

Ever since graduating college, teaching had been Hinojosa’s primary source of income.

“I married my wife, and we had three kids,” remembers Hinojosa, stating fondly that his wife was an award-winning teacher. “I was a teacher seven or eight years, then I started in the arts.”

After opening up his own gallery and running it for about five years, he says he went back to teaching another 10 years, at the end of which he was hired as Dean of Art for a new arts high school in Laredo.

“I was there for 20 years. I would get up at six in the morning, work in my studio till eight, then go to school,” recounts Hinojosa. “I was never lazy. I was doing both, but when I got the Tejano Monument, I quit and I’ve been doing art since.”

These days he spends his days sculpting, and his nights painting cowboy or Mexican themes, with either watercolors or oils. He says he is often reminded of when he first started his career with his dad.

“He would paint billboards,” says Hinojosa. “My dad would draw the letters, and I would paint the inside….Then I went to high school. While other people had jobs in stores, I was helping my dad paint the signs outside.”

He says his talented dad is still known throughout Laredo by his first name, Geronimo. Years ago, he had been hired to do props for Hollywood, but he didn’t go, because he didn’t know English. Geronimo only had a sixth grade education, but Hinojosa is very grateful for the invaluable lessons he passed down to him.

“Have a dream and stick to it,” Hinojosa says is one of those lessons. “You have to pay your dues. You have to keep at it. When I first started, I didn’t paint or sculpt like I do now. I was born with it, but I also learned from my dad.”

September 3, 2014