Texas Champions - 1949

Texas High School State Champions - 1949 Bowie High School - Texas High School State Champions Bowie High sat in El Paso's Second Ward, or Segundo Barrio, 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 one square mile, 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, 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, Camarillo said, "like another country." http://www.si.com/vault/2011/06/27/106081983/the-barrio-boys

Area: Central / South Central

Source: Tony (Azul) Alvarado Jr.

Uploaded by: El Paso Museum of History