This morning, I was revisiting a blog post by Rice University historian Melissa Kean about an important figure in Houston and Mexican American history, Elias Ramirez. Ramirez was one of the founders of Houston’s first chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and his name now adorns a state office building in the former home of Hughes Tools.
There’s a lovely photograph of him on the Portal to Texas History.
Ramirez also worked for more than three decades as a janitor at Rice University, and as Kean noted, his death in 1960 was later noticed in Rice’s alumni magazine, the Sallyport. Wanting to learn more about his time at Rice, I did a little searching this morning and turned up three interesting sources: an oral history with his son Joe Elias Ramirez (who survived a long ordeal as a Korean War POW) and two oral histories (in 2009 and in 2016) with Ramirez’s grandson, Frank Partida.
Both of the Partida interviews should be significant to Rice historians for the light they shed on how the university was perceived in and related to Mexican American communities in Houston, like the one that Ramirez led in and around Magnolia Park.
In 2009, Partida remembered his grandfather’s daily routine:
He worked for Rice. At that time it was called “Rice Institute” which is now Rice University. He worked there thirty-four years as a janitor, and my grandfather use to, we had the street cars here in Magnolia. He use to catch the first one going downtown. He’d get downtown to where Market Square is. They had the bus station there[ ] bus station. He’d buy the paper, he’d read the paper and then he’d go to Rice. He didn’t go in until about 8 o’clock, but he worked there thirty-four hours, or thirty-four years there. And he was always interested in getting things done, getting organized, you know like this Sociedad Mutualista and then LULAC …
Partida also remembered with pride the ways that his grandfather’s efforts in the community later made it possible for neighbors to attend Rice:
I think back and I think of the work of not only my grandfather and the other people that I knew, you know what they’ve done, the people that came out of here that were born and raised here in Magnolia that went to Rice Institute at time. It was very hard to get in there, and especially Mexicanos, but they did. One came out as an Engineer, what was his name, Chairez and the other was a plumber here, I forget the name. Anyway, they were two. We also, we’re very proud of other Mexicanos like Lupe Lopez who attended the University of Houston. He at one time was captain of the basketball team. … There’s other Mexicanos that are from Magnolia. We have some doctors come up and dentists that were born and raised here, that later on came out here to the Catholic Church and did free dental work for the children in the community. This is where our forefathers came to look for that dream.
In 2016, Partida elaborated further on his grandfather’s work at Rice:
my grandfather used to work, in fact, he worked for 39 years as a janitor at the university, at Rice Institute now called Rice University, and he was a man that I looked up to. I never heard him say a, what you call a dirty word or anything like that. He would never speak bad about people and he was, he used to study a lot. He used to bring books that they gave him at the university and he would read. He had his own library there of all the books that he collected there. Now, another thing he would do is that, you know, most of the students at Rice were well (laughs) well financed students and at the end of the school year they would leave their clothes, their golf clubs, their gloves, tennis rackets and suits, shoes and all of that, they would leave them there and since he was the janitor, he used to pick them all up there and they would tell him to go and throw them away, say, why throw them away, they’re very good, people in our community need them.
This just scratches the surface, I’m sure, of what can be learned about Ramirez’s time at Rice and the history of the university’s relations with Houston’s Mexican American community in the postwar period.
Thank goodness for the hard work of oral history projects at other universities, like Civil Rights in Black and Brown at Texas Christian University and the Houston History Project at the University of Houston, which also help to preserve stories important in Rice’s history that have often been under-told.
