La tragedia de la inundación de San Antonio / The Tragedy of the San Antonio Flood

By Sarah Zenaida Gould

After being lost to history for more than a century, La tragedia de la inundación de San Antonio is widely available for the first time, translated into English to commemorate the hundred-year anniversary of the San Antonio flood of 1921 and the dozens of lives lost.

This short work of twenty sections paints a picture of the city’s segregated population and income disparities before plunging into the disaster. Written in the style of a nineteenth-century high dramatic tragedy, the author (who remains anonymous) introduces us to the city’s four rivers, usually life-sustaining resources and recreational spots, that turn villainous during this deadly storm. “San Antonio river swallowed pianos, velvet rugs, Venetian moons of unparalleled beauty and wealth. Alazán Creek drowned children, killed women, knocked down men.” La tragedia’s account documents the destruction, the brunt of which was borne by the city’s Mexican population.  

Some ten personal accounts of Mexican heroism and escape illustrate the disaster’s magnitude. Some manage to survive, but others meet a tragic end. Written with dramatic flair, the accounts are often put forth as the voices of the people and provide a window into the devastation that can only come from survivors on the ground. The work ends with descriptions of early recovery and rescue efforts by the Red Cross and the Mexican organization Cruz Azul and an accounting for the flood victims.

The work in its original Spanish language and an accompanying English translation are supplemented with more than twenty black-and-white photographs taken during the flood’s immediate aftermath. A foreword by Sarah Zenaida Gould and an introduction by Char Miller provide historical context. 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maverick Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781595349781

Sarah Zenaida Gould

Sarah Zenaida Gould is the executive director of the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute, a national project to collect and disseminate Mexican American civil rights history. A longtime public historian, she has curated dozens of exhibits with Museo del Westside, of which she is the founding director, and Institute of Texan Cultures. She is cofounder and co-chair of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, a national organization promoting historic preservation in Latino communities and advocating for the protection of tangible and intangible Latino heritage. 

Book preview

Introduction

We must dig through the pain: an introduction

It takes a self-assured writer to place a horse at the center of a particularly wrenching, human tragedy—in this case the punishing flood of 1921 that tore through the city of San Antonio, flattening its westside barrio, killing an estimated 80 people, and inundating its downtown core. The size and significance of the disaster, the most damaging in the history of this flood-prone community, meant that there were any number of important stories that the uncredited author of La Tragedia de la Inundación de San Antonio might have focused on. Yet that one of them involves a horse named Joe helps explain why La Tragedia is such a compelling read. Deeply effective, poetically rendered, smart and insightful, the 64-page document, which was written and published within a week of the flood, is the single most important record of the harrowing late-night hours of September 9-10, 1921, when San Antonio went under water. As a weakening hurricane spun ashore in northern Mexico and then arced north and east into Texas, it brought heavy rain to the parched region. The precipitation intensified during the early evening of Friday, September 9, and as the rain slanted down, lightning lit up the darkening skies. The much-needed storm seemed to break the annual summer dry spell, a welcome respite from months of enervating heat. The opening lines of La Tragedia capture this anticipation of those reveling at the start of the weekend:

Despite the two-day rain that had been relentlessly hitting the town streets … despite the frightening tempest that began with a…glare of prolonged and continuous lightning… despite the sound of cannon-like roars produced by the thunder; the city, cheerful and confident, indulged in its pleasures.

Yet the longer the rain persisted—some sections of the upper reaches of the San Antonio River watershed received more than 17 inches—it created dangerous, white-out conditions. The more the thunder rumbled, the more anxious many San Antonians became.

This mounting wariness seemed especially pronounced on the city’s west side, home to a large concentration of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, a significant proportion of whom lived in substandard housing abutting the four narrow creeks that cut through their neighborhoods. By 10 p.m., the Alazán, Martínez, San Pedro, and Apache creeks were overflowing their banks. Their debris-choked stormwater churned down unpaved streets and alleys and dislodged shacks from their footings. As this fast-moving material collided with other structures, it piled up against and/or undercut them, adding to the dangers facing any frightened residents who decided that they should flee to higher ground. Some escaped on foot and managed to pick their way to safety; others had to scramble up the nearest tree and pray it held up; still others were knocked off their feet and were never seen again.

The multi-generational Ramón/Zepeda family chose a different escape route: after much discussion, Juan Zepeda sloshed through the rain and mud, harnessed the family’s horse—Joe—to its wagon, and then helped his wife, Juanita Ramón de Zepeda, their five children, his father-in-law, Donaciano Ramón, and two nieces into the vehicle. By all accounts, Joe was a beloved member of the extended family, and his surefootedness surely was one reason why the adults gambled that he could pull them out of the Alazán’s floodwaters. Alas, they lost that bet: just as they rolled into the stream to cross to the other side, a free-floating shack slammed into the wagon and threw all the passengers into the rampaging creek. There were only two survivors: the oldest, Donaciano Ramón, and Joe, who somehow slipped his harness and found the strength to regain the bank.

The broad outlines of the family’s tragedy were featured in the city’s three daily newspapers, La Prensa as well as the San Antonio Express and the Light. But what distinguished La Tragedia’s recounting of the Ramón/Zepeda clan’s heartbreaking losses was the interview that its author conducted with Rafaela Garza de Ramón, the family’s matriarch, who had stayed behind in the family’s home at 1540 South Laredo St. Written as if in her voice, her internal fears and prayers given full expression, the subsequent narrative, a form of creative nonfiction, offers a penetrating eyewitness account of the flood’s disruptive power. It was she who had urged her husband to leave with the rest—‘Donaciano,’ I said to my husband…,’ I am afraid they might get killed by a lightning bolt… that the stream has grown… you should also go with them.…’ At that point in the interview, she broke down: The sobs of the unfortunate woman cut the thread of her story, the reporter observed. Respecting her silence, we remained standing close to her, allowing the pain to diminish and waiting for her to carry on with the recollection of her misfortune. Her fears were driven in part by not knowing the fate of her loved ones and in part by the rapid rise of water in her home that threatened to engulf her. She climbed up on a chest of drawers and watched as the heavens continued to flash bright: there she waited for death or salvation, whatever God determined for my existence. One lightning bolt illuminated a shapeless bundle approaching her flooded home, and she panicked: How horrible is the darkness and how many ghosts does fear bring! What it brought, however, was not a monster but the horse friend, Joe.

The animal stuck its head through a shattered window, staring at my deranged face. If Joe knew how to speak, he would have told me the painful story of that unforgettable night: the pain wrote in my heart with a red-hot iron for my whole life. As the floodwaters slowly drained away, Rafaela Garza de Ramón went outside, wrapped her arms around Joe’s neck, and let my crying be confused with the muddy water in the mane of the beast.

That she found consolation in this embrace of the family horse, later replicated in her husband’s arms, is a striking example of the author’s ability to empathize with her plight, and by doing so evoke the depths of loss and grief, and the tests of faith that the 1921 flood generated. Rafaela Ramón, like Joe the horse, are stand-ins for so many other devastated families. Indeed, this narrative device underscores the author’s overarching intent: Like a rosary that is fragmented in prayers, we will go through its beads of agony to reveal, one by one, the bloody and painful dramas of this cruel and bitter flood.

One of its cruelties, brilliantly revealed, is the disproportionate impact that the flood had on the city’s most vulnerable population. La Tragedia bluntly analyzes the stark disparities in who died and where they perished, and the relationship between these fatalities and the city’s physical geography and economic inequities. To make this case, the author juxtaposes the differing levels of damage that the westside creeks and the San Antonio River produced. When the waters finally receded, it became clear that the San Antonio River "hit the rich—it affected the big stores on Avenue C. The powerful houses of Houston and Commerce St.¹ It must be said in its honor that it was greedy—it wanted riches and destroyed estates. The usually dry Alazán, by contrast, had become a torrent. It was relentless. It was the taker of lives—it was the cruel executioner who wiped out every poor soul it encountered. The San Antonio River may have wiped out material possessions, but the Alazán drowned children, killed women, knocked down men." Nor were its victims random, La Tragedia insists: It was our people, the Mexican people, that succumbed defeated, whose poverty did not allow them to reside in a house located in a pious neighborhood, a street near the center and out of danger. The sons of Mexico were the ones that fell asleep, unperturbed by the danger, to wake up in the hands of a monster.²

Data from the city’s mortuaries and newspaper accounts back up this argument: more than 90 percent of those who died as a result of the flood were Spanish-surnamed, and most of these were women and children living on the west side. All four of the people who drowned in the San Antonio River’s floodwaters were Spanish-surnamed, too. Yet even as the text in its last pages identifies many of the victims, and notes their impoverished status, this recounting is not simply a story of victimization. La Tragedia provides instead a nuanced reading of the flood through its sharp focus on the heroics of those who survived or aided those caught in the floodwaters. One of those initially floundering in the roaring Alazán was eleven-year-old Francisco Gutiérrez. As he tumbled through the turbulence, he grabbed his younger nephew, put him on his back, and then climbed a stunted tree to await rescue. Battered black-and-blue by flood-driven debris, and nearly unconscious when rescuers at dawn finally located him, Gutiérrez’s strength and integrity earned the praise of La Tragedia’s author (and of English-language reporters). Another whose bravery saved other—in this case almost a score of people from the stormwaters—was a U.S. Army enlistee, Alfredo Gutiérrez (no relation to Francisco). For hours he stood in the churning confluence of the Alazán and San Pedro creeks, but what he remembered most about his rescue efforts was not those he had saved but those whom he could not reach, who swept past him as he fought against the current fending off the branches brought by these muddy waters. The latter particularly prevented me from doing the work of rescue… more could have been done… much more.

A soldier’s selflessness found its parallel in the generous efforts of the Red Cross professionals and volunteers who doled out food and clothing to those thousands who had lost everything. The national organization, whose membership, managerial expertise, and operational logistics had expanded rapidly during World War I, proved essential to San Antonio’s recovery. So did a new mutual-aid society, Cruz Azul Mexicana. A westside organization founded as early as 1918, with ties to the Mexican consular office, Cruz Azul came in for considerable praise especially because of its local, hands-on approach to its relief efforts. And for the fact that it was a female-directed agency, comprised of brave girls, worthy matrons, all made for the fight and the good. Led by Marta M. Acosta, Cruz Azul drew on the largesse of westside merchants and grocers to set up two main distribution points, where it remained active for the next two months, an engagement that testified to the west side’s capacity for self-help and self-determination that were critical to its residents’ survival and a reflection of their resilience.

Those qualities were equally important to one of La Tragedia’s framing devices: even as the text diligently depicts the pain and suffering of the Mexican colony, it did so to ensure that the memory of what happened on September 9-10, 1921, would not be lost. The horrible history will arise, and over the years, tell our descendants of this tragedy in one of the most beautiful, joyful, and affluent populations in the United States. That it played a key role in relating this tragic past was only part of La Tragedia’s purpose. It was also designed to laud those who had been so sorely tested by the flood’s killing force: We have also said that we have wanted to exalt in it the Mexican blood, that cramps and crawls and goes through life suffering, poor, miserable and sad, but fills the soul with an indomitable value, with a heroic and noble feeling.… Out of such misery came much virtue: As you look through these scenes you will see that they are eagles, that they are lions, that Mexicans are always indomitable warriors. Preserving these cultural attributes among exiles living in the United States, in México de afuera, writes literary scholar