Roots stay strong for the few remaining at Santo Niño

David Adame/Caller-Times

Jose Noe Martinez, a retired U.S. Department of Agriculture soil conservation service worker who lives on a 200-acre farm, stands in a cemetery at the rural community of Santo Niño.

It may not be on the map, but residents of Santo Niño in Duval County say their spot of Texas soil is the only place they'd ever dream of calling home.
   Outsiders might be perfunctory in description, pinpointing Santo Niño as the rural community sandwiched 20 miles south of San Diego and about 4 miles north of Rios.
   Residents, however, say Santo Niño is where five families - the sum of its population - pull back the cover of night with the crowing of roosters and where they milk the last drop of daylight before being lulled to sleep by the summer song of cicadas.
   "It is the most beautiful piece of Earth I can think of," said resident Guadalupe Guerra, 67, who returned to Santo Niño nine years ago after a 27-year career as a Corpus Christi firefighter.
   Guerra is among the few who, through the years, have returned to their place of birth or childhood.
   As old-timers die and jobs and better prospects in bigger cities lure its younger generation, residents like Guerra fear that perhaps one day Santo Niño may be nothing more than a distant memory.
   Not alone
   Santo Niño is not alone, said Steve Murdock, chief demographer for the Texas State Data Center at Texas A&M University.
   Rural communities throughout the state that traditionally have been agricultural or gas- and oil-based have seen their populations declining every decade since the 1920s and '30s, Murdock said.

David Adame/Caller-Times

Nona Gonzalez Garcia is renovating a 130-year-old caliche house in the small Santo Niño community.

   Much of this rural-to-urban migration is because of the technological evolution of agriculture.
   "When jobs disappear, so do the people," he said.
   But others in Santo Niño, like Jose Noe Martinez and his cousin, Elma Gonzalez, are optimistic. They say the soul of Santo Niño is like a magnet, every now and then drawing a resident or two back to the community to live out their retirement years.
   "Most of us out here are related one way or another, and we cling to what our forefathers left us, the land and the customs," said Martinez, a retired U.S. Department of Agriculture soil conservation service worker who lives on a 200-acre farm. "That's why there'll always be that one in each family who'll come out here to toil with the soil or work some cattle.
   "But Santo Niño will never be what it was 20 or 30 years ago."
   Rural changes
   In the 1800s, after the Civil War, Santo Niño heads of household primarily raised sheep. By the early 1900s, crops such as cotton, corn and hay provided farmers' livelihoods, followed by cattle raising, Martinez said.
   In the 1920s, the community saw its one and only church. Built by Catholic priests who had settled in Hebbronville after being exiled from Mexico, they named it Santo Niño. It was torn down years ago after falling into disrepair.
   When Martinez graduated from San Diego High School in 1945, Santo Niño had 29 families. Most sons and daughters never strayed far from their farmland, but World War II changed all that.
   "That's the first time our family way of life was disrupted," he recalled.
   Veterans soon married, sought an education with the G.I. Bill or picked up a trade and chose not to return to Santo Niño. Electricity didn't come to Santo Niño until 1949; telephones followed nearly a decade later.
   After graduating from high school, Martinez returned to Santo Niño to work the land he had inherited from his father and grandfather and in 1956 began working for the soil conservation service in Benavides. He and his wife raised six children in Santo Niño, none of whom live there now.
   Oldest resident
   Santo Niño's oldest person, 86-year-old Lena Gonzalez, of Hayworth, Okla., came to the community in 1932 after marrying Martinez's uncle. The youngest resident of Santo Niño is her great-granddaughter, 11-year-old Natalie Alaniz.
   Lena Gonzalez's daughter, Elma Gonzalez, left Santo Niño in 1955 for San Diego in search of work, eventually moving to Alice and Corpus Christi. She returned in 1983 and today lives with her mother, daughter and three grandchildren on the property she inherited from her father.
   "I left because I had to find work to help my family back at the farm pay the bills and to help my parents with my siblings, who were still in school," said Elma Gonzalez. "But I was never a city gal.
   "I'll live the rest of my years out here. There's no other way of life for me. It's so peaceful and quiet and I want my grandkids to experience the life I did as a child."
   Childhood memories were among the reasons that drew Guerra back to the 230 acres he inherited from his father.
   And much like it was when he was a boy, everything about Santo Niño today still is rooted in family, Guerra said.
   Visits to cemetery
   The Santo Niño cemetery, located on Guerra's property, continues to be visited every year by kinfolk from as far away as Chicago and Michigan. More than 100 Santo Niño residents are buried there, including Guerra's parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.
   Family also was there last year when his barn was destroyed by fire.
   "One call and everyone showed up with a bucket in hand," Guerra recalled.
   Even when Guerra was halfway around the world, Santo Niño was never far from his thoughts.
   "How I longed to be in Santo Niño when I was in the service in 1954 in Germany," he said. "All I could think about were its very starry nights.
   "There's no better sight anywhere, here where my roots are."