Felix Mexican Restaurant

When a restaurant customer asked Felix Tijerina for "tomato catsup," the young Mexican-American busboy didn't know what the words meant and could not read them on the side of the bottle. But he was determined to learn. His efforts that started with those two words ended up helping thousands of children all across Texas and formed a model for the national program known as Head Start.

Felix Tijerina came to Texas as a boy in 1915, fleeing with his widowed mother and sisters from the Mexican Revolution. Facing grinding poverty and crushing discrimination, they worked picking cotton in South Texas. They moved wherever there was work, ending up in cotton fields south of Houston. Tijerina earned $1.50 a day carrying water to the workers. Growing older, he found a job as an obrero (laborer) loading crates at the Farmers Market in Houston. Then, at 14, a friend helped him get a job in a restaurant. At night, he made lists of English words from newspapers and memorized them.

Rising from busboy to waiter and then to restaurant owner, the story of for Hispanic children so they could learn a list of English words, just the way he had done as a young boy years before. In 1956, Tijerina achieved a platform for his dream of better education for children. He was elected national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the largest such organization in the U.S. That same year, Felix Tijerina found that as many as 200,000 children in Texas could not read or write. He made education a primary of focus of his work with LULAC. Traveling around the state, he discovered several small programs to help illiterate children scattered across South Texas. Seeing a pre-school escuelita (little school) at work in Freeport to teach Hispanic children to speak English, Tijerina first launched a radio program to do the same thing.

Young Felix Tijerina

LULAC Conference

The next year, Isabel Verver, a bi-lingual 17-year-old high school student in Ganado wrote to Felix Tijerina to say she wanted to help. More than half the Spanish-speaking children in her school district had failed. Others were dropping out. She had permission from the public school to use a classroom in the summer. Tijerina paid her $25 a week, and supplied 400 English words compiled by teachers he knew, as well as classroom supplies. They called it the "Little School of the 400." The instruction included words and games about family, school, health, and cleanliness. Of the 42 children who came that summer, all entered first grade - and all learned to read in English. All passed.

By 1959, there were 70 Little Schools across the state, with funding from the Texas Legislature. Through LULAC, Tijerina helped create Little Schools in New York and New Jersey. When President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs were formed, the Little Schools were cited as one of the models for Project Head Start. President Johnson - a Texan and Tijerina friend - founded the national program in 1964. Felix Tijerina, born in 1905, who never got the chance to go to school, saw the largest pre-school program in history successfully launched to help millions of children of all races and all languages. He died in 1965.

To learn more about Felix Tijerina, Houston history, Little Schools, LULAC, and Mexican-American heritage, read:

Mexican American Odyssey, Felix Tijerina, Entrepreneur and Civic Leader, 1905-1965, by Thomas H. Kreneck. University of Houston Series in Mexican American Studies. Published by Texas A&M University Press (2001).

The Felix Tijerina, Sr. Family Papers are held at The Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.

Written by: Mimi Crosley Detering, Museum of Houston