Pat Cunningham moved to Cedar Creek, an unincorporated community in Bastrop County, Texas, in 2020. Located just southeast of Austin, Cedar Creek offered the retired nurse and her husband, who moved from St. Louis, Missouri, a chance to be with family and enjoy milder winters. Unbeknownst to the couple, their new home also came with a unique retirement project that has occupied them since its discovery in March 2021: preserving Texas’s Mexican cemeteries, forgotten for decades and in urgent need of protection and restoration.

“We found it because we were doing yard work, and I saw this sea of white,” Cunningham recalled. Hundreds of white irises were blooming just beyond the Cunninghams’ fenceline, and further inspection revealed wrought-iron decorations and over a dozen grave markers on a roughly one-acre plot. The grave markers held Spanish-language names and birthdates carved in stone, dating as far back as the mid-1800s. “They were beautiful and obviously very old,” Cunningham said about preserving Texas’s Mexican cemeteries. “It was just astounding.”

The cemetery that Cunningham discovered is one of over 200 Mexican cemeteries scattered throughout Texas, according to an analysis of the Texas Historical Commission’s Texas Historic Sites Atlas by nonprofit organization Latinos in Heritage Conservation. That organization is committed to preserving Latinx historic places, which are often overlooked by existing national frameworks. Federal preservation institutions, such as the National Register of Historic Places, were designed to prioritize preserving sites tied to an Anglo-American retelling of the nation’s past. Today, less than one percent of sites on the National Register are associated with Latinx communities.

Texas’s Mexican cemeteries are sacred sites of significance to descendants, as well as cultural heritage sites that can continue to serve their communities when they are preserved and made accessible to visitors. “For many Mexican and Indigenous traditions, death is not viewed only through the lens of loss; grief and celebration exist side by side,” explained Sehila Mota Casper, executive director of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, preserving Texas’s Mexican cemeteries. “Cemeteries become places where families gather to remember, share stories, and honor ancestors.”

Read the full article about preserving Texas’s Mexican cemeteries by Marianne Dhenin at Nonprofit Quarterly.