New Journal Highlights African-American Community

Board members of the African American Community Development Center gathered on June 5, 2025, to receive a new historical manuscript documenting Harlingen’s mid‑century Black community. The photograph shows Alfonso Guillen, president of the Rio Grande Valley Hispanic Genealogical Society, joined by Idalia Flores, Dr. Alonzo Cavazos, Linda [surname not provided], Betty Emerson, Bennie Newby, and Mrs. Flowers as the group stands in front of the center’s sign during a board meeting in Harlingen. In the image, Dr. Cavazos presents a copy of the Rio Grande Valley Hispanic Genealogical Society Journal, Volume 15, to Center representatives as a gesture of partnership and shared commitment to local history.

The manuscript focuses on African American residents who lived in the segregated westside neighborhoods of Harlingen in 1950, using the 1950 federal census to reconstruct the community block by block. Researchers combed the census to identify Black households and then created a detailed database of residents, capturing key demographic data and family connections. The first section of the work presents just under one hundred genealogies, offering narrative sketches and lineage charts of families who called the westside home during the era of legal segregation.

Where records allowed, the family histories were traced back as far as 1840 and then carried forward from 1950 to 2025, weaving together more than one hundred and fifty years of African American life in the region. This long view was assembled from government documents, obituaries, and online ancestry resources, tying individual households to broader migration, labor, and civil rights stories. The quiet but proud presentation at the African American Community Development Center marked not only the delivery of a journal issue, but also a symbolic recognition that the lives of westside Black residents—once confined to the margins of official records—are now documented, named, and preserved for future generations, illustrating the shared commitment of African American and Hispanic residents to honoring the Rio Grande Valley’s intertwined histories.​