Underground Source of Life

Our aquifer is a very important part of our city and our ecosystem as well as our survival. Elyzabeth Earnly a representative for AGUA came to speak to my humanities class at Palo Alto College. She explained exactly what happens in city council meetings about the building of housing divisions and other complexes on aquifer recharge zones. She talked to us about the many different city ordinances that we have that developers must follow. Although we have city ordinances developers are still able to get away with disobeying them because their land is vested also know as “Grandfathering”; which dismisses them from having to follow the ordinances set forth by City Council and many other agencies like the one that Elyzabeth is a part of. She also gave us the names of other organizations that are there to help the city council in enforcing or city ordinances. Her presentation was an eye opener for me and made me realize how important the aquifer is to our city. She also mentioned how important it is that we stick together as citizens of San Antonio to rid our city of these developers that don’t seem to care about our only fresh water source.

Life in My Neighborhood

I live on the South Side of town on 205 Sunglo DR. about five minuets away is Loop 410 and I-35. My neighborhood is full of working class families and is kind of a quiet place to live. Most of the houses around my block are alright and well maintained but some are rundown, but I have seen worse in other parts of the city of San Antonio. Most of the families in my neighborhood have middle aged parents with young kids or teenagers still living with them and most of the families living around me are of Hispanic origin. My Grandmother lives right across the street from me and my family my mom is her daughter and my Uncle lives with her and takes care of her when he can; he is a busy man most of the day. I live cattycorner from the Carroll Bell Elementary school that I attended as a kid growing up in this neighborhood. Not more than about four or five blocks away there is an HEB and a couple of mini malls and shopping centers, so everything that is a necessity to living is no more than a few blocks away from my house. One bad part of living next to a school and having small streets is the traffic that builds up after the kids are let out, they tried to fix this by making a child pick-up area but its still to small to handle the amount of cars that come through there. Despite that it has cut back a little bit of the traffic that would occur in the neighborhood. Another bad part is about one block away is a pretty big Night Club that every Friday, Saturday, and late Sundays there is a lot of traffic on Pleasanton Road around eleven o’clock when the club opens and two o’clock at night when the club closes. Other than that there’s not much that goes on. I go to Palo Alto College as a Criminal Justice Major and that’s where I do most of my studying even with my busy schedule. I work with my Uncle, who is a Construction Contractor, as his main Drafter, who draws all of his blue prints for the business, which is called A.D. Willems Construction. I also spend a lot of time and physical working at my church, Mayfield Park Baptist Church which I have attended since I was born. I am apart of the Building and Grounds Team which is responsible for cleaning, cutting and maintaining the lawn and small gardens that we have on the premises. I also am apart of the Morning Worship Team I run the sound board as well as run the cameras that we have recording the Pastor’s sermons to give out to the homebound members of our church. My Spiritual wellbeing is a very important part of my life and always will be. I go to church every Sunday as well as the Wednesday night service that we put together for the community; we have a fall festival coming up in a few weeks that is free and open to the whole community.

MAP TO WORK

MAP TO CHURCH

MAP TO SCHOOL

Water of Life

One of the most important parts of a mission is its water system, with out it they would have surely failed as a mission because they would not have had water to irrigate their crops as well as bring them water for their families and their livestock. An acequia was used through out all of the missions in one way or another. The initial survival of a new mission depended upon the planting and harvesting of crops. In south central Texas, intermittent rainfall and the need for a reliable water source made the design and installation of an acequia system a high priority for all the missions. The main acequia that is part of the San Antonio Missions is the Espada Aqueduct, which serves water to The San Francisco de la Espada Mission. Completed in 1740, the acequia diverted river water from the San Antonio River into an acequia madre (mother ditch). The use of acequias was originally brought to the arid regions of Spain by the Romans and the Moors. When Franciscans missionaries arrived in the desert Southwest they found the system worked well in the hot, dry environment, that which was like the environment here in Texas. In order to distribute water to the missions along the San Antonio River, Franciscan missionaries oversaw the construction of seven gravity-flow ditches, dams, and at least one aqueduct, a 15-mile network that irrigated approximately 3,500 acres of land. The dam, ditch, and aqueduct survived a century of Indian attacks, ravaging floods, and controversy before the dam was repaired, in 1895. The dam had a huge impact on the missions Indians because it was there only source of water. With out it they would have been unable to bring water to irrigate there crops and would not have had the food necessary to feed there friends and family in the mission. You can just imagine what it would have been like without the acequia to bring them water, despite the hard work they put into building it. It is still in operation, but now plays a secondary role beside the modern dam. This water is used by residents living on these neighboring lands, for their water source and also for irrigating their farmlands all around the area. The people that lived in the missions before still live on in their decedents today as well as their culture lives on in the people today.

Mission Espada

I and a couple of classmates from my humanities class at Palo Alto College visited one of the missions here in San Antonio. Mission San Francisco de la Espada, also known as Mission Espada, is full of history it goes as far back as the 1600’s. The people of the missions were a diverse group of people made up mostly of Indians from all over the country, and were run by the Spaniards. The missions were here for many reasons the main one was to bring all the Indians from New Spain into Catholicism. Another reason for the missions was to make New Spain bigger and better than any other nation by bringing the Indians into the missions. They wanted to make the Indians civilized in their eyes and some Indians were forced to do so. The Indians were taken away from their former ways of living and thrown into a completely new way of life. The hardest part for the Indians to overcome was the concept of time, eating, worshiping in the parish, work, and even free time all had a certain part of the day that they needed to be done. Also the Indians were in a way forced to learn a new language because the priests and the soldiers were not going to learn their way of communication. Despite all that the people of the mission had to endure they still live on today although they may not live in the missions their culture is still apart of our world today.