Pike Park sits on a stretch of Harry Hines Boulevard in the small piece of Little Mexico that hasn't yet been devoured by Uptown. And on that park sits a 103-year-old building that now, finally, has a name: Santos Rodriguez Center.
To make that happen, 15 people seated around a makeshift horseshoe in a small room at Dallas City Hall raised their hands at the same time Thursday and said aye. And when they did, a 75-year-old woman sitting in that small conference room smiled, slightly, almost imperceptibly. As we walked out, I asked her how she felt.
"Wonderful," said Bessie Rodriguez. "I feel wonderful."
Which is an amazing, almost unbelievable thing to hear. Because 45 Julys ago, next to a Fina station that once stood along Cedar Springs Road near Bookhout Street in modern-day Uptown, a Dallas police officer named Darrell L. Cain killed Bessie's 12-year-old son Santos.
Cain had accused Santos and his 13-year-old brother David of stealing eight bucks from a Coke machine. To try to elicit a confession, he put his .357 Magnum revolver to Santos' head. The boy was handcuffed. The officer pulled the trigger twice. The first time, nothing happened. David tried to console his terrified little brother. Santos pleaded that he had done nothing wrong and was telling the truth. Cain then pulled the trigger a second time, at which point he shot Santos in the head, point-blank. Cain was convicted of murder and sentenced to five years in prison.
Bessie Rodriguez, a product of Little Mexico, has waited a very long time for the city to acknowledge her boy's brutal murder at the hands of a man who was supposed to protect Santos. It took 40 years — 40 years! — before a mayor even apologized, as Mike Rawlings did in 2013.
But now, finally, the city will name a building after her boy, thanks to many people, chief among them Park Board member Jesse Moreno, for whom this was always a cause — "as closure for the family," he said after Thursday's vote, "and also to preserve history."
That building at Pike Park isn't just any place, either. It's the very community center in which organizers met in the days after Santos' murder — "something that any American would be ashamed of," President Jimmy Carter would say in 1978. There, the organizers planned the protest that turned into a riot.
For decades, politicians told Bessie this city would do right by Santos. And for decades, they did nothing. Because that is what Dallas excels at — refusing to acknowledge or grapple with its sordid past while marching ever forward, eyes fixed on that mythical. Which is why my son has never heard the name "Santos Rodriguez" uttered in any history class. Or why, until now, there was nothing in this city to truly memorialize the slain son of Little Mexico — even years after Seattle, of all places, already named a park after the boy.
I was almost 5 when Santos was killed, and I remember only bits and pieces about the shooting and the aftermath. Maybe I saw it on the TV news or overheard my parents talking about it over dinner.
"It was the big news of the day," Dad said when I asked him what he recalled of July 1973. "I can't believe it's been 45 years. Felt like it was two weeks ago. It's hard to imagine."
Now imagine being Bessie Rodriguez, who remained here after everything.
"I have been going through a lot all these years, and I am glad people haven't let me down," Bessie said Thursday as we sat in the City Hall Flag Room. She was surrounded by Moreno; Hadi Jawad of the Dallas Peace and Justice Center; Dallas ISD trustee Miguel Solis; and West Dallas civic leader Ronnie Mestas, who had all come to speak to the Park Board on her behalf.
"They have been there for me," she said, softly. "Because not a lot of people have stood up for me."
But, she added, to have this center now, finally, "this is making that right."
The naming is only the beginning, though: Pike Park rec center, such as it is, is a shabby, shameful place — "dilapidated," as Park and Recreation Director Willis Winters put it Thursday. Winters, an architect, gave me a tour years ago, begrudgingly, because he was embarrassed by what it had become.
The center's second floor was shorn off during a renovation in the 1950s, when the lighted ball field was installed and the small playground expanded. I don't think the place has been touched since the 1978 redo, which is when the swimming pool out front was filled in and the gazebo was planted.
Winters asked a local architecture firm to draw up plans to restore the center. The firm did so, for free. But now we will find out how committed this city is to doing right by Santos: Winters said a renovation will cost around $7.5 million. Which should be nothing in this city.
Not for Pike Park, a rusted penny surrounded by towering stacks of $100 bills. Not for Santos. And not for the woman who has spent 45 years wondering what her 12-year-old son might have become.
"There were a lot of promises made," Bessie said before we parted ways. "And here's one that came true."
