Oldest neighborhood
group wants to serve all
The
Southside
community
is proud of
its Tracy
heritage.
38 |
T
racy’s Southside has a
history of looking out for
one another. It is a legacy
that the South Side Community
Organization wants to preserve
and expand to the entire city.
The community began as a
loose collection of train boxcars,
filled with workers brought by the
railroads to work the switching
yard that Tracy was built around.
“When people came from
Mexico in 1910 to Tracy,” Ray
Morelos, a South Side Community
Organization board member, said,
“it was at that time a railroad
town, so they were working for
the railroad company. They were
housed in boxcars. That was the
conditions they lived in.”
Morelos said his entire family
was raised without a permanent home.
“As a kid, we used to play out
here, not recognizing they were
boxcars,” he said. “My father and
mother were born in boxcars.”
It would be decades before some
families would buy land south of
the tracks to build family homes.
The
Guadalupe
Society
was formed in the 1950s in the
Southside community as a tie to
the Catholic Church. In 1957, the
group built the Guadalupe Center
on donated land at 126 W. First St.
Growing up on the Southside
was a close-knit experience for
Morelos.
“There’s a rich history, a rich
culture that came out of that.
The roots are right here in
Tracy,” he said. “As a kid, if you
did anything wrong, everybody
knew everybody. Word got back
to your parents if you did anything wrong. That’s what kept
kids kind of in line.”
The Southside even celebrated as a community.
“You just put the word out in
the community that there’s a
wedding. Everybody showed up
to the wedding,” Morelos said.
“It was potato salad, mole and
beans. Somebody cooked it and
everybody was fed. That’s how
weddings were celebrated.”
Working together:
at left, Guadalupe
Society members make
tamales for a cinco de
Mayo celebration in
May 1988. Facing page,
top, Walter Gouveia
(left), Mercy Silveira
and ray Morelos talk
about plans to renovate
the Guadalupe center in
2010. Facing page, bottom, trino alfaro opens
a piñata for children
during the final night of
a las Posadas celebration at the center in
2011.
Press file photos
According to Morelos, the fortunes of the Guadalupe Society
waxed and waned over the years
before the organization was
finally disbanded just after the
turn of the century.
“In the early 2000s to mid2000s, it kind of fell apart.
The building just sat there,”
Morelos said.
Another board member and
past president of the South Side
Community Organization, Frank
Garcia, said that’s when a few
people decided the community
needed a new voice and reconSouthSide, continued on next page
celebrate tracy | May 15, 2015