In Texas, a historic Route 66 neighborhood taps its deep roots for a revival
Christian Science Monitor · C · trust 44/100
| Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor Teresa Kenedy stands in La Plazita, a new park and band shell that will serve as a community event space in the Barrio neighborhood in Amarillo, Texas, Aug. 13, 2026. Loading...
Sept. 08, 2026, 12:04 p.m. ET | Amarillo, Texas
David Rosas turns off Arthur Avenue and starts walking through the old Mexican American Barrio of his childhood.
His grandmother’s house once stood here, Mr. Rosas says. It was a place where relatives streamed in and out, coffee seemed always to be brewing, and everyone came to learn the family news. He has called it the family’s “bank, library, meeting place.”
Many American neighborhoods carry the history of the people who built them and helped them flourish. When time erodes the bonds that define a place, new energy can help a place like the Barrio in Amarillo, Texas, renew itself.
He remembers the railroad men walking home for lunch, then heading back to work. Afterward, his grandmother and a neighbor would pull out flour, water, and lard and begin making tortillas, the kitchen filling with the familiar rhythm of the rolling pins.
“I wish I could hear it right now,” he says. Walking down the street a few blocks, he passes a funeral home. But Mr. Rosas knows the building by an older name: El Salón Mexicano.
His grandfather, Mateo Lopez, a Santa Fe railroad worker, helped build the neighborhood hall with other residents in the 1930s as a place for dances, weddings, and quinceañeras. “The Barrio is a town within a town,” Mr. Rosas says. “We didn’t travel far.”
The short walk amounts to a century of Barrio history, a story about how American communities are made, and often remade in order to endure. In the late 19th century, Mexican railroad workers, brought in through programs of the Santa Fe Railway, arrived with their families and built homes, businesses, and a Catholic church – a world within a world, shaped partly by the segregation and discrimination that kept them apart from much of the city’s wider civic life. But the Barrio can be seen, too, as a recognizable American story of frontier towns in which neighbors helped out neighbors, and civic services became a fully communal affair.
Like so many small towns along Route 66, old boundaries have loosened, and families have scattered as regional economies reshape where people work and live. But the neighborhood is being rebuilt again. Their challenge is no longer how to create a community within those boundaries, but how to carry forward the belonging that grew there.
There is a Route 66 irony embedded in the Barrio’s story. Its 10th Avenue was part of the original highway in 1926 – the road Americans would celebrate as the “Main Street of America.” It was rerouted north in 1932.
Yet on the other side of Amarillo’s railroad tracks, Mexican American families kept building their version of the Main Street ideal: businesses, places to gather, familiar families, and a commitment to one another.
For Mr. Rosas, that older Main Street can be measured less in storefronts than in relationships.
“Back then when you met somebody, an elderly gentleman, they asked you who your parents were,” he says. He would give his name, and the older man would begin placing him.
Lupe’s son. Mateo’s grandson. Then would come the stories: Your father helped me with this. I knew your grandfather. “Being recognized by your parents and your grandparents, it’s a big deal,” Mr. Rosas says. “I mean, it carried weight.”
Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor David Rosas (left) and Richard Reynoso gather at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in the Barrio neighborhood in Amarillo, Texas, in August. His grandfather was one of the first pillars of the Barrio. His father, Lupe Rosas, carried that ethic into a different era. A World War II veteran who later worked at Amarillo’s veterans hospital, he was one of the first members of the NAACP. In the 1950s, he and two Catholic priests conducted a sit-in at one of Amarillo’s whites-only restaurants.
Lupe also became one of the people neighbors sought out when they did not know how to navigate institutions beyond the Barrio. Someone needed help with a Social Security form. Someone had a problem with the city. Someone needed to know whom to ask.
“When people had problems, nobody had a lawyer,” says Mr. Rosas, who dropped out of school in the eighth grade and went on to spend four decades selling cars. “My dad could figure something out. And I do that for a lot of people.”
Mr. Rosas holds no public office. But neighbors call him when trash is not picked up or a dilapidated property becomes a problem. He goes to city meetings, pushes officials for neighborhood investment, and says Amarillo’s current mayor takes his calls.
People sometimes call him the “mayor of the Barrio.” Mr. Rosas has given himself an arguably grander title, printed on his business card: H.M.I.C. – “Head Mexican in Charge.”
His charm and levity, however, belie his seriousness. In 2017 he became part of a neighborhood revitalization process.
For him, the effort is about more than getting sidewalks or city money. His grandmother’s house is gone. Relatives have scattered across Amarillo and beyond. Mr. Rosas himself lives about five miles from the Barrio.
The old social geography is harder to see. “It’s getting lost,” he says.
Teresa Kenedy turns off Arthur Avenue onto 10th and drives slowly toward the railroad tracks, narrating the Barrio almost block by block.
There are the murals marking the entrance to the old neighborhood. Then the new trees. Banners celebrating Día de los Muertos with sugar skulls. Street lamps. Bike racks. Nine street benches painted in reds, blues, and greens. Most noticeably, there are sidewalks – wide, wheelchair accessible stretches of concrete in a neighborhood where, away from the businesses, sidewalks are scarce.
“What you’re seeing – none of that was here prior to April of this year,” says Ms. Kenedy, now the president of The…
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