'At last:' Blackwell School's national park recognition mends racial wounds in Marfa

MARFA, Texas -- Jessi Silva remembers exactly where she sat when she saw her heritage buried. On a humble schoolhouse's dusty block on the south side of tiny 1950s Marfa, Silva watched her teachers lower a cigar box into the ground -- a casket for dozens of papers she and her classmates were instructed to label "Spanish." At just six years old, she understood the message.

"They said we can no longer speak Spanish. And I said I felt to myself, 'What did I do wrong? Why is this taken from...