Cafeteria Worker Turned Noted Local Historian Danny Camacho Documented East Austin History

EAST AUSTIN, TX -- The East Austin of his youth is but a memory, the wave of gentrification continually sweeping over the landscape as commercial developers lured to its charm build structures often out of character to the old neighborhood making the area all but recognizable from when his family first moved here.

But Danny Camacho fought the good fight to the end, emerging as an important voice in documenting that lost local history. On Wednesday, that voice was silenced after Camacho succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 70.

“There are few people in Austin who would know more about Mexican-American history in Austin than Danny,” Juan Castillo, a friend of Camacho’s and a former Austin American-Statesman reporter, told the newspaper. “One of the things he talked about was that he felt Mexican Americans sort of weren’t given their due, their place in the city’s history.”

Camacho was one of the original members of Save Austin Cemeteries, helping to document the history of the original plots and who purchased them. As a volunteer at the Austin History Center, his considerable skills as a researcher didn't go unnoticed.

“It was his mission to make sure the stories of Austin that weren’t always told were told and celebrated by everybody,” city archivist Mike Miller told the newspaper.

But it was Camacho's own words when speaking of the East Austin he loved -- conveyed with a palpable affection, as if speaking of a beloved family member -- that resonated the most powerfully. In life, he enjoyed reliving a childhood in the pre-gentrified East Austin that sounded like an idyllic landscape for the upbringing for a young Latino who would emerge as an important local historian.

"I still live in the house my parents bought in 1951," he once told an interviewer for "Writing Austin's Lives," a project of the Humanities Institute at UT-Austin that's documented the stories of more than 800 residents. "I had first thought to recount my own memories of growing up on the East Side. Of my three sisters and I having to just cross the street to attend Metz Elementary. The summers passed on the playground and in the swimming pool at Metz Park. Or weekends spent fishing with my Dad. We would walk the few blocks down to the Colorado River, before it became Town Lake."

It was that institutional knowledge of the city's history that prompted the Statesman's editorial board to name him a local hero in 2010. It was those stories -- those cuentos -- about which he felt a sense of mission to retell, even as he witnessed the East Side of his youth quickly disappearing, if only to have an oral history still intact.

"But it’s the old stories, the cuento about the abuelos, (grandparents) that I heard as a child that I want to share," he told oral historians at UT. "My great-great-grandparents Eulogio and Pilar Luna, their seven children and extended family came to Austin in 1872. They settled in an area near the mouth of Shoal Creek called ‘Mexico.’ The men were day laborers and the women took in laundry."

His stories were word pictures giving life to a vanishing East Side of yesteryear, lending urgency to his need to share them. Informed by family history, his memories were, by extension, the story of East Austin.

"A block east of Congress, at 10th and Brazos, is St. Mary’s Cathedral," he reminsced. "It was there that great-grandma Carlota, her three sisters and brother were all married. And at 11th and Congress, now a parking lot, once stood the Travis County Court House."

In his interview for "Writing Austin's Lives," he also invoked memories of his mom: "My mother, Lorraine, was baptized at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, then located at the corner of 5th and Guadalupe Streets. The downtown post office occupies the site. She had been born in 1917 at the home of her parents, 510 West 9th."

But even as he saw his lifetime home being transformed, he felt the spirit of those ancestors stubbornly suffusing the environs. It was Camacho's memories, that living history he embodied, that served as the glue keeping their presence intact amid the outward changes.

"Whenever I’m on downtown Congress, I can’t help but feel the presence of my ancestors," he said. "It is as if they had just turned the corner ahead of me. I then wonder if 100 years from now some future relation will be walking there and think the same."

As powerful as his words were in keeping the spirit of East Austin alive, so too are testimonials of family members in describing his attributes -- not the considerable ones of a consummate local historian, but as a loved famiy member.

"He was the angel of the family, the only boy," his sister Darlene Camacho-Rosales told the Statesman.

Another sister Dolly Camacho-Watson conveyed the generous nature of a man who helped raise six nieces and nephews, a retired cafeteria worker whose intense intellectual curiosity and sense of personal history led him to learn about art, history, philosophy and religion and impart that knowledge on her and other family members.

Camacho's body is to be cremated, his sisters said. A memorial service is pending.

>>> Photo of Camacho courtesy of Humanities Institute, UT-Austin