When Cedar Rapids purchased about 150 lots north of downtown in the mid-1960s to make way for what would become Interstate 380, the project was called R-9.
But the people who lived there — the Rodriguezes, the Cortezes, the Mendozas, the Gutierrezes and the Saldanas among them — knew the neighborhood as Little Mexico.
In a move made hundred of times over in cities across the country until the 1990s, local officials wiped out a predominantly non-white neighborhood, scattering families and neighbors in the name of progress. Words like “slum,” “blighted” and “deficient” were used in Gazette articles at the time to describe the homes and businesses that would be destroyed.
“What’s that mean?” asked Margaret Pena Meier, 72 of Cedar Rapids, who grew up in the neighborhood. “The houses were older, but I don’t think it called for them to raze that neighborhood like that.”
Meier, a retired correctional officer, grew up in Little Mexico until she was 16, playing at Whittam Park, shopping at Tommy’s Foods, walking to Immaculate Conception School and visiting relatives on every corner.
“We had the dog pound right across the street. We had Cargill right down the street. We had three bars — on A Avenue, B Avenue and C Avenue. We had one grocery store. We had Cedar Rapids Transfer, which is a trucking firm,” Meier recalled. “They razed all that and everybody had to move out. That was what we called home. And they took it all.”
At the time, this was the way highway projects were done in America. Today, politicians and planners view these actions through a different lens and see how many urban development projects disproportionately hurt people of color and low incomes.
Last month, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced his agency will spend about $1 billion to fix racial inequities in U.S. highway projects, including roads built to separate white and non-white communities, Bloomberg reported.
“We need to make sure people who are going to be affected are treated with equality and equity, but mainly more equity,” said DeeAnn Newell, National Environmental and Policy Act director for the Iowa Department of Transportation. “Just because you give someone the same exact thing, it may affect them differently. We need to make sure we understand people’s needs before we make decisions.”
John Rodriguez, who grew up on a farm in Mexico, was 19 in 1907 when he paid a quarter to cross the border from Juarez to El Paso, Texas, according to a 2004 interview that former Gazette columnist Dave Rasdal conducted with one of Rodriguez’s daughters, Grace Fielder, then 82.
Rodriguez, his wife, Lydia, and their three oldest children moved to Iowa in 1918, when John learned the Rock Island Railroad was hiring in Cedar Rapids.
“He was a fire-knocker,” said Mildred Stearns, 95, of Cedar Rapids. Stearns is the Rodriguezes’ granddaughter, but as the child of one of their oldest daughters, was raised as a daughter.
A fire knocker cleared hot coals out of the train engines, scuttling the cinders to a pile in the yard where they could be reused. The sweltering and often dangerous job was done without safety equipment.
Rodriguez brought 10 other Mexicans and their families — the first residents of what would become Little Mexico. At first, the immigrants lived in boxcars set up by the railroad on the south side of Cedar Lake.
Records from the 1920 Census show 65 people lived in “boxcars on the railroad track” in Cedar Rapids. Census taker Rose O’Hanes used back-slanting cursive to list the head of each household, followed by wife, sons and daughters and then “roomers.” One boxcar had 14 roomers from countries including Mexico, Serbia and Greece.
As railroad workers earned more money, they moved into rental houses nearby and, in some cases, bought their own houses, Fielder told The Gazette. The neighborhood, which started as a German settlement around the Magnus Eagle Brewery, turned over to a new set of immigrants.
Lydia Rodriguez bought a house on Seventh Street NE on Jan. 4, 1944, from William and Ella Bluski, according to a deed on file in the Linn County Recorder’s Office. She paid between $2,000 and $2,500 for the two-story everyone in her extended family called the “red house.”
“About 15 of us grew up together,” said Jimmy Vasquez, 76, of Cedar Rapids, who was the Rodriguezes’ grandson.
A photo from the early 1950s shows nine kids between the ages of 3 and 7 sitting on the back porch of the red house. Vasquez isn’t in the photo, but his cousin, Meier, is in the middle, bearing a serious expression.
One of Meier’s favorite memories was when Lydia Rodriguez, or Grandma Rod, as they called her, would let all the kids — 15 or so — sleep on the living room floor. They’d have popcorn at night, and John Rodriguez would wake them in the morning by calling, “Who wants pancakies?”
“When we were older and started dating, girls would say ‘You guys are cousins? You look like brothers and sisters’,” Vasquez added.
Vasquez played baseball with Meier’s older brother, Michael, at Whittam Park, which was at the corner of C Avenue NE and what now is Fourth Street NE. They would try to hit the ball over the trees. Kids played in the park’s wading pool and biked or walked everywhere, including to stores downtown.
“I never heard of Little Mexico growing up,” Vasquez said. Then one day, he and his friends were messing around at a store that sold musical instruments and a police officer told them: “You get back up that hill. Get back to Little Mexico.”
The brewery building was torn down in 1937 — a victim of Prohibition — and the vacant lot was overgrown with weeds by the 1950s. Neighborhood kids, who renamed the area the Forbidden Jungle after the title of a 1950 Tarzan movie, played there and later went there to smoke cigarettes or drink beer.
Today, Meier stands on the corner of Seventh Street NE and C Avenue NE, now noisy with traffic coming off I-380 and semi trucks unloading soybeans at Cargill, and points out where various aunts, uncles and cousins once lived. Those houses all are gone.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government gave money to cities to tear down older housing and replace it with modern, affordable housing.
Many cities opted to use the money for commercial or industrial growth, according to a 2017 analysis by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. Urban renewal displaced more than 300,000 people between 1955 and 1966, with the burden falling harder on people of color, the analysis showed.
The Iowa Legislature in 1957 passed a law allowing Iowa cities to participate in the federal program.
“Cedar Rapids is the third to move on this so far,” The Gazette noted in a 1959 article about urban renewal. “Waterloo and Des Moines already are further along than the planners here on the steps to qualify for federal money in major projects.”
Cedar Rapids officials had several neighborhoods they wanted to revitalize, one being R-9 that included Little Mexico.
“They wanted a fresh, clean look for downtown,” said Mark Stoffer-Hunter, a Cedar Rapids-area historian. “The overall intent was good; they wanted to preserve the economic base.”
The reasons city officials gave for the R-9 project were to “provide for new traffic arteries,” “provide the impetus for the development of a civic center” and “eliminate substandard structures, blighting influences and any other such impediments to the sound redevelopment of the project area,” according to a 1966 city resolution.
Although the goal of urban renewal was to get Americans into newer, safer houses, Cedar Rapids realized in the midst of R-9 there wasn’t enough affordable housing in other parts of the city.
A consultant report showed the city had an “insufficient supply of standard housing for low-income families,” according to a July 1, 1964, resolution. City leaders decided to provide a $5,000 a year rent subsidy for five years to displaced renters and another $5,000 a year if needed for relocation.
It’s hard to know for sure if Little Mexico residents got fair prices for their homes.
But the people who lived there — the Rodriguezes, the Cortezes, the Mendozas, the Gutierrezes and the Saldanas among them — knew the neighborhood as Little Mexico.
In a move made hundred of times over in cities across the country until the 1990s, local officials wiped out a predominantly non-white neighborhood, scattering families and neighbors in the name of progress. Words like “slum,” “blighted” and “deficient” were used in Gazette articles at the time to describe the homes and businesses that would be destroyed.
“What’s that mean?” asked Margaret Pena Meier, 72 of Cedar Rapids, who grew up in the neighborhood. “The houses were older, but I don’t think it called for them to raze that neighborhood like that.”
Meier, a retired correctional officer, grew up in Little Mexico until she was 16, playing at Whittam Park, shopping at Tommy’s Foods, walking to Immaculate Conception School and visiting relatives on every corner.
“We had the dog pound right across the street. We had Cargill right down the street. We had three bars — on A Avenue, B Avenue and C Avenue. We had one grocery store. We had Cedar Rapids Transfer, which is a trucking firm,” Meier recalled. “They razed all that and everybody had to move out. That was what we called home. And they took it all.”
At the time, this was the way highway projects were done in America. Today, politicians and planners view these actions through a different lens and see how many urban development projects disproportionately hurt people of color and low incomes.
Last month, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced his agency will spend about $1 billion to fix racial inequities in U.S. highway projects, including roads built to separate white and non-white communities, Bloomberg reported.
“We need to make sure people who are going to be affected are treated with equality and equity, but mainly more equity,” said DeeAnn Newell, National Environmental and Policy Act director for the Iowa Department of Transportation. “Just because you give someone the same exact thing, it may affect them differently. We need to make sure we understand people’s needs before we make decisions.”
Little Mexico’s beginnings
John Rodriguez, who grew up on a farm in Mexico, was 19 in 1907 when he paid a quarter to cross the border from Juarez to El Paso, Texas, according to a 2004 interview that former Gazette columnist Dave Rasdal conducted with one of Rodriguez’s daughters, Grace Fielder, then 82.
Rodriguez, his wife, Lydia, and their three oldest children moved to Iowa in 1918, when John learned the Rock Island Railroad was hiring in Cedar Rapids.
“He was a fire-knocker,” said Mildred Stearns, 95, of Cedar Rapids. Stearns is the Rodriguezes’ granddaughter, but as the child of one of their oldest daughters, was raised as a daughter.
A fire knocker cleared hot coals out of the train engines, scuttling the cinders to a pile in the yard where they could be reused. The sweltering and often dangerous job was done without safety equipment.
Rodriguez brought 10 other Mexicans and their families — the first residents of what would become Little Mexico. At first, the immigrants lived in boxcars set up by the railroad on the south side of Cedar Lake.
Records from the 1920 Census show 65 people lived in “boxcars on the railroad track” in Cedar Rapids. Census taker Rose O’Hanes used back-slanting cursive to list the head of each household, followed by wife, sons and daughters and then “roomers.” One boxcar had 14 roomers from countries including Mexico, Serbia and Greece.
As railroad workers earned more money, they moved into rental houses nearby and, in some cases, bought their own houses, Fielder told The Gazette. The neighborhood, which started as a German settlement around the Magnus Eagle Brewery, turned over to a new set of immigrants.
Growing up in Little Mexico
Lydia Rodriguez bought a house on Seventh Street NE on Jan. 4, 1944, from William and Ella Bluski, according to a deed on file in the Linn County Recorder’s Office. She paid between $2,000 and $2,500 for the two-story everyone in her extended family called the “red house.”
“About 15 of us grew up together,” said Jimmy Vasquez, 76, of Cedar Rapids, who was the Rodriguezes’ grandson.
A photo from the early 1950s shows nine kids between the ages of 3 and 7 sitting on the back porch of the red house. Vasquez isn’t in the photo, but his cousin, Meier, is in the middle, bearing a serious expression.
One of Meier’s favorite memories was when Lydia Rodriguez, or Grandma Rod, as they called her, would let all the kids — 15 or so — sleep on the living room floor. They’d have popcorn at night, and John Rodriguez would wake them in the morning by calling, “Who wants pancakies?”
“When we were older and started dating, girls would say ‘You guys are cousins? You look like brothers and sisters’,” Vasquez added.
Vasquez played baseball with Meier’s older brother, Michael, at Whittam Park, which was at the corner of C Avenue NE and what now is Fourth Street NE. They would try to hit the ball over the trees. Kids played in the park’s wading pool and biked or walked everywhere, including to stores downtown.
“I never heard of Little Mexico growing up,” Vasquez said. Then one day, he and his friends were messing around at a store that sold musical instruments and a police officer told them: “You get back up that hill. Get back to Little Mexico.”
The brewery building was torn down in 1937 — a victim of Prohibition — and the vacant lot was overgrown with weeds by the 1950s. Neighborhood kids, who renamed the area the Forbidden Jungle after the title of a 1950 Tarzan movie, played there and later went there to smoke cigarettes or drink beer.
Today, Meier stands on the corner of Seventh Street NE and C Avenue NE, now noisy with traffic coming off I-380 and semi trucks unloading soybeans at Cargill, and points out where various aunts, uncles and cousins once lived. Those houses all are gone.
Urban renewal
In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government gave money to cities to tear down older housing and replace it with modern, affordable housing.
Many cities opted to use the money for commercial or industrial growth, according to a 2017 analysis by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. Urban renewal displaced more than 300,000 people between 1955 and 1966, with the burden falling harder on people of color, the analysis showed.
The Iowa Legislature in 1957 passed a law allowing Iowa cities to participate in the federal program.
“Cedar Rapids is the third to move on this so far,” The Gazette noted in a 1959 article about urban renewal. “Waterloo and Des Moines already are further along than the planners here on the steps to qualify for federal money in major projects.”
Cedar Rapids officials had several neighborhoods they wanted to revitalize, one being R-9 that included Little Mexico.
“They wanted a fresh, clean look for downtown,” said Mark Stoffer-Hunter, a Cedar Rapids-area historian. “The overall intent was good; they wanted to preserve the economic base.”
The reasons city officials gave for the R-9 project were to “provide for new traffic arteries,” “provide the impetus for the development of a civic center” and “eliminate substandard structures, blighting influences and any other such impediments to the sound redevelopment of the project area,” according to a 1966 city resolution.
Although the goal of urban renewal was to get Americans into newer, safer houses, Cedar Rapids realized in the midst of R-9 there wasn’t enough affordable housing in other parts of the city.
A consultant report showed the city had an “insufficient supply of standard housing for low-income families,” according to a July 1, 1964, resolution. City leaders decided to provide a $5,000 a year rent subsidy for five years to displaced renters and another $5,000 a year if needed for relocation.
It’s hard to know for sure if Little Mexico residents got fair prices for their homes.
With rise of I-380, this thriving immigrant neighborhood was leveled
Homes and businesses of the Little Mexico neighborhood in Cedar Rapids were razed in the 1960s to build I-380 in Cedar Rapids. Dozens of immigrant families were displaced. The notion of erasing a non-white neighborhood to make way for progress is now seen through a different lens.
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