By Dina López, Senior Advisor to the Junta Patriótica
In 2025, the Plataforma Jiménez was granted Texas’s first Legends and Lore marker by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation and the Texas Folklore Society, its Texas folklore partner. The marker will be dedicated at the Plataforma Jiménez building in Melvin on November 1, 2025, at 10:00 a.m.
Built in the late 1930s, the Plataforma was the location for the fiestas patrias (patriotic festivals) celebrations of the colonia Jiménez (Melvin’s Mexican community). Often there was a Ferris wheel, and families set up puestos (kiosks) outside, where they sold tamales, showed movies, and held bingo games. Often a well-known musical act—like Grammy award-winning Flaco Jiménez, or the father of conjunto music, Beto Villa—was contracted to play music for dancing. The fiestas brought people from McCulloch and its surrounding counties together in the largest and most interesting Mexican celebrations this side of San Antonio.
In addition the music and the food the cultural traditions also include the legends that live in the stories. Did they really happen? Everyone who was there say they did. Like the time the groom turned into Melvin’s own Lochinvar and ran off with one of the bridesmaids during a wedding reception. Sometimes there were fights because the guys from nearby Brady got jealous when their girls went to Melvin for the dances. One time during the middle of a dance, everyone saw that one of the men on the dance floor had been shot. The shooter (everyone knew who it was) handed the gun to his wife; she hid the gun under her skirt; and the storyteller jumped out a window “because,” she said, “I didn’t want to be next!” During another wedding reception, some of the men from Brady were upset that a guy from Melvin had stolen one of their girls. They went to Melvin and threw big rocks through the Plataforma’s huge open windows. One rock hit the drummer’s bass drum and broke a huge hole in it; another hit the lead singer in the chest. After they had tired themselves of throwing rocks, the attackers pulled out the firearms, and there was an all-out gunfight.
The Plataforma was also a central location for the Latin American Parent Teachers Association to meet and discuss solutions to the Melvin school board’s de facto segregation policies, and at one point served as overflow classroom space when the school buildings set aside could not hold all the Mexican students who had enrolled that year. I know this because my mother told me she attended classes there in fourth grade.
During the 1930s through the 1970s, the building was a node for shared knowledge, identity, and a sense of belonging for the colonia Jiménez. A Legends and Lore marker commemorates the building, but that is not the final chapter in its story. It is being restored as an event center, with the proceeds going towards a scholarship fund for agricultural students in McCulloch County and surrounding regions. And, I would venture to say, the stories will continue—but probably without the gunfights.