Chicano champion a Heights mainstay
MARCARIO RAMIREZ: 1934-2020
Macario Ramirez, who championed the Chicano cause in Houston and whose folk art gallery, Casa Ramirez, has been a decadeslong mainstay in the Heights, died Wednesday of a heart condition, his family said.
He was 86.
Ramirez’s store — which bills “Folk Art, Good Causes and Cultural Traditions” on the sign above its door — is a centerpiece of the dynamic retail scene on 19th Street. Every autumn, it bursts to life in celebration of the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.
Ramirez and his wife, Chrissie, erected altars, or ofrendas, that would draw crowds to their storefront. Some of them celebrated legends from Selena to Cesar Chavez, and others marked more personal devotions to an acquaintance’s recently departed loved one. It was considered an honor to be invited to make an altar at Casa Ramirez, friends said.
The couple taught classes for community members and students on how to make the altars and the sugar skulls that go with them.
“To me, if you look at what the mission of the store was, the way that he had it outlined, it was about art, and it was about culture, and it was about good causes,” said Charlotte Aguilar, a longtime friend. “I think that’s the important part for him. … Really, he was one of the first people to celebrate the multicultural aspects of Houston and the diversity, and help people understand that was an asset.”
He manned the store with a twinkle-eyed kindness, according to customers. More than 400 people flooded a Facebook post announcing his death this week with comments of memories and condolences. One called him a “beacon of calm and hospitality.”
Ramirez was born May 29, 1934, in San Antonio, one of six kids reared by Mexican immigrants. He was a seasonal migrant worker as a child, spending summers on farms with his family in Michigan and Wisconsin. In an oral history interview with Texas Christian University, he recalled going to school in the poor neighborhoods of San Antonio and noticing the stark disparity compared to wealthier, whiter parts of the city.
“It was a combination of good and not good. Not good, because I realized what was wrong with the city at a young age,” he said of his childhood. “It wasn’t a good feeling. That was a down part of growing up in San Antonio, knowing that you had less than what you needed for your family.”
He excelled in school and earned a degree in political science from St. Mary’s University, paving an early career in management consulting and working with the federal government. He set up training programs with the Department of Labor in San Antonio’s West Side barrios. He was then a civilian adviser with the Department of Defense, establishing language programs in South Vietnam during the war, and later in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
In Houston, Ramirez channeled his upbringing in his activism, speaking out for the Hispanic community and protesting for equity in institutions, from Houston Independent School District to the news media.
“He would call, and I would just go,” said Richard Reyes, director of the Talento Bilingue De Houston Center. “I would round up the neighborhood, the people I worked with, and we would just go. We trusted him that much.”
Long after others would acknowledge a lost cause, Aguilar said Ramirez would still venture out and walk with his sign, advocating by himself.
In a 2008 interview with La Voz, Ramirez said he considered his activism his greatest accomplishment in life.
“Although they do not go out on the streets with me when necessary, they come here (to Casa Ramirez) and tell me: ‘Macario, thank you.’ That has impact, that I am an activist.”
He opened Casa Ramirez in the 1980s as an ode to his late father, a laborer and jeweler who sold items from a small coffee table that he would set up in the streets of San Antonio.
The diversity that Casa Ramirez embodies wasn’t always welcome, Aguilar said.
When Ramirez first started making ofrendas in the Heights, there was some push-back in the community. They saw the skulls and worried it was a satanic practice, Aguilar said.
“He educated people and really made them understand, we’re in the minority of people that view death as an ending,” Aguilar said. “That was a huge thing that he kept chipping away.”
The deeply personal altars — there were ones devoted to AIDS victims, others to victims of gang violence — were the store’s greatest draw.
One year, a couple of decades ago, a young student at nearby Hamilton Middle School was shot to death, Aguilar said. Ramirez invited the family to make an altar, and they gave him the bloodied shirt that the student was wearing when he was killed.
A few years ago, he welcomed them back on the shooting’s 20th anniversary.
“That was just the kind of thing, where you would be able to celebrate somebody, an idol you had, but you would go in there and learn about something very stark,” Aguilar said. “It’s always been a very powerful, very personal thing.”
Reyes said he went to the store Saturday, which was open, to help Chrissie make an altar for Ramirez. He started doing it just like Ramirez taught him — collecting some favorite items and foods.
But Chrissie reminded him they weren’t doing that yet. When he was alive, Ramirez would often recommend customers wait a year before making an ofrenda.
There’s time to celebrate the dead, he would say. But first they must be mourned.