Funeral home grieves for matriarch
Villaseñor helped Latino families cope for decades
AUSTIN, Texas – For decades, Lois Villaseñor helped Latino families coping with the death of loved ones.
The funeral home she and her husband founded in the late 1950s has been busier as the coronavirus pandemic swept over the community it serves. The business adopted limited funeral rites – masked services and burials often viewed through car windows.
In late July, Villaseñor, 87, died of COVID-19-related complications, one of scores of coronavirus deaths in Travis County during the pandemic. Her service, like so many others in this time of remote grieving, was livestreamed.
Villaseñor had long been retired from Mission Funeral Home – she lived at home, suffering from dementia, according to her son, Charles, who runs the business. Her death signifies not only the long reach of the virus, especially among Latinos, but another rent in the fabric of fast-changing East Austin.
“When they came to Austin, it was very segregated,” Charles said of his parents.
There was no funeral home catering to Latinos, he said, and his parents “filled the void,” building a funeral home on East Cesar Chavez Street.
“They provided a place where people came together as a community and showed respect, a place that gave the community dignity,” he said.
At the funeral service last week, state Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, whose family and the Villaseñors have been longtime friends, said the funeral home was a vital part of the area.
“Long before scooters arrived in Austin, or hipsters or man buns, Charles and Lois were building a community here on the East Side,” Alvarado said. “The foundation they laid, the real estate they bought, the businesses they helped build, is why this particular part of Austin can grow and prosper.
“They started here because of their drive to help la nuestra gente (our people),” she said.
Disproportionate toll
Since July 1, Texas has doubled, then nearly doubled again, its reported coronavirus death toll, Johns Hopkins University data shows. Through June, there were 2,708 deaths. Tuesday, Johns Hopkins reported 10,457 deaths.
Statewide, Hispanics make up 39.7% of COVID-19 cases – in keeping with their portion of the state population. They make up 53.4% of coronavirus fatalities, according to the latest statistics from the Texas Department of State Health Services.
In Travis County, which is 33.6% Hispanic, 52% of the cases and 50% of the deaths are Hispanic, according to Austin Public Health figures.
The infection rate among Latinos is probably an underestimate, said Jamboor Vishwanatha, director of the Texas Center for Health Disparities at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. Testing sites are less likely to be located in poorer communities of color, he said, and people might stay away because of the cost of testing, the stigma of a positive result or the fear of deportation among people living in the country illegally.
Asked in late July about people who might fear getting tested because of their citizenship status, Gov. Greg Abbott encouraged them to get tested. “The primary concern is the health care of everybody,” he said. “There are no questions about ... status.”
The disproportionate death rate among Latinos is due to “sociological factors such as lack of transportation, the lack of availability of testing sites,”
Vishwanatha said. “Work conditions, too, in which they’re considered essential workers, all these have made the situation bad.
“The death rate is really exposing societal issues – access to health care, lack of health insurance, worry about losing income and the fear that if you’re diagnosed, you will lose your job,” he said. “These are leading people to perhaps not seek medical care. It’s also exposing other health disparities, there is more cardiovascular disease, more hypertension, cancer.“
A home in East Austin
Lois Villaseñor was well looked after by her family and at-home medical attendants, her son said.
She was born in Cuero, Texas, to a migrant farming family, picking cotton in her early years. When she was a teenager, national news regarding the treatment of Latinos by funeral parlors unfolded about an hour away in the small town of Three Rivers.
When the body of Pvt. Felix Longoria, who had been killed in the Philippines during World War II, was returned home to Three Rivers in the late 1940s, a funeral parlor refused to hold a wake, claiming, “The whites would not like it.” Longoria could be buried only in the separate Mexican section of the cemetery. After a campaign from his widow, thenfreshman Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson got involved, arranging a burial for Longoria with full military honors in Arlington
National Cemetery.
Lois and her husband, Charles Villaseñor, who trained in the funeral business in Houston, came to Austin in the late 1950s.
“We came to Austin and looked around, and we chose East Austin because we wanted to be a part of the Hispanic community,” she told the Austin Chronicle in 2004.
“We saw there was a void in funeral services available to the families here. This was way back when the bodies would lie at home.”
Mission Funeral Home was the first to build a “parlor,” so Latino families could gather at a funeral chapel to pay respects to loved ones.
In 1961, Lois was one of only a handful of women to graduate from a mortuary college in Houston.
In 1989, she became the first Latina to serve on the Texas Funeral Service Commission. She was on the boards of Catholic charities and Latino political groups.
The matriarch was known for her impeccable dress and her pioneering sense of adventure, obtaining a pilot’s license.
Her husband of 37 years, Charles Villaseñor, died in 1991, and she continued at the helm until her son, Charles II, succeeded her in 1992.
“My mother understood that you never know a family’s grief until it happens to you. That understanding now comes full circle for me,” Charles Villaseñor II said.