♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Doug "Red" Taylor: I mean, you couldn't drive down Division and not see a club.

Carl Pointer: From Lancaster all the way down to Sanford, it would be people going to the joints.

Bertha Jones: Johnny Taylor was there, B.B.

King.

♪♪♪ Cecilia Gilbreath: Fort Worth was the Bible Belt, and it was the Norris First Baptist Church, you know, he kind of controlled Fort Worth and held these people down.

They could go to Arlington and have fun, and that's what they did.

♪♪♪ Geraldine Mills: It had all the beer joints, all the honky-tonks, had Top Hill Terrace at one end and the racetrack at the other, so we were covered.

Carl: You had church folk, and you had people that partied.

Arlington had several nightclubs, and most of the patrons were from out of town.

Doug: There was a whole lot of parties went on here in Arlington, 'specially on Division.

Those two places, Lou's Blue Lounge and Dragnet, make The Hill what it is.

♪♪♪ Carl: Course, there was two or three gambling shacks.

Cecilia: Top of The Hill, where gambling took place.

Geraldine: There's still gambling going on, what do you mean, was there gambling going on?

Cecilia: Secret passages to get rid of all of the people when they were raided.

Carl: Gambling wasn't held in as much disdain as it is, you know, with people now.

It was nothing, it was just that's what you did.

♪♪♪ Cecilia: At one point in time, Arlington was dry.

Carl: Bootlegging was a substantial business, and there was some sweet old ladies that were church mothers that would sit on their front porch, with a towel folded three times, and in every fold, there'd be a pint of liquor.

Cecilia: So, all the liquor at the top of The Hill and any liquor, probably, that was drunk at the racetrack, it was not legal.

Doug: Even though there was trouble, you know, you can't have a club without trouble.

Cecilia: I'm sure that a lot of police departments just looked the other way.

Doug: Clubs and motels and car dealerships, that's it.

They made that place what it is today.

Cecilia: It was bringing in money to the county, it was bringing in money to Fort Worth.

So, money talks.

Carl: Arlington was a party town.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪ Oh, freedom ♪ ♪ Oh, freedom ♪ narrator: Black history is American history, and American history is complex.

If you're going to faithfully tell it, you got to embrace that some parts, well, they're just not pretty.

♪ And before I'll be a slave ♪ ♪ I'll be buried in my grave ♪ ♪ And go home to my Lord ♪ ♪ And be free ♪♪ Gene Preuss: North Texas was a hotbed of tension because in the years leading up to the conflict that we call the Civil War, in North Texas, there was a lot of concern that slavery wasn't accepted by everyone.

And many of the leaders felt that traveling, itinerant, Methodist ministers were coming in and stirring up foment among slaves and others, trying to maybe move them away from supporting slavery, supporting the South, supporting what would become one of the Confederate states.

narrator: At the end of the Civil War, Texas Blacks were notified of their new rights as free citizens on June 19th, 1865.

This was known as General Order Number Three.

For many of the formerly enslaved, their first action upon learning they were no longer property of another person was to go searching for brothers, sisters, wives, and mothers.

Those who had been sold away.

♪ And be free ♪ ♪ Oh, freedom ♪♪ W. Marvin Dulaney: Still this sort of conflict over were the African Americans really free or were their former slave owners gonna continue to hold them into slavery, so it takes a while for the word to cross the state of Texas.

Some African Americans don't become free until months after General Order Number Three.

What African Americans do, indeed, they try to act on their freedom.

They leave the plantations, they move to Houston, and they move to Dallas, they move to San Antonio, they create these communities called Freedom Towns.

They come into conflict with their former masters in many ways, because they're trying to assert the fact that I no longer have to listen to you, I no longer have to work for you, in fact, you've gotta pay me wages now.

♪ I'll be buried in my grave ♪ ♪ And go home to my Lord ♪ ♪ And be free ♪♪ Gene: Many of the former slaves began forming their own communities, throughout East Texas and Southeast Texas, and even in places like Northeast Texas and Dallas.

There were Freedom Colonies, towns, communities formed by free Blacks.

Bob Ray Sanders: Roseberry being the oldest one that came out of a slave plantation community.

Gene: Not all slaves were uneducated.

They had worked, they had helped build many of these empires that we had seen.

They had been the managers, they had been the overseers, and so they took that knowledge that they gained and they applied it to their own communities and to their own families.

Cecilia: And the voting rules for 1865 had a large number of Black people that were registered and at that time, it took $10 to register to vote in Tarrant County.

That's a lot of money for a Black man to put up to vote.

They knew that voting was the way to get a better life, and the reason I know that the Black people were registered to vote is because they had a C by their name that indicated that they were colored.

Gene: Southern Whites, and in fact many Whites throughout the United States, had convinced themselves that Africans were uncivilized.

They weren't like us, they said to one another.

And so, in order to react to these people who they believed were subhuman, they felt that swift punishment was the only way to keep them in control.

We do know that there were some very serious reactions.

The rise of the Klan, that this fear that Blacks would be able, by their numbers, could outvote and determine who would be political leaders, how money was gonna be spent, was still a fear that a lot of Whites carried with them.

♪ Be my woman, girl, I'll be your man ♪ ♪ Be my woman, girl, I'll be your man ♪♪ Marvin: Now, if you read some of the scholarship of the time, you'll find there's a mass violence against African Americans, where they show some form of slave owner just wantonly kill African Americans.

In fact, they kill about 1% of the male population between 1865 and 1867, because former slave owners are trying to maintain their power and their, of course, control.

They had to develop this elaborate sort of militia, police system to police the slave population.

Gene: This is why you need something like the Klan, they said to themselves, to keep them in place.

And who better than former southerners, former slave owners, former slave drivers to run these organizations that, in secret, would terrorize Black populations.

Marvin: African Americans did not want to be enslaved.

So, they were always in rebellion and in some form of resistance.

And so, then you had to have this major police force, which of course was called, basically, the Slave Patrol.

Mainly poor White men getting weapons, riding horses, and policing districts in the South.

The Black Codes, these were laws that were primarily aimed at formerly enslaved people, and said, for example, that by January 1 each year you had to have a work contract.

If you were not involved in a contract, then you could be arrested for vagrancy.

Once you were arrested, then you could be hired out.

A landowner can come in and sort of purchase you for a period of time, allegedly to work off your fine.

By 1870, there's 10,000 African Americans in jail.

Of course, develop the convict release system, where they'll hire them out and make them work for free.

They begin to use the criminal justice system as a way of controlling African Americans.

Gene: You know, we hear about random, senseless, unprovoked even, acts of violence.

One of those stories is that of Fanny Wilson, who was the daughter of Jack Ditto.

Jack Ditto, who was a Baptist Minister, was off preaching and terrorists, White night riders you might say, came up and became inquiring about him.

The daughter, Fanny, who was 15 years old at the time, says that she remembers them calling out for her dad, her mother saying, "Well, he's not here."

And they began shooting.

Geraldine: She's holding her baby in her arms, and they shoot through the house.

Gene: And one of those blasts killed the child and left a wound on the mother, both psychologically and physically, for the rest of her life.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ narrator: Five blocks.

What, maybe 1 square mile, 1.5 square miles?

In a town that began as a water stop for the railroad between Fort Worth and Dallas, it's easy to think it doesn't matter, but when you look at The Hill, what you see is an American story.

A family story, the story of us.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Carl: It was a safe place.

It was just like, you know, three blocks square, four blocks square, and I was safe.

Randy Parker: People actually looked out for each other, people actually cared for each other.

Beverley Jackson: It was just a community of love.

A community of respect, we all worked together, and everybody was supportive of everybody.

Don't get in trouble, do what you're supposed to do, know and understand right from wrong, respect yourself and respect others, that was one of the main things.

Cecilia: Lesser desirable property.

You have to remember that that community came about after slavery ended and the south side of Arlington was already pretty well White.

Carl: People, probably, in other parts of the country don't realize is that the south really wasn't that segregated in terms of where people lived.

Some White families had their maids and servants live on their property, and there were little enclaves of Black people living around each other.

Here is Arlington, in Old Arlington, you ran into people of all races.

They didn't socialize, they didn't worship together, but they lived in proximity to each other.

And over time it just coalesced into The Hill.

♪♪♪ Margaret Taylor: I lived there, what we call The Pasture, and we would go over to The Hill, because that's what was happening.

And we would love to get over on Indiana Street.

Doug: You had to go by everybody's house to go anywhere.

I'll tell you what, when I was growing up, if you walked across in front of somebody's house and you didn't speak to them, when you got home, there was an a-- whooping, because your parents, well, they would say, what do you think you doing?

You think you're grown?

♪♪♪ Gayle D. Hanson: The Hill, there were close family in that community, and if things came up and there was a need, people pooled their resources, they got together to help one another.

Margaret: I remember when we first moved to Indiana Street, we had an old family's, somebody got sick, my momma would cook, say I'm gonna take it up there, you take it up there.

Make sure they had something to eat.

They were taken care of when they were old and sick.

And that just kinda brought us all together.

Beverley: My mother worked for a lot for White people, and I asked the question once, why is it that their children can call you by your first name, but we have to say mister and missus, and she said because it's all right with me.

She said, if it's all right with me, it's gonna be all right with you.

There're certain things that you just don't have to let bother you because God's gonna take care of you.

♪♪♪ Carl: A good day was a day you didn't have to deal with White people, because they would say something, they would do something, they would assume something, they exercised some right that they felt they had, and they could just ruin your day.

You dealt with White folks as little as you could because it was just so many opportunities for them to offend you and outright discriminate against you.

Randy: My mom and dad used to take my sister shopping to Leonard Brother's, big department stores downtown Fort Worth.

And my sister would wanna actually have ice cream at the counter, wasn't allowed.

And there was many times where she would go wanna try on a dress or whatever and was denied.

Geraldine: They didn't go to the hamburger place, if they did, they'd go to the back door to get served.

You know, maybe Bender's Dry Goods, he was a Jewish shop owner here, and everybody was welcome at Bender's.

But he had the cheapest clothes and the cheapest shoes that you ever saw, but he made no distinction.

Doug: They had a lot of White swimming pools here in Arlington, but we couldn't go to none of them.

We used to ride our bicycles down Abram Street to go swimming in Grand Prairie.

Bob: Forest Park had the largest swimming pool which we could actually swim in on the only day that we could go, June 19, but on June 20, they drained the pool, then filled it back up on the 21st to get ready for the White kids to come back.

I mean, how crazy was that?

It was crazy, so that White kids wouldn't have to be in water that Black kids had swam in.

Carl: You better not go in the library, you know, they're gonna try to kick you out, and if you insisted on being there, call the police.

Previous to integration we had a bookmobile that would come to our community every other week, sent from the Fort Worth Public Library.

Bertha: We didn't have a washing machine, but they had a washateria out in town.

We couldn't go to it.

When I had to wash, I'd put on a uniform and walk-- go right in there.

Beverley: Then you'd get to ride the Fort Worth Greyhound bus, if you wanted to go to the theatre in Fort Worth, and so naturally, we just went to the back.

So, you did whatever you had to do, on the one that said, this is just the way it is, until it got better.

Geraldine: I grew up close to downtown, and I could walk to the movies from my house, and I never saw a Black kid at the movies.

You know, at least in Fort Worth they had the balcony, you know, you went up the back stairs, no, here, there was no place for them to go.

Randy: They wore scars, you know, but they still made friends.

You stay focused, you don't let that scar block you from growing, and you also keep the attitude of a Christian heart, and all people are not bad.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ narrator: For Blacks, the church was a place to worship the risen Savior, but because of Jim Crow, it had to evolve into a lot more.

The church became the center of social, religious, and civic life for Black people.

By World War I, nearly 400,000 Black Texans identified as active members of one of the principal denominations in the state.

The church became the place where you were recognized as a whole human being, worthy of respect.

♪♪♪ Carl: There were three churches, three different denominations.

As a small kid, I was COGIC, I was Church of God in Christ, we were Pentecost.

Walked around with a guilt complex, every time we'd sin, we'd confess right on the spot.

There wasn't a lot of status associated with being in the Pentecostal church.

The oldest church is actually the Methodist church.

It wasn't nearly as large or influencing the community as Mount Olive.

Mount Olive was considered, like, the church, the community church.

speaker: Highest mountain that flows to the lowest valley.

How many of you have ever had the blood applied to your life?

And you know that saying, blood gives us strength from then today, and it will never, never--everybody say never.

Never lose its power.

Margaret: I guess my mom and her family were members of Mount Olive, and in this kind of a prayer body, you know.

And from there, just, kinda like it's home.

You can go to church when you can't go nowhere.

♪♪♪ Geraldine: Their church and their families are what-- where they got their strength from.

That it was just, you couldn't go down there on a Sunday, you know, without almost the whole community being at church, one church or the other.

Bertha: My mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother, they all went to the same church.

When it was in the middle of the street, but the church-- I mean, if you didn't have anything else, I mean, you could depend on the church.

If people were sick, she'd have 'em come to their house, you know, and pray for them.

Doug: One thing on Sunday's, you knew it was church on Sunday's down there, 'cause you didn't see nobody, nowhere.

You walk out there on the street on a Sunday, you didn't see nobody.

If you'd sat down there and listened, you can hear nothing but church music and church singing and all that stuff, and the only thing you gonna see on them streets is a dog, a cat, or something, you know.

Gayle: Regardless of what opportunities we were presented with, we also got to stay focused on who got us there and who was opening up these doors for us, but religion had a whole lot to do with our communities.

Bob: But the other thing that the church did was it helped provide leadership skills.

Those Sunday Schools, those BTUs, those conferences for youth during the summer, and the Bible schools, and where you had to prepare reports and you had to give speeches and you were taught how to run a meeting and learn Robert's Rules of Order, all of those things were taught in the church.

Randy: The synergistic nature of just being in the church, the positive things that the church was doing, the positive leadership that the church had, it emboldened them.

Our church was based upon the Word of God, and that's how we conducted ourselves in our life, and I'd say it turned out okay.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ narrator: Education was instrumental in the search for an emotional place.

Education brought a certain dynamism and vitality to Black folks.

A world of possibilities began to emerge.

Suddenly it became clear that you could do more and be more than you ever thought possible.

There's a reason that reading and education were denied you.

♪♪♪ Marvin: In Texas, all across the state, education is segregated.

Geraldine: The money wasn't spent on the school or the facilities at all, you know, like it was for the White schools.

Bob: Education was key in the Black community at the time I was growing up.

Many of us went to school knowing something about reading.

We knew the alphabet, plus when you got there, you had teachers who was so invested in you that they made sure that you were gonna learn because if you failed, it meant they failed.

Doug: Booker T. Washington went from the first grade to the eighth.

Bertha: I thought we had the best teachers around.

I mean, you learn, they cared about you.

Doug: Those teachers, they would come to your house, and they'd tell your parents, say, hey look, your son or your daughter, they lacking a little education in this field, we gonna come here every day and get them back up.

When you being taught by a certain race for a certain period of time, there's a bond and a something that happens there that you can't escape from.

Bob: We didn't just look up to the educators, we looked up to the custodians, the cafeteria workers, all of those people had a say in our lives, all of those people could direct us in the right direction, if you will.

Carl: They taught so much more than Algebra and English and History, they taught you how to live and how to survive.

Bob: Most cities in Tarrant County and these surrounding areas didn't have high schools for Blacks.

Carl: The eighth grade was as far as you could go in the Arlington school district, and that was a big discouragement to a lot of people.

Plus, the assumption was an eighth-grade education was about as much as a Black man needed.

Bob: If you lived anywhere in this region, basically, and you wanted to go past grammar school, past the eighth grade, you would have to go to I.M.

Terrell.

Carl: You had to have decent clothes, you had to have money for lunch, you couldn't go home and eat lunch, and a lot of people just couldn't afford it, and that hurt the Black population in Arlington in advancing.

That the kids from Mansfield, for example, had to ride the Continental Trailways bus to downtown Fort Worth and then walk the mile to the high school.

Those kids who got to the eighth grade in some of these cities, and their parents didn't have the means to send them to a high school.

Geraldine: You'd lose those kids that didn't make it.

Either they went on and either got into trouble or they just did what they had to do to make a living.

Bob: So, they had to drop out of school, eighth grade, that was as far as they got.

And I just wonder how many geniuses we left behind.

But so, society has a debt to pay for those souls and those minds that we lost because we didn't afford them the education that they wanted and certainly deserved.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Carl: Lou Henry Taylor and her sister, Lou Tom, were so influential on a lot of levels.

Margaret: She was really, I guess, kinda like the mother of The Hill.

♪♪♪ Doug: She was married to my daddy's brother.

He was in the Navy, and my uncle used to gamble in the Navy.

And every time he'd win money, he'd send it back home to her, and she got so much money, she had that club built.

It was Lou's Blue Lounge, and my aunt, she had a nickname.

They called her Ponytail.

Before she got that club, she used to sell groceries, candy, and food out of her garage.

♪♪♪ Geraldine: Lou Henry was a smart businesswoman.

She ran a grocery store and a beer joint and a club.

Bertha: Classy lady, she didn't like all that lie talking and cursing.

She did keep her little bat and her pistol.

No, you didn't run over her.

Carl: Lou Henry, through her store, she supported a lot of things that happened in The Hill.

Bertha: She cared about the people that came to her club, and she cared about the church across the street.

Geraldine: Any of the churches that were in the neighborhood knew they could go in and get bread or ice or whatever they needed.

Carl: She supported school programs, she supported churches, she would help get people out of trouble, she'd loan you money.

When people got sick, she would be first one there.

And it didn't matter if they were Black, Brown, or White.

She fed them, she bought them clothes.

♪♪♪ Geraldine: I mean, she had got a new Cadillac every year, she was always dressed perfectly, had a lot of friends in high places too.

And I think the chief of police always took care of her.

Carl: Miss Taylor was not a lady who attended church every Sunday.

She had many faces, but she had a really, really good heart.

A lot of folk talk religion and they think it's going to church.

No, be a doer of the Word.

Bertha: That's the kind of person she was.

♪♪♪ narrator: So, there's a new high school within walking distance of my house, but my parents can't enroll me.

There's a clothing store down the street, but they won't take my $20 bill.

There's a movie theater downtown on Center Street, but they won't let me in.

My dad can't buy real estate unless someone else agrees to purchase it for him.

What kind of trauma does this create?

Geraldine: Fear and distrust of anybody White.

I said, I don't see how they ever got past that, and it was only through love in a community and in their own family that got them even halfway past that.

It has to hurt you deep.

Bob: Had it not been for some strong parenting and some strong educators, it would have been more traumatic that it happened to be.

Cecilia: And when things are left out of history, it makes me wonder why.

Carl: We had a kindergarten program started at Mount Olive, and a White lady noticed me.

She hugged me.

White people ran the risk of being labeled too, 'cause they'd call you a n-- lover, right quick.

Doug: I went to Vandergriff right there off of Center and Division, that was Vandergriff's office, right there, and I walked right on in there, and I said, "How you doing, Vandergriff?

He said, "Do I know you?"

I said, "Yeah.

I'm one of your citizens that lives here".

And he said, "Yeah?

He said, "What is it?"

and I said, "Yeah.

I need a new pair of shoes."

I really did do it, and he gave me a voucher to go get me a new-- me and my brother a new pair of shoes, sure did.

Randy: But if there was any teachable moments, the one thing that I think should be retained, people don't seem to care about each other as much as they used to.

Any success in life, someone along the way helped you, someone along the way assisted you, someone along the way gave you an opportunity.

Doug: You don't know what it's like to be living on six or seven streets.

It was kinda like the Twilight Zone, really, 'cause we're all sitting there, and we have to know one another, we don't have no choice, and we have to become something greater than what's there already.

Gene: Despite the adversity, despite the hatred, despite the fear that they had to encounter on a daily basis, is that this is their home and that they made a life for themselves.

I think that is the American story.

Doug: You know, you're somewhere where you know somebody appreciates you, somebody loves you, and that's a feeling that's hard to find.

Beverley: I mean, it wasn't perfect, but you had just so many people that really, really cared about each other, and they believed in helping each other, and it was just there.

Carl: We called it L.A., Little Arlington, The Hill, the Ghetto, but if I was within the confines of my community, I was safe.

Everybody I saw cared about me.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Eugene Martin: In the summers, between teaching film classes, where I am on the faculty of a large, public university, I take out a small camera and work on my diary.

Sometimes these diaries develop into screenplays for future films.

♪♪♪ Eugene: My process as a filmmaker, to be described as akin to a writer who keeps a pen and notebook handy to jot down story ideas.

In my case, my writing implement is a digital movie camera, which I use to record images and sounds about places, people, and things in my surroundings.

Recently I decided to turn my attention to West Texas.

My thought was to gather ideas for a third and final film about Texas to complete a trilogy of pieces I was making about the state.

I felt like I was on a search for something, but I was not exactly sure what I would find.

I had heard about small, unincorporated townships along the border with Mexico, and I wanted to see for myself what was there.

I already knew that if you drive ten hours south on Route 35 from where I live in North Texas, you arrive at the border with Mexico.

I then discovered that you can drive ten hours west by zig zagging across small highways and dirt roads.

You actually change time zones, but you're still in Texas.

So, I got in my car and did just that.

I had read that in the late 1950s a span of small settlements along the Texas border with Mexico began to emerge.

Texas landowners began offering lots to migrants and Mexican workers.

Many workers bought their land through what were called Contracts for Deed, which were often issued by the original property owners as pay-to-own contracts.

Over time, these settlements and towns became commonly known as Colonias.

Texas now has over 2,200 Colonias dotted along the border, where over 400,000 people live.

It has become the longest stretch of concentrated poverty in the United States.

It covers some 1,200 miles along the Texas border with Mexico.

In 1682, Piro Indians and Spanish families fleeing the Pueblo Revolt in Central New Mexico in North America migrated south.

The Pueblo Revolt was the largest organized uprising by indigenous people in North America.

They were able to remove the hostile Spanish rulers and reclaim most of their lands and tribal identities.

However, some indigenous people, such as a small section of the Piro tribe, chose to flee to safer ground all the way to the banks of the Rio Grande.

They were inspired to name their new town the same name as the area they had fled in New Mexico, from where the Piro had originated.

They called it Soccoro.

Soccoro means aid, or succor, in Spanish.

The Spanish mission founded here in 1682 was a safe haven for the migrants, both indigenous people and the Spanish.

It has been in continuous use ever since.

Soccoro sits directly across from Mexico at the Rio Grande, nestled just below the bustling city of El Paso in West Texas.

The Rio Grande remains the territorial border, along with patches of high, metal walls dotted between Texas and Mexico that have been erected over the past 30 years.

The terrain is rugged, the air is dry, and a persistent drought has squeezed water out of large swathes of this region.

As I was reviewing the footage from West Texas, I came to realize that there was a similar time period in American history that sparked a childhood memory.

There was a park I had played in back in Philadelphia where I grew up when I was a kid called Vernon Park.

In this park, I remembered that there was a large statue about the start of the Abolitionist Movement.

I walked from my mother's house over to Vernon Park, and there was the statue, just as I had remembered it, sparkling in the warm summer sun.

In 1688, the Quakers and the Mennonites, two religious organizations, started what would become the movement to abolish slavery.

If only they could foresee that it would take a Civil War to break the bonds of chattel slavery.

Then, in 1683, just a year after the Spanish mission was founded in Soccoro in 1682, 2,000 miles away on the North American continent, along the eastern seaboard of North America, the British started to establish settlements and towns in the new British colony of Pennsylvania.

Dutch and German citizens seeking religious freedom joined the British migration and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and settled there too.

By 1687, so many Germans had arrived that they named their main thoroughfare Germantown Highway.

The highway they traveled to sell their wares and services was based on an old Indian trail, first established by the Lenape people.

At first, the settlers lived peacefully with the Lenape, but in 1737 the sons of the treaty signer cancelled the settlers's side of the deal and deceived the Lenape to sell them over one million acres of land in what was known as the Walking Purchase.

What it really had turned into was a land grab that pushed the Indians further away from the area that had now become known as Germantown.

Germantown Highway eventually became Germantown Avenue and is now part of the city of Philadelphia.

Germantown Avenue too is a border that has evolved for over 300 years.

It runs for 12.5 continuous miles in a diagonal line across Philadelphia, ironically known as the city of brotherly love.

The avenue runs through wealthy and middle-class neighborhoods.

It then spirals south across the southeast of the city, where cheaply built housing developments and older homes built for factory workers list and decay.

♪♪♪ My connection to Germantown runs deep.

I grew up, I went to elementary there, and all of my close friends that I grew up with were my neighbors.

Everything in Germantown is old, the houses, the traditions, the history.

The Underground Railroad ran through Germantown.

The house where my mother still resides has a front door that splits into two parts.

This is called a Dutch Door, which, I suppose, is a custom the Dutch settlers brought with them as they helped build house here.

Her house was built in 1880, and though it is slowly decaying, it still, somehow, retains a graceful elegance.

The Dutch Door reminds me of my two identities of coming and going, closing and opening, east and west.

My mother has lived there for 55 years.

She has told me that she will never leave more than once, actually.

I like to pose pictures of things I find in her house and send them to my family and friends.

I know that my mother would like me to take over the house after she dies, but I have told her I do not want it.

Too many memories, too many steps, too much to take care of.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ [cars passing by] [cars passing by] [cars passing by] [cars passing by] Eugene: I ended up spending time in Presidio, a small town a few miles east of Soccoro, that also has a colonia town that sits directly adjacent to it.

The main commerce in Presidio are three dollar stores, a local school, a few taquerias, a furniture store, a health clinic, and the town hall.

The average annual household income for a family of four in Presidio is less than $25,000.

Six-thousand seven-hundred and four people live there.

Over 85% of the residents in colonias are American citizens.

The town manager gave me a map that outlines how the colonia is separated from the town of Presidio.

No one is trying to hide the fact that the town and the colonia, in terms of access to basic services, are a world apart.

The border that separates them is right there on the map for anyone to see.

A government report from 2015 from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas notes that, "Texas colonias have been built over the past 65 years.

Many colonias started as migrant farmworker settlements in response to the lack of affordable housing.

Colonias basically developed because there had been a lot of landowners who were able to sell their land by cutting it into lots, without having to account for any infrastructure," end quote.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Eugene: In 1968, I attended this elementary school, Lingelbach, with my younger brother and nine of my friends from our block.

When I was seven years old, me and my father once removed all the graffiti from the walls of the school.

The playground looks exactly the same as it did over 50 years ago when I was a student here.

I vaguely remember walking down this path to my classroom, and me and my friends played baseball along here, with the same kind of square painted on it.

A few blocks away in 1777 the battle of Germantown occurred, between 9,000 British soldiers and 11,000 continental soldiers during the Revolutionary war.

The Americans soundly lost this battle, along with 152 of their men.

Every year, the battle is reenacted.

As a child, when I first heard the shots fired from muskets, I wondered how anyone could not be scared.

I still have vivid memories of gunpowder and smoke rising from the muskets of the reenactors.

Today, the neighbors complain that the gunshots sound all too real and that they have petitioned for them to stop the reenactments.

They say they are having nightmares caused by all the gunshots, most every other night of the year.

General George Washington led the retreat for a 10-mile stretch.

A decade later, George Washington would become the first president of the United States, and his official residence, the first White House, would lie less than a mile from the battle of Germantown.

Here is the house he lived in.

He also resided here in the summers to escape the Yellow Fever pandemic.

Later, this other White House was built for him, but it no longer exists, just this frame to represent it.

More people visit the house that is no longer there versus the one that still stands.

The original house rests silently along Germantown Avenue.

Most people don't even know that it exists.

There are lines we can see, physical lines, but no matter how hard we try, even when we see them, we choose to look away.

I want to show these lines and borders with images and sounds.

Are the things we see in front of our eyes truths, or are they actually more like mirrors?

I know there is no way to make this a fair representation, I acknowledge my own inherent biases in my recordings.

For me, the best I can do is bear witness, capture moments in time, and then share them.

Sometimes the past tells us about the future, or what if it is actually telling us something about the present?

Some spans of time are measured in months, years, decades, even centuries.

Some passages of time are measured in millennia, yet to some, time is a constant that has no beginning and no end.

In the 1680s these two places, 2,000 miles apart, were hard etched into the landscape by people seeking a better life.

I often wonder, how much has actually changed?

♪♪♪ [birds chirping] [birds chirping] [birds chirping] ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪