The city’s Planning Department and the Austin Parks and Recreation Department were honored with awards from Preservation Austin’s 2023 Annual Preservation Merit Awards program for projects that preserve cultural heritage and local history in the African American and Mexican American communities.
The Planning Department – with consultants Open Chair, The Projecto and Cultural Strategies – received a Special Recognition in Education award for the Translating Community History Project, which celebrates historically significant African American and Mexican American neighborhoods in East Austin by featuring resident portraits and present-day stories interwoven with archival materials.
Translating Community History recognizes the longstanding impact of Austin’s 1928 city plan, which restricted public services for African Americans to East Austin as new downtown development forced Mexican Americans east. Over the next decades, the city provided subpar municipal services to East Austin and federal dollars funded Interstate 35 to solidify the east-west divide. Despite these challenges, East Austinites established thriving neighborhoods, prosperous business districts, and religious and cultural institutions.
PARD received a Special Recognition in Education award for the Oakwood Cemetery Chapel’s digital history exhibit “To Emancipate,” which gives context to the lives of enslaved people brought to Austin beginning in the 1830s. Through generations of brutality, poverty, and struggle, their descendants survived and some thrived, and their stories are told through oral histories, an interactive map of Freedom Communities in Austin, biographies and photos.