SOCIALIFE
COMMUNITY HISTORY
The man in the photo looks directly into the camera, hair and mustache neatly combed, hands on his lap. Seated on a wicker chair, he wears a suit, his shoes worn with use but clean. His gaze stopped Odilia “Odie” Peña Norquest in her tracks, right in the middle of the Museum of South Texas History in Edinburg. “That’s my grandpa!” she recalled exclaiming. “How did this picture get here? Where’s my grandma?” Odie and her husband, Carrol “Kelly” Norquest Jr., had been browsing the altars at the museum’s annual Día de los Muertos event Nov. 1, 2018. Odie liked looking at old photographs and was enjoying the framed pictures on the large altar in the center of the exhibit. The museum curated that particular altar, known as the Mystery Altar, to pay tribute to the unidentified people within a collection of photographs in the archives that did not have any stories or other information attached to them — not even names. The altar also served as a reminder of the importance to document family photos as a good preservation practice. The photo that caught Odie’s eyes did have a name — and a story. Odie grew up seeing photographs from different eras of her grandparents, Teófilo Peña Reyna and María Peña Rodríguez, in one photo frame. The frame on the Mystery Altar did not show Odie’s grandmother. The museum found the pictures, but without any information, separately within the collections in 1990. Who donated the photographs is a mystery. The Norquests had donated to the museum before — Kelly’s combat boots and uniforms from when he was drafted are on display in the exhibits. To their knowledge, they had not donated that particular photograph.
54
SOCIALIFE
That day, Odie and Kelly notified a staff member at the museum, and the revelation that a photo on the Mystery Altar had been identified by a family member attracted attention. The revelation led the museum to add a plaque about Teófilo, explaining who he was and told part of his story — an
unknown face in an unclaimed photo no longer. Though Odie was familiar with her grandparents’ portraits, she had not personally known her grandparents. Odie’s father was 12 years old when his mother died, and his father died
WWW.SOCIALIFERGV.COM
