Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe: A Legacy of Health Care for El Paso's Underserved

Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe, Inc., in El Paso is an organization that provides health care and social services to low-income families. It traces its origins to the mid-to-late 1960s during a time when many Mexican Americans across the nation were frustrated with the lack of services provided to underserved communities, and the growing Chicano movement raised awareness for social activism. Many ethnic and racial minorities took it upon themselves to establish their own institutions outside of federal, state, and local governing bodies. Located along the U.S.-Mexico border, El Paso, Texas, was home to ethnically Mexican communities that were segregated into barrios and experienced some of the poorest living conditions in the country. One of the main concerns for these communities was access to affordable and reliable heath facilities. Many complained about insensitive health providers, high costs, long waits for services, and the lack of Spanish-speaking providers—all factors viewed as elements of institutionalized racism and classism within the health-care system.

El Paso became home to major political and grassroots organizations that sought to build self-determined institutions that served ethnic Mexicans. Coinciding with the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, many Chicano organizations arose out of funding from the establishment of the Office of Economic Opportunity, such as Project MACHOS (Mexican American Committee on Honor Opportunity and Service), Project Bravo, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), and VISTA’s Minority Mobilization Program. Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe originated from the coming together of the aforementioned groups alongside the Ochoa Parent Association, an organization composed of mostly women who had expressed a need for an emergency clinic as early as 1967 to establish a barrio health facility in the Los Seis Infiernos (“Six Hells”) tenement.

By April 15, 1970, with funding and assistance from health organizers from the U.S. Public Health Service TransCentury Corporation, the activist groups were brought together and formed The Father Rahm Service Center, named after Father Harold Rahm, a Jesuit priest, who served poor and working-class El Paso communities in the 1950s. The directors of this new center included Pete Duarte, Salvador Ramirez, Lupe de Anda, Santiago Mendoza, Manuel de la Rosa, Hilda Herrera, Nina Sanchez, Luis Peña, Tony Moreno, Victor Navarette, and Hector Rodarte. The clinic, which had opened in 1969, was intentionally located within the Los Seis Infierno tenement, a six-building tenement owned by the director of the City-County Health Department, in order to both embarrass the director (regarding the poor living conditions there) and to serve the poor in that tenement. In March 1970 the clinic moved less than a block away to a larger building. The clinic kept its doors open in its early years through community fundraising from local business and religious institutions and physician volunteers. Physicians were recruited mainly by El Paso resident Dr. Ray Gardea, who in turn recruited other doctors. Registered nurse Mary Marquez and nursing student Andrea Galicia both enlisted the help of nurses in the area. In addition to health professionals and volunteers, the clinic received support from various local businesses as well as the Catholic Church and other religious institutions.

In 1972 the clinic received a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (which later became the Department of Health and Human Services), legitimizing it as a Family Health Center helping the clinic obtain more consultants and grant writers to continue funding La Fe. However, the new designation as a “Family Health Center” meant that their volunteers were no longer able to treat patients without proper medical licenses. Medication past its due date had to be disposed, and the clinic had to abide by city safety codes in order to keep the doors open. Shortly after this, the clinic moved to another building previously occupied by a Presbyterian church, and it was here that the clinic became fully operational under its new designation as a Family Health Center.

By 1974, at the request of the Catholic Church because of infighting regarding what kinds of services the clinic provided related to family planning, The Father Rahm clinic changed its name to Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe, Inc. After this change, the clinic went through complex changes regarding their board of directors. The clinic had to maintain a board that reflected the larger El Paso demographic, meaning that it could no longer solely contain working-class, monolingual, Chicano activists and had to incorporate middle- and upper-class English-speaking members. Problems arose over the now mandated bilingual board meetings that left monolingual Spanish speakers frustrated with newer monolingual English-speaking board members especially when translators were not readily available. Many of the original members of the board left La Fe because they felt a loss of community self-determination they had worked for since the late 1960s.

The clinic moved to a new location on S. St. Vrain Street in 1974. As the clinic made the switch from community institutions to non-profit status, it was hit by major financial issues in the late 1970s—at a time when operations had expanded from approximately 100 patients served per month to 24,000 patient visits per year. Grantees officially warned La Fe that they had to either run the clinic more bureaucratically and efficiently, or the clinic and all of its assets would be liquidated. By 1980 La Fe had to enlist an administrator that also believed in the original self-deterministic goals of the community. Pete Duarte, a former director of Project Upward Bound at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), became the new director tasked to bring La Fe out of a financial deficit and in good standing with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Duarte’s role as a faculty member in the Sociology Department at UTEP provided him with a network of individuals and organizations willing to give donations that went towards La Fe’s $328,000 deficit. Within six months, La Fe received $250,000 in donations. As La Fe was saved from closure, the clinic shifted its focus to adopt more formal bureaucratic procedures and away from its community-centric personalized care regarding health services. Survival of La Fe meant the implementation of fiscal conservatism and stricter reliance on government regulations and less on meeting the self-deterministic ideology that built La Fe in the beginning. This significant change during the 1980s also created more rifts between the new director and the original community members. In addition, the Reagan administration initiated financial cuts for grants for public health programs, a measure that impacted La Fe’s budget. However, by the 1990s the clinic built both a larger number of patrons as well as a substantially larger budget, from $7,000 to $4 million by 1990.  

La Fe’s history is deeply entrenched in Chicano movement activism, and its trajectory is a testament to the changes that many community organizations experienced as they were required to conform to federal and state institutional regulations as most relied on federal grants to remain open. Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe, however, eventually gained prominence as an institution that effectively served the poor and working class in El Paso. In the early 1990s the organization served as the National Coalition of Hispanic and Mental Health Organization’s model for training health professionals in the Southwest. La Fe’s connections as a grantee to the Kellogg Foundation placed La Fe on the international map as a team from the La Fe clinic was invited to travel to South Africa to share their model with a country going through massive changes after apartheid.

In 1992 Salvador Balcorta, previously a La Fe volunteer and community outreach activist, became the executive director. Under his leadership, La Fe reduced its dependence on federal government funding and was financially able to open clinics across El Paso. This included San Elizario clinic and the Lisbon clinic—both founded during Balcorta’s first few years as director. Into the twenty-first century, La Fe expanded its operations with the La Fe Culture and Technology Center, which included classes in computer literacy and U.S. citizenship preparedness, a graphic arts center, and other arts and crafts features. Child and Adolescent Wellness Centers focused on medical services. The organization also opened the La Fe Preparatory School, a public charter school, in El Segundo Barrio. In the 2020s La Fe operated nine clinics that provided health services to El Paso’s poor and working-class communities that would not be able to afford health care otherwise. Services included infant and maternal care, pediatric care, elderly support, immunizations, optometry, dental care, radiology and laboratory services, pharmacy service, women’s health care, as well as various educational programs. In 2024 Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe’s main office was located on Yandell Drive in El Paso. Salvadore Balcorta still served as executive director.