Brittany Kelley
SAN MARCOS — The Council for the Indigenous and Tejano Community has recently opened a museum to further educate and provide representation for Hays County residents.
The council first began in 2019 after prominent members of the Indigenous and Tejano community were denied membership to the Hays County Historical Commission, said founding member Anita Azenet Collins: “We were furious and so, we went to the judge and we said, ‘This isn’t right. There’s no representation.’ And he said, ‘You know what? Let’s just create our own.’”
“The goal is to show that our history of Hays County is diverse. It isn’t just the Anglos that came in and settled the area, that we’ve been here for between 11-14,000 years, that we deserve to have our history told, as well,” said Collins.
While the council was forming, the Historical Commission was running a museum of the county’s history in the Historic County Courthouse that told a specific story, explained Collins. During this time, she stated that many community members of color would walk in and immediately leave because there was no representation of themselves.
It was after observing this — and the fact that the museum failed to reopen after COVID-19 shut it down — that founding member Gina Alba-Rogers approached the county and asked to create an exhibit of the council’s own.
According to Collins, it took approximately two years of research and consulting with professors at Texas State University and the Indigenous Cultures Institute for the museum to open, which occured in May 2025.
“It’s a museum like you haven’t seen in Hays County because this is telling the history of the Indigenous people and of the Mexican Americans who were in this county forever,” she said. “Many people who are not from San Marcos don’t know that this is the longest continuously inhabited area.”
So, the exhibit begins with the creation story of the Native Americans, followed by artifacts that were discovered to be up to 9,500 years old. Then, a history is told on the walls from the 1600s to the midcentury. The center of the room houses panels featuring families of Hays County that have been present for 100 years or more, such as the Tobias and Veracruz families.
Additionally, there is a wall that features the Coahuiltecan language.
“[Community members] don’t realize that the Coahuiltecan still have their native language and they still are teaching it to their young people that’s here,” Collins shared. “So, we chose to put up some of the words in their language and the translations. Then, if they scan the QR code, they can listen to her saying the words. It brings awareness that the Indigenous people didn’t just die or run away when the Anglos came; we were always here.”
The community response since the museum's opening has been overwhelmingly positive, Collins said:
“They see themselves. I have people say, ‘I saw my name in there.’ And never before have they been able to say that. The names didn’t relate to them; they weren’t represented.”
The museum has also received visitors from around the world, including Amsterdam and South America, to learn more about the history.
In the future, the council hopes to rotate the center panels to tell more stories of families that have been in the community for decades.
As far as contributing other aspects to the county, Collins stated that they are always working on adding historical markers to the county, though they are currently collaborating with the National Park Service on interpretive panels to continue telling the history in Hays County.
The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Saturday and is located in the Hays County Historic Courthouse at 111 E. San Antonio St., San Marcos, in Suite 104.
To support the council or find more information on the exhibit, visit www.citc.us.
