Standing in Roberto Clemente Park opened a floodgate of memories for John Fernandez — baseball games with friends, ringing bells from nearby churches, and corner-store treats that defined life on Grand Rapids’ West Side.
“Used to play here every day in this park,” Fernandez says. “The baseball fields were over here, and they had a building in the outfield that was there for an ice-skating rink we came to in the winter. Where those kids are now at the skate park — that used to be tennis courts.
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Shandra MartinezJohn Ferna´ndez and his daughter, Delia Ferna´ndez-Jones
“We were kids, so we played baseball inside the tennis courts. Even though the fence was close, it was really high, so to hit it out, you really had to swing. Only four or five of us, and we played right there. I’ve been through all these woods,” he says, motioning to the trees to the interior of the park. “I don’t know how many times — this was our hangout.”
He remembers the sound of voices carrying down the block.
“We’d be around the corner playing — me and my two brothers — and my mother would come out on the front porch and yell,” he says. “Then the neighbors all the way down, they would keep yelling, ‘Mom wants us, let’s go.’”
The annual West Side reunion brought Fernandez back to the park that holds so many of his childhood scenes. Through his daughter’s research, he began to understand the depth of the neighborhood he so loved. Although this was his first time attending the reunion, Fernandez was eager to swap stories, check on old friends, and connect.
Recognizing history
Delia Fernández-Jones, a historian at Michigan State University and author of “
Making the MexiRican City: Migration, Placemaking, and Activism in Grand Rapids, Michigan,” is Fernández’s daughter. She has led efforts to preserve and document stories from the neighborhood her family long cherished.
“This is my first time coming to the event,” Fernandez-Jones says. “I’d seen it on Facebook and heard about it from my aunts and uncles, but I wanted to find a way to help preserve the history of the West Side. As somebody who wrote a book about Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Grand Rapids, much of it features the West Side. I wanted to look at this as, what if the West Side was the central actor? The West Side connects so many people.”
She describes growing up with stories that turned every corner into a family reference. Her background is Mexican and Puerto Rican.
“We would be out at the grocery store, my dad would see somebody and be like, ‘Oh, this is your uncle,’” she says. “I’d be like, ‘Oh, OK, hello.’ It showed the role that the community plays. He had a big family — 10 brothers and sisters — but so did everybody else. It created this amazing community.”
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Shandra MartinezInterviewer Kuzari Olushola stands in front of a studio set up in a temporary office provided by Pioneer Construction.
Interviewer Kuzari Olushola is a 2023 Jackson State University graduate whose grandfather, Carl Edward Smith, once served as the director of the state of Michigan’s civil rights department.
“We don’t have much documentation of the history of the West Side, so my job is to bring that history out through our remaining history — the people,” Olushola says. “Today is a great opportunity to do that.”
The interviews were filmed by the
Grand Rapids Media Initiative & Film Incubator (GR-MiFi) in a trailer donated for the day by
Pioneer Construction.
“We’ve got our ‘Avengers’ squad,” Olushola says. “The lives people are living now are based on decisions made in the past. It is our job, especially at an event like this, to continue this so those memories aren’t forgotten, and we can build on them for the generations that come after.”
‘All in this neighborhood together’
Fernandez-Jones’ research focuses on how neighbors share space.
“One of the things I’m thinking about is the way we talk about areas in a racially segregated way — Black history, Latino history,” she says. “In the urban North, especially in smaller Midwest cities outside Chicago, poor people lived together. If they were white, Black, Mexican — they shared schools, parks and churches. After church, no matter where you went, people hung out together. Here at the park. In front yards, backyards and industrial yards. It feels like something that can’t quite be replicated again.”
Fernandez-Jones also points to change over decades.
“There was displacement from a variety of forces — the highway, urban renewal that targeted houses without investment, industry expanding,” she says. “By the ’60s and ’70s, Latinos increased in numbers. Families were recruited for jobs, similar to how Black families were recruited during World War II. These weren’t the highest-paid jobs. Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Black folks were all in this neighborhood together.”
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Shandra MartinezReunion organizer Teri Ann (Calmese) Jones hugs a friend.
She traces later shifts as well.
“In the late 1980s and 1990s, there wasn’t as much investment in cities and state services,” she says. “Suburbs around Grand Rapids became more open to Black and Latino families than in earlier decades. Space and tax bases shifted. Places like Wyoming, Kentwood, and Walker were changing. All of this affected where people lived.”
The work of collecting stories is personal.
“I feel it first,” she says. “Long before I started to research my first book — and now this research, which will probably be a second book — I knew these stories. I didn’t know a time when I didn’t know them. People here know something about the West Side they’ve always known. They’ve renamed streets. Buildings are different. But they know something about the West Side. It’s part of my job to say, this is what this place used to be, and this is why people feel so strongly about it.”
Stories that cross generations
Now the goal is to capture the stories on video and to bridge cultural and geographical divides.
“I want to make it so that everyone here — their grandchildren — know,” she says. “I want my son to know that grandpa was on the West Side, and this is how we are. This kind of relationship our communities have had is decades old. It’s generations.”
A key organizer who puts hours behind the reunion is Teri Ann (Calmese) Jones, who helps lead the event even though she has not lived in the neighborhood — or in Michigan — for decades. Jones lives in Columbus, Ohio, and returns because, as she puts it, “this neighborhood is family.”
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Shandra MartinezTeri-Ann (Calmese) Jones
“This event has been going on since 1979,” Jones says. “I haven’t been organizing it the whole time, but I stepped in about five years ago because it was dropping off. We have 14 people on the committee, and 10 are 70-plus years old. I’m 73.”
For Jones, telling the stories is about passing along the values she learned from her parents and the neighbors who looked out for each other.
“We’re all friends,” she says. “Everybody around here knows each other or someone in your family. When I see the young people, I can look at a kid and say, you belong to the Bourbons family. You look so much like them. I can say, ‘Oh, I know you’re a Fleming,’ or ‘I know you’re a Calmese.’ It’s like looking in the mirror as a younger person and telling them how we grew up — how respectful we were to each other — and how we looked out for each other.”
She adds, “Kids nowadays don’t always have that respect. Your word is your bond. If I tell you I’m going to do something, I don’t have to say it again. We just look out for each other.”
That sense of community is why she feels connected to her childhood neighborhood.
“When I moved to Columbus, I had a friend from school whose family was there,” Jones says. “Her husband worked construction here. I told her if I ever moved away from Grand Rapids, I’d come there. We’ve been friends ever since. The church there has the same kind of atmosphere. You can walk in and not know who is biological family and who is church family. It reminded me so much of home that I stayed.”
Seeing changes
Rosie Springs, who turns 96 next month and is a mother of 12 and a former school board member, echoes those thoughts.
“Well, it was beautiful back here back in the day,” Springs says after stepping out of the recording trailer. “Love, love the neighborhood. They worked together. Loved the children. Work together — good memories of love and working together, helping the kids, sharing neighbors.”
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Shandra MartinezRosie Springs
Springs talks about coming north and finding a place on the West Side.
“I moved in ’55,” she says. “I was born in Mississippi and then moved to Detroit, and I came over here in ’65 to Grand Rapids. I was 20 and my son was a year old.”
She remembers the anchors that shaped families like hers — churches and the library — all within walking distance of her home at 655 Oakland Ave. SW, where she lived until three years ago.
Springs observes what has changed over the decades.
“The children have changed. The young people have changed,” she says. “They’re different now. They’re not as respectful, but they are trying to be more educated. The phones and things are taking them in one direction. Back then, there was no fighting, no fussing — we were just loving and enjoying life.”
Olushola says he was energized by his time with the nonagenarian.
“Miss Rosie — God bless her soul,” he says. “She’s giving me energy after that interview, so I’m ready to go with the rest of mine.”
Coordinating the production took months, says Shayna Haynes-Heard, a West Sider and Grand Valley State University graduate student. She has been volunteering with GR-MiFi since she learned about their collaboration with a documentary production based on Todd E. Robinson’s book, “
A City Within A City: The Black Freedom Struggling Grand Rapids, Michigan,” which is being produced by Grand Stand Pictures.
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GR Mi-Fi volunteers take photos and video of Rosie Springs.
Haynes-Heard discovered Robinson’s book in 2021 through her research about what she and others describe as “West Michigan Nice” culture. She has since played a hands-on role in the production of the film and in GR-MiFi’s efforts to preserve history, develop media talent, and build platforms for others to share their stories.
“Our team has been meeting weekly for the last few months,” Haynes-Heard says.
Prior to the West Side Reunion, GR-MiFi has partnered with other community members to collect oral histories related to their documentary film project. These collections include stories about the Auburn Hills Neighborhood, South High School, and now the West Side.
“Our work in collecting oral histories and developing media talent and opportunity in Grand Rapids has been several years in the making,” she says.
The
Grand Rapids African American Museum and Archives (GRAAMA) has also been a collaborator in this work.
Haynes-Heard says her approach to this work is rooted in “narrative justice,” a term she learned from leaders of GR-MiFi, including board members Rodney Brown, Victor Williams, and Synia Gant-Jordan.
She describes Gant-Jordan as a proud West Sider and a “beacon of truth in the city."
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Shandra MartinezShayna Haynes-Heard
“The West Side reunion is a good example of people telling their own stories, whether other people are shining light on them or not,” Haynes-Heard says. “The West Side reunion has been happening for years, and people travel from all over the country to come together and celebrate what it means to be a West Sider. This is history that needs to be told and is being erased.
“In this digital era,” she adds, “we’re capturing stories that perhaps 50, 100, 200, even 300 years from now people will have access to — their ancestors’ voices and their truth.”
The project pulled in students and staff from multiple campuses, including Michigan State University, Grand Valley State University, and Calvin University. Many of the crew members in matching T-shirts were volunteers from GR-MiFi. Staff from Grand Rapids Public Library were also part of the effort.
Julie Tabberer, head of the
Grand Rapids History Center, supported the creation of an interactive map upon which attendees were asked to pinpoint when and where their families lived on the West Side.
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Shandra MartinezJulie Tabberer, head of the Grand Rapids History Center, brought an interactive map for attendees to mark their families’ West Side homes and dates.
This component will help the community to fully understand patterns of displacement. Together, these contributors are compiling a digital archive at GRPL, artifacts and content that will be donated to GRAAMA, and public-facing content that will be disseminated through GR-MiFi’s public media platforms.
Memories of youth
Fernandez, who ran these blocks as a boy in the 1960s and ’70s, ticks through the places that formed him.
“I went to Maplewood school. Later on, I went back to that school when I was in high school during the summer” he says, referring to a federal employment and arts education program known as
CETA. “The theater program came, and we used to go there for three hours to school and then three hours of work. Guess where they sent us to work? Right here.”
He remembers changing schools as his family’s circumstances shifted.
“We got bounced to St. Joseph on Rumsey,” he says. “Then St. Andrews. Then Burton and Central. Central High — I graduated.”
As an adult, he and his wife started their own chapter nearby.
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Delia Fernández-Jones, a historian at Michigan State University, talks an attendee of the GR West Side reunion.
“We were here on Curve Street,” he says. “My wife grew up in that house, so we moved into that house. Delia was born there, and six months later, we moved to Wyoming. We left the neighborhood because my mother-in-law found us another house over there, but it was getting rough, too.”
When the family moved, they had three of their four children: Delia, the third oldest, was a baby. Fernandez came to the park to back her work.
“I think it’s awesome,” he says. “That’s why I said I gotta go over there and support her.”
Olushola’s takeaway from his interviews has been how tight-knit the neighborhood was.
“First thing, love. That’s what the West Side is built upon. That’s what we’re seeing here at this park.”
Fernandez-Jones agrees.
“This place connects people,” Fernandez-Jones says. “The West Side was a community where people shared space. Capturing that — in people’s own words — helps everyone understand what it meant to grow up here, and why so many still call it home.”
Photos by Shandra Martinez