When the conquistadors came to the new world, they passed through a flat, open prairie grassland that would one day be called Oklahoma.

The explorers were looking for cities of gold.

All they took home were tales of a strange and wondrous land.

Their descendants would return looking for opportunity, work and a better life.

Poverty and persecution in their homelands would push them to pursue their dreams through courage, faith and hard work.

Once here, they not only would dare to dream the American dream, they would seize it and bring with them the cultures and customs that enriched every community in Hispanic Oklahoma.

It's a familiar sight in Oklahoma from grillers who tailgate to the players in the Pride.

But for some, there's a different sound.

It's OU Spanish radio, and it's gaining a following among fans that may be new to college football.

The Spanish project of Los Sooners is very unique is still in the in that you know scale up of growing and just having having that opportunity to be able to be part of it and and, you know, give to the a different public or different audience a chance to listen to this and be part of OU's culture is really amazing.

This broadcast will reach fans far beyond the state border who dream of coming to America.

Color man Luis Rendon is from Venezuela, the project of Los Sooners.

The main goal for us is to not only entertain the Hispanic audience around the U.S. or in South America, Central America or anywhere.

It's also to let people know that OU is has open doors for diversity, for different communities, that this is an opportunity for people to come to the University of Oklahoma, and also to be part of it.

Hearing the game in Spanish allows the state's Hispanic population to connect with Oklahoma in the language of their original home.

It's the same language spoken by the first explorers that came to Oklahoma 480 years ago.

In 1540, Coronado got permission from the Viceroy of Mexico to explore the northern reaches of the Spanish empire, which would be essentially the southwest.

The vast wealth taken from the Inca and Aztec empires whetted Madrid's appetite for more gold and silver and stimulated them to explore what they called.

New Spain.

So he marched out of the valley of Mexico, across the Rio Grande, crossing the Red River, and marched into what is now southern Kansas.

But on the way, he entered what is now Oklahoma through the Oklahoma Panhandle.

He called the stake planes.

Llano Estacado because they put steaks in the ground so they could find their way back.

It was such a wide open, barren land.

The group of people included 60 foot soldiers, 800 Indians and slaves.

To get over the journey.

So it wasn't really that much of Spanish soldiers.

They didn't stay.

They went back to the valley of Mexico.

They did not find the gold.

They did not find the seven cities of Cibola.

And so they did not stay and plant any colonies.

But that that started a centuries long story of first Spain and then Mexico with the claim to what is now part of Oklahoma.

In 1762, the Spanish got control of the Louisiana territory.

The French had claimed the land.

Since LaSalle had sailed down the Mississippi River and claimed all the region west of the Mississippi for France, they seeded that land to Spain.

So the British wouldn't get it.

And now Spain had this vast empire.

The interior of what would become the United States, the Southwest, California and Texas as early as 1765.

Spanish miners sifted the soil in the Wichita Mountains near Mount Scott.

Legends of buried Spanish gold abound through the romantic haze of all those golden dreams.

No significant claim has ever been filed, but the Spanish did find treasure in trade with the tribes in the 1790s.

The first merchants left Santa Fe crossed southeast.

Across the Texas panhandle, what is now the Texas Panhandle came into Roger Mills County, which is where Cheyenne, Oklahoma, is today.

There probably followed the north fork of the Red River, south to the Red River to where the Washita River and the Red River come together.

And then in that area somewhere, which would be west of Durant, it crossed into Texas.

So it's a long trip.

And then about 200 miles of the trail was in Oklahoma, which that's that's 600 miles at 15 miles a day.

That's pretty slow going there carts, which are probably two wheeled carts, wooden wheels pulled by oxen.

Cut, cut ruts in the prairie.

The prairie was very undisturbed.

And if it was the least bit damp from a rain or snowfall, then these ruts would be made by these wooden wheel carts and they would be there almost forever.

There were the Caddo Indians.

And the Caddos were great trading partners with the Spanish.

So they were friendly.

The Wichita's and they wanted to trade and they had lots of furs and hides and other things that they would trade for because they wanted the metal implements, particularly cookware, particularly manufacturing cloth.

If they had it, I think the great Spanish road probably lost its significance.

With the advent of the Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe Trail opened in about 1822.

In the early 1800s, Americans from the East came into contact with Spanish, Mexican, Californio and Texican cowboys.

We call vaqueros, the translation into Spanish is cowboys.

After the Civil War, Mexican cowboys were among the hands, moving the Longhorns north to the Kansas railhead.

Who's going to drive those cattle north?

Who knows how to rope and ride and survive on those southern plains dealing with these longhorn cattle, Latino cowboys.

And so these cowboys who have made it on the ranches of Mexico and then Texas start bringing their Latino culture the lariat.

That's a a corruption of the Spanish word for rope.

The skill sets even Will Rogers would later say he learned his roping skills from a mexican trick roper.

The rail lines coming into the territory needed coal to fuel the engines and they needed men to dig the coal.

It was the fuel of the time and the coal beds are discovered there around what is now McAlester, Lehigh, Hartshorne.

These all become coal communities.

In 1912, a mexican immigrant named Rufino Rodriguez was working in a coal mine near Lehigh.

He's working in this deep shaft mine.

And in 1912, as he's going in down into the shafts, which go almost a mile and a half underground.

You can imagine these these dank, dark, dangerous mines.

And the mine owners of Indian territory had very few regulations on safety.

Rufino discovers a fire.

Well, your first instinct is get out of this place.

He says those people are further down on that shaft.

I'm not going to save myself.

I'm going to go down and try to save others.

So he goes another mile and a half down there telling the guys, Get out of here.

There's a fire up here on whatever level it was.

Get out.

We think today that Rufino's action saved at least 180 lives that day.

If that fire had spread.

If there had been an explosion of that, methane gas would have killed everybody at lower levels.

Probably would have been collapses with a need for cheap labor.

There was a wave of opportunity.

Migrants began settling in.

People don't leave their homes easily.

It's not as if, oh, what are we going to do today?

Oh, yeah.

Let's leave our homes and churches and extended family and the people I know and the terrain, the resources that I know.

Let's go into the old Wild West.

Nobody says that without being desperate.

After 1910, immigrants began to come to Oklahoma in an effort to escape poverty and violent revolutions that were sweeping across Mexico.

The persecution was established during the Mexican revolution.

Leaders like Venustiano Carranza.

But the one who drove them away was Pancho.

Villa, Francisco Villa, who asked them, well not just them, the priests especially, those from Spain and all the religious, the they ask them all you need to go back to your countries.

The Carmelite priests, they went throughout from Mexico, from Torreon, Coahuila that is close to the border.

So when they escape, they arrive here in 1914 and the bishop offered them to stay here, but with a condition that they need to serve the Hispanic people, especially the Mexicans.

Despite threats from the Klu Klux Klan, priests founded Our Lady of Guadalupe in Tulsa and a small church in South Oklahoma City.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Saint Terrese was built in 1921 and dedicated to Saint Terese of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun who was canonized in 1925.

We have the original altar.

From that time where they celebrate the first mass after the canonization.

And she's very popular here in the United States as a little flower Saint Terese and here in Oklahoma.

They call her La Florisita.

That is a Spanish translation because in her writings in the history of the soul that she wrote, she called her herself a little, little flower of Jesus.

The little flower was the central point was the center base where the people could go, feel safe and that was where they had the early child services.

And it was just a central point for everyone within the Mexican community.

This was the first church, the first mission to open the doors for for them, not just now or even myself.

I don't want to use to serve their Mexican, but to serve the Hispanic people, because we have from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

And of course, in less numbers.

But but we have that present.

The dust bowl and depression hit.

Hispanic communities hard in the 1930s.

By the end of the decade, 75% of the Mexican population moved out of Oklahoma.

Many were deported during the Federal Mexican repatriation program.

It has been the same discussion from When I need you, I hire you.

Then I don't need you anymore.

Then I'm gonna chase you out and the common has always been on fear.

Are they taking advantage of us?

Are they taking our jobs away?

When the United States entered World War Two, demand for wartime labor created opportunity for work.

Many Latinos became naturalized citizens by serving in the armed forces.

Mexican-Americans like Manuel Perez Jr were the nation's most highly decorated ethnic minority.

Manuel was born in the Riverside community of Oklahoma.

City in 1923, and he volunteered for the Airborne.

You didn't have to go to the Airborne.

Those were like the Navy SEALs would be today.

So he becomes a paratrooper and is in the battle for the Philippines and retaking the Philippines.

In 1945.

In one of those firefights, he and his comrades.

So his friends on either side of him face about a dozen or more pillboxes of Japanese entrenched with 50 caliber machine guns firing down on them as they're coming up a hill.

Finally, they were down to one last pillbox.

Many of his soldiers had been killed.

Many of his comrades were wounded.

He had been hit already, but he didn't give up.

He worked his way around until he was less than 20 yards away from that last pillbox.

Took a grenade, throws a grenade, took it, took out the pillbox as as the soldiers.

The enemy soldiers start fleeing.

He would take them down so they couldn't fight again.

Not only protecting himself, but protecting his comrades.

A month later, Perez was killed by a sniper in the Philippines at the age of 22.

In February of 1946, U.S. officials presented the Congressional Medal of Honor to Perez's father on the international bridge between the United States and Mexico.

Like thousands of others, one Mexican boy reached for the American dream.

Luis Alvarado came to the U.S. at the age of 15.

He didn't have a lot of education.

He had a very from a very early age, had to work hard.

He left San Jacinto in the 1920s and started working at an ice factory in San Antonio and later moved on to a company that produced some of the very first tortilla machines.

A gentleman by the name of Miguel Martinez, who owned several restaurants, Mexican restaurants in Dallas, Texas.

And he was interested and heard about these machines.

And he was given a tour of the factory by my great uncle.

And he talked to the the owner of the company and said, okay, I'm going to take one of these machines, but I also want the mechanic to come with me.

He moved from San Antonio to Dallas to run the tortilla factory at El Fenix, and then from there moved to front of the house at the restaurants.

And then at a certain point he decided that he wanted to try his hand at his own restaurant.

So in 1937, he decided to move to Oklahoma City to open his first restaurant, to not make competition to the man that had shown him the business up until then.

His first restaurant was El Charro at Northwest 10th and Dewey, no one in Oklahoma City, had experienced anything like it.

Every major Mexican restaurant in Oklahoma can trace its roots back to that beginning.

They were there at that location nine years until there was a fire that burnt the restaurant down.

And when they rebuilt, they rebuilt in the the Paseo district, it was up and coming at that point in the forties.

They opened in 1946.

And El Charro means Mexican cowboy.

And so they decided to name the next restaurant, El Charrito, which means the son of the Mexican cowboy.

The young cowboy.

If you weren't there at 11:00 on a weekday downtown, well, there was a line down the street waiting to get in there.

The El.

Charrito Corporation, which had six restaurants, and my Uncle Louis' brother in laws, the Cuellars, which had the El Chico Corporation in Dallas, they had 30 units in Texas, and he had the six here.

When they merged in 1967, it was more feasible to change the name of just six units as opposed to.

So they they chose the name El Chico for for all of them.

Luis's niece, Taide, worked in the family business and married the manager of the Shepherd Mall location, Pepe Gonzalez.

He would open his own restaurant in 1981.

There were not many restaurants.

There was not many in Edmond at that time.

So so it was busy.

Pepe's was very busy all the time.

There was a long line also waiting.

My uncle interviewed Pepe and he said the minute I saw him, I knew he was a hard worker.

So.

So he gave him a job and he started that.

Cleaning tables in as a busboy.

And little by little, he went to be a waiter and then a cashier.

And later on, he they made him assistant manager, and then they make him manager.

There's the Nino's restaurants that opened in 19-if I'm not mistaken.

It was 78 or 79 that Nino's opened, and he ended up having several locations.

He had started with my uncle as well.

Soon later on, he in 1986, he opened up.

Laredo's Mexican Restaurant on Northwest 63rd and Western.

There was family members of of Cocina De Mino, the Hernandez family that had worked with my uncle as well.

Julian Gonzalez is the general manager at Casa de la Milagros.

Every day he greets customers under the watchful eye of the man who started it all.

My uncle was always known as his favorite post or duty at the restaurant was to be a host, and he was all always decked out in a nice suit.

There as the first person that you meet as you come in.

Very, very charismatic and personable.

We always call him Don.

Don Luis that's the most, what you call is a good sign of respect.

We never addressed him as Luis.

When Pitagoras Burga arrived in the U.S., his first job was at El Charrito.

When they give me the visa in Peru, they asked me, you know what the busboy does?

And I said no, they said good, you're going to find out.

And they gave me the visa.

Okay, Nino, and I we worked together as busboys.

Okay.

Nino learned the trade there.

Then he opened his own restaurant and then a young man worked for him.

He learned the trade and he asked for Nino's help.

He consulted with him, saying that he wants to open the restaurant.

And Nino says, Go ahead.

So here are the keys for the storehouse, for the warehouse.

Whatever you need, use it for your restaraunt.

He turned out to be Chelino's.

I love to see a family come here with nothing and be successful in business, I think that's the true American story right there.

Every day in the kitchen is a swirl of coordinated chaos.

Julian takes seriously his family's role as ambassadors of Mexican culture to Oklahoma.

I feel it's very important what the Mexican culture has to offer in terms of its food, its family traditions, importance with family, its music is just one more ingredient that helps make Oklahoma a more diverse and enjoyable and interesting place to be and to live in.

From the very beginning, there were those who did not welcome immigrants with open arms.

Many times this generations, past generations were not allowed to speak their home language.

In that case, the Spanish the there was a time in with the House bill 1804.

One of the push was to eliminate the different languages from the services provided in this state.

So that is saying, I don't accept your language.

But when you create those events and opportunities to share a common language for these communities, you're saying, I accept you.

Your language is important to me and language talks to the soul.

The 1980 census indicated there were 57,000 Hispanic Oklahomans.

Today, that number has grown to half a million.

12% of the state's population.

Now we have a larger pool of Hispanics contributing to the well-being of Oklahoma.

One of the characteristics of the Hispanics is that they are open to everything.

It's not something like and to say, Wow, what I can do is always an initiative to be open and in work and try to do something.

There's a significant Hispanic community here that, you know, that is part of us.

And we have to find a way to like, you know, include them in in the activities or events that we do in and just being here as a as an Hispanic.

I feel that I I'm really thankful and and I feel like, you know, that I can give back and just, you know, different ways to my community and to, you know, to tell them, hey, you know what?

We can we can keep going together.

Oklahoma is its is for everybody here.

Cultural pride, a common language and strong family traditions are what binds together the Latino communities in Oklahoma.

The people who trace their ancestry to the Spanish speaking nations of Central and South America are a rapidly growing segment of the Sooner State and will be an important part of the future in Hispanic Oklahoma.