Magnolia Park resident Juanita Murphy has known no other home.
The 68-year-old has lived her entire life in a two-bedroom bungalow on Canal Street she inherited from her mother. Like so many of her neighbors shaped by the hard-working traditions of Houston’s oldest Mexican American community, she went to college, built a career and raised her children in Magnolia Park.
And now she spends her retirement watching the rhythms of neighborhood life unfold from her fenced-in yard. She sips on her morning coffee as her pack of tiny dogs barks at the children walking to school, parents taking the bus to work and a grandparent on a grocery run.
“I’m always here, greeting the people,” the grandmother said in Spanish. “On this block, we have known each other since we were all young.”…