History and Controversy Surrounding Campo Santo: An Ancient Cemetery Beneath San Rosa Children’s Hospital in San Antonio, Texas
Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation took the lead to organize descendants, and worked with Heritage organizations whose ancestors were also buried in the Campo Santo. Descendants had several meetings with the Hospital leadership and ultimately the Court order was rescinded. We always believed that bodies would still be buried beneath the Christus Santa Rosa hospital complex and that having disturbed burials should not have been all that surprising. City leaders in the mid-19th Century vowed to relocate remains at the site, but we believed it never happened. In the late 1990s, diggers on another Santa Rosa construction project found bone fragments that archaeologists at the University of Texas at San Antonio later determined belonged to a man, woman and maybe even an infant. They ultimately found two coffins, one of which had been partially crushed by a sewer pipe. Due to “the possibility of encountering more burials” on the hospital grounds, the experts recommended monitoring and archaeological testing before any future construction on site.” Unfortunately, this never happened. On September 7, 2017 the Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation conducted a reburial of 10 ancestral remains with the support of the descendants and Heritage organizations.
