A soccer field in the community, but not for the community
On a recent balmy evening, Los Altos neighbors were outside enjoying almost every aspect of West Dallas’ Benito Juarez Parque de Heroes.
A woman walked her dog on the loop trail while a man rode his bicycle. A father and son tossed a football back and forth on the grassy lawn next to the playground, where children climbed under their parents’ watch. Young men shot hoops at the basketball court.
The only exception was the vast soccer field, lush with spring greens but barren of activity. The lock on the fence surrounding the field made sure of that.

The field sits in the middle of the Los Altos neighborhood’s Benito Juarez Parque de Heroes. Years ago, it was a center of neighborhood activity, with pick-up soccer games and parents teaching their young children the sport.
Since 2012, however, when the City of Dallas built a fence around the field, it goes mostly unused, except for the weekends when teams pay the city as much as $61 an hour to use the field for practice or games.
Nearly a decade after the fence went up, residents of the surrounding Los Altos neighborhood say that they are still in the dark on why the city decided to privatize the only public soccer field the neighborhood had for recreation.
Before the fence was built, people played regularly and helped clean the field to preserve the park, says Raul Reyes Jr., vice-president of the Los Altos neighborhood association.
“It’s disappointing seeing that fence and knowing that you have to ask for permission to use it, especially when you see people from other communities come once in a while to use it,” Reyes says.
Is a locked fence an improvement?
Benito Juarez Parque de Heroes has special meaning because of the park’s history in Los Altos. In 1997, a former lot on top of a landfill finally became a park, which the neighborhood had been trying to establish for 17 years, according to an April 5, 1998 Dallas Morning News article.
Once the park began to take shape, organizations and donors began contributing to remodel the park’s facilities. One of them was Samaki Walker, former Dallas Mavericks forward, who contributed $7,000 to construct a basketball court.
“I looked at the landfill — it was pretty rugged and dirty to an extreme,” Walker said in the article. “I wanted to help the kids out. Where I come from, we had to walk four or five neighborhoods until we got the chance to play basketball.”
The same article notes that “volunteers installed playground equipment and built a baseball diamond and soccer field” in 1998. The basketball court Walker funded is still in the park and, though it’s also fenced, it remains available for public use, unlike the soccer field.
“My question is, why not allow that to the soccer part? If you fence in the basketball court, why not allow that same access to the soccer field?” Reyes says.
A year later in 1999, neighbors asked former District 6 Dallas City Councilmember Steve Salazar for a name change that would reflect their Hispanic pride. So the park’s name was changed from Winnetka Park to Benito Juarez Parque de Heroes.
A 17-foot bronze statue of Benito Juarez with a granite base also was erected at the park to commemorate the former Mexican president. Roughly a thousand West Dallas neighbors gathered to celebrate and to enjoy the new park.

With the park established, community members began asking for amenities such as lighting at the park and around the soccer field. In a Dec. 21, 1999 Dallas Morning News article, Salazar confirmed that $200,000 was allotted for park improvements, with funds from both a voter-approved 1998 bond package and federal funds allocated for community development, including an $86,000 price tag for lighting. But the city said “a large demand of construction projects” was delaying the improvements.
Neighbors complained that city officials didn’t care for what the community needed.
“The kids say that they want to play here because it’s their park, but there are no lights,” Isidro Gonzalez said in the article. “Nobody can do anything there after dark. This is a low-income community, and that may be why city officials are not rushing to put the lights up.”
The improvements came a decade later, in 2009. A City of Dallas Park and Recreation Board agenda shows that, initially, the city planned to spend $246,600 in both bond funds and federal funds, but ultimately it spent $449,200 in Community Development Block Grant funds — intended to “build stronger and more resilient communities” — for soccer field improvements, a loop trail, a portable toilet enclosure, site furnishings, two new parking lots — and “fencing.”
“The park’s previous soccer field — which was not fenced in — was highly used and, with so much use, the turf was getting compromised and could not get established,” Andrea Hawkins, who manages visitor experience and community engagement for Dallas parks, told Dallas Free Press via email when we posed questions to the city.
When the field was renovated, Hawkins says, “city and park officials decided to install a fence to protect the recent renovation and to prevent turf damage. The addition of the fence ensured good turf establishment, and the dec