Barrio Libre: Eighty Acres of Mexican American Life

The neighborhood that spread south of the old Spanish presidio was called Barrio Libre, the Free Barrio, because in the nineteenth century it lay outside the city's official jurisdiction. The name was also a statement about the people who lived there.

Barrio Libre was a self-sustaining community, built primarily between the eighteen sixties and nineteen twenties in the Sonoran adobe tradition, thick-walled, single-story structures flush with the street, with interior courtyards hidden from view. The buildings were not copies of anything. They were a vernacular architecture evolved from centuries of desert building. Families owned shops and homes under the same roof. The La Placita Theatre anchored community life. El Charro occupied a stone building on the neighborhood's edge. Chinese immigrant families had built homes alongside Mexican American families in the eighteen eighties and nineties.

In the nineteen sixties, Tucson voters approved urban renewal. The city's stated ambition was to transform its image from what city leaders called a Mexican border town into an American city suitable for tourism and development. The plan required the demolition of eighty acres at the heart of Barrio Libre. Between the late nineteen sixties and the mid-nineteen seventies, the bulldozers moved through. La Placita Theatre came down. More than a century of irreplaceable Sonoran adobe structures came down. The community that had sustained continuous Mexican American life in this valley since the Spanish colonial era was scattered.

A woman named Alva Torres organized the La Placita Committee and fought to save what she could. The committee preserved the old El Charro building and the La Placita gazebo. The city entombed those survivors in a faux-Mexican shopping complex called La Placita Village, a pastiche of what had just been destroyed.

In their place: the Tucson Convention Center. A parking garage. Government buildings. The neighborhood exists now only in memories and in the records of the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation.