El Barrio Azteca: Laredo's Earliest Neighborhood
Near Laredo, Texas
El Barrio Azteca is one of the oldest residential neighborhoods in Laredo, with lots first divided in the late nineteenth century when the city was expanding outward from its Spanish colonial core around San Agustin Plaza. Residents of the barrio worshiped at San Agustin Catholic Church and attended a Presbyterian congregation called La Iglesia Presbiteriana Sinai, reflecting the mixed religious influences that shaped border communities in this era.
Laredo's neighborhoods like this one grew up in the decades after the eighteen forty-eight Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when the Rio Grande became an international boundary and Laredo found itself on the American side while its sister city Nuevo Laredo remained in Mexico. El Barrio Azteca preserves the texture of that transitional era, when a Mexican-origin community was building permanent roots in a city that had suddenly changed flags.
