The West Side: Barrio, Memory, and Displacement

The West Side of San Antonio has been a Mexican American neighborhood continuously since before Texas was a republic. Its streets carry names like Guadalupe and Laredo and Brazos. The houses that line them, many of them small wood-frame structures on narrow lots, are called casitas or shotgun homes, and they hold the architectural memory of families who have been in this city for five or six generations.

The neighborhood did not prosper by neglect. It prospered in spite of it. The West Side produced painters, poets, labor organizers, and civil rights advocates, including Emma Tenayuca, who was born and raised here. The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, founded in nineteen eighty-seven, has spent decades collecting oral histories, photographs, and documents from West Side residents, building an archive of a community that city government and private capital have repeatedly treated as expendable.

Between twenty fifteen and twenty twenty, the City of San Antonio issued hundreds of orders to vacate and demolish occupied single-family homes. The neighborhoods with the highest concentration of those orders were the West Side and the East Side, the historically Mexican American and Black neighborhoods respectively. By one analysis, the number in Houston, Dallas, Austin, and Fort Worth combined was far smaller.

Historians of urban development in Texas describe the pattern clearly: decades of bank redlining, underinvestment in infrastructure, and then, when land values rose, rapid demolition of the housing stock that remained. The phrase mi barrio no se vende, my neighborhood is not for sale, emerged from this pressure and became a visible expression of community resistance.

What is being preserved on the West Side is not just buildings. It is the material record of a culture that built San Antonio and was rarely credited for doing so.