On a September afternoon, Fourth Street in downtown Santa Ana smells of carnitas and roasting corn, and the brass of a mariachi trumpet bounces off brick storefronts that have stood for a century. The Mexicans in Santa Ana have not simply moved into this city. They have remade it, block by block, into one of the most thoroughly Mexican places in the United States, a county seat where more than nine in ten Latino residents trace their roots to Mexico.
The Place
Santa Ana is the county seat of Orange County, founded in 1869 by William H. Spurgeon on land carved from the old Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, a grant that traced back to the Spanish soldier Jose Antonio Yorba. The city was incorporated in 1886 with roughly 2,000 residents and became the county seat in 1889.
For most of the twentieth century it was an agricultural town, then a defence and manufacturing hub, with a population that was overwhelmingly white. That changed completely. Today Santa Ana is home to roughly 310,000 people, and it is one of the most densely populated and most heavily Latino cities of its size in the country.
The heart of it all is downtown, where Fourth Street, known to generations as Calle Cuatro or simply La Cuatro, runs as the commercial and cultural spine of Mexican Santa Ana.
How It Became Mexican
The story of the Mexicans in Santa Ana is older than most people assume. It does not begin with the great migrations of the late twentieth century. It begins with the founding of the city itself.
The first barrios
Logan, on the east side of downtown, is the oldest Mexican and Mexican-American neighbourhood in Santa Ana. Its roots reach back to 1886, the very year the city was incorporated, when Mexican and Indigenous families began settling in the area then known as Santa Ana East. It was one of the few places where Mexican Americans were permitted to buy homes in the early 1900s, a quiet detail that says everything about the era.
Logan was not alone. It became one of three historic Latino barrios that anchored the city’s Mexican life, dense working-class neighbourhoods of small homes, corner stores and churches that held the community together when the wider city would not have them.
A city that drew a line
Santa Ana’s growth in the early twentieth century was built partly on segregation. As early as the 1910s, Mexican residents were pushed onto the stretch of Fourth Street east of Main, and by the 1930s that side of the street was almost exclusively Mexican. Spanish-language businesses, theatres and groceries filled in where the wider commercial district would not let them go.
The same lines were drawn in the schools. Children of Mexican descent across Orange County were funnelled into separate facilities, often justified by claims about language. That injustice produced one of the most important legal cases in American education.
Mendez v. Westminster
In 1946 and 1947, a lawsuit brought by Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez and other families challenged forced school segregation in four Orange County districts: Westminster, Garden Grove, El Modena, and Santa Ana. William Guzman and Thomas Estrada of Santa Ana were among the families who joined the case.
The federal courts ruled the segregation unconstitutional. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the decision in 1947, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education reached the Supreme Court. The case did not erase prejudice overnight, but it established a precedent that rippled across the country, and it began in courtrooms a short walk from Calle Cuatro. You can read more about it through the National Park Service.
White flight and a new majority
By 1890 white residents made up around 71 per cent of the city, many of them migrants from former Confederate states. For decades the demographic picture held. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, white families left for newer suburbs across Orange County, a process repeated in cities across America.
As they left, Mexican families moved in and put down roots. By the 1980s, Santa Ana had roughly equal numbers of white and Latino residents, a balance that would not hold for long. The Mexican population kept growing, drawn by jobs, by family already settled here, and by the simple gravity of a place where Spanish was spoken on every corner.
Calle Cuatro reborn
By the mid-1970s, Fourth Street was settling into a new identity as a Mexican cultural and working-class commercial zone. The turning point came in the late 1980s, when the Chase family joined with a group of Latino business owners to launch Fiesta Marketplace, a deliberate effort to remake the district around the city’s growing Mexican and Central American population.
New tenants moved in. Soon Calle Cuatro was a bustling hub again, this time a Mexican one, lined with quinceanera shops, jewellers, record stores, taquerias and groceries. It became the place where families from across Orange County came to shop, to celebrate, and to feel at home.
The Landmarks
Calle Cuatro, Fourth Street between Main and French streets, downtown. The beating heart of Mexican Santa Ana. The tree-shaded, brick-lined stretch fills with strolling mariachis, folklorico dancers, street vendors and the smell of food. For generations of families across Orange County, a Saturday on La Cuatro has been a ritual.
Logan Barrio, east of downtown. The oldest Mexican neighbourhood in the city, settled from 1886. Its quiet streets of small homes and its community spaces remain a living monument to the families who built Santa Ana’s Mexican community before Orange County itself was incorporated.
Chepa’s Park, in the Logan neighbourhood. Named for Josephine “Chepa” Andrade, a beloved community matriarch, the park has long been a gathering place for the barrio. It anchors a neighbourhood that has played a pivotal part in Mexican-American history in Santa Ana, and the city has committed funds toward its renovation.
Consulate-General of Mexico, 2100 E. 4th Street. The presence of a full Mexican consulate in Santa Ana is itself a measure of the community. Families come here for passports, identity documents and matricula cards, a steady stream that speaks to how deeply Santa Ana is tied to Mexico.
El Toro Carniceria, 1340 W. 1st Street. A family-owned Mexican meat market and taqueria that has served the community for more than forty years. Beloved as much for its tacos as its carniceria counter, it is the kind of place where families have eaten across three generations.
El Mercado Modern Cuisine, between Third and Fourth streets, downtown. A full-service restaurant and bar in a vintage downtown space with soaring ceilings and a tree-shaded patio along the pedestrian esplanade. It represents the newer, ambitious face of Mexican Santa Ana, contemporary cooking rooted firmly in tradition.
Bowers Museum, 2002 N. Main Street. Orange County’s leading art and history museum has hosted major exhibitions of Mexican art, including a celebrated show on the photographs of Frida Kahlo. It sits within reach of the downtown arts district, where murals such as Santa Ana Reflections tell the city’s story on its walls.
Where They Came From
The Mexicans of Santa Ana did not come from everywhere in Mexico in equal measure. Like much of the Mexican migration to the United States, the flows leaned heavily on the central-western states, the historical heartland of migration north.
Studies of migration into Santa Ana point to strong streams from Michoacan and Jalisco in particular, alongside flows from the State of Mexico and Mexico City. These match the broader pattern of Mexican migration to the United States, long dominated by Guanajuato, Michoacan, Jalisco and Zacatecas.
The mechanism was chain migration. One family member settled, found work, and sent word home. Cousins and neighbours followed, settling on the same streets, working the same jobs, worshipping in the same parishes. Over decades, whole networks of villages from the central-western states were stitched into the fabric of Santa Ana, which is why the city feels less like a generic Mexican-American town and more like a transplanted piece of the Bajio and the western sierra.
The same migration networks that filled Santa Ana also built Mexican communities across the country, each with its own character. There is the older Tejano world of the Mexicans in San Antonio, Texas and the border life of the Mexicans in Segundo Barrio, El Paso. There are the great urban barrios of the Mexicans in Little Village, Chicago and the Midwest enclave of the Mexicans in Mexicantown, Detroit. Closer to Santa Ana, the same Orange County and Los Angeles story plays out among the Mexicans in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. And across the wider state, California has drawn other diasporas too, from the Swedish farmers of Kingsburg to the Cambodians in Modesto.
Santa Ana Today
Today Santa Ana is one of the most heavily Mexican cities in the United States. Roughly three-quarters of residents are Hispanic or Latino, and of those, the overwhelming majority, more than nine in ten, are of Mexican origin. Spanish is not a second language here. In many neighbourhoods it is the first.
The community’s signature celebration is Fiestas Patrias, Orange County’s only festival and parade marking Mexican independence. It returned to historic Fourth Street for its 45th year in 2025, a weekend of music, a Sunday parade down Main Street, carnival rides and food that draws tens of thousands downtown. The festival commemorates Miguel Hidalgo’s 1810 call to arms in Dolores, and it has become the calendar’s high point for Mexican Santa Ana. You can find details through the City of Santa Ana.
It is not a story without tension. Downtown redevelopment and rising rents have pressed on Calle Cuatro, and longtime tenants have worried aloud about gentrification reshaping the street that the community built. The barrios east of downtown have fought for protection from industrial pollution. Santa Ana remains a working-class city, proud and crowded and contested. But it is, unmistakably, a Mexican one, and it shows no sign of becoming anything else.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Mexicans live in Santa Ana, California?
Around three-quarters of Santa Ana’s roughly 310,000 residents are Hispanic or Latino, and of that group more than nine in ten are of Mexican origin, numbering well over 200,000 people. That makes the Mexicans in Santa Ana one of the largest and most concentrated Mexican communities of any city its size in the United States.
What is Calle Cuatro in Santa Ana?
Calle Cuatro, or La Cuatro, is Fourth Street in downtown Santa Ana, the commercial and cultural heart of the city’s Mexican community. Once segregated as the Mexican section of the street in the early twentieth century, it was reborn as a Latino marketplace in the late 1980s and remains lined with taquerias, quinceanera shops, jewellers and street vendors.
Why is Santa Ana so heavily Mexican?
The Mexicans in Santa Ana built the community over more than a century, starting with the Logan barrio in 1886. As white families left for newer suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s, Mexican families moved in and chain migration from central-western Mexico brought more, until the city became majority Latino by the 1980s and overwhelmingly Mexican thereafter.
What was Mendez v. Westminster?
Mendez v. Westminster was a 1947 federal court case that ended forced school segregation of Mexican-American children in four Orange County districts, including Santa Ana. It was decided seven years before Brown v. Board of Education and stands as a landmark in the long civil-rights struggle of Mexican Americans in Santa Ana and across California.
When is Fiestas Patrias in Santa Ana?
Fiestas Patrias takes place each September on historic Fourth Street, with a parade down Main Street, marking Mexican independence. It is Orange County’s only Fiestas Patrias festival and parade, and the 2025 edition celebrated its 45th year, drawing tens of thousands of people downtown.
What is Logan Barrio?
Logan is the oldest Mexican and Mexican-American neighbourhood in Santa Ana, settled from 1886 and one of the few areas where Mexican Americans could buy homes in the early 1900s. It remains a touchstone of the city’s Chicano history, anchored by Chepa’s Park, named for community matriarch Josephine “Chepa” Andrade.
If your family’s story passed through Santa Ana, or any of the places Mexicans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Jalisco or Michoacan, to a small house in Logan barrio and a Saturday on Calle Cuatro, to wherever you are now.