Cross the Paso del Norte bridge from Ciudad Juárez on a weekday morning and within two blocks you are standing in the Segundo Barrio, where the smell of fried chicharrones drifts out of a corner store and a two-story brick tenement leans toward the sidewalk, its iron balconies hung with laundry. This is the first piece of American ground that more than a century of families touched after wading or walking across the Rio Grande. They called it the second ward. Almost everyone who lived here came from somewhere south, carrying one suitcase and a saint’s medal.
For a hundred and forty years the Segundo Barrio has done one thing better than any neighborhood on the border: it has caught people on their way north and given them a place to land. Some stayed a week. Some stayed a lifetime. The painter Mariano Azuela wrote the first great novel of the Mexican Revolution here while waiting for a war to end. The walls still talk, in twelve-foot murals of grandmothers and accordion players and a flaming sacred heart.
Segundo Barrio, El Paso: The Place
The Segundo Barrio sits in deep South El Paso, pressed against the Rio Grande and the international bridges that connect it to Juárez. Its rough boundaries run from Paisano Drive and the Cesar Chavez Border Highway to Cotton Street and South Mesa Street, a tight grid of perhaps fifty blocks. The housing stock is its signature: brick and adobe tenements, two stories, built around shared interior courtyards, many of them more than a century old. The whole neighborhood is walking distance from downtown and a few minutes on foot from another country.
How Segundo Barrio Became Mexican El Paso
Before the Mexicans
The land was farmland first. The neighborhood’s first recorded resident was Santiago Alvarado, a campesino who held a Mexican land grant here in 1834, when this stretch of the river valley was still part of Mexico. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo redrew the border and put the north bank in the United States, but the people and the language did not change overnight.
Everything changed in 1881, when the railroads reached El Paso. The Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe lines turned a dusty river crossing into a boomtown of mining, smelting, and freight almost overnight. The American Smelting and Refining Company, ASARCO, fired its first copper furnace nearby in 1899. The work was here. The workers were across the river.
The Mexicans Arrive
The Segundo Barrio was platted in 1885 as one of El Paso’s four original wards, and from the 1880s onward it became the starting point for thousands of families coming up from Mexico. The same railroads that built the smelters reached deep into Chihuahua and Durango, and they made it possible for a poor family in the interior to ride north for a few days’ wages. Those same rail lines carried other migrants onward to the packinghouses of the Mexican community in Pilsen, Chicago, but here at the river was where most got off first. They walked into the barrio.
Then came the Revolution. When fighting broke out in 1910, the trickle became a flood. Wealthier refugees passed through and continued north or east. The poor stayed in the Segundo Barrio, which by the 1910s had become the most densely packed neighborhood in the city.
El Paso was not just a refuge. It was a base of operations. Francisco Madero, who would soon be president of Mexico, settled into a small adobe house across from the ASARCO smelter in February 1911 and planned the assault on Ciudad Juárez from the upper floors of the downtown Caples Building. When his army, with Pancho Villa among its commanders, took Juárez that May, the dictator Porfirio Díaz resigned within weeks.
Villa himself was a familiar face on this side of the river, and the neighborhood remembers him for something small and human: stopping for ice cream at the Elite Confectionery. The barrio in those years was thick with revolutionaries, arms dealers, spies, and journalists. Among them was Mariano Azuela, a doctor who had ridden with Villa’s army. Forced into exile after Villa’s defeats in 1915, Azuela wrote his novel Los de Abajo, The Underdogs, and published it as a newspaper serial in the local El Paso del Norte between October and December of that year. It is now considered the defining novel of the Mexican Revolution, and it was born in El Paso.
Segundo Barrio at Its Peak
By mid-century the Segundo Barrio was bursting. Families crowded into the tenements that locals called presidios, the Spanish word for forts, because that is what the squat brick blocks looked like from the street. Inside, the conditions were brutal. A single small room often held a whole family. There was no indoor plumbing in much of the housing, just one faucet in the courtyard and outdoor toilets near the alleys.
City surveys in the 1950s counted more than 12,000 substandard dwelling units in South El Paso, with an average of seven families sharing a toilet and ten people to a family. And yet this was a real neighborhood, dense with life. Children filled the streets. Corner stores, churches, schools, and bakeries lined the blocks. Out of this crowded ground came the pachucos in their zoot suits in the 1940s, and later a famous lowrider culture, with some of the earliest car clubs in Texas forming in El Paso, part of the same border Chicano world that shaped the Mexican community in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.
The schools mattered enormously. Bowie High School, known to everyone as La Bowie, grew out of a grammar school built in 1922 and became a high school in 1927, on South Cotton Street. It served, and still serves, an almost entirely Mexican American student body. Generations of barrio kids passed through its doors, even in the years when a 1948 “English only” rule punished students for speaking Spanish on campus.
The Change
The reckoning came through fire. In July 1967 a tenement with no fire escapes burned, and three children died. The deaths set off a wave of protest that marched from Sacred Heart Church to City Hall and pushed a reluctant city, finally in the 1970s, to force landlords to add running water, heat, and private toilets. The activist José Aguilar founded a community group, MACHOS, out of that anger.
The same decade brought the murals. Young artists, inspired by the Chicano movement and the fight for decent housing, began painting the neighborhood’s own story onto the sides of its buildings. The bulldozers kept circling, though. The river was straightened into a concrete channel in the 1960s, taking tenements with it, and “urban renewal” plans threatened block after block. The Segundo Barrio learned to fight for its own existence, and it has been fighting ever since.
The Landmarks of the Segundo Barrio
Sacred Heart Church, 602 South Oregon Street. The Italian Jesuit Carlos Pinto, remembered as the “Apostle of El Paso,” opened a school here in 1892 and saw the first Sacred Heart Church dedicated on June 9, 1893. As Mexican Catholics fled religious persecution in the 1920s, the parish replaced it with the larger church standing today, finished in 1929 to seat two thousand worshippers. It is the oldest parish in El Paso and remains the spiritual anchor of the barrio.
Bowie High School, original site on South Cotton Street. La Bowie is more than a school here; it is a source of fierce neighborhood pride. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson met the Mexican president on the Bowie campus to sign the Chamizal Treaty that settled a long border dispute. The school later moved to 801 San Marcial Street, but its identity stayed rooted in the Segundo Barrio.
The Caples Building, downtown. In January 1911 the revolutionary Abraham González set up a rebel headquarters in this office building, and Francisco Madero directed the campaign against Ciudad Juárez from its upper floors. A piece of the Mexican Revolution was planned a few blocks from the tenements where its foot soldiers’ families lived.
The Sagrado Corazón mural at Sacred Heart Church. Painted by Jesus “Cimi” Alvarado and Martin “Blast” Zubia, this wall sets a flaming anatomical heart wrapped in a crown of thorns against the rings of an Aztec calendar. Alvarado, who grew up in the barrio and studied under the muralist Gaspar Enriquez at Bowie, has covered the neighborhood in this kind of work for years.
El Corrido del Segundo Barrio, 801 South Florence Street. Near the Boys and Girls Club, this mural reads like a ballad on a wall: two musicians at the center, one with an accordion and one with a guitar, and in a corner a mother bathing her son in a metal tub in a tenement courtyard. It is the daily life of the barrio, painted by the people who lived it.
The Armijo Recreation Center, Seventh Avenue and Ochoa Street. Long a fixture in the heart of the Segundo Barrio, the Armijo center has been the place where neighborhood kids learn to swim, shoot hoops, and box. Boxing has deep roots in South El Paso, and gyms like this one are where the discipline gets handed down.
Where the Segundo Barrio Mexicans Came From
The great majority came from northern Mexico, above all from the state of Chihuahua just across the river and from Durango farther south, the regions the railroads tied most directly to El Paso. These were campesinos, ranch hands, miners, and small-town families, drawn first by smelter and railroad wages and then driven by the violence of the Revolution. Ciudad Juárez was the doorway, and many barrio families have always had cousins on both sides of it.
Later arrivals came from deeper in Mexico’s interior, but the through-line never broke: this was the place where the border was thinnest and a new life was cheapest to start. A small Chinese community also passed through El Paso after building the railroads in 1881, settling a brief Chinatown just north of here before the Chinese Exclusion Act and discrimination scattered it. The Segundo Barrio, though, stayed overwhelmingly Mexican, generation after generation.
Segundo Barrio Today
The Segundo Barrio is still here, still Mexican, and still under pressure. Many of the families who could move out have, leaving a population that skews older and poorer, and longtime residents worry openly about rising rents and the slow drift of gentrification creeping south from downtown. The neighborhood remains one of the lowest-income zip codes in the country even as its small businesses move hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Its great recent battle was over survival itself. Plans to clear historic blocks have come and gone for decades, and the grassroots group Paso del Sur, formed in 2006, has fought them street by street. In the adjacent Union Plaza area, a proposed downtown arena threatened to demolish the historic Duranguito neighborhood, a fight that drew protesters, a long lawsuit, and national attention before the city finally abandoned that site in 2023. Preservationists have placed the Segundo Barrio itself among Texas’s most endangered places.
What keeps drawing people now is the art. The murals have turned the barrio into something a critic once called an outdoor museum of the border, and visitors come on foot to read its walls. Like immigrant gateways elsewhere, from the Salvadoran community in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, to its own sister barrios, it carries newcomers and memory at once. The families still cross the bridge, the bells still ring at Sacred Heart, and the neighborhood that has been catching newcomers since 1885 is still, stubbornly, doing the work of welcoming them home.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Mexican immigrants settle in the Segundo Barrio in El Paso?
The Segundo Barrio sat right against the Rio Grande and the bridges to Ciudad Juárez, making it the first and cheapest place to land after crossing. From the 1880s, smelter and railroad jobs drew families up from Chihuahua and Durango, and the Mexican Revolution pushed thousands more into the barrio after 1910.
Is the Segundo Barrio still a Mexican neighborhood today?
Yes. The Segundo Barrio in El Paso remains overwhelmingly Mexican and Mexican American, though its population has aged and shrunk as families move out and gentrification pressures rise. Sacred Heart Church, La Bowie, and the murals keep the neighborhood’s identity firmly intact.
What are the most famous landmarks in the Segundo Barrio?
Sacred Heart Church, dedicated in 1893 and rebuilt in 1929, is the spiritual anchor, and Bowie High School is the neighborhood’s pride. The barrio is also known for its murals, including the Sagrado Corazón mural and El Corrido del Segundo Barrio, which together form an open-air gallery of border life.
Where did the people of the Segundo Barrio come from?
Most came from northern Mexico, especially the state of Chihuahua directly across the river and Durango to the south, the areas the railroads connected most closely to El Paso. They were campesinos, miners, and ranch families drawn by work and later displaced by the violence of the Revolution.
When did Mexicans first arrive in the Segundo Barrio?
The neighborhood was farmland with a Mexican land grant as early as 1834, and it was platted as one of El Paso’s original wards in 1885. Large-scale Mexican migration into the Segundo Barrio began in the 1880s with the railroads and surged during the Mexican Revolution after 1910.
If your family’s story passed through the Segundo Barrio, the river crossing, the tenement courtyard, the bells at Sacred Heart, that history is worth holding onto and passing down.