They called it el West Side, and a century ago it was where Mexico landed in Texas. Walk down Guadalupe Street in the 1920s and you would hear accordion runs spilling out of a dance hall, smell mesquite smoke and toasted pecans, and pass storefront signs painted only in Spanish. The Mexicans on the West Side, San Antonio, built one of the oldest Mexican-American barrios in the United States, and by the 1930s this one stretch of the city held tens of thousands of families who had crossed the Rio Grande with little more than a saint’s medal and a hometown’s name.
The West Side: The Place
The West Side sits just beyond downtown San Antonio, west of San Pedro Creek and bounded loosely by Interstate 10 and the railroad yards that once drew workers here. Its core falls inside the 78207 ZIP code, today around 88 percent Hispanic and home to roughly 51,000 people.
The housing tells the story: small frame casitas, brick corner stores, and the long low courts of public housing built in the 1940s. The streets run on a tight grid around Guadalupe, Zarzamora, and El Paso, a working-class quarter that has stayed Mexican for four straight generations.
How the West Side Became Mexican
Before the Barrio
San Antonio was a Tejano town long before it was an American one. Founded as a Spanish presidio and mission settlement in the 18th century, the city carried a Mexican majority through the era of Spanish rule, Mexican independence, and the Texas Republic.
By the late 1800s the heart of that Mexican life sat downtown around the plazas. Each evening the Chili Queens set up tables and mesquite fires in Military Plaza and later Haymarket Plaza, serving chili con carne and tamales by lantern light from roughly 1870 into the 1930s. The dish that became Tex-Mex was cooked in the open air by Mexican women decades before it had a name.
The Mexicans Arrive
The barrio that exists today was forged by revolution. When the Mexican Revolution erupted in 1910, hundreds of thousands fled north across the border, and San Antonio, the first major city on the rail lines from Laredo, became a primary destination. Refugees poured into a city that already had deep Tejano roots, and they settled west of downtown where land was cheap and the railroad needed hands.
They came largely from the central Mexican states that sent the most emigrants in this era: Jalisco, Michoacan, Guanajuato, and the borderlands of Coahuila and Nuevo Leon. Among the new arrivals were priests fleeing anticlerical campaigns, professionals, and tens of thousands of laborers. By the 1930s San Antonio counted roughly 82,000 Mexican Americans, most of them on the West Side.
Chain migration did the rest. One brother sent for another, a village priest followed his parishioners, and word of a job at the rail yards or a pecan plant pulled the next family across. The same pattern built the great Mexican barrios of the era, from the Segundo Barrio in El Paso to Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, each a first American address for people from the same handful of Mexican states.
The West Side at Its Peak
By the 1920s and 1930s the West Side was the densest Mexican neighborhood in the country, and Guadalupe Street was its spine. A century ago the corridor boomed into a thriving commercial and cultural strip, lined with grocers, pharmacies, movie houses, and dance halls, all serving a Mexican clientele in Spanish.
The Catholic parish anchored daily life. Our Lady of Guadalupe Church became the spiritual heart of the barrio, and in July 1932 the Sicilian-born Jesuit Father Carmelo Tranchese took over as pastor of a parish serving the majority of the city’s Mexican Americans. He documented the slum conditions around him and lobbied all the way to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for relief.
But peak did not mean prosperity. Thousands of West Side residents worked as pecan shellers, sitting in airless sheds for ten hours a day, seven days a week, earning two or three dollars and breathing the fine brown dust that spread tuberculosis through the barrio. When the Southern Pecan Shelling Company cut the piece rate in early 1938, the West Side erupted.
On January 31, 1938, some 12,000 pecan shellers, most of them Mexican-American women, walked out. They elected a 21-year-old labor organizer named Emma Tenayuca as their strike leader. Police arrested more than 700 people and at one point packed 200 strikers into a jail built for 60, but the strike held, and historians now regard it as one of the first large-scale victories in the Mexican-American struggle for civil rights.
The Change
The pecan strike won a small raise, but the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 made shelling by hand too costly, and the plants mechanized. By 1941 roughly 10,000 shellers had lost their jobs for good, and the West Side’s economic base cracked.
Father Tranchese’s housing campaign bore fruit at the same moment. The Alazan-Apache Courts, the first and largest public housing built for the city’s Mexican Americans, were completed in 1942 and replaced some of the worst slums. They came with a hard edge, though: from the 1930s on, redlining and racially restrictive covenants confined most Mexican residents to the West Side, hardening the barrio’s boundaries even as it cleaned up its housing.
Unlike many barrios elsewhere, the West Side did not empty out. Postwar highways and suburbanization drew off some families, but the neighborhood stayed overwhelmingly Mexican, becoming less a port of entry and more the enduring cultural capital of Mexican San Antonio.
The Landmarks of the Mexican West Side
Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, 1321 El Paso Street. The mother parish of the barrio and the church Father Tranchese made a base for social action in the 1930s and 1940s. It remains an active center of West Side Catholic life, its feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe still the neighborhood’s biggest December celebration.
Lerma’s Nite Club, 1602-1612 North Zarzamora Street. The temple of conjunto music. Opened in 1948 as El Sombrero and renamed after Pablo H. Lerma took the lease in 1951, it hosted accordion legends Valerio Longoria, Tony de la Rosa, Lydia Mendoza, Flaco Jimenez, and Santiago Jimenez for more than sixty years. It closed in 2010, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011, and after a long community-led restoration it reopened on July 23, 2023.
Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, 1301 Guadalupe Street. Founded in 1980 and housed since 1984 in the restored Teatro Guadalupe, once the West Side’s grandest movie palace, which had operated from 1940 until 1970. It is one of the largest community-based Latino arts organizations in the country, home to the annual Tejano Conjunto Festival and the CineFestival film showcase.
The Cassiano Homes murals. The cradle of San Antonio’s Chicano mural movement. Around 1980 Lanier High School graduates Anastacio “Tache” Torres and Juan Hernandez formed a community arts crew here, and with city funding they and young artists painted more than 50 murals on the walls of the Cassiano Homes, depicting the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican icons, and barrio life. Original muralists returned to restore the work as recently as 2026.
The Alazan-Apache Courts. Completed in 1942 as housing reserved for Mexican Americans, “Los Courts” sheltered generations of West Side families. The complex was named one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places, and its future is the center of an ongoing fight over how to revitalize the near West Side without scattering the community.
The plazas downtown. Before the barrio had its own dance halls, the Chili Queens cooked in Military, Haymarket, and Milam Plaza, the open-air kitchens where Tex-Mex was born and where bankers and laborers ate elbow to elbow until the city shut the stands down in the late 1930s.
Where the West Side Mexicans Came From
Two streams fed the barrio. The first was Tejano: families who had lived in and around San Antonio since Spanish and Mexican times, whose roots in the land predated the United States itself. The second was the great wave of the Revolution, refugees and migrants who arrived between 1910 and the 1920s.
Most of those newcomers came from the central highlands and northern states of Mexico. Jalisco, Michoacan, and Guanajuato sent the largest numbers of emigrants nationwide in the 1920s, while the closer states of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas fed San Antonio directly along the railroad from Laredo. They left for the same reasons that built barrios across the country: war, hunger, land hunger, and the simple word from a cousin that there was work in Texas.
It is the same homeland that fed the Mexican neighborhoods of the Midwest, from Pilsen in Chicago to Little Village. San Antonio was simply the closest and the oldest of those American destinations.
The West Side Today
The West Side is still, unmistakably, Mexican. The 78207 ZIP code remains around 88 percent Hispanic, and the streets around Guadalupe and Zarzamora carry the same parish, the same panaderias, the same accordion music they did three generations ago. Cultural geographers have called San Antonio the Mexican-American cultural capital of the United States, and the West Side is its core.
It is also a neighborhood under pressure. The reopening of Lerma’s in 2023 and the ongoing mural restorations show a community fighting to keep its history, while the stalled, contested plan to redevelop the Alazan-Apache Courts shows how real the threat of displacement has become. Preservation groups like the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center and the Westside Preservation Alliance now wage that fight block by block.
What the West Side proves is that a barrio can last. More than a century after the first refugees stepped off the train from Laredo, their great-grandchildren still light candles at Guadalupe, still dance to conjunto on Zarzamora, still paint the walls of the courts. The journey that started in Jalisco and Michoacan did not end on the West Side. It just put down roots there.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Mexicans settle on the West Side of San Antonio?
San Antonio was already a Tejano city when refugees of the 1910 Mexican Revolution arrived by rail from Laredo, and they settled west of downtown where land and rent were cheap and the rail yards needed workers. Redlining and restrictive covenants from the 1930s then confined most Mexican residents to the West Side, concentrating the community there. It became one of the oldest and densest Mexican-American barrios in the United States.
Is the West Side of San Antonio still Mexican today?
Yes. The core 78207 ZIP code is still roughly 88 percent Hispanic, and the West Side remains the cultural heart of Mexican San Antonio after four generations. Its parishes, panaderias, murals, and conjunto music halls are still active, though preservationists are now fighting gentrification and displacement.
What are the most famous Mexican landmarks on the West Side?
The best known are Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on El Paso Street, Lerma’s Nite Club on North Zarzamora, and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center on Guadalupe Street. The Cassiano Homes murals and the historic Alazan-Apache Courts are also central to the barrio’s identity. Together they trace the religious, musical, artistic, and housing history of the Mexicans on the West Side, San Antonio.
Where in Mexico did the West Side community come from?
Many West Side families are Tejano, with roots in San Antonio dating to Spanish and Mexican times. The Revolution-era newcomers came mostly from central states such as Jalisco, Michoacan, and Guanajuato, and from the nearer northern states of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas along the railroad from Laredo.
When did Mexicans first arrive on the West Side of San Antonio?
Mexican and Tejano people have lived in San Antonio since the 18th century, so the community predates the United States. The modern West Side barrio took shape between 1910 and the 1920s, when the Mexican Revolution drove hundreds of thousands of refugees north and tens of thousands settled west of downtown San Antonio.
If your family’s story passed through the West Side, or any of the places the Mexican people made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Jalisco or Coahuila to Guadalupe Street, to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
Sources include the Texas State Historical Association and the U.S. National Park Service.