Walk south across the High Bridge from downtown Saint Paul and the city drops away beneath you, the Mississippi sliding past the bluffs toward a flat green shelf of land. That shelf is the West Side, and for a century it has been the heart of the Mexicans in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The street signs read Cesar Chavez. The bakeries sell conchas at dawn. On the first Saturday in May, thousands of people fill the pavements for the largest Cinco de Mayo fiesta in the state. This is the West Side.
The Place
The West Side is a geographic riddle. It lies south of downtown Saint Paul, not west of it, and takes its name from sitting on the west bank of the Mississippi as the river bends through the city. To reach it you cross water, which has always given the neighbourhood the feeling of a place slightly apart.
The lowest ground, the West Side Flats, ran right along the river. The higher ground, the bluffs, rose behind it. For most of the twentieth century the Flats were where newcomers landed first, and the bluffs were where families moved once they had found their footing.
Today the commercial spine is Cesar Chavez Street, the former Concord Street, lined with the taquerias, panaderias and mercados that the city officially calls District del Sol.
How It Became Mexican
The story begins with sugar beets. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mexican and Mexican American labourers moved north into the Midwest to work the beet fields of Minnesota and the Dakotas, following the harvest season by rail.
When the fields went quiet for winter, some of those workers drifted into Saint Paul rather than head home, and they found the cheapest housing in the city waiting for them on the West Side Flats.
The Flats, 1920 to 1940
The Flats had already been an immigrant doorway for decades. Neighbourhood House, the settlement house founded in 1897 by the women of Mount Zion Temple, had been built to serve Eastern European Jewish families crowded onto the lowland.
As those Jewish residents built a little wealth and moved up to the bluffs and beyond, they rented their modest frame houses on the river flats to the arriving Mexican families. The settlement house, which had opened to serve one immigrant wave, simply turned to serve the next.
The numbers tell the speed of it. Around seventy people of Mexican origin lived on the Flats in 1920. By 1930 there were roughly six hundred and thirty. By 1940 the figure had reached about a thousand, a full quarter of the Flats’ population.
A Church of Their Own
Faith arrived almost as quickly as the families. In 1931 the Guild of Catholic Women rented a former grocery shop at 123 South Wabasha Street as a mission chapel for Spanish-speaking Catholics. The first masses, in Spanish and English, were held on 22 February 1931.
The mission grew. On 25 April 1939 it was incorporated as a full parish, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the first Spanish-speaking church in the state of Minnesota. Under figures such as Sister Mary Giovanni of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, the parish ran educational, social and legal aid programmes alongside the sacraments.
The river that had drawn the community also tormented it. Repeated flooding eventually forced the parish to buy higher land, and in 1961 a new Our Lady of Guadalupe opened at 401 Concord Avenue, where it remains.
The Flats Come Down, 1960s
The move uphill turned out to be a rehearsal for a larger upheaval. In the early 1960s, the city of Saint Paul decided the flood-prone Flats should become an industrial park, and by 1964 the residents and shopkeepers had been cleared out entirely.
It was an act of displacement that uprooted the very ground where the community had taken hold. Homes, shops and the social fabric of the river flats were demolished and paved over.
But the people did not scatter from the West Side. They moved up onto the bluffs and inland, reassembling the community on higher and drier ground around Concord Street, just above the land they had lost.
El Movimiento
The 1960s and 1970s also brought the Chicano Movement to the West Side, and with it a flowering of public art. Young Chicano artists painted murals to declare cultural pride and to protest the injustices, the urban renewal among them, that had reshaped their neighbourhood.
The Guadalupe Area Project became an early creative hub. In 1969 the artists Gabriel Romo and Jose Estrada painted an interior mural there, one of the first of many.
The muralist Paul Basques produced “Cuauhtemoc” in 1978 and “Midwest Canto al Pueblo” in 1979 on Concord Street. In the 1980s, teams led by John Acosta painted “Aztec City” and “Hunger Has No Color” on Robert Street. Much of this first generation of murals is now lost, but the muralismo tradition it began never stopped.
Becoming District del Sol
By the late 1990s the Concord Street corridor had recovered into a Latino commercial centre. The Riverview Economic Development Association, a non-profit backing West Side businesses, coined the name District del Sol around 1999 to brand the growing retail strip.
The renaming of Concord Street to Cesar Chavez Street set the seal on the transformation. A neighbourhood that had begun as a winter refuge for beet pickers now had a main street named for the movement’s most famous organiser.
The Landmarks
El Burrito Mercado, 175 Cesar Chavez Street. Opened in 1979, this family-owned market and restaurant is the anchor of District del Sol, a place to buy masa and chiles, eat in the back, and stand beneath “The Heroes of Freedom, Justice and Peace,” the 1995 mural painted on its wall by Craig David with the youth group Teens Working Together.
Boca Chica Restaurante, 11 Cesar Chavez Street. Founded by the Frias family in 1964, the year the Flats came down, Boca Chica is one of the oldest Mexican restaurants in the Twin Cities. For two generations it has served the West Side from a corner near the foot of the bridge.
Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, 401 Concord Avenue. The first Spanish-speaking parish in Minnesota, rooted on the Flats in 1931 and rebuilt on higher ground in 1961 to escape the floods. It remains the spiritual centre of the West Side’s Mexican community.
Neighbourhood House at the Wellstone Center, 179 Robie Street East. The settlement house that served Jewish families in the 1890s and Mexican families from the 1920s. The current building, completed in 2014, is named for Senator Paul Wellstone and his wife Sheila, and still offers basic needs help and learning programmes to West Side families.
Don Panchos Bakery, 140 Cesar Chavez Street. A neighbourhood panaderia on the District del Sol strip, the kind of place where the conchas, bolillos and pan dulce sell out early and the trays behind the glass tell you what season it is.
“El Espiritu del Rio” mural, 178 Cesar Chavez Street. Joshua Sarantitis’s mural carries the muralismo tradition into the present day on the same corridor where the first Chicano murals were painted half a century ago. The art on the West Side has never been decoration; it is the neighbourhood’s memory in public.
Riverview Branch Library, on the West Side. Built in 1916 as a Carnegie library, it was designed expressly to educate the immigrant groups settling in the neighbourhood, and it has served wave after wave of West Siders ever since.
Where They Came From
The first West Siders came not directly from Mexico but through the migrant beet circuit of the Upper Midwest, labouring in the fields of Minnesota, the Dakotas and beyond before settling in the city for winter work in the railroads, the shops and the South Saint Paul stockyards.
The roots reach back to central and northern Mexico, and chain migration did the rest. Once a family was established on the Flats, relatives followed, until by the late 1930s so many newcomers were trying to settle near kin that the neighbourhood faced a housing shortage.
Later arrivals broadened the picture, bringing families from across Mexico and, in time, from across Latin America, so that the West Side became home to a wider Latino community gathered around its Mexican core.
Saint Paul Today
The West Side today is the recognised centre of Mexican and Latino life in the Twin Cities. Cesar Chavez Street carries its mercados, bakeries and restaurants, and District del Sol functions as both a business district and a cultural address.
The calendar holds the community together. The Cinco de Mayo fiesta, run since the pandemic by the West Side Boosters, has grown back toward roughly thirty thousand people, the largest Latino event in Minnesota, with a parade, a car show and a day of music along Cesar Chavez Street. A separate Mexican Independence Day celebration marks September.
It is not a community frozen in nostalgia. The murals keep being repainted, new arrivals keep widening the story, and the West Side keeps doing what it has done since the 1920s: making room. The Flats that the city erased are gone, but the families it tried to scatter built their neighbourhood again on the bluff above, and there they remain.
For families tracing the wider arc of Mexican settlement in America, the West Side sits alongside the great Tejano and Californio centres. You can follow the same threads through the Mexican community of San Antonio, the barrios of Santa Ana, California, the neighbourhoods of Houston, and the long-rooted enclaves of Dallas. Saint Paul itself is a city of many homelands, from this Mexican West Side to the Hmong community that settled across the river.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do the Mexicans in Saint Paul, Minnesota live?
The historic centre of the Mexicans in Saint Paul, Minnesota is the West Side, a neighbourhood that sits on the west bank of the Mississippi just south of downtown. Its commercial heart is Cesar Chavez Street, officially branded District del Sol, lined with Mexican shops, bakeries and restaurants.
Why is the West Side the centre of Saint Paul’s Mexican community?
Mexican labourers arriving for the sugar beet harvest in the 1920s found the cheapest housing on the West Side Flats by the river, where earlier Jewish immigrants had lived. As Jewish families moved up to the bluffs, they rented their homes to Mexican newcomers, and the community took root and grew there.
What happened to the West Side Flats?
In the early 1960s the city of Saint Paul cleared the flood-prone West Side Flats to build an industrial park, and by 1964 the residents and businesses had all been displaced. Rather than scatter from the area, the Mexican community moved onto the higher ground of the bluffs nearby and rebuilt around Concord Street.
What is District del Sol?
District del Sol is the name for the Latino commercial district along Cesar Chavez Street, the former Concord Street. The Riverview Economic Development Association coined the name around 1999 to brand the corridor of Mexican mercados, bakeries and restaurants that had grown up on the West Side.
How big is the West Side Cinco de Mayo fiesta?
It is the largest Latino celebration in Minnesota and one of the larger Cinco de Mayo events in the United States. The West Side Boosters now run it, and recent festivals have drawn toward thirty thousand people for a parade, car show, music and food along Cesar Chavez Street.
What is the oldest Mexican church in Saint Paul?
Our Lady of Guadalupe, founded as a mission in 1931, is the first Spanish-speaking church in the state of Minnesota. After repeated flooding on the Flats, the parish built a new church at 401 Concord Avenue in 1961, where it continues to serve the Mexicans in Saint Paul, Minnesota today.
If your family’s story passed through Saint Paul, or any of the places Mexicans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the sugar beet fields of the Upper Midwest to the West Side bluffs above the Mississippi, to wherever you are now.