Stand in Market Square at seven in the morning, before the tour buses, and you can hear the city’s first language. A baker carries trays of pan dulce across Produce Row. A mariachi tunes a guitarrón outside a cafe that has not closed its doors in eight decades. The story of Mexicans in San Antonio is not a chapter in the city’s history. It is the foundation the rest was built upon.
San Antonio is the largest Mexican American city in the United States, and the West Side is its heart. Roughly two in three residents are Hispanic, and of those, the overwhelming majority trace their roots to Mexico. This is not a community that arrived. It is a community that was already here when everyone else showed up.
The Place
San Antonio sits in south-central Texas, about 150 miles from the Mexican border, on the banks of the San Antonio River. It is the seventh-largest city in the country, with a 2020 census population of 1,434,625.
The Mexican American core lies west of San Pedro Creek, in the network of neighbourhoods known collectively as the West Side. Downtown, Market Square and the old Spanish missions ring the southern edge of the city. The whole place reads, in its street names and its food and its festivals, as a city where Mexico never quite left.
Hispanic residents make up roughly 64 per cent of San Antonio, and the Census Bureau records the Mexican-origin population at well over three-quarters of a million people, by far the largest ancestry group in the city.
How It Became Mexican
Before there was a Texas
San Antonio began as a Spanish colonial settlement. In 1731, Spain sent a small group of families from the Canary Islands to establish a civilian town called San Fernando de Bexar, alongside the presidio and the missions that Franciscan friars had founded along the river a few years earlier.
By 1780, San Antonio was the capital of Spanish Texas, with a population of around 2,000 that mixed Spanish Mexicans, mission Native Americans, Africans and the Canary Islanders. When Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, San Antonio became a Mexican town. It would remain one in everything but flag long after Texas broke away in 1836.
Laredito and the line at the creek
As early as the mid-eighteenth century, a predominantly Mexican neighbourhood took shape around Military Plaza and San Fernando, a barrio that came to be called Laredito because it sat along the road south to Laredo. By 1812, maps already labelled the settlement by that name, home to many presidio families of mestizo heritage.
San Pedro Creek became a quiet dividing line. The Mexican neighbourhoods spread to the west of it; the Anglo and German districts grew to the east. That geography of the creek would harden, over the next century, into one of the most segregated arrangements of any major American city.
The Revolution pushes north
The great wave came after 1910. When the Mexican Revolution erupted that November, refugees poured north, and San Antonio, the nearest large American city, absorbed enormous numbers of them. Francisco Madero, who would briefly become president of Mexico, fled to San Antonio and issued his call to arms, the Plan de San Luis Potosí, from the city.
By the 1930s, more than 100,000 Mexican Americans lived in San Antonio, the great majority of them packed into the West Side. The work was in pecan-shelling sheds, garment factories and the railroad. The neighbourhood that received them was, by most accounts, one of the poorest in the nation.
The corrales and the courts
Much of the West Side in those years was made of corrales, clusters of one-room shacks with tin roofs, dirt floors and walls of scrap, with no indoor plumbing and primitive sanitation. Disease ran high. The infant mortality on the West Side was among the worst in the country.
One man did more than any other to change that. Father Carmelo Tranchese, the Italian-born pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, lobbied relentlessly for public housing, reaching as far as Eleanor Roosevelt. The result was the Alazán-Apache Courts, built between 1939 and 1942 on either side of Guadalupe Street. To build it, the city demolished 929 substandard structures on the site.
The Courts became the oldest standing public housing development in the nation, and far more than that. Generations of West Siders passed through its 685 low-rise apartments, among them celebrated conjunto musicians and future scholars. People still call it, simply, Los Courts.
A music of their own
Out of this neighbourhood came a sound. In the late nineteenth century, Tejano musicians had borrowed the button accordion and the polka from the German and Czech immigrants who settled the Texas Hill Country, and married them to the bajo sexto, a twelve-string Mexican bass guitar.
By the 1920s and 1930s, San Antonio’s West Side had become a cradle of conjunto, with Santiago Jiménez, Sr. among its founding figures. His son, Flaco Jiménez, would carry the accordion to Grammy stages and global audiences. The music was born in cantinas and back yards a few blocks from Market Square, and it never left.
The Landmarks
San Fernando Cathedral, 115 Main Plaza. Founded in 1731 by the Canary Islanders, it is the oldest continuously functioning religious community in Texas and the oldest standing church building in the state. Its Saturday-evening mariachi mass still draws families who come to be sung to on their anniversaries and quinceañeras.
Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, 6701 San Jose Drive. Known as the Queen of the Missions, this 1720s Spanish colonial church is the grandest of the four that, with the Alamo, were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015, the first and only such site in Texas. It remains an active Catholic parish.
Mi Tierra Café y Panadería, 218 Produce Row. Pete Cortez, a young man from Guadalajara, and his wife Cruz opened a three-table cafe in Market Square in 1941 to feed early-rising farmers and workers. It now seats more than 500, never closes, and its bakery cases of pan dulce are a West Side institution.
Historic Market Square, 514 West Commerce Street. El Mercado, the present market building, went up as a Works Progress Administration project in 1938 and 1939. It is billed as the largest Mexican market in the United States, three blocks of shops and restaurants where the city sells its own heritage back to itself.
The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, 723 South Brazos Street. The 1940s-era Teatro Guadalupe was once the West Side’s most opulent cinema. After it fell dark, the city bought the site and reopened the rebuilt theatre in 1984 as the centre of a campus devoted to Latino, Chicano and Native American arts.
The Tejano Conjunto Festival, Rosedale Park. Presented by the Guadalupe centre each spring, it is the first and longest-running conjunto festival in the world. More than 10,000 fans gather across several days to hear dozens of acts, from student showcases to legends, in the music’s spiritual home.
The Alazán-Apache Courts, along Guadalupe Street. The nation’s oldest standing public housing, built 1939 to 1942, remains both a living neighbourhood and a contested symbol of the West Side. Preservationists and residents have fought for years over its future, a fight over what the barrio’s memory is worth.
Where They Came From
San Antonio’s Mexican community is overwhelmingly rooted in northern and central Mexico, a reflection of the city’s position as the first large American stop on the road north. The states of Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, just across the border, sent generations of families, as did Guanajuato, Jalisco and Zacatecas farther into the interior.
The Revolution after 1910 scrambled and accelerated everything, sending refugees from every social class, from labourers to merchants to exiled intellectuals. Pete Cortez of Mi Tierra came from Guadalajara in Jalisco. The pattern was chain migration in its purest form: a family member established a foothold on the West Side, then sent for the rest, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, parish by parish.
San Antonio Today
San Antonio is now the most thoroughly Mexican American major city in the country, and that identity is woven through its politics, its food, its music and its faith rather than confined to a single quarter. Tex-Mex was substantially invented here. The mariachi mass and the conjunto accordion are civic institutions, not folklore exhibits.
Yet the old line at the creek has not fully healed. The near West Side remains mostly Latino and mostly low-income, with median household incomes in some tracts hovering between 26,000 and 35,000 dollars and roughly a third of residents living in poverty. The redlining maps of the last century left their mark, and the city’s prosperity has not reached every barrio equally.
That tension is most visible at the Alazán-Apache Courts, where residents organised under the banner Mi Barrio No Se Vende, my neighbourhood is not for sale, to resist redevelopment. The West Side is fighting, as it has always had to, to remain itself. But for now the bakeries open before dawn, the mariachis still gather in Main Plaza on Saturday evenings, and the first language of San Antonio is still being spoken.
For families tracing their own movement north, San Antonio rhymes with other places Mexicans have made home, from Segundo Barrio in El Paso, the first stop for so many crossing at the Rio Grande, to Boyle Heights in Los Angeles and the storied Little Village in Chicago. Even Mexicantown in Detroit carries the same chain-migration logic far to the north. And San Antonio itself sits in a Texas shaped by many migrations, from the Germans of New Braunfels, whose polkas helped birth conjunto, to the more recent Indian community of Carrollton in the Dallas suburbs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do Mexicans live in San Antonio?
The historic heart of the Mexican community is the West Side, the neighbourhoods west of San Pedro Creek, anchored by Guadalupe Street, Market Square and parishes such as Our Lady of Guadalupe. In practice, San Antonio’s Mexican American population now lives across the entire city, but the West Side remains its cultural centre.
How many Mexicans live in San Antonio?
San Antonio is roughly 64 per cent Hispanic, and the Census Bureau records the Mexican-origin population at more than three-quarters of a million people, by far the largest ancestry group in the city. That makes San Antonio the largest Mexican American city in the United States.
Why is San Antonio so Mexican?
San Antonio was founded as a Spanish and then Mexican town, capital of Spanish Texas by 1780, and it was Mexican before it was ever American. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 then sent a vast new wave of migrants north, settling overwhelmingly on the West Side. The community here predates the United States itself.
What is the West Side of San Antonio known for?
The West Side is the birthplace of conjunto music, home to the nation’s oldest standing public housing at the Alazán-Apache Courts, and the longtime centre of Mexican American life in the city. It is celebrated for its food, its murals and its festivals, even as much of it remains low-income.
What is conjunto music and where did it come from?
Conjunto is a Texas-Mexican folk music built around the button accordion and the bajo sexto, a twelve-string bass guitar. It emerged from the West Side of San Antonio and South Texas in the early twentieth century, when Tejano musicians fused Mexican song with the polka brought by German and Czech settlers.
What should I see to understand Mexican San Antonio?
Start at Market Square and Mi Tierra, then San Fernando Cathedral for the Saturday mariachi mass, and Mission San José among the World Heritage missions. For the living culture of the West Side, visit the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and, in spring, the Tejano Conjunto Festival at Rosedale Park.
If your family’s story passed through San Antonio, or any of the places Mexicans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Jalisco or Coahuila, to a one-room corral on the West Side, to wherever you are now.