San Antonio

San Antonio’s West Side has carried the city’s largest Mexican-American community since the Republic of Texas era. The 1968 HemisFair world’s fair site clearance removed 2,239 residences, 686 businesses, and 1,349 structures from the Mexican-American neighborhood immediately east of downtown. The City of San Antonio, acting through its urban renewal agency under the federal Housing Act of 1949, used eminent domain to assemble the 92.6-acre fair site on land the community had occupied for a century. Displaced residents received limited relocation assistance. Communities Organized for Public Service, founded in 1974 by Ernesto Cortés Jr. and the Industrial Areas Foundation, channeled that displacement record into flood-control bond campaigns that funded decades of West Side infrastructure investment. The organizing method transferred directly into the current fights over the TxDOT I-35 expansion through the West Side and the Bexar County data-center siting that the Atlas’s forthcoming data-center section will document.