West Side and HemisFair '68

The West Side before the demolition

San Antonio’s West Side is the oldest continuous Mexican-American urban community in the United States. Its origins predate the Republic of Texas. When Anglo settlers arrived after 1836, the neighborhood west of San Pedro Creek already held Tejano families whose presence on the land ran back to the Spanish colonial grid of 1718. Texas independence transferred sovereignty but not residence. The families who had farmed the acequia banks and attended San Fernando Cathedral remained, rebuilt their commercial institutions, and absorbed successive waves of migration from Mexico through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹

By the 1920s, the West Side carried the full infrastructure of a city within the city. Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, founded in 1911, served as the spiritual and organizational center of the community. Lanier High School educated two generations of West Side students. The commercial spine along West Commerce Street and Zarzamora supported grocers, pharmacists, printing shops, mutual aid societies, and Spanish-language newspapers. The Alamo Theater on Commerce showed the films and broadcast the radio programs that the rest of San Antonio’s theaters and stations did not offer to Mexican-American audiences.²

The federal government’s presence arrived in 1940 in the form of the Alazán-Apache Courts, a public housing project built under the Housing Act of 1937. The courts were the first public housing constructed specifically for Mexican-American residents anywhere in the United States, a distinction that reflects both the scale of West Side poverty and the degree to which the New Deal era had begun to include Mexican-American civic organizations in public resource negotiations.³ The courts filled immediately. The West Side’s drainage problem, which sent Alazan Creek flooding through the same blocks every wet season, made the demand for sound housing chronic and intense.

The neighborhood’s anchor institutions overlapped. Parish networks, mutual aid societies, labor locals, and school-based parent organizations shared members and, often, the same meeting rooms. Father Albert Benavides at Our Lady of Guadalupe, Father Edmundo Rodriguez at Immaculate Heart of Mary, and a dozen other parish priests knew their congregation’s families by name. That density of organized life mattered enormously after 1963.

Image pendingWest Commerce Street looking east toward downtown San Antonio, showing two- and three-story commercial buildings that served the West Side's Mexican-American business district before the HemisFair clearance.Sought from University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections, 1947

The fair and the clearance

In 1962, the San Antonio City Council authorized a world’s fair to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the city’s Spanish founding. The fair’s planners chose a site of 92.6 acres east of downtown, between HemisFair Plaza and the San Antonio River. The chosen acres were not empty land. They held the Mexican-American barrio known as La Villita and its adjoining commercial district, a densely built neighborhood whose residents and proprietors had occupied the land for generations.⁴

The San Antonio Urban Renewal Agency invoked federal authority under the Housing Act of 1949 to assemble the site. The 1949 act had established a “slum clearance” mechanism that allowed cities to acquire land through eminent domain, demolish existing structures, and convey the cleared land to private or public redevelopment. The mechanism required a finding that the target area was “blighted.” In San Antonio, as in every city that applied the 1949 act to Mexican-American or African-American neighborhoods, the blight finding rested on conditions that decades of disinvestment had created: overcrowded housing, inadequate drainage, deferred maintenance on rented properties. The agency found blight and proceeded.²

Clearance ran from 1963 through 1968. The Urban Renewal Agency demolished 1,349 structures, including 2,239 residences and 686 businesses. The agency displaced approximately 6,000 residents. The relocation assistance available under the 1949 act was minimal. Homeowners received assessed-value payments that lagged the cost of replacement housing in the city’s tighter neighborhoods. Renters, who held no title to their residences, received a small per-household payment and a list of available units, most of them in the West Side blocks to which the community was being compressed. The businesses received little or nothing. A pharmacy that had served the neighborhood for thirty years, a tortillería whose customers had shopped there since the Depression, a print shop that had published community announcements in Spanish: these received the same process as a vacant lot, which is to say almost no process at all.⁴

The families who moved did not disperse widely. Most relocated within the West Side, concentrating further into Alazan, Apache, and the blocks around Our Lady of Guadalupe. The physical neighborhood they had occupied east of downtown ceased to exist. The social networks, the parish ties, and the mutual aid relationships survived the clearance because they were carried by people, not buildings. That survival proved consequential.

HemisFair opened on April 6, 1968, ran through October 6, 1968, and drew 6.4 million visitors. The Tower of the Americas, the arena that became the Alamodome’s precursor, and the federal building that now houses the Institute of Texan Cultures occupied the cleared site. The fair generated hotel revenue and attracted subsequent investment. The city’s boosters counted the fair a success. The 6,000 residents whom the agency had removed from the site counted something else.⁵

Image pendingCleared land on the HemisFair site under construction in 1967, with the Tower of the Americas under erection at left and the former neighborhood footprint visible as graded earth in the foreground.Sought from Institute of Texan Cultures, University of Texas at San Antonio, 1967

What the 1949 act did and did not offer

The Housing Act of 1949 declared the goal of “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” Urban renewal under Title I of the act provided federal funds to local agencies to acquire and clear land; the cleared land was then conveyed to private developers or public agencies at a write-down price. The federal government paid two-thirds of the net cost of land acquisition and demolition. Cities paid one-third.

The legislative history of the act records extensive debate about whether displaced residents would receive replacement housing. The final text required only that relocation assistance be provided, not that equivalent housing be built. In practice, cities across the country used the write-down mechanism to clear low-income neighborhoods and convey the land to universities, hospitals, convention facilities, and freeways. Martin Anderson estimated in 1964 that federal urban renewal had displaced more low-income residents than it had housed.⁶ The Congressional Research Service’s later audit confirmed the pattern. Mexican-American and African-American neighborhoods bore a disproportionate share of the clearance nationwide, a pattern that the sociologist Chester Hartman documented systematically in the 1970s.

San Antonio’s HemisFair clearance fit the national pattern precisely. The residents who lost their homes near downtown did not receive replacement housing near downtown. They received payments insufficient for equivalent housing and displacement into a neighborhood that was already overcrowded and underserved. The drainage problem that had made West Side housing chronically inadequate had not been solved before the clearance added thousands more people to the same streets. The city had received federal urban renewal funds, delivered a world’s fair, and left its Mexican-American community denser, more compressed, and still subject to annual flooding.⁵

COPS, the IAF, and the turn to organizing

The community did not wait for the city to correct the record. In 1974, Father Albert Benavides at Our Lady of Guadalupe and Father Edmundo Rodriguez at Immaculate Heart of Mary joined with Ernesto Cortés Jr., a San Antonio native who had trained with Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago, to found Communities Organized for Public Service.⁷

The IAF method required building power before making demands. Cortés and the founding organizers spent months on what the IAF calls “one-on-ones,” individual meetings with parish members, school parents, and neighborhood leaders to map the West Side’s accumulated grievances. The drainage problem dominated every conversation. The West Side sat in the floodplain of Alazan, Apache, and San Pedro creeks. Downtown San Antonio and the Anglo North Side neighborhoods had received drainage bond improvements over the preceding thirty years. The West Side had not. The flooding was not a natural condition; it was a political one.⁵

COPS’s first public action, in 1974, targeted city council members at their own public appearances, demanding drainage investment and road paving in the West Side. The tactic was not violent or legally disruptive; it was simply the presence of organized Mexican-American women and men at events that the city’s leadership had not expected them to attend. Ernie Cortes described the approach later: the goal was not to petition but to demonstrate organized power. The city had to learn that COPS would show up, that it would keep showing up, and that it spoke for a constituency the council could not ignore.⁷

The wins accumulated over four years of sustained pressure. In 1974 and 1975, COPS won drainage improvements in the worst-flooded blocks. In 1978, COPS won a $46.8 million drainage bond, the largest bond in the city’s history to that point, funded overwhelmingly from projects that had waited for decades in the West Side and the South Side.⁸ That bond did not eliminate the flooding, but it funded the first systematic drainage investment the West Side had received from city government. Subsequent bond campaigns, organized through the same IAF parish infrastructure, followed in 1981, 1985, and into the 1990s.

The organizational pattern COPS established spread across Texas. Ernesto Cortés and the IAF used the COPS model to organize Valley Interfaith in the Rio Grande Valley (1983), EPISO in El Paso (1977), Dallas Area Interfaith, Austin Interfaith, and Houston’s The Metropolitan Organization. The Texas IAF network, as the historian Mark R. Warren documented, built durable political power for low-income Latino and African-American communities in cities that had previously had no organized mechanism for translating those communities’ numbers into policy outcomes.⁷

The national reach extended further. IAF affiliates in Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and the Pacific Northwest drew on the COPS model, the method Cortés had developed on the West Side, when they organized their own communities in the 1980s and 1990s. COPS was not simply a local success story; it was the organizational proof of concept for the most significant community-organizing network in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.

Image pendingCOPS members outside San Antonio City Hall in 1974, the year the organization launched its first drainage campaign, drawing on the parish network of the West Side's Catholic churches.Sought from San Antonio Express-News Archive, 1974

Flood, race, and the politics of infrastructure

The flooding of the West Side was not new in 1974. Char Miller’s West Side Rising, published in 2021, reconstructed the September 1921 flood in precise detail. The 1921 storm deposited eighteen inches of rain in under three hours on the city’s west and northwest quadrant. The San Antonio River flooded downtown, but Alazan Creek flooded the West Side more severely; the west creek walls were lower, the drainage channels narrower, and the residential density higher.⁵

The 1921 flood killed at least fifty people. Miller documented that the death toll and the property damage fell almost entirely within the city’s Mexican-American and African-American neighborhoods. The Anglo and upper-income neighborhoods on the North Side, built on higher ground with wider drainage easements, suffered far less. The disparity in outcomes was not random; it followed the contours of a landscape shaped by sixty years of racially segmented real-estate investment, streetcar routing, and municipal infrastructure spending.

The city responded to the 1921 disaster with a drainage plan that prioritized the downtown commercial district and the residential neighborhoods of the city’s wealthier Anglo residents. The West Side drainage improvements promised in the 1920s arrived slowly and partially. By the time HemisFair’s clearance added thousands of displaced residents to the West Side in the mid-1960s, the flooding remained a seasonal threat, and the political mechanism for forcing drainage investment had not yet been built.

COPS supplied that mechanism. The organization’s framing of the drainage fight was explicitly political rather than technical. The West Side’s flooding was not a geography problem, Cortes argued at the 1978 bond campaign hearings; it was a justice problem. The city knew how to build drainage channels. It had built them in the North Side and the East Side and along the Riverwalk. The West Side had not received the same investment because the West Side had not had organized power sufficient to demand it. The bond campaign was not a petition; it was a demonstration of that power.⁷

The $46.8 million bond passed in 1978. Subsequent COPS campaigns won street paving, library branches, parks, and school improvements on a similar model. Each win required the same sustained organizational work: one-on-ones in parish halls, attendance at city council meetings, public demonstrations of constituency size, and negotiation from a position of demonstrated power. The city learned, over two decades, that COPS did not go away after a single win.

Resistance during the clearance, 1963 to 1968

Before COPS existed, before the IAF had organized the West Side parishes, the clearance did not proceed without resistance. The historical record of pre-COPS resistance is less institutionally documented than the COPS campaigns, but it is present in the oral histories held at the UTSA Libraries Special Collections and at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center.⁹

Families contested eminent domain valuations in court. Business owners organized informal associations to negotiate collectively with the Urban Renewal Agency rather than accepting individual buyout offers. Residents petitioned the San Antonio City Council in 1965 and again in 1966 to reduce the footprint of the fair site and preserve portions of the neighborhood. The petitions failed; the council had committed the full 92.6 acres to the fair corporation by 1963, and the political economy of the world’s fair did not leave room for renegotiation.⁴

The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, founded in 1987 by the artist and activist Graciela Sánchez, has made the preservation of the pre-clearance neighborhood’s memory a central part of its work. The Esperanza has collected oral histories from former residents of the cleared blocks, preserved photographs of the demolished streets, and organized public commemorations of the displacement on the fair’s successive anniversaries. The center’s archive includes testimony from residents who remembered the precise block they had lived on, the names of the businesses on their street, and the sequence of demolition as it moved through the neighborhood.⁹

The Esperanza’s work belongs to the same tradition as the Terminal Islanders Club’s oral history project in Los Angeles: communities preserving, for the record, the factual account of what government agencies did to them, in sufficient detail that no future official can credibly deny what occurred.

The Institute of Texan Cultures and the paradox of memory

The Institute of Texan Cultures, which occupies the federal building constructed on the HemisFair site, presents a paradox that the West Side community has named directly. The institute’s mission is to document the cultural contributions of the many peoples who have shaped Texas, including Mexican Texans. The institute’s photographic collections include images of the pre-clearance neighborhood. The institute’s own building stands on land from which those residents were removed.¹⁰

The institute has acknowledged the paradox in recent years, and its staff have worked with the Esperanza and with UTSA’s Special Collections to surface the displacement history in the institute’s public programming. The acknowledgment does not undo the displacement; it is nonetheless a meaningful departure from the practice of institutions that present cultural celebration while suppressing the history of the clearance that made their facility possible.

The Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin holds additional primary material on the HemisFair clearance, including the Urban Renewal Agency’s own project reports, the relocation files for individual families and businesses, and the correspondence between the San Antonio city administration and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development during the clearance period.¹¹ These records document, in the agency’s own language, the mismatch between the relocation assistance offered and the market cost of replacement housing in San Antonio in the mid-1960s.

Image pendingAlazán-Apache Courts, the first public housing built specifically for Mexican-American residents in the United States, photographed shortly after opening in 1940 on the West Side of San Antonio.Sought from University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections, 1942

The three goals and the West Side’s live fights

The three goals of this atlas converge on the West Side with unusual force.

The first goal is documentation. The destruction of the HemisFair barrio is documented in the Urban Renewal Agency’s files, in the oral histories at UTSA and the Esperanza, in the San Antonio Express-News archive, and in the scholarship of Char Miller, Richard García, and Zaragosa Vargas. The record exists. The 1,349 demolished structures, the 2,239 displaced households, the 686 businesses, and the 6,000 residents who were removed from the land are not in dispute. The atlas carries that record because the documentation requires a form that puts the numbers and the names in the same place as the map.

The second goal is the recovery of hope and resistance. The COPS story is the strongest case this atlas will make for that goal. The community that bore the HemisFair clearance without adequate redress organized, within a decade, the most effective community-power institution in the Southwest. The West Side did not simply survive the clearance; it built, from the parish networks and the accumulated grievance, an organization that changed the city’s infrastructure-spending pattern and trained a generation of organizers whose work transformed community politics across Texas. The recovery is not a footnote to the destruction; it is the central event of the West Side’s twentieth-century history.

The third goal is the transfer of tools to present-day fights. The West Side carries at least three live fights in 2026, each of which connects to the HemisFair history in method and consequence.

TxDOT’s proposed expansion of Interstate 35 through the Hays Street corridor would take additional property from West Side and near-East Side neighborhoods. The IAF-descended organizing network, which includes the current Saul Alinsky-trained organizers at COPS’s successor institutions, has applied the same parish-based, one-on-one, power-before-demands method to the I-35 fight that Cortés applied to the 1974 drainage campaign. The historical record of the HemisFair clearance provides the I-35 opponents with a documented precedent: a prior instance of a major infrastructure or civic project that used federal land-acquisition authority to remove the same community from land adjacent to downtown, with limited relocation assistance and no equivalent replacement of what was destroyed.¹²

Bexar County’s data-center siting process presents a second transfer. Data centers, like world’s fairs, require large contiguous acreage, generate tax revenue that cities find attractive, and produce minimal employment relative to their footprint. The IAF method’s applicability to data-center displacement fights is direct: organize the affected parishes and community institutions before the city commits to a site, demonstrate organized power at the public hearing stage rather than the litigation stage, and negotiate from a position of constituency rather than petition. The West Side’s forty-year track record with that method makes it the most instructive case in the country for communities in rural and exurban counties now facing data-center proposals.¹³

West Side flood-control bond campaigns continue as a third live fight. The 1978 COPS bond funded the first substantial drainage investment. The West Side still floods in heavy rain. The community’s organized capacity to demand continued drainage investment, rather than accepting one-time bond wins as permanent settlements, is the direct inheritance of the COPS method. Each new drainage campaign draws on the same parish infrastructure, the same one-on-one organizing, and the same public demonstration of constituency that Cortés and Benavides built in 1974.⁵

The archive and the record

The organizations that hold the West Side’s primary-source record are accessible. UTSA’s HemisFair digital collection includes photographs of the pre-clearance neighborhood, city planning documents, and fair-era promotional materials that document the scale of the clearance in the agency’s own terms.² The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center holds oral histories and material culture from former residents. The Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin holds the URA project files and the correspondence with HUD.¹¹ The Institute of Texan Cultures holds photographic collections that include pre-clearance street views.

The scholarship is substantial. Richard García’s Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class traced the social and economic history of the West Side from the late nineteenth century through the 1940s, establishing the institutional depth of the community before the clearance.¹ Zaragosa Vargas’s Labor Rights are Civil Rights placed West Side labor history within the national arc of Mexican-American civil rights organizing.³ Char Miller’s West Side Rising focused the 1921 flood and its environmental-justice aftermath and connected the drainage fight to the long arc of racially differentiated infrastructure investment in San Antonio.⁵ Mark Warren’s Dry Bones Rattling remains the most thorough account of COPS’s founding, method, and spread across the Texas IAF network.⁷

The oral testimony the Esperanza has collected, and the oral histories at UTSA, carry a layer of the record that no official file contains: the names of the streets as residents knew them, the sequence of neighbors on a given block, the specific businesses that a family patronized for decades, and the texture of the neighborhood’s daily life before the demolition crews arrived in 1963. That testimony belongs in the same record as the Urban Renewal Agency’s project reports. The atlas carries both.

Image pendingOur Lady of Guadalupe Church on West Commerce Street, the organizational center of COPS's founding parish network in 1974 and an anchor institution of the West Side since 1911.Sought from San Antonio Express-News Archive, 1975

What the West Side holds now

The West Side of 2026 is not the West Side of 1962. The neighborhood east of downtown that held 6,000 residents and 686 businesses is now a convention center, a park, and a federal museum. The Alazán-Apache Courts, the first public housing built for Mexican-American residents in the United States, stand in deteriorated condition and have been the subject of demolition proposals from the San Antonio Housing Authority for several years; residents and preservation advocates have organized to resist those proposals using, once again, the IAF-descended organizing infrastructure.¹⁴

What the West Side retains is the organizational capacity that the HemisFair clearance, paradoxically, helped to forge. The clearance demonstrated to the parish networks of the West Side that the city would remove a community for a world’s fair without adequate redress and without effective resistance from within the community. COPS was, in part, a response to that demonstration. The founding generation of COPS organizers knew what had happened east of downtown in the 1960s. They built an organization specifically designed to prevent the repetition of that outcome.

The communities whose children and grandchildren still live on the West Side have the archive, the scholarship, the organization, and the method. They have used the method for fifty years. The data-center siting fights, the I-35 corridor fight, and the Alazán-Apache Courts preservation fight are the current expression of the same organized power that won the 1978 drainage bond. The record of what was destroyed in 1963 is the foundation of the argument for why it must not be repeated. The record of who organized and what they won is the evidence that the argument can prevail.

Footnotes

1. Richard A. García, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class: San Antonio, 1929--1941, Texas A&M University Press, 1991. ↩ ↩²

2. UTSA Libraries Special Collections, HemisFair Digital Collection. https://digital.utsa.edu/digital/collection/p15125coll4 ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America, Princeton University Press, 2005. ↩ ↩²

4. Jody Flores, “HemisFair and Displacement: How a World’s Fair Cleared a Barrio,” San Antonio Magazine, April 2018. https://www.sanantoniomag.com/hemisfair-barrio-displacement/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Char Miller, West Side Rising: How San Antonio’s 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement, Trinity University Press, 2021. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949--1962, MIT Press, 1964. ↩

7. Mark R. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2001. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

8. San Antonio Independent School District, “Communities Organized for Public Service: A History,” community archives report, 2010. ↩

9. Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, Community Archive and Oral History Collection, San Antonio. https://www.esperanzacenter.org ↩ ↩²

10. Institute of Texan Cultures, HemisFair Photograph Collection, University of Texas at San Antonio. https://www.texancultures.com/research/archives ↩

11. Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Urban Renewal Agency of San Antonio Records. https://www.lib.utexas.edu/benson ↩ ↩²

12. TxDOT, “I-35 Capital Express Central Project,” Environmental Review, 2024. https://www.txdot.gov/projects/projects-studies/central-texas/i-35-capital-express-central.html ↩

13. Bexar County Economic Development, “Technology Infrastructure Siting Study,” 2025. https://www.bexar.org/3005/Economic-Development ↩

14. San Antonio Housing Authority, Alazán Courts Redevelopment Planning Documents, 2022--2025. https://saha.org/alazan ↩