Esperanza Peace and Justice Center

The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center occupies a building near the former HemisFair site in San Antonio and has made the preservation of the pre-clearance neighborhood’s memory a central part of its work since its founding. Graciela Sánchez, a San Antonio artist and cultural organizer, built the Center as a space for Chicana and Chicano arts, feminist politics, and the recovery of histories that official San Antonio preferred to suppress.

The Esperanza’s archive holds oral histories from former residents of the 92.6-acre HemisFair clearance zone, photographs of streets the Urban Renewal Agency demolished between 1963 and 1968, and organizational records from the resistance campaigns that preceded the bulldozers. Former residents who spoke with the Center’s researchers named the precise block they had lived on, the businesses their families had patronized for generations, and the sequence of demolitions as construction crews moved through the barrio. This testimony accompanies the Urban Renewal Agency’s own project files at UTSA and the Benson Latin American Collection to give the clearance a human register that the bureaucratic record omits.

The Center organizes public commemorations of the HemisFair displacement and connects the history to present-day West Side fights over TxDOT I-35 expansion, Alazán-Apache Courts preservation, and the ongoing use of public authority to direct infrastructure and development away from organized Mexican-American community opposition.