Amid the Shadows of Progress: Race and the Struggle for Metropolitan Democracy in Twentieth Century San Antonio

Abstract

“Amid the Shadows of Progress: Race and the Struggle for Metropolitan Democracy in Twentieth Century San Antonio” is a political history about the contested ways in which agents of the state harnessed its powers to remake the modern American metropolis, and about how poor and working-class people created community despite the absence of the social welfare state. Using San Antonio as a case study, I trace the ways in which state actors, police, and newspapers racialized an urban neighborhood and its people thereby creating the contemporary urban barrio. San Antonio’s West Side had been home to ethnic Mexicans for generations; however, during a period of urbanizing and industrializing in Texas, the influx of new arrivals, many of whom were mexicanos from both rural Texas and Mexico, worried municipal authorities. In their zeal to contain, control, and regulate vice through policing, they established an informal vice district on the West Side and in the process created what I call the discursive barrio in the early 20th century. Informed by newspapers, policing, health scares, and politicians, the discursive barrio was both a racialized space and place Anglos used to contain mexicanos on the West Side. But the barrio is also a physical place created by concrete public policy over the course of the 20th century. Racially restrictive covenants, federal housing policy through the Federal Housing Administration, the implementation of segregated public housing on the West Side, and urban renewal all worked together to create the physical manifestation of the barrio.

My dissertation sheds light upon poor and working class mexicanos’ everyday struggles to claim agency within a city and power structure that often relegated them to the margins. Despite racialization, segregation, and discrimination mexicanos persisted: people such as Eleuterio Escobar held rallies to pressure the school board to make life a little fairer for children; often mexicanas organized workers into unions and held strikes to demand decent pay and safe working conditions; some fought to bring in federal funds to establish public housing to mitigate the poor living conditions in the barrio; Chicano/a youth activists helped to organize school walkouts and funded community action, and a few challenged the state of Texas at the U.S. Supreme Court because they believed that every child had a right to equal education. Those historical junctures where regular working people decided that they had had enough, along with the mundane moments that made up the tapestry of life in the barrio—cultivating friendships, finding love, starting a family, purchasing a home, working in the fields, sending your children to school, burying loved ones at San Fernando cemetery—worked in conjunction to cultivate a tightly knit mexicano community. And it was this community spirit that often served as a bulwark against a discriminatory and oppressive state in an expanding metropolis during the 20th century.

Thus, my project weaves together a complicated history about contested visions of progress that take place on racially and economically stratified urban terrain. I build on the scholarship from Latino/a Studies and urban history, bringing together two historiographies that do not often speak to one another, to illustrate the richness and possibilities engendered when we broaden the scope of our scholarship to include brown people whose life experiences help subvert the black and white binary that dominates an otherwise vibrant field.