Urban renewal, city sprawl and highway construction have dramatically changed the face of San Antonio in the last half century, but there are still hints of the past where old vibrant communities once stood. Remnants of an old cement plant town are found in the signature smoke stacks and black and white photographs decorating the Alamo Quarry shopping center. A few old homes remain from the hundreds that used to make up a neighborhood where HemisFair Park is today. A little-known neighborhood located just north of Alamo Heights called El Barrio Escondido is still hanging on to its history through the remaining old homes and the generation that grew up there. This Hispanic Heritage Month, Conexión looks back these barrios of yesteryear to remember some of San Antonio's roots.

El Barrio Escondido

For their parents, the modest homes that make up El Barrio Escondido were their own small slice of the American pie.

For the children growing up there in the 1950s, the neighborhood was a paradise hidden from the rest of the city, in spite of its size.

“It was one of the smallest barrios around, and we're still here,” says Joe Lopez, owner of Gallista Gallery. He is the proud owner of a small, two-bedroom bungalow in Barrio Escondido, a community made up of 10 homes along Peter Baque Road and Everest Street in the 1950s, estimates Lopez. “People say there are no Mexicanos on the North Side. But we grew up very raza ... we didn't forget where we came from.”

Now in their 60s, Lopez and his friends say it's like time hasn't passed when they get together, which they do whenever there's a community celebration or funeral. Then they slip back to an era when the neighboring, upscale Alamo Quarry shopping center was a busy cement plant (see Cementville) full of low-income, mostly Latino families like theirs, and their neighborhood was surrounded by country fields and a dairy farm.

There are competing rumors as to how the neighborhood was named but all agree they named it, and in the Spanish language that was a source of pride yet brought punishment from teachers who didn't want to hear it in the classroom.

“Growing up Chicano in Alamo Heights, it was an experience. Our parents were like pioneers, moving into an all-white neighborhood and making something of it,” says Fred “Kiko” Aguilar, community activist and founder of the Promise Center in Baytown, a nonprofit organization that works with at-risk youth. Most of their fathers worked odd jobs such as carpentry, commercial painting or baking; most of their mothers cleaned homes for wealthy families in Alamo Heights and Terrell Hills.

The Mexican American kids had little in common with the majority of their classmates at the well-to-do, mostly white Alamo Heights High School they attended, but acted like family with each other. When Cipriano Sierra's family inherited one of the neighborhood's first TVs, the kids would gather around it to watch “I Love Lucy” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Tripas on the grill, services at nearby St. Anthony de Padua Catholic Church and mothers who watched all the neighborhood kids as their own cemented their bonds.

Change here is creeping in slowly — two apartment complexes are wedged into the middle of the block where homes used to be. The Aguilar siblings recently put their family's corner home up for sale after it was destroyed by termites. “We hated to do it,” says Marian Aguilar, a retired nun in Boerne. “We hated to see Cementville gone, too. It's a whole way of life that's gone.”




Workers came from all over South Texas to labor at the Alamo Cement Co. (originally the San Antonio Portland Cement Co.) plant and live inside the gated company town — a village with its own elementary school, police station and swimming pool.

The village was originally founded in 1908, when the land was outside the city limits. There were once 90 cottages that housed employees and their families, according to a 2011 Express-News column by Paula Allen. It was redeveloped in the 1980s.

The majority of Latino workers in Cementville came for a steady wage and job security. Many of them gave each other nicknames, from “El Grillo” (cricket) to “El Zorillo” (skunk), and they formed a close-knit community.

For Arnulfo Rendón, now 73, that community included his grandfather, father and uncles. He was an electrician at the plant, where he was known as “Araña” (spider), because of his fearless climbing skills. “The pay wasn't that good,” he says, “but it would be 40 hours (of work) rain or shine.” He also enjoyed the community life there. “There were lots of places to party and have a good time,” including a dance hall.

HemisFair Park

One of the oldest settlements in San Antonio used to be located where HemisFair Park is today, according to historian Char Miller, author of “Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas.” It was a mix of mostly Mexican American and German immigrant families and was full of businesses and homes before it was demolished in the mid-1960s to make way for the 1968 World's Fair.

Robert Treviño, director of the Social Health and Research Center, grew up nearby in the Victoria Courts public housing project. His aunt and uncle, Olivia and Napoleon Valdez, lived in the neighborhood that was torn down. “It was a nice, calm neighborhood,” says Treviño, who attended school at St. Michael Catholic Church there. “People were very friendly. People would greet each other,” and everyone knew their neighbors, he remembers.

Treviño says the 140 acres making up the original HemisFair project were an extension of the Lavaca neighborhood in Southtown, and the houses looked identical to what is there now. The sheriff forcibly evicted some of the neighborhood's last residents, the Toudouze family, from their home on 123 Wyoming St. in 1966.