If experts are to be believed, San Antonio is finally closing in on its moment. Henry Cisneros, who has written not one but two books about his hometown’s potential, told me so, celebrating the immense changes he has seen since he left the mayor’s office in 1989. “The city is booming,” he said, in the silky pitchman’s tone that he honed during decades as a public servant. “It’s a fundamentally different place.”
Fundamentally different, that is, from the San Antonio where I grew up, with its chasmic social, racial, and economic divisions. A city where people would allude to the local “mañana mentality,” a nod to the town’s leisurely pace as well as a euphemism some use to implicitly blame Latinos for its failure to thrive. A city whose measures of income and social mobility continually branded it as one of the country’s most economically stratified, and one of the poorest. A city of “sides,” rooted in its history of profound segregation, with each part of town delineated by race and class: the North Side prosperous and mostly white, the West Side poor and Latino, the East Side underserved and Black, and the South Side a mixture of blue-collar Latino and white residents who were mostly tied to the military bases.
But no more, say the Alamo City’s biggest boosters. The mayor, Ron Nirenberg, asserts that San Antonio has narrowed the gap between the richest and the poorest faster than any other U.S. city. In 2022 it was the nation’s poorest large city, while last year it was the third poorest—a sure sign, he said, of “the work we have been doing.” Longtime journalist and chronicler of San Antonio Rick Casey agrees, referring to its recent rise in national stature. “It’s the city that has made the most progress,” he said. Certainly plenty of newcomers find it irresistible. As Cisneros pointed out to me, citing recent census figures, San Antonio added more residents (roughly 22,000, net) than any other U.S. city between July 2022 and July 2023, pushing its population close to 1.5 million. “I think,” he said, “we’ve got a formula that works.”
To drive around certain parts of town is to become a believer. Sections of San Antonio flaunt an almost overwhelming beauty, with rolling hills shaded by ancient live oaks, the air scented in spring with the heady, chocolatey aroma of mountain laurel blossoms. The prosperous old neighborhoods of Alamo Heights, King William, Monte Vista, and Olmos Park, with their sedate limestone and stucco mansions, seem lovelier than ever. A showier kind of wealth is on display in the gated developments along Interstate 10, northwest toward Boerne—little kingdoms on Hill Country ridges, home to Spurs players and multimillionaire refugees from the violence and corruption of northern Mexico.
Once-neglected neighborhoods on the East and South sides have been gussied up, with restored Victorian cottages gleaming like pearls waiting to be restrung. Hip hotels such as the Kimpton Santo are moving into the urban core, and there’s talk of a new stadium for the Spurs and a new ballpark for the Missions minor-league baseball team, located in a to-be-reenergized downtown. The hotels and shops and restaurants of the revamped Pearl Brewery complex are packed with gawking tourists and approving locals nursing cups of artisanal cold brew and steering doodles on leashes. Lush native flora frames the stretch of the River Walk between the Pearl and downtown, which connects to the bike paths along the river farther south, leading past the old Spanish missions. Alamo Plaza is getting a $550 million facelift. A $2.5 billion airport expansion is underway.
Having grown up in San Antonio, I want to believe that a powerful tide is finally lifting all boats. But a contradictory image has stuck with me ever since it was published in The New York Times, in May 2020. The aerial photo showed 22 long lanes of cars in line for groceries that the San Antonio Food Bank had made available during the depths of the pandemic. COVID-19 had laid bare the city’s historic dependence on low-wage jobs tied to health care, tourism, and conventions. SeaWorld, Fiesta Texas, and the restaurants and bars along the River Walk all closed their doors.
Boom or no, for many residents life hasn’t improved much in the four years since. The city’s poverty rate has hovered between 17 and 18 percent for the past ten years; in 2023 it was 17.7 percent. (The national average was about 11 percent, the Texas average 14 percent.) San Antonio’s high level of need was all too visible when I visited the food bank this past spring. The sprawling headquarters is located in a scrubby part of the far West Side, where cargo planes landing at Lackland Air Force Base appear in danger of shearing off the roofs of nearby buildings. The place is bright and inviting, with the bustle of a community college. At its center is an enormous covered patio scented by an adjacent herb garden used for culinary training classes.
My guide for the day was Julian P. Ledezma, who is 45 and grew up in poverty near Mission Concepción, south of I-10. Bearded and tattooed, with soulful, downturned eyes and a warm smile, he serves as the food bank’s “storytelling manager,” collecting the accounts of its clients and posting videos of them on its website, providing easy access for reporters and potential donors.
On the dispensary side of the building, the clients kept coming. It was a rainy day, and some of the workers were getting drenched. Every so often someone arrived on foot, notably a thin, bedraggled white woman, her face weathered beyond her years, who carried a Chihuahua she was loath to release, even when handed a heavy plastic bag of food. Those who drove in were a diverse group, all ages and races piloting pickup trucks, battered vans, and the occasional luxury vehicle. “I don’t judge,” Ledezma said, as a woman in a white BMW sedan popped her trunk. “She may have been fired yesterday. She may have borrowed that car.” Many were women alone. “We have a lot of single moms,” he said.
Before COVID hit, the food bank served some 60,000 residents a week. The number jumped to 120,000 during the pandemic—roughly equivalent to the entire population of College Station—and today it sits at around 105,000. (In the U.S. in 2022, 12.8 percent of people needed food assistance; in Bexar County, it was 17.4 percent.) The numbers are not surprising, given that in San Antonio the convention and tourism trades are still struggling to return to prepandemic levels, so those industries now employ fewer workers for fewer hours. Meanwhile, inflation has elevated food and housing costs in San Antonio as elsewhere. The food bank’s CEO, Eric Cooper, explained, “Today’s food bank has become part of the benefits package of a low-wage employer.” When families are faced with emergency expenses, he added, food “becomes a variable.”
Left: Julian P. Ledezma, storytelling manager at the food bank. Photograph by JoMando Cruz
Top: Cars lining up at the San Antonio Food Bank in May 2020. Dan Winters
San Antonio is hardly a city of shirkers: The unemployment rate here is an impressive 4 percent. Rather, it is supported by the working poor, many of whom toil for the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County reported that 46 percent of households here were unable to make ends meet in 2022; a family of four would’ve needed a yearly income of $80,988 for that, while the median household income here is $59,593. (In Texas overall it’s $73,035.) Economic inequality has grown since the pandemic: While median household income in San Antonio (and in Texas as a whole) dropped between 2019 and 2022, the share of the city’s residents making over $100,000 jumped from 28 percent to 33 percent in the same period.
The social and economic divisions are glaring. The quality of public education remains wildly inconsistent from one side of town—the well-off north—to another, say, the impoverished west. The latest assessment by Houston-based nonprofit Children at Risk shows San Antonio’s schools lagging behind those in other parts of the state. Part of the problem can be traced to the existence of seventeen public school districts, funded through the state’s byzantine system, which disadvantages those in poor neighborhoods. (That trend will worsen if, as is expected, the Legislature this session approves Governor Greg Abbott’s plan to divert taxpayer dollars from public education to subsidize parents who send their kids to private schools.)
Poor health and poverty go hand in hand. According to a 2022 report from UT Health San Antonio, 16 percent of San Antonians ages 20 to 79 have type 2 diabetes, while the national average is 6 percentage points lower. The New York Times recently reported on a diabetes-related amputation crisis in San Antonio, particularly among Latino men. The perilously high rate of diabetes among Latinos can be partially attributed to genetics and diets high in carbohydrates. But as a paper from San Antonio’s Metropolitan Health District noted recently, “racial/ethnic disparities in socioeconomic status are common in San Antonio, and they often translate into racial/ethnic disparities in health status.”
Certainly San Antonio’s underserved suffer from many of the problems plaguing their counterparts in other big American cities, including inflation and a dearth of affordable housing and decent public education. The city also suffers disproportionately when the Republican-led state government cuts resources that would enhance opportunities for the working poor. State leaders have rejected an expansion of Medicaid, which would bring in an additional $5 billion in federal funds each year, which in turn could have provided health insurance to more than 1.3 million poor Texans—including 101,000 in Bexar County. Unlike most states, Texas denies benefits from SNAP, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to any family with a primary vehicle valued at more than $22,500 or an additional car valued at more than $8,700. Texas also opted out of a federal summer food program for impoverished children this year, denying 3.8 million young Texans what might have been the only balanced meal available to them each day. Taking part in the program would have cost the state nothing; an official from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission said that the agency had been notified the previous December and didn’t have enough lead time to implement the program.
But sometimes when San Antonio’s entrenched poverty is discussed, a particular idea comes to bear that you don’t hear so much about in Houston or Dallas or, for that matter, Los Angeles or Miami. Nearly two-thirds of San Antonio’s population is Latino—by far the highest proportion of any U.S. city with more than a million residents. Cultural vibrancy is a big part of what makes the city so gracious and so lively. And in the past fifty or so years—finally, some might say—thousands of Latino residents have entered San Antonio’s professional class as doctors, engineers, executives, lawyers, politicians, and teachers. Yet hundreds of thousands of low-income Latino workers still struggle to overcome a legacy of generational poverty, low educational attainment, and chronic illness. As of 2019, the median household income for Anglos in San Antonio was around $64,000, while for Latinos it was $43,000.
For decades much of the blame for San Antonio’s failure to thrive—or to join other “world-class” cities, in booster parlance—has been assigned to the steady stream of poor, uneducated immigrants who left Mexico to build better lives and to the supposed “cultural” or “value” differences between Latinos and Anglos. That fewer than 22 percent of the Latinos here are foreign-born is not so frequently mentioned, if at all.
In truth, San Antonio’s inability to reduce its enduring poverty presents nothing less than a Gordian knot for a city with grand ambitions. Companies that relocate or expand to San Antonio, for example, are often drawn to its low wages, low taxes, and relatively low rents and home prices—courtesy of a class of workers, mostly Latino, who have little option here but to accept the low pay. At the same time, many of the companies that city leaders want to attract require educated employees, often with specific high-tech skills, who aren’t available here in sufficient numbers. Lots of San Antonians pine for an NFL team and nonstop flights to more major cities. The city has neither, in part because there aren’t enough large corporations here to fill the expensive stadium suites the NFL demands or whose employees need to travel regularly by air. Meanwhile, nearly half the population is barely able to pay its bills, as has been the norm virtually since the city was first settled, in the early eighteenth century.
Which has long left me wondering: Why can’t a city as beautiful and welcoming as my hometown create more opportunity for the hardworking residents who keep it running?
Keeping things the way they are has long been a paramount value for many of San Antonio’s political and business leaders, and it’s an ethos that has extended well beyond the preservation of historic buildings. (Rick Casey, the writer, reminded me that a motto of a once-powerful Anglo-dominated civic club was “We do nothing, and we do it well.”) Segregation in this city, as in many others, was embedded in its initial design.
One scholar who has immersed herself in that history is Christine Drennon, director of the urban studies program at Trinity University, which perches on a picturesque ridge north of downtown San Antonio. Trim, silver-haired, and bespectacled, Drennon has the charismatic urgency of the best college lecturers. She is not from San Antonio—she’s a Rochester, New York, native—which means she has been able to approach the city’s history without the rosiness or the defensiveness of many locals. Drennon moved here in 2002, and upon trying to enroll her children in school she was flummoxed by the presence of so many school districts, along with the city’s high ranking on national lists that track economic segregation. After studying everything from restrictive neighborhood covenants to highway construction projects, Drennon came to understand the mechanisms by which inequality of opportunity had been enshrined in stone and concrete—mechanisms that “have never been random,” she says, but rather were “very much engineered.”
As early as 1883, the city designated land occupied by Mexican immigrants as “real estate deemed useless,” which it could then sell to Anglos. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, as more educated and prosperous Mexicans arrived, some Anglo leaders began instituting deed restrictions in their neighborhoods, establishing minimum values for new homes and allowing sales only to white buyers. By the twenties, and for decades afterward, virtually the only parts of town open to nonwhites were on the West Side and sections of the South and East sides.
During the Great Depression the federal government classified many nonwhite neighborhoods as lending risks, and most banks declined to fund mortgages in those areas. Would-be homebuyers “were stuck,” Drennon said. Over time, the value of the houses on the West Side went down, even as home values in other neighborhoods increased, and school districts in poor areas, supported by property taxes, were meagerly funded. Discriminatory housing covenants were declared unconstitutional by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1948, while redlining was permitted until Congress passed the Fair Housing Act twenty years later. At the same time, highway construction in the sixties further isolated the West Side and reinforced San Antonio’s racial and economic segregation, and urban-renewal funds were used to raze Latino neighborhoods.
When I was growing up, these facts weren’t taught in school and were seldom discussed around Anglo dinner tables. My North Side childhood had been relatively modest, but we benefited from superior schools and other amenities, such as paved streets. My family lived in a small contemporary cinder block house on a dead-end street in Terrell Hills, which means my friends and I played in the shadow of Joske Hill, the mansions there surrounded at the base by soaring bamboo hedges that suggested outsiders best keep their distance. The rambling estates on Eldon Road were even grander, owned by old families who had the kinds of ranches we’d seen only in movies—to my gang of neighborhood kids, they might as well have been from Saturn.
Which was also the way kids from other parts of town saw us, at best. Terrell Hills is part of the old North Side triumvirate that also includes Alamo Heights and Olmos Park, each constituting an incorporated city that is physically but not legally part of San Antonio. Each had its own police and fire departments, and, more important, the three neighborhoods had one school district for themselves, supported by a robust tax base.
Back then it would have occurred to few on the North Side to try to distinguish between appropriation and appreciation of the city’s Mexican American culture, certainly not when coronating the king and queen of the spring celebration known as Fiesta, or when donning a rebozo or a guayabera for a soiree in Olmos Park. I went to the same public school my mom had attended, and the “Mexican” kids, as all Latinos were invariably called, sat in the back of class, as they had in her day. My parents paid live-in housekeepers from Mexico just enough to send money home, as did most of our neighbors.
If you were looking for a pivotal year in the modern life of San Antonio, it would be 1968. Chaotic as that year was for the country, in San Antonio it was the year of HemisFair, a world’s fair dreamed up by the business community to celebrate the city’s 250th birthday and “the confluence of civilizations in the Americas” and so to launch it into the big leagues.
The fair’s 750-foot Tower of the Americas soared over the city like a beacon of progress, even though, really, it was just a revolving steakhouse way up in the air. (Lobster and Sara Lee cheesecake were also on the menu.) At the same time, the River Walk was extended and upgraded with cheery bars and restaurants and new hotels with balconies overlooking the action. These changes cemented San Antonio’s identity as a destination for visitors, which was great for downtown businesses—a charming river cruise and a stiff ’rita could take the edge off a long day of sales presentations—but also yoked the city more tightly to its service economy.
My bookish, college-educated dad, whose previous work experience was pretty much limited to working in his father-in-law’s clothing store, was hired as HemisFair’s director of cultural exhibits. I recently stumbled across a picture of my ten-year-old brother in a suit and me, at thirteen, in a white dress dotted with fuchsia and yellow flowers, dressed up for opening day and thrilled to be VIPs. Another photo of my parents later that night shows my dad in a tux and my mother in an organdy designer dress they probably couldn’t afford, for a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Don Carlo that The New York Times labeled “brilliant,” proving that San Antonio was on its way.
If it took breaking some eggs to make the multicultural omelet, few of the city’s leaders seemed particularly concerned. At the time, I was blithely unaware that San Antonio used eminent domain to force the sale of 2,239 homes and 686 commercial buildings, which it destroyed to make way for the fair’s downtown location, and that $12.2 million in federal housing funds were directed toward that purpose. (That’s about $110 million today.) An urban-renewal trend was then sweeping the nation, whereby the federal government bulldozed countless poor and working-class neighborhoods.
The homes flattened for HemisFair happened to be owned mainly by
working-class descendants of German, Irish, and Polish immigrants, though other renewal efforts displaced people of color living elsewhere in the city.
As is often the case, it required an outsider to look deeper. Charles Kuralt of CBS News hosted a special called Hunger in America that premiered just after HemisFair opened. The first of its four parts featured San Antonio. It begins with film of a skin-and-bones baby dying of malnutrition and contrasts the glory of HemisFair with scenes of hungry street urchins, families picking up sacks of surplus government food, and an eleven-year-old detained by police for “soliciting for prostitution.” Long-serving county commissioner A. J. Ploch, a white man, insists on camera that children were going hungry only because their fathers wouldn’t work. Those children, he continues, really didn’t need to go to school beyond eighth grade.
Another scene featured the chaos at the Robert B. Green charity hospital on the west side of downtown, overflowing with patients suffering from malnutrition and tuberculosis. Earlier that decade a group of San Antonio leaders had persuaded the University of Texas to locate a medical school north of the city—where, not coincidentally, some of them and some of their friends owned land. Another group had wanted it downtown, along with the attendant public hospital. In a bitter fight, the former camp won, and the best medical care, as well as even more of the city’s wealth, became concentrated on the North Side, leaving the rest of the city to fend for itself. That situation still exists today. One of two hospitals on the South Side, in operation for forty years, closed its doors last year. The Dallas-based for-profit hospital chain that owned it, Steward Health Care, said 25 percent of its patients could not afford to pay, which was an unsustainable model for the company.
The city’s historic dependence on low-wage service jobs set the stage for the hungry people sitting in those long food lines more than fifty years later. One was Caroline De La Fuente, whose family has lived in San Antonio for four generations. She offered me a more personal perspective on the persistent inequality of opportunity in the city; her indefatigable efforts have never quite secured her family a spot in the middle class.
Caroline was one of those featured in Julian P. Ledezma’s food bank videos, and I was drawn immediately to her warmth and honesty. We first met at her sand-hued home, the core of which was built in 1947, with a second story added later. It’s located in an older working-class suburb on the near northwest side of town. She shares the five-bedroom, two-bath house with nine others: her husband, Miguel; her older son and his daughter, both of whom moved in after his divorce; her youngest daughter, who moved in after suffering domestic violence, and that daughter’s five kids. Caroline is a sturdy woman of 61, her long, thick hair making its march toward gray, her blue-framed glasses accentuating an almost preternatural cheerfulness in her shining brown eyes. “You do what you have to do” is her motto, born of necessity but also reflecting a resourcefulness she learned at an early age. “I don’t sit there,” she told me. “I go looking.”
That is how she found herself in her brownish twenty-year-old GMC Yukon lining up for food along with thousands of other San Antonians in similar straits. “I would get up early” to beat the crowds, Caroline said. “I would go and just wait.” Sometimes she took some of her grandkids—she has sixteen in all, plus one great grandchild. The waits stretched to five hours and beyond.
The pandemic’s economic devastation of San Antonio’s workers could largely be attributed to the city’s longtime dependence on tourism and conventions and the affiliated low-wage jobs with little to no safety net. The New York Times reported that 26 conventions were canceled by mid-May 2020, which resulted in $123 million in lost revenue. More than 140,500 workers filed for unemployment, which, the Times noted, did not include the undocumented. Bexar County reported more COVID infections and nearly as many deaths as Dallas County, though the latter had 600,000 more residents.
Caroline’s husband lost three relatives in short order. Food prices soared. After the city’s hotels, restaurants, and tourist attractions shut down virtually overnight, laid-off employees drained their retirement savings, ran up credit card debt, and borrowed more from family members. The vast majority had no access to paid leave. In the San Antonio Independent School District, the number of students chronically absent from school jumped from 14.5 percent in the 2019–20 school year to 53 percent the next. (Statewide it was 25.7 percent in 2021–22.)
Caroline’s family had seen its share of ups and downs, but the pandemic set the family on its heels. Miguel was laid off from his job as a truck driver, while their youngest daughter, a veterinary assistant, and their son, an air-
conditioning repairman, couldn’t go to work. There were no earnings coming in with four adults and six children living in her house. “That,” she said, “was something crazy.”
Even now, with the worst of the pandemic behind her, a normal day for Caroline involves taking one set of kids to day care and another to school, wrangling with doctors’ offices over her husband’s medical bills (the result of a heart ailment compounded by exposure to toxic dust at work), grocery shopping, retrieving the kids, and getting dinner ready. My texts to her were usually countered with an autoreply: “I’m driving with FOCUS turned on. I’ll see your message when I get where I’m going,” which made me wonder just when that might happen. She struck me as a woman who hasn’t had a minute to herself in decades.
As I got to know her, I couldn’t help wondering whether, in another place, at another time, Caroline might have been afforded different opportunities and a different life. Her mother, Josephine De Leon, grew up not on the West Side but in a small North Side neighborhood of workers, piedreros (“stonecutters”) who toiled in the limestone quarry that, when played out, would become the Japanese garden in Brackenridge Park. The Latino laborers were paid lower wages than their Anglo counterparts and struggled to pay the poll tax required of voters back then.
Josephine’s father delivered groceries, while her mother, employed by a dry cleaner, would steam the lavish gowns for San Antonio’s Fiesta royalty. At a time when banks rarely lent to Latinos, Josephine and her husband saved enough money to buy a house from a relative. Unbeknownst to the family, their neighborhood was characterized by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the fifties as “definitely declining”—a category second only to the West Side’s designation of “hazardous.”
Caroline spent her early childhood in that house, and she and her siblings attended Catholic school. “We would get up at four a.m. to catch the bus to be downtown at five, all four of us,” Caroline told me. The nuns, she said, “would hit us with a ruler if we spoke Spanish.” After school, the whole of Brackenridge Park was their backyard. The boys played sports and joined scout troops. The girls learned to cook and care for family.
In the mid-seventies, when Caroline was around twelve, an Anglo man showed up wanting to buy her family’s house. An expansion of U.S. 281, a major north-south freeway, had been planned, and the entire neighborhood was in its path. Caroline’s father was shrewd enough to hold out for the best price he could get, but ultimately his family had no choice but to leave the neighborhood and the home that had been theirs since the late fifties. Today the portion of 281 that runs through town is called the McAllister Freeway, after former mayor Walter McAllister, who in 1970 had appeared on NBC and said that there was “a difference of temperament between the Anglos and our Americans of Mexican descent.” The latter loved beauty, dancing, flowers, and music, he insisted, adding that “perhaps they’re not quite as, uh, let’s say as ambitiously motivated as the Anglos are to get ahead financially.”
Caroline’s family moved to a nearby pocket of affordable homes near the elegant old mansions of Monte Vista, and as soon she was old enough, she took on a series of after-school jobs: at Olmos Pharmacy, at Sandwich Garden restaurant, at H-E-B. I asked whether she was ever envious of the rich kids who came in for fountain drinks at the pharmacy, or of the big houses they lived in nearby. “Honestly, no,” she told me. “I loved the houses and loved looking at them, thinking about what my house was going to look like.”
She finished high school and enrolled at San Antonio College, hoping to one day open a day care center. Her brothers, meanwhile, were embarking on military careers—the path that many Mexican American men in the city had followed out of poverty for decades. Caroline considered that path, but, as she told me, at eighteen “other things came into play.” She had reconnected with a boy she had known at Edison High, Miguel De La Fuente.
“I didn’t like him at first,” she confessed. Still, their mothers were close friends, and with familiarity she softened. They married in 1983, and in 1986 their first child, Melissa, was born. Caroline left college and her jobs behind. “It was a lot trying to work and take care of a child,” she told me.
For the next few years, Miguel worked as a truck driver for the food service company Sysco, and in 1993 they bought a small three-bedroom frame house on the northwest side of town, just a block from the I-10 frontage road. “It had a huge yard and great neighbors,” Caroline recalled. “We lived a very relaxed family life: barbecue at home, playing card games, always at our house, nieces and nephews, all our kids playing.” By 32, she was mother to three daughters and one son.
Melissa has different memories. “They were always struggling to make ends meet,” she said of her parents. “There was always bickering about money. Always, always. But it wasn’t even about the money—just the frustrations from the struggle.” To save, Caroline shopped in thrift stores on Zarzamora Street and at Goodwill and tracked down free-lunch and summer-enrichment programs for the kids. Sometimes she found help from SNAP and other antipoverty programs.
She advocated for her kids within the public school system, and then, when an Anglo teacher tore up her son’s homework and shamed him in front of the class, Caroline turned to an early voucher program and enrolled him in private school. When I told this story to Rosie Castro, a longtime civil rights advocate and the mother of former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro and current U.S. Congressman Joaquin Castro, she wasn’t surprised. “There is a long history of mistreatment, bullying, physical punishment, and abuse that our children endured in public schools,” she said. “Despite that, parents encouraged their children to attend as a way to better their opportunity to have a good career, which would better support their families,” giving the lie to an Anglo shibboleth that Texans—and particularly San Antonians—of Mexican descent do not value education.
Still, for families living on the margins, it’s all too easy to get knocked off track—by an ER visit, a fender bender, or an AC collapse in the middle of August. In 1996, for instance, Caroline went back to school at a place called Texas Careers, a for-profit education company later purchased by the international chain Kaplan. She trained as an administrative assistant and did so well that the company hired her. Caroline loved the job and thrived in it, but two years later, Miguel had a heart attack, and Caroline quit to take care of him during his recovery. He has since been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and chronic lung disease. His medical costs soared.
Three years after that, with nineteen years as a truck driver for Sysco under his belt, he was laid off, losing his health insurance as well as his income. Miguel worked as an independent contractor, then found another job delivering trailers throughout the Rio Grande Valley, and by 2003 had made enough to finance their current house. Eventually he took a new job delivering sand to West Texas fracking sites. For a while the company didn’t require or provide masks, and he developed a persistent cough. Even so, he kept working.
Once again their life was on the upswing. Caroline went back to work, this time to a job at the San Antonio Parks and Recreation Department, looking after other people’s kids at an after-school program: She supervised arts and crafts classes, a Girl Scout troop, and volleyball games—whatever was asked. “I loved my job,” she told me. But by 2016, at 55, she had developed health problems of her own. A complicated knee surgery was followed by two hip replacements, and, finally, full-time work was just too much.
Then came the pandemic, another setback. Four years later, the family still finds itself treading water. With Miguel now unwell and unable to work, they are short his income, a loss that has sent Caroline back to the food bank and looking to other sources for help. She does her best to put a good face on the situation. Aside from Miguel, she said, “everyone is back to work. The kids are healthy. We recovered as best we could.”
“Here I am, back on the West Side,” Henry Cisneros reminded me when we met up this summer, and he seemed pretty happy about it. He lives in his grandparents’ craftsman bungalow and has set up operations in a building that used to house his grandfather Romulo Munguia’s print shop. The old printing press sits in the lobby, while on the first floor Cisneros’s office is furnished with a commanding desk worthy of San Antonio’s longest-serving mayor (1981–89) and the Clinton administration’s first Housing and Urban Development secretary (1993–97). That it is almost buried under stacks of papers, academic treatises, and drafts of his latest book, on the much hoped-for Austin–San Antonio Megaregion, is testament that, at 77, Cisneros is still a very busy man.
He is older, grayer, and just a smidge thicker than in the days when he was the political equivalent of a matinee idol, a whip-smart shoo-in for the role of first Latino U.S. president—until he suffered a bruising fall from grace, after a scandal involving an extramarital affair. But ever the optimist, Cisneros still radiates that youthful, could-sell-sand-at-the-beach energy. While he has been succeeded by nine mayors, he looms over the city like a guardian angel—albeit one more beloved by many Anglos, for raising San Antonio’s national profile, than by some Latinos who feel he didn’t do enough to expand opportunities for them amid the city’s rapid growth.
When Henry was elected—and everyone still calls him Henry, as if we are all BFFs—I thought, like so many others, that San Antonio would soon leap into the big leagues, if not overnight then soon. A political centrist and an Aggie,
with additional degrees in various urban-studies disciplines, from his time at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and George Washington University, he believed utterly in his power to radically change the racial and economic inequities of his hometown. He frequently described his approach as “two-fisted”: with one hand he would push to grow the economy, and with the other extend “a stepladder” of support to offer more opportunity to those long left behind. He was more successful with the former than the latter, but he was probably most effective as a symbol, seeding the next generation of Latino leaders and showing the city’s Latino majority what was possible.
Inequality Then and Now
Starting in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, San Antonio’s Anglo leaders dictated who could live where, eventually confining most nonwhite residents to parts of the East, West, and South sides. Today, those areas still contain the region’s highest concentration of poverty and diabetes.
San Antonio, he says now, is on the right track. “I read the newspaper and look at the names on the sports teams of the most northern regions in town, and they’re Gonzalez and Hernandez along with Smith and Jones,” he told me. Cisneros, like many of his contemporaries, remembers all too well how, through the sixties, the Latino community struggled under the thumb of many of the city’s Anglo power brokers. But in the pivotal year of 1968, activists formed MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which fought (and continues to fight) to equalize funding for public schools. Then, in the mid-seventies, Ernesto Cortes created COPS, Communities Organized for Public Service, which successfully pushed for infrastructure on the West Side—flood prevention, sewers, streets—that the North Side had received long ago. COPS also won a lawsuit that obliged the Anglo-dominated city council to replace its at-large seats with single-member districts. The rise of Latino voting power culminated in the election of Cisneros as the city’s first Latino mayor since 1842.
In his view, most of his successors as mayor have all subscribed to the same essential formula: “Do the things to create jobs and grow so that we can tap those jobs and make them work for those who are marginalized. That’s kind of the basic essence of San Antonio.”
He’s kept that faith even though San Antonio lacked Houston’s status as a world capital of the energy industry and advanced medical care or Dallas’s position as a crossroads of banking and transportation. Cisneros believed initially that the extensive military presence—with then four (now three) bases in the area, as well as the Brooke Army Medical Center and, later, various cyber warfare commands—could be used as a springboard for tech-based industries such as biomedicine and cybersecurity. Some such companies have launched here, but not enough to make them major employers. He has also held tightly to his “megaregion” concept: Cisneros insists that Austin and San Antonio complement each other in ways that could be mutually beneficial, even if Austin has tended to behave like a starlet on the rise ignoring a pesky understudy.
The Henry spell is not easily broken, but a post-interview drive down Buena Vista Street was immediately bracing. The near West Side appears highly resistant to economic progress. Its streets are paved now, unlike when I was growing up, but 78207 is still one of the city’s poorest zip codes, with a median household income of $28,500. While Cisneros grew up in a middle-class section with some more durable homes, most of the houses on the near West Side are tiny wood-frame structures with barred windows and postage-stamp yards surrounded by chain-link fences. The Catholic churches still look to be doing a good business, as do the smaller enterprises with signs in Spanish—taquerias, tire shops, tortillerias—that cohabit with restaurants such as Jack in the Box and Pizza Patrón.
“Zarzamora has all these fast-food chains, and people wonder why the diabetes rates keep going up,” said my guide for the day, Graciela Sanchez, who could barely suppress a wry laugh when I suggested the West Side hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. A longtime activist and perpetual thorn in the side of the local power structure, Sanchez is a Yale University graduate with a halo of gray curls and the mordant sense of humor common to community organizers. Her family has been on the West Side for five generations, though not without difficulty: Sanchez’s childhood home, along with her grandmother’s home and hundreds more, was demolished in an urban renewal putsch in the mid-seventies, over residents’ protests.
When she isn’t fighting for affordable housing and neighborhood preservation, Sanchez puts up banners honoring former West Side residents. It’s a way of commemorating what used to be a thrumming, economically mixed community, one she evoked for me as we cruised the streets. This was a cab company, she began. There was a cantina here, fresh-fruit sellers there, boticas (“drugstores”) here, sex workers there. “We weren’t just losing the homes,” she said of the continuous bulldozing of the West Side, “but the whole culture of the neighborhood.”
Ironically, what could “save” the West Side might also complete the destruction, long underway, of the community that once thrived there. Because of its proximity to downtown, developers have been eyeing the area, with some new projects already in the works. Most worrisome to Sanchez and many local residents is the $160 million downtown ballpark planned for San Antonio’s minor-league team, the Missions, which is co-owned by, among others, Henry Cisneros and San Antonio megadeveloper Graham Weston. In the area around the stadium, Weston’s company, Weston Urban, already the dominant developer downtown, plans to build apartments, a hotel, and spaces for retail and restaurants, at a cost estimated at $1 billion.
The city council approved public financing for the ballpark in a hasty if acrid meeting in mid-September. Some speakers protested the proposed demolition of the Soap Factory, an apartment complex in the same area, built in 1979 and bought by Weston Urban in 2023. It is the rare downtown complex that service workers can afford. Although one pro-ballpark councilman (and 2025 mayoral candidate), the northwest’s Manny Pelaez, dissed the complex as “held together with duct tape, bailing wire, and string,” photos on the Soap Factory website show updated interiors.
Weston has inarguably brought life to forgotten areas on the western edge of downtown—new parks, a second river walk along San Pedro Creek, and new commercial and apartment buildings, along with a $15 million donation to University of Texas at San Antonio for a school of data science. He has also received generous tax abatements from the city for his projects while promising to make San Antonio a better place for everyone. “[We] will build many more modern residential units than are there today,” Weston told me in an email. “We will give unprecedented financial support to assist existing tenants being asked to move to allow construction of the new projects.”
“Unprecedented” in this case means that in a rare break with tradition—and after public protests assisted by the Texas Organizing Project—some financial aid will be given to displaced tenants, and a nonprofit has been hired to assist those ejected with finding new homes. But in a curious arrangement, half of the $500,000 designated for that purpose will come from Weston Urban and half from the city—from San Antonio’s taxpayers.
“One city council member said we should be happy that Weston Urban was giving us anything,” said Soap Factory tenant James Boscher, a soft-spoken 21-year-old student from Brownsville with wire-rim glasses and a wisp of a mustache. He and his girlfriend have been grateful to pay $800 a month in rent for a 360-square-foot studio after months of searching for an affordable place. While putting himself through the University of the Incarnate Word, Boscher is working as a tutor, while his partner, also a college student, works at a day care center. The negative descriptions of his apartment complex have been hurtful, he told me, and he has become increasingly skeptical of self-serving promises to help the couple relocate. “Okay, the bar is on the ground,” he said. “And you just lifted it up half an inch?”
The ballpark and surrounding development will surely put a shine on a quadrant of downtown in need of burnishing, while simultaneously encouraging still more expensive developments to the west, raising home prices beyond the means of many residents who wish to stay. Meanwhile an old San Antonio conundrum has been overlooked in the fray: Will the city’s development plans create lasting, high-quality jobs or more of the same?
Heywood Sanders, a recently retired professor of urban studies and public administration at Trinity University and UTSA, is a slight man with a brushy mustache, the contagious enthusiasm of a natural educator, and a touch of old-world politesse. He agreed to meet me at the corner of Cesar Chavez Boulevard and South Frio Street, just west of downtown. With a flourish, Sanders directed my gaze to the barren urban landscape abutting the UTSA downtown campus—parking lots, squat buildings housing city agencies, a bail bond office, a gun shop, and an uninviting chain hotel. “This,” he announced, “is Henry Cisneros’s boulevard of broken dreams.”
It was in this part of town, he explained, that Cisneros began to build San Antonio’s high-tech future, back in the eighties. Much like during the run-up to HemisFair, the urban-renewal bulldozers were brought in to raze “blighted” West Side homes to make room for a new outpost of the Control Data Corporation and more of its kind. High tech would save San Antonio. West Side moms would be lifted out of poverty by learning to help build computers. “Once upon a time there was the great hope and a high-tech vision,” Sanders says. “And it just fizzled.”
Cisneros was too late. When CDC hit the skids, he tried to pivot to biomedicine, but, said Rick Casey, “we weren’t going to compete with Houston.” High-tech companies preferred to locate near a Tier One university that could produce highly trained workers—like, say, the flagship campus of the University of Texas System, in Austin. UTSA, established in 1969, didn’t add an engineering school until 1982, a delay that still hurts.
One of Cisneros’s most vocal opponents was a childhood friend, María Berriozábal, who became San Antonio’s first Latina city councilwoman, elected from the West Side in 1981. Petite, with short dark curls and the warmth of a favorite tía, she probably seemed easy for power brokers and pols to dismiss at first. But when she needed to, Berriozábal could take on the contemptuous mien of a seasoned prosecutor with a guilty liar on the stand.
When I visited her, Berriozábal, at 83, was awaiting cataract surgery and caring for her ailing spouse, but her voice and her mind were as sharp as ever, maybe because she still wants others to understand that San Antonio’s “structure” remains one dominated by business interests—mostly Anglo—that put short-term gains over improving the lives of San Antonians for the long haul. “You know what? It was going to take too long,” she said of Cisneros’s two-fisted approach. “How do you raise the educational level of people? How do you improve their health? You’ve got to change a structure. And he didn’t do that.” Instead, she said, “he went looking for the industries that matched the skills we had.”
Cisneros doubled down on tourism. The largest SeaWorld in the U.S. came to town, lured by tax abatements and land donated by Marty Wender, a major local developer at the time, who would go on to build pricey nearby housing developments such as Westover Hills. Essentially the same scenario repeated itself four years later, under Mayor Lila Cockrell (who’d occupied the office before Cisneros and then returned after him), with another theme park, Fiesta Texas. Berriozábal fought all such projects, repeatedly asking how the poor were supposed to benefit from the siphoning of public resources to build amusement parks, other than through a relatively small number of low-wage jobs.
A questionable obsession with sports facilities also took hold. The Alamodome was supposed to bring in San Antonio’s first NFL team; Cisneros staked his legacy as mayor on it. Once again, those who argued for spending on schools, infrastructure, and transportation lost out. The Alamodome opened in 1993 with no NFL team to show for Cisneros’s labors. Instead the Spurs moved there, from the HemisFair arena. The biggest beneficiary of the relocation from the old downtown arena was probably the team’s then–majority owner and longtime Cisneros backer Red McCombs, a billionaire car dealer and entrepreneur, who had managed to wrangle higher concession and ticket prices with the move. But watching basketball in a stadium designed for football lacked appeal, and the team re-relocated in 2002 to a basketball arena farther out on the East Side, which is now likely to be replaced by yet another one—back downtown, not too far from the Spurs’ original home.
It wasn’t that Cisneros didn’t care that nearly a quarter of the population was then living in poverty. He’d convened a passel of local visionaries, in 1982, to determine where San Antonio should be in 1990, calling the project Target ’90. Their wish list included upgraded schools and infrastructure and affordable housing for the working poor. But ultimately what got built was the Alamodome.
“It’s a very perplexing kind of fascination with the symbols of being big-league and world-class without understanding what it takes to get there,” Sanders told me, citing the well-educated populace and skilled workforce that have been key to the success of Pittsburgh; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; and, again, Austin.
Instead, the leaders of San Antonio were mostly engaged in rancid debates over development, most glaringly with the building or proposed building of resorts, shopping malls, and golf courses over the recharge zone for San Antonio’s water supply (Berriozábal fought the development tooth and nail). As Sanders put it, “The way to make money in a very poor city is land deals.”
Like Cisneros, Julián Castro, mayor from 2009 to 2014, tried to lift up the city’s neediest residents while simultaneously attracting more economic development. He did the city a solid with the creation of Pre-K 4 SA, a small early-education program approved by voters in 2012, financed by a one-eighth-cent sales tax increase. So far Pre-K 4 SA has served around 12,000 low-income kids a year, reaching about a third of San Antonio’s poorest children.
Castro’s major initiative was called the “Decade of Downtown,” though ironically that area would end up all the more ceded to tourists while the revitalized area of the once abandoned Pearl Brewery stole the limelight. Again the developers received huge tax incentives, fee waivers, and infrastructure grants. Of the 64 projects included in Castro’s Center City Housing Incentive Policy, 37 were built near the Pearl complex, an abundance of nice apartments and condos priced at market rates for well-
educated younger millennials. Just four projects were built on the South Side and seven on the West.
The affordable housing crisis continued apace. “How can we have [produced] two HUD secretaries, and San Antonio has one of the biggest housing problems in the U.S.?” asked Diane Sánchez, a businesswoman who briefly served as president of the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
As Cisneros had done thirty years earlier, Castro assembled a diverse group of citizens in 2010 to plan for the year 2020. Along with improvements to the central business district, the recommendations included raising the minimum wage and per-capita income (it was $29,036 in 2012), improving high school graduation rates, and, of course, reducing the poverty rate. The problems and proposed solutions were similar to the those of Target ’90, as was the outcome. In the end, the schools did not improve; the poverty rate did not go down; health outcomes remained poor—the really tough stuff was passed over in favor of developments for a wealthier clientele.
When Caroline De La Fuente’s daughter Melissa dreams about winning the lottery, it’s for a specific amount: $30,000. Exactly. Not to buy a car, not for a down payment on a house, not for an insanely luxurious trip. Thirty thousand dollars, a near-impossible sum for Melissa and a great many other working people in San Antonio and beyond, would allow her to make one crucial home repair on the first place she has ever owned and lived in all alone. “That’s it,” she told me. “Get my house’s foundation leveled and I’d be good. I don’t want any more than that.”
At 37 Melissa has her mom’s broad face, bright eyes, and bountiful tresses, along with her unrelenting determination. “I had seen my mom from the time I was young never giving up,” she told me when we met, a sleeve of tattoos twining up her arm and her work badge from Via, San Antonio’s metropolitan transit authority, hanging around her neck. “I wanted to make her proud of me.”
It has not been easy. In many ways Melissa is a poster child for the obstacles faced by San Antonio residents trying to make it. Much as she has hoped to overcome her family’s historical disadvantages—and though she has a job she enjoys, as a strategic planning support specialist for Via, which pays around $50,000 a year with overtime, as well as another part-time job there, helping people who are disabled reserve paratransit rides—she still lives “paycheck to paycheck,” she told me. “To be comfortable you have to be making seventy thousand dollars a year for one person.” (As the food bank’s Ledezma said to me of San Antonio, “It’s now about the second job. Your side hustle. If you don’t have a second job, you’re gonna face hard times.”)
Melissa had originally envisioned a different future for herself. In high school she entered a prelaw program and dreamed of being a judge. “I did lose interest because I felt it was out of my reach,” she said. Instead she got pregnant at fifteen. There had been no sex education courses at her public school, and no one there tried to dissuade her from dropping out. She considered an abortion, made it as far as a clinic, but couldn’t bring herself to go in. She quit school and, when her son was four months old, went to work at a nearby Jack in the Box as a cashier, joining the already crowded ranks of cash-strapped single mothers in the city.
Single motherhood made her far more vulnerable to a low-income life, a problem nationally but more so in San Antonio. A 2022 SmartAsset survey rated San Antonio the tenth worst city in the country for single mothers, where their median household income sits at $26,570. Women overall lag behind their counterparts in other cities, a 2019 study commissioned by the city found. Women of color in San Antonio, particularly Latinas, earn less, have less education, and suffer more domestic violence; their representation in local government is negligible.
Melissa was nothing if not determined to escape those numbers. She wanted a better life for herself and her child. At seventeen she thought she had found it when she married and had a second child. Three years later, with help from a Sallie Mae program, she and her husband bought a house, and they started a small business installing radios and alarm systems in cars. But being homeowners and running a small business stretched the couple to the limit, and they fell into debt. Melissa now blames this on a youthful lack of business acumen. “We weren’t as resourceful at the time!” she told me. But in 2009, as now, many of San Antonio’s Latinos lacked access to decent education in financial matters and, equally important, to bank loans, according to Next Street, a national research firm for small businesses.
To try to improve her financial prospects, Melissa enrolled two years later at Brown Mackie College, a for-profit trade school, to become a paralegal. Within two months she sensed trouble: One of her teachers offered to boost the grade of any student who asked. After eight months she tried to transfer to San Antonio College, the local commuter school. “They told me all the classes I had taken didn’t count for anything,” Melissa said. “Now I have ten thousand dollars in student loans on my credit rating.” She finally got her GED in 2013. (Melissa’s younger sister had a similar experience at another local for-profit.) These for-profit schools that target poor communities are sometimes referred to as “predatory services,” comparable to payday loan companies.
“I’m still trying to build on what I am now,” said Melissa, now single and attending SAC. She wishes there had been someone around, a parent, a teacher, a mentor, who had taught her earlier about managing finances—about budgeting, building credit, etc. “I would have been way better off,” she said. “For me I learned the hard way. But as long as I continue to move forward it’s okay.”
If you ask urbanists about opportunity and poverty in San Antonio, they are pretty clear about what might bring real change, and growth for growth’s sake isn’t it. The city’s continued dependence on tourism and conventions has not served it well. “I would never tell a mayor to shut them down, but those are mostly low-wage jobs,” said economist Cullum Clark, who directs the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative. Steven Pedigo, director of the Urban Lab at UT-Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, has more-specific advice: The city should provide incentives for more employers to locate on the South, East, and West sides, where employees can get to them, and other businesses can grow around them.
Drennon argues that the city should offer the working poor—who “have made this city the great city it already is”—more opportunities through universal pre-K, affordable housing, and a requirement that employers pay a living wage of at least $15 an hour while also providing paid sick leave. The City of San Antonio could increase the amount it spends on health care, which is currently 2.5 percent of its $3.96 billion budget, and it could also choose to raise the property tax rate of 54 cents on every $100 of taxable value, which has been stagnant for thirty years. It could phase out tax abatements to Toyota, heralded as a major boon to the San Antonio economy ever since the company broke ground on a manufacturing plant, in 2003. The auto company continues to report record profits—up 17 percent since the first quarter of this year. “The poor have subsidized the wealthy for decades,” Drennon wrote recently. “We can begin to imagine redistribution in the other direction.”
Since he took office, in 2017, the current mayor, Ron Nirenberg, has also promised to take on San Antonio’s entrenched poverty. A fit, youthful man of 47, who formerly managed the student radio station at Trinity University, he introduced an “equity framework” in the 2018 city budget, meaning that funds would go where they were needed most instead of being distributed equally among council districts. Easier said than done: During that fiscal year, four underserved districts received only the baseline amount for needed street repairs. Little to nothing has been done since. Nirenberg created a modestly successful affordable housing plan, and voters passed a $150 million housing bond to pay for it in 2022. And he rolled out a Ready to Work initiative, funded by a voter-approved one-eighth-cent sales tax that is supposed to bring in $240 million from December 2021 through December 2025. Its seductive website promises everything from child care to education to transportation to job training—free of charge—to help an applicant “find and keep the job you love.”
Unfortunately enrollment in the program has been far lower than anticipated, in part because many of the available jobs—aerospace, cybersecurity, and financial services are highlighted alongside construction and warehouse work—do not fit the lower skill level of most San Antonio applicants. The program was expanded this past May and will now be using $3 million in local tax dollars to subsidize 31 local companies to train employees they already have, instead of serving job-seekers.
For Berriozábal, that decision represents more of the same. Current business and civic leaders aren’t that different from their predecessors of the 1950s when it comes to providing a genuine leg up to the city’s underserved, she says. “These businesspeople created a path . . . and it was a powerful thing,” she told me recently. “The aim was to have San Antonio be a city that has as its priority growth and expansion. But what does it take to grow? What does it take to expand? Where does the money go? Who makes the money? That’s the history. That’s the system that we created. And so we have never changed. We grow simply to grow, without questioning what that means and who benefits and who pays.”
James Boscher, the Soap Factory tenant trying to keep his apartment from being bulldozed by Weston Urban, mentioned a statement on the company’s website: “Our Mission Is to Build the City Our Kids Want to Call Home.”
“Does that mean my children?” Boscher asked. “Or just the children who can afford it? The city they want to build isn’t really for me.”
This article originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Poverty Paradox.” Subscribe today.
