San Antonio Westside Local History

Artistic passion flows throughout the city of San Antonio, Texas and so it is no surprise to find a beautiful piece of art wherever you go. At the City of San Antonio’s Department of Arts & Culture, we strive to enrich the quality of life of San Antonio residents and visitors by creating art programming and helping people experience art.

Esperanza was founded in 1987 by a group made up of mostly Chicana activists seeking to bring together diverse movements for peace and justice in San Antonio and around the world.

The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center was founded in 1980 as a nonprofit, multidisciplinary organization.
Located in the heart of San Antonio’s Westside, the Guadalupe is one of the
largest community-based, multidisciplinary organizations in the U.S.The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center cultivates, promotes and preserves traditional and contemporary
Chicano, Latino and Native American arts and culture through multidisciplinary programming.

The Museo del Westside is dedicated to preserving and presenting the unique history, heritage, culture, pride, work ethic, and diverse experiences of la gente del Westside. We hope to increase understanding and appreciation of the neighborhood and its people in order to create a more vibrant future for our community.

San Antonio Cultural Arts is a San Antonio, TX nonprofit founded in 1993 with the mission to foster human and community development through community-based arts.

The mission of the Office of Historic Preservation (OHP) is to safeguard the cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability that preserves San Antonio’s unique sense of place, economic competitiveness, and authenticity.

The Westside Preservation Alliance is a consortium of community activists, scholars and residents who realize that San Antonio’s future is built upon San Antonio’s past and history should not be erased based on decisions made without the input or concern for those whose lives are effected by change.

The Office of Historic Preservation has partnered with the Westside Preservation Alliance (WPA), the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, the Westside Development Corporation (WDC), the San Antonio Conservation Society, the Old Spanish Trail Centennial (OST 100), and other volunteers to launch a Westside Cultural Resource Survey. This is an ongoing initiative to identify, document, and protect places of cultural, historical, and architectural significance on the Westside of San Antonio. Working with our community partners, we have identified over 90 historic properties and potential districts that are significant to the Westside community (see Westside Potential Landmarks link below).

This dissertation investigates the early influences, inception, and evolution of
the diverse musical genres of the West Side Sound—a popular, yet understudied
music culture from San Antonio, Texas—from the interwar period to the close of the
twentieth century. I argue that Latinos and Latinas in San Antonio were pioneers, not
late-coming contributors, in the creation of postwar American popular music. This
study focuses on the untold history of San Antonio’s numerous multiracial doo-wop,
R&B, soul, and early rock-and-roll groups of the mid-twentieth century and the
distinct urban dynamics that facilitated the sound’s growth. By revealing sonic
affinities and cultural kinships across African-American and Mexican-American
communities, “Young, Gifted, and Brown” provides new understandings of
interethnic connections along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that deviate from
conflict-centered narratives of Black-Brown relations