photos Reprinted with permission from mexicans in phoenix, by frank m. barrios. Available from the publisher online at www.arcadiapublishing.com or by calling 888-313-2665. Sacred Heart Catholic Church, near 16th Street and Buckeye Road

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we explore Phoenix’s barrios ­from their colorful beginnings to their fade into memory.

The last vestige of Phoenix’s once-bustling Golden Gate barrio is caged by barbed wire fencing on a lonely dirt lot at 16th Street and Buckeye Road. It is the Sacred Heart Church, a red brick structure with boarded-up windows resembling patched eyes.

If it could see, the church would look out on football field-sized industrial buildings and freeways that emit the voiceless din of traffic ­– the flip side of its view in the mid-1900s. Then, the church was surrounded by a congregation of adobe homes and shops frequented mostly by a Latino crowd that tilled the nearby farmland and sang Mexican tunes on weekends.

The Sacred Heart is one of the few reminders of Phoenix’s 20 or so barrios, the Latin-flavored soul that sustained the city’s birth but was forgotten or sold in the quest for progress.

“All of that community is gone, and their history has been replaced,” says ASU Chicano Archives curator Christine Marin. “There’s nothing left but memories.”

But memories live on in culture, and there are still those who recall the legacy of Phoenix’s barrios and replay their traditions.

The H. W. Ryder Lumber Company during the 1891 flood that led Anglos to leave south Phoenix barrios, permanently changing the city’s development

Birth of the Barrios
Phoenix in its first decade resembled a Mexican settlement, with adobe buildings scattered amid agricultural land, according to historian Geoffrey P. Mawn. In 1877, the population of 500 was approximately half Latino, half Anglo.

Mexican laborers constructed Phoenix’s streets and the canals that would become the Salt River Project. They laid the tracks for streetcars and for the Maricopa and Phoenix Railroad, connecting the city with the Southern Pacific mainline and, ironically, transporting the droves of Anglos that would overwhelm the Latino population.

The Latinos made their homes in barrios, or “neighborhoods,” which were originally fairly integrated with Anglos and Asians. Most barrios were located south of the railroad tracks ­– the “wrong” side of the tracks (both then and now), because before Roosevelt Dam, the unbridled Salt River occasionally flooded the area.

In 1891, when a severe deluge spilled as far north as Washington Street, “The city’s more affluent residents left the southern area of the city and moved to new residential districts on higher ground north of the city…” wrote historian Marsha Weisiger in Boosters, Streetcars, and Bungalows, a local history book published in 1984. “This northward movement marked a permanent change in the direction of the city’s development.”

Most Latinos couldn’t afford to move uptown and were often restricted by segregated housing policies. Many who did move felt unwelcome and returned to the barrios, where, despite declining property values and a dearth of municipal services, a great sense of community and pride reigned.

In the 1910s, the Mexican Revolution triggered a diaspora of people seeking work on the irrigated cotton farms newly created with the construction of Roosevelt Dam. Instead of water, Phoenix’s barrios were flooded with people, giving rise over the next few decades to the largest neighborhoods: Golden Gate, Cuatro Milpas, El Campito, Grant Park, Harmon Park and La Sonorita.

Life in the barrios from the 1930s onward was as bittersweet as its history. The Great Depression busted the cotton boom, industry replaced agriculture, and Phoenix became more urban. For many years, the barrios remained undeveloped yet vibrant. But gradually, progress ate away at their foundations. Driving through the area now, one can hear only echoes of their history.

One of many Chinese-owned, Spanish-speaking barrio shops

Barrios: Then and Now
Golden Gate barrio always found itself at the uneasy crossroads between rich and poor. Formed in the 1920s, its very name referenced the shiny gate on the prosperous Valenzuela family’s home that locked out the local riffraff. By 1935, its population of 6,000 lacked water, sewers and paved streets.

What they did have was valuable property. From the 1960s to ’80s, the city snatched up patches of Golden Gate to make more room for Sky Harbor International Airport and rental car service expansion, forcing residents to relocate. All that’s left is the broken Sacred Heart Church.

Drive south from former Golden Gate, turn west on Mohave Street (east is Rental Car Way), and you’ll see what remains of Cuatro Milpas barrio. The “four fields” have been paved over by Interstate 17, new residences and Barrios Unidos Park, where locals still celebrate Mexican Independence Day every September with music and dance, just as the original Cuatro Milpas residents did.

Cruise north along Seventh Street, between Buckeye Road and Chase Field, and you’ll reach the former El Campito, so called because tramps, many impoverished by the Depression, would hop off the train to camp beneath the barrio’s mesquite trees and beg for food or work from Mexican residents. El Campito and all the barrios east of Central Avenue remained outside the city limits until they were annexed in 1959. Today, the ubiquitous dead-end signs and crumbling shacks continue to make this area feel transient and banished.

The first movie theater built in a Mexican-American area, located at 339 E. Washington St. in Phoenix.

If you drive south from El Campito and stop at the Circle K, you might be served by a bilingual employee, just as you would have in the early 1900s, when the barrios were filled with shops owned by Spanish-speaking Chinese and European merchants.

Drive west, past Grant and Harmon parks, and you’ll enter the former La Sonorita barrio, where writer Joe Abril grew up in the 1950s. In his book Echoes of Life in Phoenix, Abril reminisces about the constant hubbub in the streets, the horse races down then-dirt Mohave Street and the Latin dances at the Salt River bottom.

Award-winning novelist Stella Pope Duarte also wrote about La Sonorita, calling it “an open wound, a sore spot in society people don’t want to look at very long, a molar that hurts.” But she also described her barrio’s “spirit of carnalismo,” the feeling that neighbors were family.

Some of that carnalismo survives today in the area, despite the blight and the forgotten history. The nonprofit Chicanos Por la Causa is working to keep the legacy of the barrios alive, providing services and economic development. The Braun Sacred Heart foundation is lobbying to preserve Sacred Heart Church, where supporters have gathered each December since 1988 for a commemorative mass. It’s these people who will keep the heart of the barrios beating.