First Mexican Residents

There isn’t an exact date for when exactly the first Mexican migrants moved to Fort Worth. Harold Rich claimed Mexicans started moving to Fort Worth soon after Major Arnold established the camp in 1849 and grew slowly (Rich 168). Looking at city directories – documents that featured the names, addresses, and occupations of residents – and the 1880 census, Carlos Cuéllar found the earliest documented Mexican residents were 14 male residents in Fort Worth had either been born in Mexico or had a Mexican parent (Cuéllar 3). Because very few of the names reappeared in other city directories, the lack of female Mexicans, and the low job status, Cuéllar believed that these residents in the 1880s were largely nomadic as they searched for a city, job, and opportunities that met their wants and needs (Rich 170). Cuéllar also noted that these documented Mexican residents arrived soon after the first railroad came to Fort Worth (Cuéllar 3). The earliest Mexican residents in Fort Worth lived in the south part of Hell’s Half Acre and once more had settled around the area, the neighborhood was referred to as La Diecisiete (Cuéllar 7).

Road Maps of Tarrant County (right) and Fort Worth (bottom left).
The North Side in the ealry 1920s. Niles City had the Stockyards and the Armour and Swift packing plants.
The Northside in 2025. The first documented Mexican residents in the North Side lived south of the Stockyards, north of E Northside Dr, and east of N Main Street (BUS 287 on map).

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J’Nell Pate claimed that “Hispanic immigration [to the North Side] developed in three fairly distinct phases” during the 20th century (Pate 137). The first phase started in the early 1900s and ended just before World War I (Pate 137). Few in numbers, the first phase consisted of Mexicans with ranching backgrounds found jobs at Armour and Swift meat packing facilities in the North Side (Rich 171).

The earliest Hispanic neighborhood in the North Side was east of Main Street, south of 23rd Street and the Stockyards, and north of Northside Drive – this is also where the central and eastern Europeans lived. Residents here lived in shacks and the largely unpaved roads (Pate 141). Living within walking distance of the packing facilities and the stockyards had other negatives too: the stockyards and the packing facilities were loud and smelled bad. Using some mental gymnastics, Pate spun this as a positive: the noise – “the constant din of frightened animals” – “lulled” the workers to sleep, and the smell was a “reassurance of sorts […] that they had a purpose for each day” (Pate 30). The 1905-06 City Directory listed most of the 44 people with Hispanic surnames with addressed located in this area (Rich 172) and is the first city directory to list Mexicans with jobs at the Armour and Swift facilities (Cuéllar 11). Hispanic residents and immigrants who wanted to live west of Main Street and north of 23rd Street were discriminated against and were prevented from moving west (Pate 141).

Cuéllar, Carlos Eliseo. Stories from the Barrio: A History of Mexican Fort Worth. Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2003.

Pate, J'Nell L. North of the River: A Brief History of North Fort Worth. Fort Worth: TCU Press, 1994.

Rich, Harold. Fort Worth: Outpost, Cowtown, Boomtown. University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.