San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Working to restore West Side he knew
Helping residents get clear titles to their homes, access to internet part of law professor’s quest
Roger Enriquez remembers, when he was in fourth or fifth grade, telling one of the nuns who taught him at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic School that he would leave the West Side when he grew up.
She asked him why. “The houses here are terrible,” he recalls saying.
Her response would stick in his memory: “Well, have you ever thought about building your own house here?”
“Quite frankly, at that moment, I hadn’t even given that any thought,” he said. “I just didn’t think that was possible. It is a struggle for folks who want to stay here and work here and live here.”
Enriquez did go on to leave the West Side, to earn a law degree from the University of Iowa — but he came back.
Today, he lives with his family not far from where he grew up. As executive director of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Westside Community Partnerships initiative, he’s working to restore the sense of community and the vibrant business environment he remembers from his childhood, when he would pass four dry cleaners on his paper route for the San Antonio Light — all gone now.
“It was a very strange kind of neighborhood, because you could have two houses and then all of a sudden a little bodega, then a molino (mill), then a bakery, then five houses, right on the same block,” said Enriquez, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at UTSA. “You had all these really wonderful things. Folks had an opportunity to live, work and thrive here.”
Through Westside Community Partnerships, which operates from an office on Guadalupe Street, Enriquez works with the Mexican American Unity Council, or MAUC, and other partners to help his
West Side neighbors get clear titles for their homes, secure homestead exemptions, access the internet and protect themselves against predatory buyers, among other things. It all amounts to an effort to make the West Side a healthy community where families can build wealth.
“He’s from the West Side, so he understands the culture, the language,” said Fernando Godinez, president and CEO of MAUC. Enriquez is a “great family man” with a strong faith, he said. “Those are the attributes that spill over to his work, his ethics. He never says no. He’s very interested in helping the individuals here.”
One of the people he’s helped is Maria Cardona.
Years after the deaths of her mother and father, Cardona was having trouble establishing title to their home in the Memorial Heights neighborhood, near St. Mary’s University, after an attorney told her their wills were invalid.
A friend recommended she seek help from MAUC, which put her in touch with Enriquez. Meeting with her by video-chat, he helped her get all the paperwork she needed,
a tortuous process that involved gathering notarized statements from her siblings and, in the case of a brother who had died, his sons living in Florida.
Today, the home is securely in her name.
“That was a relief. I am so glad that Mr. Enriquez is there to help out people in that situation,” she said. “Thank God that Mr. Enriquez and MAUC are there to help people.”
‘Actual solutions’
Enriquez, 58, went to college at UTSA after attending Lanier High School. Upon earning his law degree in 2001, he established a private practice in San Antonio, taking mostly criminal cases, but he quickly moved into UTSA’s orbit. He has been with the university since 2002.
Today, along with his work for Westside Community Partnerships, he teaches classes in criminal law at the university’s downtown campus.
During his three years as Westside’s executive director, he and his students have helped more than 300 homeowners secure title to their homes. His team has held workshops across the West Side to help homeowners fight their property tax appraisals. He has sent students door-todoor to inform residents about predatory buying practices and tax exemptions they might use.
His legal training has been
of great help, he said — and not just by making him knowledgeable about estate law.
“They teach you to be very neutral and detached from a problem,” he said. “That can be very difficult in areas where emotions can run quite high, but there’s a lot to be said for that skill set, because you tend to make some pretty decent decisions.”
Juan Valdez, a senior policy advisor to Mayor Ron Nirenberg who has worked with Enriquez for years on his West Side initiatives, said Enriquez doesn’t view neighborhood development in San Antonio as being “zero-sum” — in other words, different parts of the city don’t need to be in competition with each other.
He pointed out that Enriquez helped conduct the city of San Antonio’s citywide digital inclusion survey. Under his leadership, UTSA’s Westside Community Center established a student group known as the Digital Inclusion Ambassadors to help West Side residents gain access to, and navigate, the internet.
“When you talk to Roger, he’ll tell you where the challenge is and where we need to go and fix it,” Valdez said. “He’s one of the rare individuals that doesn’t just get stuck in the barriers. He proposes actual solutions, programs that can be funded.”
Along with MAUC, Enriquez works with a long list of
nonprofits active on the West Side, including Texas Housers, Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, Avenida Guadalupe Association, Our Casas Resident Council and San Antonio Alternative Housing Corp.
“There’s a lot of folks that are doing the work and trying to grind it out over here, but it takes a while — it takes money, it takes time,” he said.
“This is where UTSA comes in, and myself as well: convening those resources all in one space, to be able to have these discussions and say, ‘Listen, we’re going to stay in our lanes, but can we all move this in a certain direction?’”
The West Side ecosystem
Enriquez grew up as the youngest of 10 children. His father was a World War II veteran who worked in a meatpacking plant, his mother a homemaker who went on to work in his school cafeteria. He was an altar boy at Our Lady of Guadalupe.
“The church was a very vibrant part of growing up,” he said. “I tell folks, you have to understand that our festivals were three-day affairs — they would begin on Friday, go all day Saturday and all the way to Sunday. I mean, it was a very vibrant parish life that would emanate from all that.”
The West Side has changed a lot since he grew up there in the ’70s, he said. He describes an “ecosystem” of small businesses sharing the streets with single-family homes, often built by the families themselves with kits purchased from lumberyards. There was a Joske’s department store in the Las Palmas area and movies showing at the Guadalupe Theater.
“The ecosystem was created out of necessity, because folks in this community could not participate in the broader community in the same ways, because of things like redlining, discrimination,” he said.
Without access to lawyers or real estate agents, West Side families often bought homes by making handshake deals with the prior owners or writing agreements on napkins, he said. Decades later, the same families are having trouble proving ownership of the homes. The difficulties can prevent the families from building wealth through homeownership.
Meanwhile, the last 50 years has seen the West Side’s urban fabric torn apart by government initiatives such as socalled “slum clearance” programs that tore down small businesses and historic homes. The closure of Kelly AFB also eliminated good jobs.
“A whole bunch of things happened, and they all sort of worked against the interest of folks living, working and staying on the West Side,” he said. “You see the institutions suffering — you see the Catholic Church suffer, you’re seeing the schools suffer. I imagine that other institutions will also have to rethink how it is that they exist, or coexist, on the West Side.”
A home without clear title might fall into what Enriquez calls a “death spiral”: If no one can establish ownership of it, no one will take care of it. A lack of title can be a hurdle to securing homestead exemptions or making use of government programs such as the city’s home repair initiatives.
“What we know about communities — particularly communities of color — is there’s a lack of intergenerational wealth transfers,” which are “extremely important to build up communities,” Enriquez said. “Quite frankly, it become practically impossible to enter into the housing market period without some kind of wealth.”
In his work on the West Side, Enriquez sees the value of patience. It might take 15 or 20 years for UTSA to fully establish itself there, making deep connections and earning the trust of the community, he said.
Sometimes, it’s the small gestures that matter. Talking to his neighbors, he kept hearing about how there was nowhere on the West Side to have copies made. So he told people they could do it at UTSA’s neighborhood center.
“One of the things that we know about building community is this concept of legitimacy,” he said. “Legitimacy is just the idea that the institution that is asking to help — whether it be the police, or UTSA, or whatever — that they share the same values and beliefs as the community, so that our interests and their interests align. I knew that was going to take some time.”