Santa Fe New Mexican - CONNECT
SAVVYSOUTHSIDERS
Historically the tourist-driven economy that clusters around the city center — and the people who patronize it — have paid little attention to Santa Fe’s Southside. However, the Southside now lurks as a sleeping economic giant, one that’s about to awaken and assert itself. “The Southside has always been an afterthought,” says John Paul Granillo, a born-and-raised Southside resident and chief of operations at the nonprofit YouthWorks, whose programs help Santa Fe youths develop their social, leadership, and workforce skills. “There’s a whole new culture that’s been there for a long time, and it’s finally coming into its own.”
With Cerrillos Road and Airport Road serving as the district’s main transportation corridors, the Southside presses north from NM 599 through a series of residential neighborhoods peppered with national chain restaurants and stores. The diverse population includes a large portion of low- to moderate-income residents and immigrants.
Although the neighborhood’s emergence may seem sudden, the Southside economy has evolved over two decades and has been carefully curated. Granillo points to several impactful milestones beyond the expansions of big box stores and housing developments. Since the Southside Library’s 2007 opening, it has served as the area’s host for community events. The Santa Fe Farmers Del Sur Market, which opened in 2019, added another community hub. YouthWorks’ Full Circle Farm, opened in 2020 in Agua Fria Village, has continued the trend with a community farm aimed at addressing food insecurity in the area.
The city of Santa Fe, via its Office of Economic Development, the Santa Fe Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce, have also poured resources into the area. To encourage entrepreneurship among Hispanic immigrants and to foster connections between businesses and organizations, the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce began Feria Southside in August 2022 and Mercado Southside in April 2023. Its June 2023 mercado, as an example, included 35 vendors and more than 300 attendees. Two of every three participants were Spanish speaking. The chamber has also facilitated a series of workshops guiding Southside entrepreneurs through the process of starting their own businesses.
The Office of Economic Development has partnered with the chamber on these initiatives. “Southside has definitely evolved,” says Liz Camacho, who took over as OED director in 2018. “It’s been this great cultural beast that’s been kind of dormant.” Camacho has also helped the Santa Fe Hispanic Chamber of Commerce put together a Major Arena Soccer League 2 team, which will play its home games at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center — another effort to dial up community engagement and family fun in the area. “Embracing the immigrant community really makes everybody feel part of the same team and not necessarily like somebody who might be a separate or different kind of citizen — or not a citizen. So that type of engagement has been really key,” she says.
The goal is to make Airport Road, which locals and visitors alike traverse, vibrant. “When people from out of town are going down this way in their Uber, it should be as exciting as the rest of Santa Fe,” Camacho says. “The people who live there want that feeling too. They want to know that people are as invested in us as we are in Santa Fe.”
Southside isn’t just Mexican restaurants, and taco trucks either. “You have stores that focus on specific brands, stores from all regions of Latin and South America,” Granillo observes. “You have an array of different businesses popping up too — Zumba Latino, tire stores, El Paisano.”
“The city is being more progressive and more inclusive and we’re trying to create a bridge where Northside and Southside go back and forth,” Granillo continues. “But this is a long time coming. People down here, they’re aware, they’re paying attention, and they’re thinking and they’re planning. The Southside is gonna be its own powerhouse.”
Three Southside entrepreneurs who’ve been part of this “immigrantaissance” are Argos MacCallum, founder of Teatro Paraguas (a bilingual “umbrella theater”); Alex Streeper, an artist, event manager, and jewelry maker who two years ago started her online shop Alita’s Mexican Curios; and Ana Luisa Garcia, founder of Ana Luisa Event Rentals, which has everything needed for weddings,
and other big soirees.
“When we started, we’d realized, ‘Wait a second, there’s really no Spanish or Spanish-speaking theater here.’ With 400 years of history, there really ought to be. So we made it our mission not only to present bilingual theater but to present theater by New Mexico playwrights. And now we’ve developed very close ties with the Mexican immigrant community too,” Argos MacCallum says. Teatro Paraguas programs include Latinx plays in English, bilingual presentations of poetry and (folk tales), children’s theater, and the works of New Mexican playwrights. It also rents its theater space to other organizations, such as flamenco companies.
MacCallum says when he founded the organization in 2012, audience members had some reluctance to travel to the Southside or even Midtown. “I still remember one of the ladies from the Eastside when she first came down. She said, I just can’t believe how far down the road this place is. But that same lady kept coming back,” he says.
He says that reaction is shifting thanks to Southside city councilors vocally representing the area and the city of Santa Fe’s economic development efforts. “There’s some real economic muscle starting to develop. And the climate refugees from California and elsewhere — we’ve seen an influx of new people down here. It’s funny. People are always talking about Santa Fe’s three cultures. Well, there are a lot more than just three now. There are immigrants from all over,” he says.
Ana Luisa Garcia’s family has generational business roots on the Southside. Her parents opened Alicia’s Tortilleria in 1996. “So I’ve always been within business, even when I was in junior high, when my parents started that business,” she says.
Her parents hail from Mexico, as do the parents of her husband, Luis, and Spanish was her first language, so it was natural that most of her initial customers were also Spanish speaking. However, she’s seen a growth in English-speaking customers as well.
“The growth [on the Southside] has been constant but in phases, where it’s like one part of the community just grows really fast and then another part has been spreading throughout the whole area, just more gradually,” she says. “Southside definitely has more of an identity now, and it’s been getting a little bit more diverse. You can eat somewhere new every single day for a whole month.”
Garcia hopes to open an event center to host family and community gatherings, “because it’s only getting bigger and better out here, and in reality Southside is still growing,” she says. “So I don’t see that stopping anytime soon. People will start intermingling with each other more and coming over to this side. It’ll maybe be a slower process, but it’ll happen eventually.”