Look at the street sign here: East Caesar Chavez, the main commercial artery of East Austin's historic Mexican American community, and a name that tells its own story. For most of the twentieth century this was simply 1st Street — a corridor of tamale houses, panaderías, taquerías, and family-owned shops serving a working-class Latino neighborhood that had been pushed east of the I-35 corridor by the city's 1928 segregation plan. In 1993 the city renamed the street for César Chávez, the Mexican American farmworker organizer who co-founded the United Farm Workers and led the grape boycott that became a defining act of the Chicano civil rights movement.
The renaming was an acknowledgment — however symbolic — of the community's presence and its history of struggle. Today East César Chávez is at the front lines of gentrification, as tech workers and boutique developers move east from downtown. The taquerías and panaderías that defined the street for generations are being joined — and in some cases replaced — by cocktail bars and upscale coffee roasters.
The tension between Austin's newest and oldest residents plays out daily on this block, in the competing smells of corn masa and cold brew.