Much is known about Jorge Cortez, but little has been written about how his family arranged to come to San Antonio from Mexico This is an account of the Cortez journey to Texas and their initial settlement in Prospect Hill.
Valentin and Justina Larios, [relatives of Jorge Cortes], and early residents of the Prospect Hill neighborhood, came to San Antonio during the mid-1910s as the Mexican Revolution raged across the Mexican countryside. They soon became part of the merchant class that settled in the Prospect Hill community after modest success in the grocery business in an older Mexican community downtown known as Laredito. Their businesses enabled a chain migration process that helped later arriving relatives with work opportunities.
I found records confirming that Valentin Larios was born in 1896 in Jalisco, Mexico. Family lore suggests that Larios, the Director of Telegraphs in Mexico, faced certain death by the Revolutionary Villistas who identified all bureaucrats as useless citizens or traitors to Francisco Villa’s revolutionary cause. The Villistas captured most of the men in Larios’s Mexican colonia and lined them against a wall facing a firing squad. By good fortune Larios was saved by a friend.
In order to leave Mexico Larios called upon the Cortezes, family friends from the same city. Both families agreed that Valentin Larios’s life as an immigrant in the United States would be more manageable if he had a wife. Thus the families arranged a marriage for Larios with a Cortez daughter, Justina.
In his adopted home of San Antonio, Valentin Larios demonstrated ambition and talent in managing small businesses. By the 1920s, he had opened a grocery store, La Villa del Carmen, on the corner of Frio and Durango [now Cesar Chavez]. Among his first employees was Larios’s nephew Pedro Cortez [Jorge’s father] who had left Mexico in the early 1920s and lived with the Larios. Cortez aided his sponsors in the Larios grocery business as a butcher and deliveryman. The Larios family also opened a restaurant named La Blanca Cafe in a building once owned by Jose Antonio Navarro. [Today the Navarro building, across from the new Federal Court House, is designated as a historical structure].
Jorge Cortez was born in the Prospect Hill neighborhood in San Antonio. His neighborhood was one of the first major middle-class Latino communities in the United States. Over the period 1920-1950, many of the city’s leading Latino merchants, lawyers, and community leaders resided in Prospect Hill. Among the families who lived there were Mayor and HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, La Prensa printer Romulo Munguia, and Texas Secretary of State Hope Andrade. Andrade lived a block away from Jorge Cortez’s home. Jorge’s community also had many notable artists and writers, including Porfirio Salinas, Jesse Trevino, Rolando Brisceno, and Tomas Rivera. The grandparents of poet Carmen Tafolla and the family of State Senator Leticia Van de Putte also resided in that esteemed community.
By the mid-1940s when Jorge Cortez was growing up, Prospect Hill had also become the home of many of the small merchant-class Latinos of San Antonio. The community also included my first-grade teacher [Ms. Mary Vela], doctors, pharmacists [Davilas and Guerras], and midwives [Maria Saenz Romo, my grandmother]. These early Prospect Hill families demonstrated strong determination, enduring patience, and an exceptional ability to save money and plan. The families initiated small businesses, opened restaurants and cleaners, and bought homes in the Prospect Hill community. They maintained strong family ties, took pride in their neighborhood, and encouraged their children to pursue higher education.
