The Where I Live series aims to showcase our diverse city and region by spotlighting its many vibrant neighborhoods. Each week a local resident invites us over and lets us in on what makes their neighborhood special. Have we been to your neighborhood yet? Get in touch to share your story. If your story is selected and published, you will receive a $250 stipend.
I was born, raised and educated for most of my life on the East Side of San Antonio. Years later, after living in other places — Missouri, Japan, Nebraska and California — I decided in 2022 that it was time to return home.
My dream was to return to the East Side. It was the one place that knew all of me, no secrets and no judgment.
The East Side saw my first kiss, shared in kindergarten at W.W. White Elementary. It remembers me flipping my desk over in first grade after being told I had to let someone else read, and it remembers the fight I got into over a milk carton. It remembers me playing violin and learning to speak Japanese. Walking to Teran’s with my cousins for carne guisada with cheese, and chorizo and egg tacos. Pickup football games at the Second Baptist Apartments, where I was always the only girl. It could calculate just how much my body had endured from hoop sessions at the Eastside Boys and Girls Club, the Jeff Davis summer program, Copernicus Park and Recreation Center and the Antioch gym. And it remembers my grandma always telling me, “You’re going to die on that basketball court.”
It remembers a girl telling me “I didn’t know Nike made dresses” after I entered a beauty pageant competition at Copernicus. It also remembers the joy I felt after I won first runner-up and Miss Congeniality in my first, and only, beauty pageant — even though I should have won first place.
The MLK Youth Empowerment Mural by artist Kaldric Dow, which Tunette Powell organized and had installed earlier this year, resides in St Paul’s Square. Credit: Clint Datchuk for the San Antonio Report
My Grandma’s house. My Granny’s house. My Aunt Tandy’s house. Buttercup’s apartment in Antioch Village. Front porches. Ice cream trucks. Dominoes and spades.
But when I moved back, gentrification met me at the doors of the homes I was interested in buying. The price tags were just too high. So I ran to the nearest place that reminded me of the East Side: the Northeast Side — not because of the city’s design but because of the people. I saw that a lot of Eastsiders have been pushed to the Northeast Side.
Still, I vowed to spend my money and my time on the East Side as often as I could.
Tunette takes her daily morning walk through Copernicus Park, where she is able to connect with her neighbors, friends and family who join by her side. Credit: Clint Datchuk for the San Antonio Report Credit: Clint Datchuk for the San Antonio Report
Since October 2025, I’ve been walking at least three days a week at the track at Copernicus, the same place where I competed in a beauty pageant, the same place where I played basketball and attended the most epic teen dances.
These days, I am not surrounded by my peers; I am surrounded by my elders — my mom, my dad and 95-year-old Mr. Blackwell, who sits in his van every morning, eating his breakfast, and waiting for us to finish our walk so that he can tell us about the history of the Eastside through his eyes.
We continue to show up.
To live in the San Antonio Metropolitan area as a Black woman with East Side roots will never mean just one thing. No matter how far outside of the city limits you go, the East Side is still home.
It’s Sweet Yams and Squeezers when I want to take care of my body. It’s the Little Fish Factory when I want to catch up with people I haven’t seen in years. It’s the mural on Sycamore Street in St. Paul Square, which I co-created through my work as the Youth Empowerment Chair of the City of San Antonio Martin Luther King Jr. Commission. And it’s Copernicus — a morning walk that reminds you of every good thing about the East Side.
A groundskeeper tends to the MLK Youth Empowerment Mural by artist Kaldric Dow, which Tunette Powell organized and had installed earlier this year in St Paul’s Square. Credit: Clint Datchuk for the San Antonio Report
It reminds me that even though the East Side has been underinvested in, even though we’ve had to survive so much, even though so much has changed, the people make life worth living.
Where you live is not just where you lay your head; it’s where you choose to spend your time, where you feel seen, where people know your name and where your history lives.
It’s Gary, a family friend whom my Granny taught to sing at Golden Gate Missionary Baptist Church when he was a child, and Mr. Calvin, who went to high school with my Aunt Tandy. Both have always looked out for me on our morning walks, especially on the days when my parents can’t be there.
It’s the random, but not-so-random, stranger who walks up and encourages you.
It’s the presence of Mr. Smith, who used to run the Apaches, the former youth football program that practiced at Copernicus when I was a kid.
The smile of Mr. Cedric, whom I met through our morning walks to Copernicus but who has come to feel like the uncle I always needed.
The “What’s your last name? And do you know such and such?”
It’s bursting into a praise and worship song just because.
It’s the care of so many around us who survived so many things on the East Side, from segregation to the War on Drugs and the lasting impact of it all.
It’s the East Side, for me.