The decade of the eighties witnessed large-scale undocumented immigration of Latinos throughout U.S. urban areas. By the mid-eighties Houston’s undocumented Latino population numbered over 100,000 (Rodriguez, 1987). Many of the tens of thousands of newcomer Central Americans and Mexicans who migrated to Houston settled in the city’s west side, miles away from the east-side established barrios of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants (see Figure 1). With their Latino ethnicities and predominant campesino and lower working-class origins, the Central American and other Latino settlers in the west side contrasted sharply with the area’s established white, middle-class population.