Save the San Juan Hotel was founded by Río Grande Valley Residents that came together in April of 2024 to stop the demolition of the San Juan Hotel by the city of San Juan, Texas. The city of San Juan, Texas, purchased the San Juan Hotel, a registered Texas Historical Landmark, in November 2023 as part of its downtown revitalization plan. In February 2024, the City of San Juan City Commission unanimously voted to demolish the San Juan Hotel in order to build an event center. Upon learning the plans to demolish the San Juan Hotel, residents in San Juan and throughout the Río Grande Valley mobilized to form the Save the San Juan Hotel Collective in an effort to stop the demolition of the hotel. Since that Spring of 2024 community members have launched an online petition, held meetings and repeatedly attended bi-weekly city commission meetings requesting a workshop or meeting so that we may share our perspective in the hopes to convince the City of San Juan officials to not demolish the San Juan Hotel, but instead preserve the hotel and convert it into a site of consciousness and reconciliation. In June of 2025, the collective opened the first ever civil rights museum in the Río Grande Valley, MUSEO 956 de Derechos Civiles to tell the history of the hotel in the context of white settler colonialism, land theft, and lynching.
Our work to Save the San Juan Hotel is inspired by the desire to not erase the painful history of colonization and violence in the Rio Grande Valley, but rather ensure that the hotel is preserved and serves as a site for truth-telling and reconciliation. After all, it is only by confronting and understanding the painful history that a community can release and transcend the trauma in order to heal. As long as the truth remains hidden the community will suffer.
Save The San Juan Hotel 