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 like to consider myself a disciple of South and Central Texas. I was born and raised in Corpus Christi, went to college in Austin and have now settled in Converse, nestled sweetly and securely in the practical affordability of a growing San Antonio suburb.
For me, Converse represents a connection to my family. My mom still lives near Corpus Christi, and one of my sisters remains in Austin. It’s only an hour and a half drive either way for me to see my two favorite people, and I don’t mind the drive. Converse feels central to my world despite being on the fringe of San Antonio proper.
I have lived in Converse for about a year now, sharing a house with my older sister and four capricious dogs. My sister has lived in the San Antonio area for about a decade, serving as a dispatcher in Alamo Heights. She opened her home to me after I graduated college in late 2022, plying me with cheap rent and cozy movie nights with a sister I didn’t get to see very often. Now, I work in hospital administration, exploring the city — or at least the highways — as I travel between hospitals.
At the time, moving from Austin to Converse seemed inconceivable; the two places were too different, too irreconcilable, and I feared the obsolescence of my youth in a town shuttered by military bases on every side. Despite this, I have found an ease and a simple happiness living in Converse. If nothing else, the frequency of traffic and road construction is the same here as it was in Austin, much to my chagrin.
What Converse lacks in hustle and bustle, it makes up for in familiarity. The weathered streets, calloused yet never empty, connect me to any number of welcoming neighborhood haunts. The taquerias that claim every corner are filled with the endless visages of my mother, my aunt, my cousin. I see in these strangers knowledge confirmed, expounded and dispersed. I see quiet community and parochial bliss.
It feels easy to live here, to crawl into bed in the early evening and not worry about the din of sirens and big city noise rousing me from slumber. To watch my sister mow the lawn while I nurse a beer in a lawn chair on our porch some sunny Saturday afternoons, retreating inside to make s’mores on the gas stove when the summer heat and mosquitoes become unbearable. To walk my weenie dog to the community mailbox, carrying her up the hill on the way back as she pants into my ear and thumps her tail against my ribs. It’s a level of domesticity I wasn’t sure I could achieve in my early 20s.
In a way, Converse exists just as any other diverse Texas town, preternaturally and inexplicably the same. The sprawling Walmart sits across from my favorite local Chinese restaurant (Wu’s, obviously), both places staffed by my peers but inexorably different in scope and origin. The gleaming, contemporarily designed fast food establishments that dot the winding roads are devoid of character beyond the neon of their signs, the planned obsolescence of their architecture antithetical to the gaudiness of the local jaunts, the neighborhood legends. Yet both places enjoy the same amount of business. It’s the American dream, this juxtaposition of battling values and tenuous, but shared, success.
For all its isolation and placid seclusion, I like Converse. As an avid podcast listener, I don’t mind that everything worth doing is 20 minutes away, or that there is always inexplicable traffic on 1604 at every hour of the day. I am building a little life here, nurtured by conventionality and drive-thru coffee stands. I think I will be here for some time yet.
