El Azteca is one of the oldest and most intact residential neighborhoods in Laredo, Texas, with buildings dating from the 1870s representing nearly every major architectural type and style that has appeared on the border since that time.

By the turn of the 20th century, El Azteca was a thriving community of homes and small businesses populated almost exclusively by Mexican and Mexican-American residents.

In the 1930s, when moving pictures supplanted live theater in popularity, it became known as El Azteca movie house and showed Spanish language films.

The first electric streetcar line built west of the Mississippi River passed through the neighborhood and crossed Zacate Creek via the Iturbide Street Bridge.

The neighborhood maintains a sufficient concentration of historic properties, some of which are rare, even extraordinary, examples of domestic and commercial vernacular architecture found only in the borderlands region of South Texas.