The Last Ruby.

San Francisco’s Mission street is the oldest neighborhood in the sucka free city. Which was once home to the Ohlone when the Spanish arrived and subjugated them. Five days before the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, the first Mass at Mission Dolores was held under a makeshift arbor woven of native tule branches. Soon, Spanish priests and soldiers conscripted the Ohlone to build a structure.

For as long as I could remember the Mission was a place where many San Francisco natives would go to smoke as teenagers. Or go to hop on the back door of a grimy 14 Mission bus to go downtown with friends. Not to mention the communal violence between street gangs Nortenos and Surenos. It has at times been grazing lands, a frontier settlement, a home to Italian immigrants, a German neighborhood, and an Irish one. It has been a place for immigrants to get their start. And  — until now.

As the Mission’s Latino community grew, it became the city’s Latino stronghold. Taquerias, fruit stands, and bodegas nestled next to thrift stores, dive bars, and grand Art Deco movie palaces on Mission Street, the main thoroughfare. Colorful Latino murals weave through its alleyways, celebrating indigenous culture and protesting U.S. involvement in Central America, and the neighborhood spends all year building up for its annual Carnaval parade.

But that neighborhood is changing yet again. Even as the city’s Latino population has grown, the 50 square blocks around the Mosqueda home — once 65 percent Latino — has lost more than 2,400 Latino residents since 2000, according to Census Bureau data. San Francisco’s tech boom is reshaping communities, family by family, business by business, block by block — few as intensely as the block of 24th Street between Folsom and Shotwell, near many native San Francisco resident’s homes. For this reason, I believe we have witnessed in recent years the tragedy of the largest Latino neighborhood in Northern California.