Edgar Sandoval

SAN ANTONIO — One day last week, Juanita Cruz-Perez poked her head out the back door of her two-bedroom home in San Antonio and shook her head no. It wasn’t quite noon yet, and the heat was already unbearable. She opened the front and back doors, praying for any kind of breeze, and turned on a plastic fan that sputtered hot air. She resisted the temptation to turn on the power-guzzling air-conditioner.

“The A.C. only goes on at night, no matter how hot it gets,” she said.

Ms. Cruz-Perez suffers from a slew of health problems that are exacerbated by the stifling heat, including diabetes and high blood pressure, but her $800-a-month budget leaves little room for what she would consider a luxury.

In San Antonio, weathering the second week of a heat wave that has been ferocious even by Texas standards, lower-income residents like Ms. Cruz-Perez are sometimes left with few options to relieve the misery. Not only can she not afford air-conditioning during the hottest part of the day, she lives in the Westside, one of several parts of San Antonio — nearly all of them working-class or poor neighborhoods — where there are few trees to provide shade.

Simple things like venturing into the back yard, walking to the store or waiting for a bus can be perilous.

“When you are poor, the sun finds you faster,” Ms. Cruz-Perez said.

San Antonio has seen at least 46 days of 100-plus-degree weather so far this year, according to the National Weather Service. Through July 25, measurements taken at the city’s airport have detected that all but one day in July has surpassed the 100-degree mark.

The heat wave has been blamed for a series of wildfires, including a blaze that damaged at least 29 homes Monday evening in Balch Springs, a suburb of Dallas. The heat has also tested the state’s beleaguered power grid. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which runs the power grid, has pleaded for power conservation from those who can afford air-conditioning to avoid rolling blackouts.

High temperatures have afflicted much of the southern and eastern parts of the United States over the past two weeks, and have reached this week into the normally temperate Pacific Northwest. The oppressive impact is particularly visible in places like the San Antonio metropolitan area, a Latino-majority region where nearly 18 percent of the population lives in poverty.

Heat Index Forecast for San Antonio

See detailed maps about dangerous heat in the U.S.

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