Adult Movie Theatres in El Paso

What is still open

From Mesa Street to Montana Avenue

The drive-in is the format this trade should have lost first. It is outdoors, it needs land, it depends on the weather, it cannot be made discreet, and the film has to be big enough to see from a car. The Fiesta is still selling a place in the field.

The first Fiesta Drive-In was on Mesa Street. It opened on 7 February 1950 with Bob Hope in The Paleface. Cinema Treasures dates the Fiesta on Montana Avenue to 9 October 1981, when it opened with a double bill of adult films, Little Girls Blue and Intimate Illusions. A KFOX report in February 2025 put the move from Mesa in 1985.

The Apache Drive-In in Tyler closed in March 2023, when its land was sold. Since then the Fiesta has been reported as the only adult drive-in in Texas.

Downtown went the usual way

None of this survived on South El Paso Street, which is where the city’s cinemas were.

The State Theater at 108 East San Antonio Avenue was the Wigwam by 1914, turned to adult films in 1981 and closed before the year was out.

The Capri at 107 South El Paso Street began as the Ellanay in 1918 and premiered Manos: The Hands of Fate on 15 November 1966. It became a dollar house in January 1975 and closed on 26 March 1983 after a weekend of Pink Flamingos, which is a way to go out. It came down that August.

Out of the centre, the Valley Theater at 6345 Alameda Avenue opened on 5 September 1948 and was showing adult films from 11 May 1973. The Trail Drive-In on Conley Road showed adult films from 1964 to 1969.

So the old houses went, on roughly the national schedule. What replaced them here is four places with rooms, open past midnight, and one of them a drive-in.

The city’s case, and the county’s order

The City of El Paso passed an ordinance on adult businesses in 1978. In 1986 a city planning study counted about three adult cinemas, seven adult cinemas with bookstores and twenty-three nude clubs in the city as of that June. Two more ordinances followed, in 1987 and 1988.

A jury later found that 39 adult businesses were operating in El Paso on 22 March 1988. Police began ticketing adult businesses in April 1988, and a number of them sued the city that year. The case was Woodall v. City of El Paso. The first jury found for the city. The Fifth Circuit sent the case back in January 1992, and the second jury found for the businesses. On 14 April 1995 the Fifth Circuit reversed that verdict, held the ordinances constitutional and ordered the injunction against them dissolved.

The city’s ordinances apply inside the city limits. Texas law lets a city regulate these businesses inside its limits and a county only outside them. Parts of El Paso’s far east lie outside the city limits, in unincorporated El Paso County. The county commissioners adopted an order of their own on these businesses in 2008 and amended it on 10 December 2012.