In this paper, we study the spatial correlations among quarks and antiquarksproduced at mid-rapidity by gluon pair production in the color glass condensateframework. This paper is the first part of a series in which we calculate acomplete set of quark/quark, quark/antiquark, and antiquark/antiquark spatialcorrelation functions in heavy-light ion collisions, with the goal ofincorporating their conserved charges into the initial conditions ofhydrodynamics. The physical mechanisms captured in this calculation includegeometric, entanglement, and interaction-mediated correlations. In this firstpaper, we construct the building blocks for the correlations arising fromsingle- and double-pair production, studying in detail the single-pair case andthe general features of the double-pair case. We find a rich correlationstructure in transverse coordinate space, with different mechanisms dominatingover different length scales, and we present explicit results for thequark-antiquark correlations in the single-pair production regime. We reserve adetailed discussion of the double-pair production regime for the next paper inthis sequence.