Transcription
[Music] San Diego, USA. California's Southern gate. Navy town, industry. Border lines, factories. Mexicans, Americans. Highrise businessmen, sun-washed beach sand. Tourist-filled vacation lands, growing, building, affluence. Urban, modern development. [Music] That's San Diego today, but it has not always been so. Once this fine land was Mexican. Once it was Spanish. Once it was Indian. And once, in the time of myth and history, San Diego, like all the American Southwest, was called Aslan. [Music]
The ancient story of Aslan speaks of a people who hunted from the Pacific to the Rio Grande, but their land became dry, parched. So they migrated South to the valley of Mexico. They renamed themselves AA in honor of their original home, Aslan. And the last of their Emperors left a prophecy: "One day our sky shall bloom in new splendor, and you, my people, shall rise up again like trodden grass to find Aslan once more." [Music]
This is the story of one piece of Aslan reborn, and how its people, the Chicanos, rediscovered their culture and history by claiming their destiny as a people and as a community. This is the story of Cho Park. [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] Sing it. It began in 1970, under the Coronado Bridge. [Music] And so in San Diego, well, my people began to fight for [Music] CH. Every year there is a celebration of the anniversary of that day, April 22nd, 1970, when La Raza took over this land and made Cho Park. It's a very special day for a lot of Chicanos. In most of our lives, this is probably the only time that we've ever had a voice, uh, a say in something that we wanted. You know, it's not much of a park, but it's our park, you know. It's in our style. We shall continue to live, my brother. We shall continue to fight, my friend. Under the bridge park, under the bridge. Cho Park is four blocks from the bay in the community of Barrio Logan. Barrio, in Spanish, it means neighborhood; in English, it means ghetto. Once, Barrio Logan was the second largest Chicano community on the West Coast, with a population of almost 20,000. [Music]
Park under the bridge. Barrio Logan is the first neighborhood south of downtown San Diego, squarely in the path of continued expansion. Chicanos have lived here for hundreds of years, since before the US even existed. Today, Barrio Logan is 17 miles from the border, that line that guards the difference between cultures, between languages, between the United States and Mexico. But once there was no border, and people passed freely across this beautiful land. My parents came at the turn of the century, and I—I don't remember a lot about that, but I do remember that all my life I have lived in the barrio. My mother died when I was very young, and my sister, my brother, and I lived with our father, who was a blind man and sold newspapers for a living. And I guess we were very, very poor, but I remember being very happy. All the children went to the same school; we all knew each other; we had everything. [Music] Here, my great-grandmother came at the turn of the century to San Diego and settled in Logan Heights because of, uh, all the community here. Many of them were from Baja California, and she describes it as being wonderful in the sense that everything was [Music] there. My father's family came by rail from Sonora. There were a lot of families coming into this area, and they were working as longshoremen; um, they were working in the canneries, and it became very convenient to just interact and live on both sides of the border. I mean, there were no borders. Being on the border, I don't ever remember any of my neighbors even mentioning it. I had never—we never heard the word "undocumented alien," "illegal alien." People went, came, and there was—was just like you went across the street or went downtown, or there was no big issue.
The border chain and checkpoint were set up in 1924. [Music] With the Depression of 1929, Chicano labor was no longer [Music] needed. During the Depression, people were just hurt; they were rounded up, given a certain date, "move out." They packed their little belongings. Children that were born here, of course, had to go with their parents that weren't citizens. And I remember that my neighbors and I used to go down here to the railroad and see the train that was taking them. It was really very sad. The Depression weakened Barrio Logan, and as many people were deported, it became smaller in shape and in memory. I remember sometimes, you know, I used to get in shouting matches with gringos or something, and they used to—and they would tell you, "Go back where you came from," you know. And one of the things that always stuck out of my mind was that here I was, you know, like José Elío Gómez in San Diego, CA, and I was being told by somebody named Smith or Johnson to go back where I came from.
As soldiers marched off to World War II, Mexicans were pulled into Barrio Logan to fill jobs created by the war industry, the shipyards. By losing access to the coast, Logan was beginning to be boxed in, but with jobs and working families, the neighborhood blossomed again. There had been, like in San Diego, a huge population explosion because of the aircraft industry and the Naval Station being established there. And I was born in 1942, so it was during the beginning of the war, and, uh, I remember spending a lot of time in Logan Heights growing up. There was a real sense of community. There was a—that next door to us where my best girlfriend lived, and we used to play in the back. Growing up in Logan Heights, I really didn't have to interact with Anglos. Everything we wanted was here. I mean, it was like being in the womb. You went to the Central to get your groceries; you went down the street to get your tortillas at the tortillería; you went to the panadería to get your bread. You didn't have to venture outside of Logan Heights. I was very unaware as a youth of racism. I accepted a lot of things as just being—and that's the way it was, you know, like running around with my own people, and I was a kid, and everybody I knew spoke Spanish. It was very rare that you saw anybody of another ethnic group. I remember one time it was a guy that came walking down the sidewalk, really light-skinned, bright red hair, and I remember just kind of like everything stopped for me, 'cause I had never seen anybody with red hair. I didn't even know it existed.
At the heart of all community activity was the neighborhood house. The neighborhood house was great; that was our one recreation. I met my husband there at a dance, and I was 16 when I got married, and I had my children, four, one right after the other. I was just a mother and a wife, and my whole life revolved around [Music] that. By the 1950s, the area many had called home had been rezoned; the laws had been changed. San Diego wanted a place to expand and relocate its industry; they chose Barrio Logan. When our, um, neighborhood was changed from residential to industrial, it was just changed. No one knew anything; no one knew that you could go to the city council and protest. I didn't know any of those things. There used to be houses all in here, and then the junkyard started moving in, and at that time people started to have to move out because the freeway started coming through, the Coronado Bridge. Junkyards, industry, everything started happening. My community started kind of falling apart. There was no talk of community development or neighborhood planning associations; we had no idea of what those types of things actually were. The pounding, every day. Clash, smash, smash. Our house is slowly cracking; the walls in our house, the paint's peeling off. This used to be a very nice area at one time, until somehow somebody said it'd be a nice place to make junkyards. They built the freeway, 5, condemned a lot of houses. Many, many families had to move. They built the Coronado Bridge; the same thing happened. We lost a lot of our friends. We just thought that that's the way things had to be. With Highway 5 going through and the Coronado on-ramp, a lot of the families and the housing that existed before was totally gone. The little businesses were gone; the little shops were gone. Abandoned houses, abandoned storefronts. It was very shocking and disturbing to me. One day somebody came, knocked at the door, and told us that we had to leave because the state had bought the property and that, uh, we had to move because they were going to build a bridge there. So it was rather a surprise. I would walk up and down the street, passing through, and I'd see this desolate area of our community where the homes had always been. Nothing was there; it was all destroyed, and it was such a sad feeling to see this. I thought, "What could change this? If only something could change [Music] this." So, lo and behold, the bridge was built, and these great big, huge, massive columns were built there, and the, uh, ideas began to evolve in my mind. So I started sketching them and sketching the, uh, the work that was taking place. [Music] [Music]
The '60s marked an explosive moment in the world. People dreamed and organized for a new society, free of oppression. Civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements flourished, challenging mainstream culture. And Chicanos organized themselves. The struggle to create a United Farm Workers Union sparked a fire that roused Chicanos across the US. Self-determination for Chicanos, people. Alternative institutions to meet the needs of an ignored minority. Now countless individual voices came together into the powerful chorus of El Movimiento. The Chicano movement. Social unrest was happening. Cesar Chavez had just had the march from Delano to Sacramento, and the movement was starting to develop. There were organizations such as MEChA and M.E.Ch.A., and there were all these sons and daughters of farmworkers and fieldworkers and railroad workers all meeting together in college, and it was a real awakening to see other students with the same backgrounds or similar backgrounds as I [Music] had. I walked into this hall, and there was the flag of the United Farm Workers, and it was such a strong impact, the colors and the image, that, uh, I adopted it in my own artworks and began exploring this particular [Music] power. Here we had the chance to actually, like, make images of ourselves and make images of ourselves the way we wanted to see ourselves. My involvement as an artist was the fact that, uh, we started having art exhibits; we started doing posters, and when there was a march or a rally or something was happening politically, we were able to do images that dealt with that. I just like to think of myself as indigenous. I wanted to give pride, uh, and identity to my own people. I wanted them to realize that they have roots in this [Music] continent. The only history that they were teaching was the California mission thing, you know, about the Spaniards came with the priests, and they had an idyllic thing going with the Indians, and I just couldn't relate to that.
As I grew older, I kept looking, and the only thing I kept finding in history books was things like, "Pancho Villa was a bandit." Well, I grew up believing Pancho Villa was a—was a national hero; uh, that Santa Anna was a bandit, and like I had grown up believing Santa Anna to be a hero. So right there, you know, I was in complete odds with, uh, just about everything that they taught me in social studies or in history. Even though my parents always said, "You're Mexicano, and you'd be proud of what you are," and which I was, my attitude outside of Logan Heights was very, very defensive. Going outside of here was very intimidating, like I'm less because I was Mexicano. But when I went to Mexico or to Tijuana to visit my family, I was "Pocho," you know, which is Americanized, or you're from the other side of the border. So I didn't really fit on either side, and it was—it was pretty confusing. It was considered polite to refer to someone like me, "Are you Spanish?" rather than, um, use the—what was then a derogatory term of "Mexican." When I became a Chicana and I became a Chicano artist and began to learn more about my history, there was a whole revolutionary different way of looking at, um, myself as a woman, and all of a sudden I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, "You know, I'm not—I'm not too bad-looking." I didn't feel awkward or somehow strange or that I didn't look right. I felt somehow I looked the way that I should look like; this was natural, and it was good. And I looked at my mother and I looked at my grandmother and I said, "God, they look good to me, too."
In the late '60s, artists throughout the Southwest set up centros culturales—cultural centers for the artistic and political voice of the community. All this created a new wave in poetry, dance, music, and visual art. Many artists journeyed to Latin America and Mexico to immerse themselves in Aslan and returned with new horizons for the Chicano future. I ended up going down into Mexico, and we traveled down there for almost a month, and during that time I would stop every place that I knew where there was some kind of monumental sculpture or mosaic or murals. You could see everything, the movement in it. I became aware of the concept of mural painting that influenced me a lot. I remember my work changing dramatically after seeing that. So when I got back, I went back to my drawings for the mural that I was working on, and the images just begun to jump right out of it. I think my purpose was to educate people as to the status of the society in the sense that—of being a mechanized world, half-man, half-machine, the pollution of the air, war [Music] destruction. I started looking at the kind of media images used within our own Chicano community movement as far as, like, positive role models as for women, and the predominant image that was basically one was the Virgin of Guadalupe, basically a passive image. She's wrapped; she can't even walk in the material that she's got. So in my desire to create a positive image, I used, um, my mother, my grandmother, and myself as prototypes. Since I was running at that point in my life, I did myself as a runner, and I threw up, uh, her dress, 'cause she's running. I put sneakers on her, as taking off, exuberant, full of life. Then I did my mother, who worked at the Naval Training Center for 30 years as a seamstress, sitting behind her industrial sewing machine, making her own cape of stars. And my grandmother, I saw as an old woman. Very rarely do you see, like, the Virgin portrayed as an older woman. I guess this has to do with—with the sanctifying of her [Music] virginity.
In the '60s, when the young people that had lived in this neighborhood and they went to college or they went in the service and they came back, they woke everybody up. That's the way I got involved. We wanted a park. There was a community council meeting at the school every month, and we were told that we would get a park, and these meetings went on for at least three years, and nothing ever happened. No park. 1970, the city began construction of a highway patrol station on that same piece of land under the bridge, the residents had wanted for a park. No one in the community was consulted. I was absolutely outraged because then I realized that they had just been lying to us, and they had just decided it would be a highway, uh, office, at the highway patrol office, and—and that was it. We needed no more police in our neighborhood; we needed social services; we needed human care services, but we did not need any more police. One day I was walking down Logan, and Mario Solis came up to me. He says, "Guess what? Guess what?" He says, "They're going to build a highway patrol station down there." I said, "Where? What? What's happening?" He says, "They're going to build a highway patrol station down there where we want the park. Yeah, they're already got the bulldozers down there, and they're building fences and everything." We were in our Chicano studies classes, and I can just remember someone coming in and saying, "You know, they're going to create, uh, a highway patrol station right in—in the barrio." The next step was really fast; everything just started going just like that. We came down; we came into the park; we made human chains around the tractors. I was going to the grocery store one morning, and I saw many young people, and they were in a circle, holding hands. So I flew over there to see what was happening, so I joined in. I never came back home from the store; I just stayed there, and from then on I was there every single day, taking pots of food for the young people to eat, and we were planting and digging and singing and [Music] [Applause] [Music] chanting.
In the year 1970, the city of San Diego, under the Coronado Bridge, eyed a little piece of land, a piece of land that the community of Logan Heights wanted to make into a park—a park where all the chavalitos could come and play in so they wouldn't have to play in the street anymore and get run over by a car; a park where all the viejitos could come and just sit down and watch the sun go down in the—a park where all the familias could come and just get together on a Sunday afternoon and celebrate the spirit of life itself. But the city of San Diego said, "Chicanos, we're going to make a highway patrol substation here, man." So on April the 22nd, 1970, the Raza of Logan Heights and other Chicano communities of San Diego got together, and they organized, and they walked on the land, and they took it over with their picks and their shovels, and they began to build their park. And today that little piece of land under the Coronado Bridge is known to everybody as Cho Park. [Music] We shall continue to live, my brother. We shall continue to fight, my friend. We shall continue to live, my brother. We shall continue to fight, my friend. For Cho Park under the bridge. It was the first time that we had all come together in a sense of unity for ourselves and our community. Other—other than that, it had been very isolated. We believed it; we said it; we taught our children, but we didn't vocally come out for the—I think for the first time in my life I saw some people that were very—you could see it in them—dedicated, committed, believing in something, and that really inspired me and made me say to myself inside, "You know, I want to be part of this. I want to be like these people. I want to be able to feel dedicated and committed to something, to a good cause," and to me the issue of Cho Park was that cause. That's the way we got it; we wouldn't let the tractors work; we just stood right there, let them roll over us if they wanted [Music] to.
Cho Park marked the rebirth of Barrio Logan. A small thing to some, a little piece of land, but to the Logan Heights residents, it was something of their own. People remembered the voices of their ancestors fighting in the Mexican Revolution, crying, "Land and freedom! Land and [Music] freedom!" As the flag of Aslan was raised over the park, a new rallying cry was born: "All the way to the bay! Extend the park to the bay and reclaim the waterfront from industry!" The ancient prophecy for a new Aslan was answered; the trodden grass had risen up, thirsty, and drank the sweet water of victory. The park had been won; now it would be made beautiful. Fill it with murals! Fill it with murals! The empty pillars waited; new Chicano art was about to emerge for the world to see. We organized ourselves to do the first murals in 1973. Um, that, uh, that whole process of doing the murals and trying to get permission from the—from the city was very difficult. We had to do a lot of bureaucratic red tape; there was a lot of paperwork. Every time we, uh, accomplished one step, there was always another step. But we did a lot of preparation, putting the, uh, primer, scaffolding, paints, brushes, because permission or not, we were going to paint. The paints were all laid out, and there's this gigantic wall there, and, uh, all of us were just looking at this wall. So we poured out the paint and took some rollers and some rollers and just attacked the wall. The rollers and put color everywhere. There was at least 200–300 people that all of a sudden were all over the walls, just the energy of all the people just—just gathering over here, grabbing brushes and going for it. It was done spontaneously; we exploded on the walls. Whatever went on, went on on the walls. If we thought we had control, we realized that we really didn't. By the time everybody got done, there were names; there were Donald Ducks; there were Mickey Mouses; uh, there were all kinds of things all over. And I was looking at it, and about that time José comes walking up to me, and he was really upset with me. It's like if I was responsible for what had happened. "We really ruined it; we really destroyed something that was possible," and, uh, I can remember listening to him, and I just kind of turned toward him and I says, uh, "We haven't finished yet." [Music] So for about four or five months there was about five or six of us that kept going back and working on those walls. [Music]
We thought it was very important that our community realized that we had very important people in our history, and we did a series of portraits to have more role models or [Music] heroes. This was our first attempt to coordinate and to work a mural. I had never seen murals in my life; I thought they—I think they're absolutely beautiful, and I was just surprised. No one in the community had ever seen them; we had never even knew there was such a thing; we had never learned about them in [Applause] [Music] school. These were the first murals in the park, a celebration of all the images from the Chicano experience. So there was so much to paint: red and black, the United Farm Workers flag; black and red, the Aztec symbol of the four directions of Mother Earth; Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent of knowledge, arching over the community; the kiosko, a stylized Mayan pyramid to be built at the center of the park; La Catrina, the Mexican death skeleton, reminding everyone of the everlasting dance between life and death, and death and life; and the Mesoamerican face symbol for the fusion of Indian, Spanish, and Chicano cultures. The murals reached back and then forward to the present and beyond, into the future. Park all the way to the bay! We will have Cho Park all the way to the bay! We're asking everyone to please be down here on Tuesday, April 22nd, at 12:00 noon to participate in the march to the bay.
Cho Park was a flowering of Chicano power and a challenge to those in San Diego who had planned for the barrio to disappear. Yet the question lingered: how to bring about change? The park was such a great victory that almost all the people that, uh, were at the park takeover, then we moved over to the neighborhood house and took that building over, and—and it was decided that it should be a free clinic. And I thought, "Well, we do have some rights, and we can speak up and change things." Uh, we started with volunteer doctors, volunteer nurses, and it was just wonderful. I was so apprehensive about the city council taking the building from us that I slept outside on the—on the porch just to guard the place, see that nobody took it away from us. In the early '70s, the barrio's strength was rising. Other small, volunteer, self-help organizations sprang up: La Causa, a Chicano free school; the Barrio Station, a community youth center; Toas in Aslan, an artist collective. It was a time of intense creativity and exuberance. The Logan was in motion; everything seemed possible at a moment's notice, just almost like a snap of the finger. We could have 200, 300, 400 people, uh, marching and demonstrating in front of City Administration to, uh, to get our issues heard. You had to fight for everything you wanted: grass, you wanted a faucet, you wanted trash cans. There were endless meetings to ask for a lousy trash can. Then, uh, the kiosko was another thing; they didn't like the plans for it; they didn't like it; it looked like a pyramid; they didn't like this; they didn't like that. So what? Wasn't going to be their park; it was ours. We wanted the kiosko the way it was, uh, had the blueprint, and that's the way it [Music] was. After the park takeover, something really nice and beautiful started happening; it wasn't just confined to the park.
Though I mean, uh, the Centro familiar was organizing the social workers; the artists were organizing the artists; the teachers were organizing the teachers' organizations. A lot of movement was taking place. Don Mus, all the arts themselves were flourishing; people were flourishing. It was like as if the seed was finally getting watered, and people started sprouting. [Music] Through the movement and through our own efforts, especially through our music, we began to learn more and more about where we came from and where we are going as a people. [Music] Oh. [Music] This was the height of the movement, politically and culturally. Logan artists traveled to other communities to paint. Chicano artists from elsewhere traveled here to Chicano Park. It was the time of the artistic collectives; artists worked together in groups, sharing and reinforcing their ideas and styles. A visual language for Chicano art had developed, anchored in the pre-Colombian imagery of Aztlán and inspired by the Mexican Masters Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco, and [Music] Frida Kahlo. Chicano art chose its subject matter from the political issues of the day, be it the farmworker struggle or la lucha, my land.
Chicano Park in 1975: Uh, we organized an invitational to invite other mural groups from throughout the area. The Royal Air Force was one that brought down a really good contingent of artists. The RCAF was a group of artists in Sacramento. Some of us had been doing art for some time. A lot of the people that started the group with us were our students. So we went, and we had nine days to do it. So the night that we arrived, they wanted us to hit the sack and get up early, and we said, “We, we can’t. We don’t—we want to go right now. We want to go and see what we’re doing here,” so that we could get up in the morning and start painting as soon as we—we said, “We can go right now.” You know, Kessel snaps his finger, and lights go on, and the scaffolding was there, and we could actually go out there and and know at least how to grid our cartoon, how to make our preparations. The RCAF women left here earlier; they had already started their mural when we got there. And I think the women messed up by jumping the gun. See, they took off without letting us know, so it was a solo flight. That usually, in the RCAF, you know, it’s a court-martial, man, in which case they would have come back and say, “What are you talking about? We know you guys too well.” Again, it’s the old machismo coming out, but they did a very beautiful [Music] mural.
I maintain that there was enough in our Chicano history that still hadn’t been told, so I thought, “Someone is handling the images of Chávez and the [Music] and Zapata; I’m going to concentrate on something that I’ve always done as my [Music] people,” having been brought up in the Fresno area, San Joaquin Valley, after leaving New Mexico and being farmers in New Mexico, it was like a natural. So I did a farmworker family: education, jobs, political power, housing, and health care. These were El Movimiento’s national agenda issues that affected every Chicano and Chicana in the United States, and in Chicano Park, local issues shared the center stage. So come up here for those people who want to stay together, down to the land on the waterfront. Barrio Logan mobilized around the “All the Way to the Bay” campaign, and in a thousand City Council meetings, San Diego resisted every step of the way. We began to organize here in this particular community to begin planning for our future, because this was our right, uh, and it’s important that every community should plan for their future. The dream was to free Logan from industry and junkyards, but did the barrio have the strength to realize it, or would San Diego force families out of their homes like so many others that had been forced out before when they built the freeway and then they built the bridge? The residents here weren’t recognized as being residents; they were just recognized as people who hadn’t gotten out of the way of the junkyards yet, you know, because they’re coming—the freeways and the bridge, and these people haven’t gotten out of the way, but they’ll be out of there in a few years. Well, the whole area, the whole barrio refused to just roll over and die here at the border—that’s how we say it. Junkyards? ¡No! The mural “Barrio, ¡No!” was part of the campaign to drive out the junkyards. Making this billboard was a moment of harmony within the Chicano movement: artists and activists working together to build a better community. “Más casas, menos yonkes”—more houses, less junkyards.
I went to all the meetings with all these young people; they all came after me, and I went because I—I guess they thought if they took an old lady along it would be respectful. And we finally got some of the things we wanted. [Music] Barrio Logan was rezoned; junkyards began to move away. It was a victory, but not like the park takeover. The politics of the Chicano movement had changed: less confrontation, more meetings—meetings and more meetings. The “All the Way to the Bay” campaign was being stalled by endless meetings with city attorneys, city council, the court authority. And the murals: by the late ‘70s, the period of spontaneous murals bursting onto the walls was coming to an end. The community wanted input, so the Chicano Park Steering Committee began to set standards. New artists would have to submit sketches and proposals for the murals. This was limiting; they yearned for the freedom they once had. Now everything was open to review and to question. Everybody had [Music] was a very heavy criticism, uh, from the barrio. The red star on the on the right hand: you know, “Are you preaching communism, socialism?” The intertwined figures with—to him—was using the Aztec notion to show a movement, or the Ollin symbol, the interacting—that was criticized for its nudity. And uh, Ste. Man, a white lady with tattoos: she intimidated the Logan probably more than uh any of the other things that were there. If Ste. had done an emerging woman, and he did it all in white, and it was not for the white woman or against the brown or the black woman—that was the color that he thought best put across what he had in mind. She was ascending into a new prominence. By the late ‘70s, the ongoing conflicts between male Chicano artists and Chicana women artists became public. Women had been encouraged by the activism around them; now they reexamined their own lives and emerged to play a major role in the art movement. When I approached the male artists, they didn’t know quite what to make out of me. Here was a confident, trained, verbal, um, artist, and who was a woman, and yet we’re not relating to them exactly like the typical male-female relationship. So most of my role was as a support person; I was never invited to paint a mural with them and didn’t really push it myself, as well. This young woman and her high school friend—friends wanted to paint a mural, and they showed me a drawing of themselves as coming out of these corn stalks. So they saw themselves as little plants, tender little sprouts. The idea of working with young women was really thrilling to me, and um, so I said, “Okay, we’ll do it.” We didn’t have any money; we didn’t have a sponsor. They told me later that they had approached some male artists, and they had been turned down or ignored. Our enthusiasm for each other was really contagious. I saw myself simply with them as a facilitator and and teacher. I called myself a technical advisor; I saw them as the artists. So the murals portray Mexican history; they portray Latin American history, and they portray contemporary Chicano history. Contemporary Chicano history: think about it. Things have changed. Chicanos can refuse to be an invisible people and can say with pride, “We write our history for ourselves and paint it on our murals.” Yes, things have changed. Not all the small alternative institutions started in the ‘60s survived, but some did become established, funded organizations. And the long-haired barrio warriors, brushes in hand: many left, but others stayed and became painters and teachers of art. And the park, once a barren patch, a pass-over piece of land, now is green and beautiful. Chicano Park has become a set of real-life stories of a people’s self-determination, a message of creativity and struggle, not just for the sons and daughters of Aztlán, but for all the people and all communities. Let Chicano Park speak to those who dream of roses but swallow thorns, as a tale of hope fulfilled. [Music]
Into the ‘80s, the national Chicano movement had fragmented. In Barrio Logan, activists focused on a single issue: enlarging the park to the bay. Years of struggle had taken their toll; organizations weakened; some leaders left, but others stayed. Since I began to work on the murals, I’ve never let them—I’ve always, uh, been restoring them a little bit here, a little bit there. I’m still involved. Every time there’s a picket, every time there’s a march, I’m there. Over the years, I’ve been involved in the free clinic that has just grown tremendously, and I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that it would be the way it is now. I just got reelected as the chairman of the committee; once again, I’m back on for another ride. I have mixed feelings about it. Over the years, it’s been like a roller-coaster ride; there’s been times we’ve been riding high, and times where we, you know, we’d be riding low. We’ve had problems within the organization, problems sometimes with membership, disagreements, but um, I’ve taken on the chairmanship here because by letting a lot of this division continue, we are setting a bad example for our children, because they’re going to grow up, and it’s going to cause them the same problems that we had—the same miscommunication that we [Music] had, like so many times before. The population of Barrio Logan is changing. By the end of the 1980s, Barrio Logan began to shrink again as San Diego continued to expand. The growth of San Diego was accelerating; the downtown was revitalized, and a new convention complex installed. San Diego is on the move, and Logan is in its path. For Chicano Park, the future is an open question. It can be the symbol around which people can rally and defend their barrio, or it can be the last Chicano island as families are forced from their homes by the pressure of San Diego’s urban development. It is a question that the future and the people of Barrio Logan will have to [Music] answer. We are united; we are not divided. We are united; we don’t have to fall apart right now. We have a a common [Music] goal, in spite of all conflicts. Barrio Logan moved forward. In 1987, the community won a victory, extending the park to the bay, acquiring three acres on the [Music] waterfront. This took seventeen years. Even though the population around Chicano Park is more scant every year, people do use the park, I mean, and every year in Chicano Park Day, there’s there’s a celebration with thousands of people. There’s a greater meaning beyond simply the neighborhood; now, in a sense, it’s almost a memorial to all the little barrios that exist across the country where working-class people live. But we’re not going to go down easily. [Applause] [Music] Spee. [Music] Fore. Spee. [Music] [Music] Fore. [Music]
I never realized that I could do the things I did, or had the strength, or even had the the guts to do it, you know, and I thought, “You know, here I am, a housewife and a mother; I’ve never done this,” and it just made me feel real good. If I wouldn’t have been involved in these things, I would never have had the dreams to try to accomplish something; I would have never even attempted it. I would have never attempted to paint a mural. We go to parades in areas of of San Diego where before would be full of intimidation and fear because we were Mexicanos, and my children are going, “Look at the Chicanos, Mama! Yoo! Look at the Chicanos! Look at the dancers! Look at the Fiestas, Mama! Look at how proud! Look at the lowriders!” And people looking around at us like, you know, and my kids just saying it with pride and beauty, and and I know that that’s what that did for me. I don’t know of any other community that would fight for a park under a bridge where we get the fumes, where we get the pigeon droppings, but it’s our park, and we love it. [Applause] The park under the bridge. [Music] [Music] We shall continue to live, my brother. We shall continue to fight, my friend. We shall continue to live, my brother. We shall continue to fight, my friend. Park under the bridge. Chicano under the bridge. [Music] N. [Music] [Music] [Music] Alicia. [Music] [Music] [Music] Mar. For. [Music] You. Am. Cig. I. For. There. Ar. E. E. For. For. For. E.