San Diego USA California's southern gate Navytown industry borderline factories Mexicans Americans high-rise businessmen sun-washed beach sand tourist filled vacation lands growing building affluence urban modern development That's San Diego today, but it has not always been. 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 Aztlan. The ancient story of Aztlan 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 Azteca 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. 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.
It began in 1970 Under the Coronado Bridge In my neighborhood In San Diego In San Diego Where my people begin to fight Pochika no pa Pochika no pa Every year there is a celebration of the anniversary of that day, April 22nd 1970, when La Raza took over this land and made Chicano Park. 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, 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 friends Oh, Chicano Park Under the bridge Oh, Chicano Park Under the bridge Chicano 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. 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. There's a good man on the hillside there. I accept that. There's a good man on the hillside there.
But once there was no border. people passed freely across this beautiful land. My parents came at the turn of the century and 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 here. My great-grandmother came at the turn of the century to San Diego and settled in Logan Heights because of all the community here. Many of them were from Baja California.
And she describes it as being being wonderful in the sense that everything was 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. 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. Working on the border, I don't ever remember any of my neighbors even mentioning. yet. We never heard the word undocumented alien, illegal alien. People went, came, and it was just like you went across the street or went downtown.
There was no big issue. The border chain and checkpoint were set up in 1924. With the depression of 1929, Chicano labor was no longer needed. During the depression, people were just herded. They were rounded up, given a certain date, and moved 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 Anglos or something, and they used to be, 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 Jose Eligio Gomez, in La Ciudad de San Diego, in Estado de California, 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, Mexicanos were pulled into Barrio Logan to fill jobs created by the war industry, the shipyards. By losing access to the coast, the 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 I remember spending a lot of time in Logan Heights growing up. It was a real sense of community. There was a torteria next door.
...to us, where my best girlfriend lived. Then 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...
You went to the torqueria, you went to the paneria to get your bread. You didn't have to venture outside of Logan Heights. I was very unaware as a youth of race system.
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 when I was a kid. 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 skin, bright red hair, and I remember just kind of like everything stopped for me because I had never seen anybody with red hair.
I didn't even know it existed. At the heart of all community activity, I was like, 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 that. By the 1950s, the area many had called home had been rezoned.
The laws had been changed. changed. San Diego wanted a place to expand and relocate its industry. They chose Barrio Logan.
When our 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. 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 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 what those type of things actually were. The pounding every day. Smash, smash, smash.
Our house is slowly cracking. The walls in our house, the paint pilling is falling off. This used to be a very nice area at one time until somehow somebody said it would be a nice place to make junkyards. They built the freeway, five, 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 panerias were gone, the little torterias were gone, abandoned houses, abandoned storefronts. It was very shocking and disturbing to me.
One day, somebody came and knocked at the door and told us that we had to leave because the state had bought the property and that 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 streets passing through and I'd see this desolate area of our community where the homes had always been. there was all destroyed and it was such a sad feeling to see this.
I thought what could change this? If only something could change this. So lo and behold the bridge was built and these great big huge massive columns were built there and the ideas began to evolve. in my mind so I started sketching them and sketching the work that was taking place you 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 U.S. Self-determination for Chicanos as a 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 Maya and Mecha and there were all these sons and daughters of farm workers and cannery workers and railroad workers all meeting together in college. It was a real awakening to see other students with the same backgrounds or similar backgrounds as I 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 imagery that I adopted it in my own artworks and began exploring this particular 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 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 and identity to my own people. I wanted them to realize that they have roots in this 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 panchoville was abandoned well i grew up believing panchoville was a national hero uh that sabata was abandoned and like i had grown up believing in sparta to be a hero so right there you know i was complete odds with 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 pocha, 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 pretty confusing. It was considered polite to refer to someone like me, are you Spanish, rather than use what was then a derogatory term of Mexicans. When I became a Chicana, and I became a Chicana, and began to learn more about my history. There was a whole revolutionary, different way of looking at myself as a woman.
And all of a sudden I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, you know, 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 at 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 Aztlan and return 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 of being a mechanized world. Half man, half machine.
The pollution of the air, war, destruction. I started looking at the kind of media images used within our own Chicano community movement, as far as like positive role models for women. And the predominant image that was basically one was the Virgin of Guadalupe.
She's wrapped, she can't even walk in the material that she's got. So in my desire to create positive images, I used my mother, my grandmother, and myself as prototypes. Since I was running the company, I've been running the company for a long time.
running at that point in my life. I did myself as a runner. And I threw up her dress because 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 the sanctifying of 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.
In 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 patrol office 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 and says, Queso, Queso!
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 to park. Yeah, they've 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 a highway patrol station right in the barrio.
And the next step was really fast. Everything just started going just like that. We can't. 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 lots of food for the young people to eat.
We were planting and digging and singing and chanting. All the way! All the way! All the way! All the way!
In the year 1970, the city of San Diego, under the Coronado Bridge, lied a little piece of land. A piece of land that the community of Logan Heights wanted to keep. I'm going to take you to 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 tarde. 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, Charlie, we're going to make a highway patrol substation here, man.
So on April the 22nd, 1970, La 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 Chicano Park. Oh Chicano Park under the bridge Oh Chicano 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 than that, it had been very isolated.
We believed it, we said it, we taught our children, but we didn't vocally come out. 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 Chicano Pueblo part was that cause? That's the way we got it.
We wouldn't let the tractors work. We just stood right there and let them roll over us if they wanted to. Chicano Park marked the rebirth of Barrio Logan.
A small thing to some, a little piece of land, but to the Logan, it was something of their own. People remembered the voices of their ancestors fighting in the Mexican Revolution, crying, ¡Lierra y libertad! ¡Land and freedom!
Land and freedom. The flag of Aztlan 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 murales! 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. That whole process of doing the murals and trying to get permission 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 accomplished one step, there was always another step. But we did a lot of preparation, putting the 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 all of us were just looking at this wall so we poured out the paint took some rollers rollers everywhere there was at least two three hundred people that all of a sudden were just the energy of all the people just just gathering over here grabbing brushes and going for it it was done spontaneously Simultaneously 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 was names. It was Donald ducks. There was some Mickey Mouse, there was all kinds of things all over.
And I was looking at him about that time Jose 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 I can remember listening to him, and I just kind of turned toward him, and I says, we haven't finished yet.
So for about four or five months there was about five or six of us that kept going back and working on those walls. And so we were able to get a lot of people to come back and work on those walls. We thought it was very important that our community realize that we had very important people in our history and we did a series of portraits to have more role models or 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 him in 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 kiosco, a stylized Mayan pyramid to be built at the center of the park. La Muerte, the Mexican death skeleton, reminding everyone of the everlasting dance between life and death, and death and life.
and the mestizo 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. We have Chicano Park all the way to the bay. We will have Chicano Park all the way. to the bay.
We're asking everyone to please be down here on Tuesday, April 22nd at 12 o'clock noon to participate in the march to the bay. Chicano 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 were at the park take over. Then we moved over to the neighborhood house and took that building over.
And it was decided that it should be a free clinic. Then I thought, well, we do have some rights and we can speak up and change things. 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 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 Esquelita, a Chicanos free school. The Barrio Station, a community youth center.
Toltecas en 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. marching and demonstrating in front of the city administration to get our issues heard. You had to fight for everything. You wanted grass, you wanted a faucet, you wanted trash cans.
There were umpteen meetings to ask for a lousy trash can. can. Then 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? It wasn't going to be their park. It was ours.
We wanted the kiosko. The way it was had the blueprint and that's the way it was. After the park takeover something really nice and beautiful started happening. It wasn't just confined to the park though. I mean the Centro Familiar was organizing the social workers, the artists were organizing.
Organizing the artists, the teachers were organizing the teachers organizations. A lot of movement was taking place. Danza, folklorico, music, all the arts themselves were flourishing.
People were flourishing. It was like as if the seed was finally getting watered and people started sprouting. Go Jalisco!
Through the Chicano 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. 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-Columbian imagery of Aslan and inspired by the Mexican masters Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco and Frida Kahlo. Chicano art chose its subject matter from the political issues of the day, be it the farm worker struggle or La Tierra Mia, my land, Chicano Park. In 1975, we organized an invitational to invite other mural groups from throughout the area.
The road The Ochoacano Air Force was one that brought down a really good contention 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 can'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 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 know at least how.
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 guns.
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 said, 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 pillar.
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 Che and the Virgen and Zapata. I'm going to concentrate on something that I've always done.
It's my 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 farm worker 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.
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.
And it's... 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 on 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, 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. Barrio C, junk and no! Barrio C, junkyard no.
Here at the border, that's how we say junkyards, junk is no. The mural, Barrio C, Junk is 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 yonques. 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 guess they thought if they took an old lady along, it would be respectful. And we finally got some of the things we wanted. 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 Port 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 artists, this was limited. They yearned for the freedom they once had.
Now everything was open to review and to question. Everybody had an opinion. Do you like murals? Not for me.
No, because instead of giving you pleasure, you get scared. Because there are many ugly monkeys. It was a very heavy criticism. from the barrio.
The red star on the right hand, you know, are you preaching communism, socialism? Juan Ishi's intertwined figures which to him was using the... cash notion to show a movement or the Olin symbol, the interacting. That was criticized for his nudity. And Esteban, man, a white lady with tattoos, she intimidated the Logan probably more than any of the other things that were there.
Esteban had done an emerging mujer or 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 Chicano women artists became public. Women had been encouraged by the activism around them. Now they re-examine their own lives and emerge 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 artist who was a woman, and yet was 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 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 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 artist and they had been turned down or ignored. Our enthusiasm for each other was... was really contagious. When we were in high school, we got an idea of the mural we made in Chicano Park.
When we saw the students dressing up, and the girls transforming, painting their faces, but we didn't put that on the mural. We wanted to give an idea of the ancestors, how the girls were dressed, no makeup before, but like an Indian, we put on the mural an Indian and a cholo representing the past and the present. I saw myself simply with them as a facilitator.
facilitator and teacher. I called myself a technical advisor. I saw them as the artists. I was very interested in the people and the schools, but we all had an idea. Since there are many Mexicans who don't know about their culture, they want to learn.
So the murals portray Mexican history, they portray Latin America. 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 an established, funded organization. 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 passed 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 Aslan, 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. Into the 80s, the national Chicano movement had fragmented.
In Barrio Logan, activists focus on a single issue of enlarging the park to the bay. Years of struggle had taken their toll. Organizations weakening, some leaders left, but others stayed.
Since I began to work on the murals, I've never left them. I've always 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. It has just grown tremendously, and I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that it would be the way it is now. I just got re-elected 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 we've been riding low. We've had problems within the organization, problems sometimes with membership, disagreements. But 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 miscommunications that we 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 answer. We are united. We are not divided.
We are united. We don't have to fall apart right now. We have a common 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 waterfront. This took 17 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 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. We're not going to go down easily.
that I could do the things I did or had the strength or even had 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.
And 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 San Diego where before it would be full of intimidation and fear because we were Mexicanos and my children are going, look at the charros, mama, yeah! Look at the charos, look at the danzantes, look at the folklorico, mama. Look at how pride, look at the lowriders and people looking around at us like, you know.
And my kids just saying it with pride and beauty. 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.
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. Por Chicanos Paz.
Under the bridge Oh, she can applaud Under the bridge The United neighborhoods, Long live, long live, The United neighborhoods, Long live, long live, The United neighborhoods, Long live, long live, The United neighborhoods, Long live, long live,