For the next month, visitors at City Hall will be greeted with an archival exhibit that explores and honors the history of the Chicano community in San Diego.
The exhibit, titled “Telling Our Stories and Preserving Our Histories: The Chicano Movement in San Diego,” opened Monday. It features photos, city records and newspaper articles that help tell the story of the Logan Heights and Barrio Logan neighborhoods — predominantly Chicano communities — since around the 1880s.
The City Clerk Archives organized the exhibit through a collaboration with the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center. It will be on display in the City Hall lobby until Oct. 18.
“We have the documents, the microfilm and the actions that the council took … but that’s not the whole story of what happened,” said City Clerk Diana Fuentes. “Being able to bring together those documents with the images and stories of the people, I think it’s just really been able to create a larger story.”
The exhibit is the first in an annual series from the City Clerk Archives that will dive into the history of various San Diego communities — especially highlighting stories that “may not have been historically told or preserved in our repositories previously,” Fuentes said at the opening ceremony Monday, where she was also honored with a proclamation for Hispanic/Latino Heritage Month.
The exhibit coincides with American Archives Month.
Visitors enter the exhibit through an archway — or a “portal,” as Armando de la Torre, the artist who provided the design concept for the exhibit, describes it.
Once inside, they’ll walk through key moments in the community’s history, as shown through artifacts, such as Logan Heights residents’ role in San Diego’s tuna fishing and canning industry in the mid-20th century to the lowrider car culture in the 1970s and ’80s.
Visitors can also add a note on the “Decision Tree” — which de la Torre also created — about how the exhibit and Chicano Park have affected them. On Monday, notes on the tree included “Viva la raza” and “the struggle continues.”
The Chicano community’s history in San Diego is one of struggle and strength, including in the creation of Chicano Park.
Located beneath Interstate 5 and the on-ramps for the San Diego-Coronado Bridge, the park was established in 1970 as a result of protests soon after construction of the bridge was completed.
The bridge itself forced thousands of residents — whose homes were in the construction’s path — to move, and frustrations mounted in 1970 with the attempted construction of a highway patrol station in the area. Barrio Logan residents and Chicano activists, who protested the development, occupied the park for 12 days until an agreement was reached between the community, state officials and the city of San Diego to support the creation of a community park.
Today, it stakes the claim of holding the largest collection of outdoor murals in the world, with more than 100 painted on the freeway pillars, depicting messages and images of Indigenous, Mexican and Mexican American history.
The “colors and stories” inscribed on the pillars have helped tell and preserve the community’s history, Alberto Pulido, the vice-chair of the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center, said at Monday’s event. “With reclamation comes honor, pride and origin stories, all defined by those who lived it or those who heard from it by those who lived it.”
Helen Gonzales, a board member for the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center, visited the exhibit Monday with her husband. She said she especially enjoyed getting a closer look at the lives of the “people that were activists and instrumental in a lot of the successes of Logan Heights and Barrio Logan.”
For Fuentes, the artifact that most affects her is a large photo from the 1930s of the tuna cannery workers. Her grandmother worked in the canneries, she said, and the photo serves as a reminder of the real people who lived these historical experiences.
“You see this image of literally putting faces to the names and the history,” she said. “Having those two pieces come together — of our historical documents regarding the canneries and the tuna industry in San Diego, and then the large picture of all of those cannery workers — is just really emblematic of the collaboration of the event.”
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