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Breaking ground at Chicano Park

April 22, 1970

Kera Lovell, Ph.D.�@keralovell�Kera.lovell@utah.edu�www.keralovell.com

The idea for the lot takeover emerged when the city abandoned its effort to construct a park for Mexican American citizens displaced by segregation, the military, and urban renewal.^[1] In June of 1969, the San Diego city council officially approved the construction of a park for Barrio Logan, but took no action to implement the decision for the next year. On April 22, 1970, when construction workers began building a state patrol office on the site instead of a park, activists took over the lot. They planted nopales, magueys, and flowers. Raising the flag of Aztlán on a telephone pole, the activists symbolically called the land Chicano Park, “La Tierra Mia”—as a historic reclamation of their lost Aztecan homeland.^[2] That day women and children encircled bulldozers operated by state construction workers, making human chains to stop the creation of a new state patrol station under the bridge.^[3]

[1] For work on Chicano Park, see Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (University of Minnesota Press, 2014): 161-172; Eva Cockcraft, “The Story of Chicano Park,” Aztlán vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring 1984): pp. 79-103; Ella Maria Diaz, Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping a Chicano/a Art History (University of Texas Press, 2017); Martin Rosen and James Fisher, “Chicano Park and the Chicano Park Murals: Barrio Logan, City of San Diego, California,” The Public Historian vol. 23, no. 4 (Fall 2001): pp. 91-111; Kevin Delgado, "A Turning Point: The Conception and Realization of Chicano Park," Journal of San Diego History 44, no. 1 (1998): pp. 48-61.

[2] Marco Anguiano, “The Battle of Chicano Park: A Brief History of the Takeover,” Chicano Park Steering Committee, Chicano-Park.org.

[3] Marco Anguiano, “The Battle of Chicano Park: A Brief History of the Takeover,” Chicano Park Steering Committee Website: http://www.chicano-park.com/cpscbattleof.html.

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Murals of women at Chicano Park (right, Carlotta Hernandez Terry poses in front of her work revised by men)

Kera Lovell, Ph.D.�@keralovell�Kera.lovell@utah.edu�www.keralovell.com

In the 1970s, the park mostly contained murals of men as reflected in the park’s “Historical Mural” featuring a collage of a dozen revolutionary men of color painted by a group of male muralists. The portraits of Cesar Chavez, Ruben Salazar, Miguel Hidalgo, Fidel Castro, Benito Juarez, and Zapata Pancho Villa tower over park goers, visually granting them larger-than-life status as heroes. These murals were important in teaching the long, transnational history of resistance to colonialism that connected the plight of farmworkers with that of the indigenous.^[1]

[1] Raúl Homero Villa calls this alternative epistemology “barrio-logos” in its negotiation of transcultural spaces. See Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (University of Texas Press, 2000).

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Rather than ripping out the new concrete pillars that overshadowed their once-vibrant community, the park creators embraced them—using them as canvases for vivid portraits of largely male revolutionary leaders. On Earth Day 1971, the park officially opened as Barrio Logan’s Chicano Park with murals painted on the cement pillars depicting Chicano history and struggles over the course of imperialism.^[1]Even when parks “survived” materially, park organizers have struggled to control representations of these spaces as political contexts have shifted. In September 2017, a small white supremacist group met at Chicano Park for a regular outing they called Patriotic Picnics. After eating pizza in the park, the group planned to take a tour of the park’s murals to gather information as part of a campaign to have what they defined as anti-American anti-police murals removed. Hundreds of park advocates led a counter demonstration they called a Solidarity Gathering, featuring dozens of speakers who argued that these murals needed to be contextualized within histories of violence, oppression, and resistance. Many argued that the park created space for a cross-border identity, allowing Chicanos and Latinos the ability to celebrate their heritage of ethnic anti-colonial resistance on colonized land. Arguing that these murals embodied their cross-cultural American heritage, Tania Marquez gestured to the surrounding portraits, stating, “This is who we are as Latinos.”^[1] The bodies of gun-toting indigenous and Mexican revolutionaries as celebratory representations of multi-ethnic resistance claimed space in ways that, nearly five decades after the park’s creation, oppressed people of color still could not. In 1970, park creators raised the flag of Aztlán in the park featuring the three-faced mestizo centered a red and green Mexican flag. Now, in 2023, the murals blend with music, poetry, dance, and “lowriders” on Chicano Park Day, celebrating creativity and resistance, indigeneity and modern technology as non-Chicano tourists embrace the park as a historical American landmark.^[2]

[1] Lyndsay Winkley, “Brief but explosive shouting match erupts at Chicano Park demonstration,” San Diego Union-Tribune (September 3, 2017): http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/sd-me-chicano-park-20170903-story.html.

[2] For a brief description of the park’s most recent anniversary celebration, see John Wilkens, “Annual Chicano Park Day Honors ‘Chunky’ Sanchez,” San Diego Union-Tribune (April 22, 2017): http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/sd-me-chicano-park-20170422-story.html.

[1] In 1980, these murals became the basis for a petition to the Historical Resources Board to designate Chicano Park as a local landmark; in 2007 the site was added to the National Register of historic places before becoming recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 2017. City of San Diego, City Planning and Community Investment, “Barrio Logan Historical Resources Survey,” Unpublished document (February 1, 2001): http://www.sandiego.gov/planning/programs/historical/pdf/2013/201304blhistoricsurvey.pdf; Erik Anderson, “Chicano Park Designated as a National Historic Landmark,” KPBS (January 11, 2017): http://www.kpbs.org/news/2017/jan/11/chicano-park-designated-as-a-national-historic/.

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Art by Ricardo Levins Morales on the Young Lords’ Poor People’s Park in Lincoln Park, Chicago

Kera Lovell, Ph.D.�@keralovell�Kera.lovell@utah.edu�www.keralovell.com

Over the mid-1960s, the Young Lords restructured itself from a self-identified gang into a political organization, modeling their leadership structure and ideology on the Black Panthers. By 1968, the Young Lords expanded their use of spatial protests as resistance tactics to dramatize the plight of low-income communities of color used negative publicity to their advantage and to demonstrate the seriousness of their issues. After the group restructured itself from a self-identified gang into a racial self-determination political organization, modeling their leadership structure and ideology on the Black Panthers, the YLO along with other members of the CCSF protested urban renewal in Lincoln Park by taking over an LPCCC meeting and trashing the Lincoln Park’s local office for the Department of Urban Renewal. Throughout the spring and summer of 1969, the Young Lords and allies disrupted LPCCC meetings or police/community workshops by breaking furniture and shouting as well as holding sit-ins at government offices to demand greater access to social services and freedom from police harassment. LPCCC meetings required police officers to protect their order of business and to deny local citizens displaced by urban renewal a voice in these decision-making meetings.^[1]

In May of 1969 after YLO member Manuel Ramos was murdered, the Young Lords formed a coalition, including members from the Concerned Citizens Survival Front, the Latin American Defense Organization, the Young Patriots, the Welfare Mothers of Wicker Park, Hermanos, the Independent Precinct Organization, and the Lincoln Park Town Meeting. Together they formed the Poor People’s Coalition and occupied an administration building at the McCormick Theological Seminary for a week to dramatize opposition to the seminary’s $20 million campus expansion in the neighborhood. Renaming the brand new $2 million W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Administration Building the Manual Ramos Memorial Building, the protestors demanded the institution take a greater role in advocating for the services and welfare of low-income communities of color in their neighborhood by providing more than $600,000 for low-income housing, $25,000 to open a free clinic, $25,000 to open a People’s Law Office, and $25,000 for a Puerto Rican Cultural Center. In addition, the protestors demanded the use of campus facilities for a daycare center, that seminary-owned apartments should be rented to working-class families of color, and that the black iron gate surrounding the seminary be torn down to allow non-students access to the campus’s green spaces.^[2] The YLO seminary takeover was widely covered by United Press International, and featured alongside coverage of Berkeley’s People’s Park protests.^[3]

The building takeover ended, yet on May 5, 1969, seminarian students echoed these demands by occupying the lawn in front of the new building. In addition to the list of monetary demands the building occupiers had issued, the students called for full financial disclosure from McCormick’s board, official seminary opposition to city urban renewal policies, and request that the seminary “join in co-operative ventures aimed at solving the housing problems, especially the North Side Co-Operative Ministry.” Ries who had spoken out against police brutality at the 1968 DNC took part in the tent-in, saying, “There is no adequate placement service for the families, mostly blacks and Puerto Ricans, who have to move out,” he said.^[4] The Chicago Daily News described the occupation as a small isolated “small tent-village” inhabited by only 29 largely white, middle-class “married” students whose encampment served as a powerfully “symbolic act” in advocating for the poor. In contrast, the Chicago Sun-Times played on racial and class stereotypes to position unborn renewal activists of color as foreign infiltrators or brute rebels versus white students characterized as noble yet corrupted by the political radicalism of former gangs. The Sun-Times reported that more than 1000 seminary students were joined by LADO and the YLO, mixing cardboard and plywood shanties with tents and protest placards reading “Viva Che!” The newspaper reported that simultaneous protests occurred at DePaul University, where the student newspaper reported that on May 8, 1969 a group of black and white radical students led a sit-in in Dean Edwin Schillinger’s office as part of the Black Student Union strike before occupying the entire administration building “and then proceeded to invite the Blackstone Rangers, Young Lords, and Black Panthers into the building as their guests.”^[5]

The takeover became a key moment of coalitional organizing in the history of urban renewal in Lincoln Park, as well as an indicator of how the media portrayed working-class, protestors of color as inherently violent and irrational. While seminary students who had protested for many of the same demands two weeks earlier were met with praise, Seminary President Arthur McKay announced that he was requesting an injunction to remove foreign occupiers. Coverage of these protests in Lincoln Park often de-contextualized the issue of urban renewal, ignoring how the Young Lords, Black Panthers, and Young Comancheros worked with students, white anti-racist activists, and white religious officials in a multitude of coalitions that reflect how the resistance to urban renewal was cross-cultural. And newspapers erased how these direct actions were part of a growing resistance movement to years of institutionalized violence. When the LPCA board made no changes to the urban renewal plan, activists escalated their tactics to more permanent occupations.

[1] “Young Lords and Friends Shout, Disrupt Police Council Meeting,” Near North News vol. 13, no. 24 (February 15, 1969): p. 1, Folder “Young Lords – Newspaper Articles,” Box 81, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University.

[2] “People’s Demands,” The Movement (June 1969): p. 5. These demands would later become part of a Senate committee report on the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization and the subversive tactics and Communist ideologies of Puerto Rican self-determination groups. See Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, The Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization: A Staff Study (94^th Congress, 2d Session: March 1976): p. 22.

[3] United Press International, “National Guard Controls Berkeley Streets,” The Bakersfield Californian vol. 82, no 257 (May 18, 1969): p. 1.

[4] Ries quoted in Sam Washington, “1,000 in Protest Rally at Seminary,” Chicago Sun-Times (Wed., May 7, 1969): p. 34, in Folder “Newspaper Articles,” McCormick Theological Seminary Collection, Special Collections, DePaul University.

[5] James Hammonds, “‘Watch Out—A Revolution is on Its Way,” The DePaulia (May 29, 1969), Folder “Newspaper Articles, 1967-1969,” Box 15, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University.

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Poor People’s Park in Chicago

Kera Lovell, Ph.D.�@keralovell�Kera.lovell@utah.edu�www.keralovell.com

Despite a severe lack of financial support for tools and plants, and ongoing police harassment, Chicago park workers agreed that the diverse multitude of volunteers proved the project was a success. Park workers heralded their poverty as a form of authenticity and positioned the park as both a means of community-building and survival. Park workers heralded their poverty as a form of authenticity and positioned the park as both a means of community-building and survival. Vice Chairman of the Young Comancheros, “Cisco,” described how they were using his “old jalopy” as a tow truck to remove debris from the site. Poverty became a point of pride in their manual labor that they argued connected their bodies to the earth. “When you’re poor you work hard to get the things you want,” Cisco said. “We put our strength together…even if we have to pick the dirt up with our hands they won’t stop us.” Cisco described what the first showing of workers had felt like, seeing a couple hundred volunteers remove several tons of stone by forming three lines in a “bucket brigade.” The cross-cultural coalition of laborers sang the union anthem “Solidarity Forever” and other songs and chants to keep enthusiasm high. Hippies, Lords, Comancheros, Wobblies, and Patriots spent two hours passing bricks hand to hand to build a wall. The work was exhausting and frustrations ran high due to near-constant harassment by police, but Cisco felt resolved by the solidarity achieved through laboring together. “I had never seen a sense of community higher.”^[1]

[1] Studs Terkel, Interview, T3400 SCD., ca. 60 min. recording (ca. August 1969), in Studs Terkel Collection, Chicago History Museum.

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In closing - looking to contemporary organizing and representations of Latinx people in those park creations:

Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita, was a Venezuelan environmental activist and non-binary eco-anarchist ^[1]^[2] who was shot and killed by a Georgia State Patrol trooper after an altercation wounded an officer during a raid of the Stop Cop City encampment on January 18, 2023 (some believe the officer was wounded by friendly fire).^[3]^[4] At the time Terán was shot the family claims their hands were up, based on their recent independent autopsy results, which showed bullet exit wounds in both hands.^[5]^[6]^[7] The wounding initiated fire from police, killing Terán. The claim of friendly fire is disputed by the Atlanta Police Department, who claim Terán fired without warning.^[8]

A GBI report claims a loaded 9mm handgun Terán purchased in 2022 was the weapon that injured the trooper based on their forensic ballistic analysis.^[9] The details of the analysis have not been released publicly.

Terán was the first environmental activist to be killed by police in United States history.^[10] Protests and vigils were held in several cities in the United States and elsewhere in reaction to the shooting, including a riot in Atlanta on January 21, 2023.^[11]^[12]^[1] Many organizations and some members of Congress have condemned the killing and called for an independent investigation of the events.^[13]^[14]

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