This year is the 50th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium. For me, this local event marked the beginning of the Latino transformation of the American landscape. When it occurred, however, I was blissfully unaware of it. As I played in my backyard in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970, a Saturday, just a few blocks away the streets were ablaze. The day began with a 20,000-strong march against the compulsory conscription of young Mexican Americans into the U.S. Army, for service in the Vietnam War. The peaceful march ended at Laguna Park (now Ruben Salazar Park), with speeches and entertainment. But it was a short-lived day of celebration: Los Angeles County sheriffs brutally disbanded the gathering, and a riot broke out.
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The charred aftermath of the Chicano Moratorium marked the physical end of Anglo-dominated modernism in East L.A. The damage from the riots pushed the political agenda into a rebuilding phase. Artists, architects, activists and residents were all asking, in different ways: What might a new Chicano utopia look like? Because Chicanos had few financial resources for rebuilding, we relied on our instincts, crafting a series of provisional and permanent interventions.1
In contrast to L.A.’s tabula rasa of the modern city, the Chicano version of placemaking embraced its past. Chicano artists, architects, and residents transformed their visual and spatial landscape with a series of fine grained urban design interventions. East Los Angeles became the visual manifestation of Aztlan, the mythical region where the Aztecs are said to have originated from. Aztlan was scrawled on many walls alongside gang graffiti. Murals educated and celebrated the power and struggle of the community and were painted on the blank walls of the private and public buildings. ASCO, a group of Chicano artists based in East L.A., used ephemeral interventions, such as a dinner party in a traffic island, performative murals, and sidewalk parades down Whittier Boulevard to create identity through the use of public space.
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- 1. The Chicano way of thinking about space also derived from centuries of turbulent history. Like most Chicanos, my own being is heavily influenced by the indigenous past (according to DNA tests, I am 48% indigenous, 27% Spanish, and the rest is mixture, including African). Our deep indigenous roots connected us to the land and to each other, long before the Spanish arrived in 1492. When the Spanish arrived, they imposed a new way of city building based on their Law of the Indies, which for centuries regulated social, political, religious, and economic life. At the time of the conquest, the indigenous peoples could not speak Spanish; thus visual expression in the landscape became the language between the two groups, as well as with the slave populations. The Spanish used this civic communication to subjugate the indigenous people by razing their temples and building elaborate Catholic churches. And yet out of the cauldron of suppression came a new way of thinking about space derived from four centuries of mixing, adopting, and evolving. It represented our tortuous—and joyous—way of becoming American.
