History Keepers: Eleven Stories that Moved Los Angeles

For more than two hundred years, our community, our Los Angeles, has been molded and shaped by its people. In small ways and big, individuals impact the city, inching us collectively one way and then another. This exhibition tells eleven compelling stories that are part of our city’s complex fabric. Some are stories of promise, others are of despair.

The Sunset Limited

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Union Station Historical Society 

           Garden Court Apartments, Front Entrance, 1976 

 Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

Two of them aren’t specifically about people. One is about a train with staying power, and another is about a building that despite a promising pedigree came to a violent end. But they still have something to teach us about both loss and endurance. 

Special issue of La Raza, September 3, 1970, with cover photographs by Raul Ruiz of the Silver Dollar bar where Ruben Salazar was killed

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Records on the Homicide Investigation of Ruben Salazar, USC Libraries, Special Collections                                         

The objects on view come from university libraries, museums, and nonprofit organizations. We invited caretakers of these collections to bring forward objects and share with us the histories that they illuminate. The librarians, historians, archivists, collectors, volunteers, and local citizens who maintain these collections are the keepers of our history. They devotedly research, organize, store, and repair these items and make them available to the public in person, online, in exhibitions, and through publications.

In the retelling, these stories that have shaped our city move us emotionally in the present, helping us to understand how we got to where we are, and perhaps better see where we are going. Should we ever forget or lose sight of our past, we need only return to these primary source materials to once again illuminate our history.

Courtesy of UCLA Library Special Collections

Ruth Strout McCandless with Nyogen Senzaki

History Keepers: Eleven Stories that moved Los Angeles

August 4, 2017 – October 1, 2017

El Tranquilo Gallery & Visitor Center Olvera Street

El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument

Tuesday-Friday 10am- 3pm Saturday/Sunday 9am-4pm
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