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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This Day in History August 29: National Chicano Moratorium

Willie Herron and Gronk, Moratorium—The Black and White Mural, 1973

Courtesy of Nancy Tovar Murals of East Los Angeles Slide Collection

Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles

Forty-six years ago today, a rally to protest the Vietnam War turned deadly. Sponsored by the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, an antiwar activist group, the Chicano Moratorium march in Los Angeles drew up to 30,000 people eager to give their voice to the war’s injustices. Community members, families, artists, and students marched through East Los Angeles from Belvedere Park to what was then called Laguna Park.

During the rally, stores burned, over 100 people were arrested, many were injured, and four people were killed, including the prominent Chicano Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar.

The moratorium has been considered the largest anti-Vietnam War demonstration by a minority group and the largest demonstration of the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. And while the moratorium resulted in loss of life, it also gave birth to continued expression of Latino political power, including a murals movement that still resonates today.

Below we look at images of the Chicano Moratorium and examples of Chicano murals that were created in its wake.

Sal Castro (Photographer), Chicano Moratorium March, 1970

Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library, Security Pacific National Bank Collection

Sal Castro (Photographer), National Chicano Moratorium, 1970

Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library, Security Pacific National Bank Collection

Rioting Following Chicano Moratorium Committee Antiwar Protest, 1970

Courtesy of Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Department of Special Collections,

Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA

Guy Goodenow (Photographer), Harbor College Mural, 1973

Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection

 David Botello’s Dreams of Flight at Estrada Courts, East Los Angeles, 1973–78

Courtesy of UCLA Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies http://publicartla.blogspot.com/2014/07/week-4-estrada-courts_6248.html

El Congresso de Artists Cosmicos de las Americas de San Diego’s We Are Not a Minority at Estrada Courts, East Los Angeles, 1978

Courtesy of Los Angeles Conservancy; photo by Adrian Scott Fine

Shelly Kale

Publications and Strategic Initiatives Manager

skale@calhist.org

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Together with LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles, the California Historical Society is developing an exhibition and related publication about contested Chicano Murals, part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA project sponsored by the Getty and Bank of America.

September 4, 2017 - January 29, 2018

¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art

LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes
501 North Main Street
Los Angeles, California