Chicano Park: Murals on the Pylons That Displaced the Community
Near La Jolla, California
Stand under the Coronado Bridge here in Barrio Logan and look up at the concrete pylons. Every surface is painted. Serpents, eagles, Aztec figures, Cesar Chavez, revolutionary heroes, the history of Mexican and Chicano California rendered in murals that run from the ground to the curve of the bridge deck above. This is the largest collection of outdoor murals in the United States, and it is painted on the bridge that destroyed the community that painted it.
When the San Diego-Coronado Bridge was under construction in the late nineteen sixties, its on-ramps and approach structures drove through Barrio Logan, demolishing houses and severing streets in a Mexican American neighborhood that had been established here since the early twentieth century. Roughly five thousand residents were displaced. The community was promised a park on the land that would remain under the bridge, as partial acknowledgment of what had been taken.
The park was not delivered. On April twenty-second, nineteen seventy, residents learned that the land under the bridge had been designated for a California Highway Patrol substation. They arrived at the site that morning while bulldozers were already clearing brush, formed human chains around the machinery, and held their ground. They occupied the space for twelve days, and the city relented. Chicano Park was established on April twenty-second, nineteen seventy. The date became the community's founding day.
The murals came next, painted on the bridge pylons over the following years and decades. They are an answer to the infrastructure: the bridge that took the neighborhood's houses is now wearing the neighborhood's history. What the engineers built as purely functional, the on-ramps and the pylon bases and the underpass voids, became the canvas for one of the most sustained public art programs in California history.
The park was designated a National Historic Landmark in two thousand sixteen. The murals continue to grow. The bridge still stands above them.
