After the Mexican Revolution,
Mexicans were brought into the United States to be part of the Bracero Program.
After working a cheap labor job, they would be sent back to Mexico. However,
more and more began staying in America. In the early to mid-20th
century, boosters proclaimed that the City of Los Angeles would become the next
best US city. This entailed, though, that the city would need to be
“de-Mexaicanized,” according to the boosters, while retaining some of the
Mexican culture. Mexicans were to be assigned a place in the allegorical part
of Los Angeles, where they could be controlled to a quaint section of a city
made for the enjoyment of tourists and antiquarians. Real Mexicans, and their
culture, were out of sight and out of mind, yet still close enough to provide
the cheap labor necessary for industry and agriculture. They were put in
barrios occupying the least amount of space possible using tactics such as
urban renewal and eminent domain by city elites who wanted to make LA a
successful tourist town. Areas formed, such as Olvera Street, where true
Mexicans are not seen but their culture is used to bring in tourists, which
still remains a popular attraction today. It came to be known as “A Mexican
Street of Yesterday in a City of Today (Bender).” If you look at pictures of
Olvera Street, you can see tons of people walking the street looking at
beautiful little shops filled with objects resembling Mexican culture (Chapman).
There are many other places like Olvera Street throughout California where
Latino people have been pushed away but still used for their culture. If people
knew what happened to Mexicans and other Latinos for this California tourist places
to arise, would they still be popular?
Latinos in Los Angeles, as well
as San Diego, did not have it easy. The Chicano Movement of the 1960s
was a civil rights movement extending the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement
with the goal of achieving Mexican American empowerment. Artists and activists
worked together to build a better community. Women especially felt as if they
were a minority in their own land, and often felt characterized by poverty,
racism, and sexism within their own culture. This led to a group of Chicana
women painting murals of women in Chicano Park. “We wanted to do something
about consciousness and women’s part in the revolution and movement,” one of
the women said (Perez). The Chicanos were being driven out of the area as
industrialization began to occur, and were being moved to smaller areas in
barrios. As San Diego continued to expand, the barrios were getting smaller and
smaller. Chicano Park was a symbol of empowerment, and through dedication the
Chicanos did, however, win a victory, as Chicano Park was extended 3 acres to
the waterfront (Barrera & Mulford).
Overall, as the Mexican and
Latino population grew in California, they quickly became unwanted and became
targets of discrimination and relocations that uprooted their families from
their homes in certain parts of California. They were forced to live in
polluted areas and crowded homes that often didn’t even have a toilet inside of
it. In addition, they have been discriminated against and categorized by their
race and culture for years and years, yet we still use their culture to attract
tourists to areas in California. In my opinion, knowing what Mexicans have
suffered through makes places like Olvera Street, where I would have once loved
to visit, much less appealing now knowing the hardships Mexicans faced for that
place to be what it is today. I am now much more likely to visit a place like
Chicano Park, where the murals and paintings have so much meaning and life
behind them, especially after the recent restoration (Perez). So much has been
done to drive Latinos out of the country- but through strong will,
perseverance, banding together, and standing up for themselves, and while still
facing discrimination now, they still take up over a third of the population of
California today.
Works Cited
Barrera,
M., & Mulford, M. (2013, December 19). Chicano Park Documentary. Retrieved
February 14, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXwZLo8hrp4
Bender,
S. (2010). Tierra y Libertad: Land, Liberty, and Latino Housing. New York:
New York University Press.
Chapman
University Program Board | Tags: Activities, Diversity & Equity,
Experiences. (n.d.). UPB Goes to Olvera Street! Retrieved February 14, 2017,
from https://blogs.chapman.edu/students/event-story/upb-goes-to-olvera-street/
Perez,
G. (2012, July 27). Women Hold Up Half of Chicano Park. Retrieved February 13,
2017, from
http://laprensa-sandiego.org/featured/women-hold-up-half-of-chicano-park/
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