San Diego

Barrio Logan sits at the northwest corner of San Diego Bay, wedged between the working port and the Coronado Bridge. Mexican Revolution refugees began settling Logan Heights in 1910, and by the 1930s the neighborhood supported a tuna-canning industry that employed Italian, Mexican, Japanese, and Portuguese workers side by side along the waterfront from 16th to 28th Streets. The community lost bay access during World War II when the Navy expanded Naval Station San Diego onto the southern shoreline.

The two postwar infrastructure projects that remade the neighborhood arrived without community consent. In 1963, Interstate 5 construction bisected the neighborhood, demolishing an estimated 5,000 residences and businesses and creating the physical split between Barrio Logan, west of the freeway, and Logan Heights, east of it. Six years later, the Coronado Bridge opened, its approach ramps physically dominating the blocks directly beneath the pylons and displacing approximately 1,500 additional families. The state had agreed to lease the 1.8 acres beneath the pylons for a community park. In April 1970, the state prepared that site for a California Highway Patrol substation instead.

What the state built was stopped before a foundation was poured. On April 22, 1970, community members, Brown Berets, MEChA students, and Chicano Studies instructors surrounded the bulldozers and held the site for twelve days. The City of San Diego ultimately acquired the 1.8 acres and transferred it to the community as Chicano Park. Beginning in 1973, artists painted murals on the bridge pylons, and the mural campaign continued for decades. In December 2016, the Secretary of the Interior designated Chicano Park a National Historic Landmark. The Chicano Park Steering Committee, not the city, holds the lease.

The essay under this city documents the destruction that preceded the takeover, the twelve days that changed the outcome, and the organizing models the Barrio Logan community built over the fifty years that followed.