Chicano Park Steering Committee

Chicano Park occupies the land beneath the San Diego-Coronado Bridge interchange in Barrio Logan, the Mexican-American neighborhood that the bridge and Interstate 5 construction had already divided and partially displaced through the 1960s. On April 22, 1970, community members occupied the cleared site under the bridge’s on-ramps after learning that the California Highway Patrol intended to build a substation there rather than the park the city had promised as mitigation for freeway construction. The occupation held, and the city ultimately conveyed the land to the community for a park.

The Chicano Park Steering Committee organized to govern the park and to oversee the mural program that community artists began painting on the bridge pillars in 1973. The murals, which depict Mexican, Chicano, and Mesoamerican history and culture, now number more than 80 and cover most of the bridge support columns visible from the park. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Committee’s forty-plus years of stewardship connect Barrio Logan’s displacement history to the broader pattern of freeway and infrastructure clearances through Mexican-American and African-American neighborhoods that this atlas documents across multiple cities. Barrio Logan’s experience, like Chávez Ravine’s, demonstrates that a community whose land was taken for public infrastructure can organize, without waiting for government action, to claim and steward a replacement public resource on the same cleared ground.