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Ceremony Marks ‘A National Treasure in the Barrio’ Standing Tall at City Hall

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Photos and Story by Miguel Cid

On September 16th, City Hall’s Administration Building lobby doors opened and Barrio Logan’s 45 year old Chicano Park pillars, murals and all, stood tall on display— well, four foot tall replicas did, that is.

The pillars and artwork by members of the Barrio Logan community (names of artists and contributors below), part of “A National Treasure in the Barrio” art show, curated by Chicano Park muralist Victor Ochoa and co-curator Claudia Portillo, will be on display at City Hall until September 19th.

The replicas of the muralists’ work may be small in comparison to the pillars located in historic Chicano Park, but the artwork on display still holds the weight of the resistance to forces of the 60’s, 70’s, and prior to present—the fight and struggle to create a park—and the beauty of people coming together and forming a community with a new identity of the times—a Chicano identity.   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Lowrider Women: Carolina’s Hopper

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By Barbara Zaragoza / South Bay Compass

Two kinds of lowrider cars stand out: show cars and hoppers. Marisa Rosales and Jose Arevalo are good examples of lowriders who have worked for two decades to perfect their show cars.

Carolina Hernandez, on the other hand, is the lowrider with the hopper—a car whose front hood can bounce up in the air.

‘Hopping’ cars has been an art form since the 1960s. It wasn’t fully perfected, however, until the mid-1970s. Back in the day, they would put a beer can next to the car and if your car was able to hop higher than the beer can, you gained celebrity status among lowriders. Nowadays, when hoppers get together casually or at competitions such as Extreme Autofest, they can hop their cars up to eighty inches high.   [Read more…]

Freeps in the News: Jim Bliesner, Barbara Zaragoza, Jeeni Criscenzo

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By Anna Daniels

San Diego Free Press contributors are a diverse and talented group of individuals. It will be a busy weekend for three of them with the unveiling of Jim Bliesner‘s sculpture Cultural Fusion, Casa Familiar’s Abrazo Award for Barbara Zaragoza and An Evening of Provocative Poetry with Jeeni Criscenzo. These events follow upon last week’s screening of SDFP video- journalist Horacio Jones‘ short film “Wingin’ It” at the 48 Hour Film Project in San Diego.   [Read more…]

Anatomy Of A Lowrider: The Standards, The Art, The Technology

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To join a car club or win awards at car shows, every lowrider needs to adhere to strict standards. Standard #1: the car must be impeccably clean.

Jose Arevalo, born and raised in National City, explains the standards while giving me a tour of his car.

Arevalo is a member of the Switch Car Club, established in National City in 1980. “How switch came together was, six of us guys played baseball together down in Las Palmas here locally. As we turned fourteen or fifteen years old we started getting cars. The club right there, the Latin Lowriders, were older guys, so we kinda looked up to them. They are the kind of group of people who showed us standards. Things that you do. How to act. How to be correct. During the early mid-1980s, Switch flourished and grew to be from 6 guys to 36 guys. From the early 80s to the late 80s we were one of the top clubs in San Diego.”   [Read more…]

Lowriders Return To Highland Avenue in National City

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And the National City Mayor is joining them

By Barbara Zaragoza / Southbay Compass

After many decades of clashes with the city council and police department in National City, lowriders again take Highland Avenue by storm, this time packing the parking lot of Foodland Mercado on Highland Avenue for Taco Tuesdays to show off their hoppers and show cars.

On Tuesday, July 28th even the National City Mayor, Ron Morrison, attended. He strolled past the vintage cars and posed for a picture with lowriders from several different car clubs.

Mayor Morrison said, “This is like an art fair because these cars are more like art than anything else.”   [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles #7: Ten Moments in Places that No Longer Exist in Downtown San Diego

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The maps of our memories fray like fine gauze

By Jim Miller

We are where we are from. Place, our place or “home,” gives us a sense of rootedness and identity, but it is also transient, always moving and changing as we ride the river of time and space.

Some places are fundamentally grounded in a central idea of what “home” is, of what defines a locality—the people in such places hold fast, perhaps futilely, to some notion of what it means to be there.

Not us though, not here in San Diego where history and tradition outside of empty tourist spectacles are cast off like a snakeskin and our sense of place is transformed by the whims of boosters and marketing schemes, sometimes erasing whole communities in the service of civic marketing.   [Read more…]

Chicano Park in Barrio Logan

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Editor’s note: Welcome to our newest column, Progressive San Diego! We received an email from Dave, a reader in Liverpool, UK, who’s visiting San Diego later this year. He had one simple question: What are some progressive places to visit?

That got us thinking. There’s nothing really available online that’s broad and comprehensive with regard to San Diego’s progressive history and locales — a directory of sorts. We want to change that.

And so twice a month we will feature a person, place or thing that has done something to contribute to our important cause and culture. Given our time and resource restraints, each feature will be short and sweet, or pulled from other sites with permission. Please feel free to add information in the comments. We would love this to be organic and ever evolving.

This installment: Chicano Park in Barrio Logan   [Read more…]

SDFP Cartoonist Junco Canché to Have First Solo Exhibit of Work

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Artesano: The Political Cartoons of Junco Canché to be held Saturday in Barrio Logan

By Brent E. Beltrán

San Diego Free Press is always looking for contributors. Especially voices from outside the mainstream dominant culture. Some contribute one or two pieces. While others stick around for longer.

One such contributor brought fully into the Freep fold is Joaquin Junco, Jr. aka Junco Canché. Since May 19, 2014 he has contributed sixty editorial cartoons under the Junco’s Jabs moniker. His toons have taken jabs at a variety of local, national and international politicians, celebrities and evil-doers.

For the first time in his young life Junco will have a solo exhibition of his work. The exhibition takes place this Saturday, July 25 at Border X Brewing in Barrio Logan.   [Read more…]

Logan Library to Host Women of Color in Comics Panel

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An interview with panel moderator and comic book writer/publisher Regine Sawyer

By Brent E. Beltrán

Comic-Con is here and, as usual, Barrio Logan has been left out of the official fun stuff. But we don’t fret around here. We do things for ourselves, like Chicano-Con and MARVEL vs DC.

But there is also something else taking place in San Diego’s favorite barrio. On Sunday, July 12 from 12:30pm to 1:45pm there will be a panel discussion at the Logan Heights Library called Women of Color in Comics: Race, Gender & The Comic Book Medium.

The panel is free to all and will be moderated by Lockett Down Productions Publications owner Regine Sawyer. There will also be some free giveaways to audience members from the panelists as well as free superhero comics for kids and parents donated by an anonymous friend of mine.   [Read more…]

Ignored by Comic-Con Barrio Logan Creates Its Own

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By Brent E. Beltrán

Barrio Logan, located less than a mile from the convention center, has been mostly left out of Comic-Con over the years. Comic-Con International recently bought a building at 16th and National in Barrio Logan. Yet no official events are scheduled to take place here.

There’s not even a shuttle bus stop yet there will be Comic-Con buses running every twenty minutes down Cesar Chavez Parkway heading towards the freeway. And there will also be countless attendees using this community as a parking lot to escape the outrageous parking fees.

Yet no official activities take place here. No outreach has been done to incorporate a low income, mostly  Latino community impacted every year by Comic-Con. And that is unfortunate.   [Read more…]

Birds of Paradise Art Show at Te Mana Cafe

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For the remainder of June, local beach artist Micaela Porte is displaying her recent works – Birds of Paradise – at Te Mana Cafe in Ocean Beach, over at 4956 Voltaire Street.

The show has been running since the end of April. They’re open daily until 6 pm, closed Wednesdays.

Micaela told us that acrylic paint, some old canvases and bird of paradise heads from one of her neighbor’s yard inspired a binge of colorful paintings of bird of paradise flowers – which all harmonize with the aloha theme at the Te Mana garden cafe.   [Read more…]

7 billion Others : A Sea of Stories at the Museum of Photographic Arts

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By Nat Krieger

One hundred years ago movies were a new technology and folks were getting excited. Humans had been making images since there were humans but for the first time ever pictures could move, and laugh, and cry. The possibilities seemed so deliriously infinite that in 1908 Brazilian essayist João do Rio was moved to declare that, “in the future, the man of our era will be classified as the homo cinematographicus.”

Breakthrough technologies are never only children and the telephone, motion picture’s slightly older sister, was also inspiring some pretty high hopes. Writing in 1891, AT&T’s John J. Carty doffed his chief engineer’s cap and slipped into a prophet’s robe: “Someday we will build up a world telephone system, making necessary to all peoples the use of a common language or common understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the earth into one brotherhood. There will be heard throughout the earth a great voice coming out of the ether which will proclaim, ‘Peace on earth, good will towards men.'”   [Read more…]

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