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Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center Coming to Barrio Logan

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Community Fundraiser Set for August 13 at Bread & Salt

The Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center is coming to Barrio Logan next door to Chicano Park. The City and museum have yet to sign a lease over the property that for years held the Cesar Chavez Continuing Education Center. But it will happen.

Activists involved with the Chicano Park Steering Committee created the nonprofit Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center. Board members include…

Chicano Park co-founder and lifelong CPSC member Josie Talamantez, who wrote the proposal to place Chicano Park’s Monumental Murals on the National Registry of Historic Sites and recently presented in Washington, DC before the National Landmark review committee (her proposal passed unanimously), is leading the charge to make the museum happen.   [Read more…]

Carlos and Linda LeGerrette: Abiding Commitment to Community Service

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Part II

In Part I the activist path of Linda and Carlos LeGerrette connected them with United Farm Worker efforts in Keene California in the early 70s. Part II provides more details about their work with César Chávez and the UFW, how the couple faced personal crises and their abiding commitment to community service here in San Diego.

César Chávez approached Carlos and Linda about going to La Paz, where he had moved the United Farm Workers’ headquarters in 1971 from Delano. “On 187 acres in the small Tehachapi mountain town of Keene, Chávez began building a community of fellow union members and volunteers who worked with him full time for social justice.”

La Paz was housed in a former tuberculosis sanatorium. Linda and Carlos’ room was in what had been the kitchen.   [Read more…]

General Dynamics, Once a San Diego Mainstay, Now Dearly Departed

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The following article appeared in the 1969 print edition of the San Diego Free Press. It has been transcribed from the microfilm at the San Diego Public Library.

As Frank Pace says in the Foreward to Dynamic America: A History of the General Dynamics Corporation by John Niven. “In 1960, ours is the most powerful of nations, intimately involved in all the earth’s daily business, the major bulwark against communism and so most threatened. From these times to the present, during our growth, from an insular agrarian society to the world’s political and industrial leader, the position of the United States in world politics has determined, almost exclusively, the flow of product research and development from General Dynamics.”   [Read more…]

Progressive Patriotism—Not an Oxymoron

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Much of our patriotic culture was created by people with decidedly progressive sympathies.

By Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks / AlterNet

July 4 is an occasion for Americans to express their patriotism. But the ways we do so are as diverse as our nation.

To some, patriotism means “my country—right or wrong.” To others, it means loyalty to a set of principles, and thus requires dissent and criticism when those in power violate those standards. One version of patriotism suggests “Love it or leave it.” The other version means “Love it and fix it.   [Read more…]

On the 140th Anniversary of Custer’s Well-Remembered Demise, Why Is California Genocide Forgotten?

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By Meteor Blades / Daily Kos

June 25th marked the 140th anniversary of the Little Big Horn Battle, known as Custer’s Last Stand to Americans at the time and ever afterward. Remembered as the Battle of the Greasy Grass among the Lakota (Sioux), Cheyenne and Arapahoe, it’s hard to overstate how much the 7th Cavalry’s defeat in the hills of Montana that June day in 1876 affected the nation then and how it has shaped and reshaped subsequent views of both Custer and American Indians.

In the past couple of weeks, there have already been a few published commentaries about the battle and its impacts, including this fascinating New York Times piece: A Real War Story, in Drawings. It looks at colored pencil pictographs of the battle drawn five years after it occurred by Red Horse, a Mniconjou Lakota.   [Read more…]

Carlos and Linda LeGerrette : Lives Forever Changed by Farm Worker Organizing

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Linda and Carlos LeGerrette are known in San Diego for their Chicano activism, particularly with farm workers. They started César Chávez clubs in San Diego and have been politically active for decades. They continue to be examples of what can be achieved when working together, not only in marriage but through a shared value system. Like many of us, they have had their share of life’s ups and downs. Both grew up poor but as Linda puts it they weren’t aware of that because everyone around them was also poor.   [Read more…]

Norma Hernandez: ‘Getting our Community Educated’

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The 1970s were a period of unrest in San Diego’s Barrio. Norma was taking Chicano Studies at San Diego State and meeting with MEChA. Norma adds that Chicano Studies had a lot of theory but they did not always have the opportunity to practice what they had learned. This changed rather quickly as she started picketing the National City Police Station about police brutality and the Safeway stores as part of the grape boycott.

This was also a time of student walk outs that began with the “blowouts” in East Los Angeles in 1968. These walk outs were precipitated by inferior and discriminatory education in public schools with a high percentage of Latino children. Student walk outs soon followed in San Diego.   [Read more…]

Much Ado About Raised Fists

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By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos

Black women have a long and often unrecognized history of serving in our military. But this tempest in a tea party pot is really not about the military, except for the fact that the armed forces are symbolic of our nation’s strength and have traditionally been a male domain and preserve. The criticism is simply part of a historical continuum that attempts to repress any and all expressions of black pride, and our solidarity and success against the odds.   [Read more…]

Engaged In Good Causes: Longtime War Criminal Inexplicably, Unconscionably Gets Not Jail Sentence But Award (WTF?)

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By Abby Zimet / CommonDreams

Having blithely orchestrated several genocides and the deaths of millions of brown-skinned innocents in the specious, imperial name of the right to bomb neutral countries in order to save them and maybe us – a right that America, despite our ongoing carnage, still claims – Henry Kissinger, our best and brightest war criminal, on Monday won the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Defense Department’s highest honor for private citizens.

In a stomach-roiling spectacle at the Pentagon wherein one discordantly unfit Nobel Peace Prize winner honors another, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called the former Secretary of State’s murderous service “unique in the annals of American diplomacy.” Kissinger, Carter said, “demonstrated how serious thinking and perspective can deliver solutions to seemingly intractable problems.”   [Read more…]

May Day: The Forgotten Celebration of America’s Labor Struggles

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By Brett Warnke

On the books, May 1st is officially Law Day, whose origins (like the holy portions of the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust”) came out of the Eisenhower Administration’s rhetorical battle against the Soviet Union. Of course, the silent smear was that radical workers lacked respect for a nation of laws. But for those with a sense of history May 1 is and shall be a day of observance for workers mourned after the bloody Haymarket Affair in 1886 which later became memorialized when strikers pushed for an eight-hour work day.

Is it so hard to imagine an era of endless work? Of plutocrats and bought government? Of a used, dispirited and duped population?   [Read more…]

Hippie Life In Ocean Beach

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Editor’s Note: Frank Gormlie will speak about “Hippies in OB” this Saturday, April 30th at the OB Library, from 2 to 3 pm.

OB as the Haight-Ashbury of San Diego

In my many writings about Ocean Beach history – some of which I share below – I’ve always noted that in the late 1960s, OB became the Haight-Ashbury of San Diego. By 1967 – a year after the OB Pier had officially opened – it was already evident that Ocean Beach was morphing into the San Diego equivalent of that fabled and iconic San Francisco neighborhood synonymous with “hippie-ism”. If you were a hippie or a hippie-wannabe during this time somewhere in San Diego, you ended up in OB.   [Read more…]

Treasury Will Put a Woman On the $20, But the New Bill Won’t Appear Until 2030 … Or Later

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By Meteor Blades / Daily Kos

An unnamed senior federal official told CNN Saturday that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will announce this week sometime that Alexander Hamilton will remain on a newly designed $10 bill but a woman will replace Andrew Jackson on the $20. Just don’t expect to see bills with whomever that replacement is pouring out of the nation’s ATMs anytime soon.

Newly designed $5 and $10 bills will show up first. Because of the lengthy design and anti-counterfeiting measures, if Hillary Clinton becomes president and serves two terms, she’ll be long out of office by the time a woman appears on the $20—in 2030 at the earliest, according to Treasury officials …   [Read more…]

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