Chicano Park - Controversy

Controversy

Since its inception, Chicano Park has been a source of controversy. There have been disputes within the community about who decides who gets to paint the murals, what imagery should be represented, who is responsible for the restoration of the murals, etc. But conflicts between the community artists and city and state officials have been much greater. Conflicts have also arisen between defenders of the park and neighboring Anglo-American communities.

• In 1979, a San Diego Grand jury investigation forced the Chicano Federation to vacate the park building.
• A demand for a kiosk, called the Chicano Park kiosko and based on traditional community centers in Mexican villages, was fulfilled in 1977, but only after a great deal of bureaucratic wrangling and disputes over the style of architecture to be used. Councilman Jess Haro wanted the architecture to be in the Spanish style, while the barrio residents wanted an indigenous style of architecture. The community won out, and today the kiosko resembles a Mayan temple.
• Barrios Sí, Yonkes No. An effort to have the barrio re-zoned as (only) residential provoked the ire of the neighborhood junk dealers, who vandalized the murals, especially the "Barrio Sí, Yonkes No" mural created to commemorate the effort.
• In the mid-1990s, Caltrans decided to retrofit the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge to make it earthquake safe. Fearing that the murals would be damaged or destroyed, the community mobilized to stop the project to protect the murals from what they viewed as official insensitivity to the history and culture the murals represented. Eventually, a compromise was reached whereby the murals would be boarded over with plywood to protect their surfaces from damage during the retrofitting process, and would be restored to their previous condition afterward.
• A 2003 plan to renovate the park was stalled when Caltrans objected to the word "Aztlán", which for years had been spelled out in rocks on the park's grounds. Calling the term "militant", they claimed that using federal funding for the project would violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by showing preference to Mexicans and Mexican Americans. However, Caltrans district director Pedro Orso, after consultations with civil rights experts from within the agency and from the Federal Highway Administration, decided that the word did not violate the law, and the $600,000 grant was allowed to go through.
• There are communist motifs scattered throughout several of the murals, including portraits of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and references to Salvador Allende, and Ho Chi Minh (as "Tio Ho" a take on his Vietnamese nickname, "Bac Ho" which means "Uncle Ho").