San Diego, CA – On April 20, thousands of people descended on Chicano Park, located in the Barrio Logan neighborhood of San Diego, California. The scene was lively, with vendors selling food and refreshments and music playing throughout the park. The colorful murals were complemented by a variety of low riders and customized vehicles.

The historical and cultural significance of Chicano Park dates to April 22, 1970. For years, the community of Barrio Logan wanted a park built for its families. During the construction of the Interstate 5 freeway, the community rallied and fought back. The city, in exchange, was forced to grant the space underneath the bridge to build the park. But the project lay dormant for years until a community member noticed construction was taking place and realized it was for a California Highway Patrol station. Once again, the community fought against this and won. The city later approved the park to be built.

In 1970, the Chicano Park Steering Committee was founded. From that point on, local artists began to paint the pillars that held up Coronado Bridge with murals showcasing Chicano history and Chicano pride. Over the years several key figures of the community have upheld the quality of the Chicano Park.

The community has kept the park from being taken over by the city of San Diego. In the 1980s, the park was deemed a historical landmark by the San Diego Site Board. Its detailed murals were also officially recognized by the San Diego Public Advisory Board. Finally in 2013, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places due to its significance to the Chicano movement. Additionally, a museum and a cultural center were established after the park’s being designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016.

Today, thousands have come to celebrate Chicano Park Day. The official day, April 22, is celebrated by the Chicano people by putting on live music, dances, ceremonies and lowrider car displays. Rain Mendoza, member of Orange County CSO, exclaimed, “This year’s Chicano Park Day was filled with cultural pride, with hundreds of Chicanos showing up in brown pride attire, sharing images of Aztlán, and congregating to celebrate the accomplishments of La Raza!”

Aztlán is commonly referred to as the territory of the Chicano nation. It is the Mexican territory that became the U.S. after the signing of the February 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Since 1848, a shared connection among the Chicano people within this area continues to grow and is evident, especially during events like Chicano Park Day.

As those in the festivities put it simply, Chicano Park is an achievement of decades of constant struggle against Chicanos oppressors. Its murals are displayed around the park, featuring Aztlán as a nation with a rich culture and history. Chicano Park stands as a place for its people to learn and cultivate their history for future generations to come.

#SanDiegoCA #Aztlan #ChicanoPark #ChicanoPride #Chicano #LaRaza #BarrioLogan #ChicanoParkDay

San Diego, CA – On April 3, a group of activists from the Legalization For All Network hiked along the U.S. Border State Park Trail and toward Friendship Park. This park was created so that people on opposite sides of the U.S.-Mexico border could meet. In the past, families have used the site to touch and slip gifts to one another, but with the new Trump Wall, they won’t even be able to see each other.

The activists traveled dry and rugged, then wet and muddy, terrain that at times resembled quicksand. In some instances, the park trail would abruptly stop due to flooding from rainfall days before. However, the group was able to continue onward despite these obstacles by traversing through a stretch of greenery beside the trail.

About a mile later the group was met by two large border walls standing between them and the park. The walls run parallel to one another and could be seen spanning from the top of the hills in the distance down to the nearby coast. The group’s shoes and clothes were either drenched or covered in mud, giving the activists a glimpse of the extremely treacherous conditions immigrants crossing the border face consistently.

The fact that there are two walls means that people who are successful in crossing one are met by yet another. Those unable to make it past the second become stuck between the walls for hours – and sometimes days – without food or water. Border patrol does nothing to rescue them. Instead, they watch as the lives of men, women and newly-born children are in limbo. Oftentimes, it’s the people from the nearby communities who bring them resources that keep them alive.

As militarization of the border increases, onlookers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border watch as the already hostile terrain becomes even more deadly. The activists witnessed loud helicopters flying overhead and ICE agents driving up and down the hills alongside the border. Somewhat less visible but ever still present is a combination of tower systems, ground sensors, radars, license plate readers and drone cameras.

There are currently more than 290 surveillance towers already in operation throughout the Southwest – one of which is located near Friendship Park. This tower was built by Anduril, which declares on its website: “The battlefield has changed. How we deter and defend needs to change too.” The company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying federal officials, according to the Guardian, and in a promotional video boasts that its technology never sleeps, never takes a break, never blinks.

Altogether, this technology is a testament to the ugly reality that the U.S. government would rather spend billions of dollars to put immigrants down than grant them their humanity. The increased militarization of the border in 2023 stands in stark contradiction to the calls for people’s freedom, in particular, those people living in the most heavily militarized area of the country, Aztlán.

#SanDiegoCA #LegalizationForAllNetworkL4A

San Diego, CA – On April 2, part of the Legalization for All Network’s border delegation spent the day in San Diego, the city on the U.S. side of the border across from Tijuana, México.

The group of immigrant rights activists from Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Chicago and Minnesota spent the day in San Diego’s Barrio Logan neighborhood.

They started with a tour of Chicano Park at the heart of the neighborhood, and then did a walkthrough of the surrounding neighborhood.

As a border city on land that was part of Mexico until 1848, until the U.S.’s theft of the states that are now the southwestern part of the U.S., parts of San Diego are strongly marked by Chicano culture.

Robert Vivar, bi-national coordinator at Via international, and Rigo Reyes, community development director at Via Migrante, explained the history of Chicano Park to the group, a park that is now an officially recognized federal historical landmark.

In the park there is a series of massive murals telling the history of the struggle of the Chicano people who were forged as a people in the struggle against colonization, national oppression, brutality from police and ICE, and exploitation.

53 years ago in 1970, Chicano community activists occupied and then took control over Chicano Park to have a community-controlled space to tell their story and organize activities in their community, which was being threatened with high levels of pollution from the highway passing over it as well as polluting industries, including military contractors, and gentrification.

The massive colorful murals in the park are painted on the large pillars that hold up the highway overpasses that go over the park, bringing life to an area that would otherwise be drab and forgotten.

The 1970 community takeover had to fight against both the city of San Diego and the state of California for control of the park, as the state wanted to use the space under the highway for a Highway Patrol station. After winning control of the space through militant struggle, a Chicano Park Steering Committee was formed, which controls the park to this day. The building at the edge of the park hosts a Chicano Park museum.

Every April, members of the community organize Chicano Park Day commemoration of the April 22, 1970 takeover of the park. They also hold many community events in the park.

The day that the border delegation visited, there was a large Palm Sunday ceremony as well as a lowrider car and bike show. There were also posters around the park advertising the upcoming May 1 International Workers Day march.

After learning about the history of the park and the meaning of many of the images depicted in the murals, the delegation got a block-by-block tour through Barrio Logan with Chicano Park Steering Committee member Lucas Cruz.

He explained the struggle to preserve Chicano culture, identity and political consciousness in the neighborhood. This includes struggles against gentrification, rent gouging and businesses that want to move into the neighborhood while either erasing the Chicano character of the neighborhood or co-opting Chicano culture opportunistically without a connection to the Chicano community or movement. It also includes struggles to prevent police brutality and over-policing of Chicano youth, and struggling with some business owners to not default to calling the police into the community for every problem they encounter.

Cruz talked to the group about the history of the Chicano people while describing one of the murals in Chicano Park. The Chicano people were forged into a nationality in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Mexico and then the imposed Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The people in the states that the U.S. seized in 1848 that currently are the southwestern states of the U.S., began to live a different reality than both Mexicans in México and people in the rest of the United States. The awakening of the Chicano liberation movement in the late 1960s led to the Plan Spiritual de Aztlan that identified the land base of the Chicano liberation struggle as the territory seized by the U.S. in 1848 and the struggle as one for self-determination on that land, named Aztlan.

This Chicano national consciousness can be seen in distinctive features of Chicano culture and language that continue to this day as well as with the persistence of Chicano organizations such as MEChA, Brown Berets, among others.

After the neighborhood tour with Cruz, the delegation met with two leaders of Aztlan Youth, a Chicano organization based in Barrio Logan. They heard from two women leaders of Aztlan Youth, Rocky and Briana. They talked about the struggles young Chicanos are engaged in in Barrio Logan, like the struggle against the effects of environmental racism including the high rates of asthma and other medical conditions in the community due to the decades of corporate and government decisions to pollute their neighborhood. They talked about the continual struggle to make sure young Chicanos learn their culture, history and identity, since those things aren’t usually taught in schools.

After meeting with Aztlan Youth, the delegation got to visit the Tommie Camarillo Collection, a meticulously-maintained archive of posters, buttons, newspapers, photos, videos, music and other materials going back more than 50 years documenting the history of the Chicano liberation movement with a strong focus on the history of the struggle over Chicano Park.

The day as a whole gave the participants in the border delegation a grounding in the struggles of the Chicano community in the border town of San Diego, and a deeper understanding of the basis of modern-day anti-immigrant politics in the history of oppression and theft of land from Mexico and the forging of the Chicano people in the borderlands and the Southwest.

#SanDiegoCA #immigrantRights #USMexicoBorder #LegalizationForAllNetworkL4A

San Diego, CA – On April 2, part of the Legalization for All Network’s border delegation spent the day in San Diego, the city on the U.S. side of the border across from Tijuana, México.

The group of immigrant rights activists from Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Chicago and Minnesota spent the day in San Diego’s Barrio Logan neighborhood.

They started with a tour of Chicano Park at the heart of the neighborhood, and then did a walkthrough of the surrounding neighborhood.

As a border city on land that was part of Mexico until 1848, until the U.S.’s theft of the states that are now the southwestern part of the U.S., parts of San Diego are strongly marked by Chicano culture.

Robert Vivar, bi-national coordinator at Via international, and Rigo Reyes, community development director at Via Migrante, explained the history of Chicano Park to the group, a park that is now an officially recognized federal historical landmark.

In the park there is a series of massive murals telling the history of the struggle of the Chicano people who were forged as a people in the struggle against colonization, national oppression, brutality from police and ICE, and exploitation.

53 years ago in 1970, Chicano community activists occupied and then took control over Chicano Park to have a community-controlled space to tell their story and organize activities in their community, which was being threatened with high levels of pollution from the highway passing over it as well as polluting industries, including military contractors, and gentrification.

The massive colorful murals in the park are painted on the large pillars that hold up the highway overpasses that go over the park, bringing life to an area that would otherwise be drab and forgotten.

The 1970 community takeover had to fight against both the city of San Diego and the state of California for control of the park, as the state wanted to use the space under the highway for a Highway Patrol station. After winning control of the space through militant struggle, a Chicano Park Steering Committee was formed, which controls the park to this day. The building at the edge of the park hosts a Chicano Park museum.

Every April, members of the community organize Chicano Park Day commemoration of the April 22, 1970 takeover of the park. They also hold many community events in the park.

The day that the border delegation visited, there was a large Palm Sunday ceremony as well as a lowrider car and bike show. There were also posters around the park advertising the upcoming May 1 International Workers Day march.

After learning about the history of the park and the meaning of many of the images depicted in the murals, the delegation got a block-by-block tour through Barrio Logan with Chicano Park Steering Committee member Lucas Cruz.

He explained the struggle to preserve Chicano culture, identity and political consciousness in the neighborhood. This includes struggles against gentrification, rent gouging and businesses that want to move into the neighborhood while either erasing the Chicano character of the neighborhood or co-opting Chicano culture opportunistically without a connection to the Chicano community or movement. It also includes struggles to prevent police brutality and over-policing of Chicano youth, and struggling with some business owners to not default to calling the police into the community for every problem they encounter.

Cruz talked to the group about the history of the Chicano people while describing one of the murals in Chicano Park. The Chicano people were forged into a nationality in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Mexico and then the imposed Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The people in the states that the U.S. seized in 1848 that currently are the southwestern states of the U.S., began to live a different reality than both Mexicans in México and people in the rest of the United States. The awakening of the Chicano liberation movement in the late 1960s led to the Plan Spiritual de Aztlan that identified the land base of the Chicano liberation struggle as the territory seized by the U.S. in 1848 and the struggle as one for self-determination on that land, named Aztlan.

This Chicano national consciousness can be seen in distinctive features of Chicano culture and language that continue to this day as well as with the persistence of Chicano organizations such as MEChA, Brown Berets, among others.

After the neighborhood tour with Cruz, the delegation met with two leaders of Aztlan Youth, a Chicano organization based in Barrio Logan. They heard from two women leaders of Aztlan Youth, Rocky and Briana. They talked about the struggles young Chicanos are engaged in in Barrio Logan, like the struggle against the effects of environmental racism including the high rates of asthma and other medical conditions in the community due to the decades of corporate and government decisions to pollute their neighborhood. They talked about the continual struggle to make sure young Chicanos learn their culture, history and identity, since those things aren’t usually taught in schools.

After meeting with Aztlan Youth, the delegation got to visit the Tommie Camarillo Collection, a meticulously-maintained archive of posters, buttons, newspapers, photos, videos, music and other materials going back more than 50 years documenting the history of the Chicano liberation movement with a strong focus on the history of the struggle over Chicano Park.

The day as a whole gave the participants in the border delegation a grounding in the struggles of the Chicano community in the border town of San Diego, and a deeper understanding of the basis of modern-day anti-immigrant politics in the history of oppression and theft of land from Mexico and the forging of the Chicano people in the borderlands and the Southwest.

#SanDiegoCA #immigrantRights #USMexicoBorder #LegalizationForAllNetworkL4A

San Diego, CA – About 800 protesters rallied and marched, July 2, to demand the abolition and defunding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE is a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notorious for harassing and terrorizing immigrants, refugees and the Chicano community. Due to its proximity to the border with Mexico, San Diego has been a focal point for the immigrant rights movement, the struggle against ICE, and now the Trump administration’s vicious separation of families policy.

Protesters began the rally with speeches in the famous landmark, Chicano Park, then marched several miles through the city streets to the U.S. Federal District Court building in downtown San Diego. During a brief stop at the Westin Hotel in Horton Plaza, several protesters rappelled down from the roof of the building to drop an enormous banner that read, “Free our families now!” During the march, protesters chants rang out, “This is for the people who are locked inside! Together we can abolish ICE,” and, “Money for health and education! Not for wars and deportation,” and “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” Upon arrival at the court building, about 20 protesters locked arms in act of civil disobedience, blocking the entrance. Ten were eventually arrested.

This day was chosen as a major day of resistance as the Trump administration plans to ramp up raids and separations.

#SanDiegoCA #AbolishICE

San Diego, CA – People assembled across the globe, May 20, to protest the corporate chemical behemoth Monsanto. These demonstrations are an annual event, facilitated by the organization March Against Monsanto, and organized at the grassroots level by concerned people. One such local protest was in sunny Temecula, California, known for its own booming small farming sector. People from San Diego and Riverside counties came together in 90-degree heat to show their discontent with the industrial agribusiness giant.

“Monsanto is putting small farmers out of business,” said Gary Lotspeich, a demonstrator who is also a former budget officer for the California Department of Water Resources. He was referring to Monsanto’s prohibition on seed saving. The seed saving ban forces farmers to buy new seeds each season because of the patent on genetically modified crops.

“Yeah, small farmers are struggling anyway,” added Hanna Alfaddaghi, a Cal-Poly Pomona student in the agricultural studies program. “Monsanto sends employees out to test farmers’ seeds for their patented genes and sue them out of business.”

In fact, Monsanto collected $23 million from small farmers for patent infringement by 2014. Farmers were forced to pay an average of $412,000, even if the infringement was the result of natural cross-pollination carried by insects and wind.

Monsanto is most infamous for the toxic chemical Agent Orange, used to defoliate large swaths of forest during the Vietnam War. The corporation was caught falsifying data on the amounts of toxic ingredients in Agent Orange, including PCB and dioxin. Yet Vietnam veterans overwhelmingly report devastating side effects from exposure to the chemical and many Vietnamese are still suffering from residual effects to this day, including many birth defects.

Monsanto was part of chemical warfare again under the U.S. Plan Colombia. U.S. military contractors flew over and sprayed Monsanto’s Roundup Ultra on poor peasants’ crops in Colombia, as part of the U.S. dirty war. Poor peasants were forced to abandon their land as the U.S. sprayed in areas under the control of FARC rebels, while wealthy landowners were largely untouched.

Monsanto is also an example of the revolving door between private industry and the U.S. government. Monsanto employees take jobs at the FDA and EPA, setting policy in the company’s favor regarding genetic modification and acceptable levels of toxicity. Under George W. Bush, Monsanto associates filled the office of Attorney General, Secretaries of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, and even Defense. One can only speculate as to how much data on the harmful effects of its toxic products like Roundup Ultra is concealed through such conflicts of interest.

Monsanto is monopolizing the seed and pesticide markets through its patents on genetically modified commercial crops. This not only impacts domestic farmers, but also overseas in India, Asia and South America. Monsanto will certainly be the subject of further public actions and demonstrations because of these destructive practices.

#SanDiegoCA #PeoplesStruggles #Protest #EnvironmentalJustice #Monsanto

During the course of the trial, members of the Somali community packed the court room to support the men. One of the defendants, Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, is a well known religious leader.

The government’s case relied on its interpretations of wiretaps and attempts to inflame the jury.

At issue is the fact that many in the community strongly opposed the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia and attempts to install a Western-backed puppet government. The indictment of the four men explicitly equates fighting the Ethiopian invasion with terrorism.

This case is the latest of many targeting Somali immigrants who are working to help their homeland.

#SanDiegoCalifornia #SanDiegoCA #politicalRepression #Somalia #materialSupport #Africa

At issue was the accusation that Yusuf helped out friends in Somalia, who were also said to be members of al-Shabab.

The courtroom was packed with family, friends and supporters when Judge Barry Ted Moskowitz handed down the sentence.

A statement from Yusef’s defense committee refers to her as a hero and notes, “Nimo Yusuf is a daughter with great heart. She will go beyond her ability to help others. She is highly beloved in the Somali Community. She has touched the lives of so many of us here in the twin cities. She translated, provided transportation, cared for the sick and the widows. She loved her faith and followed its commandments of giving, helping, and caring. She carried the burden of others, solved their problems, counseled the youth, cried and cared for many of us who are struggling and adjusting to the new life in America.”

The FBI made use of wiretaps against Yusuf and, according to court records, intercepted and recorded 35,000 calls made by her.

Mick Kelly, of the Committee to Stop Repression, states, “A good person who did good things is being sent to prison for a very long time. The government wants to criminalize people who support a Somalia that is independent of foreign domination. She should be released at once.”

#SanDiegoCA #PoliticalPrisoner #PoliticalPrisoners #CommitteeToStopFBIRepression #politicalRepression #alShabab #InjusticeSystem #NimaAliYusuf