Santa Ana’s first Chicano Heritage Festival celebrates city’s people, culture

There was a time when El Salvador Park was the place to be on a Sunday afternoon.

Santa Ana residents packed the park to meet friends, hear music, and check out the shiny low-riders that cruised by, all forming part of a vibrant Mexican scene in the city.

On Sunday, Aug. 28, Santa Ana is celebrating that heritage and its residents with a free community event billed as the first Chicano Heritage Festival put on by a city in California. The festival will feature live entertainment, a car show, arts and cultural exhibits, food trucks, and more, from noon to 8 p.m.

It will all take place at El Salvador Park, where the adjacent neighborhood has been home to generations of Mexican American families and saw a number of significant moments take place.

“We are highlighting and commemorating and acknowledging the residents who have contributed to this community,” said Councilman Johnathan Ryan Hernandez, who, along with Councilwoman Nelida Mendoza, helped organize the festival in the working-class Artesia Pilar neighborhood.

The celebration, funded by $50,000 from the city, follows a proclamation Hernandez and Mendoza introduced last year recognizing August as Chicano Heritage Month. Then, Rep. Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana, put forth a similar resolution in Congress in late July.

On Sunday, Correa will present his resolution, which was signed by various members of Congress.

“I’m almost brought to tears,” Correa said. “To have a resolution about Chicanos tells me that Santa Ana is recognizing the contributions of an activist Chicano movement from the 60s and 70s when a lot of people fought to be recognized, fought to be a part of the history of America.”

That includes people who fell through the cracks, Hernandez said. Not everyone has a successful story. And many in the neighborhood have had their share of hard times, he noted.

“What I’m looking forward to is celebrating our resiliency and the stories of redemption and triumph,” Hernandez said.

One such story is that of Nati Alvarado, Jr., a 61-year-old resident who grew up three houses away from the park and whose family history in the city dates back nearly a century.

Alvarado remembers a childhood where the park “was our backyard,” with Little League baseball games and a community center that saw Black and Latino kids playing together in peace. But by the time he was 15, he was a father and into drugs. It took years to turn his life around, he said, but Alvarado has since spent decades working with youth, attempting to break the cycle of poverty through his non-profit and as a pastor of a local church. One of his programs registered some 1,600 children for activities at the park this summer.

“It was a tough time, the 70s going into the 80s, with the violence and gangs. El Salvador Park had a very bad name, and I was a part of that in the 70s,” Alvarado said. “But there was a community of people who stuck together” and are “changing the story of El Salvador Park and our city in general,” he said.

Muralist Marina Aguilera said many Latino youths had nothing to do with gangs, but she said that’s not how police viewed them at the time.

“If you were Latino, and you dressed a certain way, they thought you were a gang banger,” Aguilera said.

She was part of a group called “Buena Gente,” or “Good People,” that worked with young people to “change the stereotypical and negative stigma surrounding Chicano youth and bring positivity to the Chicano culture.”

Aguilera also spoke of the low-rider culture in Santa Ana, where car clubs are still popular, as well as the dozens of murals depicting Mexican life that were once seen across the city but got painted over by city workers. That includes her own works, such as a piece now gone that depicted two ’57 Chevys at El Salvador Park.

“The city covered them up. I feel like the hierarchy tried to erase the Chicano culture,” said Aguilera, who goes by the name “La Artista Marina Aguilera” and is believed to be the first woman muralist in Santa Ana.

Another mural that’s been painted over at the park, done by Aguilera and a group of artists, is beginning to peek through as the edges of the newer paint are peeling off. That mural depicted “the story of how the Latino community has been treated.” One section shows farmers picking strawberries. Another pictured men “doing construction and building the city.” And another showed “immigration and police throwing you in jail if you were brown,” she said.

“It was depicting (a) life that many were living at the time,” she said, arguing her mural is “screaming to come out” at El Salvador Park.

Through the years, the park has seen a number of significant historical moments, according to resident Manny Escamilla, who is working on a book about the city’s history.

— In January 1971, the park was part of a three-day march and protests outside police stations with more than 150 Chicano high school and college-aged students protesting against the Vietnam War.

— In June 1972, several hundred Black and Latino students rallied at El Salvador Park to demand changes in schools, including a mandatory ethnic studies program.

— In October 1972, farm worker leader Cesar Chavez met with residents at El Salvador Park to speak against a proposition that would have prohibited labor strikes and boycotts.

— In the summer of 1992, about 500 Latino gang members from across the county met at the park to codify a truce that reduced drive-by shootings in the city.

Hernandez said residents also were involved in the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War, when on Aug. 29, 1970, Los Angeles Times reporter and Santa Ana resident Ruben Salazar was killed by a tear-gas projectile fired by a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy. Hernandez would like to see Santa Ana honor Salazar, the first Mexican-American journalist in mainstream media to cover the community, by officially recognizing his former home.

“We’ve always taken pride knowing (Salazar) had roots here,” Hernandez said. “This history helped me as a kid. I want to accentuate these stories so people can take pride in where they come from.”

For long-time residents, the festival celebrating the Chicano culture is a new source of pride.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Aguilera, the muralist whose family dates back to the early 1900s in Santa Ana.

Mendoza, the councilwoman who worked to bring the festival to Santa Ana, said the inaugural event, which she hopes will become annual, is an important way to celebrate Chicano culture and the community in general.

“We want to relay a message that the city of Santa Ana truly values all our residents,” she said.

Meanwhile, Alvarado, who grew up three doors down from the park, is readying for the fest.

“For us to be able to have the first Chicano Festival at El Salvador Park means a lot to me and my friends who up in the community in the ’60s and ’70s,” he said. “Back then, it was the place to cruise on a Sunday afternoon. It was packed.”

Come Sunday morning, Alvarado will be there — with his 1969 El Camino on display.

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