Chicano Park

Chicano Park sits beneath the Coronado Bridge in San Diego, established after protesters led by the Brown Berets occupied the site in the early 1970s when the construction of I-5 and the bridge had divided the surrounding Chicano community. The first murals were painted in the early 1970s by Los Toltecas en Aztlan and El Congreso de Artistas Chicanos en Aztlan, and a Mural Marathon from April 1 to April 22, 1978, added approximately 10,000 square feet of painted surfaces. The park was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 23, 2013, and designated a National Historic Landmark in December 2016. The Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center, which opened on October 8, 2022, hosts exhibitions such as "PILLARS: Stories of Resilience and Self-Determination."

Beneath the Interstate 5 and Coronado Bridge overpasses in San Diego's Barrio Logan, the concrete pillars left after the Coronado Bridge's 1969 completion have been transformed by local artists into dense clusters of vividly colored murals depicting the Mexican immigrant experience. The park originated on April 22, 1970, when student Mario Solis discovered construction crews planning a Highway Patrol station under the bridge, sparking a 12-day community occupation that halted the work. The bordering street is now Chicano Park Boulevard, and 18 of the murals received a state-funded restoration completed in August 2012.

Chicano Park sits beneath the Interstate 5 and Bay Bridge interchange in Barrio Logan, where a twelve-day community occupation in April 1970 pressured the city into developing the land as a park. The defining landmark is the Kiosko, constructed between 1972 and dedicated in 1977, surrounded by dozens of murals painted on the freeway support pylons, a vision first proposed by Salvador Torres, a longtime resident whose family home was lost to freeway construction. The murals honor a long cultural lineage reaching back to the Aztecs and have made the site known as a liberated zone of reclaimed ancestral land. Photographers should plan for soft, diffused light under the freeway deck, where the painted columns and the Kiosko are best captured in the morning hours.