The effort to save the murals at Santa Barbara’s Ortega Park intensified on Saturday when a group of activists, educators and artists spoke at a virtual forum and called on the city to listen to the community instead of barging ahead with its controversial plan.
“The struggle is far from over,” said Mark Alvarado, an activist leading the charge to save the murals. “We’re in a dogfight.”
The city’s Parks & Recreation Department has resisted requests to preserve the park’s 18 murals. Instead, it commissioned a report that suggested that seven of the murals could be “re-created” at the park.
The murals were painted between 1979 and 2011. They were created by several artists, most of them youths, and later touched up by artist Manuel Unzueta. With names such as “Ninos de Maiz,” “La Playa” and “Campesinos,” they depict Aztec, Mexican and Chicano art and have long served as the visual heart of the park.
Santa Barbara City Councilwoman Alejandra Gutierrez was one of two council members at the meeting, along with Kristen Sneddon.
“This park is central to this district,” Gutierrez said. “It’s one of the parks that really represents the Mexican-American culture. It’s history.”
For those who spoke at Saturday’s meeting, the murals are also part of the Chicano and Latinx indentity and history.
“Our struggle joins other struggles we face right now — the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, LGBTQ efforts toward full representation and acknowledgement, and the other existential challenges we’re facing right now,” said Holly Barnet-Sanchez, a retired professor of Chicano, Latino and modern Latin-American art history at the University of New Mexico. “They exhaust us, they energize us and we keep going.”
The city’s Parks & Recreation Department held several meetings about the use of the park, but outside of a November meeting, gave little attention to the murals themselves. Most of the discussion when the city was developing its Ortega Park master plan centered on the sports fields, the pool, the playground, and creating a walled perimeter around the park to improve safety. The city plans to spend about $14 million to renovate the park, which also has faced challenges with people drinking and using drugs.
Under one rendering that the city presented at a Historic Landmarks Commission meeting last week, the re-created murals were placed on the outside walls, which upset some of the speakers on Saturday morning.
“You have what’s been a beautiful open space, easily accessible to the passerby, become almost a walled prison,” artist Frederick Janka said. “You will see all of the murals have been turned around to face outside the park, so essentially that tells the community that you are no longer welcome, but these things that you find important you can walk by and see them, you don’t actually need to go into the park now.”
He said the Parks & Recreation Department needs to go back to the drawing board and rethink how it does engagement with the community.
Janka also said that even though the department claims it reached out to the community, the outreach did not work.
“How were they asked?” Janka said. “What language were they asked in? How much time did they give people to respond to these questions?”
Janka said the process was not inclusive.
“This also shows a great waste of community resources,” Janka said. “The fact that we have gone this far, that so much effort has been made into this, and so much money has been paid and invested and put into this, to only come up with something that does a disservice to our community, not only the local community around the park, but also our greater Santa Barbara city.”
The speakers tried to convey that the murals are part of a larger network of Chicano and Latinx identity and historical expression, and tied to other works throughout the Southwest.
They cited Chicano Park in San Diego as a reference point to the importance of preserving murals.
“This is a network of Chicano culture that really celebrates indigenous knowledge and the connection to the indigenous,” Janka said.
He called the removal of the murals “whitewashing,” and he wasn’t alone.
“Planning has always been immersed in systematic racism against our communities,” said Josephine Talamantez, co-founder of Chicano Park. “I was pretty shocked at the mismanagement of the process.”
The issue is set to go before the Santa Barbara City Council on Tuesday. The Parks & Recreation Department is applying for an $8.6 million grant to pay for the renovation of the park, but Alvarado and others are concerned that if the city receives and accepts a grant that it would cement the current proposal, which doesn’t preserve the existing murals in their current form.
The item is on the council’s consent agenda, which means it will be voted on as part of a group of other items considered routine, unless a member of the City Council or the public asks for individual discussion on the matter.
“The city will be locked into whatever it proposes,” Alvarado said. “We do know now based on what we saw in the staff report that there’s no mention of full preservation of the murals.”
Gutierrez told Noozhawk that she hopes the city staff understands that the community is not pleased with the situation.
“The reason there’s pushback is these murals represent the Chicano movement, the Mexican-American culture here,” Gutierrez said. “These murals represent the Latinx community’s history and it is very dear to the community’s heart. For the city to present this beautiful plan of the renovation of this park and saying that they are going to destroy the murals, that was not going to go well with the community.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.