The cover for Eric Avila's book "The Folklore of the Freeway" features an image of Chicano Park in San Diego.
An excerpt from Eric Avila's book reads: "A more spectacular example of this effort comes from the barrio of San Diego. Chicano Park, located in the heart of Barrio Logan, just south of downtown, at the foot of the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge, features elaborate murals painted on the concrete columns that support the interchange of the bridge and I-5, completed by CalTrans in the early 1970s. Although this parcel of land was initially intended to be the site for a proposed highway patrol station, community activists, fed up with the incursions of highways and junkyards, seized control of the site in 1970, demanding a neighborhood park instead of a highway patrol station and claiming the right to paint murals on the concrete columns supporting the elevated interchange. San Diego's Chicano Park is now the symbolic heart of San Diego's barrio, a spectacular example of how a community improvises a new relationship to the freeway, taking advantage of its immediate proximity to inspire a Chicano sense of place."
"Chicano Park is now the symbolic heart of San Diego's barrio, a spectacular example of how a community improvises a new relationship to the freeway, taking advantage of its immediate proximity to inspire a #Chicano sense of place," Avila.
@uminnpress.bsky.social: www.upress.umn.edu/978081668073...