HistoricPlacesLA Revealed: Latino Los Angeles

At a time where our diverse society’s core values are being challenged, Los Angeles City Planning remains committed to serving all Angelenos with respect and human dignity.

HistoricPlacesLA Revealed is a new initiative aimed at celebrating places and stories associated with Los Angeles’s underrepresented histories. The pilot project, HistoricPlacesLA Revealed: Latino Los Angeles, will highlight sites that reflect the heritage of Los Angeles’s Latino communities, the city’s largest ethnic/cultural group. This will be achieved through the installation of physical markers across the city that feature Quick Response (QR) codes linked to multimedia content in HistoricPlacesLA, the City’s inventory of designated and surveyed historic resources. More than 100 physical markers will be visible and accessible in public spaces near the sites.

The project is a collaborative effort among the Los Angeles City Planning’s Office of Historic Resources (OHR), a consultant team (managed by architecture, design, planning, and historic preservation firm Page & Turnbull), and a Community Advisory Committee comprised of non-profit, cultural, and civic leaders, historians, educators, and others that represent the Latino community.

Mark this Site!

The City’s Latino Los Angeles Historic Context Statement identified numerous places with significant ties to Latino history and culture, but there are many more stories to share throughout the different neighborhoods and communities of Los Angeles.

We want to learn about the places that matter to you! We invite community members to tell us about sites in the city of Los Angeles (buildings, monuments, businesses, places, murals, etc.) that have important connections to Latino history or heritage and should be recognized by a marker. An in-progress list of identified sites has been assembled here.

HistoricPlacesLA Revealed gathers and displays stories about places that matter to Latino Angelenos. For generations, people from the Americas have moved through and settled in the place we now call Los Angeles. Although the project uses the term “Latino” to describe them collectively, no single word or phrase conveys the diversity of these communities, historically and today.

In recent years, terms like “Latino/a,” “Latinx,” and “Latine” have gained popularity for their direct inclusion of women and queer people. Other words – such as “Chicano” identify specific ethnic and/or political groups. Here, we refer to all communities by their preferred name(s) and use gendered language where appropriate, including (but not limited to): Central American, Indigenous, Mexican American, Chicano, Afro-Latino, Caribbean, South American, and Hispanic.

The project team recognizes that the meanings of these words will continue to evolve in the future. Latino communities are not monolithic, and these places are a testament to their historical complexities. Taken together, we hope the markers will deepen our shared understandings of Latino experiences and identities across Los Angeles.

Following field surveys that took place from 2010-2017, the Office of Historic Resources (OHR) completed a pioneering citywide survey of its historic resources, SurveyLA. The project resulted in the creation of a Los Angeles Historic Context Statement, a citywide framework that organizes the patterns of history shared by properties into narrative themes such as architecture, development patterns, and cultural landscapes. The OHR has also been creating additional historic context statements that reflect the histories of the City’s diverse ethnic and cultural communities.

In 2015, the OHR completed the Latino Los Angeles Historic Context Statement, a framework for identifying and evaluating properties related to Latino history in Los Angeles. Produced as a part of the overall citywide survey of historic resources, SurveyLA, the context statement was a first step in highlighting the lesser-known heritage of the Latino community in Los Angeles. The resources identified in the historic context statement were added to HistoricPlacesLA, the citywide inventory of historic resources.

For more information about this project, e-mail planning.hpla@lacity.org.


Web Banner Image:
The Great Wall of Los Angeles, completed between 1974-1984, Tujunga Wash, North Hollywood. Photo: Los Angeles City Planning Office of Historic Resources.

Designed by Chicana muralist Judith F. Baca, working with the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), The Great Wall of Los Angeles is a half-mile long mural depicting the history of California through images of significant figures and historic events from diverse and traditionally marginalized communities.