Just 30 minutes across the border to the south, Mexico has played a long and intimate role in the history of San Diego, California. Travelers see Mexican culture in San Diego in the names of streets and towns, in the prevalence of Mexican food and in cultural traditions from art to festivals. Here are five places to experience Mexican culture in San Diego without crossing the border.
Centro Cultural de la Raza
Centro Cultural de la Raza is an active fixture of the Chicano culture. Photo: Jay Galvin/Flickr.
Built in 1970 from a water tank in Balboa Park, the Centro Cultural de la Raza is now a circular art and music space that preserves and promotes Chicano, Mexican, Latin and indigenous culture. The exterior is covered in colorful murals that depict Aztec designs and deities as well as modern images, and the inside hosts monthly art exhibitions, concerts and workshops on music, dance and traditional crafts.
Chicano Park
Chicano Park features one of the nation’s largest concentrations of murals. Photo: kellinahandbasket/Flickr.
Constructed around the pillars of the Coronado Bridge, which intersects the Interstate 5 freeway in the predominantly Hispanic Barrio Logan neighborhood, Chicano Park is an example of a community taking back its land and culture in the face of development and disregard in the 1970s. Hundreds of students, activists and community members fought against the building of a highway patrol station parking lot by commandeering the bulldozers and building the park for which they had been asking for decades. Over the years, residents planted cactus, plants and trees; established annual cultural traditions; and painted one of the largest collections of murals in the country, which deal with such Chicano-themed subject matter as immigration, the labor movement and the struggle for equal rights.
El Campo Santo Cemetery
El Campo Santo is San Diego’s second oldest cemetery. Photo: Herb Neufeld/Flickr.
This supposedly haunted cemetery in the center of Old Town is San Diego’s second oldest dating back to 1849. Burials were conducted through the 1880 and consisted of early settlers, including Don Miguel de Pedrorena, Juan Maria Osuna, the Bandini family, the Estudillos and the Aguierres. Today, El Campo Santo is the site of much reported supernatural activity from the blaring of car alarms to a feeling of an icy chill to sightings of ghostly figures like a woman in a Victorian-era dress and a floating Native American man.
Mission San Diego de Alcalá
California’s first mission, Mission San Diego de Alcala is an active member of the Roman Catholic church. Photo: Rennett Stowe/Flickr.
Old Town San Diego
San Diego’s Old Town is one of the best places to experience Mexican culture in San Diego.
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