(upbeat music begins) - My forefathers were here before the signature of the independence of the United States.

- And today, probably anthropologists would say that what was occurring then is we were seeing the first expressions of what they call cultural citizenship, Chicanos claiming space.

- And my father and mother were the ones who drove us on to become what we are.

Now, Arthur helped, but my father and mother were solid Mexicans.

- [Narrator] Join historians Richard Griswold Del Castillo and Isidro Ortiz as they introduce you to seven San Diegans on a journey through the history of the Mexican-American experience in "San Diego's DNA."

(upbeat music continues) - My name is David Martinez.

I'm a Silvas, actually a Silvas.

I was adopted by the Martinez family when my mother passed away at my birth.

And so my real family is the Silvas family out of San Ysidro.

- You brought some information here about your family.

- Well, this is actually my family.

My forefathers came here with Dienza in 1776.

They came to San Gabriel.

San Gabriel, they went to, and started the Presidio in San Francisco, started the Presidio in Monterey, came down to San Juan Capistrano, I'm sorry, came down to Los Angeles, and then came down to San Juan Capistrano coming into San Diego in 1784.

- So your roots go deep here in San Diego?

- Yes, very, very, a long ways back.

Actually, my forefathers are here before the signature of the independence of the United States.

- Tell me more about your family.

You have your genealogy here, but you mentioned already about being one of the early founders of San Diego, really, related to them.

- Here in this picture, I have a great uncle, Librado Silvas, with a violin is my great uncle.

And this is part of the family.

We just don't know who in the family it was.

This picture was taken in, we had a ranch in Del Mar.

Actually we had, along with the Asunas, we had 4,400 acres in Del Mar that include the Delmar racetrack all the way to the beach and the mountain, the southern mountain of Rancho Santa Fe and Fairbank's Ranch with all the Asuna's Silva's spread.

- This photo was taken about when do you think?

- This photo apparently was taken somewhere about 1903, 1904, somewhere in that neighborhood.

- Yeah, there are, during the Mexican period, there were about 20, no 31 ranches, Ranchos, that the Mexican government created.

So your family was owner of one of them.

- These are all my brothers and sisters right here.

I'm the 10th one down the line.

- Oh, okay.

- [David] My forefathers, like I said, came all the way to San Juan Capistrano and into San Diego in 1784.

They were the first ones.

As a matter of fact, one of my aunts was the first one to build a house below the Presidio and close to the river, the river running along Congress Street in Old Town.

(upbeat music continues) This is the Silvas Machado Adobe here in Old Town San Diego and my nephew, to keep the history going of our family, gives underground tours.

- [Abel] Okay, this Adobe was here when Richard Henry Dana came here in 1835.

He recorded, there was 30 to 40 Mud Shack homes in San Diego, El Pueblo San Diego.

It wasn't called Old Town San Diego, only recently, because it was the beginning of San Diego or California.

It was El Pueblo San Diego.

So there was five original Adobes that are standing up today that you can see when Richard Henry Dana came here.

But there's, that's five, so there's 35 more.

Those 35 is what's on the underground tour.

Yeah, this particular Adobe was given to the family as a service that's serving for the Spanish and Mexican military.

The family built this, this was one of our town homes.

We had a Rancho in Rancho Santa Fe where we had cattle, and this is where we come and sell it to the ships who were coming through.

It was eventually built by the Silvas Machado family and it was kept in the family thereafter, when it became United States.

We started selling food in this house.

So this was the first commercial restaurant of California.

When people come off the ship, they didn't have time to go hunting.

So here we provided the food for them.

And in 1968 it became a state park and then a museum.

And now we, as descendants, are the caretakers of the history of this building.

(gentle music continues) - I'm a direct descendant of the Marone and Asuna family, and I'm blessed to live in my family's Adobe.

- And this is one of the original Ranchos.

- [Shelley] Yes.

- That were given by the Mexican government back in the 1800s.

You have some old, very old photographs here.

Can you tell us who these people are?

- Yes, that is an original photo, and sitting in the front is Sylvester Marone, my great-great-grandfather.

To the right side is my great-grandmother, Philippa Hayes.

She married Judge Chauncey Hayes in 1875, and they had their own adobe there in the Buena Vista Valley.

And they raised 14 children, seven of which were born there on the ranch.

And my grandfather was one of the first, he was number five of the 14.

- So about when was this taken, do you think?

- 1895.

- 95, okay.

So these are sort of the remnants of the Californios, the people who used to own, and some of 'em continued, like yourself, to own the Rancho lands here in San Diego.

- [Shelley] This is an aerial showing before there was all kinds of development in the North County.

This would be what is currently Highway 78.

This is where the Rancho is, and this is the Buena Vista Creek here.

And it's part of a cultural corridor, if you will.

We have a sacred waterfall in the valley, which is the tallest coastal waterfall in Southern California, El Salto.

(gentle music continues) And then this was the dividing line between the San Diego de Alcalá Mission and the San Luis Rey Mission.

And then our family applied for a land grant in 1839.

And so it was granted in 1842.

So my family has lived here for seven generations, and my grandchildren being the seventh generation.

And we're here in the Buena Vista Creek Valley, Northern San Diego County.

And this was the Rinconada portion of Rancho Argüellonda.

(gentle music continues) I'm fortunate to have inherited some very nice pieces of history, and I only wish the furniture could talk, because then I would know a lot more about my family.

But there are some period pieces from the 1800s, which was the style of furniture at that time.

And some family heirlooms, some bibles that record marriages and deaths and are another primary source for our history.

This table belonged to my great-grandmother, and she had 14 children, seven of whom were born here in this valley.

And she smoked a pipe, and this was her table, and she lit her matches on the bottom of this table.

And I let the children that come for school tours get down and peek at all the match strikes at the bottom of the table.

So it's kind of a fun thing.

And we love telling that story about her.

This is a little writing book that belonged to my great-grandmother, Philippa Amarancia Marone, and later Hayes.

And she wrote this journal before she was married, in 1870s I would imagine.

This is all her penmanship and her artwork.

And it's a great treasure.

(gentle music continues) - My father took care of a flower organization business with Kate Sessions then.

- So this was about in the late 30s, 1930s?

- No, thank you, I was born 1921.

- Oh my goodness.

- I'm an old man.

- Okay.

- And my father had been in the Mexican, he was a Mexican naval officer.

And when the revolution came, he came up this country and somehow he found Kate Sessions, and he worked with Kate Sessions for a while at this place called Sessions Ranch, where I was born, and my mother was there too.

- And you have a picture here from the place where you were born and you're at Sessions.

- This is it right here.

And it was just country at that time.

Today, you know, it's heavily populated.

And that house where I was born is still there.

- In the 1920s, there were actually very few Mexicanos, or Chicanos, or Mexican Americans living in San Diego.

- Well, they weren't Chicanos, they weren't Mexican Americans.

You should be very much aware of one thing, Ricardo, because at that time we were all Mexicanos.

Mexicans they called us no matter whether you were born, here or in Mexico, you were called a Mexican.

- [Richard] That's right.

- And that's what we were at that time.

And that's what I was told I was all throughout my life until I left here during the Second World War.

Well, according to my parents, it was the house I was born in in September of 1921.

That's what I know about this house.

And that was a long, long time ago.

1921.

Heavens.

When I was growing up in Pacific Beach, and that's where I grew up, you know?

It was a tiny rural town, a village.

There were only a few people.

And my father, from what he would tell me is that he would gather the flowers on certain days of the week and take them down in a horse-drawn carriage down the railroad station, which was here in Pacific Beach.

And then they would be taken to San Diego where Kate Sessions had a flower shop.

Well, this article was written by Richmond Barber, and it was published in 1945.

And Richmond Barber, at that time, was director of the Bureau of Child Guidance of the San Diego City schools.

And his wife was my teacher in the fourth grade, seventh, eighth, and ninth.

And she was one of my oldest friends.

She died a few years ago.

And I used to see her quite often, even when I was back east teaching.

I would come out once in a while and I'd always make sure that I saw her.

And Dick Barber wrote this article when my brother and I had gone off to the Army Air Corps and we were then pilots and lieutenants.

And the article talks about my father, who, unlike many others of his background, came here and eventually established a nursery, and how well he did as a nurseryman, unlike many others who didn't do very well, who were of his own background.

"We have known both boys since they were little shavers in the third and fourth grades respectively.

And they were neighbors, and fine neighbors at that.

The boy's father had immigrated to this country from his childhood home in the state of Sinaloa.

He went to work as a day laborer in a large nursery, and in a few years he had learned the business so well to strike out on his own."

And that is basically what this thing talks about.

That my father and mother were the ones who drove us on to become what we are.

Now Arthur helped, but it's my father and mother.

Good, solid Mexicans.

(gentle music continues) - My maiden name is Maria Antonieta Flores.

- Well you brought a number of artifacts from your family's history here.

I know your family goes back quite a ways.

You were born here in San Diego, I understand.

- Yes, I was born in San Diego 70 years ago.

- And why don't you tell us about, I guess, whichever picture you want to introduce us to.

- [Maria] Okay, that is my Aunt Alex, and that's the one that's here.

And she's the eldest sister, and because of her, she's the one that brought the whole family from Mexico because of all the danger that was there.

She came to San Diego and then started, over the years, bringing one by one the family.

- And then tell us about the story behind this story here.

- Well, the editor of the San Diego Union, editor of Food came to visit my aunt.

- [Richard] So this is a recipe that she had?

- Yes, my favorite was this one, is actually tortas de camaron, which is the whites of the egg.

You make it into meringue and you add powdered shrimp, and you use 'em like dumplings after you've made this stew of nopales, which is cactus.

And she would put a sauce in there, and so this sauce would be absorbed into these meringues or dumplings and it was so delicious.

One of my favorites.

So she actually submitted that recipe and her famous herb chicken and she talks, the editor talks about going through her recipe file, and many of them are in French, because on my mother's side, their grandfather was with the troops of Maximilian that came into Mexico.

- Okay, that's something a lot of people don't recognize is, or remember or know, is that at one time France occupied Mexico, the French dictator.

- And many of 'em didn't go back to France, they stayed in Mexico.

So that's why there's so much French blood.

And there's a lot of Spanish blood.

- Indian blood too.

- Yeah, Indian blood, yes.

It's a beautiful mixture of all these delicious dishes from Mexico.

- Right, yeah, so the food is really important for the culture.

- Yes.

- And keeping in track of it is an important heritage that we hand down.

(upbeat music begins) - Well it started out, I'm one of 11 children that ended up in college in the Civil Rights Movement, and I was in Stanford, and I was in a graduate English class, and I met a poet there.

My professor invited me to pick up a poet from the airport and it happened to be Alurista from San Diego.

- As I understand it, he was also, he's known as the architect of the concept of Aztlan.

- Oh he is.

He wrote "Plan Espiritual de Aztlán," it's actually in this book, which I found surprisingly yesterday when I was getting ready for this.

This is from 1972, and it's actually documented in the first few pages.

- [Isidro] What was Aztlan?

- It's about, what it is is it's a statement about the land of the people that's indigenous.

He calls it Amerindia.

It's the concept of America, not just being a colonized nation, but being an indigenous land.

And it meant a lot to the Mexican American people here.

- 1974 was a very exciting time.

It was at almost the height of the Chicano movement.

And so in San Diego, of course, sometimes it's referred to as la Cuna of Aztlan, or the birthplace of Aztlan, because it was such a hot bed of Chicano activism in those years.

So when you came here, did you become part of the Chicano movement activities?

- I was now sort of this lone woman in a department and I had to decide on my own what to do in this department.

So what I did is I worked on the journal.

- [Isidro] This journal.

- [Rita] With student writings, because what seemed really important at the time was that we expressed ourselves in writing that we became published.

- [Richard] So you could say in some ways that these were the first, at least formal expression of Chicano voice in California.

- Written down, I think so for the Chicana Chicano movement.

But let me show you something here, because we have set up for you the video of a film that was donated by Caesar Lopez and Sonya Lopez.

- I see.

- They actually donated this 16 millimeter huge reel, this big, to the archive.

And let me just press it here and I'll tell you a little bit about it as I show you.

What you see waving here, it's called the Flag of Aztlan.

It's something that was devised by the people at San Diego studios, it's the Mestizo flag, and what they did is they decided to place the flag at the top of Hoover, not Hoover Tower, that's Stanford, I think it's Hardy Tower at San Diego State.

This is Chicano Park and it's the initial digging of Chicano Park.

So it's a very historical film.

I don't know if anybody else has films like this, but it's really important, because it's the beginning of the digging of Chicano Park when students.

- [Isidro] Square footage, certainly, yes.

And today we probably, anthropologists would say that what was occurring then is we were seeing the first expressions of what they call cultural citizenship.

Chicanos claiming space.

- [Rita] Exactly, and more than that, they called it La Tierra y libertad, which was land and freedom.

And really what they're asking for though is they're asking for a place for their children to play in the park, because they didn't have any place to play.

And at that time they had put in the bridge, the Coronado Bridge, which covered their neighborhoods.

And so they were sort of demanding space.

And it was about to be made into a highway patrol station.

(upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] In the year 1970, the city of San Diego, under the Coronado Bridge, lied a little piece of land.

A piece of land that the community of Logan Heights wanted to make into a park.

- [Rita] They were getting the people speaking out for rights, for education, for a place for the children to play in the park, that sort of thing.

- [Isidro] So this was 1970?

- [Rita] This film is 1970, yes.

- [Isidro] So we've now celebrated 39 years of the creation of the park.

- [Rita] Right.

- [Isidro] So it's a legacy of this time period.

- [Rita] It's a legacy of this time.

- [Isidro] like your journal is a legacy of its time.

(upbeat music continues) (gentle music begins) - My name is Johnny Lopez, also known as Juan Lopez.

So a lot of people know me as Juan Johnny Lopez.

- Johnny Lopez, right.

As I understand it, you're a native of San Diego, one of those rare breeds.

- Yeah, born and raised in San Diego.

- In any specific community or neighborhood?

- Well, I was born and raised in Logan Heights and actually Shell Town as they call it now.

- You brought today with you a number of photos.

Could you begin, let's start here.

This looks like a very old photo.

- [Juan] Yes, this is a photo of a group called los Chicanos.

And it was a group of young teenagers that formed a group in the Logan Heights area.

We used to meet at the Neighborhood House at, well, I guess around 1955.

- 1955?

- 1955.

- And you called yourselves Chicanos.

- Yeah, and the reason how that came about was that, Neighborhood House was sponsoring a lot of groups to come and to sort of get the young people together and they were all calling themselves Los Gallos, Los Lobos, whatever these names, they picked animal names.

And one of our members said, "Well we're not animals, we're Chicanos."

We just actually took a step in the right direction of identifying ourselves as Mexican Americans.

Not necessarily political, but we just wanted the people to know that we were Chicanos and not an animal, like some people, you know, animals that people were calling themselves.

We just had our 50th reunion about a couple of years ago.

And this uses some of the guys.

- [Isidro] Is this a photo?

- [Juan] Yeah, there's a photo.

And it was a photo when we first got together.

And most of us are still alive.

Some of us have passed on.

But over the years there's about 70 of us that were a part of this group and we were very popular, especially with the ladies.

- Ah.

- Yeah.

- Tell me about that.

- Well, we used to have dances, and we used to have dances at Balboa Park, the War Memorial building, and we would always have a packed house.

At one individual, it was called the Battle of the Bands, we had a bunch of bands, and we had a 1,000 people at our dance.

And with some of that money we would go back in the community.

- So it was for fundraising?

- Yeah.

- Now when we think about the term Chicano, we often associated with the Chicano movement of the late 1960s.

So in many ways you were pioneering the concept.

- I think we were ahead of our time.

- Yes, ahead of your time, yeah.

- I think so, because the research that I've done, I haven't seen anybody call themselves Chicano.

The time that we did, 1955.

- Was your participation in Chicanos your last participation in any kind of activity, social activity or otherwise?

- Once I graduated from UCSD, I volunteered to go work for Cesar Chavez making $5 a week.

- [Isidro] $5 a week during that time period.

- For two years.

- [Isidro] This was in the 1970s?

- Yes.

- Were you a photographer for the union or how did these photos come to be?

- No, basically I was just an amateur photographer and always had a camera with me at UCSD.

And I was always taking pictures, especially some of the Chicano movement leaders at the time.

- Could you describe what's in these photos here?

- Well, this is a photo of Cesar Chavez when he came down to San Diego, and he was at San Diego State talking to the students.

What he was trying to do at the time, he was trying to organize the students to get involved in boycotting grapes.

And what he would do is come down and talk to the students, say, "Look, this is important that you get involved in our movement because we need to be able to tell the growers that we need a form union for the farm workers."

- [Isidro] Farm workers, true.

- [Juan] So he was there talking to students.

And some of these people in these pictures, especially in this picture, were activists already in the Chicano movement.

- In Chicano movements.

And what about this photo?

- This photo is Chunky Sanchez.

A lot of people know in San Diego, he and his brother in a group called, used to call themselves Alacranes Mojados.

And now, Alacranes.

- Alacranes, yes.

- Chunky and I have been involved in the Chicano movement for years.

As a matter of fact, I have a picture of Chunky and I at San Diego State playing guitars.

And I've known him for a long period of time.

He came to, when I was working for the Farm Workers Union, I was working as an organizer and the staff person in the Lamont Arvin area, which is south of Bakersfield.

- In the San Joaquin Valley.

- Yes, and so Chunky came down with a teatro and he played in the fields and he was singing old abuela songs.

(Chunky sings in Spanish) - What about the photo behind me?

- Well, that photo was taken in the Imperial Valley in Coachella, in the lettuce fields.

This is a United Farm worker who is balancing, I call it the balancing act.

And he's balancing these boxes coming outta the field.

And I just so happened just to catch him at the right time.

- And so looking back on those years, these photos cover many different periods and very important struggles.

What did you learn from that experience that relates to what is happening today?

- My family, we're farm workers.

- [Isidro] I see, so that's part of the connection.

- Yeah, the connection, and so I just committed myself to being involved in the Chicano movement and with Cesar Chavez.

- Well, thank you for coming in and sharing these photos with us and sharing your history.

- Well, it's my pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

(upbeat music continues) (singing in Spanish begins) (upbeat music continues) (singing in Spanish continues)