Celebrating Survival : For 25 years, San Diego's Centro Cultural de la Raza has honored the Chicano experience. Can it continue?

The Centro emerged from these tumultuous and contentious origins to become one of the most vibrant visual and performing arts centers in the Southwest dedicated to Chicano, Mexican and indigenous American culture.

Earlier this year the Centro began celebrating its 25th anniversary. Festivities kicked off in the spring with tributes to some of the organization's founders. A few weeks ago, the exhibition "Plan 9 From Aztlan" opened, showcasing a young crop of Chicano artists. Next April, a capstone exhibition will feature the works of veteran Chicano and Chicana artists. And augmenting the Centro's regular schedule of film, theater, poetry, music and dance events, will be a special series of performances by Mexican artists.

Founded in the heat of the Chicano movement--at the time of the Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles and the opening of the Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco, among other landmark events--the founding of San Diego's Centro Cultural represented a "capture of territory, to serve a cultural and social function," says UCLA art historian Shifra Goldman, whose specialization is Latin American and Chicano art.

"The New Left was in a mode of protesting for change, but also for taking action to establish its claims and even symbolic territory. Chicano Park [a plot of land just south of downtown San Diego seized in 1970 by Chicanos protesting the bifurcation of the barrio by a new freeway and bridge] was a symbolic territory capture, and so was the Ford Building. They were not given. They were the result of conflict."

Similarly, the ring of cactus planted around the Centro--in a park that is otherwise defined by its lawns and eucalyptus trees--is another symbol of recapturing territory by its indigenous inhabitants, Goldman says. Nothing, however, affirms the presence and spirit of la raza more potently or immediately than the turbulent skin of murals that wraps the 90-foot diameter building. Pre-Columbian motifs, coyotes, skulls, dancers, musicians and historical figures all intermingle beneath the unifying image of an abstracted serpent, winding its way around the top of the water tank.

Murals activate the space inside as well, especially the huge, three-dimensional fist that appears to burst through a wall near the entrance. It points the way, both literally and figuratively, to the Centro's performance space and its visual arts gallery, and is a forceful reminder of the intimate bond between the political fervor of Chicano activism and its artistic expressions. Behind the gallery is the informally furnished office, where a full-time staff of four keeps the place buzzing.

In a recent conversation at the Centro about the organization's evolution, mention is made frequently of its original mission statement, the anchor to which all of its programming is tethered. While the Centro's original goals to foster cultural expression in the San Diego/Tijuana border region and respect its roots in the Chicano movement still hold, the organization's strategies have necessarily shifted with the times. The militancy of Chicano nationalism in the late 1960s and early '70s propelled the Centro forward from concept to reality. In the '90s, however, a different kind of militancy has taken hold, this time coming from the right in the form of ultraconservatism and anti-immigrant nativism. As much as ever, the Centro is more than just an arts organization--it plays an urgent and purposeful role in raising consciousness through cultural discourse.