The Artistic Alchemy of 18th Street Arts Center
& RAP

While meandering Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, I noticed that the vibrantly rich narratives of Black and Brown communities historically present here had been untold --until I realized 18th Street Arts Center was actively working to collectively unify these community voices in the public space. These transformative, poetic revealings of Santa Monica's historical truths are continuously made transparent and activated by the rigorous healing community-based work of 18th Street Arts Center and RAP collaborations.

How does one capture communities once displaced and forgotten? How do we lean into re-telling and activating narratives of histories neglected by the ever-evolving planning and expansion of a city like Santa Monica? The body and land still remember the violence and erasure even after the city's paved over the harm. Oftentimes, I navigate these tensions in my ongoing archival work around marginalized artistic legacies and caretaking of contested public spaces while previously in Brooklyn, and now in LA.

18th Street Art Center embodies caretaking through the radical spatial re-imagining of art, memory, and critical research, working collaboratively with long-standing Santa Monica residents. 18th Street Arts Center also manifests radical joy through intergenerational relationship building in expansive, interdisciplinary, archival forms of art, performance and media practices. These ongoing relationships centered in and around the periphery of Santa Monica at 18th Street synchronize the budding alchemy of living histories often excluded from the public sphere of cultural and artistic influence of modernity. The unity of RAP and 18th Street honors the integrity of shared mapping collaborations embedded in the alchemy of transformative trust and reciprocation.

Race, Arts, and Place (RAP) and 18th Street Arts Center have collectively invested in the spatial re-imagining and bending of Santa Monica's historical past through site-specific engagement and interactive, critical cartography student-supported research at USC.

Through the map they bend space, time, and shared Black and Mexican ancestral, community-led knowledge sprouted and culminated in Santa Monica's intersectional histories. What isn't revealed in Santa Monica's current sanitized, hyper-modernized, over-developed landscape are the origins of its becoming -- the critical labor and communities of Black and Mexican families building its core foundation from Tongva natives to 19th Century Afro-Mexican governor Pío Pico and Mexican land grants to the most recent 19th century Black Migration movement. The powerful legacies of Black and Mexican histories of Santa Monica are brought to light through their maps' archival interventions of places like Belmar Triangle, the Pico neighborhood, Ocean Avenue, 18th Street, among other sites. 18th Street's devotion to caretaking narratives of historically neglected and redlined communities in Santa Monica reveal the nuances of storytelling led by community members, elders, archivists, artists as activists, educators, and scholars.

Because of these unheard legacies, 18th Street Art Center began its Culture Mapping 90404 project in 2015 and started collaborating with RAP faculty member Annette Kim in 2016. The emergence of these critical Black and Mexican histories (as shown in the projects below) echo and satiate the deep longing by Santa Monica's community activists to be heard, recognized, and honored in its built environment and cultural heritage. 18th Street Art Center and RAP's collaborations on archival investigations, interactive artistic programming and site-based historical activations with artists have spurred the growing re-imagination of Santa Monica's powerful Black and Mexican legacies, bending space, place, and time to unearth these legacies.

The Culture Mapping 90404 project counters the erasure and misperceptions of Santa Monica as a touristy, affluent beach town. Through curiosity, play, and exploratory story mapping, 18th Street Arts Center created the project to actively collect cultural assets, oral histories, and unique portrayals of unseen Santa Monica. In this framework, the 90404 Map project unifies the broader Santa Monica community through radical joy in the form of reclamation, preservation, and revisioning of a community of stories often unheard.

"Created by the community for the community!"

- Jeny Amaya, 18th Street Arts Center

I experienced the power of re-mapping during the Fall of 2021 when I participated in Professor Annette Kim's Critical Cartography course. I had the opportunity to support Jiyoon Kim, my USC colleague in creating the "From Rancho Boca de Santa Monica to Pascual Marquez Family Cemetery" media project about Mexican land grants and stewardship in Santa Monica. As a native Tejana raised in the West Texas / Mexico borderland area, this rigorous research act of interrogating borders and generational Mexican histories activated a deep yearning to quell the ambiguous nature of colonialism and its contemporary construction of gentrification through (mis)understandings of community self-preservation across space and time.

The Pascual Marquez Family Cemetery Project critically illuminated many questions around settler colonialism, legacy building, and power dynamics across spatial transformations throughout Santa Monica's history. Historically, Santa Monica formed from ten Mexican land grants – one still actively preserved through the 1839 Rancho Boca de Santa Monica land grant protected by the Pascual Marquez Family near the Pacific Palisades. In Santa Monica, what remains is a small parcel maintained as a cemetery by Mexican-American historian Ernest Marquez’s family. The legacy of Mexican-Americans in Santa Monica is otherwise almost physically non-existent.

There are many such possibilities to illuminate with critical re-mapping. My fellow classmates created media about the expansion of the Santa Monica I-10 highway in 1950'-60's and Black and immigrant communities of historic Santa Monica who faced forced relocation due to the increased need for transportation accessibility. Following the expansion of I-10, mortgages and rents skyrocketed –forcing many Black, Mexican, and immigrant families out of Santa Monica. What remains is the historical legacies of 18th Street Art Center’s reclamation and emancipatory cultural work that illuminates the travesties and gems of Black, Mexican, and immigrant communities of historic Santa Monica.

" Culture Mapping 90404 centers people-first, community-centered long-term artistic collaborations building trust, agency, self-preservation and documentation by and for Santa Monica communities." - 18th Street Arts Center

“Our collaboration with RAP is so valuable because the students are able to make a deeper dive in these histories using their skills and the resources that USC offers. The students have been able to make deeper meaning and significance of these historical archives to our Culture Map 90404.”

-18th Street Arts Center

About the author: Tracy Fenix identifies as a native queer Tejana currently residing in Koreatown, Los Angeles on Tongva territory. Tracy is currently a Dual degree USC Master of Urban Planning / MA Curatorial Practice candidate. They are a caretaker of memories, people, and land. fenix@usc.edu | they/ them.