Latino Heritage Scholars push preservation of various heritage sites

(Michael Ochs/Getty Images)

By Delilah Alvarado

(AUSTIN, Texas) The Latino Heritage Scholars that are part of an initiative nonprofit Hispanic Access Foundation, picked seven sites to be preserved as Latino heritage sites.

In a report released Wednesday, the group said the sites picked are threatened due to gentrification or deterioration, according to NBC News.

“Even though for generations Latinos have continued to prove they are essential to the United States, sites that commemorate Latino heritage are disproportionately excluded when it comes to officially designated heritage and conservation sites,” Manuel Galaviz, the report’s co-author and an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement.

Galvez said the sites can be federally preserved through the Antiquities Act which can designate national monuments by the president.

The sites in need of preservation include:

• Castner Range, ancestral lands of Comanche and Apache in El Paso, Texas.
• Chepa’s Park, located in the oldest Mexican neighborhood in California in Logan Barrio, Santa Ana.
• Duranguito, El Paso's oldest city that also played a role the Mexican Revolution in Texas.
• Fefa’s Market, the first Dominican-owned bodega on that street in Providence, Rhode Island.
• Friendship Park that sits partly in Southern California and partly in Tijuana, Mexico.
• The Gila River was a system used by the Mogollon civilization, the Chiricahua band of Apaches and later Spanish colonists from New Mexico through Arizona.
• Hazard Park in East L.A. that was used for the gathering of Chicano students during the East Los Angeles Blowouts in 1968, protesting inequalities in school.

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