El Pueblo 50
El Pueblo 50 is a co-curated public exhibition presenting the stories of Southside Tucson resilience. El Pueblo 50 brings together a creative team of community experts, local artists and UA scholars who will collectively document, narrate, and share stories of Southside resilience. Together this collective will bring a commemorative exhibition slated for November 2025 that celebrates El Pueblo’s 50th anniversary, preserving the memory of its vibrant actions for community and environmental care, while envisioning El Pueblo’s role in shaping a more resilient Southside future.
Visitors to the El Pueblo 50 exhibition will learn about the site through a series of themes about El Pueblo as a heart of Tucson Southside histories, legacies and ongoing investment. University of Arizona interdisciplinary scholars (Humanities, Arts, Architecture & Urban Planning) in collaboration with the Sunnyside Foundation, a leader in Tucson Southside reinvestment effort will work with local experts as “community co-creators'' to produce thematized collections of cultural and social treasures of the Southside community, that the site in fact provides a unique portal into. The themes that visitors will be able to access through the exhibition include the following:
- El Pueblo Neighborhood Center’s historic significance as a visual and linguistic repository of Southern Arizona Chicane cultural and political empowerment
- Southside Tucson’s unique participation in historical and contemporary environmental justice movements, and how these shape place-based identities of resilience
- The significance of Southside Tucson’s accounts of intergenerational bonds in naming, preserving and re-activating cultural landmarks as essential social infrastructure.
The exhibition will be produced through a design process centering co-creative urban humanities and art research, public archival efforts, and participatory media-making, so that privately-held memories and experiences of Southside residents might be transformed into a publicly-legible, and visible narrative of place. The exhibition leverages relationships, especially between the local neighborhood and the University, to augment the capacities of the communities of this historic site to interpret, imagine and grow the cultural and social power of Tucson’s Southside communities.
The exhibition’s goals are to: (1) collect, preserve and activate extant community knowledges about the historic uses of El Pueblo as the “heart” of the Southside (2) materialize an exhibition interpreting the intersectional and evolving histories of El Pueblo (3) to generate, enliven and enrich place-based imaginaries for the future uses of the site.
El Pueblo 50 Team: Raúl Netza Aguirre, Selina Barajas, Dr. Jacqueline Jean Barrios, Cassandra Becerra, Rebecca Senf, Elizabeth Soltero, Kenny H. Wong.
El Pueblo 50 Community Co-Curators: Raúl E. Aguirre, Yolanda Herrera, Dr. Lydia Otero, Anna Sanchez, Joseph Robert “Bob” Diaz
El Pueblo 50 Exhibition Designer: Lizzy Guevara-Golden
We would like to acknowledge the Arts Research + Resilience Grant program administered by the Arizona Institute of Resilience (AIR) and College of Fine Arts for supporting El Pueblo 50. Partners for El Pueblo 50 include the Department of Public and Applied Humanities (PAH), College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (CAPLA), Center for Creative Photography, College of FIne Arts (CFA), Arizona Institute of Resilience (AIR) as well as Sunnyside Foundation, Office of Congressman Raúl Grijalva and the City of Tucson.