[music] I knew about Sleepy Lagoon, I know about the Zoot Suit riots.

I didn't know that they happened in my neighborhood.

We wanted to memorialize a place that has significant history.

In 2019, we started a process to honor the Sleepy Lagoon, the Zoot Suit culture, and the culture that continues today.

I'm Arturo Gonzalez.

I am project manager and lead muralist for the Agua por Vida's Sleepy Lagoon Murals Project.

I'm also co-director and co-founder of East Side of the River.

It's a non-profit community-based organization.

We're a collective of artists dedicated to empowering our community, teaching Indigenous ceremony, and beautifying our neighborhoods through art and murals.

We paint with everybody, from the policy makers, to community organizations, to homeboys in the street who feel like nobody cares about them.

We want to show them, "Hey, this is your wall, this is your neighborhood, and be a part of this."

With community engagement, there's always a few things they always want, especially in Latino neighborhoods.

You get in the Guadalupe, and they always want monarch butterflies.

We're in East LA right now.

I think we're literally on the border of East LA and Monte.. This is where I grew up.

I went to high school around here.

Art and murals, as well as community activism, pulled me away from getting in trouble.

I was getting locked up a lot and running amok, and really not doing anything good for myself or good for my community.

I carry that with me today.

A lot of our murals are primarily in working-class communities like East LA are very similar, a lot of gang issues.

We check in and figure out who's who around there and try to work wi.. to pull them into more positive behavior, which is important.

We come in with respect, and it's reciprocated.

[music] The mural is a homage to Sleepy Lagoon, to this reservoir, but it's all around water.

My abuela, my grandma, used to talk to me about Sleepy Lagoon.

She would tell me that there was this place that all the kids used to go to back in the day, like a lot of Pachuco kids.

It was also during segregation era, these kids weren't allowed to swim in public plunges, they weren't allowed to go to a lot of public beaches, or they couldn't make it to those beaches.

They weren't allowed in lot of public spaces.

Kids today don't really know about it.

People in that community didn't know about that.

This is a narrative of what Sleepy Lagoon was.

It was paved over when they built the freeway.

It's an industrial area near Eastern and Slauson.

This is the closest residential community to where the Sleepy Lagoon was located.

This is in the early '40s.

Some stuff went down at Sleepy Lagoon.

This guy, who was from 38th Street, Henry Leyvas, was jumped by a group of teens.

He went back to his neighborhood, brought all his homeboys back.

They were looking around, figuring out where these people went, and they saw a party going on.

They went to the party and broke it up, started a fight.

During the fight, someone got stabbed and killed.

What happened was, the police response was over dramatic.

They basically went all around the East side and Southeast LA, South Central.

They incarcerated hundreds of kids.

They tried a couple of dozen kids for one murder.

The trial was extremely racist.

It was so racist that the California State Supreme Court overturned the ruling years later.

The problem was, all these kids, they sent them to jail to mingle with real hardened criminals.

They went to criminal school.

There was a seed that was planted.

What occurred was it just grew and it grew and it grew to the point we're at today.

[music] One day, he reached out and said, "Hey, there's this scrap by the state, Coastal Conservancy.

If y'all can apply, we can work together on this."

I said, "Yes, I love that idea."

Through the Sleepy Lagoon report, we already had themes, the theme of water in the LA River, talking about indigenous cultures, and how they're still present and not just a part of history.

We are on Tongva lands, as well as remembering the zoot suit culture, culture of resistance that continues today.

We wanted to celebrate the specific communities.

Not just tell a story, but also recognize who's there now and why they're important, and let them know they're important.

There's a whole aspect of it that's about our indigenous culture.

Tongva Vakish culture, the first peoples in this area, but also the tribes from Mexico, where most of the community of Maywood, Southeast LA, all of the artists were from.

It wasn't even on my radar really, to do a mural project until that funding came out.

That allowed Arturo to have a little seed that had been planted.

Community members ended up choosing Maywood Riverfront Park, and that was the most viable of the sites as well.

I worked with Eddie De La Riva, who has been mayor, vice mayor, and council member.

We rotate in and out in the southeast cities politically.

The city of Maywood is a very small city, 1.2 square miles, making us one of the smallest cities in the county.

There's a pride in our community.

You tend to know a lot of the same people.

A lot of the friends that I went to school with still live in Maywood.

There's that sense of community, small town that we're very proud of here in Maywood.

For me, this was a no-brainer.

This was something that not only myself, but as a counselor that we had to support.

Being able to take a very tumultuous point in our nation's history and tell it from our point of view was very important for me.

Oh, my brother, good to see you, man.

Long time no see.

Another artist, my homeboy from back in the day, Thunder, I hit him up like, "Hey, foo, I'm going to need help with this," da da da da.

We might be getting [?]

going for it.

Then he plugged me in with all the people that are our organization out East Side of the river.

I was very, very excited once it was 100% sure that we had it because I've never done a mural on this scale.

It's very important that the youth get to see this because not only do they see this, but we involve them.

A big chunk of that grant was about paying kids from Maywood, from Southeast and East LA, to get paid to paint with us.

We would mentor them, they would get paid pretty decently to work with us, and they'd also be learning about the mural.

Every talent is needed in this movement, is needed for our communities.

For folks to be able to find their lane, for youth to be able to explore what that lane is, for us to be able to create the opportunity for that has really been beautiful.

There are all these little chunks of the wall, little aspects in the mural that are like a love letter to that community, to our community, so to Maywood, to the people that live in that neighborhood, to the East Side, to the Chicano community, to the Latino community, to the Indigenous community, to the undocumented community.

All these people who feel like their voices aren't being heard.

We want to show people that somebody cares, that things that you want to see, that our story about these events they may not know about are on this wall, and they're going to be there for generations, and other people are going to see them.

[music] Our hope for this mural and the work that we do for East Side of the River as an organization, they can use the energy and the education they learned about what went down in their neighborhood to empower them to improve their community.

To see a mural from the start of the process to the finished process was really, really beautiful and powerful.

From community members here that it's the reflection of the three engagements that we did with them has been just so powerful to see the ownership.

We wanted folks to walk away knowing that we get wins, too, and we can have beautiful things, too.

[music]