7 Places That Tell the Story of Latino Heritage in the US

Some 30,000 people walk, crawl or are carried for miles during Holy Week each year to fulfill a vow, pray for cures or rub their bodies with the healing mud at the small adobe chapel of Santuario de Chimayó in the hills north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Don Bernardo Abeyta built the original chapel on his land in 1810 after, according to legend, he miraculously discovered a shining crucifix in the earth.

Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1970, the Santuario receives hundreds of thousands of visitors annually who leave discarded crutches, photos and grateful testimonials. Often called the “Lourdes of America,” it remains the most important Catholic pilgrimage site in the United States, famed for its therapeutic mud and enduring spiritual traditions.

The Spanish empire built Old San Juan’s 16th-century limestone walls, some 45 feet thick, to protect its Caribbean possession, Puerto Rico, from English and Dutch attacks. Standing tall over the Atlantic Ocean five centuries later, the walled city—the oldest settlement and colonial district in the United States—remains a touchstone for Puerto Ricans at home and abroad.

Founded in 1511, almost 100 years before the first English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, Old San Juan has endured centuries of decay and revival, shifting from a Spanish stronghold to an American territory after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Its cobblestone streets and colorful buildings have witnessed industrialization, migration to mainland cities and waves of tourism and return migration.

Listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, with forts, walls and castles designated UNESCO World Heritage sites in 1983, the city also lives in song. During World War II, composer Noel Estrada wrote “En Mi Viejo San Juan” (“In My Old San Juan”) for his brother serving abroad. The nostalgic anthem, recorded more than a thousand times in multiple languages, still echoes the refrain: “Me voy (I’m leaving), Pero un día volveré (But one day I will return).”

Historic Olvera Street sits at the heart of El Pueblo de Los Ángeles, the site where the city was founded in 1781 by a mix of Spanish, Indigenous, mestizo and African-descended settlers. The surrounding plaza and adobe buildings represent some of the city’s oldest surviving architecture, tying modern Los Angeles back to its colonial roots.

In 1781, about a dozen Spanish families and a handful of soldiers from nearby Mission San Gabriel Arcángel founded the town by the Los Angeles River and built its first parish church.

Those original 44 settlers, according to the Los Angeles Almanac, represented an ethnic melting pot. For centuries, under the successive flags of Spain, Mexico and finally the United States, the central plaza of their pueblo remained the heart of Los Angeles community life, home to an ever-growing mix of immigrants, from Mexico, Asia and beyond.

In the 1920s, a young woman named Christine Sperling led efforts to save Ávila Adobe, the city’s oldest existing house. By Easter Sunday 1930, she opened Olvera Street as a Mexican marketplace of shops, restaurants and historic buildings. The name honored judge and politician Agustín Olvera (1820–1876), who held Los Angeles’ first county court sessions in his now-demolished house on that street. Nearly a century later, the street continues to host festivals like the annual Las Posadas, a re-enactment of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem, keeping alive traditions that link Los Angeles to its rich, culturally diverse past.

Beginning in 1973, artists created the nation’s largest collection of outdoor murals on the gray concrete piers of a freeway that cut through San Diego’s Mexican American Barrio Logan, turning them into a lasting symbol of community resistance. Scores of large, colorful murals cover almost eight acres where refugees fleeing the Mexican Revolution had originally settled in 1910.

After the newly constructed Interstate 5 cleaved the barrio in two in the early 1960s, officials promised a park to make up for the 5,000 homes and businesses lost. In 1970, when bulldozers arrived to build a parking lot instead, local college student Mario Solis rallied neighbors. Activists, inspired by the country’s burgeoning civil rights-oriented Chicano Movement, formed a human chain around the bulldozers, planted trees and occupied the land for 12 days, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Three years later, artists began painting murals featuring historical and civil rights leaders, and themes of immigration, feminism and the symbolic reclamation of the local land that was once part of Mexico. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016, Chicano Park exemplifies how individuals become agents of change in their own communities. "There's an energy there that's hard to describe,” said activist and musician Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez. “When you see your people struggling for something positive, it's very inspiring.”

Strong coffee, music and politics fuel Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood and its main street Calle Ocho (8th Street), the heart of Cuban exile life and culture since Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution of 1959 prompted an exodus to southern Florida. Once a lower-middle-class neighborhood in downtown Miami, the area became a stronghold for Cuban businesses and counterrevolutionary activity in the 1960s, as Castro strengthened his power.

Now a landing point for immigrants from across Latin America and the Caribbean, Little Havana still teems with Cuban culture and history. Neighborhood old-timers clack their dotted tiles while chatting and sipping coffee in Domino Park. Locals and tourists alike tuck into ropa vieja (stewed beef) and the famous Cuban sandwiches at Versailles Restaurant. Visitors light up at hand-rolled cigar shops and pay homage at the Bay of Pigs Monument, with its eternal flame at the top.

The community hosts regular arts and culture fairs in open plazas, while more than a million people gather for the annual Calle Ocho street festival (aka Carnaval Miami), famous for breaking the Guinness record for the world’s longest conga line (120,000 people) in March 1988.

Massive post-World War II migration pushed tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans from that Caribbean island to New York City’s neighborhood known as Spanish Harlem, or El Barrio. In just one year—1946—New York City’s Puerto Rican population quadrupled to 50,000. By 1955, nearly 700,000 in search of jobs had arrived in the first great airborne migration in U.S. history, a number that jumped to more than a million by the mid-1960s.

El Barrio in Manhattan’s East Harlem became the center of working-class Puerto Rican life. One important hub has been La Marqueta, a marketplace under the Metro-North Railroad viaduct created in the 1930s as a place to consolidate the neighborhood’s pushcart vendors under one roof. It became a daily crossroads for thousands of barrio residents, who would catch tantalizing whiffs from home—including roast pork, arroz con pollo (chicken with rice) and fried plantains—while traveling into and out of the nearby subway.

Puerto Ricans also helped define New York’s music scene, from mambo bandleaders Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez in the 1950s to a younger generation of Nuyorican musicians blaring hard-driving salsa music on the street and out of apartment windows. Though Puerto Ricans have since dispersed, El Barrio remains inextricably tied to their culture and New York City history.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as wars raged in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, refugees from those countries arrived in San Francisco, and protests spilled onto its walls. Balmy Alley, a block-long stretch in the Mission District, became the city’s most concentrated collection of murals, celebrating Indigenous cultures and protesting U.S. intervention in Central America.

The first murals appeared in 1972—painted, in part, by children in a local day care center, according to artist, scholar and curator Mauricio E. Rodriguez. But in 1984, at the height of El Salvador’s civil war, artists Patricia Rodriguez and Ray Patlan, who both lived in Balmy Alley, organized 36 painters to create 27 murals under the banner PLACA—Spanish for “badge” and close to a slang term for “leaving your mark.” Their vivid work portrayed the violence driving migration and the hope for survival.

Herbert Sigüenza’s “Después del Triunfo/After the Triumph” imagined two alternative futures for his native El Salvador, depending on who won the civil war. White handprints—marks left by death squads in El Salvador during the war—appeared on a door by the word Asesino, or Murderer, in gray paint. Carlos “Kookie” Gonzalez’s mural showed an eagle clutching a limp dove, a haunting symbol of peace crushed by war.

As the wars died down and migration struggles took varying forms for different groups, murals have been added or changed to focus Balmy Alley visitors on topics like human rights, local gentrification and economic inequality. The murals make Balmy Alley one of San Francisco’s most visited cultural landmarks—a space where history, activism and neighborhood life intersect.