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My colleague Jose Del Real wrote this dispatch, about the renewed, urgent interest in some of California’s most foundational history:

El Pueblo de Los Ángeles is often called the birthplace of the city. The much celebrated historic district in downtown, today, is brought to life by pumping Spanish-language music.

The vibrant colors of Olvera Street marketplace assure you: We celebrate our Mexican past.

But LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, the Mexican-American museum and community center nearby, asks its visitors to also interrogate some of the darker aspects of Los Angeles’s story.

The museum’s audience has nearly doubled in the last five years to about 111,000 visitors in 2018, according to Abelardo de la Peña Jr, a spokesman for LA Plaza. He believes recent criticism of people of Mexican descent has given members of the community a sense of urgency to learn more about their history.

[Read about California’s history of racist violence.]

Those visitors include Ulisses Esparza and Karen Casillas, who visited the museum on a recent afternoon. They came to the museum with a common refrain in mind: No somos ni de aquí, ni de allá; “we’re neither from here nor from there.”