Depending on where you work or send your kids to school, it’s surprisingly easy to ignore the fact that nearly half of Santa Barbara’s population is Hispanic or Latino. Michael Montenegro learned early on that there are two separate, unequal Santa Barbaras. “I see how Santa Barbara treats my brothers and sisters who are darker and more indigenous looking,” said the light-skinned Montenegro, a child of Mexican immigrants who grew up on both sides of town. So as a teenager, he would tell people his parents were from Spain, taking advantage of his visually ambiguous ethnicity in a Eurocentric culture with a fetish for its Spanish colonial period.
That all changed when Montenegro took a course in Chicano studies with Santa Barbara City College instructor and artist Manuel Unzueta. “Chicano” is a word that generally refers to people of Mexican descent, but it is often theorized as a mixed identity drawing on both sides of the border, as well as indigenous roots. Unzueta’s course led Montenegro to embrace his Chicano identity, and he became determined to use his budding skills as a digital-media content creator to resurrect stories of the city’s Chicano history.
Among these efforts — along with producing documentaries and leading tours of Santa Barbara murals and Mexican restaurants — is a Facebook page that Montenegro calls Chicano Culture de Santa Barbara. The page serves as a public archive where Montenegro posts historical ephemera, asking his audience to fill in the context of these photos or documents, turning them into stories.