Local News and Street Art: Inside El Tecolote’s Community Archives

It’s October 26, 2024, on a crowded corridor. As a long, painted scroll spins slowly, unveiling a mural of the city, a storyteller recounts neighborhood struggles from decades past. Children print historic flyers from a 2006 student walkout onto t-shirts, while performers recreate moments of protest and solidarity pulled straight from the archives. This is Paseo Artístico, a bilingual walking tour that transforms the neighborhood into a living history lesson. On 24th Street, stories once printed on paper now breathe, move, and grow in the hands of the community.

“The history of our community is forgotten unless we participate in it, by creating and communing,” says Paul Flores, Paseo Artístico producer at Acción Latina, the arts organization that organizes these public events.

At the center of Paseo Artístico is El Tecolote, which, founded in 1970, is the longest-running Spanish-English newspaper in California. Originally a student-run paper at San Francisco State University, El Tecolote documents the political, cultural, and artistic life of the Mission District, shedding light on migration, labor organizing, and housing struggles. Today, its archives are stewarded by Acción Latina, lifting local history off the page and into the life of the local community.

In 2020, the newspaper’s archives were digitized, making them fully searchable and accessible to community members.

“As an artist, this is a gold mine,” Flores says on digitization. “Most of my work is about the neighborhood, so I need the history. All I have to do is click the file and get 50 years of neighborhood archives.”

Rather than treating history as frozen in time, Acción Latina reanimates the archives through Paseo Artístico. Drawing from El Tecolote’s coverage, these walking tours bring archival histories into the present through performances, murals, and installations.

“We wanted to go back into the archives and lift out incredible moments that El Tecolote had reported on,” Flores explains. “What was important about those early years that we should share with people?”

In October 2025, Acción Latina hosted its fifth history-based Paseo Artístico. Titled “History Matters in the Mission 2010–2020,” the event reimagined a decade of neighborhood life, from the glory of three San Francisco Giants World Series championships to housing struggles caused by the city’s growing tech industry.

Artistic activations do more than entertain. They have tangible impacts. “We started a cultural district to fight gentrification. Our Latino, working-class, and BIPOC community was facing massive evictions,” Flores explains. “We put the cultural district in to preserve the cultural identity of the neighborhood, and the archive offers that as a reminder.”

Today, El Tecolote continues to publish community-centered journalism that documents and shapes the future of the neighborhood.

“We have to remind people to value this history,” Flores affirms. “To reimagine. To inspire. To say, ‘this happened, and we need to learn from this.’”