A sporadic newspaper for the greater Los Angeles Spring 2022 Issue 1
Speaking to a friend we wondered why when we first got taught history in school no one told us how it got to the present. No one told us how we connect with our neighborhood, to the city of Los Angeles, to California, to the Pacific Ocean. When we were taught History in school, history felt distant, written and done, enclosed in books with vague authors and an alleged air of "Truth." When we learned about history in school no one told us who wrote it, why or how, no one told us about another branch of study, historiography.
History is merely the study of occurrences, the stacking of facts and places, deeds and numbers, of what happened and was done. Historiography, however, is to look at how the writing of events came together, and the ways history relates to us, how it has treated us differently. That what we already know, we see through the lens of others, so the writing of history cannot be neutral.
La Crónica Libre seeks to counter this "neutrality", as fully passed, as things to be memorized and recalled as trivia, as events that add up to points that mean you know what? La Crónica is here to say, the past is present and demands you feel it.
La Crónica Libre will change with the seasons, we are a quarterly, expect us in the Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer. We are slow because there's enough fast thinking in the news, so fast it's dizzying and we are interestred in the deep conections, the ones buried under conrete and tar, in our neighbors memories, in the city' streets and archives. A permanent breaking news headline doesn't mean much at all, but the seasons, aren't they everything?
We have precedents that they elders in our communities may remember, La Free Press, La Gente de Aztlan, Open City. In those pages counterculture, political activism and community building coexisted. We work in their footsteps, because, as many have said and many more have learned these past few years, history doesn't repear but rhymes.
La Crónica Libre offers herself as a public platform, its printed pages are open to our readers and collaborators alike as a place to share opinions, resources, experiences, services, political commitments and parties!
We want to look, think, talk and feel the place where we are, find ourselves and is our present.
La Crónica Libre is committed to the creation of solidarity and camaraderie with the Owens Valley Paiute, whose water gives us life, and the Tongva, whose land we live on. We echo what they call Land Back!
La Crónica Libre is a liberated chronicle.
with Love,
Wes Larios & Clara López Menéndez
