San Francisco Historical Circle of the Displaced
A Counter-Monumental Project of Memory, Erasure, and Resistance
“Every city, every place, carries within it many buried histories—circles of displacement, erasure, and survival.”
The San Francisco Historical Circle of the Displaced is a critical, community-driven project committed to preserving the layered histories of cultural displacement, removal, and erasure in the San Francisco Bay Area. It emerges as both a platform and practice of remembering—a response to the dominant ideologies of progress and prosperity that continually overwrite the lived histories of the marginalized.
In contrast to traditional historical societies that often center settler narratives, the Historical Circle draws attention to what is missing, obscured, or silenced in the official archives. The project recognizes that to understand the identity and complexity of San Francisco, we must also illuminate its erasures—those moments when entire peoples, communities, and ways of life were systematically removed from visibility, land, and power.
This project began with the understanding that historical amnesia is not accidental—it is structural. The retelling of these counter-histories resists the cyclical waves of displacement and culturacide that have long characterized urban transformation in San Francisco.
The San Francisco Historical Circle of the Displaced was conceived as a collaborative project between artists John Jota Leaños and René Garcia, bringing together decolonial aesthetics, archival research, and site-based intervention to make visible the lives and stories historically erased from the city’s dominant narrative.
Los Olvidados and the Politics of Memory
The Historical Circle engages in what might be called the preservation of los olvidados—the forgotten, the disappeared, the ghosted. Through the gathering of testimonies, visual interventions, site-based commemorations, and public education, the Circle restores presence to those omitted from dominant historical narratives. This act of historical witnessing does not simply recover the past—it reclaims the right to the city.
In telling these stories, the project also becomes an aesthetic of refusal: a refusal to let gentrification and structural violence continue without public reckoning; a refusal to allow dominant institutions to dictate who is remembered and who is disposable.
The San Francisco Historical Monument Series
Six Monuments for the Displaced
The Historical Monument Series is a mobile, conceptual, and often site-specific intervention that honors six moments of cultural displacement in San Francisco’s modern history. In the tradition of counter-monuments and anti-statues, these pieces do not monumentalize conquest or wealth, but rather draw attention to the dismembered roots of communities forcibly removed from the urban fabric.
These monuments do not stand in marble or bronze. Instead, they exist as ephemeral images, digital murals, performative gestures, and community inscriptions. Together, they mark a geography of loss—and of memory.
1. Mission Indians (1769-1830s)
The Ohlone peoples, the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula, were among the first to experience colonial displacement through forced labor and religious conversion at Mission Dolores beginning in 1776. The mission system initiated a cycle of genocidal practices and cultural erasure that persists today in land dispossession, settler renaming, and the romanticization of conquest.
2. California Indian Slavery (1850)
Following the U.S. annexation of California, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians legalized the kidnapping and enslavement of Native peoples, particularly children. Under the pretext of “protection,” this act enabled white settlers to extract unpaid labor, especially during the Gold Rush, further entrenching the violence of westward expansion. This legislation was part of the California genocide or “extermination” between 1846-1873 as lawmakers named it.
3. Anti-Chinese Legislation (1882)
San Francisco was ground zero for anti-Chinese violence, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first U.S. law to restrict immigration based on race. Local riots, discriminatory laws, and the razing of Chinatowns reflect a deep legacy of xenophobia that helped shape the racial state.
4. Japanese Internment (1942)
Over 14,000 Japanese Americans in San Francisco were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in internment camps during World War II. This mass displacement, sanctioned by Executive Order 9066, represents a pivotal moment of state-sanctioned cultural removal—one that still reverberates in Japanese American memory and activism.
5. Chicano Lowrider Culture (1980s)
In the Mission District, Chicano lowrider cruising became a vibrant form of cultural expression and pride. By the 1980s, this movement was criminalized through police harassment, discriminatory traffic laws, and an illegal curfew implemented under Mayor Dianne Feinstein. The removal of lowriders from the streets reflects a broader pattern of aesthetic policing and cultural displacement.
6. Gold-Rush.com (1990s–2000s)
The Dot-Com Boom triggered a “Nuevo Gold Rush” that radically altered the housing landscape of San Francisco. Eviction rates quadrupled, speculative real estate practices soared, and long-time residents—particularly working-class communities of color—were pushed out. What was once the Mission, Bayview, or Fillmore, became ground zero for digital colonization.
Why It Matters
In the face of continuing displacement—from tech-fueled gentrification to climate migration—the Historical Circle of the Displaced offers a necessary intervention. It reasserts that memory is not nostalgia but struggle. To remember is to resist. To map these sites is to contest the invisibility of the displaced and to reclaim place through narrative. This project stands as a living archive for future generations—one that resists the flattening of San Francisco’s radical past and insists on a more honest civic future.
