With support from the California Arts Council, MendoLatino will collaborate with the Latinx community to collect, create, and showcase the contributions of this community to Noyo Harbor, a small, vibrant commercial harbor on the Mendocino coast. In Making History/Haciendo Historia: Latinx migration, labor and resiliency in Noyo Harbor, we will record oral histories, produce audio stories; and gather archival family photos and beloved memorabilia. Artist-led participatory workshops include Story circles; Timeline creation; Community mapping; and Mixed-media portrait creation. These activities will contribute to a multimedia/arts exhibit and an illustrated map of Noyo Harbor’s Latinx sites and stories. The goal of this project is to ensure that the contributions of the Latinx community, largely absent, are publicly recognized and integrated into the historical narrative of the Mendocino Coast.
MendoLatino works in multiple media and artistic formats, including radio, video, podcasts, oral history, storytelling, and mixed-media exhibitions. Since 2019, we produce MendoLatino, a Spanish-language and Bilingual public affairs radio program on KZYX twice a month. Since 2022, our audio storytelling project Making History/Haciendo Historia: Latin@s in Mendocino has been training members of the Latinx community to record oral histories of their loved ones and other people who have helped shape the local Latinx community. These oral histories are shaped into powerful audio stories and podcasts. Our podcast series is called Our North/Nuestro Norte, based on the oral histories of community members.