Corredor Oaxaqueño: Aiding Tequio through Oaxacan Design

Authors: Marco Aguilar Mendez, Natalie Marshall, Jocelyn Urbina, and Mariana Estrada

Instructed by: Gustavo Leclerc, Maite Zubiaurre

Teaching Assistant: Daniel Rodríguez Mora

An estimated 200,000 Oaxacan residents living in Los Angeles have established a transnational and transitional home in Oaxacalifornia, specifically along a stretch of W. Pico Boulevard in Central Los Angeles. Oaxacan businesses and restaurants populate this street, as does the yearly Guelaguetza festival organized by the  Regional Organization of Oaxaca  (ORO) since the late 1980s. The hybrid dynamic of this street includes a combination of cultural traditions and commitments, where Oaxacan Angelenos perform their Oaxacalifornian identities in innovative ways. In 2022, a pivotal moment for LA’s Oaxacan community came when audio of anti-Indigenous remarks made by members of the Los Angeles City Council was leaked, to which the Los Angeles Oaxacan community responded with a published list of four  demands  that could combat anti-Indigenous racism. In these demands, they call for delineating a Oaxacan corridor and protection for street vendors.

Taking these demands as our chief source of inspiration, students asked: what might W. Pico Boulevard look like if it allowed for safe vending, walking, eating, sitting, performing, socializing, living, and connecting? As the site of the yearly Guelaguetza festival – an event in which LA’s Oaxacan community celebrates their cultural heritage through music, food, dance, and art – what if this spirit of conviviality could be accommodated year-round? This imagination of a built environment of connectivity is heavily inspired by ancestral indigenous practices of mutual aid that already exist in this space – a tradition encapsulated by the term Guelaguetza, which means “to offer without receiving anything in exchange,” and the term tequio, which is a concept that promotes the responsibility of collective work to sustain communities. With this theme in mind, students identified two main transformations to reimagine W. Pico Boulevard as a space informed by Guelaguetza and tequio ancestral traditions - Transforming traffic-heavy street into pedestrian zone, and incorporating shade structures inspired by features of Oaxacan built environment.