History

Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos’ (SCBU) core philosophy of La Cultura Cura (Culture Cures) is at the root of its many efforts in grassroots organizing, policy advocacy, direct service, transformative justice, intergroup coalition-building, and evidence-based community change, and has been foundational to the modern community peace and social justice movement. SCBU serves as an “Anchor Institution,” a communal hub for people to heal and regain one’s cultural bearings; a safe space for unconditional acceptance, cultural expression, and inter-cultural exchange; an organic learning center to develop leaders, nurture healthy intergenerational relationships, and preserve the sacred passage of ancestral values-based knowledge for building traditional communal structures that nurture its people. Organizations and leaders from across the country come to Barrios Unidos for elder leadership, cultural guidance, and practical knowledge to implement in their own efforts.

The story of Barrios Unidos (BU) is a story of an evolving grassroots mobilization, originating in the Chicano civil rights and anti war movements in the 1960s and 1970s. From the 1970s through the late 1990s, BU worked with the California Coalition to End Barrio Warfare as the Coalition’s organizing arm in the northern part of the state, promoting nonviolent values and strategies. Together, they broke new ground by developing workshops and school presentations, a network of peace workers across California, and a series of highly visible, nationally recognized peace summits and conferences. This fruitful partnership helped to forge many of Barrios Unidos’s subsequent organizing and mobilizing strategies.

Throughout the early 2000s to the present day, Barrios Unidos expanded and evolved its scope of influence. Partnering with notable movement leaders such as Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Dolores Huerta and many more, Barrios Unidos made its mark in the movement for social justice by expanding its work in California Prisons and mentoring young leaders who have gone on to start what are now influential non profit organizations in California, New Mexico, and New York.

Evolving from its early initiatives that focused on preventing and interrupting gang violence, Barrios now works to address violence in all of its forms, from individual to systemic, economic, and cultural. Current programming includes a weekly food pantry, job training, reentry program, programming in prisons, arts, youth development, community events, indigenous ceremony, and more – tackling the issue of violence comprehensively and at multiple angles. Barrios Unidos’ programming and strategies place those with relevant lived experience at the front lines of social change. All of Barrios Unidos staff and board of directors are either previously incarcerated or system impacted.

The lessons and contributions of BU to the human family underscore that truth and reconciliation are both possible and necessary. BU’s leadership now looks toward developing the next generation of Barrios Unidos, adapting and implementing new strategies to fit this contemporary era of non profit work, while holding a non negotiable stance in maintaining BU’s original guiding principles. The development of the Barrios Unidos Institute of Peace and Community Development will represent decades worth of work and sacrifice and act as an anchor and blueprint for the next generations to face the great social problems of our time and further achieve peace in our communities.