About this Project

Time Travel is a series of posters created by Deborah Aschheim celebrating 50 years of student activism in Pasadena and East L.A. The posters are on display at 18 bus stop shelters in Pasadena and on 29 Pasadena Transit buses in 2018.

Between 2017 and 2018, Aschheim interviewed participants in the famous 1968 East L.A. High School student walkouts and participants in related, less well-known grassroots student activism in the Pasadena public schools c.1968-73. She also collected stories of the 1960s-1970s Chicano Civil Rights Movement in Southern California and the fight to integrate the Pasadena Unified School District in the years leading up to and following the federal court order to desegregate the City’s schools in 1970.

In addition to researching the Chicano “Blowouts,” Aschheim spent hours in the Pasadena Central Library looking at microfilm of Pasadena Star News and Los Angeles Times articles from the Pasadena Walkouts of 1969 (and the April 30, 1969 riot at Pasadena High School) and searching through 50 year old yearbooks from Pasadena High School, John Muir High School and Blair High School for images and information related to Pasadena student movements. She is extremely grateful for generous, knowledgeable archivists at the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA who partnered with her on drawings from La Raza, the influential Chicano community newspaper published in Los Angeles 1967 to 1977. Thank you to La Raza photographers for their generosity in letting Aschheim work from their amazing images, which you can see at the Autry Museum through February, 2019:

Aschheim combined excerpts from stories shared by project participants with her drawings based on the historical photographs to create posters that served as interventions into public space. The entire series is archived here, as well as longer excerpts from the oral histories and more of the research that went into this project. (If you’d prefer to read the 10 small posters in Spanish, hit the contact button and request a PDF of the Spanish text version.)

On May 3, 2018, Time Travel Panel Discussion, presented by Deborah Aschheim in partnership with La Pintoresca Teen Education Center, and featuring project participants Starla Lewis, Roberta H. Martínez, Carlos M. Montes and Raul Ruiz, was held at Pasadena Central Library, funded by a grant from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Video and audio from the panel discussion will be posted on this site as soon as it is edited.

This project was made possible in part by the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division.

Deborah Aschheim would love to hear from you about this project!

Email: info@deborahaschheim.com

Thank you to everyone who contributed time, stories, images, expertise and energy to Time Travel:

Oral histories
Deva Anderson
Vibiana Aparicio-Chamberlin
Rick Cole
Frankie Connor
Paula Crisostomo
Starla Lewis
Chuck Maloof
Roberta H. Martínez
Carlos M. Montes
Rosalio Munoz
Cynthia Olivo, Ph.D,
Peter Ochoa
Don Radcliff
Ernest M. Saenz
George Van Alstine
Florence Zinzun

La Raza Photographers
Pedro Arias
Joe Razo
Raul Ruiz
La Raza Staff
Devra Weber

La Raza Photographic collection, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
www.chicano.ucla.edu/research/la-raza
Xaviera Flores, Librarian and archivist

Support, encouragement, advice, permissions, funding
Blair High School
Vilma Martinez

John Muir High School
Cynthia Lake

John Muir High School Alumni Association
Jim Henderson

Pablo Miralles
https://arroyosecofilms.com

Pasadena High School
Laurie Radcliff
Robert Hernandez, principal

East LA Archives, University John F. Kennedy Memorial Library
California State University, Los Angeles
https://pasadenahistory.org
Azalea Camacho, Library Archivist

Anuja Navare, Archivist, Pasadena Museum of History
https://pasadenahistory.org

City of Pasadena Arts and Cultural Affairs Division
Rochelle Branch
Jayme Fillipini

City of Pasadena Department of Transportation
Valerie Gibson
Sebastian Hernandez
Britt Card

Pasadena Public Library
Rosa Cesaretti
Pat Smith
Dan Mclaughlin
Jane Gov

City of Pasadena Human Services and Recreation
La Pintoresca Teen Education Center
Elizabeth Luna

California Humanities
http://calhum.org
Jody Sahota
Felicia Kelley
Lucy Boltz

Emily Hopkins, Side Street Projects
http://sidestreet.org

Scott Ward, Armory Center for the Arts
http://www.armoryarts.org
Lilia Hernandez, Armory Center for the Arts
Lorraine Cleary Dale, Armory Center for the Arts

Gerda Govine

Design
Jody Zellen
http://www.jodyzellen.com

Photography
Brian Moss
http://www.briancmoss.com

Editor
Barbara Aschheim

Translators:
Carlos Gonzalez
Kristin F. Pilon

Artists’ Assistant:
George Nakayama

Printing:
Robert Meyers Studio
http://www.rmsdigital.com