No, UC Riverside's Prof. Jorge N. Leal and La Plaza De Cultura y Artes did not create A Great Day In East L.A.
A Great Day In East LA®: A Public Statement from Creator Piero F. Giunti
A Note Regarding This Statement
I write this fully understanding that speaking publicly about my experience may carry professional, personal and legal consequences. I understand that, in telling this story, I may be putting relationships and even parts of my career on the line.
I nevertheless believe that artists, independent contractors, freelancers, cultural workers, lenders, historians and creators have the right to speak truthfully about their experiences, raise concerns about mistreatment and correct the historical record surrounding their own work.
This statement reflects my personal experiences, recollections, opinions and understanding of events surrounding A Great Day In East LA®: Celebrando the Eastside Sound at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes. Where I describe statements, conduct, motivations or actions of other individuals, those descriptions should be understood as my account and, where disputed, as allegations rather than judicially established findings.
Many of the events described here are supported, in my possession, by emails, photographs, contracts, loan documentation, exhibition records, contemporaneous communications and, in certain instances, mutually agreed recorded conversations.
I am not writing this to personally attack anyone.
I am writing because after more than a decade devoted to preserving the histories of Los Angeles musicians, I believe I have a responsibility to preserve the history of this project accurately as well.
There is something deeply troubling
There is something deeply troubling about a cultural institution that claims to preserve community history while failing to understand or properly credit the people who created it.
There is something even more troubling when an institution that publicly speaks about representation, dignity, culture and human rights appears, in my experience, unwilling to extend those same values to the artists, historians, cultural workers and community members whose labor makes its exhibitions possible.
That contradiction sits at the heart of what I experienced at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes.
And before I describe those incidents, the history of A Great Day In East LA® needs to be clear.
A Great Day In East LA® did not begin at a museum.
More than a decade ago, I had a vivid dream about Art Kane's legendary 1958 photograph A Great Day in Harlem.
I woke up thinking about generations of musicians who shaped East Los Angeles and the greater Los Angeles music landscape and asked myself:
What if we documented them with the same sense of historical purpose?
That became A Great Day In East LA®.
One of the first calls I made was a cold call to musician and historian Mark Guerrero.
I found Mark while researching East Los Angeles music and immediately recognized the extraordinary depth of his knowledge. Mark had not learned this history solely through books or academia. He had lived it. He was a musician himself, the son of Chicano music pioneer Lalo Guerrero, and someone whose personal relationships stretched across generations of Los Angeles music.
Mark believed in the idea and joined me at the beginning.
There was no museum.
There was no university.
There was no academic department.
There was no curatorial staff.
There was no major institution standing behind us.
There was an idea, a camera, research, persistence and relationships.
And there were plenty of people who thought the idea would go nowhere.
When People Didn't Believe in It
Early in the project's development, I approached people I believed might understand what I was trying to build.
Some did. Others absolutely did not.
A prominent Chicano art collector once told me(No, not cheech or Castulo De La Rocha), in substance, that the project was dumb, unoriginal and that I should go back and think of something else.
Years later, I watched that same person walk through the completed museum exhibition expressing excitement about how extraordinary it was.
I don't tell that story bitterly.
I tell it because creative ideas often appear obvious after someone has spent ten years proving they were worth pursuing. I also approached an important academic affiliated with a major Los Angeles university. I shared portions of my research and hoped that person might help.
I felt completely brushed aside. Later, I learned that material connected to research I had shared appeared to inform that person's own work.
Years afterward, a museum employee recounted encountering that academic and hearing them speak as though they were going to work on the exhibition and had helped me during the project's beginnings. According to that museum employee, when the exhibition was eventually announced without that academic's involvement, the academic was upset that they had never received the call.
My response today is simple:
Dude, you got the call.
You got it ten years ago.
I called.
I emailed.
I followed up, including after being asked to call and email.
The calls simply were not answered.
The lesson I learned was that institutional validation frequently arrives after the difficult work has already been done.
So Mark and I kept going.
Building Something Without Permission
For approximately the next decade, we built A Great Day In East LA® one musician and one family at a time. I photographed hundreds of musicians and Mark and I recorded hundreds of oral histories.
Mark and I researched histories, followed leads, searched for musicians who had disappeared from the public record, corrected misinformation, located families and slowly built an archive documenting generations of Los Angeles music. Years before LA Plaza became involved, the project was already publicly established.
In 2017, I curated A Great Day in East LA: Building Relationships Through Space and Sound at Scripps College in Pomona.
That matters.
Because the chronology is indisputable:
A Great Day In East LA® existed before LA Plaza's exhibition.
The museum did not create A Great Day In East LA®.
The museum became one chapter in a project that had already existed for approximately a decade.
Before the later museum leadership and curatorial team became involved, former LA Plaza CEO John Echeveste had supported A Great Day In East LA® for years, giving me space at the museum to conduct interviews and photo sessions and recognizing the value of the project long before it became a major exhibition. Years later, as he prepared to leave LA Plaza, John asked that A Great Day In East LA® be brought into the museum as an exhibition. To me, that history matters because the relationship between the project and LA Plaza did not begin with the people who later claimed greater ownership over its narrative. It began with someone who had watched the project grow for years and understood that it already existed independently, with its own history, relationships and identity.
From an Independent Project to a Museum Exhibition
When the opportunity came to transform A Great Day In East LA® into a major museum exhibition, I did not simply deliver photographs to somebody else's curatorial concept. I led the curatorial vision of what that exhibition would become.I wanted visitors to feel the community when they entered.
Punk beside soul.
Chicano rock beside hip-hop.
Backyard parties beside international stages.
Unknown musicians beside Grammy winners.
Different generations speaking to one another.
I wanted people to feel that East Los Angeles had entered the museum rather than the museum simply attempting to explain East Los Angeles. And the objects were never decorations.
Every guitar, jacket, photograph, handwritten lyric, record, flyer and piece of ephemera had a historical reason for being there.
Approximately 98 percent of the material Mark and I helped bring into the exhibition was extraordinarily rare, and much of it had never been displayed inside a museum. Some objects took years of relationships and trust before families would allow them to leave their possession.
That trust cannot be manufactured by sending someone a museum loan form.
It has to be earned.
We knew what existed.
We knew who had it.
We knew why it mattered.
Most importantly, people trusted us enough to put pieces of their lives in our hands.
That was real curatorial labor. The Bigger the Artifact, the Harder It Could Become
One of the recurring frustrations I experienced involved the acquisition process itself.
The bigger the object was in terms of historical importance, the more I sometimes felt sandbagged rather than supported.
I recall then-CEO Leticia Rhi Buckley telling me, in substance, that I was making museum staff look bad because her staff was capable of doing everything themselves and that the museum could recreate the exhibition without me if necessary.
I disagreed completely.
I told her that what Mark and I brought to the table could not simply be recreated institutionally.
My recollection is that she responded by suggesting the museum could simply get Mark to acquire everything because Mark had brought everything in. But that fundamentally misunderstood what Mark had given me.
Mark's greatest gift to me wasn't a contact list.
It was trust.
It was loyalty.
It was decades of relationships with musicians and families who extended some of that trust to me because Mark trusted me.
I told her that, God forbid something happened to Mark, those relationships could not simply be transferred to the museum.
You cannot purchase that.
You cannot recreate it with a collections department.
You cannot demand it because your title says curator.
Relationships built over lifetimes do not automatically become institutional property.
The Reality of Working With Musicians
Before I even signed my contract with LA Plaza, I told Senior Curator Karen Crews that there needed to be an understanding about artifact deadlines. I would do everything humanly possible to meet them. But I could not guarantee them. We were working with musicians, widows, families, personal collections and objects that sometimes had not left someone's home in decades.
I even predicted that objects would probably continue arriving until opening day, which they did.
My understanding was that this reality was acknowledged before I signed.
Yet throughout the process, I felt repeatedly blamed for late-arriving objects.
At one point, a very famous musician explained the situation to Museum Registrar Carolyn H. Lopez better than I ever could.
In substance, he said:
"If you ask a musician on Friday to bring you something Monday, you might get it on a Monday six
months from now."
I asked what happened if the musician was even bigger.
His response was essentially:
"Oh, you may never get it."
That is funny because it is true.
Community-based curating requires understanding the people whose history you are asking to borrow.
Teaching the People Who Were Supposed to Interpret the History
One of the most difficult contradictions of this experience was that several people who eventually had considerable authority over how East Los Angeles music history was presented entered the process, in my experience, with limited knowledge of substantial portions of that history.
That included members of LA Plaza's curatorial staff and, in my experience, Dr. Jorge N. Leal.
Jorge did not create A Great Day In East LA®.
He entered the process years later in connection with the museum exhibition.
His strongest area of expertise, as I understood it through our work together, centered on the late-1990s and early-2000s Rock en Español scene. He brought useful material and academic research connected to that history.
But in terms of the physical objects making up the exhibition, my estimate from our work together is that Jorge was responsible for only a very small percentage, approximately 2 % as Jorge has said, much of it from his personal collection.
That is not an insult.
It is a distinction about contribution.
Mark and I often found ourselves explaining who musicians were, why certain objects mattered, how generations
connected, which bands belonged to which movements and why something that might look ordinary carried enormous historical significance. We were effectively teaching portions of the history while simultaneously finding ourselves having to defend our authority to speak about it. That is why it has been painful for me to subsequently see interviews where Jorge is presented, or presents himself, in ways that I believe can leave audiences with the impression that he possesses comprehensive expertise across the entire Eastside music history represented by A Great Day In East LA®.
Jorge has expertise.
Mark has expertise.
I have expertise.
Those areas of expertise are not interchangeable.
"This Is No Longer Your Project. It's Ours."
One of the most alarming issues for me was language I recall hearing from both Leticia and Karen suggesting, in substance:
"This is no longer your project. It's ours." I repeatedly tried to clarify what they meant.
I asked whether what they were actually trying to say was:
A Great Day In East LA® is my independent project, but Celebrando the Eastside Sound is now a collaborative museum exhibition. That distinction would have made sense.
My recollection is that they rejected it.
That terrified me.
Because there is a fundamental difference between an institution collaborating with an artist to create an exhibition from an existing project and an institution effectively asserting that the underlying project has somehow become theirs.
A Great Day In East LA® existed long before this exhibition.
The museum exhibition was built from it.
The exhibition did not absorb ownership of its history.
Representation Cannot Mean Rewriting History
One of the most revealing conflicts involved gender representation.
Associate Curator Esperanza Sanchez, in my experience, pushed to exclude or remove additional portraits of male musicians because she believed the
exhibition was, in her words, "too man heavy."
I fundamentally disagreed with that approach.
The historical reality is uncomfortable but important.
Many periods of East Los Angeles music history, particularly the 1950s and 1960s, were disproportionately male.
To pretend otherwise is not inclusion.\
It is rewriting the historical record.
What Mark and I did was much harder.
We consciously went searching for the women whose histories had been overlooked.
We searched for LGBTQ+ musicians.
We followed obscure references.
We talked with families.
We examined old photographs.
We tracked down musicians.
We asked questions previous histories had apparently failed to ask.
Again and again, when people discussed women in East Los Angeles music, the same handful of names appeared.
We ultimately identified nearly 100 women and LGBTQ+ musicians connected to these histories and scenes.
I am incredibly proud of that.
We did not make history more inclusive by pretending that the past had been perfectly equitable.
We made it more inclusive by doing the work necessary to find the people history had overlooked.
The Women Behind Los Lobos
The suggestion that I somehow had a problem supporting women was especially painful because advocacy for women's stories runs through my work beyond this exhibition.
The feature documentary I have been directing about Los Lobos, which has been winning awards on the festival circuit, repeatedly returns to an important part of the band's story:
the women behind Los Lobos.
Their wives and partners are not treated as footnotes.
One of the film's important thematic threads is that these women have been part of the backbone that allowed Los Lobos to survive decades of touring, uncertainty, family sacrifice and the demands of life in music.
You cannot honestly tell the story of Los Lobos without telling the story of the women who held families together
while that extraordinary journey unfolded.
That is the kind of history I believe in.
"You Just Don't Like Strong Women Telling You What to Do"
When I challenged historical or curatorial decisions that I believed were inaccurate, I expected discussions about evidence and history. Instead, during one exchange with Karen Crews, I was told words to the effect of:
"You just don't like strong women telling you what to do."
I was deeply offended.
People at the museum knew my work and personal background.
They knew the effort Mark and I had made to locate women whose contributions had been forgotten.
They knew my commitment to telling women's stories.
To reduce a legitimate curatorial disagreement to an accusation about my attitude toward women felt dismissive and personally insulting.
I was not objecting to women exercising authority.
I was objecting to decisions I believed were historically wrong.
Those are fundamentally different things.
"She Doesn't Look Pretty and She's Old"
One incident made that contradiction even harder for me to reconcile.
While discussing the inclusion of a portrait of an important female musician whose work helped open doors for later generations, I recall Karen Crews objecting to prominently displaying a particular photograph with words to
the effect that:
she didn't look pretty and she looked old.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
Was this a beauty pageant?
Or was this a museum?
A woman who survives decades in the music industry should not become less worthy of museum space because she aged.
Her age is part of the history.
What Happened With Joanna Salas
Another experience involved Joanna Salas, widow of Rudy Salas of Tierra.
Joanna trusted us enough to provide extraordinary access to materials connected to Rudy and Tierra, including access to a storage unit containing pieces of the band's history.
For anyone who loves Tierra, Chicano music or Los Angeles music history, it was a treasure trove.
In my presence, Karen made comments concerning the monetary worth or perceived lack of value of materials connected to Rudy that I considered extraordinarily insensitive, particularly when speaking to a widow still grieving her husband.
I remember being appalled.
Historical value is not the same thing as auction value.
A worn jacket can be priceless.
A handwritten page can be priceless.
A broken instrument can be priceless.
That is precisely why community knowledge matters.
When Objects Went Missing
Even before the burglary, I had serious concerns about the handling of artifacts.
During installation, objects I had helped secure became unaccounted for.
In one incident involving Museum Registrar Carolyn H. Lopez, I felt that she spoke to me in an accusatory and disrespectful manner, treating me as though I had lost the materials.
That was extremely serious because these objects belonged to people who trusted me.
The objects were subsequently found.
My recollection of the resolution was essentially receiving a short call saying:
"I found the objects. Okay, bye."
For me, that wasn't enough.
My reputation with lenders had been placed at risk.
For a community curator, trust is currency.
You can damage in one careless interaction a relationship that took ten years to build.
Objects Were Not Props
I witnessed situations where I believed museum representatives provided inaccurate or incomplete
information about musicians, artifacts and even the origins of the exhibition.
At times, when historical knowledge surrounding an object was lacking, I heard explanations shift
toward the idea that the exhibition was not necessarily about an object's history but about how that object made someone feel.
I rejected that.
Every object was there for a historical reason.
I witnessed presentations where artifacts were discussed without the context Mark and I had worked so hard to establish.
I later saw public interviews in which, in my opinion, musicians, objects or histories were incorrectly identified.
A museum carries authority.
When somebody speaking for a museum says something, visitors understandably assume somebody verified it.
When inaccurate community history is delivered under institutional authority, mistakes become institutionalized.
Fourteen Months Later, Objects Still Remained Unlabeled
Perhaps one of the clearest examples of this contradiction is something much simpler: the labels.
We spent years locating these objects.
We sat with musicians and families to understand their histories.
We documented who owned them, who used them, what recordings or performances they were connected to and why they belonged in the exhibition.
Some of these objects had never been displayed publicly before. Some took years of trust before a family or musician would even consider allowing them to leave their possession.
And yet, approximately 14 months after the exhibition opened, objects still remained without proper labeling, identification or lender credit.
To me, that is unacceptable.
A museum label is not an optional decorative element.
The label is part of the historical record.
Without it, a visitor may see an old guitar.
With it, they understand whose hands played it, what music was created with it, what generation it represents and why someone preserved it for decades.
Without proper lender credit, the person or family who trusted the institution with that history can disappear from the story entirely.
And this was not something only I noticed. Musicians, lenders and visitors repeatedly commented to me about the lack of information accompanying the objects.
One member of Los Lobos described the experience to me in words I have never forgotten. In substance, he said:
"This is such an amazing exhibition, but I feel like I'm standing in this huge room with all these cool things and I have no clue what I'm looking at."
Others expressed similar confusion.
That should concern any museum.
Because these were people who actually knew this history.
If musicians whose own community, friends and contemporaries were represented in the galleries could walk through and struggle to understand what particular objects were, imagine the experience of a visitor encountering East Los Angeles music history for the first time.
That was precisely why Mark and I had worked so hard gathering the histories behind these objects.
The guitar was never just a guitar.
The jacket was never just a jacket.
The handwritten lyrics were never simply pieces of paper.
The story was what transformed an object into history.
People did not hand us these things because they needed somewhere to store them.
They loaned them because we told them:
Your history matters.
People should know what this is.
People should know who it belonged to.
People should know why it matters.
After all the work Mark and I did locating these objects, researching them, convincing people to lend them and physically getting them into the museum, I found myself still having to push for the most fundamental museum responsibility of all:
Tell the visitor what they are looking at.
Fourteen months is not an installation delay.
Fourteen months is not opening-week chaos.
At that point, it becomes a serious question about institutional responsibility.
The exhibition was allowed to run for more than a year while some of the history sitting inside those galleries still had not been properly identified.
For an institution whose purpose is supposedly to preserve and interpret history, I find that extraordinarily difficult to understand.
And once again, the people most affected were the musicians, families and lenders who trusted us.
Because an unlabeled object is not simply an unfinished piece of exhibition design.
It is a story left untold.
And in an exhibition created specifically to prevent these histories from disappearing, leaving the story untold defeats the very reason we brought the object into the museum in the first place.
Fighting Erasure Inside an Exhibition About History
I had to push back when founding members of Los Lobos were being left out of wall text.
Think about that contradiction. We were telling generations of East Los Angeles music history, and I had to argue that founding members of one of the most important bands ever to emerge from East Los Angeles could not simply disappear. I also pushed back against attempts to give younger musicians with still-developing careers historical positions that I believed belonged to pioneers who spent decades opening those doors.
Young musicians absolutely belong in this story. But celebrating the future cannot require erasing the people who built the road leading to it.
When I Felt Speaking Up Had Consequences
As these disagreements accumulated, I began experiencing what I perceived as gaslighting, obstruction, sandbagging and retaliation.
I wasn't an outsider attacking the exhibition.
I had been invited into the museum to help create an exhibition from my own project.
During a mutually agreed recorded conversation with Leticia, I raised what I believed was mistreatment, gaslighting, obstruction and retaliation.
I explained that I felt I needed to protect myself.
I asked, in substance:
I am an invited guest working inside your institution. Don't I deserve respect and a safe professional working environment?
My recollection of her response was essentially no, and that as someone working within her museum I did not possess the rights or protections I believed I had.
I was stunned.
Later, when I raised California's Freelance Worker Protection Act, SB 988, in an email, Leticia responded while copying museum lawyer.
I experienced that response as intimidating escalation rather than engagement with the substance of the concerns I had raised.
Whether that law applies to every aspect of my particular relationship with LA Plaza is ultimately a legal question.
But I should never have reached a point where I felt I needed to invoke legal protections simply to ask to be treated with professional respect.
When Protest Was Used Against My Concerns
There was another moment with Leticia that deeply disturbed me.
When I raised concerns about how I was being treated, I felt that protests taking place outside the museum were invoked in a way that minimized or redirected the concerns I was raising about what was happening to me inside the institution.
I experienced that as weaponizing a legitimate political struggle against an individual cultural worker raising concerns about his treatment.
I understood the political moment.
I understood why people were protesting.
I understood what immigrant and Latino communities were facing.
But those realities did not make what was happening inside the museum irrelevant.
Justice cannot only matter when it is happening outside your doors.
It has to matter inside them too.
"You Can Gaslight Jorge and Me, But Not My Wife"
At a certain point, I had become so accustomed to questioning my own perception of what was happening that I began wondering whether I was somehow misunderstanding the situation.
Then my wife witnessed some of it herself.
That changed something for me.
Months earlier, at an Eastside Arts Initiative gala, my wife was approximately four months pregnant. At the time, Karen Crews and Esperanza Sanchez had told me that during exhibition installation I would need to be at the museum every day for long hours.
That was not a small logistical detail for my family.
By the time installation began, our son would have been born, and my wife and I were already trying to figure out childcare and how heavily we would need to rely on our family for help while I spent long days at LA Plaza.
Because of that, I made a point of bringing my wife directly to Karen and Esperanza at the gala.
I said, in substance:
Can you please explain to my wife how much I am going to have to be here during installation?
I specifically wanted them to tell her because this was going to affect our family life, childcare and the support we would need from relatives.
My recollection is that Karen and Esperanza told both of us that I would need to be at the museum for long hours throughout installation.
So we planned our lives around that understanding.
Then came the Friday before installation.
I was sitting in a conference room at LA Plaza with Karen, Esperanza, Jorge and myself. My wife had reminded me to ask for a detailed breakdown or schedule of what the installation days would look like because, as we understood it, we were expected to be there every day.
I asked.
Karen responded:
"I never said you had to be here every day."
I was confused.
By that point, I had already experienced enough contradictions that I simply responded:
"Yes, you did."
Her response was:
"No, Piero, I didn't."
I looked over at Jorge.
On his computer, I could see that he had his calendar open and, like me, had blocked out the installation dates.
Jorge responded with something to the effect of:
"Oh, great. That means I can work on my book."
I stopped him.
I said:
"Wait, Jorge. You remember her saying this too, right?"
He answered:
"Oh yes, but if I don't have to be here, I can work on my book."
I asked again:
"So you remember Karen saying this?"
He said:
"Yes."
I remember looking back at Karen and saying, in substance:
See? We both understood the exact same thing.
Her response was:
"Piero, I never told you guys you had to be here at all."
And that was when I remembered the gala.
I remembered deliberately bringing my pregnant wife over to Karen and Esperanza.
I remembered making a point of asking them to explain the installation commitment directly to her because we were planning childcare around what we had been told.
So I said:
"That's funny, because you can lie to me, you can lie to Jorge, but you can't lie to my wife. She remembers everything, and so do I."
My recollection is that Karen again denied having said it, got up from her seat, left the room, and we did not see her again for the remainder of that day.
That incident has stayed with me because it crystallized something I had been struggling to understand.
When a person repeatedly tells you that something you clearly remember did not happen, eventually you begin questioning yourself.
But my wife had heard it too.
She had no professional stake in the museum.
She was not involved in the curatorial disagreements.
She had no reason to reinterpret what had happened.
She remembered because the conversation directly affected our family and how we were going to care for our newborn son while I worked on installation.
That was when I remember thinking:
You can gaslight Jorge and me, but you cannot gaslight my wife.
She was standing outside the professional conflict.
And when her memory matched mine, it became much harder for me to accept the idea that everything I was experiencing was simply a misunderstanding.
August 23, 2025
One incident crystallized for me how strained the relationship had become.
On August 23, 2025, I was preparing to introduce my friends Tropa Magica at the museum concert.
I asked Leticia about introducing the band.
My recollection is that she told me:
"Okay, you will go on first and then I will speak."
I explained that wasn't really how introducing a band worked.
My recollection is that she dismissed the concern and told me to meet her at the stage at 7:30.
As I walked toward the stage at the agreed time, she was already speaking.
I moved closer. Eventually she acknowledged me, introduced me and handed me the microphone.
I gave my remarks.
I looked toward Leticia and asked:
"Ready?"
She nodded.
I began:
"Now, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce..."
Before I could finish, Leticia interrupted.
My recollection is that she yelled:
"No! No! No!"
She took the microphone from me and told the audience words to the effect of:
"It is my prerogative as the CEO of this museum that I get the last word!"
I stood there stunned.
My recollection is that she then appeared to realize how the exchange looked publicly and suggested perhaps we could introduce the band together.
To someone watching from the audience, it may have looked like a strange thirty-second interaction.
To me, after everything that had already happened privately, it felt as though the private dynamic had suddenly spilled onto the stage. Many came up me once got of the stage and said "what was that all about? that was akward" all i could say is I dont know.
Even Through the Conflict, I Tried to Help the Museum Succeed
Something else is important to understand.
Even while all of this was happening, I continued trying to help LA Plaza succeed.
I did not want the exhibition to fail because I was having problems with museum leadership.
Quite the opposite.
I wanted the exhibition and the museum to benefit from the extraordinary attention surrounding A Great Day In East LA®.
I brought members of my own outside professional team and network into conversations about helping the museum raise money and build relationships with potential supporters.
Through relationships outside the museum, we helped open conversations and arrange meetings with very high-level companies and potential corporate partners that I believed could have resulted in meaningful support.
These were relationships that required credibility to open.
And I did this while privately feeling mistreated by the institution.
Why?
Because if the museum benefited, I believed the community could benefit too.
Yet, in my experience, when these opportunities reached museum leadership, Leticia repeatedly failed to meaningfully follow through.
Meetings and introductions that had taken considerable effort and personal relationships to secure were, from my perspective, mishandled or allowed to go nowhere.
I cannot say what happened inside every conversation after an introduction was made.
But I can say that my outside team and I repeatedly tried to open doors.
That contradiction says a great deal about my experience.
Even while I believed I was being mistreated, I was still trying to help.
Even while I felt pushed out, I was still opening doors.
Even while fighting for recognition of my own work, I was trying to create opportunities that could financially benefit the institution.
My conflict was never with LA Plaza succeeding.
I wanted the museum to succeed.
I wanted the exhibition to succeed.
I wanted the community to benefit.
What I could not accept was the idea that helping the institution succeed required remaining silent about how I was being treated.
Being Yelled at in Front of Museum VIPs
The problems did not end with one administration.
During an Eastside Arts Initiative gala, I had received approval to give a tour of the exhibition to museum VIPs and guests.
I was operating within the time allotted to me and, by my calculation, still had approximately ten minutes remaining.
Despite that, before current Interim CEO Tracy Serrano took power she confronted me and yelled at me in front of museum guests and VIPs.
I found the interaction extraordinarily unprofessional and embarrassing.
This was not a private disagreement behind closed doors.
I was being spoken to this way publicly in front of people I had been invited to engage with as part of an event connected to the exhibition.
I had approval to give the tour.
I was still within my allotted time.
And yet I was treated as though I had done something improper.
For me, that incident reinforced the feeling that the problem was larger than one personality or one administration.
It felt cultural.
The Burglary
Then came the event that fundamentally changed my relationship with the museum.
The museum was burglarized.
Five artifacts entrusted to the exhibition were stolen.
Among them was a guitar belonging to George Pajon Jr., guitarist associated with the Black Eyed Peas and a musician and co-writer connected to numerous major recordings by the group.
According to the history shared with us, this guitar was connected to the creation of a significant body of that music.
Another stolen artifact was a one-of-one El Chicano sweater belonging to guitarist Mickey Lespron.
Three other irreplaceable objects were also taken from artists like Aztlan Underground, Olmeca and La Tuya.
These were not museum props.
They were pieces of people's lives.
Forty-Five Minutes?
After the burglary, I spoke with security personnel because I needed to understand what had happened.
I asked how someone could remove a large Plexiglas enclosure, move through multiple sections of the exhibition and leave with several objects without being stopped.
A security employee told me, to my recollection, that the individual had been inside for a minimum of approximately 45 minutes.
I was horrified.
That account helped explain how someone apparently had enough time to access multiple exhibition areas and remove several objects.
But it raised much bigger questions for me about what security protections actually existed.
The Security We Thought Was There
Mark, Jorge and I pushed the museum to address the burglary.
Eventually, an internal communication was issued by Leticia.
Based on communications I received and my understanding of the loan arrangements, lenders had been given expectations about security protecting their objects.
After the burglary, information emerged that led me to believe important security measures we contractually expected to exist were not actually in place.
That realization was devastating.
People had entrusted their histories to this institution.
And Mark and I had helped convince them to do it.
Where Was the Public Appeal?
What happened afterward disturbed me almost as much.
I wanted the museum to immediately mobilize the community to recover these artifacts.
Release photographs.
Contact musicians.
Contact collectors.
Contact record stores.
Alert auction houses.
Ask the public for help.
These objects were distinctive enough that people within the music community could potentially recognize them.
Instead, from what I observed, there was no meaningful sustained public recovery campaign.
No major public appeal.
No public urgency proportional to what had been lost.
There was an internal memo only after Mark, Jorge and I pushed for the situation to be addressed.
I could not understand it.
A Conversation With the Consul General
Sometime after the burglary, one of my film producers hosted a private screening at his home.
The Consul General of Mexico in Los Angeles was among the invited guests.
When I introduced myself, he greeted me and said words to the effect of:
"I look forward to seeing your work."
I responded:
"You've actually seen my work."
He seemed surprised and asked where.
I told him about A Great Day In East LA®: Celebrando the Eastside Sound at LA Plaza and explained that A Great Day In East LA® was my project and that I had helped lead the exhibition.
He told me he had really enjoyed it and asked, in substance:
"Why didn't the museum tell me about you?"
I told him it was a long story and not one for that evening.
Then he asked something that stopped me:
"So then you know about the burglary?"
I was shocked.
At that point, I did not understand the burglary to be public knowledge, I was told to not do or say anything about it.
I asked:
"How do you know about that?"
My recollection is that he smiled and replied that it was a conversation for another day.
I still think about that exchange.
I do not know what conversations occurred outside my presence, and I will not speculate.
But the moment reinforced how little I understood about what was being said about the exhibition and its problems when I wasn't in the room.
I Tried to Help After the Burglary
My immediate concern was the lenders.
I wanted to help recover the objects.
I wanted to communicate responsibly with the people who had trusted us.
I wanted to help protect what remained.
Instead, I felt stonewalled.
That was devastating.
The museum might have possessed the objects during the exhibition.
But Mark and I carried many of the relationships behind them.
These people trusted us.
When something went wrong, I could not simply shrug and tell them to speak with the institution.
It was my reputation.
My relationship.
My word.
Jorge and the Opening
I also want to address my relationship with Jorge because the public record has increasingly troubled me. A few days before the exhibition opened, Jorge called me in what I experienced as a frantic state.
He repeatedly asked:
"Are we going to have an exhibition opening?"
I told him I saw no reason why we wouldn't.
He continued asking.
Eventually, I had to stop him and tell him not to yell at me. I reminded him that I had never yelled at or disrespected him.
My recollection is that Jorge explained that he had a lot riding on the exhibition and many people coming.
He asked me to leave him out of the problems I was experiencing with the museum.
In exchange, my recollection is that he agreed that he would not participate in press or museum activities concerning the project without me.
I agreed.
And I told him:
Never yell at me again.
That understanding became important later because, in my experience, it did not last.
When Visibility Becomes History
As the exhibition became successful, I increasingly felt removed from its public presentation.
I was interviewed on two occasions by museum staff for social media content.
To my knowledge, those interviews were never published.
At one point, I asked a museum staff member when my interviews were going to be posted.
The response was:
"Oh, we're going in a different direction."
I asked what that meant.
The staff member simply walked away.
What exactly was the different direction?
I created A Great Day In East LA®.
I was a lead guest curator of the exhibition.
My photography, oral histories, relationships and curatorial work were foundational to what visitors were seeing.
Yet apparently my voice was no longer part of the direction the museum wanted publicly.
At the same time, Veronica Diaz, Marketing & Communications Manager, and the museum's broader communications efforts increasingly amplified Jorge's public presence.
The result, intentional or not, was that the creator of the project became less visible while another curator increasingly became one of its public faces.
That matters.
Publicity becomes historical memory.
If one person repeatedly appears publicly discussing a project while its creator disappears, audiences eventually make a reasonable assumption:
They assume the person they keep seeing created it.
That is exactly the confusion I am correcting now.
Being Asked to Get Approval to Speak About My Own Project
The pattern continued.
Most recently, I went through what I understood to be the proper channels to arrange a museum tour for a major documentary director and an equally prominent film producer.
There was also a possibility that I might be interviewed during the visit.
When I communicated with Veronica Diaz, with whom I had already experienced difficult interactions, I understood her response to mean that what I planned to say during the tour about my own project and exhibition would have to receive museum approval or I could not conduct the tour as planned.
That was extraordinary to me.
I was being asked to seek approval for what I could say about the project I created.
I forwarded the correspondence to my attorney.
My counsel subsequently communicated with the museum regarding my ability to speak about my project and the exhibition without having my comments pre-approved.
Again, I found myself asking:
How did we get here?
The Dolores Huerta Portrait
And the conflict has continued in another way.
Most recently, I discovered that the museum used my copyrighted portrait of Dolores Huerta.
The image included my watermark.
In the version used by the museum, the image was cropped in a manner that removed that watermark and no credit was given.
The museum does not own the copyright to that photograph.
After everything that had already happened involving attribution, authorship and visibility, seeing my copyrighted photograph used in a way that removed my visible watermark was deeply troubling.
Given the broader history between us, I perceived it as another part of the continuing pattern of retaliation and erasure I had experienced.
Whether that particular use constitutes copyright infringement or another legal violation is for counsel to determine.
But there is no question about how it felt.
Even my name on my own photograph seemed capable of disappearing.
An Institution Dedicated to Our Stories
This is where the experience becomes most difficult for me to reconcile with the museum's public mission.
LA Plaza presents itself as an institution devoted to preserving our stories, cultural history, representation and communities whose voices have historically been marginalized.
Those are values I share.
That is one reason I agreed to work there.
But an institution cannot champion dignity, representation and human rights publicly while, in my experience, denying those principles to cultural workers inside its own walls.
At some point, that begins to feel performative.
Our stories matter.
But the people carrying those stories must matter too.
I Believe There Is a Serious Cultural Problem
After everything I experienced, I no longer believe these problems can be explained simply as personality conflicts between individual staff members.
I believe there is a serious problem within the culture of LA Plaza, extending through leadership and, in my opinion, raising questions about institutional governance and oversight.
My experience left me questioning whether the institution consistently values artists, cultural workers, lenders and community historians as people, or whether too often it values what those people can provide to the institution.
I understand how institutions work.
I understand fundraising.
I understand sponsorships.
I understand budgets.
I understand that museums need money to keep their doors open, pay staff, create exhibitions and survive.
Obviously, money makes the world go around.
But at what cost?
From my experience, I came away believing that too many decisions were driven by institutional power, reputation and money rather than genuine care for artists and the people whose histories were being presented.
That is especially troubling for a cultural institution whose public identity is built around preserving community stories.
Because an institution cannot credibly say:
"We care about your stories."
while communicating through its actions:
"We do not necessarily care about the people who brought those stories here."
That contradiction is at the heart of why I am speaking now.
And Yet, the Community Came
Despite everything I have described, something extraordinary happened when the doors opened.
Los Angeles was experiencing an intensely tense political moment.
Fear and uncertainty were hanging over many immigrant and Latino communities.
And people came.
They came in enormous numbers.
Lines stretched around the block.
The museum reached capacity.
People waited outside hoping to enter.
Inside were generations of East Los Angeles music history that Mark and I had spent approximately a decade helping preserve.
Families saw themselves.
Musicians saw themselves.
People saw parents, grandparents, neighborhoods, records, guitars, photographs and stories that rarely receive this scale of institutional recognition.
Whatever happened behind the scenes could not diminish what happened between the community and that exhibition.
The community understood what the project meant.
Who Created What
So I want the historical record to be precise.
I created A Great Day In East LA®.
Mark Guerrero joined me at the beginning and became its essential longtime collaborator, founder and historian.
Years later, I led the curatorial vision that transformed the independent project into A Great Day In East LA®: Celebrando the Eastside Sound.
Dr. Jorge N. Leal subsequently joined the museum exhibition and he and his students contributed some research, writing, academic perspective and curatorial work, particularly connected to areas within his expertise.
LA Plaza's curatorial, collections, design, installation and administrative teams contributed to producing the physical exhibition.
All of those statements can coexist.
Giving someone appropriate credit does not require giving them somebody else's history.
Co-Curator Does Not Explain the Whole Story
The term "co-curator" creates an appearance of equivalence that does not explain chronology, labor or contribution.
Mark and I spent years building relationships.
I created the photography and Mark and I created oral-history archive.
We knew where the artifacts were.
We knew the families.
We knew why the objects mattered.
We spent years earning trust.
Jorge brought his contributions.
The museum brought its institutional resources.
Those contributions were not identical.
Equality of title does not automatically mean equality of contribution.
And no title can retroactively place someone at the beginning of a project that existed years before they joined it.
And All of This Happened While Life Continued
While helping build this enormous exhibition, I was simultaneously directing a feature documentary about Los Lobos.
I was working on one of the largest filmmaking projects of my career.
And I was preparing to become a father.
Yet I never abandoned my commitment to the exhibition.
I kept calling musicians.
I kept visiting families.
I kept locating artifacts.
I kept researching.
I kept showing up.
Because I believed in what this exhibition could mean.
Who I Am
I am a Chicano photographer, filmmaker, cultural historian and cultural worker.
My work has spent years documenting cultural histories that I believe deserve serious preservation.
I spent years documenting Día de los Muertos across the United States and Mexico, work that ultimately traveled internationally.
I have photographed musicians and cultural figures across generations.
I have directed a feature documentary about Los Lobos.
My work has been published and collected.
But some of the work I value most cannot be measured in awards, press or institutional credentials.
It is measured in trust.
Being invited into someone's home.
Being allowed to photograph an object nobody outside the family has seen.
Sitting with an elder while they tell a story that may otherwise disappear.
Convincing a widow that her husband's history matters.
Finding someone who played in a band sixty years ago and telling them:
You were part of this history too.
That is what A Great Day In East LA® has always been about.
The Dream
There is a deeply personal reason I am finally saying all of this.
By the end of the museum experience, I felt as though my dream had been taken from me.
I had the dream.
I woke up and pursued it.
I made the calls.
I drove the miles.
I carried the cameras.
Mark and I conducted the interviews.
Mark and I searched for musicians whose histories had almost disappeared.
We found women whose contributions had been overlooked.
We searched for LGBTQ+ musicians whose stories rarely entered conventional histories.
We sat with families.
We located artifacts people did not know still existed.
We built something before a major institution believed it belonged inside a museum.
Then, approximately a decade later, I walked into galleries filled with those photographs, those stories and those objects.
It should have been one of the proudest experiences of my professional life.
Instead, I eventually found myself fighting to explain that the project inside the museum had begun with me.
There is something extraordinarily painful about having to prove your existence inside your own dream.
But I understand something today that I did not understand when all of this began.
No museum can take A Great Day In East LA® away from me.
No curator can rewrite when it began.
No academic title can change the chronology.
No social media campaign can erase the decade before the exhibition.
No cropped photograph can erase who made the photograph.
No institutional wall can contain the project.
Because the exhibition was never A Great Day In East LA® itself.
It was one expression of it.
The photographs remain.
The oral histories remain.
The archive remains.
The research remains.
The relationships remain.
The musicians remain.
The families remain.
And the work continues.
I remain profoundly grateful to every musician, artist, widow, family, collector, historian and community member who trusted Mark and me.
You made this possible.
As Celebrando the Eastside Sound closes, I am therefore not saying goodbye to A Great Day In East LA®.
I am saying goodbye to this particular exhibition.
And I am reclaiming the clarity of where everything came from.
I had the dream.
I created A Great Day In East LA®.
Mark Guerrero helped me build it from the beginning.
I led the curatorial vision that transformed it into this museum exhibition.
Hundreds of extraordinary people trusted us with their histories.
Whatever happened inside the institution cannot erase the beauty of what those people helped us create.
The museum was never the beginning.
The museum does not define the project.
And the closing of this exhibition will not be the end.
A Great Day In East LA® continues.
Piero F. Giunti
Creator and Founder, A Great Day In East LA®
Lead Guest Curator, A Great Day In East LA®: Celebrando the Eastside Sound
Photographer · Filmmaker · Cultural Historian
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