Acción Latina

Acción Latina is a non-profit community media and cultural arts programming organization serving Latinos in San Francisco since 1982.

The El Tecolote newspaper, the organization’s cornerstone media project, began as a journalism project in a Raza Studies class at San Francisco State University under the direction of Professor Juan Gonzales. The class produced a bilingual newspaper, which they named El Tecolote (The Owl). In 1982, the then-grassroots group, run entirely by volunteers, produced the first Encuentro del Canto Popular, a three-day music festival highlighting the musical genre of Nueva Canción from Latin America.

In 1987, the James Irvine Foundation awarded Acción Latina a two-year grant to help build organizational infrastructure, and they incorporated as a nonprofit organization. In 2000, they purchased a building on 24th Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, in the area now designated as the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District. In late 2015, they opened a brand new art gallery, the Juan R. Fuentes Gallery, to showcase the diversity of visual art forms—ceramics, watercolor, sculpture, photography, poster art—created by established and emerging Latino/a artists.