Events Fall-Spring 2026-27

To speak of community in Southern California is to speak of place, memory, struggle, belonging, and responsibility. It is to ask how people come together across neighborhoods, languages, histories, and identities. It is also to ask who has been included, who has been pushed aside, and who has had to create community in the face of exclusion, displacement, and harm.

​

Southern California has never been one single story. It is made up of many communities, layered across land, culture, migration, labor, faith, family, resistance, and imagination. Some communities are rooted in long histories of place. Others are formed through movement, necessity, survival, and shared hope. Some are visible in institutions and public memory, while others have been sustained quietly through mutual aid, storytelling, caregiving, activism, and everyday acts of connection.

​

This year’s theme invites us to think about community not as something simple or sentimental, but as something living. Community is built through care, but it is also tested by inequality, fire, policing, housing insecurity, environmental crisis, racism, displacement, and political neglect. It can be a source of protection and belonging, but it can also reveal the boundaries of power: who is allowed to belong, who is asked to assimilate, and who must fight to be seen.

​

True to our mission, the Historical Society remains committed to “uplifting underrepresented voices, empowering community partners to tell their own stories, and creating an inclusive narrative about the history of Southern California and the West—a narrative that embraces both agency and anguish.” A focus on community allows us to deepen that mission by listening closely to the people, places, and histories that have shaped this region from the ground up.

​

The 2026–2027 theme asks us to reflect on community as something made and remade through history. It is not only a place we inherit, but a relationship we practice. It is found in neighborhoods, archives, movements, families, schools, churches, cultural spaces, labor struggles, and acts of collective memory. It is found wherever people gather to preserve the past, confront the present, and imagine a more just future.

 

Together, we will explore what community has meant, what it means now, and what it might still become in Southern California.