The Venice Mexican American Traquero Monument has received final design approval from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission, ending years of city review and allowing organizers to move forward with fundraising, fabrication and installation.
The monument will honor the Mexican and Mexican American railroad workers, known as traqueros, whose dangerous and poorly paid labor helped build and maintain the rail system that connected Los Angeles and the West to the rest of the country. The monument will be placed at Windward Circle in Venice and will be the first monument on the Westside dedicated to Mexican American history.
“This is a part of history that is not in our history books and not taught in schools,” Venice native and longtime organizer Laura Ceballos told the Los Angeles Times in 2022. “It’s very important to educate the community and leave something for our children and grandchildren.”
Ceballos has led the effort through the Venice Mexican American Traquero Monument Committee since 2017. The Venice Neighborhood Council approved the project in 2020, and the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved the monument in May 2021.
But approval was only the beginning of a lengthy city process. More than three years after the City Council vote, the project was still waiting for a Revocable R Permit allowing the monument to be placed in the public right-of-way.
“I feel we have been forgotten and put on the back burner,” Ceballos told CALÓ News in October 2024.
The Board of Public Works finally approved the permit in June 2025, and the Cultural Affairs Commission’s August 12 vote granted the final design approval needed for the project to advance. Organizers say every required permit and approval is now in place.
The approval is a major victory, but the monument is not yet built. The project was estimated in 2024 to cost approximately $650,000. Organizers have already raised a portion of the funding but say they still need another $225,000 to begin work on the sculpture.
The bronze sculpture, created by renowned Mexican artist Jorge Marín, will depict a traquero standing on railroad tracks with his family: holding his daughter’s hand, carrying his son on his shoulders and standing beside his wife. The sculpture will sit inside a large circular fountain at Windward Circle. The family-centered design recognizes that the railroads were built not only by individual workers, but by entire communities.
Beginning in the late 1800s, Mexican and Mexican American workers performed the backbreaking labor of laying and maintaining rail lines throughout Los Angeles and across the West. They became a dominant source of railroad track labor following anti-Chinese violence and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, as railroad companies sought another source of low-paid labor.
Traqueros often lived with their families in isolated railroad camps, sometimes in makeshift homes constructed from old boxcars. Women fed workers, did laundry, cared for children and created informal community networks that allowed families to survive under harsh conditions. Some women also worked directly for the railroads.
Many of these families later settled near the tracks in communities including Venice, Santa Monica and Culver City. Their descendants remain part of the Westside today, even as gentrification and displacement have erased much of the visible history of the Black and Brown communities that helped build Venice.
“When I moved back to Venice, I noticed the gentrification,” Ceballos told L.A. TACO in 2022. “There’s nothing here that says we were here, we’ve been here, so we want to make sure we mark our footprint.”
For longtime Venice resident Joe Preciado, the monument also preserves his own family’s story. His grandfather came from Guanajuato, Mexico, in the 1890s and laid railroad tracks in Oklahoma and Santa Monica. He met Preciado’s grandmother in a traquero camp, where women prepared food and brought baskets of tacos to the workers.
“It’s a great way to honor the families that came and the families that grew on those tracks,” Preciado said of the monument.
The monument has received support from the Mexican Consulate, community organizations and labor and civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, who addressed the City Council before its 2021 vote.
“This is so important because we have to honor the working people of our country, who are often ignored, disrespected and forgotten,” Huerta said in support.
The final approval carries particular weight at a moment when Latino communities are again facing raids and family separations. Ceballos has spent the past year helping Westside families affected by ICE enforcement through the Venice Community Resource Center. In July 2025, she told Mar Vista Voice that the monument and the mutual aid work were connected.
“It’s for laborers, for our people,” Ceballos said. “And now, when our communities are under attack again, I think people understand how important it is to honor our history and who this city was built by.”
Before the commission vote, Mar Vista Voice asked readers to send letters supporting approval. The commission’s decision means the project can now move beyond the city review process that held it up for years.
For a community whose labor is embedded in our city but so often absent from its official history, this monument will make that history visible in one of the most prominent public spaces on the Westside.
Supporters can learn more and contribute to the monument’s construction at the Venice Traquero Monument website.