Sometimes the history we choose to remember hides a history we’re supposed to forget.

When you stand in La Placita Olvera today, under a rainbow of papel picado, what you don’t see is how this neighborhood has been shaped by a long history of colonialism, poverty and resistance. Our narrator Karla Estrada helps uncover this story.

We learn how in the 1920s, La Placita and neighboring Olvera Street were decaying, until wealthy socialite Christine Sterling vows to rebuild her own version of a technicolor "Mexican" tourist attraction.

Yet even as Olvera Street opens, the Mexican Americans living in the neighborhood are under siege. In February 1931, the first mass public immigration raid in US history takes place in La Placita, ushering in a decade of Mexican American "repatriation". The majority of those forced to leave are US-born children: American citizens. As Karla tells us, this story still resonates today, in her own experience of family separation across the border.