Nuestra Casa Museum of History and Culture offers a downtown Pomona gallery for Latino, Indigenous and Mexican American history that organizers say has long gone unrecorded locally. The museum began regular gallery hours on Sept. 1, with free admission; its founders describe it as a place where visitors can encounter those histories, according to The San Bernardino Sun.
The museum occupies a small gallery space in the Mission Promenade Plaza at Garey Avenue and Mission Boulevard, according to the Southern California News Group. Its address is listed as 101 W. Mission Blvd., Suite 108, per the museum's own website. The name itself, Nuestra Casa, translates to “our house” in Spanish, a detail reported by the Daily Bulletin.
Families, neighbors, artists and elders filled the space on Aug. 22 for an opening celebration ahead of the official launch, the museum's website states. The museum is free and nonprofit, run entirely by volunteers, and its gallery is open Tuesday through Thursday from noon to 4 p.m. and Saturday from noon to 5 p.m.
From Community Conversations to a Storefront Gallery
The museum grew out of community conversations that began in 2024. Founders later presented plans to the Pomona City Council at the start of 2026, according to The San Bernardino Sun. Five founding board members drew on their own collections and community connections to build the gallery, and organizers consulted local elders, historians and collectors as they developed its exhibits.
Opening the museum cost roughly $15,000, and the project was helped along by a $20,000 arts grant, as noted by The San Bernardino Sun. The gallery has drawn visits and support from elected officials as well as students from Pomona Unified School District and the Claremont Colleges.
Flags, Family Trees and a Protest Puppet Named Victoria
The gallery places different kinds of material side by side: U.S. and Mexico flags, a hand-stitched 1972 United Farm Workers flag, artwork about Chicano and Latino heritage, and portraits and stories of Latino leaders and Pomona residents. A timeline traces events in Latino American history, The San Bernardino Sun reported.
Another prominent piece is Victoria, a large papier-mâché puppet inspired by traditional street processions in Oaxaca, Mexico. Signs on the puppet read “immigrant rights are human rights” and “rising for justice and human rights”; Victoria has appeared at No Kings marches and the Roots of Resistance pilgrimage. Other contributions include a portrait of Frida Kahlo, a jaguar mask carved from a machete in honor of Mayan culture, and Arturo Jimenez’s family tree.
Museum co-founder Donna Otero said the museum's purpose is to help people hold on to their history. Fellow organizer Angela Sanbrano said having a museum that reflects both past and current history feels especially important amid attacks on Mexican and Chicano communities.
An 83-Year-Old Trailblazer's Personal Collection
Among the founders is Cristina Carrizosa, 83, who has lived in Pomona since the 1960s and was elected the city's first Mexican-born woman officeholder in 1993. Carrizosa has contributed hand-embroidered garments and bags preserved from her family's home state of Nayarit, Mexico, to the museum's collection, per a report from The San Bernardino Sun. She said she hopes the museum will outlive its founders and keep growing long after they are gone.
Organizers see the current exhibits as a starting point rather than a finished product. They hope to eventually open future displays covering Pomona's boxing history, lowrider culture, immigrant farmworkers and the Inland Empire's history of Mexican American baseball leagues, connecting Latino and Indigenous histories, along with the histories of Pomona's thousands of Latino residents, to the broader story of the United States and the American Southwest.
Other records and institutions offer context
The Historical Society of Pomona Valley says it has worked to protect and preserve Pomona Valley history since 1916. Cal Poly Pomona’s University Archives, by contrast, says its collections document the university’s history—an institutional scope distinct from a collection specifically focused on Pomona’s Mexican American and Chicano community histories, according to the Historical Society of Pomona Valley and Cal Poly Pomona University Archives.
Education is another part of the local context, though it is separate from the museum’s work: the Daily Bulletin reported that Pomona Unified’s Board of Education unanimously adopted an ethnic-studies graduation requirement on Sept. 15, 2021, for students beginning in the 2025-26 school year. At the national level, the National Museum of the American Latino says Congress entrusted the Smithsonian in 2020 with presenting U.S. Latino experiences and contributions within American history, a distinct remit from Nuestra Casa’s focus on Pomona, according to the Daily Bulletin and the National Museum of the American Latino.
Part of a Wider Latino Museum Movement
Nuestra Casa joins a small but growing lineage of Latino-focused cultural institutions in Southern California. LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes opened in downtown Los Angeles on April 16, 2011, with a mission to center Mexican and Mexican American history, and has since grown into a 2.2-acre campus with two renovated historic buildings, a public garden, a teaching kitchen and event space as an official Los Angeles County project and Smithsonian Affiliate. Where that institution runs on a countywide scale, Nuestra Casa remains a single-room, volunteer-built effort rooted specifically in Pomona's own neighborhoods and families.
