Julia Corrales Leads Tierras Indígenas Community Land Trust in the Fight to Keep Barrio Logan Rooted

By Cesar A Reyes

Julia Corrales didn’t arrive in Barrio Logan by accident or ambition alone—it was something closer to recognition, like a place she already knew how to move through. She’s a first-generation Queer Xicanx activist, organizer, spoken word artist, and sculptor, but she doesn’t lead with titles. She leads with presence. “I followed the drums to Barrio Logan,” she says, describing it less like a career move and more like a pull toward something familiar, something necessary. As co-founder and Executive Director of Tierras Indígenas Community Land Trust (TICLT), her work sits at the intersection of land, art, and survival for Queer Xicanx and Indigenous communities trying to stay rooted in a city that keeps shifting beneath them.

Her roots stretch from Eastside San Diego—City Heights now—to a family story shaped by migration and survival. “My immigrant parents met in Los Angeles and moved to San Diego in the late ‘70s,” she shares. “I was born and raised in Eastside San Diego.” But Barrio Logan wasn’t accidental. It was something closer to instinct. “I always say that I followed the drums to Barrio Logan,” Julia says. “I came to practice my art and engage in political activism where my people were.” In her words, Barrio Logan is not just a neighborhood—it’s a “Mecca for Xicanx artists and activists,” a place where culture is not preserved in glass but lived out loud in the streets.

Through TICLT, that sense of belonging turns into infrastructure. The organization is rooted in a simple but urgent idea: land should stay in community hands. “TICLT is a member-led non-profit that works in Barrio Logan to curb gentrification and displacement and safeguard Xicanx culture,” she explains. That work became real in November 2024 when the group purchased its first property. What followed wasn’t a sterile development timeline, but something far more communal and messy—in the best way. “In true Barrio Logan style, the community answered the call out and about 35 people came and cleaned the space.”

That building is now alive in transition. Not polished, not finished, but actively becoming. “We have office space downstairs… and open community space in the adjoining space,” Julia says. The long-term vision includes affordable housing, an Indigenous-led midwifery and birthing clinic, and an art gallery—but the present is already full. “We host cultural and arts events almost weekly,” she says, listing exhibitions, writing workshops, open mics, Indigenous healing circles, and political teach-ins. The space is less a project and more a pulse.

Julia also holds another kind of responsibility as chair of the Barrio Logan Community Planning Group, where land use decisions can determine whether culture stays or gets priced out. “The CPG is a first line of defense against gentrification,” she says plainly. In a neighborhood where art spaces have disappeared one by one—Roots Factory, Voz Alta, Chicano Park Gallery, La Bodega, Border X—the stakes are not abstract. “Without the art, it’s evident now, the businesses don’t thrive,” she says. “Folks come for the dope art and stay for a beer and food and to shop.”

Being a Queer Xicanx leader in that landscape is not romanticized. It is complicated, and sometimes sharp. “Unfortunately, there is a lot of transphobia and homophobia in the Xicano community,” Julia says. Her response is not withdrawal, but confrontation paired with care—education, dialogue, and space-building. “It means calling that out… and creating safe spaces for Queer raza to come together.” That includes something as simple and radical as joy: “to gather with other queer folks and dance.”

For Julia, this work is inseparable from history. She challenges the idea that Queer Xicanx identity is new or imported. “Transphobia and homophobia are colonial oppressive mindframes,” she says firmly. “Indigenous people have always accepted, even celebrated, gender fluidity.” She points to Muxes in Oaxaca, Two-Spirit traditions across Turtle Island, and other Indigenous gender systems that long predate colonization. “To be Xicano/a/x is to decolonize,” she says. “That includes rejecting colonial ideas of gender and sex.”

When asked what defines her work in one word, she doesn’t hesitate. “The WORD is Decolonial.” Not as a slogan, but as practice—how space is built, how people are held, and how memory is protected. In Barrio Logan, that decolonial work isn’t theoretical. It’s a building being painted, a meeting being held, a dance floor being cleared, a future being insisted into existence.