WorldBeat Cultural Center

This guide to the WorldBeat Cultural Center in San Diego starts with a steel water tank raised in Balboa Park during World War Two to serve the naval hospital, later handed to the police department to store stolen bicycles. It follows Makeda Cheatom, a teenager who had already opened the city's first vegetarian restaurant and was booking reggae shows, as she pushed for years against what she called bureaucratic and racial battles to turn the empty tank into a room for African, Caribbean, and Indigenous culture. The murals of Nefertiti, Marcus Garvey, and Bob Marley now cover its curved walls, and reggae acts including Big Mountain played their first paying gigs inside.