ii

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Between Pointed Guns and Barren Trees:

Los Angeles and David Alfaro Siqueiros’s América tropical

by

Rebecca Zamora

Master of Arts in Latin American Studies

University of California, Los Angeles, 2011

Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black, Chair

Commissioned by the Plaza Art Center director, David Alfaro Siqueiros’s América

tropical (1932) in Olvera Street was intended to complement the renovation of the city’s

historic center; this renovation, as I argue, also proposed to rewrite the city’s history. As a

response to this reframing of the early Spanish/Mexican history of Los Angeles as a

tourist attraction, Siqueiros inserted his radical and subversive mural. This thesis argues

that the city boosters attempted to craft a more “acceptable,” read manageable, vision of

iii

Mexicans and Mexican history that would correct the area’s use as a center of protest and

unrest. In addition to a local commentary, the mural also addressed the larger political

and economic strategies of the United States-Mexico relations at the time. The aim of this

thesis is to demonstrate the ways in which the mural and its compositional elements

highlight this often invisible backstory of Los Angeles and United States history.

iv

1

BETWEEN POINTED GUNS AND BARREN TREES: LOS ANGELES AND DAVID ALFARO SIQUEIROS’S AMÉRICA TROPICAL

The technical revolution consists in that the Bloc of Mural Painters fights for the supremacy of mural painting in the open air, mural painting towards the streets (open to skyscrapers, plazas, and parks, etc.), over and against hidden interior mural painting. The latter is limited, its scope of action is negligible. The former extends its perspective towards the cities and in connecting with the flows of traffic delivers itself entirely to millions.1 This quote from Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros illustrates his project

for visual expression, specifically street murals, as a tactical assault in a revolution that

was to come.2 Open to the street and the public, he conceived of the mural as an

intervention into the everyday, connecting to the hundreds, even millions, of passers-by

who comprised for him the heartbeat and pulse of the city. According to Siqueiros, a

mural, in order to be considered a true mural, had to be able to deliver itself at every

possible vantage point of the viewer; and even further to perspectives in motion.3 His

murals were not meant merely to connect passively with their audience’s gaze, however.

They often posed a challenge—perhaps a threat to some while a call to action to others—

but nonetheless a challenge to engage in that potentially subversive dialectic his murals

promise.

In 1932, Siqueiros was commissioned by the Los Angeles Plaza Art Center

director to paint what would be his first outdoor mural, América tropical. In this thesis, I

1 Raquel Tibol, ed., Palabras de Siqueiros (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), 66.

2 The quote comes from a lecture titled, “Los Vehículos de la Pintura Dialéctico-Subversiva” [The Vehicles of Dialectical-Subversive Painting], which Siqueiros gave at the Hollywood John Reed Club in 1932.

3 David Alfaro Siqueiros, Como se pinta un mural (Chile: Gráfica Andes Ltd., 1979), 80.

2

will argue that Siqueiros’s mural employs the technical revolution outlined above to both

challenge the effort to create a narrative of Americanism at an international level and to

belie the romantic historical narrative that Los Angeles city boosters had tried to create in

the streets below it. He sought to reengage art with function and to take into account the

surrounding built environment in its design. It is no wonder that the head of the project

and city boosters would whitewash the mural almost as soon as it had gone up. This

cover up would set the precedent for censorship that continues today. The boosters could

not have anticipated that the mural would outlast its veil; his mural continues to challenge

those perspectives in a movement that has lasted over half a century, leaving an indelible

impression on the building and the city in which it was meant to be an intervention.

The first section of the thesis details a longer history of the city of Los Angeles in

order to highlight the erasures and obfuscations at work in Christine Sterling’s

construction of El Paseo de Los Angeles, now known as Olvera Street. Sterling, the self-

titled mother of Olvera Street, moved to Los Angeles in search of a Spanish/Mexican

California often advertised by tourist magazines, posters, and orange crates alike.

Encountering a neglected and abandoned former city center, she protested the dilapidated

state of the historical buildings and the sometimes less than romantic inhabitants. She

successfully garnered financial support from city boosters who sought to remake and

cleanse the area around the old Plaza. The project of El Paseo remade a neighborhood of

immigrants, impoverished citizens, and local businesses into a quaint Mexican

marketplace, which history is the subject of the second section.

3

Sterling and city boosters provided more than just a particular setting in El Paseo

de Los Angeles, however. In keeping with the history of conquest, the city boosters

initiated a kind of recolonization effort by trying to impose a social, racial, class, and

gendered frame through which Los Angeles would be understood.4 Christine Sterling

covered over the current turbulent reality of an engaged and active Mexican community

with an idyllic image, forcing “dangerous” and politically radical elements through a

filter of the city’s own design. In effect, this was the first in a series of erasures and

whitewashings that this area would undergo.

The third section, accordingly, will argue that the mural América Tropical entered

this constructed site to contest the dominant characterizations in use at El Paseo and their

corresponding historiography. Siqueiros’s piece menaced the normative project by

reinserting those radical and active elements that El Paseo sought to obscure. Through a

modernization of the fresco technique, which he considered a failed and backward

medium, his critique exploited the flaws and weaknesses inherent in a revisioning of the

Spanish/Mexican past even while depending on the complicity of Mexican/Mexican

American actors whose history El Paseo de Los Angeles sought to represent.

América tropical destrozada y oprimida por los imperialismos [Tropical

America: Destroyed and Oppressed by Imperialism] also exemplifies the agency of the

margin to disturb and highlight the methods of identity formation exploited by the U.S. as

it raced to participate on a global stage with the Old World. The United States began to

4 Phoebe S. Kropp, “Citizens of the Past? Olvera Street and the Construction of Race and Memory in 1930s

Los Angeles,” Radical History Review 81 (Fall 2001): 36.

4

utilize Mexican culture to emphasize the uniqueness and permanence of the American

hemisphere. The mural provides a curious mirror that reflects the larger national

diplomatic efforts in U.S.-Mexico relations. It attempts to expose the often hidden

processes of the US to assert commercial dominance. Siqueiros’s work very rarely enters

into a conversation to employ Mexican art as a political and diplomatic tool in the service

of official policy. 5 However, Siqueiros’s U.S. production does speak to an international

context, especially his third and last mural done in Los Angeles, Retrato de México

actual [Portrait of Mexico Today]. This last mural emphasizes the oppressive relations

between American capital and the Mexican government, who he considered complicit in

the exploitation of Mexico’s natural resources and its people. América tropical deserves

to be considered in relation to those larger political strategies and interrelations.

Siqueiros’s challenge to the suspect desire for a socially acceptable image of tropical

America did more than upset the political program behind Olvera Street. More

importantly, it both forces the spectator to question the meaning of the “truths” on display

at the mural’s site and brings to the fore the ways in which the relationships and strategies

in play at the local level parallel and sustain larger national narratives upon which

international strategies of dominance rely.

5 Siqueiros’s activities in Los Angeles coincide with a conscious effort to support and circulate Mexican

art throughout the country. Aside from muralists José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera (who were both active in the U.S.), there were several other Mexican and Latin American artists (including Siqueiros’s own teacher from the Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre, Alfredo Ramos Martínez, Dr. Atl, Miguel Covarrubias, Juan de’Prey, Miguel Ángel de León, Luis Hidalgo, and Rufino Tamayo to name a few) working not only in Los Angeles and New York, but also San Francisco, Detroit, and other metropoles—in addition to the numerous exhibitions of Mexican art occurring at the time as well.

5

FROM EL PUEBLO TO SONORATOWN

The creation of Olvera Street in the late 1920’s in many ways served to erase a

previous history of the area, supplanting that history with one that would come to

influence the picture of Mexican-American relations for decades to come. For this

reason, beginning some 150 years before Siqueiros’s arrival in Los Angeles,6 is a vital

part of situating his mural as a critique of both that erasure as well as of the powerful

image factory that Olvera Street/El Paseo de Los Angeles would soon become. The

creation of Olvera Street effects this erasure by promoting a past and culture from which

the city had long endeavored to disassociate itself, and in doing so, makes the image

projected by El Paseo de Los Angeles doubly disturbing.

El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles was founded on September 4, 1781, by 44

settlers from the northwest of Mexico, predominantly Sonora and Sinaloa. According to

William Estrada in Los Angeles’ Olvera Street, the site we now refer to as the Old Plaza

is the third or perhaps the fourth iteration. On the north side of the plaza, a short street

named Wine or Vine Street, which would later be known as Olvera Street, ran in a north-

south direction, ending in a bluff that led to the Zanja Madre (Mother Ditch), which

provided much needed water to the small pueblo.7 After Mexico’s independence from

Spain, the pueblo flourished into the “economic, political, and social center of Alta

6 I am not including the Gabrielino/Tongva tribe.

7 William Estrada, Los Angeles’ Olvera Street (San Francisco: Arcadia Publishing, 2006), 9.

6

California.”8 Over forty ranchos covered the vast territory between the San Gabriel

Mountains and the sea with the Plaza acting as the political and social nerve center [fig.

1]. It acted as the epicenter for trade where the most important segment of Californio

(California-born Mexicans) society, also known as the gente de razón, had their second

homes.9

The mid-nineteenth century brought many changes to the area through non-

Mexican immigration due to the United States policy of Manifest Destiny, the cessation

of approximately 525,000 acres of land as a result of the Mexican-American War and its

resultant Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (which did not include the state of Texas), and the

Gold Rush. It was as a result of the gold rush that Californio society was overwhelmed by

an influx of immigrants and relegated almost instantly to minority status in numbers

alone. Rodolfo Acuña states in Occupied America that the Gold Rush created a

“template for North American-Mexican relations” where Anglo dominance and capitalist

structures overwhelmed the local communities and cultures, almost completely disrupting

the overall composition of that area, even down to the language in which business was

transacted.

Specifically, for Los Angeles this meant the first step in a protracted

marginalization of Mexicans, their culture and history, and their transformation from

8 Jean Bruce Poole and Tevvy Ball, El Pueblo The Historic Heart of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Getty

Conservation Institute, 2002), 13.

9 By 1829 the Californios had already begun to employ the term hidalgo in their self-description, despite their own very marginalized and mestizo and/or mulato backgrounds (Acuña 107). Californios had sought to fashion themselves as a ruling elite of Alta California, white and Spanish, then Mexican, and lastly Californio to distinguish from the newer cholo, mongrel-like immigrants from Mexico.

7

native Californios to racialized foreigners. As capital flowed in and remade sectors of the

city, the introduction of a banking system, merchants, and retail businesses compounded

and accelerated the decomposition of Californio society.10 In addition, the California

Land Act of 1851 (which violated the provisions set out in the Treaty of Guadalupe

Hidalgo) established a land court and required all owners to provide proof of title.11

However, such litigation proved costly, lengthy, and, as all proceedings were held in

English, doubly disadvantageous to the Californios.12 In order to cover costs of litigation,

many were forced to seek out money lenders who often charged exorbitant rates and

eagerly seized lands put up as collateral.13 As a result, by the 1860s a majority of the

Mexican land holding rancheros lost their wealth and property.14 The Californios who

remained stayed just north of the old pueblo—then identified as Sonoratown—and were

grouped together and equated with the newly arrived Mexican immigrants; having been

stripped officially by the courts of any claims to a more grounded history, they were

10 Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), 111.

11 Legal suits were brought before district courts and could be appealed to the Supreme Court if necessary. Also, due to intermarriage of Californio women and the newly arrived Anglo immigrants contributed to the loss of land and power of some of the rancho families.

12 Acuña, 113.

13 Poole, 29.

14 The Californios’ loss of power can be attributed not only to the Americanization of the town, but also to a severe two-year drought, followed by a devastating flood, that was succeeded by yet another flood, all of which killed thousands of head of cattle (See Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: a Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 246]. Such a huge loss of cattle was ruinous to a Californio economy that was based mostly on the trade of cattle hides and tallow—trade performed at the Plaza. These natural disasters were accompanied by yet another natural catastrophe:a smallpox epidemic particularly affected the Spanish-speaking areas of Los Angeles.

8

excluded from taking part of a local history in their transformation to strangers in their

own city.

This area of Los Angeles was further relegated to the margins as development

moved southward [fig. 2]. The old downtown area (space around the old plaza and

adobes) became the sector in which newly arrived immigrants settled. For instance, Calle

de los negros15 and the surrounding neighborhood were “inhabited by the town’s poorest

residents, including Mexicans, Indians, Chileños, French, and Anglos, and the

newcomers’ presence stirred resentment among those who feared competition for jobs.”16

As Acuña notes, at this time the prostitution industry emerged in the city, geographically

restricted to its non-Anglo sectors. Prostitution would come to be an oft cited

characteristic of Mexican sectors of the city and most importantly would be utilized by

Christine Sterling as evidence for the need to rehabilitate Olvera Street and Sonoratown.

The end of the nineteenth century brought even greater numbers of immigrants

from the East. Trains full of Anglo-Americans riding the Southern Pacific Railroad,

which connected the two coasts, would increase the Los Angeles’s population from

15 Calle de los Negros: located on the Plaza's east side, parallel to today's Los Angeles Street, across from

the Garnier Block. This street also was referred to as “Nigger Alley” by the Anglo population, including The Los Angeles Times.

16 Poole, 32. Open hostility towards immigrants exploded frequently; this is best exemplified by the notorious “Chinese Massacre of 1871,” which resulted in the deaths of at least 19 Chinese men and boys. This historical episode has been memorialized in the Great Wall of Los Angeles by Judy Baca and her team of city youths and volunteer artists. In an interesting study of the violence that often located itself in and around the Old Plaza, see artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s “Lynching in the West Los Angeles Walking Tour,” part of his Erased Lynching project. He describes the complicated image of the city as one “of dreams, of flesh, and bone.” http://www.kengonzalesday.com/projects/erasedlynching/walkingtour.htm

9

11,000 in 1880 to 50,000 by the 1890s.17 The old pueblo fell into disrepair with a number

of the old buildings razed and replaced with new manufacturing buildings, “rail yards,

machine shops, cheap hotels, and a noisy substation [that] provid[ed] power for electric

trolleys.”18 Olvera Street became just another dilapidated sector of the old pueblo, an

unpaved alley used mainly for deliveries to the rear entrances of businesses that fronted

Main Street [fig. 3].19

The Plaza and the surrounding area were marked for redevelopment long before

Christine Sterling began campaigning for El Paseo de Los Angeles and the Avila Adobe.

Through city leaders like General Harrison Gray Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler

(publishers of The Los Angeles Times), the Plaza and Olvera Street become the sites of

the intersection between the history of Los Angeles and the relationship between Mexico

and the US. Otis and Chandler had vested interests in reimagining the use and

appearance of the old historic center while at the same time safeguarding their assets

across the border. According to William Estrada in Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and

Contested Space, General Otis and Harry Chandler, among others, were part of a land

syndicate that had purchased property in Baja California stretching all the way to

Southern California’s Imperial Valley for cattle, cotton, and other purposes.20 The

syndicate’s large holdings were made possible by Mexican president Porfirio Diaz,

17 Poole, 37.

18 Ibid., 40.

19 Ibid., 42.

20 William Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008), 139.

10

whose major push to “modernize” Mexico allowed the syndicate relatively unregulated

business freedom in exchange for reporting favorably on his regime. During the

Porfiriato, foreign businessman easily acquired large tracts of land in Mexico for use as

“mines, manufacturing plants, banks[;] oil rights, public utilities, and most of the nation’s

railroads.”21 The selling of Mexico to foreign entities, coupled with the oppression of

peasant populations to which it led, were principal incitements for the Mexican

Revolution. When war then broke out, Otis and the syndicate found their holdings in

danger due to the efforts of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) under the leadership of

Ricardo Flores-Magón. The liberales, as PLM members were called, whose numbers

included not only Mexican radicals and anarchists but Americans as well, fought for the

redistribution of land in Baja California, 78% of which was in foreign hands.22

Needless to say, the Los Angeles Times was quick to paint a negative picture of

the revolution in Mexico. More interesting, however, are the ways in which that depiction

was tied to radical politics in Los Angeles. Indeed the portrayal by the news media of

newly arrived Mexican immigrants (fleeing a war-torn Mexico and suspected to have ties

to the PLM) as radicals and “labor agitators” fanned fears of the “brown scare” that

dominated the period between 1913-1918. The peasant rebellion nature of the Mexican

Revolution was troubling to Otis and Chandler as it accentuated the worker/laborer

struggles visible in Los Angeles, which could prove problematic for Otis’s efforts to

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., 140.

11

poise Los Angeles as an industrial bastion of the “open shop”23 in contrast to the highly

unionized San Francisco labor environment. Otis and other city boosters identified newly

arrived immigrants (especially those from revolutionary Mexico) as the main agitators

and agents of unionization. General Otis impeded the growth of unions by not only

providing financial aid to businesses facing labor troubles, but also counted on the “Red

Squad” arm of the Los Angeles Police Department to strong arm strikers, protect

strikebreakers, and disrupt worker demonstrations [fig. 4].24 Otis and other city boosters

launched defenses against two fronts of what seemed like the same radical assault: one in

Mexico and the other at the Plaza, a meeting place for the influx of immigrant workers,

largely from Mexico and upon whom the open shop depended.25

The Plaza figures prominently in Los Angeles’s labor struggle. It is during this

interval of labor unrest that the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance placing a

23 The “open shop” is a place of employment where one is not required to join or financially support a

union as a condition of hiring or continued employment. “Otis took pride in his growing reputation as the most aggressive and unyielding foe of organized labor in America. He founded the Merchants and Manufacturers (M&M) Association—a league of local businesses created to keep the unions out. He rallied the M&M membership with his cry: ‘We say to capital: Here you can invest in safety! Don’t hover between the lines or I will count you as the enemy! Decide!’ Los Angeles eventually earned the nickname ‘Otistown of the Open Shop.’” “Inventing LA: The Chandlers & Their Times; Harrison Gray Otis,” Public Broadcast Service, accessed March 5, 2011, http://www.pbs.org/kcet/inventing-la/characters/index.html.

24 Estrada (2008), 136. These tactics ended in the bombing of the newspaper building by brothers John J. and James B. McNamara in October 1910.

25 Beyond the upsurge in leftist politics, the Plaza was having a renewal of Mexican identity. Restrictive federal immigration policies affected every group except Mexicans; as a result, the Mexican community in Los Angeles increased by 500,000 throughout the 1920s. They were accepted as a labor force for expanding agriculture industry, not so unlike today’s hypocritical stance towards immigration. Many of the immigrants were drawn to the old Plaza and the remnants of the Mexican community. However, as the U.S. sank into the Depression, the ability to scapegoat unemployment and welfare burdens on immigrants proved too tantalizing and repatriation would send Mexicans and even some American citizens to their native soil.

12

ban on free speech from public streets and private property within city limits—that is

except for within the space of the Plaza. 26 Located far from the rapidly growing business

district, but close to the police department and city and county jails, the Plaza became the

nexus around which newly arrived immigrants settled and voiced their concerns. Indeed,

when the PLM was expelled from Mexico, its new headquarters were located across the

Plaza. Here Ricardo Flores-Magón distributed his newspaper Regeneración (circulation

reached the Southwest and Mexico), and took great advantage of the Plaza’s free speech

zone. These speeches often targeted foreign land holdings in Mexico and the sorry state

of the worker both in Mexico and in the United States [figs. 5-6]. As a sanctuary for

publicly free speech, the Plaza attracted radical leaders, protests, and demonstrations

from organizations such as the Communist party and the I.W.W.27 It is not difficult to

understand why city boosters like Otis and Chandler were attracted by and lent their

support to the El Paseo campaign.

Disparaging the protests and demonstrations, the media amplified the negative

rhetoric of the print assaults upon the Plaza. Although Mexicans were not the only

immigrant group targeted by The Los Angeles Times, they were often figured as

“embarking on [a] trek back to [their] native land,” also known as repatriation, or as

“riot[ing] at the plaza” [fig. 7].28 Urged by T.C. Horton (leader of the Los Angeles Bible

26 Estrada (1999), 110.

27 The Plaza was the center for the PLM, active Communist leaders like Meyer Baylin and Karl Gosu Yoneda, in and a number of female demonstrators like Emma Goldman and María Talavera.

28 “Horde Departs for Native Soil,” Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1931, http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=386511081&sid=6&Fmt=10&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=HNP. “Mexicans Riot in Plaza,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1922,

13

Institute) and the Times, there were several attempts to amend the free speech ordinance

that protected the Plaza. Both parties described the Plaza’s free speech ordinance as

“permitting anarchistic teachings that inflame ignorant and excitable Mexicans and

irresponsible foreigners of other nationalities” and hoped to issue speaking permits “to

responsible citizens of Los Angeles only.”29 In particular the Times noted the

conspiratorial nature of the street vendors and “tamale wagons” where “much of the

revolutionary flub-tub of that portion of the city [was] hatched.”30

Despite these efforts, the ordinance remained intact and the Plaza continued to be

used as a site for public demonstrations such as the 1927 vigil in protest of the execution

of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, and rallies in support of the unemployed that steadily

increased throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. Undaunted, The Times continued its

negative representation of the Plaza activities. The news coverage coupled the attacks on

rabble rousers with reports of plague-ridden Mexican barrios and emphasized these areas

close proximity to the business centers of downtown. Given the almost accidental

radicalization of the Plaza’s role in city life, it is not surprising that the Plaza area was

singled out for redevelopment. However, it is also this history that tarnished the effort to

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=328796022&sid=8&Fmt=1&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=HNP. These headlines and their articles were to be found on the front page. It also should be noted that these are only a sampling of the multitude of similarly titled articles found in the Los Angeles Times not to mention the other city newspapers. The proliferation of such headlines helped to foster and foment anxiety concerning Mexican communities.

29 Estrada (2008), 152.

30 Ibid.

14

“renew” the area around the Plaza and revealed a repressive backstory into which effort

Siqueiros’s mural entered as a critical interruption.

15

THIS BIT OF OLD MEXICO…

Christine Sterling’s campaign for El Paseo de Los Angeles is essential to

understanding Siqueiros’s visual response to the street and to the overall perception and

treatment of Mexico and Mexican/Mexican Americans in the United States. The

commercial support lent to the project further demonstrates how civic and capitalist

interests dovetailed in Los Angeles at the time and provides an even more enticing

counterpoint to Siqueiros, his personal convictions, and his desire to openly critique veiled

processes of capitalism and local/national identity formation. El Paseo de Los Angeles

should be regarded as part of the larger diplomatic effort between Mexico and the United

States, which took the guise of, among other things, the 1930 Mexican Arts show at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art. This consideration expands the context of the criticism

levied by Siqueiros’s mural and helps to reveal the official lengths taken by local and

national governments in order to recreate the public image of Mexico in all its iterations.

In search of the romantic Southern California promised by popular novels such as in

Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 Ramona [figs. 8-9], Christine Sterling encountered the old

Plaza in its dilapidated state, characterized by official neglect, by industrial waste, and by a

contentious atmosphere [fig. 3]. The Plaza was “suffocated in a cheap sordid atmosphere”

with its “fine” old buildings like the Lugo House “occupied by the Chinese and too altered

to recognize.” Sterling continues, “I closed my eyes and thought of the Plaza as a Spanish-

American social and commercial center, a spot of beauty as a gesture of appreciation to

Mexico and Spain for our historical past. . . [where] [t]here were picnics into the hills,

16

dancing at night, moonlight serenades, romance and real happiness.”31 Sterling, née

Chastina Rix, began an active campaign to cleanse the area surrounding the old plaza, an

area which, for her, should signify the glorious romantic bygone days of a

Spanish/Mexican past. For Sterling and many other Anglo-Americans, the Spanish and

Mexican cultures were interchangeable, which ignored the intricacies of over 300 years of

history and compressed this period into a neat and simple category of Spanish/Mexican:

“The booklets and folders I read about Los Angeles were painted in colors of Spanish,

Mexican romance. They were appealing with old Missions, palm trees, sunshine, and the

‘Click of the castanets’.”32

Sterling’s vision for Olvera Street was not only a product of her personal ambitions,

but also aligned with local business desires. Her interest in Los Angeles’s past and the

trend “among Americans for all forms of Mexican art and architecture”33 furthered her

conservation campaign to turn Olvera Street into El Paseo de Los Angeles.34 She entreated

the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and a Mr. Arnoll to recognize the benefits that a 31 Christine Sterling, Olvera Street: Its History and Restoration (Los Angeles: Old Mission Printing Shop,

1933), 7.

32 Christine Sterling, Olvera Street: Its History and Restoration (Los Angeles: Old Mission Printing Shop, 1933), 8-9.

33 Estrada (1999), 112.

34 El Paseo was constructed at a time when the project of historical preservation and conservation was well established (from restoring the Alamo or Mission San Antonio de Valero, to Colonial Williamsburg)—it was an acceptable occupation for women to appoint themselves as a protectors and preservers of the nation’s historical sites. Estrada recognizes that as a divorced single mother with limited income, Sterling had few socially proscribed roles she could fulfill. However, Sterling herself experienced gender-based prejudice as recorded in her diary: “I, as Captain of the Crew apparently lacked the necessary brains or expertise to put a solid foundation under what after all was just the presentation of a pretty idea.” However, she did make the most of her role by publicly speaking about her tireless campaign and sacrifice to renew the street. It should be noted that she was a strong-handed overseer and the success of the street ensured her continuing presence on the street and granted her financial stability.

17

restored Plaza could bring. Sterling stated that the Plaza should be converted into a “social

and commercial Latin American center” in order to reap “better trade relations with

Mexico, Central, and South America [as was] the earnest desire of the National

Government” and succeed in the “fulfillment of a true Pan-American Ideal.”35

Her appeals to the Chamber of Commerce led her to contact Harry Chandler who, as

was illustrated earlier, had interests not only in real estate, but also in eradicating

unionizing and radical politics.36 To marshal the funds necessary to remake Olvera Street,

Chandler organized the Plaza de Los Angeles Corporation, a for-profit entity that included

such equally interested figures as Moses H. Sherman (who held vast interests in Southern

California real estate, public utilities, and streetcar and urban railways), Henry O’Melveny

(head of Los Angeles’s most powerful law firm), Lucien Napoleon Brunswig (head of the

Brunswig Drug Company), James Martin (banker and developer), David Faries (then

attorney, and soon to be Superior Court Judge), Harry Bauer (Southern California Edison

Company), and Rodolfo Montes (president of the British owned El Águila Oil Company

during the Porfiriato, but forced into exile under the presidency of Plutarco Elias Calles—

he liquidated his Mexican assets into cash prior to his arrival in Los Angeles).37 The

establishment of such an organization speaks to the facility with which culture was/is

employed as a commercial asset to the benefit of a few and to the detriment of entire

35 Christine Sterling, Olvera Street: Its History and Restoration (Los Angeles: Old Mission Printing Shop,

1933), 9.

36 Estrada (1999), 113-114.

37 Estrada (2008), 189-90.

18

populations in the city. These are the cabalistic maneuverings to which, along with similar

maneuverings occurring in Mexico to prevent the nationalization of key industries,

Siqueiros reacted in his mural. However, Mexico’s culture as a tool of commerce (and of

Sterling’s “Pan-American ideal”) was not confined to Los Angeles during this period. At

about the same time that Olvera Street was remade into El Paseo de Los Angeles, New

York was experiencing a similar reimaging of Mexico and its arts. Siqueiros’s mural can

be pitched as a critique of an image of Mexico that is both offered by the Mexican

government and used by the U.S. nationally as a form of international relations tool, and

one that played a problematic role in Angeleno history.

The 1930 travelling exhibit Mexican Arts [fig. 10], initiated by the U.S. Ambassador

to Mexico Dwight Morrow and curated by René d’Harnoncourt38 (which began at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art), was a direct result of the United States’ broader political

objectives in Mexico. It played into the “political expediency of culture” needed to

alleviate tensions between the United States and Mexico during this time.39 Since the new

Mexican constitution provided for the nationalization of key industries such as mining and

petroleum, US interests in garnering exceptions for companies with large holdings in

Mexico became urgent. ThAne exhibition that provided a positive impression of Mexico

38 René d’Harnoncourt, an impecunious Austrian aristocrat, arrived in Mexico in 1926. Despite his inability

to speak Spanish or English (which he remedied), soon acquired a reputation as an astute adviser on Mexican arts and crafts. He expanded his clientele base and standing when he worked under the American Frederick Davis, whose Mexico City antiques shop sold to such collectors as William Randolph Hearst, Edward Doheny, and U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow. (James Oles. South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 124.

39 Anna Indych-López, Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927-1940s (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 84.

19

by emphasizing not only its craft and folkloric elements, but also its contributions to

modern arts, became part and parcel of diplomatic ploys to ensure US financial interests.40

Exhibitions like Mexican Arts received funding from institutions such as the American

Federation of Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation, among

others. While the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations were non-profit institutions, each

were also tied to business interests with pressing concerns in Mexico (as was the case with

El Paseo de Los Angeles and local leaders like the Chandlers).

Beyond the financial anxieties surrounding the tensions between the two countries,

the 1920s and 1930s found each country struggling to redefine its national identity;

Mexico sought to refurbish a tarnished reputation of volatility and violence following the

turbulence of the Revolution, and the United States tried to “assert the uniqueness of the

U.S. experience relative to that of the European.”41 The Mexican Arts exhibit, and others

like it, proposed a cultural pan-Americanism that affirmed the individuality of the New

World. Several universities and groups sponsored expeditions to Mexico and other Latin

American countries to discover the “Egypt of America” in order to bring “rare” and

“exceptional” pieces of American civilization to US audiences. These helped to promote

US national identity against the perception of the European ideal. The exhibition of

Mexican folk arts was seen as a continuation of an exclusively American aesthetic that the

native Mexican artisan brought unconsciously to his/her product/artwork. Likewise, El

Paseo de Los Angeles was touted as “our experience,” a collective history in which all

40 Ibid., 83.

41 Ibid., 94.

20

Angelenos should share and delight. Sterling and the project promoters stressed the

ownership of such a history as part of a shared American experience.

Adding to the function of Mexican objects as pawns in strategic diplomacy was a

general tendency to view Mexico as a remnant of simpler times [fig. 11]. With the advent

of the Great Depression, many looked to Mexico as a country that offered an “uplifting

contrast to the supposed decay of individualist capitalism[;]…the murals of leading

Mexican artists…symbolized the power of a public art responsive to the hopes and needs

of a broad populace.”42 Contemporary American artists active in Mexico emphasized the

“idyllic and timeless rural world” and, specifically, “Mexican rural life as [an] abstract

symbol of a Golden Age when man worked the soil, had little use for machines or

newspapers, and enjoyed a cultural continuity with his ancestors.”43 The project of El

Paseo de Los Angeles has been described as stemming from a warped sense of nostalgia

for days when modernity had not complicated daily life. As mentioned, Christine Sterling

herself wrote of the whimsy of an era where the air was filled with the perfume of dazzling

señoritas and the ballad of a handsome caballero’s serenade [fig. 12a-d].44

Not coincidentally, in the years following the revolution, the Mexican government

went to great lengths to re-establish its reputation, to highlight the “attractive, ‘pretty’

aspects of popular culture…while leaving open the possibility of transforming less

42 Karen Cordero Reiman, “Constructing a Modern Mexican Art, 1910-1940,” in South of the Border:

Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947, ed. James Oles (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 5.

43 Ibid., 53.

44 However, the onset of the Great Depression also brought with it a renewed negative attention to the Mexican, Mexican-American, and other immigrant populations that El Paseo sought to sanitize.

21

acceptable aspects of popular culture, such as technological and sanitary deficiencies, as

part of a broader political program.”45 In this light, Olvera Street can be seen as a indicator

of Mexico’s success at marketing itself as untouched by the technological and social

problems of the United States; this image is complicated by the desire on the part of

Americans to see Mexico in that way as well. However, this distancing of technology from

its promotional materials left Mexico vulnerable to being assigned to an inferior stage of

historical development by the United States. It is this weakness that Siqueiros feared was

ruining his country and would come to define Mexico’s role in relation to the United

States in problematic ways.

El Paseo de Los Angeles marketed the nostalgic history for which disillusioned Los

Angelenos yearned [fig. 12]. LA Times pundit Harry Carr called El Paseo “this bit of old

California, sheltered from modernity like some lovely princess who has slept through the

ages.”46 Sterling and city boosters consistently isolated time on the street. From the fragile

cobblestone street used for paving to restoring the buildings to their “original” condition,

they created an air of authenticity that effectively obscured how constructed this

legitimacy was. Taking up the same aesthetic program as did the Mexican government, El

Paseo distanced technology and contemporary reality at every turn, focusing instead on the

innocent pleasures of the “mercado.” The open-air market became the quintessential

symbol of the rural Mexican experience;47 “[Mexicans] were more alive and real because

45 Ibid., 21.

46 Kropp, 39.

47 The prevalence of this motif can be seen in a review of the 1930 Met exhibit; a critic notes that “‘This autumn, by our good fortune, a gay hint or two of the puestos [market stands] is visible right here in New

22

they were free from the standardization that came to typify American life after the

1920s.”48 The Mexican marketplace had long been singled out as the locus where

a zealous collector will usually come away with folk art treasures fashioned along traditional lines. As in ancient times, today's trading centers swarm with Indians—and, more likely than not, insatiable collectors can be spotted in the crowds...The exotic sights and riotous colors, the cacophony of sound, and the pungent and aromatic smells blend together to create a fantastic carnival atmosphere….Despite visible evidence of modern encroachments, the market-day pattern remains essentially unchanged.49

As such, El Paseo’s marketplace was a time-capsule of an unchanged Mexican

experience.50 Sterling effectively recreated this history by closing the street to traffic

(again distancing technological progress), paving the street, restoring dilapidated buildings

such as the Avila Adobe, Pelanconi House, and the Pico Hotel, and giving puestos or

wooden stands to Mexican families.51 Many of the sanctioned roles for Mexicans and

York.’ The same review lamented the absence of regional artisans normally at work in the market stands and suggested that a few well-stocked puestos be sent to New York some holiday season.” (NY Herald Tribune, "Mexico at the Metropolitan," Oct 16, 1930 as quoted in Indych-López, p. 119).

48 Oles 77.

49 Avon Neal preface, Folk Treasures of Mexico: The Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection, ed. Marion Oettinger (Houston, TX: Arte público press, 2010), XXXIX.

50 Accentuating the hypocrisy inherent in the proclivity for the rural image is the fact that El Paseo represented a Mexican Los Angeles that was not typically “rural” but cosmopolitan in that the adobes were the town homes of the various wealthier Mexican residents who journeyed there for more urban activities. The “quaint” picturesque history of people who worked with their hands and its peasant actors (predominantly male) in his/her "white pyjamas" also had their history in the old pueblo, but reducing the entire history to a rural one undercut the diversity and complexity of life prior to American annexation. El Paseo emphasized the charm of bygone days with the señoritas, charros (usually carrying guitars) and peasants; however it also chose to forsake allusions to the modernization efforts of the post-pobladores generations, including the construction of a theater and hotels. In addition, there was no mention of the diverse ethnicities of the city’s residents prior to US control from its Anglo and European immigrants to the continued influx of immigrants from other regions of Mexico.

51 Kropp 40. In addition to these puestos being temporary, Sterling was cited as saying, each puesto was “given to a Mexican family and they will sell all things typical of Mexico” (Kropp, 40). This rhetoric of

23

Mexican-Americans in El Paseo took the form of puesteros, which required them to dress

in costume [figs. 14-15]; those that refused were evicted.52 The puestos, or small wooden

structures set up in the middle of the street, were noted as the key element for the

legitimacy of the street: “Much of the color of El Paseo de Los Angeles is due to the little

outdoor stands that flank it on either side. Here the Mexican people of the

neighborhood…sell their native wares.”53 However, even though they were recognized as

essential to the creation of the authenticity, the very fact that the structures were located in

the middle of the street and were wooden signifies a temporary status whereas the

permanent buildings on either side of the street were typically owned by Anglos. In

general, they offered services or products completely removed from the Mexican

atmosphere of the street—“for those who like Mexican atmosphere better than Mexican

food,” one could eat “American food in the Southern manner” as advertised for the

restaurant by Mary W. Brown.54

The spatial delineation of Olvera Street also underlined the overall racial politics that

structured the space. The fact that the puestos were temporary and run by Mexicans and

Mexican Americans helped to cement the image of the Mexican immigrants as perpetually

foreign—members of a short-term labor force that could be done away with easily, e.g.,

repatriated. The structure reinforced the power relations at play in El Paseo and precluded

Anglo charity to an impoverished minority completely overlooks that fact that puesteros paid dues and also that many of the puestos endured far longer than that of the permanent stores in the buildings.

52 Ibid., 48.

53 Ibid., 40.

54 Ibid., 43.

24

any critique of its representation. Although Siqueiros’s visual intervention would call into

question the history on display in El Paseo and the power dynamics that gave rise to it, the

mural’s later whitewashed condition would delay its ability to change the restrictive social

situation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles until the 1960s.

The theme-park-like, immersive experience of El Paseo was, in essence, a “powerful

image factory about Mexicans in the city.”55 Through official outlets such as newspapers,

the promotion and advertising of El Paseo confined the street to a “composite of an

imagined past, with carefully groomed, passively optimistic Mexicans, seemingly devoid

of any political thoughts whatsoever, who were on permanent display for the curious

delights of tourists.”56 Times columnists provided unquestioned interpretations of the

street. As a result, these interpretations became authoritative and “enforceable,” relegating

Mexicans to the past through the organization of space and interaction with “characters.”57

Many Anglos remarked that “these people” were capable of being happy with very little.

Journalists mentioned the reluctance of the craftspeople to sell their goods: “potter Julio

Rueda [had] ‘an intense dislike for economics which force him to sell his beloved ollas.”

Another observer stated that “‘Cresencio the potter’ fired his pots in the kiln behind the

Avila Adobe every day, but once they [were] complete he cares little about them, whether

they sell or not. His joy is in his work, not his profits.”58

55 Estrada (1999), 115.

56 Estrada, 119.

57 Kropp, 39.

58 Ibid., 46.

25

El Paseo pictured a friendly, compliant Mexican identity, at ease in its romantic

pastoral life [see figs. 9, 12-15]. This image reinforced and justified oppressive labor

conditions and the exploitation of immigrant workers—if Mexicans were satisfied in those

conditions, then they would be equally happy with whatever pay they might receive.

Moreover, if the perception of a contented poor Mexican of El Paseo was natural, “then

Mexican economic complaint or political expression appeared unnatural, something to be

controlled.”59 The occlusion of the active and contemporary communities (made invisible,

but still stigmatized) further delineated the marginalization created by the power structures

through the inscription and reproduction of Mexican/Spanish culture as remnant and

memory. By doing so, the Mexican and Mexican-American community that was

acknowledged and sanctioned was confined to an Anglo paradigm which easily lent itself

to appropriation and commodification.

El Paseo de Los Angeles was more popular than its creators could have imagined;

the construction of a past so complete enticed visitors to this experience. El Paseo was

presented as a cluttered menagerie of Mexican objects, which were seen primarily as

souvenir commodities rather than “art.”60 The street provided Anglos a way of purchasing

59 Ibid., 44.

60 One of the many criticisms aimed at the 1930 exhibition was that the Met was an inappropriate venue for such a subject; the Natural History museum would have been more suitable. A majority of the exhibit reviews concentrated on the folk objects, dedicating only a small space to the modern art pieces. Many of the “folk” and popular objects offered in the Mexican Arts exhibit were considered “low” art (by proxy, this critical neglect could relegate the modern art examples of the exhibition to the same denigration of “low” art). Indych-López juxtaposes the critical reception and display strategies of the Met’s Mexican Arts exhibit against those of the American Wing at the Met (119). The American Wing, which presented American decorative arts in a “formal, uncluttered manner,” was more in keeping with traditional exhibition aesthetics. Therefore, these objects were elevated to high “canonical” art versus the overwhelming barrage and seeming disorder of the Mexican Arts exhibition—whose displays seemingly created a wunderkammer of ethnographically interesting objects.

26

Mexican goods, eating Mexican food, listening to music, and enjoying the sights of sultry

señoritas without actually having to cross the border. Even Christine Sterling had failed to

cross the border in order to somewhat authenticate her vision.61 Bolstered by the idea of a

themed experience in its totality of "Old Mexican Los Angeles," El Paseo was never built

to be anything but an indulgence in "low" art. This is relevant in consideration of

Siqueiros’s appointment and the ways in which his art production may have been seen as

just another folk object with little fear of his criticality upsetting the status quo. Whether at

the Met or in Los Angeles, these Mexican objects were meant to assert the uniqueness of

the American experience and to affirm the sophistication of the United States within this

American experience. Additionally, beyond bypassing the inconvenience of travelling to

another country, it had become increasingly more difficult to encounter the Mexico of the

American imagination as modernity erased the picturesque qualities that were most

attractive to early twentieth century Americans. Therefore to experience an authentic

Mexico one needed only to stay in Los Angeles and visit El Paseo de Los Angeles or visit

the local museum.

61 Estrada (1999), 113.

27

AMÉRICA TROPICAL: EL PASEO DE LOS ANGELES INTERRUPTED

The desire to display a mural at El Paseo, especially one created by a Mexican

artist, becomes understandable in relation to not only the previously mentioned

Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition and the vogue for things Mexican, but also the

numerous mural and Mexican art reproductions and coverage made available in the

United States and the cries for such an art movement to occur in Los Angeles.

‘In Mexico City,’ says Richard Day, art director for Samuel Goldwyn… [who has] just returned from that metropolis, ‘everyone talks fresco.’ …Why can’t we have it here? It needs only a few courageous examples. This may have to come from the younger painters …because of the scale and direct daring required….62

“Why can’t we have it [fresco] here?” wrote art critic for the LA Times Arthur Millier.

Mexican muralism had caught the attention of U.S. audiences years before 1932 as they

had been widely publicized in the United States. Photographic reproductions of the

murals appeared in periodicals such as Art Digest and Creative Art among others. “The

January 1929 issue of Creative Art, devoted to the 'development of art in Mexico,'

focused on Rivera and included numerous reproductions of his murals at the Secretaría de

Educación Pública (SEP) in Mexico City and the Escuela Nacional de Agricultura (now

known as Universidad Autónoma Chapingo).”63 The Spanish-English journal Mexican

Folkways [fig. 16] created by American Frances Toor, which was edited by Rivera and

published in Mexico City between 1925 and 1937, acquainted, and to a certain extent

62 Arthur Millier, “Brush strokes,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 1932, B20.

63 Indych-López, 77.

28

formed, the reception of Mexican art for American audiences. As previously noted, in

U.S. exhibitions, modern Mexican art was often displayed alongside pre-Columbian

objects, as were folk arts and crafts. The 1930 Met exhibit employed this exact display

strategy [fig. 17].64 In its case, which became one of the touchstones to which other

exhibits of Mexican art in the US were compared, all of the tres grandes65 were

represented as were the reproductions of murals; however it was the artisanal production,

folk and craft work that received the most promotion and critical acclaim. The partiality

to the traditional folk objects of the exhibit on the part of many of the reviewers

marginalized the contributions of the modern artists and helped to cement the

expectations of “simplicity” and folk values in modern Mexican art for American

audiences. This left little room for critically aware artists .

Sterling’s El Paseo project trafficked in the same motifs as the Mexican art

exhibits in the United States. Sterling-approved tenants occupied many of the buildings

lining the street and their businesses began to trade in the same constructed theme as the

street. The Italian Hall, named for its use as an Italian community center, in the 1930s,

functioned as a banquet space, a restaurant (located in the basement, which was

transformed in 1934 from the Casa di Pranza [Italian fare] to El Paseo Inn [Mexican

cuisine]), and an art gallery (the Plaza Art Center) with an accompanying “beer garden,”

tea room, and space for refreshments. It was decided that a decorative exterior wall mural

would complement the outdoor patio of the beer garden. Plaza Art Center and art gallery 64 Ibid., 3.

65 The tres grandes referred to the three leading artists of the mural movement: José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

29

director F.K. Ferenz contracted Mexican muralist (and then exile) David Alfaro Siqueiros

to create this ornamental element.

David Alfaro Siqueiros arrived in Los Angeles in April, 1932, as a result of

voluntary exile from Mexico. Prior to his arrival in Los Angeles, Siqueiros personally

and passionately supported militant leftist politics. By 1911 at the age of 15, Siqueiros

participated in his first strike with the students at the National School of Fine Arts of the

San Carlos Academy. Their goal was to oust the pro-Porfirian teachers from the

academy. As a result, Siqueiros was incarcerated. Three years later would find Siqueiros

in Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalist army, rising to the appointment of second

lieutenant by the time he was discharged in 1917. His post war endeavors centered

around further political action and his participation in many groups such as the Mexican

Communist Party and the “Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos, Pintores y Escultores.” He

also co-wrote a number of manifestoes for “soldier artists,” acted as strike leader in the

mining towns of the state of Jalisco, and underwent arrest in the Lecumberri (Mexico

City’s infamous jail), and subsequently was sentenced to house arrest in Taxco preceding

his arrival in Los Angeles.66

Before executing América tropical oprimida y destrozada por los imperialismos

(Tropical America Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism) at El Paseo, Siqueiros had

executed a mural at the Chouinard School of Art, Mitín obrero (Workers’ Meeting),

which suffered much the same fate as América tropical and has long since faded from

66 His imprisonment in 1930 was due to his alleged participation in an assault on then interim president

Emilio Portes Gil. For more information concerning Siqueiros, please see the related works section.

30

view.67 This first mural centered on an orator, most likely a union organizer, addressing a

multi-ethnic crowd. Siqueiros’s gallery showings in Jake Zeitlin’s bookshop, Earl

Stendahl’s Ambassador gallery, and then the Plaza Art Center68 acquainted the Los

Angeles public with his monumental figures and “dark paintings…deeply imbued with

the revolutionary ardor which turned him from painting on walls to organizing a miner’s

union.”69 Evocative of the future América tropical, Millier’s review of the Stendahl

exhibit emphasizes the “overwhelming” effect of his paintings, “massive forms and heads

[that] look out of an aura of black…with an impression of brutality and darkness, of a

complete absence of any ‘charm’…There is present…[a] brooding sense of tragedy.”70

Considering his personal history, his activities in Los Angeles, and the critical reviews

67 According to mural activists, the Chouinard mural has resurfaced. “The mural was rediscovered by Dave

Tourje, an artist who is executive director of the new Chouinard School of Art. (Founded two years ago, the school models its programs after its predecessor, but it is now located in South Pasadena.) Tourje knew of the Siqueiros Chouinard mural, but its exact location, or even its continued existence, was uncertain. Researching and exploring the original Chouinard building, now owned by the New Times Presbyterian Church and run by Korean immigrants, he noticed that a ragged nail hole above the door of the church's kitchen was surrounded by bright colors. He summoned a group of conservators and Siqueiros scholars led by Leslie Rainer, a veteran of América Tropical's conservation project, who found further evidence of the mural through cracks and crumbling chunks of paint and plaster behind the kitchen's large refrigerators. The kitchen wall, it turns out, was once part of the building's facade, before a wing was added” (David Ebony, “Siqueiros mural rediscovered,” Art in America, April 2005).

68 The Plaza Art Center exhibit was an extension of the Stendahl gallery showing. Not only does this notice in the Los Angeles Times mention the extension, but it references Siqueiros’s inclusion in the 1930 Met exhibit as having “some of the finest works in the painting and print section.” (Arthur Millier, “Brush strokes,” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1932, B10.

69 Arthur Millier, “Mexico’s Art Ferment Stirring in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times, May, 22, 1932, B13. Siqueiros also had exhibited paintings in the opening show of the Plaza Art Center in September 1931, which was curated by Ferenz, Jorge Juan Crespo and Mexican consul, Rafael de la Carolina. Of the many in attendance, including the consuls from Central and South American countries, were Christine Sterling, Alma Reed, Harry Carr, and Arthur Millier. (“Mexican Artists’ Work Put on Display,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1931, A1-A2). In Millier’s review, Siqueiros is given special distinction for the Prisoner’s Wife, stating that “[i]n color and feeling it is unlike anything in the show. It emanates a peculiar distinction” (“Mexican Art Seen at Plaza,” Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1931, 12).

70 Ibid.

31

his work had received, Siqueiros should have been the very last person commissioned for

an image of a tropical “Mexican curio” so desired by Sterling and Ferenz.

Ferenz and Sterling intended the mural for the Plaza Art Center to fit with the

folkloric elements of Mexican culture. Simultaneously, Siqueiros’s mural would further

propagate El Paseo as representing a true history. However, Siqueiros was not amenable

to a romantic depiction of “a continent of happy men, surrounded by palms and parrots

where the fruit voluntarily detached itself to fall into the mouths of the happy mortals.”

He said, “I painted a man. . . crucified on a double cross, which had, proudly perched on

the top, the eagle of North American coins” [fig. 18].71 The mural’s central portion is set

against a ruined pre-Columbian pyramid with ceiba trees and other threatening vegetation

flanking the ruins, and several Mayan sculptural elements, including a partial kulkulcan

column, a chacmool, and a standard bearer.72 The upper right-hand portion of the piece

depicts two armed male figures, which are often identified as a Mexican revolutionary

and a Peruvian guerilla. Siqueiros challenged the suspect desire for a socially acceptable

image of tropical America.73 Taking the image of the sanitized and distanced past, he

71 Shifra M. Goldman, “Siqueiros and Three Early Murals in Los Angeles,” Art Journal 33, no. 4 (Summer

1974): 321-27, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3249%28197422%2933%3A4%3C321%3ASATEMI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W.

72 Mary Ellen Miller, The kulkulcan is a translation of “Feathered Serpent” deity into Maya. A chacmool depicts a reclining human figure who holds a flat receptacle for offerings. A standard bearer often has his arms in front of his chest and tends to hold/bear flags or emblems (Mary Ellen Miller, Maya Art and Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1999, 65-66).

73 Siqueiros questioned: "How were the tropics? Naturally when the manager made his request, he thought we would paint a tropical America bursting with joy, colors, dancing; but this could not be the Latin American tropics. Brazil was dominated by the Ford House; it was in the Brazilian tropics where generals were sold out to English imperialism and tear the country apart. These tropics are exploited by the allied bourgeoisie from the diverse imperialistic nations in the same way as tropical Mexico is, where Indians work in gum factories for a petty pay, and where there is no authority but that of the imperialistic

32

transported it to the present as a commentary on US/Mexican relations and the part that

business and capitalism (as an extension of the imperial enterprise) played in maintaining

hegemonic power structures.

The central portion of the mural is considered the most controversial.

Identification of the central figure as a Mexican male, a peasant, is due to those costumes

worn in the street below. As stated previously, Christine Sterling required the wearing of

a costume for all puesteros enforced by the threat of expulsion. This costume was

typically seen on Mexican peasants.74 Siqueiros’s image of the crucified Mexican male

contrasts with the happy people selling their wares on the street. Siqueiros references El

Paseo through an incomplete representation of the normative image of a Mexican male as

dictated on the street. This state of undress of the crucified figure could be taken to

signify barbarity versus the fully clothed civilizers; however when compared to the

conventional undress of a crucified Christ figure, the partially dressed indigenous figure

takes on holy attributes and adds to the sacrilegious and derisive character of the mural.

The crucified figure also references those identities sacrificed/replaced in order to create

an imposed order on the Mexican and Mexican-Americans in El Paseo, and symbolizes

company itself. A bitter drama is taking place in the tropical regions of Mexico which we all know (those belonging to the Chamulas, the Yaquis, etc.); a drama of Biblical dimensions of peoples without rightful autonomy, geographically rich cultures which are starving. So we painted, as best we could, the Mexico of Latin America" (Irene Herner, Siqueiros: from Paradise to Utopia, Mexico: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2010, 321).

74 Such an image of a Mexican peasant was easily at hand and provided by films such as The Mexican Hatred, A Mexican Spy in America, At Mexico's Mercy, Arms and the Gringo, and Captured by Mexicans, all produced in 1914. These offer a sampling of this representation. It should be noted that some of the characters in El Paseo dressed in charro clothing or brilliant faldas and rebosos in order to represent the dons and doñas of the Spanish past—and not Mexican history. The fluidity with which Olvera Street conflated Spanish and Mexican served to idealize another colonizer’s past and look sympathetically on the colonized.

33

the exploited labor force in Mexico [fig. 19]. Moreover, if the cross is looked at closely,

the indigenous person is not nailed to the cross, but hangs by ropes. This detail can be

read as more than just a stylistic choice. By not adhering completely to this aspect of the

more conventional crucifixion image, the mural prompts the viewer to ask to what

purpose the mimicry is only partially complete? The central figure is secured to the cross

by a rope wound around the hands, feet, shoulders and neck. If this depiction was

transported to reality, the legs would have collapsed way and the figure would have been

lynched on the cross. 75 Lynching was fairly prevalent in American visual culture.

Although not a uniquely American method of retribution, it is easily recognizable and

therefore furthers the idea of American culpability.76 The crucified figure traps the eye

not only because of its central location, but also due to the eagle’s wings, and the trees

and rifles, which point at the center and encircle it. These design elements stress the

importance of the depiction of oppressed peoples.

Most of the mural is taken up not by figures, but by scenery: Mayan ruins,

monumental trees, and small sculptures. The “great twisting trees” on either side of the

Mayan temple stand for the lush tropical Mexico that was to serve as background [fig.

21]. Tropical trees connote images of palm trees, especially in Southern California;

75 According to Shifra Goldman, a photograph from Felice Beato could serve as the model for the central

crucified figure, “Crucifixion of the Male Servant Sokichi Who Killed the Son of His Boss and was Therefore Crucified. He was 25 Years Old,” 1865-68, albumen print (Los Murales de Siqueiros, ed. Raquel Tibol, Mexico City: Instituto de Bellas Artes, 1998, 62). [fig. 20]

76 I fully acknowledge the possibility of projecting contemporary ideas on a past; however, lynching as a means of vigilante justice would have been familiar to most literate Americans. There are 200 references to Judge Lynch (i.e. lynching as justice) in the Los Angeles Times archives from 1881-1932 alone. In addition, this number does not account for other acccounts of lynching that did not include the words “Judge Lynch” in the headline.

34

however the mural does not look to the swaying palm with its dates or coconuts, but to

undulating barren trees that invade the ruins and add to the threatening tone of the mural

in general. The trees lack leaves, deviating from the lush foliage that would have been

expected given the Mexican art sold and marketed in the U.S. The trees also act as a

symmetrical balance to the guns on the other side, emphasizing the center of the

composition. The rhythm and movement of the trees’ forms that guide the eye towards

the center are arrested by the stark geometry of the Mayan temple.77 The form of the

temple highlights and imitates the overall form of the eagle-peon-crucifixion image

group, accentuating its importance. The location of a sacrificial scene at a Mayan temple

would not have disturbed popular notions of native customs; however the mimicry of this

conventional site is given new meaning, as the sacrifice is not native against native at the

top of a pyramid, but North American over Amerindian—capitalist over laborer.

The mural’s critique of El Paseo’s image of Mexico and Mexican Los Angeles is

not directed only at Anglo-Americans but also at Mexico. The mural addresses a Mexico

tangentially referenced in Olvera Street, in its performers and inhabitants. Siqueiros

speaks to two nations and cultures, their sordid histories intermixing. Nevertheless, he

depicts Mexico, not some reinvented history of Spanish/Mexican cultural remnant on

display in Olvera Street. The temple is the site, not Los Angeles. The dilapidated pyramid

encroached upon by aggressive vegetation, fallen warriors with empty offerings

(chacmool),78 standard bearers without flags or symbols of the ruling government, and a

77 Goldman, 324.

78 Both scholars Shifra Goldman and Irene Herner identified the pre-Columbian elements with Chichén Itzá, specifically the Temple of the Warriors with its standard bearers lining the staircase, the chacmool

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castrated kukulcan (lacking its horned head) with only a rattled tail to warn of danger (but

not equipped to strike at the invaders) suggest the dark past and weak government that

allow the subjugation of its peoples [fig. 22]. The mural speaks to the ineffectiveness of

creating a national identity based upon indigenismo and “Mexican curios” without

protecting its citizens, turning to a past that cannot successfully combat the modern times.

Siqueiros was a self-described “soldier-artist” and, as such, militantly opposed the

policies of the Porfiriato that had allowed foreign influences to take control of Mexico at

the expense of the lower classes. According to Siqueiros, the post-revolutionary

government fell critically short of the revolutionary ideals for which he fought and had

done little to change U.S. commercial relations in Mexico. Siqueiros “condemned the

subserviency of the Mexican government toward the United States. He railed against

Yankee imperialism running the government, against the murder of unarmed agrarian

reform workers, against the betrayal by the corrupt labor leaders of the right to strike,

against the expulsion of militants from the unions, and against the Lamont-de la Huerta

treaty with the United States, which ‘brings the workers and peasants tied hand and foot

to North American imperialism for generations to come’.” 79 The history referred to in the

street (a history of ranchos and Californios) is undone as the mural shifts and calls into

question not only the reverence for a Californio past that ignored the Mexican and

Mexican-American present, but also the very relationship that continues to perpetuate

and kulkulcan columns at the summit. According to Herner, Siqueiros and Blanca Luz visited this site in 1929 (Herner, 322).

79 Philip Stein, Siqueiros: His Life and Works (New York: International Publishers, 1994), 55.

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colonial difference within Los Angeles and in Mexico, and the often invisible workings

of power involved in all the borders.

Siqueiros advocates for action through his depiction of modern warriors in the

upper left-hand register of the mural [fig. 23]. For Siqueiros, these actors of the mural

represent those best prepared to safeguard the future—those prepared for militant and

dynamic action to assert and, if necessary, forcibly defend their liberty. As an additional

slight, these figures clash with the Sterling-prescribed image created in El Paseo and

reinsert the contemporary Mexican-American radical presence that El Paseo sought to

overwrite.80 The street vendor while in costume was not permitted to arm himself; of the

many images used as postcards and in newspapers, the sight of a sidearm was never

shown. Sterling and city boosters labored to disempower Mexican identity and distance it

far from armed resistance. Therefore the sight of an armed “other” highlighted fears of

anti-union business owners and interrupted the nostalgic effect that the accepted image of

El Paseo is meant to produce.

The Mexican Revolution was well documented in American newspapers, as were

the socialist and communist influences of this uprising that extended into post-

revolutionary Mexico. According to James Oles in South of the Border, “the images that

sold best, the images that most captured the imagination of the [American] public, were

scenes of lower class violence, of peasant banditry or social conflict (depending on one's

80 For later political use of the site, I take as an example Josefina Fierro de Bright’s speech at El Congreso

de los Pueblos que Hablan Español in 1939: “I’m going to say a few words in English first, to explain to the Americans here what this is all about. Then I’ll continue in Spanish, because this is our fiesta, a Mexican fiesta. It’s a kind of birthday party, a different kind of celebration than Olvera Street has ever seen before. An awakening of the Mexican people in the United States!” (Kropp, 51).

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perspective), of the frightening and larger than life drama that unfolds when masses begin

to move.”81 The plaza had already seen “Red Riots” and a court order had been obtained

by the police’s Red Squad for the removal of Siqueiros’s previous mural at the Chouinard

School because of its leftist sentiment.82 This image of a revolution literally waiting in

the wings with the fighters’ guns aimed at the American eagle, made more threatening by

the fighters’ ability to camouflage themselves and go unseen, would not have

complemented the official history (and by extension, what the city viewed as acceptable

Mexican behavior) in the street. Taken another way, the negative impact of American

imperialism on the laborer causes not just the death of the individual laborer, but is the

death knell for imperialism. The image acts as a public call for the laborer to recognize

this exploitive system, and in accordance with Marxist theory, to take up arms and rebel

against this oppression.

Moreover, if images of the Mexican Revolution were so widely printed and

circulated, then Siqueiros’s message was much more layered. He satirized favored

American images of the Mexican Revolution and reoriented these images of civil strife

by juxtaposing and reinvigorating their threatening aspects towards imperialist capitalist

symbols. Evoking the fear of both violence and leftist politics (and updating it within the

context of Olvera Street), Siqueiros did not resurrect the soldier for entertainment

purposes—instead he highlighted this absence of a type in El Paseo and unsettled the

comforting nostalgia that the street fabricated. The mural would have been seen by not

81 Oles, 63.

82 Stein, 75.

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only tourists and visitors to Olvera Street, but also by those persons who helped to create

the performed history in the street—those who could be incited by such an image to

revolt. This is a powerful image, a radical and rebellious call, proven by the fact that

Sterling censored and whitewashed this section first. More powerful than a mere

indictment of American imperialism in Mexico and Los Angeles, the mural’s ability to

incite revolution could foreground those elements of the Mexican community that the

very construction of Olvera Street sought to obliterate.

The intended audience was not limited to those in close proximity to the wall. The

mural was designed as an experiment in dynamic space; multiple perspectives were taken

into account during the planning stages of the mural [fig. 24]. As the viewer moved

through the environment of the mural, the mural was meant to move with

him/her.Though the mural was meant to be a decorative piece for the outdoor patio,

Siqueiros stated that he wanted it to be seen from buses and cars driving by, and from

buildings 10-15 stories tall. Incidentally people in the newly finished City Hall—among

other municipal buildings—would have been able to see the mural from such a height

[figs. 25-27]. The space had been used previously for advertisements, which further

interested Siqueiros in his endeavor to modernize and adapt art for a “new type of view

and new market: cinema, radio…the poster industry, etc.”83 To that end, he updated his

technique by employing the electric drill, the cement gun, white water-proof cement, the

airbrush or spray gun, the blow-torch, the electric projector and pre-colored cement.

When looked at frontally and from a distance, the only element that looks out of the

83 Herner, 148.

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picture plane to return the spectator’s gaze is the American eagle [see fig. 19] perched

atop the crucified Mexican male—Siqueiros’s indictment of American imperialism. A

confrontation exists between the harsh images of American culpability in the mural and

that on display in the street. The eagle with its claws clearly visible adds to the

threatening and intimidating nature of not only the image, but also the United States’

relationship with the Mexican people.84 The eagle was an easily identifiable symbol of

the United States given its use in the Great Seal of 1782, and thereby needed no

additional remarks by Siqueiros. In addition, the confrontation is extended into the

physical space of reality as the columns cinematically project into real space, bringing the

picture plane out onto the street, especially when the mural is viewed from a high

elevation. Also, the use of the cross can act referentially to the wooden cross erected at

the south entrance of Olvera Street prior to the grand opening, on which is written the

complete Spanish name for the city as well as the date of its founding. By referring to

objects in the street, the mural extends into real space and again opens up the “history” on

display at Olvera Street to interruption. The mural upsets the historicity of El Paseo, and

the advertising methods of the US to portray elements often utilized in folkloric

depictions of dead civilizations in order to reflect the often invisible victims of

imperialism and capitalism.

Siqueiros’s mural created a problem for Christine Sterling and the city boosters

who had been marshalling the inventedness of El Paseo to reclaim territory that had been

84 The Mexican male is a stand-in for the Mexican and/or Mexican-American population as a whole. While

Siqueiros was radical in his politics it rarely manifested itself through protests for gender equality.

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marginalized by the city. The mural proved especially troublesome because El Paseo

relied upon people who could be compelled to revolt. According to Arthur Millier, art

critic for the Los Angeles Times, onlookers gasped at the power of the mural. He

attributed its overall tone and content to Siqueiros’s “own troubled land…of the tragedy

of history and of man’s fate. The human sacrifice lies deep in the heart of the old races of

Mexico.”85 While Millier may have misunderstood where culpability for the sacrifice lay,

Sterling and the city boosters did not. They were unhappy with its “anti-American”

sentiments.86 Within months the section visible from the street had been whitewashed.

The time it took to whitewash the remaining portion of the mural varies from scholar to

scholar; although it is evidenced through photographs that at least until 1938, the mural

was only partially concealed [fig. 28]. It should be noted that Sterling would only renew

the lease of the upstairs club, which had become a bar, on condition that the fresco

remain covered.87 The whitewashing of the mural was eventually forgotten (because

Siqueiros’s visa was denied, he was expelled from the United States shortly thereafter)

and El Paseo de Los Angeles endured for a time as intended.88 Despite his short term in

Los Angeles, however, Siqueiros’s impact on the art and artists of the region was/is

85 Arthur Millier, “Power Unadorned Marks Olvera Street Fresco,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1932.

86 Poole, 77.

87 Goldman, 325.

88 Remarkably, Siqueiros protected the mural from completely vanishing. Siqueiros stated that artists “must paint in such a way that our paintings will be easily reproducible, so that clear photographs may be taken of them to be distributed all over the world, so that certain photos may be reproduced in infinite numbers…' Paintings can fade or be destroyed, but thanks to photography, 'we were well-equipped to distribute...photographs of the entire process of the work with greater political efficacy'" to go beyond its fixed locale and reach even more viewers (Herner, 250).

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enormous. Sterling and the city boosters were right to fear the consequences of

Siqueiros’s message considering reactions exemplified by Don Ryan, a journalist for the

Illustrated Daily News:

The artist Siqueiros, whom the federal authorities seem so anxious to deport, is without doubt a dangerous type; dangerous for all the snarling and pusillanimous speculators and retailers in art and life. The federal agents justly claim that art is propaganda, for when youth confront this gigantic dynamo that pounds in the night under the rain, or clamors boldly when the brilliant sun of midday shines in the plaza, they will possibly find in it the inspiration to rise in rebellion in future revolution, in art and in life, exclaiming: 'Off the road, conservatives and old ones, here comes the future.'89

89 Don Ryan, “Parade Ground,” Illustrated Daily News (Los Angeles), October 11, 1932. As quoted in

Michael Kammen’s Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 132-3.

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AMÉRICA TROPICAL TODAY

The painful saga of Siqueiros’s mural at Olvera Street has entered a new chapter,

and is plagued by a laborious resurrection. The project to revive it has started and stalled

so many times that it has become yet another episode in the city’s history. As art historian

Shifra Goldman so poignantly stated, “Censorship has many faces…Siqueiros’s Los

Angeles mural is [the] victim of two deaths: [the first], in 1932, open censorship in the

blatant form of white overpaint; and the second, since the late 1960s to the ‘recent’

present, in the more subtle technique of official indifference.”90 As the mural reemerged

from layers of overpaint, it was utilized in the 1970s as a remnant of Chicano/Latino

culture that needed to be preserved—a part of neglected history that needed to be

reinserted into the cultural imaginary as a sign of resistance and protest. Speaking to the

Chicano artists, the mural in its ghostly state called for a renewal of muralism.91

In 1968, Shifra Goldman wrote to Siqueiros about the state of the mural and

queried on how to best approach the next steps in its rebirth. She engaged conservators

Jaime Mejia and Josefina Quezada to assess the piece and recommend a course of action.

When conservation became the clear strategy, Goldman and filmmaker Jesus Treviño

spearheaded the “Save the Mural Committee” in 1970.92 Despite the lack of official

90 As quoted in Luis Garza, “Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied,” in Convergence [Autry

National Center Magazine] (Fall 2010): 43.

91 See Judy Baca, “Birth of a Mural Movement: 30 Years in the Making of Sites of Public Memory,” p. 3, http://www.judybaca.com/now/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=97:birth-of-a-movement-30-years-in-the-making-of-sites-of-public-memory-by-judith-f-baca&catid=34:publications&Itemid=67.

92 The committee would not receive active El Pueblo Park support until the 1980s when Jean Bruce Poole (then curator) would join the campaign in 1980.

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interest from El Pueblo Park and the city government, Siqueiros remained concerned

about not only the state of the mural, but also the role it had played in the Chicano civil

rights movement, especially during the aftermath of the Chicano Moratorium and the

death of journalist Rubén Salazar.93 Siqueiros decided to repaint panels of the original

mural [fig. 29a-d] as a gift to the city of Los Angeles and specifically to the Mexican

American community, naming a few potential sites for América tropical II, among them

Lincoln Park, and, after the Sylmar earthquake, the nascent Plaza de la Raza Cultural

Center.94 However, Siqueiros passed away before he could complete his offering to the

Chicano community.

Beginning in 1988, through the concerted efforts of El Pueblo curator Jean Bruce

Poole, the Getty Conservation Institute (under then director Miguel Angel Corzo) began

its study, preparation and eventual conservation of América tropical, finishing in 2002.95

The project languished yet again until t money was allocated to “save” this historical

work from further destruction by the offices of Mayor Villaraigosa. The project recently

has been given a cash injection and the mural and interpretative center is scheduled to

open in 2012. In celebration of the centennial celebration of Mexican Independence,

September 2010 saw a ground breaking ceremony occur at the site. The mural is to have

93 Siqueiros would create a limited edition lithograph honoring Salazar in the early 1970s.

94 Letter from Siqueiros to Goldman, March 16, 1972. Getty Conservation Institute, Irene Herner files.

95 “The walls of the Italian Hall—including the wall on which the mural is painted—were seismically stabilized by the City of Los Angeles in 1995. In 1997 the GCI undertook a thorough condition survey; in 2002 the Institute stabilized the mural and, with the help of the J. Paul Getty Museum, installed temporary protection over it” (http://www.getty.edu/conservation/field_projects/siqueiros/).

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a viewing platform and a shelter designed by the architectural firm Brooks + Scarpa,96 as

well as an interpretive center located in the first floor of the Sepúlveda House [figs. 30-

31]. The interpretive center is being overseen by exhibit design specialists IQ Magic and

will house a site-specific mural designed by Judy Baca and students from the Cesar

Chavez Digital Mural Lab of UCLA at Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice,

CA, entitled Los Angeles Tropical [fig. 32].

The interpretive center’s content and research is guided by Amigos de Siqueiros

and Luis Garza, who recently curated the Autry National Center Museum of the

American West’s Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied. The exhibition did a

laudable job of disseminating information by creating timelines, building a history, and

contextualizing it amongst the artist’s claims, personal history, and the output of the

artists upon whom the artist exerted influence. A number of original works were

interspersed with reproductions and wall decals, but the curators had the difficult task of

representing Siqueiros’s time in LA because his most notable productions exist on walls

that either are no longer in LA or exist in a poor. Various display strategies engaged the

viewer and personalized the experience, such as handwritten quotes from Siqueiros

adorning the walls [fig. 33], film clips,97 didactic displays [fig.34], and a question-and-

answer section. The inclusion of a scaffolding installation entitled “Machine Age

96 For more information please visit, http://www.pugh-scarpa.com/projects/siqueiros.

97 There are three videos: the first, an excerpt from Treviño’s film showing Siqueiros’ reaction to the state of the mural; the second video, Arena of the 10th Olympiad, Los Angeles, August 1932 highlights the Olvera Street fantasy—as this section is called—noting that the site is untouched by time where the descendents of Aztecs can play undisturbed); and the last video is a compilation of active artists speaking to the Maestro’s impact on their work.

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Techniques” set against an image of Siqueiros instructing the Bloc of Mural painters

served to emphasize Siqueiros’s innovative spirit guiding his mural experiments. It also

tangibly illustrated one of Siqueiros’s main criticisms concerning fresco: he sought to

take away the romantic image of the artist and reinvent the artist as laborer, in essence

removing the color palette and brushes for cans of paint, a trowel, a spray gun, and bags

of cement [fig. 35]. Interestingly, the exhibit layout and its many pathways create a

number of sightlines that must cross the center detail of América tropical at the heart of

the exhibit, illustrating the power and pull of the mural both in the lead up to Siqueiros’s

creation of the mural and its legacy today.

I mention the long history of the mural, its legacy, and its renewed attention to

demonstrate Siqueiros’s resurgence in Los Angeles at a time that benefits the city to do

so; they promote the uniqueness of the city’s cultural past, albeit a troubled one, allowing

for an increase in attention to the mural and, through tourist dollars, revenue for the city.

The robust marketing campaign for the Autry exhibit and the interpretive center (not to

mention the Museum of Latin American Art exhibit of Siqueiros landscapes or the

lithograph show at the José Vera Gallery in Eagle Rock—all of which occurred

simultaneously) through a wide variety of print and digital media services is essential to

the maintenance of the mural, and opens the mural up to commodification. A point of

concern that arises out of the renewed interest and political support in the mural is that it

could be falling prey to the same traps and concerns that many subaltern scholars and

theorists warn against: “always essentially open to hijacking…[counter-politics of the

local, in this case the mural,] can be tamed and reduced to a mere mechanism for identity

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consumption in much the same way as one is prompted to consume products of various

kinds” [fig. 36].98

Is the mural becoming just another anecdote in Los Angeles’s history—one that

can now be written about and used as a source of pride because Los Angeles and society

have progressed to a point where appreciation for such a critique is not only permissible

but displayed? Where Olvera Street is still cited as a little piece of Mexico? Could it

become nothing more than self-aggrandizement at the expense of dealing with the

possibility that the very critique of imperialism has not been resolved despite the progress

of time? Projects such as the North American Fair Trade Agreement and other global

trade barriers that are lifted to create a globalized economy persist in creating difference

and ignoring difference as much as it ever has. I am in no way trying to disparage the

attempts to restore Siqueiros and his murals in Los Angeles. I would simply temper the

aforementioned concerns by noting that the restitution of Siqueiros publicly in Los

Angeles is the result of concerted efforts made by scholars, artists, and mural enthusiasts

who wish to pay homage to the maestro and the heritage of visual expression he left

behind. The many events related to the exhibit also have served to contextualize the

mural within Los Angeles history, the Chicano civil rights movement, the current state of

murals, and other forms of street art, such as graffiti, in order hopefully to hinder the use

of the mural as mere political ploy or a tent-pole in the legacy of Mayor Villaraigosa.99

98 Alberto Moreiras, “Hybridity and Double Consciousness,” Cultural Studies 13.3 (1999): 387.

99 The events included, but are not limited to, lectures: “State of the LA Murals Today” (October 29, 2010), “Space and Purpose: Art on Walls (December 4, 2010), “Homage to Siqueiros Poetry Reading” (January 9, 2011); opera: “América tropical Chamber Opera” (October 24, 2010), and numerous film screenings concerning the Mexican revolution.