Walls of Empowerment - Notes on Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California

Chicana/o Murals and Cultural Nationalism

By the early 1970s, Chicana/o activists used the civil rights movement and the Chicano Movement to articulate politicized identities.
Visual repertoire was needed to complement nationalist discourses.
Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino (1965) set a precedent for celebrating indigenous images and culture.
Indigenist imagery in murals became crucial for Chicana/o cultural nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s.
This nationalism proclaimed cultural autonomy for Mexican-descent peoples in the U.S.
"El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán" (1969 Denver Youth Conference manifesto) declared Chicanas/os a "nation autonomous and free—culturally, socially, and politically."
Aztlán was identified as an undeniably indigenous nation.
Genaro M. Padilla argued indigeneity lent a mythical and spiritual component to political struggles, giving el movimiento added impetus.
La causa chicana fostered social justice and equality and achieved a greater cosmic balance between indigenous and Western worldviews.
Chicanas/os sought legitimate participation within the U.S. nation-state, not separation.
Michael Murphy: “indigenous nationalism does not represent an absolute rejection of the state’s authority . . . [but rather seeks] shared rule in state institutions.”
Challenges to the U.S. nation-state (critiques of educational, labor, and legal systems) were articulated within the law and in keeping with democratic traditions.
The Chicana/o nation was built through celebrating and protecting culture, defined as indigenous to the Americas.
Cultural capital invested in by Chicanas/os signified a new strategy for survival and self-determination, challenging assimilation and Americanization.
Nationalists believed socioeconomic, racial, and gender equality could be accomplished through cultural nationalism.
Nationalist consciousness was about group solidarity and community building.
Walker Connor argues that the essence of a nation is intangible, bonds are psychological and emotional, and nations are self-defined.
The term "nation" evoked political power that "minority" and "group" did not have.
The term "nation" was well-suited to the radical temperament of the Chicano Movement.
Indigenous groups in the Americas used "nation" to challenge the postcolonial state.
The Chicana/o nation was further radicalized by its denomination as Aztlán, an indigenous nation.
Indigeneity transformed Chicanas/os from "minority" to nation.
Visual imagery played a critical role in forming a Chicana/o nationalist and Indigenist vocabulary.
Murals were the most powerful means to disseminate ideas about nation building because of their public nature.
Indigenist imagery in murals became politicized and radicalized.
These images reminded the community of shared cultural and historical roots with other indigenous groups.
They demonstrated that indigenous consciousness could become a rallying cry for collective decolonization and denunciation of a discriminatory social system.
Artists were at the forefront of the political struggle.
Genaro Padilla: “the role of the artist . . . proves to be a signifi cant and oft en more continuous one than that of the political nationalist.”
The distinction between activism and artistic activity during the early phases of el movimiento became nearly indistinguishable.
Artists like Yolanda López acted as political activists before becoming practicing artists.
The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) dedicated creative energies to César Chávez and the United Farm Workers (UFW).
Posters initially served a pragmatic purpose but evolved into creative endeavors.
Political activism and artistic expression had a symbiotic relationship.
The visual became critical for constructing the new Chicana/o nation.

Indigenism and Murals

Indigenist imagery became a critical element of the iconographic program associated with the Chicano Movement.
El movimiento required a visual language free from colonized and co-opted aesthetics.
The language needed elasticity to accommodate the social, cultural, and political position of Chicanas/os.
Indigenist iconography provided an ideal tool to promote Chicana/o activist discourse.
In Latin America, Indigenism was associated with the representation of indigenous communities.
Chicana/o artists and activists liberated Indigenism from its postcolonial predicaments.
Chicanas/os personally identified with the plight of indigenous peoples, declaring: “We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán.”
This statement declared a common culture and history with the rest of indigenous America.
This consciousness provided the building blocks for a Chicana/o nation within the U.S. nation-state.
Indigenism provided a sense of belonging and a heightened sense of cultural difference vis-à-vis Anglo and European-American culture.
Indigenous consciousness transcended the limitations imposed by militant nationalist discourse.
The Chicano Movement breathed new life into Indigenist aesthetics.
This proved decisive for constructing a cultural nationalism that challenged the hegemony of the United States.

The Medium of Murals

Chicana/o artists sought a medium to convey the political fervor of the moment.
Conventional artistic media were too elitist.
Many artists echoed the sentiments of the Mexican muralists, who denounced easel painting as bourgeois and apolitical.
Chicana/o artists attached a heightened political and indigenous consciousness to mural making.
Chicanas/os had long been excluded from the museum and gallery circuits.
Asco, a charismatic artists collective, challenged this exclusion.
In 1972, they signed their names in spray paint near the entrance of LACMA to protest the museum’s unwillingness to exhibit Chicana/o art.
The Chicana/o search for alternative media was connected to indigenous consciousness.
The medium needed to disseminate indigenous consciousness and reflect artistic practices of other indigenous peoples.
The Mexican artistic renaissance (1920s-1940s) served as a precedent.
Public murals and graphic arts were taken up by Chicana/o artists.
Muralism monumentalized Chicana/o political discourses.
Chicana/o artists recruited the community for the conception and creation of murals.
Local youth were recruited, sharing work, responsibility, authorship, and credit.
Community empowerment through public image making became a leitmotif.

Indigenist Iconography & Community Murals

Indigenist iconography and community murals created new symbolic and physical spaces for articulating Chicana/o identity.
The community mural lent monumentalization to Indigenist imagery.
Indigenist iconography saturated the murals with an aura of the pre-Columbian era.
Public murals asserted an Indigenist identity in a collective way.
Artists inscribed images in wall paintings in barrios, making them part of the lived reality.
These murals became familiar to almost every sector of Chicana/o and Mexican society in urban areas.

Indigenist Motifs

The repeated use of simplified yet highly coded Indigenist symbols and motifs characterized Chicana/o nationalist murals.
Recurring motifs helped construct components of Chicana/o cultural nationalism.
Each symbol was strategically chosen and performed a specific function.
Motifs had roots in ancient Mesoamerican iconography, legitimizing Chicana/o nationalism.

The Aztec Calendar Stone

Recurrence of the Aztec Calendar Stone in murals.
Its flat yet highly complex design elements were ideal for collective mural making.
Its intricate composition offered a stark contrast to barrio architecture.
The image was based on a low-relief stone sculpture found near the Cathedral of Mexico City.
Artists turned it into a colorful two-dimensional wall design.
Filling in the color of the different registers was an ideal activity for children, facilitating community interaction and empowerment.
The Aztec Calendar Stone held importance beyond its stylistic qualities.
Its significance in the pre-Columbian context became relevant to the emerging politicized nature of Chicana/o identity.
The calendar’s iconography became familiar through Con Safos magazine.
In 1970, Con Safos reproduced a diagram of the Aztec Calendar Stone with explanations.
As an Indigenist image, the Aztec Calendar Stone legitimized Chicanas/os’ claim to Mexica spirituality and cosmology.
It constructed an alternative history from canonical U.S. narratives.
The central glyph is identified as a personification of the sun (Tonatiuh).
It refers to the Fifth Sun, the final stage of creation in Mexica cosmology.
The concept of cosmic time allowed Chicanas/os to situate their emerging identity in the past, present, and future.
The Aztec Calendar Stone permitted Chicanas/os to write themselves into a narrative of both historical and cosmic dimensions.
Pre-Columbian scholars believed the Aztec Calendar Stone also served as a platform where sacrifices were performed.
Emily Umberger explained that calendar stones were created in commemoration of Tlaxcaxipehualiztli, the Flaying of Men ceremony.
The event commemorated warfare and military victories while legitimizing the power of Aztec rulers.
The sacrifice of war prisoners constituted the culminating portion of the ceremony.
Chicanas/os took an interest in the concept of sacrifice, not for its violent connotations but for its capability to perpetuate the cycles of life.
Concerns about survival, be that cultural or natural survival, were prominent.
Activists exposed social ills that threatened the community, such as gang warfare, the Vietnam War, and sterilizations imposed on women.
Preoccupation with survival was associated with the fear of assimilation.
Sacrifice reinforced the concept of survival on several levels.
The calendrical function was the most important element that appealed to Chicanas/os.
The calendar included glyphs corresponding to dates in historical and cosmic time.
Directly above the face of the Fifth Sun, the date 1 Flint is inscribed.
This date functioned as a symbol of the Aztec nation, referring to the year in which the Aztecs left Aztlán to migrate south.
Aztlán was identified as the U.S. Southwest or “the Mexican territory ceded to the United States in 1848.”
The existence of Aztlán was a definitive revelation.
José Montoya: “To be given that information when you’re looking for your roots is liberating; it empowers you,”
Michael Pina: “a nation without its ‘homeland’ is almost unthinkable.”
The 1 Flint inscription commemorates the migration from Aztlán to Tenochtitlán as a spiritual event.
This sculpture legitimizes the Mexican presence on U.S. soil, giving Chicana/o history in this country a mythical connotation.

The Mestizo or Tripartite Face

The ubiquity of the Aztec Calendar Stone was rivaled by the recurrent use of the mestizo or tripartite face.
This motif was an important symbol with Indigenist overtones that saturated community mural imagery.
It depicted a three-sided face in which the flanking figures represent the Spaniard and the Indian.
The central face illustrated the merging of the two, the mestizo or the contemporary Chicana/o.
This figure was formulated by Manuel Martínez, inspired by a tripartite face in the School of Medicine (Facultad de Medicina) in Mexico City’s UNAM.
The UNAM mural (1953–1954) was created by Francisco Eppens, who depicted a tripartite face as the composition’s central motif.
The tripartite face defined the essence of Chicana/o cultural and ethnic identity.
Drawing from the ideas on mestizaje formulated by José Vasconcelos, Chicana/o mestizaje included the added dimension of the U.S. experience.
Chicanas/os found Vasconcelos’s notion of mestizaje particularly important, given that it had a cultural and spiritual component.
He believed that the four “races” would converge into one superior fifth race.
Nicandro F. Juárez regarded Vasconcelos’s childhood growing up near the U.S.-Mexico border as a crucial experience.
Chicana/o intellectuals saw Vasconcelos’s critical postures as creative alternatives to then-current postulates about racial and cultural identity.
Vasconcelos criticized the British and Anglo-Americans as colonizers because of their refusal to intermix.
He said that Spanish colonization at least had the merit of initiating mestizaje in Latin America.
These ideas gave Chicanas/os a critical basis for the internal colonialism they suffered under the Anglo-American system.
Chicanas/os saw their indigenous blood as a crucial component of their being.
The tripartite face in community murals acted as a public call for Chicanas/os to embrace the complexity of their identity.

Mesoamerican Pyramids

Mural representations of Mesoamerican pyramids transformed the community’s physical environment.
Artists included pyramids to provide a visual backdrop to pre-Columbian scenes.
Pyramids functioned as trompe l’oeil complements to barrio architecture.
The representation of these pyramids seemed to imply that Chicanas/os once built and inhabited grander Mesoamerican structures.
Portrayals attempted to transform the urban environment into an almost mythical Indigenist realm.
In his mural Inspire to Aspire (1987), Michael Rios juxtaposed a Teotihuacán-like pyramid with San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid.
This disrupted the cultural homogeneity of San Francisco’s skyline.
Large-scale public architecture is a reliable indication of a complex civilization.
Pyramids alluded to the Aztec civilization as a direct historical antecedent to contemporary Chicana/o culture.
Chicana/o artists and activists utilized the pyramid as the most monumental example of Mexican Americans’ legitimate role.

Obras Maestras

Recurring Indigenist motifs played a pivotal role in constructing Chicana/o cultural nationalism.
Their inclusion within specific and recognizable murals had an even bigger impact.
Individual motifs could adjust themselves according to the theme of any given mural.
The Chicana/o nation needed master artworks (obras maestras) that epitomized its spirit.
The Chicana/o artistic tradition would not be centered around an individual genius.
Chicana/o art needed to expound a more collective aesthetic that could embrace the sentiments of the community.
Murals would play the role of obras maestras that represented the ideals of the community.
A great deal of mural production took place in conjunction with the establishment of cultural centers.
Guillermo Aranda directed one of the most ambitious early mural projects inside San Diego’s Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park.
La Dualidad (1970–1984) graced the curved interior wall of the Centro’s main gallery space.
Other artists such as the Toltecas en Aztlán and Tupac Enrique participated in its creation.
The mural resulted from intellectual dialogues about Indigenism that took place at the Centro.
The artists used Indigenist themes to celebrate Chicano/Mexican culture.
Their work also served as platforms to critique Anglo-American and European imperialism.
The title “Duality” alluded to the distribution of iconography across the mural’s composition.
The left half of La Dualidad focused on the negative effects of colonization on American indigenous cultures.
The right half illustrated the utopian nature of native cultures once liberated.
Duality implies an interdependence and correspondence between these notions.
Mario Garza recognized that the Mexican American experience contained a persistent duality.
Alurista argued that the Maya saw elements of the universe as interdependent parts of a unified whole.
The expression in lak’ech, “you are my other self,” epitomized the relationship that human beings have with one another.
Individuals must first understand their relationship with others.
This idea opposed the notion of the “Other” postulated by European colonialist thinking.
In La Dualidad, Aranda alludes to this Maya concept to address the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer.
In the right-hand side of the composition, Aranda rendered the body of an indigenous male figure crucified on a silver dollar.
The figure under his feet identifies him as Cuauhtémoc, the last of the Aztec warriors.
He is surrounded by figures who act as allegories for indigenous oppression in the Americas.
A bird between a vulture and an eagle soars above Cuauhtémoc.
Behind him, a troop of soldiers charge forward toward an unseen enemy.
Aranda: “I think my purpose was to educate people about the status of society in the sense of being a mechanized world, half-human, half-machine.”
Cuauhtémoc stands as the fallen Aztec hero and a personification of the contemporary Chicano.
During the siege of Tenochtitlán, Cuauhtémoc offered the last resistance toward the Spanish invaders.
After his capture, the Spaniards set his feet on fire.
Chicanas/os saw this act as a model for the types of resistance they needed to offer.
The right-hand side of La Dualidad offers a contrast to the images of destruction.
The iconography centers around an Aztec pyramid surrounded by symbols associated with indigenous culture.
Behind the pyramid is the UFW eagle.
Representations of the sun and the moon hover nearby.
A Native American man and woman are engaged in ritual hunting-and-gathering activities.
The artists closely associate indigenous culture with the earth’s natural habitat.
Colonization and imperialism are connected to industrialized environments.
Indigenism in La Dualidad became a tool for cultural celebration and social critique.
The combination of Mexican and U.S. Native cultures points to the alliances that Chicana/o and Native American activist groups formed.
Chicana/o activists realized that Native Americans and Mexican Americans shared a history of dispossession, displacement, and discrimination.
Chicana/o artists sought to erase this distinction, creating a Pan-Indigenist aesthetic.
The Indigenist symbols functioned as allegorical solutions to the problems posed on the Cuauhtémoc side.

Mesoamerican Imagery

The use of ancient Mesoamerican imagery became a common strategy to construct Indigenist imagery.
Chicana/o artists established a direct lineage between precolonial cultures and contemporary Chicana/o communities.
This strategy became part of their campaign to construct a history that had been ignored.
Reclaiming the pre-Columbian past lent a sense of legitimacy to cultural nationalism.
Pre-Columbian imagery reminded the community about their history and also re-created a piece of that history.
The utilization of pre-Columbian visual language took many forms.
Domingo Rivera’s Psycho-Cybernetics (1975) featured a Maya figure piloting a rocket ship.
The Mayas’ knowledge of science, cosmology, and astronomy led to some creative Indigenist representations.
Rivera made reference to the scientific inventiveness of the Maya, responding to claims made by Euro-American writers like Erich von Däniken.
Rivera emphasized the Maya figure piloting the craft.
The artist took the image of the pilot and his spaceship from a Maya stone relief sculpture dating back to AD 683.
He rotated the original composition ninety degrees.
An essential component of the Chicano nationalist aesthetic is precisely the use of humor and irony.
Ricardo Favela explained that humor was often used “as a means of resistance, as a means of defiance, as a means of doing something to your oppressor where he doesn’t understand or know that you’re doing it to him [sic].”
Everything becomes subject to parody.
The use of parody and humor becomes a means by which to decode and then reformulate the different components of preexisting cultural and social norms.
Rivera transformed Janaab’ Pakal into a rocket-ship pilot, modifying Mesoamerican culture with elements of pop culture.
The artist uses the “science fiction” theme to direct his audience toward the importance of Mesoamerican culture.

Mexican Revolution Imagery

Modern Mexican history was also utilized to explain the current state of affairs affecting the Mexican community in the United States.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 became an important event for Chicanas/os.
Many artists claimed direct connection to the Revolution.
Nationalists regarded the Revolution as a historical precedent to their struggles.
Figures such as Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa became recurring icons.
Their use deeply ingrained these revolutionary figures in the public psyche.
The Mexican Revolution provided a model for a radical political uprising.
Chicana/o artists presented the Revolution as an event that gave a voice to the nation’s indigenous population.
Wayne Alaniz Healy and David Rivas Botello completed their first collaboration in 1977 with the mural Chicano Time Trip.
This five-panel mural depicts figures that represent the components of Chicana/o identity.
The last and largest panel, La Familia, presents the spectator with a representation of the archetypal Chicana/o family.
This mural sought to construct the Chicano nation through the family.
The four single-figure panels represent four moments in Mexican history: the Mexican Revolution, the Wars for Independence, the Colonial Era, and the pre-Columbian world.
The Maya and soldadera figures underscored the importance of Indigenist history.
The El Indígeno panel is a male priest grasping a flint knife and holding up a human heart.
The emphasis on and monumentalization of this Maya priest speaks to the tendency among thinkers to hail these figures as the direct ancestors of the Chicana/o community.

The Soldadera

Another important Indigenist figure was that of the soldadera.
Soldaderas, or Adelitas, were the mostly indigenous and mestiza female companions to Mexican soldiers during the Revolution of 1910.
Healy and Botello highlighted her role with a scene in the upper-left corner of this panel that shows a soldadera handing a food basket to a soldier on a train.
The soldaderas’ contributions epitomized the ideal role a woman could take in nationalist struggles.
Chicano nationalists imagined Chicanas who joined el movimiento as fulfilling a similar role.
Healy and Botello looked to the work of Mexican revolutionary photographer Agustín Víctor Casasola for their soldadera rendition.
Drawing inspiration directly from a photograph in the Casasola Archive dating to around 1915 that depicted soldaderas these artists were attracted to the immediacy and sense of urgency of the image.
They chose to focus on the figure of the soldadera standing to the left-hand side of this photograph’s composition.
For Chicana/o artists, Casasola’s photography was perhaps the most faithful historical record of the Mexican Revolution.
Writing Mexican Americans back into U.S. history constituted one of the most important goals of the Chicano Movement.
Casasola’s photography depicted a political, social, and cultural revolution that contributed to the growing Indigenist consciousness.
Many Chicana/o artists believed that his work provided irrefutable proof of the Revolution’s importance because of the veracity of the photographic image.
Chicana artist Santa Barraza found in his work a social, political, and cultural validation.
She felt that those photos helped her to decolonize herself.
Transposing Casasola’s photography to the mural medium also required a discursive shift of the significance attached to his imagery.
His images became monumental icons capable of defining the formation of Chicana/o national identity.
The historicity of Casasola’s images operated as the motivation behind the creation of La Revolución Mexicana (The Mexican Revolution) mural on the pylon in San Diego’s Chicano Park, painted by Víctor Ochoa in 1978.
Ochoa had been inspired by a recent exhibition of Casasola’s work at the Centro Cultural de la Raza and by celebrations of the Mexican Revolution.
In La Revolución Mexicana, the artist utilized a color palette that emulated the photographic medium to remain authentic to the photographs.
In between the “arms” of the pylon, we see Francisco Villa standing next to his wife, Luz Corral.
On the left, we find a group of soldaderas, and on the right, we find a lineup of male indigenous peasants.
Emiliano Zapata at the base of the pylon.
Zapata portrayed as important because of his mestizo background and his bond with Mexico’s indigenous peoples.
Leaders like Reyes López Tijerina and Cesar Chavez viewed as contemporary reincarnations of Zapata.
For Chicana/o artists, Casasola functioned as a signifier of resistance and difference vis-à-vis the U.S. mainstream.
In the United States, his images characterized a marginalized though emerging cultural identity.
His photographs contributed to the formation of an Indigenist canon.
The visual provided an immediate and direct message that could be readily understood across cultural, social, political, and linguistic divides.

Emigdio Vasquez Murals

The Chicana/o activist and historian sought to re-create previously undermined narratives.
They uncovered the forgotten experiences of the Mexican American community.
Through legends, folklore and oral history they created unique accounts legitimizing the Chicana/o experience.
Chicana/o muralists wishing to create visual histories resorted to threads provided by historians.
Emigdio Vasquez created visual histories with the aid of photography.
Vasquez traced the beginning of Chicana/o history to the Mexican Revolution.
In Memories of the Past, the Revolution is represented by a series of figures of leaders and also the anonymous indigenous peasants.
He used their figures as transitional visual devices between the Mexican and Chicana/o experience.
Chicana/o experience then rendered through episodes of struggle and triumph.
The working-class and Chicana/o experiences are intimately intertwined.
In the last panel, there were two figures of a Spanish soldier and an Aztec warrior that function as allegorical figures.
There there to “represent the fusion of the Indian and the Iberian cultures that resulted in the Mestizo.”
The Spanish soldier and Aztec warrior are seen in this panel looking at a kind of hybrid landscape with mesoamerican pyramids/ figures sitting next to ancient stone sculptures.
The inhabitants are now the disenfrancised workers of a postindustrial society but also the native of the Andean highlands, Peru or Bolivia.
Vasquez was commissioned to carry out another mural titled Nuestra Experiencia en el Siglo Veinte (Our Experience in the Twentieth Century; 1980).
Narratives of Chicana/o history is shown by the artist from left -> right.
1929 Stock Market Crash, Zoot Suit Riots, the Vietnam War (Ruben Salazar), the UFW demonstrations and the Bracero Program.
Indigenist themes are still apparent for the Chicana/o artist in that mural.
Figures of Zapata and the Flores Magón brothers return close to the foreground.
Enchanted and disenfranchised by the unfulfilled promises of the Revolution, this group then migrates north in search of a better life.
Vasquez then returns to a familiar theme, namely, the visual citation of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s crucified Indian from the Los Angeles mural La América Tropical.

Conclusion

The Chicana/o art movement’s role in nation building and Indigenist image making provided muralists with a clear directive.
The spirit of collectivity gave many artists a meaningful purpose.
The visual component was particularly important because it circulated the ideals of el movimiento in ways that textual and oral means couldn’t.