Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 15

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
terwards) and to be seen by and interact with the public in plain ways (Coffey 2002:18).
However, 1920s revolutionary muralists failed to instruct the public about how to interpret
their mural’s visual discourse (Vaughan 1982 quoted in Coffey 2002:18). In the
mid-1950s, murals were being painted in public spaces such as hospitals (Soto Laveaga
2015), thus somewhat expanding their accessibility. Whatever the political shortcomings
were of muralism in Mexico, Mexican muralists created murals with Marxist themes
in the United States during the 1930s. Examples that influenced Chicana/o muralists
include: (1) José Clemente Orozco Prometheus (Pomona College) (1930), (2) Diego
Rivera’s California School of Fine Arts mural in San Francisco (1930); (3) David Alfaro
Siqueiros’s’ Portrait of Present Day Mexico (1932) [in Santa Monica originally]; and (4)
Siqueiros’s La America Tropicana / Tropical America (1932) in Olvera Street, Los Angeles
(Latorre 2008:9–10).
In the 1950s and 1960s, light industry sought to take over Logan Heights, San Diego
(where Chicano Park now is), and subsequent highway construction caused massive
destruction of homes (Amer 2011), much like freeway construction in New York City
which decimated entire neighbourhoods by dividing them from more prosperous ones
(Caro 1975:20). In compensation, a park under the Coronado Bridge was promised;
however, the California Highway Patrol began building a parking lot there and in 1970,
Chicana/os responded by physically occupied this land which was owned by the U.S.
government. Initial plans for Chicano Park included a nation-state with relevant community
infrastructure that would extend to the San Diego Bay (see Berelowitz 2005).
Instead, only a separate park on the San Diego Bay was built in 1990. Chicano Park has
hosted community events. It became a U.S. national park in 2017.
Other more recent mural projects include the Lincoln Park murals in El Paso, Texas,
begun in 1980; in San Francisco’s Mission District, the Balmey Alley, created by Pricita
Eyes, an N.G.O. founded by women in 1977 and Clarion Alley, created in 1992; in
Los Angeles, the Espalda Courts housing project; and the recent Calle Arts Mural in
Phoenix Arizona. In contrast to other mural sites explored in this paper, Muralism in the
Mission District had far more public support against the wishes of a white middle class
that preferred gentrification (Cordova 2006:359–360). A private business owner created
the Calle 16 mural project. Thus, there have been a variety of relations with municipal
governance and political–economic objectives of mural creation despite similar imagery.
Chicano Park, and other mural projects, were created at a time when there were many
attempts to create common lands and living experiences in the United States. Nineteen
sixties counterculture communes combined community service with artwork (Doyle
2012:22). It is hard to determine whether such communal living in California influenced
Chicano Park or vice versa. White counterculture communes were influenced by
the communal sharing of Latino, Native American, and African American communities
(Lustig 2012:36; Drew 2012:50), so it is possible that the communal aspect of Chicano
Park came directly from the Mexican-American community. Nonetheless, the occupy-
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