Chicana/o Murals and Indigenism

Two Aztec warriors, dressed in full regalia, clasp arms as they engage in a ritual dance with a mountainous landscape stretching behind them. Aside from inhabiting this idyllic environment, these heroes also physically reside within the barrio setting of East Los Angeles, where Ernesto de la Loza's Danza de las Aguilas (1978) mural is located. How did the meaning of these indigenous figures connect with the mostly Chicana/o and Mexican residents of East L.A. whose own experience was shaped by both urban life and native Mexican traditions? How was political, social, and cultural consciousness meant to be inscribed into this kind of iconography? As seen in the community murals that have transformed the urban landscapes of California since the late 1960s, the rehabilitation of indigenous history and culture became a crucial component in the growing politicization that saturated Chicana/o political thought with the onset of the Chicano Movement, or el movimiento. California became a significant site of mural activity because it possessed a mural tradition spanning most of the twentieth century, and, as art historian Shifra Goldman has written, the West Coast has led "the country in sheer [mural] quantity." But most significantly, the state had endured a bitter and prolonged colonial, expansionist, and postindustrial history that directly and indirectly informed the Indigenist subject matter of these wall paintings. The Indian of the Americas emerged within these murals as a timeless ideal and a fluid allegory of cultural affirmation that reconstructed Chicanas/os' fragmented past while providing entire communities with a vocabulary that celebrated their contemporary cultural practices. Moreover, the recognition that the continent of America was essentially indigenous territory became one of the most fundamental steps toward decolonization and liberation of oppressed communities.

Chicana/o artists employed the monumentality of the public mural to disseminate an iconography radicalized in large part through its indigenizing qualities. These murals cited indigenous culture in a multiplicity of ways and for a variety of different reasons, yet composed part of an aesthetic that continuously sought to firmly establish Chicanas/os' sociopolitical place in U.S. territory. Indigenism, in the Chicana/o context, functioned as an elastic metaphor of political consciousness that allowed for innovative articulations of cultural and gendered identity. Though many artists outside the Chicana/o community also practiced community muralism, and despite the fact that indigenous imagery was part of a larger whole that defined Chicana/o decolonial consciousness, Indigenism contributed significantly to the politicizing process of Chicano and Chicana mural production. In the social and political context of late twentieth-century U.S. history, the idea of an autonomous and independent indigenous voice necessarily posed a threat to the foundations of postcolonial and capitalist orders.

In this introduction, I lay out the theoretical framework that informed Indigenism in California Chicana/o murals from the late 1960s to the turn of the twentieth century. In the process, I argue that through the public mural, Chicanas/os found a unique and effective tool with which to assert agency from the margins. In subsequent chapters of this project, this theoretical analysis provides a methodological foundation that allows me to engage the visual vocabulary of these murals as well as to discuss the activities and aspirations of the individual artists or collectives who created them. Focusing on three major centers of muralist activity—namely, the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the San Francisco Bay area, and San Diego—the question I ultimately want to raise is not whether the "subaltern" can speak, as Gayatri Spivak would posit, for we know that Third World and First Nation communities have achieved varying degrees of agency since the onset of colonialism, imperialism, and postindustrialization. Instead, the focus of this volume is to generate an understanding of the sorts of strategies deployed by the so-called subaltern in order to create a compelling and decolonized frame of self-representation. The Indigenist aesthetic that Chicana/o artists created provides a model for ways in which marginalized communities can empower themselves against the grain of dominant ideologies.

The images of indigenous America depicted in many California Chicana/o murals engaged a long history of Indigenist aesthetics and discourse in the Americas. The words "Indigenism" and "Indigenist" here will be distinguished and differentiated from the terms indigeneity and indigenous. Generally speaking, "Indigenism" refers to the act of consciously adopting an indigenous identity—which may otherwise not be fully self-evident—for a political or strategic purpose. The Indigenist posture often seeks to overturn historical processes in order to exact radical change. Indigenism as an ideology, however, can operate in favor but also against the needs of the native peoples themselves, and thus one must be cautious when resorting to it. Indeed, individuals or institutions outside of indigenous communities have utilized Indigenism in their quest to incorporate America's native cultures into articulations of national, cultural, or racial identity. Indigenism can constitute a political posture that seeks to construct race rather than define cultural practices. When such institutions or individuals generate Indigenist thinking, they are not necessarily identifying themselves as Indian but instead are acknowledging, in their own terms, the native presence in the country's cultural patrimony, with the ultimate goal of modifying or altering indigenous culture, often rendering it invisible or inconsequential. Mexican indigenous studies scholar Guillermo Bonfil Batalla argued that in most Latin American countries, modern Indigenist campaigns sought to assimilate and acculturate native peoples into national culture: "Indigenist policies in Latin American governments, in spite of their significant national differences, had one final objective in common: the assimilation of Indians." Bonfil Batalla further argues that the assimilation and co-optation of indigenous people forms part of a larger project of preparing nascent nation-states for capitalist enterprising. In the Americas, especially Latin America, Indigenism also emerged as a solution to identity crises arising as a result of political and social turmoil (wars, radical changes in government, movements of civil or human rights, etc.). Paternalist forms of Indigenism make up an integral part of a Pan-Americanist spirit that seeks to rid itself of European control while still maintaining Western institutions.

By contrast, indigeneity, as understood in this book, will refer to the organic expressions that emerge from the indigenous communities themselves, which may or may not have anything to do with the official Indigenism often espoused by nation-states. While these expressions may be understood and even appropriated by non-natives, indigeneity primarily serves the spiritual and pragmatic needs of indigenous communities and nations without necessarily having to profess an overt political and anticolonialist agenda behind them. Notwithstanding, Indigenist and indigenous expressions can overlap or even negate one another. Admittedly, we could argue that in colonial and postcolonial contexts, any expression of indigenous culture is inevitably Indigenist and thus political because, consciously or not, it counters dominant culture. We could also contend that there are cultural expressions within native nations and communities that fulfill both Indigenist and indigenous purposes. We will tread carefully in this volume as we navigate the nuanced and subtle distinctions between Indigenism and indigeneity and will proceed with caution through the problematic history of Indigenism.

The Chicana/o Indigenist aesthetic and discourse posed a unique phenomenon in the history of counterhegemonic struggles in the Americas, for it was positioned somewhere between Indigenism and indigeneity. As it emerged in various forms of creative and political expression during and after the Chicano Movement, Chicana/o Indigenism redeployed many of the strategies and tools of previous Indigenist initiatives but with critically different motives, goals, and outcomes. As with earlier Indigenist projects, Chicana/o artists sought to consciously and strategically embrace indigenous culture for political purposes. Some Chicana/o activists, intellectuals, and artists even looked to the Indigenist campaigns in Mexico after the Revolution of 1910 as a model for understanding how indigeneity can be incorporated in the construction of national formations. But within the cultural context of the United States, where indigenous culture is excluded on all levels of nationalist agendas, the act of proclaiming an indigenous identity as an identifying marker of the Chicana/o experience in this country was necessarily a subversive and transgressive move. Most importantly, however, Chicana/o Indigenism transcended the need to adopt politically strategic discourses and postures. While there were concerted efforts on the part of scholars, artists, activists, and intellectuals to adopt an Indigenist worldview that would challenge the stagnation of U.S. dominant culture, indigenous practices and beliefs have been important cornerstones of Chicana/o culture in North America predating U.S. expansionism and Spanish colonialism. The Indigenist aesthetic and discourse that would surface on the coattails of the Chicano Movement afforded the Mexican American community the unprecedented opportunity to be themselves, quite literally. Indigenous practices such as curanderismo (folk healing) and oral traditions, previously dismissed as backward, folkloric (i.e., quaint but not modern), and even superstitious by Western thought, were now celebrated and exalted during el movimiento, for these were the indigenous cultural markers that survived the ravages of colonization and connected the contemporary Chicana/o community to the great preconquest indigenous civilizations and cultures in the Americas. Moreover, in the process of reclaiming their indigeneity, Chicanas/os were seeking to rehabilitate the systems of collective support and communal protection that were prevalent among the native populations in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans who brought with them a more individualistic and capital-driven culture. Nevertheless, many of the Indigenist images and ideas Chicana/o artists and thinkers embraced did not come directly from their own personal indigenous experiences but from their process of politicization and self-education that prompted them to study Mexican history and culture, both ancient and modern. For example, the spiritual connection that Chicana artists and writers established with the Aztec earth goddess Coatlicue emerged out of their profound readings of Mesoamerican texts. Nevertheless, Coatlicue, whose abilities included the extraordinary power to give and take away life and whose anthropomorphic features were both beautiful and horrific, represented the embodiment of polar opposites and contradictions, a characteristic that mirrored and legitimized Chicanas' subject positions. Because Chicanas/os were not indigenous in the same way that Native Americans were, their political consciousness reflected both Indigenist (politically motivated) and indigenous (organically manifested) proclivities. The hybridity, or mestizaje, within the Chicana/o community, while not negating the connection to other native populations, conditioned its activists to navigate between these two realms of political, social, and cultural being, namely, Indigenism and indigeneity.

If we think of ideology in its Marxist definition, that is, as a system of ideas that creates a "'false consciousness' [and] works in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the powerless," as John Storey explains, then we can perhaps think of Latin American Indigenism more as an ideology than as an aesthetic functioning independently of the needs of indigenous people. In Mexico, the construction of Indigenism implied no overt intention to work against the interests of native populations, but there was an attempt to diffuse the possibility of revolts or insurgences among the country's indigenous communities, whose consciousness had been dangerously awakened during the Revolution. As opposed to an ideology of oppression, Chicana/o Indigenism emerged as a methodology of decolonization that sought to create not a false consciousness but alternative models of oppositional thinking serving the needs of Third World communities.

Although representations of indigenous populations date as far back as the conquest, the use of such representations to construct the nation-state signals a fairly modern phenomenon. Prior to the nineteenth century, European colonizers produced images of Indians in written and visual texts to further reiterate their own cultural identity and superiority in the face of growing miscegenation. Helmut Scheben, however, quickly pointed out that Indigenism, as an aesthetic and nationalist discourse, coincided chronologically with modernism, and Debora Castillo asserted that the act of sidelining indigenous culture while romantically appropriating it lies at the crux of modernist and postmodernist debates in Latin America.

Nations like Mexico, for instance, openly embraced indigenous iconography during the modern phases of their artistic development. This new aesthetic, though complicit with European coloniality, signaled a desire to proclaim a voice independent of foreign avant-garde trends. Indigenism, specifically in the Mexican context, did not provide platforms for self-representation for indigenous peoples, but rather created a state-sanctioned visual vocabulary that articulated a native identity according to the precepts of the new nation-state after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. As part of Mexico's educational reforms during the first few decades of the twentieth century, the education minister José Vasconcelos commissioned elaborate mural cycles to help the populace visually conceive the shape this new nation-state would take. The power of the public mural, as the Mexican muralists of the 1920s and 1930s knew, resided in its ability to not only prescribe ideology but also construct its own spectators. When addressing Mexican indigenous history and culture, Diego Rivera was perhaps the one muralist who best understood the role that murals could play in the creation of a national collective identity. The unproblematized and often romantic Indigenism that emerged in the mural cycles he painted throughout Mexico became emblematic of the nationalist ideologies regarding the Mexican native communities.

Contesting Modernism and the Avant-Garde

The spirit of the Chicana/o arts movement presented a diametrically opposed school of thought to the prevailing discourses and practices surrounding the visual arts in the field of art history and criticism, in particular, modern and contemporary art history. The categories that defined established art history as well as time-honored museum practices proved to be utterly irrelevant to the practice of Chicana/o art. The categories pertinent to the standard periodization utilized in traditional art-historical methodologies—namely, prehistoric, ancient, medieval, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary art—proved to be inaccurate and even obstructive to the understanding of indigenous art, including Chicana/o creative expressions. The classification "non-Western" was also fraught with recurring colonialist visions and discourses that defined indigenous arts as exotic and primitive. Of particular interest to this study, however, is the way European and Euro-American academic thinking constructed the role of art and artists in the modern era. Art was the result of the most elevated form of creative endeavor coming from an intellectual elite. Art existed independently and quite above the mundane goings-on of everyday life and existence. The artist, as the human vessel for this creative force, held a special place in society, for he or she (though mostly he) held neither responsibility nor accountability toward a larger collective. The artist often lived marginalized from society not because of any social injustice but because of his/her misunderstood genius and idiosyncratic lifestyle and personality. Modern and contemporary art history turned to the artist as the focus of attention, thus placing inordinate importance on an artwork's authorship. This "cult-of-the-artist" approach deployed by many art historians and critics has led to the publication of hundreds, if not thousands, of lavish monographs on "modern masters" such as Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Wassily Kandinsky, just to name a few, granting them all celebrity status.

The obstinacy of the structures of art history and criticism, coupled with the refusal on the part of many art historians and critics to recognize the legitimacy and value of Chicana/o art, conditioned numerous Chicana/o artists and intellectuals to create alternative historical and physical spaces for the free expression and deeper engagement of indigenous aesthetics. For Chicana/o artists who came of age during the Chicano Movement, the models offered by scholars of modern and contemporary art regarding the role of art and the artist were exceedingly inappropriate and even outmoded. Many Chicana/o artists had such strong ties to community concerns that they saw their roles as artists and activists as the same. So, as stipulated by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, a critical "task was to re-think representation, the role of the artist, and the social function of art." Conversely, indigenous aesthetics provided Chicana/o artists with more fitting and culturally sensitive models for creative expressions. The old adage "art for art's sake," which defined creative expression as a function of its own internal machinations, was supplanted in the minds of Chicana/o and indigenous scholars with the motto "art for life's sake." Mexican Indigenist scholar Guillermo Bonfil Batalla underscored quite eloquently the fact that many indigenous cultures regard commonplace experiences (lo cotidiano) as necessary mediating occurrences that happen between an individual and the rest of nature. Without sacrificing individual creativity and artistic freedom, Native American scholar Daniel Heath Justice called for a form of creativity that is deeply ingrained in community concerns:

[The idea of art for art's sake] frequently brings with it a hypernarcissism and self-centered conceit that contributes to the destabilization of the basic values and kinship ties of tribal communities. . . . I believe it's fair to say that most tribal artists . . . are creating art not only for themselves, but also for the survival and enduring presence of Native people . . . It becomes, as Cherokee/Appalachian poet Marilou Awiakta has noted, "art for Life's sake, as opposed to art for Art's sake."

Like Native American artists, Chicanas/os were looking for ways to consolidate their creative needs with their commitment to community. Thus, by looking to various forms of indigenous aesthetics, both past and present, they found meaningful examples of art practices that existed in organic relationship to the community at large. The often collective nature of many indigenous arts also involved a process of transformation for both the artist and the community. While this transformation is primarily a spiritual one, it is also connected to other forms of transformations. For Chicana/o artists who invited local community members to collaborate in the creation of murals, this spiritual transformation also took the form of political revelation, whereby all those involved underwent a radical process of what Paulo Freire would call conscientização, or "conscientization," through which they became conscious of their own oppression but also of their own potential and power to bring about change at an individual and collective level.

Chicana/o artists could not afford to simply retreat into their studios to explore the contours of their own artistic imagination, for they were often compelled and driven to understand how their individual creativity related to the process of community building and preservation, a task they could not achieve by remaining in cultural, social, and political isolation. These desires of defining the self in relationship to community as well as to a spiritual universe were motivations that Chicana/o artists shared with other native peoples. But if artists had the responsibility of creating art that served objectives leading toward social justice, then art automatically became a form of decolonization. Through the process of developing an individual and collective creative expression, which can also be regarded as a form of empowerment and emancipation, artist and community alike begin to shed the mechanisms of a colonial system that has invaded their bodies, minds, and souls. By using art as a decolonizing agent, indigenous artists, including Chicanas/os, were subverting and overturning a very powerful yet pernicious tradition, namely, the practice on the part of colonizing powers of using art to further subdue and indoctrinate conquered and vanquished peoples. One must only look to the casta paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Latin America, to the nineteenth-century Anglo-American landscape paintings, or, even more recently, to the early twentieth-century political cartoons in major U.S. newspapers to understand how visual artists traditionally used the arts to literally and metaphorically reify colonial orders. The representations of indigenous peoples in these aforementioned visual traditions operated as circumscribing devices that contained and confined the social movement of the racial Other. If representation itself becomes hampered by a colonialist gaze, then self-representation necessarily implies a reversal of that process, as Steven Leuthold argues: "Indigenous self-representation primarily involves a shift in authority, implying that inherent in cross-cultural representations are the dynamics of power."

Mexican and Chicana/o Indigenism in Murals

Though we can speak of several important Indigenist moments in the history of the Americas, Chicana/o creative expressions of the 1960s and beyond were most significantly influenced by the Indigenist revival that occurred during and shortly after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Alfonso Caso, anthropologist and founder of Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista, credited the Revolution itself with ushering in considerable changes in the way Mexico viewed its native populations: "One of the most permanent and constructive results of the Revolution was the consciousness and determination on the part of Mexico to resolve the indigenous problem." Though Caso saw the presence of native communities as a potential liability to the country's progress and urged their assimilation as a way to solve the "indigenous problem," Chicanas/os' interest in the Revolution and its Indigenist proclamations was part of a more affirmative and potentially transgressive process of self-definition. While various Chicana/o thinkers regarded the Mexican Revolution as a metaphor for the contemporaneous struggles they waged, its historical importance also held a more tangible relevance to Mexican Americans. As historians have pointed out, many of the events prior, during, and after the Revolution brought about one of the largest influxes of Mexican immigrants to the United States, with as many as 1.5 million people—approximately 10 percent of Mexico's entire population—crossing the border between 1900 and 1930. Many of the Chicanas/os who came of age during the conflicts of the civil rights movement were either the children or grandchildren of these immigrants. In the conscious imagination of many activists and artists, the Chicano Movement operated as an extension of the political and cultural debates instituted by the Revolution. After all, this event ennobled the cause of land reform to benefit Indians, and it also glorified leaders like Emiliano Zapata, whose indigenous blood symbolized the very essence of the Mexican nation.

Though Chicana/o muralism resides at the intersection of various currents and tendencies, the historical connection to the Mexican mural renaissance is quite self-evident. Nearly half a century prior to the flowering of Chicana/o muralism in California, the state had already become an important site for Mexican muralism. José Clemente Orozco's Prometheus (1930) in Pomona College, Diego Rivera's California School of Fine Arts mural in San Francisco (1930), and David Alfaro Siqueiros's Portrait of Present-Day Mexico (1932), originally located in Santa Monica, all offered a politicized modernist vocabulary that was previously unfamiliar to the current artistic scene in California and the rest of the country. As far as the generation of Chicana/o artists of the sixties and seventies was concerned, however, the most pivotal Mexican mural was undoubtedly Siqueiros's La América Tropical (Tropical America; 1932), located on Los Angeles's Olvera Street. Laurance P. Hurlburt, author of The Mexican Muralists in the United States (1989), explained that the mural's bold critique of imperialism and capitalism centered around the figure of the crucified Indian, an image that must have struck a chord with the Mexican American residents of the area. La América Tropical also demonstrated the powerful effects political statements coupled with Indigenist aesthetics could have when displayed in a public mural.

Mexican Indigenist art also migrated to California via the work of Alfredo Ramos Martínez, who had led Mexico's Academia de San Carlos in the early twenties and eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1929. His open-air paintings and indigenous subjects had considerable influence on many Southern California artists of the period. During the decades of the 1950s and early 1960s, several Mexican American artists contributed much to the area's artistic patrimony, even though their oeuvre often went largely unnoticed. Such was the case of Martín Ramírez, an artist active during the 1950s in the Los Angeles area, whose works on paper revealed, as Octavio Paz remarked, "forms, lines, volumes, and colors that express with a sort of exasperation the twin forces of separation and participation." Referring to Ramírez's experience immigrating to the United States during the Mexican Revolution and his subsequent bouts with paranoid schizophrenia, Paz erroneously and dismissively described his work as that of a solitary and isolated genius who neither exerted influence on nor received influence from broader artistic currents. Nevertheless, Chicago artist Jim Nutt "discovered" his drawings in 1968, and later, approximately one decade after Ramírez's death in 1960, the Mexican artist's work became the subject of various exhibitions around the country. Though he produced all his drawings while a mental patient at the DeWitt State Hospital (Auburn, California), subsequent interest in his art reinforced the Mexican American artistic tradition in California. Chicano writer and activist Ricardo Bracho found Ramírez's drawings to be "exquisite, unsettling, dazzling in their intricate craft and deep with Mexican cultural referent," and in 2004 he began writing a play entitled "Mexican Psychotic," based on the artist's life.

Painter and draftsman Carlos Licón, a Los Angeles artist whose style more closely resembled the Mexican School's social-realist tendencies than Ramírez's, established very early in his career a strong connection with his community when, in 1942, at the age of thirteen, he worked as a stage designer for the Mexican American venue Padua Hills Theater in Claremont, California. Four years later, Licón would actually meet the artist Alfredo Ramos Martínez and work as his assistant on a Scripps College mural. But, like Ramírez, recurring instabilities in his personal life often sidelined Licón's artistic production. A victim of drug and alcohol abuse, Licón spent a great portion of his adult life in prison on narcotics charges. But this period in the 1960s marked the most productive phase in his career. Displaying the stylistic influence of the modern Mexican artists of the 1920s and 1930s, Licón's work nevertheless remained more personal and introspective. A tragic feeling of pathos and melancholy often saturated his iconlike portraits and figural compositions. The legacy of his artwork would greatly inspire the artists associated with the Chicano Movement.

Though the work of Mexican American artists prior to the Chicano Movement remains largely unrecognized for its influence on subsequent generations of California artists, their contribution nonetheless provided an impetus and a sense of historical continuity to artists working during and after the civil rights movement. But because Chicana/o artists during el movimiento sought to produce an art that would challenge social and political categories and classifications, they took greater interest in media like the graphic arts, such as posters, and, of course, muralism. As had the artists of the Mexican School during the earlier decades of the twentieth century, Chicanas/os, too, found in muralism a particularly fitting medium through which to profess and disseminate their new perspectives on Indigenism as it applied to their growing racial consciousness. On the one hand, wall paintings functioned as grand platforms of cultural expression for preconquest civilizations, and, on the other, they served as highly effective instruments for consciousness raising in modern Mexico.

The elements of Mexican Indigenism that influenced Chicana/o muralists are not unproblematic, however, and they present difficulties when addressing the similarities and differences between these two important moments of mural history. Indeed, scholars must problematize the relationship between modern Mexican and Chicana/o art history. On the one hand, Chicana/o community murals emphasized the narrative and discursive continuity between Mexican and Chicana/o history. Indigenous figures such as Quetzalcoatl, Cuauhtémoc, and Benito Juárez are as much a part of the Chicana/o pantheon of heroes as are individuals from the U.S. side of the border, like César Chávez and Reies López Tijerina. On the other hand, these community murals express the specificity, innovation, and originality that is unique to Chicana/o artistic production operating independently of the previous Mexican movements. Consequently, the Mexican influence on Chicana/o art poses a number of pressing questions regarding the nature of Chicana/o creative expressions. Can we think of Mexican Indigenist iconography as merely a form of artistic influence on these community murals? To what degree was Mexico a source of inspiration or a point of departure for Chicana/o artists? If Chicanas/os were seeking to carve out an autonomous space for themselves in the United States, why look at Mexican history and art? In addressing these questions, I found a genuine danger in applying essentialist frameworks to Chicana/o culture. Thinking of Mexico as a culture of origin inscribed in the Mexican American consciousness would obscure the complexity associated with the formation of bordered identities in the United States. If we maintain an essentialist model, the recurrence of Mexican Indigenism in these West Coast community murals would inevitably be described as part of a static model of unidirectional cultural flow simply migrating from Mexico to the United States, thereby denying a certain degree of creative agency to Chicana/o artists. By contrast, thinking of the relationship between Mexican and Chicana/o art as a dialectic provides a more fluid model of analysis. Anthropologist Charles W. Nuckolls described cultural systems as dialectical phenomena in that they are "made up of dynamic conflicts between the whole and its parts." Drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin, communication studies scholars Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery, in discussing the nature of interpersonal exchanges, commented on how forces of unity and difference (or centripetal and centrifugal forces) often collaborate in the formation of social relations. The relationship between Chicana/o culture and Mexican culture can be described as a relational yet conflictive and oppositional dialogue. Chicana/o art then becomes conversant with Mexican currents, but often in a critical and contesting fashion. Though a visual dialogue takes place between the Mexican and Chicana/o muralists, this dialogue often involves a multivocal process whereby dissenting and consenting voices contribute to the creation of a unified cultural product. Chicana/o community muralism can be regarded as that product, given that it simultaneously embraced and digressed from the Mexican canon. This element of "contradiction" and "opposition," however, does not point to stagnation in the cultural process, but instead ushers in the creation of an emerging new cultural system.

As seen in community murals, the dialectic process played a particularly relevant role in the construction of Chicana/o Indigenism. Informed by Mexican Indigenist thinking and iconography, Chicanas/os revived their indigenous roots by reusing cultural paraphernalia already circulating in other spheres. Even though the social and political arenas were dramatically different, Chicanos/os frequently cited and alluded to Mexican Indigenism and muralism in their work during the civil rights movement. As in Mexico, the emergence of Indigenism and muralism in the United States happened after a period of critical social and political turmoil. In many ways, Chicana/o artists saw a model of socially engaged art in the Mexican mural renaissance. But while the Indigenist ideology, along with the muralist projects in Mexico, formed a symbiotic part of institutional initiatives to rebuild the nation-state after the Revolution, in the United States, both became phenomena occurring on the fringes of official discourses. As such, Indigenism among Chicanas/os initially emerged as a counterideology, that is, an alternative to hegemonic discourses about marginalized minorities not only in Mexico but also in the United States. Indigenist imagery for many Chicana/o muralists arose as a means to express forms of resistance and protest not sanctioned by state apparatuses.

Regardless of whether Chicana/o muralists constructed Indigenism through the borrowing of different styles, themes, or concepts, this process generally remained a highly critical and interventionist one. Behind this redeployment, Chicana/o artists subverted the traits of more canonic Indigenist discourses in Mexico that sought to keep indigenous communities from active participation in rebuilding the nation. Likewise, the use of wall painting itself functioned as an act of subversion and decentralization of other modern mural movements that were institutionally supported and state sanctioned, like the so-called Mexican School of painting. The resurrection of Indigenist thought and aesthetics allowed Chicanas/os to build a nation without government sponsorship and on the fringes of the mainstream establishment. But, ultimately, the use of Mexican Indigenism signified for Chicanas/os the reclaiming of a culture and a history traditionally commodified by Western powers of colonization.

Aztlán and the Politics of Place and Space

When Chicana/o artists chose to use murals as vehicles for Indigenist aesthetics, it was not by coincidence or happenstance. One of the most significant connections between the concept of Indigenism and muralism involved the symbolic implications of space and place that both tendencies invoked. The concept of Aztlán composed an important element of Chicana/o Indigenism. According to Mexica history, the Aztecs migrated south to Tenochtitlán from a northern homeland called Aztlán. In the manifesto entitled "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán" (1969), written primarily by the Chicano poet Alurista with assistance from Denver muralist Manuel Martínez,34 Chicanas/os geographically identified this homeland as the U.S. Southwest. Regarding themselves as the descendants of the Aztecs who currently inhabited Aztlán, Chicana/o activists saw the Mexican American presence in this area as a fulfillment of this mythical return to the homeland. Not only did Aztlán, as a concept, contest the categorization of Chicanas/os as an invariably immigrant community, it also provided them with a physical and symbolic space that had previously been denied to them by official U.S. histories. To further legitimize the existence of Aztlán, many Chicana/o writers often cited a critical primary-source text, namely, the 1610 conquest chronicles of Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá entitled Historia de la Nueva México. In the first chapter, Pérez de Villagrá describes in great detail the lands of the U.S. Southwest while also identifying them as the former home of the Aztec Empire. But Aztlán was not only a geographical location for Chicana/o artists and activists; it was also a spiritual space where decolonizing frames of mind could be fully realized. Aztlán was a concept capable of converging into one discursive space many of the concerns affecting Chicanas/os, as Rafael Pérez-Torres elucidates: "The ideas embodied in Aztlán draw together geography, culture, history, genetics, migration, tradition, heritage, unity, authenticity."

Like the notion of Aztlán, wall paintings, too, had the unique capacity to carve out physical and symbolic spaces for the articulation of identity. In turn, Chicana/o Indigenism, of which the concept of Aztlán was a crucial component, sought to push the national and psychological border that had marginalized Mexican-descent communities in the United States. Thus, muralism celebrated the urban spaces prescribed to the Chicana/o nation and often transformed the barrio environment into an Indigenist realm. Moreover, Indigenism, as an aesthetic, and muralism, as an artistic medium, both seemed capable of conveying the specificities of place and time while simultaneously asserting broader statements of social and political consciousness. Ramón García, speaking in more general terms, stated that Chicanas/os "produce an art of place, where location is central to the representation of the self in many individual and collective guises." Indigenism offered Chicanas/os a means by which to address the specificity of their indigenous roots without circumscribing their cultural identity. So when a Chicana/o muralist cited Aztec or Maya culture, for example, she/he generally did not seek to portray these images as, in the words of Ramón García, "static things to be imitated," but rather "as active things in the present."

The notion that Chicana/o community muralism is essentially an "art of place" implies that this practice is essentially site specific. Nevertheless, although many community murals must be understood in the context of the barrio setting and in relation to the period in which they were made, they rarely, if ever, remain static signifiers of particular moments and places in history. However, the site specificity of the Chicana/o Indigenist murals in California aligned them with the movement of site-specific work that emerged simultaneously in the 1960s and 1970s within more mainstream artistic spheres in the United States and Europe. According to art historian Miwon Kwon, site-specific work "focused on establishing an inextricable, indivisible relationship between the work and its site and then demanded the physical presence of the viewer for the work's completion." Artists who engaged in this type of work, Kwon continued, resisted "the forces of the capitalist market economy, which circulates artworks as transportable and exchangeable commodity goods." Site specificity functioned under the assumption that the space in which art resides is neither innocent nor devoid of meaning but rather laden with dynamics of signification and, as such, is necessarily complicit with its location. Chicana/o artists embraced site specificity for these reasons but also because of its connections to indigenous aesthetics, which, according to Steven Leuthold, are deeply rooted in space consciousness: "Indigenous representation rests upon social ties and a profound sense of place more than any particular medium, style, or subject matter." Leuthold further argues that in indigenous art the sacred quality attributed to particular locations and sites is accompanied by a sense of responsibility toward that place, its community, and its environment. For the most part, Chicana/o muralists conscientiously sought to work with the qualities that are already intrinsic at any given site, thus avoiding interfering with many of the natural dynamics that are already in place there. Conversely, the practice of transforming and manipulating natural spaces is one closely aligned with colonialist and imperialist enterprises. For instance, the architects of the Roman imperial basilicas sought to re-create the vastness of exterior spaces inside these ambitious structures, and the colonial urban planners of El Zócalo in Mexico City dramatically altered the environment in and around Lake Texcoco to establish the seat of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Chicana/o artists were conscious of how colonial and expansionist states often disturbed and ultimately destroyed natural environments, and they therefore developed strategies to interact rather than disrupt the natural dynamics of space and place.

Another significant dimension to the issue of space in relationship to Chicanas/os' Indigenist consciousness centered around the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) as a key episode in U.S./Mexican history. The annexation of Mexico's northern provinces during the mid-nineteenth century changed the citizenship rights and social status of some 100,000 Mexicans, many of whom were indigenous inhabitants of the area. Chicana/o activists argued that this particular event in U.S. history explained the current marginalization of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in this country. Richard Griswold del Castillo, in his 1990 monograph entitled The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, outlined the process of self-education Chicana/o activists underwent during the civil rights movement, when many learned about this treaty and its implications. During various public demonstrations, rallies, and meetings, activists like Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales and Armando Rendón stipulated that the U.S. government had violated the terms of the treaty and that Mexico was indeed entitled to a number of the territories now under U.S. jurisdiction. The historical dynamics triggered by the events surrounding 1848 were intimately connected to more recent histories of displacement such as the forced relocation of neighborhoods after the 1959-1962 construction of Dodger Stadium in the area of Los Angeles called Chávez Ravine. The significance and meaning of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave Chicanas/os not only the means by which to furnish their activist discourse with historical legitimacy but also an epistemological complement to the notion of Aztlán that further substantiated their mythical and innate right to inhabit North American soil. So while many Chicanas/os expressed the symbolic connection between land and indigenous consciousness in a performative manner through activist, oral, and written means, they most concretely achieved the reclaiming of this territory through the creation of murals that secured a place for Mexican Americans within the communities they resided in, as well as within the political and social landscape of the United States.

Chicana/o and Native American Indigenism

Knowledge of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also provided a platform on which Chicanas/os forged alliances with Native American groups in the 1980s, given that the distinction between a Native American and a Mexican Indian was by and large determined by the redrawing of the U.S.-Mexico border in the mid-nineteenth century. Griswold del Castillo, for instance, cited an anonymous Chicano pamphlet entitled "Aztlán vs. the United States" that alluded to the common plight between Chicanos and Native Americans:

It [the pamphlet] argued that Chicanos in the United States were Indians by blood as well as heritage; they had suffered the same second class treatment as Indians. Aztlán . . . was a spiritual and biological nation that included Indians as well as Chicanos. "This is the nation of RAZA INDIGENA, and the INDIAN NATIONS, or in other words nosotros los indios de Aztlán."

Chicana/o Indigenist thinkers and artists recognized the importance of addressing the plight of indigenous people both south and north of the border. For example, Los Toltecas en Aztlán, an organization of artists and activists founded in San Diego's Centro Cultural de la Raza, would attend various meetings and events organized by Native American activists with the understanding that, like them, Chicana/o radicals were also pursuing the common goals of land rights and sovereignty. In this respect, Cherríe Moraga commented that movimiento activists often joked that "Chicanos [were] usually the most Indian-looking people in a room full of 'skins,'" further maintaining that Chicanas/os carried not only indigenous blood from Mexico but also that of other "nations [in North America], including Apache, Yaqui, Papago, Navajo, and Tarahumara from the border regions." The commonality of the Chicana/o and Native American Indigenist initiatives was also underscored by the shared experiences of having to contend with Anglo-Saxon expansionism and aggressive deterritorialization after having suffered the ravages of Spanish colonial campaigns. In many ways, the Anglo-American expansionist mentality posed different kinds of threats and challenges to indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the more parochial Spanish colonialism. Discourses about self-proclaimed racial superiority, accompanied by the support of scientific racism and the unrelenting quest for capital and prosperity, lent U.S. westward expansion an impetus and drive previously unheard of in other colonial enterprises. Indigenous peoples in North America were now faced not only with virulent genocidal campaigns, the systemic usurpation of their ancestral lands, and other forms of devastation, but they were also confronted with the erection of institutions of power that would oppress indigenous nations for many generations to come. It is no surprise, then, that the forms of protest and civil disobedience enacted by Chicana/o and Native American activists later in the 1960s and 1970s would bear striking similarities with one another. For instance, in 1969, a group of more than three hundred Native American activists from fifty different indigenous nations took over San Francisco's Alcatraz Island, reclaiming the territory "in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery," as stipulated in a joint statement released by the group. In a similar fashion, the Chicano radical group the Brown Berets arrived on California's Santa Catalina Island in September of 1972 and began what would end up being a twenty-four-day vigil in which a large group of Berets lined up along the island's Avalon Harbor holding flags. The Berets insisted that the island was not mentioned in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and thus still belonged to Mexico. Chicano historian Richard Griswold del Castillo astutely pointed out that the aim of the whole operation was not to reclaim Catalina in the name of Mexico, but rather "to provide a forum for discussion of the problems confronting Mexican Americans arising from their colonized status." Given its various strategies and modi operandi, as well as its worldview, the Chicano Movement, including its mural component, functioned in various aspects as an indigenous movement seeking to challenge the dominance of an overpowering nation-state. Nevertheless, the specificity of the Chicana/o and Native American experiences need not be collapsed when discussing the similarities in these two communities' colonial history. As a matter of fact, Native American studies scholars like Patricia Penn-Hilden have emerged as ardent critics of the way in which Chicana/o activists and intellectuals have, in her view, appropriated Native American narratives in an ahistorical manner, calling these appropriations "spiritual tourism and obfuscatory hybridization." Penn-Hilden has also argued that some Chicano historians have gone so far as to minimize the devastation of Spanish colonialism on Native American populations. The book When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away (1991), by Chicano historian Ramón Gutiérrez, has been at the center of the controversy generated by Penn-Hilden and other Native American studies scholars and activists who argue that Gutiérrez relied too much on colonial sources for the book and, as a result, reproduced their exoticizing and eroticizing visions of the Pueblo peoples of the U.S. Southwest.

Making space for previously silenced historical narratives of the Chicana/o experience also formed part of the mission behind the creation of Indigenist murals. Chicana/o artists were cognizant that modern Mexican and ancient Mesoamerican muralists alike had used this medium to "write" monumental epics of indigenous history. This project was of critical importance to Chicana/o activists, given that one of the most virulent aggressions directed at indigenous peoples in the Americas was precisely the obliteration of their history, for "without history, one cannot be, and with a false and foreign history, one cannot be oneself," as Guillermo Bonfil Batalla elucidates. One of the major projects Chicana/o activists, artists, and scholars undertook during el movimiento was the recovery and recuperation of Chicana/o and Mexican history, a history that, of course, predated the encroachment of Spanish colonialism and Anglo-American expansionism. This history reclaimed a crucial piece of cultural information that had been notoriously denied to most of these activists in the U.S. public school system. Historian and activist Ignacio García explained that art, in particular the public mural, played a pivotal role in the reconstruction of this history, which became a visual narrative that also underscored Chicanas/os' Indigenist consciousness:

Art was another form of history, since most of it depicted the Chicano's Indian heritage and the community's legacy of struggle. Many Mexican-American children first learned about Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Benito Juárez, Cuauhtémoc, and other Mexican heroes from the murals in the barrio . . . Much of the impetus for this "new" art came from the Mexican Revolutionary artists like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros.51

But with these Indigenist images, Chicana/o artists not only debunked dominant historical narratives to create autonomous spaces but also exposed the arbitrary and exclusionary character of these texts, thereby calling into question the whole business of writing history. In Western culture, written and visual history was the quintessential hallmark of legitimacy and truth. The myth of veracity associated with history was intimately linked with the preservation of hegemonic powers. Intellectuals in postcolonial and ethnic studies have long understood that most histories are merely elaborate discourses often created to maintain the social and political order. Postcolonial scholars Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, for example, underscored how dominant historical constructs inform our very notion of reality, and that consequently we should regard the narrative component of these constructs as a product of imperialist thinking:

The post-colonial task therefore is not simply to contest the message of history, which has so often relegated individual post-colonial societies to footnotes to the march of progress, but also to engage the medium of narrativity itself, to reinscribe the 'rhetoric', the heterogeneity of historical representation . . . This, of course, is easier said than done for post-colonial societies which so often have failed to gain access to the very institution of 'History' itself with its powerful rules of inclusion and exclusion.

Chicanas/os began to regard history as a subjective, positioned, and often arbitrary text that privileged the experiences and narratives of social elites and dominant culture. Nevertheless, if the act of writing history is equated with power, then Chicanas/os would undergo a radical process of empowerment through the writing and dissemination of their own history. Indigenism and muralism not only made Mexican American history more visible to a greater public, but also gave Chicanas/os access to the very institution of history itself. Moreover, the act of recuperating memory was a significant component within this historically enabling process. Indigenist imagery appeared in these murals not as a nostalgic longing for an indigenous existence, "but as a vision of a different time and space that enable[d] a critique of the present," as explained by cultural studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz when discussing the performative role of memory in Chicana/o art. In this way, Chicana/o artists mirrored the strategies utilized by Native American scholars and activists who sought to explore past indigenous history to understand and address the issues affecting indigenous peoples in the present. Moreover, by depicting Mesoamerican images in their murals, Chicana/o artists were underscoring a historical continuity previously ignored or undermined by prevailing narratives. While scholars of indigenous history and culture recognized the scientific innovation, the social complexity, and the overall greatness of pre-Columbian civilizations, they systematically overlooked, consciously or not, the fact that contemporary indigenous people were the direct descendants of these civilizations and, as such, carried much of the sacred and intellectual knowledge of their ancestors. The images of preconquest civilizations rendered in Chicana/o community murals were then public reminders that this historical knowledge and continuity was also inherent in the contemporary urban Chicana/o community. As scholars and activists of indigenous resistance would argue, indigenous history did not end with the European conquest and colonization, thus establishing that, as Peruvian writer Guillermo Carnero Hoke contends, "the Indian nation lives in continuity with its past."

The Chicano Movement ultimately questioned and contested the status quo of postcolonial systems in which the lives of oppressed and formerly colonized peoples are conditioned and compromised by the presence of a hegemonic and overpowering nation-state. Like many other indigenous movements, el movimiento sought to transform the relationship that the Chicana/o community had with the United States as a nation-state, a relationship necessarily defined by a center-versus-margin power dynamic. Given that all ethnic groups are "potential nations," as Guillermo Bonfil Batalla maintains, different writers and activists felt this relationship could be altered in many ways, some arguably more radical than others. These proposed changes ranged from the complete destruction or expulsion of the invading nation-state from native lands, to the return of territory belonging to indigenous nations while still allowing the foreign state to remain in the region, to merely devising strategies aimed at changing the culture of racism and marginalization that originally informed westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. Ward Churchill argued that the ultimate goal for Indigenist activists should be to find the means to subvert that status quo that regiments the dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized:

[The Indigenist objective] is to arrive at a new set of relationships with peoples that effectively put an end to the era of international domination. The need is to gradually replace the existing world order with one that is predicated in collaboration and cooperation between nations. The only way to ever accomplish this is to physically disassemble the gigantic state structures—structures that are literally grounded in systemic intergroup domination; they cannot in any sense exist without it.

Along similar lines, Bonfil Batalla argued that "ethnic groups are social entities with the proper conditions to justify their right to self-rule, be it as autonomous nations or as clearly differentiated segments of a broader social whole." For the most part, Chicana/o writers, artists, and activists sought to redefine their relationship to the hegemonic centers of power by indigenizing rather than eradicating the nation-state. Advocating for a reconceptualization of the United States as a nation by acknowledging its indigenous foundations, Chicana/o thinkers imagined a relationship on equal footing between indigenous peoples and their former colonizers, but also nonoppressive ways in which communities can come together as nations without violating the rights, sovereignty, and autonomy of other nations.

In this quest to redefine the role of nations vis-à-vis historically oppressed peoples, public murals fulfilled a critical role. Chicana/o artists were acutely aware that murals had been historically complicit with nation-building campaigns by virtue of their highly visible and public status. Conscious of the fact that public art in general is intimately connected with the discursive construction of the nation-state, Chicana/o artists utilized this art form to formulate their notions of an indigenous nation as a contrasting model to the overpowering hegemonic state, namely, the United States. The images of indigenous America depicted in the Chicana/o murals not only posed counterexamples for the postcolonial state but also altered the prevailing definition of that very organism by connecting this Indigenist imagery to U.S. soil, thus indigenizing the state. The public murals became a call for the Chicana/o community and the U.S. nation-state to embrace their repressed and undermined indigeneity.

Radicalism, Identity, and Education

Constructing a radical discourse of resistance—though not always Indigenist in tone—was a critical move for Chicana/o activists during the civil rights era. Nevertheless, many of their proclamations expounding political and cultural difference borrowed much from the rhetorical vocabulary of past Indigenist moments in Latin America. For instance, Rivera's and Orozco's posture of reclaiming Mexico's pre-Columbian past also reemerged in the political discourse of Chicanas/os, and, in both cases, it functioned as a means by which to establish a position of difference and resistance in relation to dominant currents. But Chicanas/os knew all about the distinction between Indigenist identity politics enacted by state apparatuses in Mexico and those utilized by indigenous groups themselves to denounce and challenge their marginalization and continued colonization. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla identified some of the principal characteristics of indigenous protest and activism in Mexico, namely, resistance and innovation. Such tactics, while not the sole property of indigenous protest, were also deployed by Chicana/o activists seeking to devise a radical political posture that would situate them in direct opposition to mainstream U.S. politics. Events like the school blow-outs in Los Angeles or the formation of highly oppositional activist groups like the Brown Berets pointed toward the greater radicalization in Chicana/o activist discourse, a discourse influenced by other civil rights activism of the time, such as the Black Power movement, as well as by indigenous movements of self-determination elsewhere in the Americas. Indeed, the Chicano Movement was a hybrid political struggle that combined various activist tactics that were both indigenous and nonindigenous; nevertheless, its public embrace of indigenous heritage, coupled with its open critique of coloniality and postcoloniality, distinguished it from other civil rights initiatives while simultaneously connecting it to hemispheric indigenous-rights campaigns.

The proclamation of Chicanas/os' indigenous roots also functioned as a distinct maker of difference, thus further reiterating their radical position concerning dominant culture. Within the Chicana/o radical perspective, the notion of difference functioned not as a marker of inequality or a justification for marginalization, but rather as a concept that contested homogeny and assimilation. Behind this conscious assertion of a separate and distinct cultural identity, Chicana/o radicals realized that identity itself was the result of constructed and positioned politics. Stuart Hall likens cultural identity to an act of "becoming" as well as "being." This meant that Chicanas/os themselves came to the conclusion not only that identity is dynamic and that, as Hall himself determined, its "meaning is never finished or completed," but also that it can often be subject to arbitrary manipulation. If society formulates identity more through "politics, memory, and desire" than through empirical criteria, then Chicanas/os could freely fashion their history and culture in a radically Indigenist vein.

For various Chicana/o artists and their constituent communities, the public mural fulfilled an educational role for a population culturally and politically excluded and isolated from the various schools and universities across the nation. Accordingly, community murals became part of a larger effort carried out by Chicana/o activists to reform the U.S. educational system on all levels. While accounts of the Chicano Movement speak at length of the important changes the student movement in high schools and universities brought to the U.S. educational system, Chicana/o studies scholars have said relatively little about the function that murals played as platforms for alternative educational experiences. Of course, the notion that public murals had the capability to educate entire communities was certainly not a new idea, as this was precisely what murals in early twentieth-century Mexico were meant to do. But Chicana/o artists and activists were all too conscious that both state-sponsored murals and government-funded educational initiatives had troublesome historical connections to public indoctrination, assimilation, and colonization. Like other indigenous peoples of the Americas, Chicanas/o had emerged from a public school system that sought to erase all forms of difference and cultural identity, thus creating a colonized subject who is capable of "seeing, hearing, but not speaking or critiquing," to borrow the words of Guatemalan indigenous activist Pedro Coj Ajbalam. The push for reform and reorganization on the educational front to make schools and universities sites of decolonization rather than social control was part of the political agendas of various indigenous groups throughout the Americas. The demands placed on hegemonic educational systems by Chicana/o activists mirrored those initiated by other indigenous groups in the Americas: both advocated for bilingual and bicultural school curricula, state-funded outreach programs in deprived areas, increases in the hire of teachers and faculty of color, respect and support of family and community cultural traditions within educational institutions, the creation of specialized programs for the study of indigenous communities, and so on. Chicana/o artists, in particular, were also aware that public monuments like murals could carry much of the knowledge and history not taught in schools and universities.

Gender and Heterogeneity

Both Indigenism and muralism, as cultural phenomena in Mexico and the United States, failed to address how gendered subjectivities are deeply compromised by patriarchal systems. Hordes of Mexican and Chicana feminist scholars have written extensively about the peripheral or prescribed role women have had within nation-building processes in Mexico and the United States. In many ways, the history of modern mural movements in the Americas can be defined, in part, as a succession of emerging and contesting public discourses. To a certain degree, the male Chicano murals that would come out of the early 1970s directly or indirectly challenged everything from the style to the modes of production of the Mexican mural renaissance. But the fluid and dynamic nature of community muralism would soon allow for a more heterogeneous articulation of Chicana/o cultural identity. Just as Chicana feminist writers and activists found the need to challenge and problematize the orthodoxy of male Chicano identity politics, Chicana muralists, often by their mere presence up on scaffolding, offset the Chicano nationalist project. Artists such as Judy Baca, Juana Alicia, and Yreina Cervántez and the artists collective Mujeres Muralistas established a muralist tradition of their own, along with an alternative vision of Indigenist aesthetics. By conveying the critical contribution of Mujeres Muralistas, Alicia Gaspar de Alba further illustrated the highly gendered nature of muralism, both in its subject matter and its practices:

They challenged the sexist and stereotypical notions within the Chicano Art Movement that women were physically not able and politically not "meant" to create murals, to build and climb scaffolding, to be on public display and withstand the comments of passersby.

By default, then, women had little or nothing to say regarding how Chicano Indigenist nationalism would be constructed. This nationalist ideology would often revere male indigenous icons like Cuauhtémoc and Quetzalcoatl while rendering mestiza and indigenous women anonymously. As far as Chicanas were concerned, the Chicano Movement, along with its mural renaissance, had perpetuated patriarchal worldviews in the process of supposedly decolonizing the Chicana/o community.

Chicana muralists found themselves working in a medium that had historically excluded women for centuries. In the context of modern muralist activity in Mexico and the United States, there were at least two decisive episodes in the artistic traditions of these two countries that established muralism as an exclusively male artistic endeavor. The first episode involved the case of María Izquierdo, a Mexican easel painter and a contemporary to los tres grandes (the three great ones [Mexican muralists]: Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco). The Mexican government commissioned Izquierdo to design a mural for the government building in Mexico City in 1945. After she had made numerous preparations, purchased artistic materials, and created various sketches, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros launched accusations against her, claiming that she lacked the necessary experience to execute a mural, accusations that resulted in the cancellation of her commission. The scandal even reached certain sectors of the press, who continued belittling her qualifications as an artist: "María Izquierdo is not a muralist, she is an outsider in this branch of painting, she does not have the right to take over functions that do not pertain to her."

Chicano muralism certainly inherited many of the gendered exclusions of the Mexican period. Marcos Sánchez-Tranquilino, in his account of the making of the Estrada Courts murals in East Los Angeles, recalled how the predominantly Chicano male organizers of this mural rejected Judy Baca's proposed design for the housing complex:

According to Baca, her proposed mural was turned down because it was interpreted as being "negative." . . . [Her] finished drawing for the proposed Estrada Courts untitled mural focused on the pain and suffering of women as they have been historically impacted by different forms of male militarism.

Though Sánchez-Tranquilino explains that Baca submitted her design at a time when the organizers and participants of the Estrada murals were trying to convey a more positive image of Chicano youth culture, and that other women did participate in other murals, Baca's emphasis on women's experiences in times of crisis decentered the Chicano nationalist project taking place in Estrada Courts. In her own accounts, however, Judy Baca has stated that her original design was not rejected when she submitted it, but that she actually started doing work on it in Estrada Courts. Nevertheless, she was unable to complete it because, as she stated, "they [the organizers of the Estrada mural project] made it impossible for me to finish" by making the necessary artistic materials and equipment unavailable to her. Both Izquierdo's and Baca's failed mural projects demonstrated that muralism, as a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon, carried much of its machista baggage across time and space.

Chicana artists diversified the Indigenist aesthetic through their own muralist visions. Echoing the critiques of Chicano cultural identity proposed by Gloria Anzaldúa and other Chicana feminists since the 1970s, these artists provided an innovative alternative to the previous notions that Indigenism could only be articulated through the body, culture, and history of the male Indian. The work of Mujeres Muralistas, for example, often depicted indigenous landscapes and communities from Latin America in an attempt to distance themselves from what member Irene Pérez called the more "blood and guts" aesthetics of male Chicano murals. Chicana muralists saw—as many other women of color did—that "their experience at the intersection of oppression . . . generated a multifaceted social critique." In other words, their experiences of gender oppression afforded them insight into the varying degrees to which colonization functions for people outside and inside the Chicana/o community.

The work by Chicana artists inevitably introduced a greater heterogeneity to the mural practice, thus loosening the rigidity with which the medium had been defined. This heterogeneity, however, was also the result of a process that was already underway in Mexican and Chicana/o cultural practices. The process through which Chicana/o murals became increasingly heterogeneous can be linked to the interest in the concept of mestizaje, which, Rafael Pérez-Torres argues, was critical in Chicana/o identity formation: "The celebration of the racial and cultural mestizaje that, during the 1920s and beyond, found valorization in the construction of Mexican national identity resonates, during the 1960s and beyond, throughout the development of Chicano cultural identity." In La raza cósmica (1925), one of the most important treatises on mestizaje read by many Chicana/o intellectuals in the early stages of el movimiento, Mexican philosopher and politician José Vasconcelos outlined the spiritual and social benefits that the synthesis of different racial and ethnic traits could bring to the global community. With regard to Mexico's own situation, Vasconcelos conceded that the indigenous presence in Mexico acted as "a good bridge [toward] racial mixing." While Vasconcelos thought of mestizaje as a means of assimilating Mexico's native populations, he also maintained that Mexican indigenous culture provided an appropriate starting point toward the achievement of greater heterogeneity. In a curiously similar fashion, the Indigenist aesthetic served to incorporate Chicana/o cultural identity into the parallel and simultaneous articulations of differential consciousness of other marginalized groups in the United States. While the iconography of the early Chicano murals displayed a more monolithic Indigenist vocabulary, those created during the last couple of decades of the twentieth century began to reveal new forms and developments of Indigenist iconography and thought. For example, during the 1970s, images of Aztec warriors and princesses embodied common muralist themes, but as the 1980s emerged, Chicana/o artists began to conceptualize the indigenous figure and landscape in relation to intersecting identities and currents. Indians began to share the muralist pictorial space with Black, Asian, Anglo, and other Latina/o figures. We also start to see collaborations among muralists from different communities whose only common goal is achieving greater social justice through creative avenues. Such a phenomenon, however, pointed not to a disintegration of these individual identities, but rather to the realization that all these distinct groups often shared the same physical and cultural spheres and suffered under the same systems of oppression. With Chicana cultural studies scholar Angie Chabram-Dernersesian calling for more in-depth academic analyses of "social relations that produce these heterogeneous social identities," it seemed fitting to think of muralist aesthetics and their Indigenist characteristics as phenomena significantly affected by intersecting social phenomena.

The very fleeting and ephemeral quality of many community murals created in California since the late 1960s, the majority of which are executed outdoors, exposing them to vandalism, to the wear and tear of the elements, or, in the specific case of Los Angeles, to local government graffiti-abatement programs, further intensified this heterogeneity. Given that the majority of these projects lack the proper funding for maintenance and restoration, community murals often enjoy a relatively short life span. A large percentage of the artworks created during the 1970s, for instance, have disappeared or exist in a deplorable state of deterioration. This unfortunate reality, however, contributed to an inevitable and continuous renewal of the style and themes that inform muralist production, a phenomenon that greatly promoted much of this growing heterogeneity. As the century came to a close, Chicana/o Indigenism appeared to be a mere artifact of a bygone era of Chicano nationalism, but its elements were inadvertently reinscribed and fused into the increasingly hybrid aesthetics of the West Coast urban landscape.

On Indigenism, Nonessentialism, and Unstable Identities

In spite of its seemingly essentialist overtones, Indigenism as a theoretical tool for the articulation of a Chicana/o mural history offers dynamic rather than static definitions of cultural identity. Indeed, Indigenist aesthetics emerged from the Chicano/o political project as a way to find an origin, some sort of cultural essence that defined the Chicana/o being. But since identities are always "subject to the play of history and the play of difference," as Stuart Hall has told us, the Chicana/o search for a quintessential indigenous essence always met with an unstable subject, impossible to pin down and open to numerous possibilities. As a posture that operates mainly on the level of consciousness, Indigenism can also transcend the specificities of race and class. Though it emerged from a specifically Chicana/o political project, Indigenism was not exclusively articulated, understood, and utilized by artists, intellectuals, and activists of Mexican or Chicana/o or Latina/o descent. A number of non-Chicana/o artists working within Chicana/o and Mexican community settings articulated Indigenist sensibilities in their public art by virtue of their often intimate contact with these populations or by their own political proclivities. It is because of the transcendental and unstable qualities of Chicana/o Indigenist aesthetics and identities that I include in this book the work of artists like Susan Kelk Cervantes, Posh One, Nicole Emmanuel, and others who are not Chicanas/os per se but whose work has done much to construct Chicana/o Indigenist identities. Community muralism has exemplified what Hall called the "de-centering of identity," in other words, "the fragmentation of social identity [, which] is very much part of the modern and . . . postmodern experience." Moreover, the urban settings where these murals reside are often characterized by what George Lipsitz has called "dangerous crossroads" where cultural transactions and dynamic dialogues often take place among different communities in ways that usually threaten monolithic notions of identity and social expectations about race. While these transactions do not erase power relations and communities' attachment to place, they are capable of transcending the strongholds of race, class, gender, sexuality, if only for a brief moment of contact. Given the pervasiveness and visibility of Chicana/o Indigenist imagery in community muralism, it should come as no surprise that this aesthetic should traverse ethnic lines via these cultural transactions within the heterogeneous setting of the city.

The inclusion of non-Chicana/o artists in this volume on Chicana/o art is also prompted by their roles as community artists in the public and urban settings of California. When these artists were working within a context of community involvement, their subjectivities were intertwined with that of the surrounding community, therefore their finished artwork inevitably reflects the two. Unlike artists working within a studio setting, community artists are charged with the task of facilitating collective creativity rather than expressing individual artistic sensibilities. While I am not arguing that their individuality as artists is completely lost in the act of engagement, they are accountable to a larger constituency. These artists are engaged in what James Bau Graves calls participation in culture, a process through which community artists are conditioned to "[place] community interests at the center of the project's purpose and [rely] on community members' knowledge of their own heritage in the development of the most relevant programs." Working within these contexts, an individual artist can legitimately articulate sensibilities, anxieties, concerns, feelings, and other expressions that fall outside her or his personal experience. In this way, works of art created within a Mexican American community context while organized or led by a non-Chicana/o can also further Chicana/o collective empowerment. Seana S. Lowe argues that when artists are engaged in the creation of a communal art project, individual and collective identities are dialectically defined through one another, thus further problematizing fixed and unilateral notions of identity.

Vision, Methodology, and Configuration

This volume brings together two bodies of literature that until now have operated in complete oblivion of one another, namely, the existing scholarship on U.S. community muralism and the various writings and treatises on indigenous agency and resistance throughout the Americas. In this study, I argue that the complexity and multivalency of Chicana/o community muralism is best understood through the theoretical, discursive, and pragmatic lens of autonomous indigenous expressions. Rather than following a rigid chronological framework that does not properly represent the dynamic nature of Chicana/o mural history, this volume opts instead to privilege a thematic approach whereby the history of Chicana/o muralism unravels in an episodic fashion. Nonetheless, these different episodes or themes do follow a sequential order in that they discursively and theoretically build upon one another. We begin in Chapter 1 by directly addressing the connection between Mexican and Chicana/o muralism. In this chapter, the text focuses on the importance of the various murals created by David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera in California to the generation of Chicana/o artists working nearly half a century later in the region. I then carry out close iconographic readings of Chicana/o murals that utilize Indigenist imagery "borrowed" from the work of Siqueiros, Rivera, and, to a lesser degree, José Clemente Orozco. I argue that this imagery emerges in the mural work by Chicana/o artists neither as an artistic "influence" nor a form of "appropriation," but rather as a dialectic element that allows Chicana/o artists to establish a critical dialogue with their Mexican predecessors.

Chapter 2, by contrast, focuses solely on the early phases of Chicana/o mural history, namely, the period from 1968 to 1978. This chapter identifies and interprets the most recurrent and persistent Indigenist motifs in Chicana/o muralism, images that were meant to aid in the formation of a Chicana/o nationalist identity. The frequent representations of the Aztec calendar stone, the mestizo tripartite face, and Mesoamerican pyramids pointed to the ways in which artists consciously sought to develop a visual vocabulary that further stimulated their growing political consciousness in the 1970s. But like any prominent civilization and culture, the Chicano Nation needed not only individual motifs but also obras maestras (masterpieces) that epitomized its spirit and essence, such as Guillermo Aranda's Dualidad and East Los Streetscapers' Chicano Time Trip, murals that are now considered emblems of Chicano nationalist zeal.

Chapter 3 moves into the ambiguous terrain of graffiti art and culture and the ways in which these modes of expression influenced the Chicana/o mural movement and its Indigenous aesthetic. Marcos Sánchez-Tranquilino astutely observed that cultural critics as well as community entities often thought of muralism and graffiti as opposite and contesting systems of visual signification, when in fact the relationship between the two was a dialectical and symbiotic one. The presence of graffiti calligraphy in community murals and the emergence of actual graffiti murals further complicated the mural vs. graffiti dichotomy. In this chapter, I further argue that graffiti calligraphy was particularly influential to Chicana/o muralists because of its similarities with Mesoamerican glyphs; the two generally operate as both image and text, in other words, as sign and signifier simultaneously. Moreover, in Chapter 3, I discuss artists whose work transcends or problematizes the distinction between muralism and graffiti, such as Charles "Chaz" Bojórquez, Esteban Villa, and Posh One, among others. While this volume identifies various individual murals that are important to the history of Chicana/o muralism, in Chapter 4, I discuss the phenomenon of the mural environment. These environments consist of initiatives to create series of murals in close proximity to one another and within a defined and limited space. With these murals, the public is expected to see them not as single works of art, but rather as components of a larger and collective artistic project. The position and iconography of the individual murals within the environment should be understood as functions of one another and in relation to the space in which they reside. I cite the murals in San Diego's Chicano Park, East Los Angeles' Estrada Courts, and San Francisco's Balmy Alley (Mission District) as examples of mural environments, and I interpret their creation as responses to the history of displacement and marginalization traditionally suffered by Mexican and Chicana/o populations in the United States. As such, the mural environment operates for Chicana/o populations as a means to reclaim the spaces historically denied to them. I note that by reappropriating these spaces, Chicana/o muralists were seeking to physically restore the Aztec homeland of Aztlán on U.S. soil.

Though artists, art historians, and critics have traditionally construed muralism as an exclusively male art form, Chicana artists, with their substantial body of work, have radically subverted that belief. Chapter 5 provides a general overview of the contributions made by Chicanas to the history of community muralism in California. The first part of this chapter demonstrates how the mural movement often eroticized and exoticized the bodies of women, and the second part focuses on the actual work produced by women artists.

Finally, Chapter 6 examines the growing heterogeneity that has come to characterize the community mural movement in California. While muralism emerged as a seemingly unified artistic project that represented the spirit of the Chicano Movement, in actuality, mural history develops unevenly through the fragmented subject positions of the artists and the communities they served. There is no one mural Indigenist aesthetic, but rather a multiplicity of complementary and contesting aesthetics. I explore the nature of this heterogeneity by examining various examples of murals throughout California that for numerous reasons challenge traditional and time-honored notions about muralism. For instance, I discuss examples of new and innovative media utilized to create murals, such as recycled materials, performance, and digital technology. I ultimately underscore that, rather than creating a monolithic and static notion of Chicana/o identity through community murals, Indigenism allowed for a dynamic and heterogeneous notion of the indigenous.