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"Chicano art comes from the creation of community. In a society that does not affirm your culture
or your experience Chicano art is making visible our own reality, a particular reality - by doing so we become
an irritant to the mainstream vision. We have a tradition of being viewed as the other; an
unwillingness to disappear."
- artist Judith Baca from Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1991 |
Paralleling a nationalistic desire for the homeland of Aztlán, Chicano artists, through their murals,
were in fact claiming property and territory as specifically Chicano. Murals within the barrio proclaimed
"this land is Chicano," and in doing so, through specific artistic images, laid a specific cultural foundation
to that land. A gathering of murals then created the possibility of political and community activism within
that cultural space. A clear example of the necessity of cultural affirmation for nationalistic, political
ferment is found in the history of Chicano Park in San Diego. During the spring of 1970, the citizens of
Barrio Logan demanded that the city give them land, then destined to become a police substation, to use as
a park. The construction of Highway 5, which divided the barrio, caused a relatively cohesive community
to crumble. Mural artist Salvador "Queso" Torres remembers walking through the concrete pillars of the
highway: "It was such a sad feeling to see [the destruction of my neighborhood], and I thought what could
change this? Ideas began to evolve in my mind, so I started sketching them." Through the creation
of artistic space, artists desired, albeit culturally, to conquer the Anglo intruder, and they approached the
effort as if going into battle: "Chicano artists and sculptors will turn the great columns of the bridge . . . into
things of beauty reflecting Mexican American culture," declared Torres to a growing crowd in 1970 - "We
are ready to die."
Torres quotes from Chicano Park, dir. Marilyn Mulford, Cinema Guild, 1988
and "The Story of Chicano Park," by Eva Cockcroft in Aztlán Vol. 15, No. 1, 1984.
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