..••• CHAPTER FIVE

Raising Community Consciousnesswith Public ArtThe Guadalupe Mural Project

G uadalupe, California, is a small rural town, located at thenon hemmosr rip of Santa Barbara County. Drivers zippingalong Highway I, aiming for the surf at Pismo Beach or the

Mission architect ure in San l uis Obispo some 7'- kilometers (45 miles)away, can cru ise th rough Guadalupe in about ten seco nds flat. After theycross the county line right outside town, they' re usually surp rised thatthe place they've just passed through is even a pan of rich , RepublicanSanta Barbara County.Man y Guada lupe resident s (approx imately 5,479 in the 1990 census)

want eo change those impressions. ' They anti cipate the day when a llthose fleet ing ca rs and RVs will slow down, take a left at leRoy Park,and spend some time savoring one of the best things that their town hasto o ffer: a four-panel mural depicti ng the histori es a nd hopes o f this pri-madly agr icultural, and mostl y Mexican American community (Figs. 48and 49), Designed and painted by Los Angeles artist Judy Baca from1988 to 1989 , in co llaboratio n with literally hundreds of the town's in·habitant s, the ClladalulJe Mural seems to test ify to the possi bilities ofpubl ic art a nd cultural democracy in contempo ra ry America.Baca spenr months in Guadalupe , see ping OUt its streets and psyche.

Headq carrered on Ma in Street in the a bandoned audito rium of theUnited Ancient O rde r o f Dru ids (a defu nct fraternal dub dating to

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Spirit Poles andAying •••

• -i8. Judy a aca..Guodoollpe Murol, Panel I: '1he Founde" of Guathlupe,M1988-89;H (8 feet) by 2.1 meterS (7 feet ), Guadalupe, Calif. Copyright

JudyBaa.

I 88-i), s he sought out public inte res t and input as the essential iugredi-enrs in Guada lupc's f irst pub lic a rtwo rk. "Successfu l integration of apublic artwo rk requires the people envision ing what a mon ument shouldbe in their town," remar ks Beca.! To find ou t what that was in Gua -da lupe, Baca talked with everyone, with Guadal upe's movers and shakoers [the postmistress, the mayo r, tht public health officer ) and with mi-grant laborers and civil rights activists. " I went into the fields and lookPola roids and gave them to the Iarmworkers, " Baca recalls (Fig. So )."They got Interested in what 1 was doing with the mural project andwould come visit me at the Druid Temple, right down the street from allthe restaurants where they ate their lunches and dinners....3

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• 'I'.JudJ 6aca., Murci, Pmel 2: "The Ethnic Contributions,M1988-89:acrylic/panel, 2.4 meten. (8 fMt) by' 2.1 meten (7 feet), Gu.adalupe, Calif. CopyrightJ<><ly Boa.

She ate her meals at those restaurants, too. in the Imperia l Ca fe andthe Far Western Tavern and the Taco loco. She hired teenagers from sev-era l Chicano and Filipino farm families to help collect historical infor-mation and make a town time line. She rephotographed thousand s ofpictures culled from local scrapbooks and school yearbooks, all loanedto the project by interested citizens and arts enthusiasts. Finally shecalled a town meeting and drew on the insights of a d iverse audience tochoose the imagery for each of the 1. . .. - by a. r-roerer (8- by 7-foot) pan-els. Hired by the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission simply topaint a mural. Baca turned Guadal upe's pub lic art project into commu-nity consciousness-raising. "The processes of coming into, understand-

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·- -> • so. Judy Baa in fields with farmwort.:ers. Fall 1988. CopyrfJht Judy Saa.

ing, and successfully mobilizing an entire community," writes crinc andart ist Suzanne Lacy, "a ne intrinsic aspects o f :1 complex artwo rk, aIIpa rts o f which d early bear the stamp of Baca's socio-aesrheric inten-tion..,4But in the process o f creating community through public a rt, Baca did

not armcipare how a symbol o f civic pride and solida rity would a lso be-come so highly prized as an art object. Meant for Lekoy Par k, in a spe-d ally designed gazebo in front of the town's community cente r, theGuadalupe Mural is currently insta lled at City Hall. Many Gca dalu-peans say that that 's JUSt temporary, until enough money is raised tobui ld the mural shelter in the park; funds from the Sant a Barbar aCounty Parks Depa rtment to aid with the park 's rehabilita tion werewithdrawn oudproject, and residents arc now ra ising the money com-plerely on their own. Others feel that the mura l should stay at City Hall ."A lot o f peop le are worried that it might get damaged, vanda lized, if itgoes into that park, " Mayor Renaldo (Rennie) Pili remarks. "They say itis so beautiful that they want it to sta y here, at City Hall, where it can beprotected."Issues of agency of how people make and remake their lives, thei r

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identities, and their sociocultural and political environments, are centralto contemporary debates surrounding public ar t. If artists, governmentarts agencies, and corporate sponsors tend to devalue the dialogue anddebate necessary in the development of public a rt, the model that Judy8aca followed with the Guadalupe Mural was clearly that of communityengagement. Still, while she treated Guadalupe's public ar t process as aforum for civic dialogue, the town's focus on the mural's preciousnessmay have tempered its own political and public agency.

The Guadalupe Mural project started in 1987, when EI Comite CrvicoMexicano de Guadalupe (known locally as the Comire) took on atwenty-year lease to manage and maintain leRoy Park, a I .a-hectare (3-acre) park and community center at the western edge of town. Locatedabo ut a block off Main Street (most of Guadalupe, in fact, is concen-trated in a square kilometer and a half [1 square mile) along MainStreet), the park was officially under the jurisdiction of the Santa Bar-bara County Parks Department. Rife with spray paint and broken glass,viewed as "an eyesore and a disgrace to the county park system," thepark had been more or less abandoned by both the county and the city.sleRoy Park was a teen hot spot, the place where local kids liked to sa.

cialize, drink beer, and tag some graffiti. Aside from schoo l and churchfunctions, there was little organized activity for Guadalupe's kids; exceptfor the bars along Main Street and the weekly bingo game at City Han,there weren't many places besides leRoy Park where they could hangout. Some outs iders (especially those in Santa Barbara] suspiciouslyviewed l eRoy Park's youthful habitues as crack-selling, gun-toting gangmembers; in contemporary America, it seems, any group of kids largerthan twa hysterically gets labeled a gang. Most Guadalupeans laughedat the idea of local gang activity (Guadalupe has never seen any drive-byshootings or Uzi fusillades), and many rightfully bristled at racist accusa-tions likening their Mexican American community to a rural outpos t forjuvenile terrorism. They knew that leRoy Park was teen central inGuadalupe, and that some teens had contributed to its vandalism. Theyalso knew not to confuse teen angst with gang warfare.Members of the Comire, a nonprofi t group that started in 192.} with

the goal of promoting Mexican American culture and recreation, wereeager to refurbish the park and the community center (built in 1955),and to provide some outlets for Guadalupe's kids. In 1980 Guada lupe'spopulation was three-quarters Mexican, and leRoy Park was their pri-mary public space: the site of frequent quincenedas [traditional "coming

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Spirit Pdes and ffyin& f'I&s •••

out" celebrations for teenage girls), Sunday rardeadas (social gatheringswith live music and food boo ths), and, especially, Fiestas Patrias (three-day festivals with parades held every year around September 16, com-memorari ng Mexican Independence Day). Basketball games, wrestlingmatches, wedding receptions, and family reunions had once been com-mon at leRoy Park 's community center, but by the mid-198os the van-dalized and dete riorating building was deemed unsafe and unusable.The Comlte aimed at cleaning up the park and building a better com-

munity center, add ing an auditorium and theate r, rest rooms, and din ingand day-care facilities. They also wanted to have some SOrt of mural, ahistory of Guadalupe, displayed at the park in an outdoor gazebo or'"colonnade covering the sidewalk to the community center's front doo r.Seeking fOf'iloR.oy... ParFs rejuvenation, the Comite turned to twounty agencies-the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission and the>-Parks Department. To their surprise, both pledged substantial financialsupport for the mural project: $1.0,056 from the Arts Commission andabout $15,000 from the Parks Department, which a lso promised 10 sub-sid ize leRoy Park's predicted $400,000 refurbishment COSts.Santa Barbara County prevailed throughout the 1980s as one of

America's wealthiest districts, a lthough almost all its money was concen-trated in the south-in Santa Barbara, an upscale oceanside resort witha population of about 75,000, some 104 kilometers (65 miles) south ofGuada lupe. Self-procla imed birthplace of the hot tub and the Egg Mc-Muffin, center stage for one of daytime TV's most popul ar-and gfirai-est-soaps, host to Nancy and Ronald Reagan (whose Rancho del Cielowas JUSt 46.7 kilometers 119 miles) away), and cbcckful of a ffl uent re-nrees, in the 19805 Santa Barbara embodied Reagan-era prosperity andprivilege. "The re is litt le or no industry here," wrote one resident-jour-nalist, "and everyone seems to be wor king, full-time, on his life-style."Not exactly everyone's lifestyle: In the 19805Santa Barbara was also thesite of one of America's "most poisonous" batt les over homelessness.When the city too k aggressive measures to ban outdoo r camping andsleeping for the town's ) ,000 or so "vagrants" and tried to deny votingrights to those without an address, homeless activists reacted by march-ing on the Reagan ranch and raking their case to the U.S. SupremeCourt.' Santa Barbara's Shangri-Ia-Ia image was further tarnished by thehuge Chevron derricks that were erected in the early 1980$ on ly a thou-sand meters offshore, and their attendant oi l spills.Guada lupe was-and remains-Santa Barba ra's antithesis. Situated in

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the fertile Santa Maria Valley along California's central coast. Guada-lupe revolves almost entirely around agriculture. Multiple crops of let-tuce, cauliflower, artichokes, and strawberries arc: grown annually, andthe town prides itself on being "the broccoli capital of the world." In1980 dry statistics claimed a median income of S I ",4 1.4, but a majoriryof Guadalupeans are Iarmworkers, and in 1988 the average annua l in-come for a farmworker household (approximately s.) persons, with oneprimary wage earner) in Guadalupe was S I ),4 16, or about S1,000 lessthan the federal guidelines that year for an impoverished household.Moreover, as ant hropologist Victor Garcia discovered, in the 1980s resi-dent farmworkers in Guadalupe (as those in California's other Chicano!Mexican agricultural enclaves) were largely displaced by migrant labor-ers who were contracted at much lower wages and whose numbers-and annual household incomes-were not the stuff of officia l statistics.7Simply in terms of 1980s economics, the contrast between the two

towns could not have been greater: Santa Barbara brashly embodiedReagan-era wealth and arrogance; Guadalupe-where hundreds of farm-workers tried to survive underemployment, unemployment, and lowwages-showed the broader impact of the so-called Reagan Revolution.Before the Guadalupe Mural project, little of Santa Barbara County'swealth ever reached this northernmost part of the district; indeed, leRoyPark's planned restoration was the first time in years that county agen-cies had even expressed any interest in Guadalupe's public and cultura lwelfare.Guadalupe had not always been so impoverished or insignificant, as

Baca and the townspeople found when they sifted through local historysearching for stories and themes that might shape the mural. Locatedjust 8 kilometers (s miles) from the Pacific Ocean, the area was onceflush with Chumash Indians, whose shell middens can still be foundalong the Nipomo Dunes, a 2.9-kilometer (l 8-mile) stretch of stunningcoastline (with the highest beach dunes in the western United States)now managed by the Nature Conservancy. The background of themural's initial panel shows the local dunes and features a large portraitof a Chumash hunter wearing an elaborate abalone necklace: (see Fig.48). "Tbe Indian is an appari tion," Baca notes. "You can't paint himsolid. or he' ll stop looking like a spirit and mote like a mud monster.".Similarly ghostlike, a brown bear-the Chumash totem- peeks frombehind. Brown bears were once plentiful in the dunes and hills fringingGuadalupe; locally they are commemorated at Oso Flaco ("skinny

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5f)lrit Poles and Flying Pip •••

bear " ) Lake outside town, which Baca painted on [he picture's right side.The remainder of the first panel, called "The Founders of Ouada-

lupe," concentrates on the town's Hispanic roots-and quite literally:Evok ing historical links and relationships, plaerlike forms leech fromthe lettuce fields and the adobe house in the panel 's center and reachfor the Chumash Indian on the left and the vaqueros (cattle handlers ) onthe right. Named after Mexico 's patron saint (Nuesera Senora 101 Virgende Guadalupe), Rancho Guadalupe was a 13, 12j-hectare (32,408-acre)land grant given in 1840 to Teodoro Arellanes and Don Diego Olivera ,who int roduced cattle to the region; Arellanes can be seen roping steersat the right . The redwood shingle- roo fed adobe houses they built nearthe site of roday's Park we among the earliest in Califo rnia, andBaca in the midd le of the panel. Here she

the loca l legend of rwo lovers-an Anglo soldier and anIndian woman-so passionately romantic they burst into flames. Bacathinks the ta le proba bly stems from memories of John Fremont's 1846expedit ion into the area, which left the Guada lupe adobes razed and theChumash population decimated. The Arellanes and Olivera families re-built, but in the 18705 rhe ranch was sold to Teodore leRoy, a Frenchtrader and bank agent who founded the town of Guadalupe around theorigina l adobes and subdivided the ranch into farming plots.In 1881 leRoy donated 1.6 hectares (3.9 acres) of his land " for the

use and enjoyment of the inhabitants of the Village of Guadalupe forrecreat ion and healthful amusements." Th e deed further stipulated thatthe park's trustees were responsible for preventing and exclud ing "all ri-otous and disorderly persons and all conflicts and Despitesuch provisos leRoy Park, not unlike Guada lupe itself, was occasionallythe site of violent, usually racially motivated, outbursts. One of the park'slarger oaks, for instance, was called the "hanging tree" and was used. [Qlynch several Chinese wo rkers brough t into the area in the 18905 tobuild the Southern Pacific Railroad . Banned from residential areas of thecommunity, those Chinese laborers who remained in Guadalupe openedshops along Main Street and lived above or in back of their businesses.The second panel of the C lJadalllpe Mural (see Fig. 49) tells the sto ry

of the town's d iverse erhn iciry and its long history of racial conf lict. Dur-ing the Gilded Age, Guadalupe's fertile soil att racted Chilean, English,Italian , Peruvian, Portuguese, Scotch, and Swiss-Italian immigrant s whooperated family farms and da iries. The railroad opened in 190 1, andGuadalupe became a major center for vegetable shipping, alth ough it

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••• RaisinI Community Consclousness

was always overshadowed by Santa Mar ia, a town 11..8 kilometers (8miles) away and more in the middle of the valley's numerous farms.Packing sheds and ice docks were built close to Guadal upe's rail yards,employing hundreds of farmwcrkers and shipping thousands of carloadsof produce annually to metropolitan markers. Beet production for UnionSugar (now Holly Sugar), a la rge facto ry established in nearby Betteraviain 1897, was met by Japanese farmers who, within a few decades, dcrni-nat ed area agriculture.Circumvent ing antia lien landownership laws by purchasing property

under the names of their Amer ican-born children, Japanese workersowned more than half Guadal upe's farmland and constituted more thanS 1 percent of the city's population by 1940. Many lefr farm labor andset up businesses along Main Street: H. Y. Kata yama owned a successfuljewelry Store; Harold Shimizu managed the city's Chevrolet franchise.Sersuo Ararani (aka "The Boss") was the era's most prom inent grower,and Tani Vegetables were once a dieta ry staple throughout Ca lifornia.Guada lupe's richest resident, Ararani donated several hectares of hisown land in the late 191.0$ 10 the Guadalupe Jo int Union GrammarSchool to build a baseball diamond , then sponsored a local team's tourof Asia . "Marvelous has been the sense of responsibility of our Japanesefriends," boasted the priest of Our Lady of Guada lupe, the town'sCa tholic church, in 19) 6. "Towards their fellow cit izens, they have beenfair, honest , and sincere." IOYet by March 1941. most of Guadalupe'sjapanese popu latio n were incarcera ted at internment camps in Califo r-nia and Urah. Few returned to Guada lupe after the war, especially aherlearning that much of their property had hem seized by other localgrowers and merchants.Framed by a view down Guadalupe's Main Street, the second mural

panel shows the Druid Temple and the Community Service Center onthe left, and the City of Guada lupe water tower, Nero's Bakery, theImperial Cafe, and the 1894 S. Campodonico building, once thetown's largest general sto re, on the right. In the background another viewof the dunes shows how they were used when silent fi lm directors shotdesert scenes for movies such as The Ten Commandments (192) }, TheThief of Baghdad ( 1924), and Son of the Sheik (19261. The "City ofthe Pharaoh " set for Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments,the largest silent movie set ever constructed, was built and buried inthe sands of Guada lupe; currently a Hollywood group is t rying to raisefunds for an archaeological excava tion of the site, now littered with the

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Spirit Poles and Arinc PIp •••

remains of rwenry or so giant sphinxes and severa l rc .r -merer {JS-foot )sta tues o f Phar aoh Ramses.'! Fixing Guadalupe's moments of moviefame in the back of the mura l panel, Baca filled the foreground wit h por-traits of contemporary Chicano and Filipino Guada lupeans.This second panel, ca lled "The Ethnic Cont ributions," is further filled

with blue-green ghosts-figures from Guadalupe's past inte rminglingwith the town 's present-day residents. The ghost of a sma ll Chi nese girlreaches out to grab the hand of a Mexican child being tugged down thestreet by her farmwo rker mom - ident ified by a gimme cap with aUnited Farm Workers (UFW) logo (Fig. 51). The ghost o f a G.1. rests hisfoot on a red Toyota pickup. The ghost o f Feod oro Arellanes rides ahor se down the main stree t of the town he helped found. The ghost o f aDru id peeks from his former temple rooftop, while next door j ohn Perrystands in front of t".c: N.t.P. auto-panr store he manages. The ghos t of

bOlding a da ted .. t941." and with a tag on his£' back reail ing "Ma nzanar" and "Topaz" (the rwo inte rnment campswhere most of Guadal upe's j apanese citizens, includ ing Aratani, wereimprisoned du ring World War 11 ) gazes at the figures commanding thepanel's foregro und: Manuel Magana (the Comiee's current head ), ayouthful po rt rai t o f Ariston julian (Guadalupe's director of publichealt h), and a farmwo rke:r (also wearing a UFW gimme cap). Otherghostsof Filipino, Mexican , and Okie descent-a ll of whom found farmwork in Guadal upe in the t 92.OS and 1930$, when large-sca le: vegetablegrowing intens ified-sta nd on street corners watching co ntemporaryfield workers, lunch boxes in hand, and j inn ie Ponce, Guada lupe's post-mist ress, str ide to work , Mixing the blue-green ghosts of the past withfigures from the present , Baca illustrat ed Guada lupe's racia lly diverse yetinterl inked history, remind ing viewers that yesterday's racial conflictsconti nue to shape attitudes and behaviors.The elimination of j apanese workers in t942. created a huge labor

shortage, remedied for several decades by the Bracero Program (194 2.-1964), an "emergency" bilateral labor ag reement between Mexico andthe United States that brought tho usands of Mexican migrants into Cali-fornia agriculture on six-month visas. Guada lupe's ag roindusma l econ-omy boomed in the postwa r years, and thousands o f braceros were em-ployed in the fields and packing sheds, as well as in the fifteen o r so areaagri businesses ranging from flower and vegetable seed processing plantsto fertilize r factories. Even afte r the program was terminated , Gua da-lupe's Mexican pop ulat ion climbed-from 18.6 percent in 1960 to 75.0

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• •• 1QiVl& Community Consciousness

• 51. JudySua, GuodolJpe Mural, detail Panel 2: "The Ethnk: Contributions."Copyright Judy & ca.

percent in 1980 and 8).0 percent in 1990-a5 fermworkers f lowed intothe area in search of jobs. During the bracero era they had often lived inlabor camps provided by th e growers; when the program ended the cityof Guadalu pe saw massive Mex ican sett lement, and whitt' flight tonewer housing developments in nea rby Santa Maria. With on ly a hand-ful of growers and ag ribusinesses owning most of th e farmland.Guada lupe in a sense became a bedroom community for the region 'sfarm laborers. The mural's third pan el, «T he- Parmworkers o f Guada -lupe" (Fig. 52). focuses on the Mexicansc--and also the numerous Pili-pinos-who came to work in th e vegetable fields and remained to live- intown,It shows a typical cauliflower harvest crew organized around a mobile

field appa ratus-a gigantic machine that facilitates the cutti ng, bagging,packi ng, and loa ding of vegeta bles. Sta rting in tht' 1950S growers hadtu rned to field packing, a process of harvesting and packing vegetables inthe field , which eliminates the need for packing sheds and their crews.Each season huge field -pack ing apparatuses ente r the Santa Maria

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SpiritP'*s and Ffyinr; Pip •••

• S2. Judy Baea,. ""'rot Panel J: "The of Guadalupe."1988-89: acrytidpanel. 1.4 meters (8 feet) by 1.1 meters (1 feet). GuadWpe..Calif.COJ'Yri&ht Judy 8aca.

Va lley. Cutters-mostly men-walk in back of an apparatus. which ispulled across the fields by a tracto r. They cut, trim, and tOSS cauliflowerheads onto the conveyor belt, where baggers-mostly female-wrapthem in plastic bags marked with company logos. They usually bagtwenty to rwenry-five heads per minute. Packers behind them grab theplastic-wrapped heads and place them in cartons, assembled by oneworker and loaded onto pallets by another. In this panel the packers andloaders, and the tractor, a re obscured by the rows of cauliflower cartons,often sucked twelve high.In the picture's background lush acres of harvest-ready vegetab les

bump up against Guadalupe's hills, while farmworkers up front place

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••• Raising Community Consciousness

cauliflower heads onto an endless blue belt. A fema le worker on theright wears a red banda nna decorated with symbols of the Virgin ofGuadalupe. Above these views Baca painted an enormous orange arch, aro lling conveyor with six old-style wooden crates {replaced in today'sfields by waterproo f cardboard cartons). Each crate has a colorful pic-tu re postcard-like label with a typical scene from Oil Guadalupe farm-worker's daily life. Each has a cheerful "greeting," the visualization, saysBaca, of the "Mexican radio voice," the boom ing, cheesy speech thatbellows from the border radio stations tha t many field workers tune into when they get off wo rk."Bienvenidos" ("Welcome" ) shows the typical farmworker's arrival in

town after hopping a freight, bedroll and belongings in tow; "Vivienda '"("Accommoda tions"') shows the overcrowded and unsanitary conditionsof migran t housi ng; " EI Sueldo" (loosely transl ated as "Wages") shows apicker swearing pennies from a handful of freshly harvested srrawber-ries; "Neblina Peligrosa " ("Dangerous Fog" shows the toxic pesticidesand fertilizers that helped generate Guadalupe's agricultu ra l bonanzabut now dangerously affect the hea lth of farmworkers- and of thewhole town; "Dolor de la Espalda" (" Back Pain" ) shows the backbreak-ing stoo p-and-cur labor of lettuce picking; and "Ayuda Exrran jera" (lit-t rally translated as "Foreign Aid" ) shows the farmworker writ ing a let-rer and sending a monty order-probably most of his wages-to hisfami ly in Mexico. Most of Guada lupe's cauliflower and broccoli crewsart resident farmworkers, but lerruce, strawberry, and a rtichoke crewsconsist of migrant s who move from one harvest site to the next th rough -out Centra l Ca lifornia and claim Mexico as their borne.Despite local grumbling today that Cesar Chavez "just co uldn't orga-

nize farm labo r" in Guada lupe, in the 19705 resident farmworkers sawbette r pay and improved working conditions as a result of UFW activismin the area. In the recessionary 1980s, however, growe rs fought the f i-nancial (and political) impact of such union success with agribusinesscontractors, who organized migrato ry crews of undcxumented, mini-mum-wage, workers. This, and the to tal shift to field packing (the last ofGuadalupe's packing sheds was torn down in the early 1980s1 so dra-matica lly affected the local economy that by the mid-198os the onceflourishing City of Guadal upe was suffering serious economic blight.Today mor t crops than ever are harvested in the Santa Maria VaUt y, butless agricu ltu ra l work has become avai lable for resident farmwcrkers,Guadalupe's majo rity population. Dependeor on, yet displaced from

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Spirit Poles and flying Pigs •••

• 51 Judy Raca. Guodolupe: Murol, Panel 04: "The Fuwre o( Guada lupe," 1988--8';acrylic/panel, 2.04 mete rs (8 (eet) by 2.1 mete rs (7 (eet), Guadalupe , Cala. CopyrightJudy Boo.

farm labor, Guadal upe's resident farmworkers now work sporad ically,and fo r significantly lower wages than a decade ago , as " reserve labor"when con tractor-hired migrants are unava ilable. Still committed to thevalue and integrity of "hard work," they supplement their incomes atarea fast-food restaurants and Wal-Mans and speak harshly of those"who can work but prefer to go on governrr ene-rehef.t "! Still commit-ted to American prom ises of opportunity and equality, they dream of abetter futu re for their families and their community.The Guadalupe Mltrafs founh panel (Fig. 5.3 ), titled "The Future of

Guada lupe," depicts those dreams . It is dominated by a female angel,copied from one of the large nineteenth-centu ry marble tombstones so il

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• 5'4. Rod Rolle , StnlWberryPrdd ofDreom$, 1988. PhotOof female fll rmwor1<er witht».by In field. Photo: Rod Rolle.

standing in the Guada lupe Cemetery. Perched amid that cemetery, hcrbody is circled by symbols o f plenty and privation, by scenes o f Gua -dalupe's lush fields and its dilapidated shacks- rough wooden huts builtfor migrant laborers in the 191.05 and still inhabited . Her real-life coen-rerparr, a female fannworker with a baby fi rmly snuggled to her back, isseen at the left of the panel , stooping and cutting an infinite loop of ver-dam crops . Field conditions are extremely dangerous-workers [ell oflosing fingers and limbs , of being dusted by pesticides and getting badheada ches and rashes- but, without adequate day-care opportunities o rthe money [ 0 pay for sitters, many women must bring their babies [ 0 thefields (Fig. 54). Making direct eye cceracr with the viewe r, the angelbeckons us into Guadalupe 's wo rld. Her hands spill an invit ing stream ofunpolluted water, a symbol of nourishment indica tive o f Guadalupe'sbounty and potentialGuada lupe's angel spreads her wings over the town, its seemingly end-

less and unchanging cycle of harv est, farm work, and poor housing at

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her feet. Her ancillary wings picture the dreams o f the female: farm-worker, dr eams shared by all Guadalupeans: affordab le hea lth cart, im-proved living condi tions, bette r schools, a healthy environment. Eachwing shows a specific scene: a doctor listening [ 0 the heartbea t of a farm-worker; a planned residential community; a boy kicking a socce r ball ata new high schoo l; a tern and several otte rs-some of the area's rare andendangered animals- thriving at the Nipomo Dunes. Like the otherpanels, the mural's final picture features specific local derails-Gua-dalupe 's hills in the: background, its cemetery in the center, its fields andshacks-c-ehar ground those dreams in the rea lity of local circ umsta nces.Guadalupe's future is nor, in other words, Baa 's vision of a utopianidea l but 3 hopeful poss ibil'o' prisobl and public desiresfor civic a;;--a;ommunity agency,In each of"them ura l's fou r panel s, Baca dr ew on specific formal de-

vices that help the audience become hooked into her socia l and po litica lagenda. Each panel is large and brigh tly colored, with a cent ra l composi -tional focu s tha t draws viewers into scenes of Guadalupe past, present,and futu re. Th ree of the four panels are st ructured with dominant fore-ground figu res (the Chumash Indian, Manuel Magana, the female farm-worker] who help guide viewers to look deeper in. The final panel ismissing that fo regro undcd fo rma l element (the angel occupies a middle-ground posit ion ), perha ps because Baca wanted to encourage viewers toguide themselves th rough the picture and personally consider the soc ialand political action required to create Guadalupe 's futu re.Colored, of course, by public input , the fourth mural panel was also

shaped by Baca 's analysis of Guadalupe 's recent histo ry. In 19 7 0 Mexi-ca ns and Mexican Americans made up over 66 percent of Guada lupe 'spopulatio n, yet the police fo rce, city government, and school boa rd wereprimarily Anglo. Racial tensions heated up as angry parents confrontedthe school board about the segrega tio n of Mexican and Anglo pupils,the excessive use o f co rpo ral punishment for Mexican students , thepaucity o f Spanish-speaking reachers and bilingual education, and thefact that 10 0 percent of the students in special education classes were o fMexican ancestry. Arlsron j ulian , who went to Guadalupe'S junior highin the 1960s, recalls reachers telling rhe child ren o f loca l growers " to situp front and lead th e rest o f the class, beca use they would lead the com-munity when they grew up."Anger boiled over in 1972, when studen ts wal ked out o f school

protesting cond itions and when , 011 a PTA meeting a few mont hs lateE:, ten

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people were arrested for "disturbing a public meeting." Police reports re-veal that the arr ests were motivated by fears that " radica l" UFW andBrown Beret activists had linked arms with Mexican parents to take overthe school, and maybe the town. Eventually, while seven of the Guada-lupe Ten were found guilty and served time in jail, the California StateAdvisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in a lengthymonograph titled The Schools of Guadalupe. _. A Legacy of Educe-tiona! Oppression, concluded that the school district had indeed grosslyviolated Mexican American civil rights, and superintendent KermitMcKenzie resigned (after forty-two years in the dismcn.'! Ironically, inthe 1980s Guadalupe's Junior High School was named after Mcxeeeie.The case of the Guadalupe Ten was a turn ing point in the town 's life.

Encouraged by the success of the UFW and the growing political powerof the Chicano movement, Guadalupeans pressed for significant institu-tional changes; by 1975 bilingual teachers and classes, for example, hadbeen added to the distr ict. The case pushed the town (or at least theschool board) to confront its racism. It also stimulated outsider views ofGuada lupe as deeply divided and debased. A "three-year investigationinto alleged prostitution, drug trafficking and public corruption" led tothe infamous-Guadalupe Raid of J983, when more than 130 police offi-cers, Santa Barbara County sheriff's deputies, and DEA and FBI agents-in seventy police cars and several helicopters-stormed the town insearch of whores, dope, and political payoffs. While some prostitutesand pot were uncovered, the sting of the century came off as a scene outof Police Academy when only eighteen arrests were made (two on out-standing traffic warrants), and most charges were later dismissed. An-other raid, in 1986, led to forty-six arrests- most for illegal immigra-don." Still, media appetites through the 19805 continued to exaggerateGuadalupe as the ViceCapita l of Central California in hysterical head-lines and exposes."Guadalupe is like other small towns,It comments Julian. " Its bad rep-

utation was enhanced by its minoriry reputation. There was lots of un-rest because Mexicans were the new presence in an older community. "Some reacted to Mexican demands for equality by reasserting their ownauthority-naming the junior high after McKenzie, for example. Otherxenophobes alarmed by Guadalupe's swelling minority population auto-matically equated Mexicans with mari juana and money laundering andused those popular racist stereotypes to their own advantage; it is inter-esting how Guada lupe's raids always seemed to occur during the county

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sheriff's reelection campaign. likewise, overstated accounts of a Guada-lupe Carte l came primari ly from newspapers in Santa Maria-thetown's economic rival since the turn of the century, Equally sensational-ized reports of Guadalupe's guerrilla gangs stemmed from outside r octo-genarians chilled by glimpses of Mexican American teens "hanging outin LeRoy Park and doing god knows what." By 1988, when Judy Bacaarrived, Guadal upe, once described as "the most progressive little townin Santa Barba ra County," was widd y conside red a cesspool of criminal-ity.U Worse it, c;l?u ldn'[ its new mean streets image:Stricken n of agribusiness and the consequences of racialstruggles and racism, Guada lupe seemed to have succumbed to historica lamnesia and forgonen the labor and educatio n gain s made on ly a fewyears ea rlier.EJ Comitr Civico Mexicano de Gua da lupe: hoped to revive the town's

civic sp irit with their refurbishmen t of leRoy Park , and they turned toBaca for help. Well known as a " muralist, act ivist, and spokesperson forthe Hispan ic community," Baca has utilized publ ic art as a means tocommunity engagement since the late 19605, when she began paint ingmura ls in Ease Los Angeles. A second-generation Mexican American,born (in 1949) and raised in Southern Cal ifornia, Baca had experiencesnot unlike those of Guadal upe's resident farmworkers: "When I wentinto the school system, I was forbidden to speak Spanish.... In elemen-tary schoo l, most o f the Spanish-spc:aking kids were trea ted like theywere reta rded and held back. I thought to myself, they ' re not going to beable to do this to me. I'm go ing to learn what they' re sa ying." Hermother encouraged her: " Like a lor o f immigran t people, she felt tha t ed-ucation was the key if I was to avoid suffering the kind of things that shehad suffered." She a lso encou raged Baca's pursuit o f a pragmatic, so-cially responsible art: "My family d idn't want me [ 0 be an artist beca use:it was a crazy thi ng to be. What impact does your art have on real life? Ith ink a loe of the ethic seeped into me: it 's not good enough just to be anartist. .. . What does it mean to the people you live around? So in co l-lege I also mino red in history and in education." I'Graduating from Californ ia State University, No rthridge, in 1969,

Baca taught school and then headed the Citywide Mural Project , a LosAngeles City Council-funded outfit that eventually produced more than:tjO murals in var ious L.A. neighborhoods (Baca herself directed morethan I SOof them). Citywide was advised by SPARC (the Social and Pub-lic Art Resource Cente r), wh ich broke off in 1976 to become a mulncul-

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••• Raising Community Consciousness

• 55. Judy Baa, GrtcJt lM:lI o(Los An,eks. 1976-8) ; oYerview of 762 meters (2.soofeet) Iont in Tujunp Wash Flood Conuol Channel. Van Nuys, Calif. CopyrightJudy&a.

rural arts center commirred ro "producing, exhibiting, distributing, andpreserving" public art. Under Baca's direction SPARC has involved hun-deeds of artists and community groups in public an projects rangingfrom AIDS awareness exhibits to multimedia programs on drug rrear-mem. The Grear Walls Unlimited: Neighborhood Pride program ofSPARC has produced 50 murals in locales from Venice Beach and Litt leTokyo to Hollywood and Sourb-Central. As testimony to the "grassrootsprocess of public involvement" that shapes these murals, not one wasdamaged during the L.A. Uprising of 1992.17The largest project SPARe has undertaken . and the work for which

Judy Baca is probably besr known, is the Great Wall of Los A"geles, amammoth mural in Van Nuys (Fig. 55)' In the mid-1970S Baca was ap-proached by the U.S. Army Co rps of Engineers at the outset of theirreclamation of the Tujunga Wash Flood Control Channel in the San Fer-nando ValJey. In the '930S the corps had chan nelized rhe Los AngelesRiver, lining the riverbed with concrete and constructing Ilood -conrrol

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Spirit Poles ;and AyinJ Pies •••

ditches some 4.6 meters (15 feer) deep and 1.:1.9 meters (75 feet) wide.This hardening of the river's arteries actuall y caused more flooding, leftunusable dirt belts on each side of the channels, and divided the city intodistinct ethnic nelghbor hoods-c-Chicano, African American , Asian, andAnglo. Fifty years later, blending land preservation with civic improve-ment, the corps began turn ing rhese channel grounds into recreationareas with small parks and bike paths. Because of her success with City-wide, Baca was hired to pain! what would become the world 's largestmural -4.} meters (14 feet) ta ll and 762..0 meters (2.,500 feet) long inthe (1000 control chann el.The Great Wall is a "monumentally scaled history painting depict ing

the panorama of events that contributed to LosAngeles' distinctive pro-file."'1 A visual hisrc ry of California, the mural emphasizes the role ofracial minorities. Baca conceived the epic wall as a paiming describingthe diverse communities of LosAngeles: "When I fi rst saw the wall, I en-visioned a long narrative of another history of California; one which in-cluded ethnic peoples, women and minorities who were so invisible inconventional textbook accounts. The discovery of Califo rnia's mulricul-rured peop les was a revelation to me." \' The San Ferna ndo Valley, homeof "Valley Girls" and a fierce ant ibusing coalition, was the destinat ion ofAnglos fleeing inner-city Los Angeles in the 1950S. With the Great Wall,Baca, who grew up in nearby Pacoima, proposed to restore to publicconscio usness the area's d iverse ethnic and cultural histo ry.The cont ent of the mural easily conveys that history. Viewed by walk-

ing or biking along a path parallel to the wash channel or by drivingalong adjacent Coldwater Canyon Avenue, the mura l opens with scenesof prehistor ic creatures in the La Brea rar pits and currently closes withpictures of African American and Chicano Olympic cham pions from1948 to 1964. Chumash theology and industry dominate early muralpanels, and the destruction of Nat ive American culture is depicted inscenes of the arr ival of the Spanish; a derail shows a huge white hand up-rooting a native durin g the Span ish conquest. Colonization, Mexicanrule, and the presence of Catholic missionar ies continue the story. TheTreaty of Guadalupe: Hidalgo, by which Mexico ceded Southern Califor-nia to the United Sta tes in 1848, is followed by srerehood , the gold rush.massive immigration from Europe: and Asia, the building of the railroadwith Chinese labor, and the beginnings of woman suffrage.Twenoeth-century scenes trace the early years of the aviation and

movie industries, Prohibition, and the impact of the Great Depression on

• 56. Judy Baca, Gtecn WoI. 1976-83, detail: "Depomtion 01 Mexican-Americans."Copyri&tlt Judy Baa..

various ethnic groups: blacks segregated in South-Central, Indians sell-ing their land for ferry-fi ve cents an acre, and the H O,o OO MexicanAmericans deponed to make room for Dust Bowl refugees (Fig. 56). The1940S are demarcated by scenes of the j apanese Fighting H l.nd, themOSI decorated infantry division of the U.s. Army during World War IJ(Fig. 57 ). and of their families exiled 10 California imemmem camps inManzanar and Tule Lake. Women working in factories are juxtaposedwith the helmets of dead soldiers. Other 19405 panels include j eannetteRankin, Inc only member of Congress to vote in opposition to a declare-tion of war against j apan, and the building of the California Aqueduct ,which aided developers by tr ansporting water from north to south hutcreated a desert in the Owens Valley. The mural's fi nal sections rangefrom the baby boom and white flight to McCarthyism and the civilrights movement, with cultural referents to Elvis, Charlie Par ker, and BigMama Thornton. The Great Wall currently ends with positive picturesof opportunities found and rights gained by minorities in the 19505 and

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SpIrit Poles FlyingPip •••

• 57. JudySac&,Gmn WoII, 1976-83, deuil: Amef'iQ n Fighting 112MRegimenQl Combit Copyright Judy&0. .

I960s., and Baca hopes eventually 10 include Los Angeles's recent historyand projecr irs image in the next millennium.Scattered throughout the Creal Waif are the names of those who

helped plan and paint it. Although Baca is ofren given sole artistic creditfor the Van Nuys mural, hundreds aided in determining its nar rativestructure and overall aesthetic. In addition to a handful of arts profes-sionals and consultants, Baca recruited 2 15 teenagers ro work on thewall du ring the summer months of 1976, 1978, 1980 , and 1. 98 ).Treating the Great Wall as an educational project and a vehicle for "therehabilitation of self-esteem," she hired kids ranging in age from four-teen to rwenry-ooe as artistic contributors and cclla borators.P Theirethnic and racial backgrounds varied; many were gang members or onproba tion. The Mural Makers, as they called themselves, received in-struction in drawing and painting and were taught math skills orientedto grid making and design. Job counseling and drug therapy were alsoprovided. Mondays through Thursdays the crews worked on (he mural,completing almost 30 5 meters (1,000 feet) during the first summer. On

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••• Raisirl& Community ConKioosness

Fridays Baca arranged for university teachers and community act ivists todiscuss ethnic history, economics, and politics with the kids. Combiningtheir art training with ideas about cultural self-determination, the Mu ralMak ers researched and designed much of the Great Wall.Baca insisted that they be paid for their work, knowing " it nor only

gives them sorely needed income but also tells them their work is valu-ab le to the community."21 Initially a LosAngeles youth counseling groupcalled Project HEAVY (Human Effons at Vitalizing Youth ) made itsCETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) monies availableto Bace's teams. But in the 1980$, when neoconservative politics domi-nated and social service dollars were axed nationwide, salaries were paidwith grants from the ational Endowment for the Arts, the CaliforniaCouncil for the Humanities, and the Los Angeles Olympic OrganizingCommittee and donations from local businesses. However, because ofprohibitive insurance rates and a lack of dependable fi nancing, work onthe Great Wall came to a halt in 1983- about the same time that a simi-lar sort of antipublic, antiethnic backlash occurred in Guadalupe:.Involvement with the Great Wall provided youths with summer jobs,

and, equally important, as Mural Maker Todd Ableser wrote in 1983, itgenerated "feelings of identity and pride": "After my first year on themural, I left with a sense of who I was and what I could do rhar was un-like anything I'd ever felt before. The feeling came from . .. seeing whatI was personally capable of at a time in my life when my self-confidencehad been extremely low." Baca is proud to tell the success stories of theMural Makers she has guided through the Great Wall, which trans-formed not only the Tujunga Wash Flood Control Channel but also thelivesof hundreds of former juvenile delinquents. Like lim Rollins's col-laboration with K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) in the Bronx, Baca's work withthe Great Walrs Mural Makers helped unleash potentia l and empowe r agroup that many had declared irredeemable .PThe Great Wall cata lyzed a tremendous feeling of group conscious-

ness, of community, among the Mural Makers, many of whom returnedyear after year to work on the project. As sevenreen-yeer-old Nancy JuneAvila recalled in 1983, after her first summer on the project, "There'sone way to describe the worksire of people and that is we're one BigFamily and I hope when the public comes to admire our mural they'llshare the magic and emotion that our crew shared with one another. " UBaca's basic intention in persuading teenagers such as Ablese:r and

Avila to revisualize California's history was to push them to confront

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Spirit Poles and Ayina Pip •••

their own racism. "The black, Asian, and Chicano communmes aremiles apa rt." not es Baca . "-The re's ter rific geographical and cultu ra l isc-lation ; the people just can't read each other at all."2. Such separat ismcontributes to igno rance and stereotyping. the main components ofracism. To comba t racism, Baca o rganized racially diverse crews,arr anged the Friday history lessons, and used ro le playing and improvi-sat ional theater to unmask the dangers of racist behavior . One youngChicana started a summe r declaring, " I ain't never gonna work withthem niggers!" After working with Baca on the Great Wall for threemonths, she had changed so much that she was promoted to head anall-African American crew that was video ta ping po rtions of the mural,an assignment she enthusiast ically accepted.v Brought together in multi-cultu ral awareness and respect, the Creat Waifs Mural Makers becamea family, a community.TIll: collectivity inherent in the Great Wall, and in subsequent works

such as the GuadDlupe Mural, stems from Baca's insistence that a so-cia lly committed art can "break down the d ivisions among ... people,give them information and change their environment ." Her convictionsstem from her identity as a Chicana artist and feminist . She says.

I have beencalled a Spanish-speaking artist, a Spanish-surname artist, aMexican artist (in the early '60sI, a Mexican·Amerkan artist, a culturalworker (in the lare '60s), a Chicano artist. a Chicana artist (during thediscovery of gender), a Latino artist, II Latina artist (during the discoveryof women in Latin America). an ..other" (as in check one), an eehnkartist, a folk artisr, a Hispanic artist, a barrio artist, a primitive artist, aneighborhood artist, a sereet artist, an urban arrisr, a multKtiltural artist.• • . All these terms have bent coined. in essence, to define my relseioe-ship to a border mygrandparents cameacross during the revolution inMc:xico.u

Reclaiming the forgotten history of that bordered relationship was acentra l component of the Chicano movement in the 1960s and 19705.which focused on the constructio n of a mora l community based on col-lectivism and cultu ral empowerment. Many Chicano activists sought in-spiration in a "hero ic Aztec past [that] emphasized the virility of war-riors and the exerc ise of brute force." Ma ny Chicano a rtists symbolizedthat past in murals resonant with images of powerful Pre-Co lumbiandeities such as Quenak oatl and with slogans such as "Viva la Rn a,"crea ting a gende red vision of masculine autho rity, writes histori anRamOn Gutierrez, rhat " rarely extends to women." 21

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••• Railing CommuniryConsciousness

Baca's art , as the Great Wall and the Guadalupe Mural attest, is an en-compassing ana lysis of power and poss ibility based on a feminist critiqueof class and racial oppression. No less committed to E/ Mou;miento's vi-sion of cultural nationalism, Baca's aesthetic employs narrative structuresand socia l critiq ues to envision a broadly defined community free frombo th racism and sexism.It She follow s neither an assimilationisr nor an 'oppositional model but creates public art that addresses collectivity,honors difference, and encourages dialogue. In both the Van Nuys andGuadalupe mura ls, from one scene to the next, Baca offers images of di-verse cultural rea lities and models o f soc ial change, images that " bindtogether disparate histories and adversar ial consti tuencies!' Thi s is notto suggest that her public an: projects emphasize a kind of broad unitythat ab sorbs diversity. Rather the y encourage a kind of multicultural tol -erance. As she remarks, Win the case of Th e Great Walf the metap hor re-ally is the bridge. It's about the inte rrelationship between ethnic andracia l groups, the develo pment of interracial harmon y .. . there are re-ally rwo products-the mural and another product which is invisible,the inte rracia l harmon y between the peop le who have been invol ved."29The Great Wall actually engages several communit ies: the kids who

pa inted it and the residents of the San Fernando Valley who see it everyday. Th e brigh t co lo ration of the panels, the dynamic and fluid style, andthe easily recogn izable and evocat ive images demand att entio n. Bacastud ied at the Taller Siqueiros in Cuernav aca in 1<) 77 and inco rpo ratedthe paint ing styles o f Los Tres Grandes (jose Clemente Orozco, DiegoRivera , and David Alfaro Siq ueiros) in the Great Wall and subseq uentpubli c art pro jects . Like th e subjects of their murals, the Great Walts im-ages are big, and pu rposel y so; says Baca, WBy taking a small o bject andtransforming it into a giant image, yo u teach people to look at it in a dif-ferent wa y. Claes O ldenburg knew about that . When your whole bodyfits into the eye of a mon umentally rendered head, yo u are go ing to lookat it in a way you never looked at the eye before. Th e same thing is tr ueof the issues included in the mural."30 The Great Waif s style, in otherwords, is the principal tool used to engage and raise the consciousness ofits aud ience .Th e process of crea ting the Great Wa/l was inst rumenta l to that

consciousness-raisi ng. Throughout the project Baca and the crews inter-acted wit h the community: giving numerous talks, co nducting o penfo rums on the mural, posting the designs in public places. Researcherstracing the history of California's minorit ies interviewed Van Nu ys resi-dents and presented their stories at the Friday lect ures; these reclaimed

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• 58. JudyIbca, Grtot Waf, 1976-83, dewt: "Laundry Unes .M Copy right Judy8lIa.

memories often worked their way into the Great Wall. Trying to visual-ize California's migration patterns in the early 19 405, especia lly those ofDust Bowl refugees and Japanese American deportees, Baca asked herassistants, '"What did the Okies and the Nisei have in common?" Onerespon se, stemming from community conversations, was an image oflaundry, and, as a result, long clotheslines of pants and shins were sym-bolically used to link several mural segments (Fig. 58). Donat ions ofpaint, brushes, tools, scaffolds , po rtab le toi lets, food, and ot her supplieswere a lso solicited from the communi ty, from local schoo ls and neigh-borhood groups. Baca knew thai most of these materials cou ld havebeen purchased, but asking the communiry to contribute to the projectgave residen ts a sense of ownership in the Great Wall as substantia l asthat of the kids who painted it.At fi rst some Van Nuys residents feared the presence of "hoodlums"

in the wash channel and arrributed neighborhood crime to the MuralMakers; at one point "narcotics agents watched with binoculars to catchthe mar ijuana smokers they were! sure were there!." J I But because ofBaca's insistence on collaboration between community residents and the

••• Community Consciousness

kids in the development of the Great WaU, the former have come to em-brace the mural as an emblem of collective identity. Local high schoolteachers use it to supplement (or replace) textbooks, and an informalsurvey reveals that those who walk along the mural or drive past it on adaily basis consider the Great Wa/l "their Story, their history." The muralhas had an impact, then, in raising community consciousness about thechanging historical role, from dispossession to empowerment, of Califor-nia's ethnic minorities. But, more significant, it has tru ly succeeded asBeca intended, as a "catalyst for the regeneration of the community.")2Th is is precisely what Baca intended in Guadalupe. In late 1987 the

Comire asked Santa Barbara County's Arts Commission and Parks De-partment to help finance an original mural painting by Baca at Lek oyPark, and in January £988 Baca made her first visit to the town. Her pre-senranon in the gym of the park's community center, a slide-lecture onpublic art, was well attended by members of the Comire and countyagencies, the junior high school principal, the postmistress, the head ofthe Guadalupe Chamber of Commerce, several city council members,and representatives from the American Legion, the Senior Citizens Cen-ter, and the Community Service Center. Convinced of civic inrercsr, theArts Commission and Parks Department agreed to help fund a muralproject, and contract negotiations began over salary, assistance, materi-als, insurance, maintenance, and copyright. The problem of where tohouse the project was resolved when John Perry, a Guadalupe historybuff, loaned the Druid Temple, a deserted building with a cavernous sec-ond-floor auditorium next door to his auto parts store. Finally, in Au-gust 1988, Baca accepted a salary of $1.0,056 from the Arts Commissionand signed a contract promising to produce a mural for leRoy Park . Shereta ined copyright on the mural, and the county Parks Departmentagreed to pay for project assistants, materials, and maintenance. Theyalso agreed to help with leRoy Park 's overall refurbishment-the park,after all, was an official county entity. Baca rook a sabbatical from theUniversity of California, Irvine. where she has taught since 198J , andmoved to Guadalupe, where she lived (on and off} for the next year."What I found when I arrived in this town only three hours from Los

Angeles," Baca recalls, "was amazing.. .. Guadalupe's history paral-leled the history of California that I had depicted in The Great Wall ofLos Angeles." It is not surprising, then, that Baca followed this publicart model in Guadalupe, first organizing crews of teenagers to help andthen orienting the project toward an examination of Guadalupe's racial

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Spirit and fIyinJ Pip •••

att itudes and behav iors. " I'm very attached to young people," she.says," because I ident ify with their rebellion, the st ruggle they're goingthrough. I believe that they have a future, that they the gauge o fwhat the socie ty is doing ... they are the barometer of racism." )JMore speci fically, Baca works with teenagers because she views public

art as an educat ional ente rprise, a crit ica l for um for discussion s of race,erhniciry, gender, and class. She wo rks with kids because they are oftenthe public sphere's largest audience: They hang out in the park s andstreets where so much public an winds up, and sometimes they get introuble in those parks and st reets. In Guada lupe, Baca worked with fourhigh school students: Mila Cast ro, Gabriel Esrubillo, Alejandro Pereira,and Adria na Quezada. All were the child ren o f resident farmworkers,and a few had contri buted to leRoy Par k's gra ffit i " problem." " It is in-teresting working with kids who get in trouble with the law," says Baca ,"because they'll know who the powers are and maybe how to beat thebureaucrat ic system." Relying on them as liaisons between herself andGuada lupe's figures of autho rity, Baca offered the kids sala ries and arttrain ing. She also offered an education in empowerment.The Santa Barbara County Arts Commission and the Parks Depa rt-

ment were interested in Guada lupe's teens, and ebe entire GUQtUJ lupeMural project, for somewhat different reasons, After newspapers ran up-beat articles on the Great Wall with headlines such as "Teenage GangsPut Down Knives for Brushes," arts agencies around the country flockedto Baca and begged her to " bott le" her fonnula for deflat ing juveniledelinquency and cleaning up gra ffiti. Thinking thai Guada lupe wasunder siege by " fierce" gangs and seeing leRoy Park's gra ffiti as a signof "a lienated youth trying to take possession of its community" (which,in a sense, they were), county agencies asked Baca to redirect the town 'steen spirit in a more const ructive manner." They saw the GUQdalupeMu ral project as an answer to vandalism and Baca as an o rchest rator ofgraffiti aba tement.But Baca's intent ions are ultimately much more revolutionary than

curtailing property dama ge. She encourages the kids she works with ,and everyo ne else, quite literally to take possession of their community.If arts agencies treat her mural p ro jects (a nd those of other artists) as so-cial Band-Aids, she views them as instruments of socia l reform. "Shouldpubl ic an and public good be equated? My answer has always been'Why not ?' " says Baca .Adamantl y opposed to the a rtisr-kncws-besr syndrome of much pub-

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••• 1Qi5ina: Community Consci0u5ness

lie art, Baca and her studen t assistants began the Mural proj-e<:t with a critical study of the town's social context . Having spenrtwenty years in the public sphere, she knows the failure of imposedstyles and sensibilities:

The notion that we can impose: ideas of beaury in neighborhoods., for ex-ample, could be as "colonizing" as any previous conquest of our ances-tot'S. For inherent in this ideaofGreat An from the powers that be is thebelief that the people- the indigenous pcople-do OOt have a culture ortradirions of their own. It is precisely this idea that made the burningofthe Mrso-Amcrka n codexes possible soc years ago.

Cultural imposition is hardl y an Anglo monopoly: While di recting theCitywide Mural Project , Baca saw some art ists doing "awful things,"such as "coming into an ethnically mixed community and, because theart ist was Chicano , pain ting a Chicano piece with only Chicano kids."Baca's version of public art, in contrast, is that of cultural democracy,the product of a long and involved process of civic dialogue and partici-pation .lS Determined to avoid accusations of personal o r aesthet ic biasand to discover Guadalupe's own cultural autonomy, Baca spent monthsin town simply talk ing with people, collecting information and ideas.Atte nding community meeti ngs, going to church, visiting schoo l class-

rooms, hanging out at dance halls on Saturday nights, spending time inlocal diners, watching workers jump off freight trains, frequenting thevegetable fields, ca lling on growers, showing up at swap meets, walkingdoor to door, and roaming the streets , Baa met most of Guadal upe. Sheposted signs all over town invit ing people to the Druid Temple, whereshe and the students conducted oral interviews and amassed historicalmaterial: o ld newspaper clippings, photographs, family albums, pose-cards, police reports . The temple itself proved a treasure trove, full of theDruids' costumes (lots of robes and paste-on beards), correspondence(reese letters about membership and dues), and the stuff of their monthlyrituals (mysterious pictu res of fraterna l handshakes and initiation proto-col). Once it had been the site of the secret ceremonies of Guada lupe'selite, a place where grown-ups played dress-up . Now the Dru id Templebecame the clear inghouse for a broa der and more democrat ic considera-tion of Guadalupe's history and identity.Community response was overwhelming. Asked to participate in

Guadalupe's Christmas Parade in Decembe r 1988, Baca and the studen tsdeco rated her car with ornaments and pinecones (Fig. 59 ) and rode

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•• 59. Roat entered by Jody &.aand students in GuadJ,lupeChristmas P:lrade , December1988. Copyricht Judy 8K1.

behind the Ierrilizer truck ("a place of prestige," she says, laughing). Asthe C,IQdalufU Mural project grew, Santa Barbara photographer RodRolle was hired to reshoo t loaned materials; eventuall y an archive of3,000 slides was established from the pictures that Guadal upe residentseagerly shared. In April .1989 hundreds turned OUt for a community por-trait (Fig. 60) that Rolle shot from a cherry picker in the middle of MainSrreet (" £S invitado para asisrir LA GRA FOTO GUADALUPE, Seaparte de la hisecria," announced the posters that the mural crew dist rib-uted a ll over [Own).After spending mont hs withou t lifting a paintbrush, Baca called a

town meering and invited everyone to contribute to the mural project.More than tOO people came to the Druid Temple that night, each speak-ing for five minutes about their memories. experiences, and hopes for thefuture of Guada lupe. Older residents recalled pageants and para des,May Day picnics at leRoy Park and fireworks on July Fourth (a holiday

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• 60. Rod Rolle , Guodolupe Town Photo. 1989. Photo: Rod Rolle .

mostly replaced in today's Guadalupe by Fiestas Parriasl. The y spoke ofthe Swiss Celebration , when thousands of Swiss Guadalupeans gatheredto commemora te the founding of (he Republic of Switzerland, and of thel ady of Fatima Celebration observed by Guadal upe's Filipino popula-tion each December. They to ld of their membership in long defunctGuadalupe clubs-the United Ancient O rder of Dru ids, the Sons of Italy,the Japanese Association. The ir sto ries were of Guadalupe's rich history,and much of what they remembered wound up in the first two panels ofthe mura l.6uI rhc dominant story rhnr emerged that night, and in all the months

of the Guadalupe Mural project, was of a city hemmed in on all foursides by agricultural concerns with litt le interest in community welfare.Guadalupeans told sto ries of their town's lack of housing, of families liv-ing in buses and garages, on back porches and in the fields. They ta lkedabou t health care, about how farrnworkers sought medical service in

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Spirit Poles V\d FIyW'lt Pip •••

Mexico because they could not affo rd treatment in the United States.They sha red their worries about pestic ides and pollution, and recalledpre-UFW labor condit ions when toilets and drin king water were un-ava ilab le and work with the corriro (sho rt hoe) caused serious back in-juries. They spo ke of the town's need for a high schoo l (teens are cur-rently bused to Santa Maria schools) and expressed their concerns abouteducatio nal and recreationa l oppo rtunities for Guadalupe's kids.Ca reful to avoi d favoritism, Baca made a point of moving "between

all the factions of the city" and listened to everyo ne's story. She heardlandowners boas t o f growing crops from seed to full flower in seventydays and of harvesting four to five full crops a year. She heard an thro-pologist Victo r Ga rcia call Gua da lupe a "farm labor camp " and explainthe enormous profits growers were making, especially with the incorpo-rat ion o f contrac t labor. She heard people who harvest food tell of nothaving enough to eat, a Story especia lly honed on a day near Ch ristmaswhen her student crew begged off work and she discovered they had allgone to get hol iday food baskets for their families from the CommunityService Cente r. After listen ing to all these stories, Baca and her crewbegan to shape the Guadalupe Murafs story.Centra l to thai Story was Guada lupe's history o f racial diversity- and

animosity. As the mura l pro ject progressed, Baca discovered the town'scom plex cas te system, driven by the relation ship between grower andfarmworker and further measured by the length of a farmworker's stayin the United States. As is typical of American immig ration patterns,each o f Guadalupe'S ethnic groups encountered an entrenched politica lstructure and bigotry; eventually most infiltra ted that st ructure and un-dercu t racism. Today in Guada lupe, desp ite the appearance of racial ho-mogeneity in a dominant Mexican populatio n. ethnic relationships arehard ly smoo th. The authority of Anglo growers, of course, has the mostubiqui tous impact on Ihat relat ionship. but bigotry is prevalent amongfarmworkers themselves. Mexican immigrants and Chicanos slur newmigrants as friio/edos (bean eaters) a nd moiados (wetbacks), and mi-grants retort with labels such as agrigando (Mexican gr ingo) and pocho(culturally dispossessed ind ividual).Eschewing the polemics of blame o r a condemna to ry visual style thai

might rum audiences o ff. {he Guadalupe Mura l. like the Crea l Wa/l, fo-cuses on the resolution of racial conflict as a step toward civic empower-ment . As Baca comments:

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Tnt deep-seared social 1sslleSand problems in Guadalupe arc historic, andonce one this history it is how they are derived. Califor-nia-not just Guadalupe- has a history, a long histo ry, o f interracialstruggle. It is cssmrially1M probkm: How do people from verydifferent places COrM rcgether, and develo p some kind of respect fo r oeeaOOlM.r's cu ltu res and thei r d iffttfllccs? Perhaps Ihis has been the centraltMIM of my work forever, and maybe: will be: unti l it 's over.'"

Clearly comrnirred to socia l reform, and pinpointing racism as Guada-lupe's (and America's) outstanding social problem, Baca shaped thetown's public an project around that problem. Carefully illustratingGuadalupe's complex history of ethnic diversity and agricultural labor,she went beyond mere narration to critique the race, class, and genderdimensions of that history and to imagine (in the ancillary wings of thefourth panel) Guadalupe's redefined future.A few townspeople accused her of neglecting what they considered

Guada lupe's " real" hisrory. John Perry complained that the mural " fo-cuses so much on the race thing instead of the history of Guadalupe. Thedairy industry, you know, is completely left ou t, and there a lot ofdairy farms around here." Hank lawrence, Guada lupe's fire chief, ob-jected to the seeming paucity of Portuguese and Swiss-Ita lian historicalreferents. Ken Rosene, Guadalupe's public defender and the head of thechamber of commerce, commented that some residents wondered why"so many Mexicans" were depicted in the MUTQI. " I didn'tassume tha t the mural was just for the mostly Mexican population,"counters Baca. " I think there's a fair presentation of all the people inGuadalupe- look at Panel 1., for instance." She also points ou t that " therace thing" is Guada lupe's history and that to assume that history andrace (or history and class) are separa te is to ignore the realities of Ameri-can identity.Likewise, a few people questioned the Guadalupe MUTats focus on

farrnwcrkers, but Baca argues that agricultural labor has been Guada -lupe's defining experience. " I got a tremendous amount of material re-tared to the problems of the farmworkers," she says, noting that the fieldworkers were some of the mural project's most responsive participants:'" remember one evening when a Filipino broccoli crew came after along day's work in the fields to demonstra te the differences between his-torical and contemporary techniques for cutting lettuce and broccoli ...ten f ilipino workmen in my studio, gesturing while squatting on the

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floor, as historical slides projected in the background. " Moreover, manyof the Comnemembers who had initiated and supported theMural project were or had been farmworkers, Manuel Magana, theCormre's president, immigrated from Mexico in 1963 and worked in thefields for several decades unti l an injury forced him to retire on disability.Guadal upe's resident fermworkers are, and always have been, the town'smajority population, and it made sense that their sto ries dominate theGuadalupe Mural.Mostly, though, community reaction to the Guadalupe Mural was

(and remains) overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Baca worked towa rd thatcivic acceptance with a well-orchesrrared campaign that concentrated ongaining community access and integrating the art and the process withgrassroo ts concerns. "Be prepared , be a good citizen, and know how thepower structu res work." Baca advises. "And no surprises. Always giveadva nce warning of what you' re up to. so tha t peop le don't feel imposedupon ." One reporte r suggested that the Arcs supporred theGuadalupe Mural because they wanted to reach out t'O"a small commu-nity with a multi-eultural art project that will serve people nor usuallytouched by mainstream art programming." ]7 Bur the impetus for theGuadalupe Mural came from Guadalupe itself, not from Santa BarbaraCounty agencies that had ignored the town for decades. And this is cen-tral to the mural's local success: People in Guada lupe are proud of themural they helped create. Concomitant with that pride is a sense of own-ership and responsibility.That doesn't mean that the Guadalupe Mural is typical of the upbeat,

feel-good, PIM (Positive Image Menta lity) placebos that account for alot of contemporary public art-such as the cutesy bronzes tha t GlennaGoodacre churns out (see Pledge Allegiance, Fig. 6) or the colorful turdsin the civic/corporate plaza created by George Sugarman and AlexanderCalder (see La Grande Vitesse, Fig. 17). Author Nelson George writesthat a lot of public culture consists of civic cheerleading rather than crit-ical debate about public needs.J' Bace's public art cannot, obviously, bedescribed as an world or even civic boosrerism-c-ir raises questions andconcerns rat her than mouths platitudes, and it is ultimately absorbedless with itself than with irs audience. Enthusiasm for the GuadalupeMural can be attributed to Baca's serious and intelligent trea tment ofboth local history and the locals: The mural doesn 't gloss Guada lupe'shistory, and it doesn't treat Guadalupeans as one-dimensional dolts. Itdoesn't exaggerate or romanticize the ability of "the people" to outsmart

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"the system," and it doesn't underp lay the very real problems of race,class, and gender in Guada lupe. It is, rather, purpose ly complicated bylayers of visual references and socia l possibilities." If I do my job right," says Beca, " the guy walking down the street

with little or no education can read it. If I do it really well, it will also ap-peal to the more educa ted person, who will set references to Los TresGra ndee, to fi lm, and to contempo rary art. And if 1do it even bette r, thework will stand without the product- without the physical mura l." Thestrength of the Cuadalupe Mural, Like that of the Great Wall and otherexamples of Baca's publ ic an, lies in its ability to communicate on differ-ent levels to different people withou t losing its "hberarory vision."J'School kids, resident farmwcrkers, migrants, growers, and a rt cr iticsmay all respond to the mura l differently, seeing it as painting, as localhistory, as a visual pun, as art, as a call to action. The crates in Panel 3.for instance, show real-life minidramas and also provide bit ing crit iquesof the conditions of agriculrural labor ; similarly, their double-enreedrelabels can be read either straight or as farmworker (and grower) in-jokes. Yet the mural's metaphor of interracial and class struggle, andcommunity ethos, remains embedded in all these readings. Beyond, o rperhaps over and above the Guadalupe Murars compelling sto ry and vi-sua l ap peal, is, as Baca says, " the work" thar went into it-the work ofcommuniry building and the com plicated process of cultura l democracythat embod ies her definition of public art.Beyond its large scale, its beautiful jewel-like colors, and irs familiar

scenes, beyond its art style and subject , the Guadalupe Mural has beenembraced in Guadalupe because it is plausibly prescriptive. Through themedium of public an, Baca convinces aud iences of the possibilities of so-cial change. She says,

I want 10 convey the beauty of the farm workers . . . while at the samerime revealing the harsh conditions that Ihis surface beaut)' belics-thelow wages, health problems.substandard livingconditions. Caughl up inthe immediacyof their material crisis, it is often difficult for these farmworkers to articulate the issues Ihat are of concern to them, 10 makecon-nccrions that will allow them to orpnize their thoughts. I am hoping thatthe murals will help them to do this."

Baca treats pub lic art as civic construction: " I believe public art is aboutinspiring. If you JUSt go to people and give them something or makesomething for them, you have much less of a dialogue or a part icipator)'

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Spirit Po&es and f¥nc Pip •••

publ ic art project. You need to inspire them, not simply give them an.-With some degree of bitterness, she also makes the comment that cce-temporary public art is increasingly used in ethnic and minority comma,nine s as a "colonizing device." " Public art agencies talk a lot aboutmulticulturalism," she remarks, "but when it comes right down to it,they're most interested in silencing the people and keeping them quin.·Clearly, Baca imagines a more complex public art of community engage--ment and civic agency. Employing "mechanisms of persona l agency·that encourage people to think and act politically, Baca tried to convinceGuadalupeans to think of themselves as active citizens- not just passiwspectators...1Mayor Rennie Pili concu rs that the Guadalupe Mural project stimu-

lated civic dialogue, noting, "There was a lot of energy here when themural was being made." Ariston Julian adds that it "generated a lac ofinternal thinking" and "c reated a new sense of community." As Baca in-tended, the process of creating the C IUldalupe Mural fi red public imagi-nations. A proposal was made to develop 8t hectares (200 acres) on thetown's south side for low- and middle-income housing. Guadalupe's tinahistorical society was formed to house the thousands of slides that wereraken for the project and the numerous other artifacts that were col-lected. Several of the teens involved with the project went on to college;one former graffiti writer is now studying a rchitecture. Baca talkedabout sett ing up a permanent public art studio in the Druid Temple forfuture projects. People discussed selling "l-shirrs and postcards of thefour panels, conducting mural tours, and starting a silk-screen businessto print scarves with the Virgin of Guadalupe on them- like the antworn by the female farmworker in the ir third panel. And recently otherpublic murals have sprouted in Guada lupe: Teacher Liz Dominguez. in-stigated a mural painted by her students at the Mary Buren ElementarySchool, and a long row of colorfu l scenes of local history covers a fenceat the edge of town.Local optimism was infectious, and Guada lupe's former notoriety was

undercut by outsiders who now found the place appealing. The NatureConservancy proposed a youth hostel and ecology center in one ofGuadal upe's vacant buildings, and linking the rown more with its acrivi-ties at the Nipomo Dunes. Various Los Angeles outfits became interestedin Guadalupe's small-town scenery: GTE filmed a phone ad on MainStreet in September 1993. and Ken Rosene nores that rhe California FilmCounc il has scouted rhe a rea more than a few times- and that the 1991.

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movie: Of Mice and Men was "almost" filmed in Guadalupe instead ofnearby Santa Ynez. From insider conversations to outsider perceptions,the Guadalupe Mural project certa inly reshaped the mind-set and imageof the community.If the stories of contemporary public an in Concord, Cleveland, and

Onawa (and elsewhere in America ) seem to substantiate Jurgen Haber-mas's sense of an a lienated and victimized citizenry concomitant with themodel of the: passive and detached public sphere, Guada lupe's public an:story is that of an active citizenry engaged in a longtime, ongoing, andunfinished conversation. Indeed, Mikhail Bakhrin's concept of the "die-logic imagination" can certainly be applied to an analysis of the: Guada-lupe Mural project, which clearly demonstrated a dialogue between his-tory. affect, and agency," Baca recovered and reframed symbols andstories from Guadalupe's past (from Chumash Indians to Ja paneseAmerican deportees] to make contemporary discourse about the: town'sinterracial struggle comprehensible and legitimate. Utilizing rbese sym-bols in a particularly accessible and appealing (and often humorous) vi-sual language, she shaped Guadalupe's public an process around a civicdialogue: thai encouraged townspeople to remember their past and imag-ine their future. Ultimately the prod uct of innumerable (and even contra -dictory ] conversatio ns, the Guadalupe Mural mediated between thetown's past history, its present circumstances, and its future possibilities."One: of the most dangerous, condescending assumptions" about pub-

lie art, writes Michael Kimmelman, "is ghereoizaucn under the guise ofpublic ourreach-c-thar an for lower-income communities, immigrantcommunities, mUSI take: the form of social activism, that the history ofWestern culture as presented in museums is irrelevant to such people."4JSepara ting "an " {real an:, the an of museums) from "social activism,"Kimmelman argues thai aesthetics and social change are distinct andthat "art" is primarily property-the painted or sculpted products ofsolita ry a rtists.However, the real issue for the public artist committed to social re-

form is making an art of social act ivism that goes beyond commodifica-tion and into the realm of social change- which is exactly what Bacaaimed to do with the Mural. Moving beyond the "coloniz-ing" level at which many arts agencies treat inner-city public an-as ananngraffi ri. barrio beautification device, a son of pictur e-making socialservice that keeps juvenile delinquents off the streers-c-Bacacreated a vi-sually compelling. finely crafted, work of "an " that embodies issues of

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Spirit Poles and Ayifl& PIp •••

social agency. Certa inly. people in Guada lupe are entitled 10 "art" asmuch as those in Manhat tan . Perhaps the more significant issue is whya rt world crit ics tend to igno re what Baca and other activist arti sts areup ro in the public sphere. The Social and Public Art Resou rce Centerunveils dozens of murals each year in Los Angeles. and similar artsgroups do the same across the country. They arc ra rtly reviewed in theart press. When they show up in newspapers, it 's usually as the stu ff oflocal color; when they ' re ana lyzed with an y depth it's usually by urbansociologises looking for ways to quantify socia l change. The "ghen oiaa-tion" of an art world committed mainly to issues of artistic property(such as style, quality. and, ultimately, cost) seems to prohi bit the seriousaesthetic anenrion that these public artworks deserve.After the process of making the Guadaillpe Mural ended, in 1990. a

number of issues came into play. The first was the mu ral's location. InSeptember 1993 over 5.000 people turned OUI in leRoy Park for FiestasParries, the largest crowd the three-day festival had ever seen. ManuelMagana and ot her Comite members proudly showed off the community

- cente r's new kitchen and rest room facilities. and the: new bleachers andretracta ble basketball hoops in the gym. But festival goers didn 't see theGuadalupe Mural in leRoy Park. Despite the fact that Baca 's contractwith the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission specifically ca lled for"a visual representation of the interracial diversity and histo ry of the cityof Guadalupe for the leRoy Park... the mural was insta lled at City Hallin 1990.Baca and arch itect Paul Libowicki had proposed housing the mura l in

a plaza in front of leRoy Park's community center, in a semicircu laradobe building with severa l windows. Standing in the center of thegazebolike structure, the viewer could compare the scenes illustrated inthe Guadalupe Mura f s fou r panels with those outside the windows. AI·though their proposal was moderately priced at around $10.000. theSanta Barba ra County Parks Department refused to fund it. The ParksDepartment had generously endorsed the Cwu:lDlupe Mural project bypaying for materials and student salaries. But, apparently in a show ofstrength over park jurisdictio n as the project was drawing to an end. thedepartment withdrew funding to house the mural or to help with thepark's refurbishment. Curreerly, funds to build LtRoy Park's intendedgazebo have yet to be secured; the Comire have concentra ted on raisingmoney for the rest of the community center's resto ration. "The muralwasn 't made for City Hall," says Guadalupe postmistress j innie Ponce.

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• •• fbisint Community Consciousness

" It was intended for leRoy Park, and tha t's where: it shou ld go.II Bacaadds that. on aesthetic grounds alone, City Hall is "defi nitely the wrongplace" for the: mural. "There is a shadow that runs across the panelsthere,.. she complains. " U they were: meant fo r that place, I would have:designed them for that space. But they were meant for Lc:Roy Park."Most Guada lupeans agret. A few, howeve r, look upon the four panels

of the Guadalupe Mural as valuab le art objects that need to be protectedon the secure walls of City Hall. Hand in hand with the issue of wherethe mura l should be placed has arisen the issue of its worth, or its placewithin a " hierarchy of preciousness," as Baca describes it. The mura l it-self, in other words, may now outweigh the collaborative process ofcultura l democracy that created it, or the community revitalization itembodies. Some of those who had heralded it as a viral symbol of grass-roots Guada lupe now express grave concern for its "safety" when talkof moving it comes up. Objections have been raised about putting themural in leRoy Park because: it might "get damaged " there: by graffitiwriters or vandals. Conscious or not, such sentiments reveal the depth ofthe town 's abiding racial tensions: The few who say they want to S« themura l stay at City Hall are older and more estab lished residents; thosewho want to see the mural placed in leRoy Park include Guada lupe'snewer Mexican immigrants and migrant workers.During the process of making the mural, Guada lupe's historical bag-

gage was dragged out of the closet and dusted off. Townspeop le ana-lyzed their social and political histories and confronted Guadalupe'slegacy of interracial struggle. Newly atten tive to issues of race and class,they openly discussed the dynamics of their past, present, and future: re-lationships. The mural project clearly raised civic consciousness aboutGuadalupe's deep-seated racial problems-which became the drivingmetaphor in each of the mural 's four panels. But, when the process ofmaking public art in Guada lupe came to an end, civic dialogue aboutrace was supplanted by talk about art and about protecting valuab lecommunity property. The town's sense of personal and political agency,in other words, became stalled at a level of commodification that, writescritic David Trend, " frustrates community ethos by encouraging com-petitive acquisition" and demonstrations of" It's ironic," says Baca, reflecting on the community's str uggle to de-

fine the mural experience and lind an appropriate place for the mural it-self: "My dream was to have them in the park, where the people are. Butthey've got them in a place of protection-not the park. but City Hall. I

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made a mistak e in making them mobile. Now they a re open to appropri-at ion by City Hall and the like because they can be moved around."Baca had hoped the process of making the Guadalllpe Mura l would in-spire Guadal upea ns to work toward social cha nge! (" If I do my job ...even better, the work will stand withou t the product-withou t the phys·ical mural" ], But to chastise the people of Guadalupe for their desire toprotect the physica l object, the mural, that brought them toge ther andinspired levels o f persona l and civic revision is perhaps unfair. The rea-son that the G'loda/upe Mural currently bedecks the walls of City Hall,of COUrK. is that the Santa Barbara County Parks Depa rtment withdrewfunding to construct rhe LtRoy Park gazebo intended to house it- notany malevolent Guada lupe City Hall au thoritarianism. Mayor Pili, asdo most city officials, avidly supports putting the Mural inleRoy Park, "where it belongs," once the gazebo has been built. And,by trying to protect the mural , the cit izens of Guadalupe show they areattempting to preserve and sustai n the memories of the collaborat iveprocess of community revita lization and social agency that it embodies.Indeed, beyond the issues of placement and prope rty value that Stem

lately to have dominated Guada lupe's think ing about the mural, the factis that the process of making it provided Cuadalupeans with a glimpseof their social possibilities. In The New Populism , community activistHarry C. Boyte asserts tha t a progressive and democratic publ ic culturecan reawaken "generous and hopeful insti ncts among the people.....oS TheStory of the Guad4lupe Mural project. with its emphasis on co llabo ra-tive activity, its reclamat ion of histori cal memory, and its inspiration to-ward civic d ialogue and trejconsrrucrion, certainly substa ntiates th is.Jud y Baca helped raise consciousness and helped re-create <I sense ofcommunity through the public art process of making the mura l. Al-though it is ultimately up to the citizens of Guada lupe to sustain thatnewly raised consciousness and actua lly create the democratic and egali-raria n society pictured in that public art, the Guadalupe Mural may wellbe the ca talyst to tha t t rans formation.

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