Completing the mural. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

The border between Playas de Tijuana and San Diego. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

Painting the mural. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

The archive, it keeps growing. Another story. This time, Jorge. Yesterday it was Angel, the day before that, Ruben, Andy, Hector, Alex.

I first met Jorge in June 2017, at a Father’s Day celebration at Friendship Park in Playas de Tijuana. We were steps away from the border fence separating Mexico and San Diego’s Border Field State Park. Jorge, who was one of the only young folks there that day, and he reminded me of my younger brother Jose, and my friends back in Compton. Jorge, who was 26 years old, wore a long white t-shirt, high white socks, and baggy khaki shorts. He had a short haircut, tattoos, and a piercing in his ear. He mostly spoke English, and he made American cultural references, quoting artists such as Dr. Dre and Kendrick Lamar. Jorge liked to sing along with Lamar’s “DNA” when he rode in the car. The lyrics—“I was born like this, since one like this… I transform like this, perform like this”—align with his story.

At first, I thought Jorge was just visiting Tijuana. But I was wrong. He was stuck, having been deported there twice. His “crime” was being a “childhood arrival,” brought into the U.S. as an undocumented minor by his mother. It did not matter that Jorge came into the country as an 8-month-old infant and grew up feeling he was an American. Nor did it matter that he didn’t learn he was undocumented until he was 18 years old, nor that he had no family in Mexico. U.S. law would not allow him to go home.

Thousands of others, who were raised in the U.S., and who only know how to move around the world as Americans—who migrated to the U.S. as minors and became cultural and social citizens by learning English, attending American schools, participating in society, and developing a sense of belonging—languish in a similar situation.

When I met Jorge, I began to question why someone who was raised in the same country as me, and who went through the same educational system, was now forced to live abroad. I questioned why I had never heard more stories like Jorge’s back at home. In the U.S., deportation is usually described in numbers or heated rhetoric, and personal stories go untold—as if there is shame surrounding the forced removal of a generation of immigrants we raised.

Javier Salazar. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

I questioned, too, the limits of being a researcher, and felt guilt for not doing more. Perhaps I was motivated by being part of a mixed-immigration status family that is no stranger to deportations. I wanted to be a vocera, an advocate. I wanted to force audiences to engage with the stories I was hearing.

Bearing witness to the human impact of deportation became a starting point for the Playas de Tijuana Mural project, which I launched in August of 2019 and concluded in July 2021. Located on the westernmost point of the Mexican side of the border, at the edge of the Pacific where Playas de Tijuana meets San Diego, the mural stretches 150 feet long and 20 feet high. Its 15 grayscale portraits are made out of cloth, and were painted in an art studio and a migrant shelter before being cut up into strips and glued directly onto the border fence. The mural is interactive: viewers can point their phones at QR codes located next to each portrait to access YouTube videos of audiovisual stories put together by the migrants themselves, part of the Humanizing Deportation and DACAmented: DREAMs Without Borders digital storytelling projects.

The backdrop baby-blue paint blends into the sky, and creates the illusion of erasing the border. It highlights the faces on the mural and the human stories they tell, upstaging the border fence itself. Depending where a visitor stands, they will see a version of the mural unique to their perspective. The mural becomes metaphor: Throughout life, we choose how to read and see the stories that are presented to us, and the process can change our perceptions.

Chris Cuauhtli. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

For many U.S. childhood arrivals, the border fence is a constant reminder of their exile from their families and a country that helped shape their identity. Such is the case for Chris Cuauhtli, a mural subject who was born in Tamazula, Jalisco, illegally adopted by U.S. citizens at the age of 3, and raised in Sacramento. His adoptive parents never legalized his immigration status, and he was deported in 2019. Chris is now an English teacher, translator, and tattoo artist in Tijuana. Isaac, who was born in Oaxaca, and raised in the San Diego metropolitan area, was pulled over at an immigration checkpoint. He was a student with no criminal record, but he was arrested and deported anyway, the border patrol agent commenting, “Congratulations! You are the first person we get for the month of June.” Alex Murillo, a U.S. Navy veteran and U.S. childhood arrival, questions, “Why was I good enough to fight and die for America but I’m not good enough to live there?” Immigrant veterans hold permanent resident status and thus are eligible to enlist in the military, but receive no special consideration in deportation proceedings. Outrageously, the most accessible way for deported veterans to return to the U.S. is by dying. It is only then that they are repatriated for their military funeral, and buried with honors.

In putting the project together, I wanted to change the way we consider art-making. It was vital for the storytellers to paint their own portraits. Instead of producing the mural himself, the lead artist, Mauro Carrera, provided tools for the storytellers to become artists. Together, the storytellers, volunteers, Carrera and myself drew the portraits—using a projector and Sharpies we traced photographs of each storyteller onto cloth. We then painted each face using gray tones we mixed ourselves. Through this method, the storytellers got to control how they would be seen and understood by others, creating a counter-narrative to the media and political rhetoric that prevails on the other side of the border.

Alex Murillo. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

At the border mural, two-way conversation is key. Deported people get to inform our understanding of deportation, a reciprocity not afforded to them by the law enforcement system, and the staunch border fence erected in its name. Throughout the project, there is a spark of resistance, of reclaiming the barrier that continues to inflict violence on the storytellers. Because of the mural, Javier Salazar feels others care about him and is no longer alone in fighting for his return home. Daniel Ruiz feels empowered to continue sharing his story because he knows others are willing to listen. José Avila, who was deported to Tijuana in 2021, shares appreciation for finding a community through the project—a group of folks who provide support upon arrival in Tijuana, helping U.S. childhood arrivals adapt to Mexican society, culture, and bureaucratic processes.

Research demonstrates that most Americans support the legalization of immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. But the various proposals to benefit the approximately 800,000 childhood arrivals—legislative efforts such as Deferred Action and Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Actcontinue to fall short. DACA and the DREAM Act, while seeking to protect a selective group of immigrants, set eligibility guidelines that creates a deportable class of childhood arrivals excluded from legal protection.

So far, the mural has withstood weathering and some vandalism. As long as it stands, it will invite visitors to inquire about the 15 faces on its surface. Viewers, who perhaps only engaged with this ongoing American sin in a superficial way, can begin to understand the circumstances that led a generation of immigrants, as American as any of us, to be banished to a country they don’t recognize.

My intention is for people to leave the space not able to unsee or unhear the stories, and unable but to learn more. The simple act of scanning a QR code can fold any viewer into the conversation, presenting the option to become an advocate or a perpetrator. The storytellers talk, and the visitors ask: Which am I?

Which are you?

The post Looking Deportation in the Face appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The mural—which is being donated to the city of Coachella by my old boss Billy Steinberg—was first commissioned for the company’s new packing plant and offices in the unincorporated town of Thermal, more than 40 years ago.

The 14-foot-by-7-foot work was created in 1979 by Laurence Neufeld, an art major whom Billy had met at Bard College in New York and who would go on to earn his degree from the University of Connecticut. Neufeld had studied the harvest paintings of Pieter Bruegel and Vincent van Gogh, and his mural was influenced by them. He did not want to paint the vineyards realistically—this would have limited his color palette—and instead used vivid expressionistic colors associated with French Fauvist painters, like Matisse and Derain.

Close-up of the mural. Photo by Aaron Salcido.

Neufeld applied the canvas directly to the entry wall of the office. He designed it to fit the space. To the right of the mural was the window where one might ask about a check or apply for a leave of absence or schedule a paid vacation. To the left was the conference room with the big table where we met for grievances.  

The most important thing about the mural was how it depicted farm workers. Unlike standard paintings purporting to show “happy” farm workers, Neufeld portrayed them realistically. They also were picking into boxes with the eagle of the United Farm Workers (UFW), Cesar Chavez’s union.

This reflects a history that should be better known. Billy’s father, Lionel Steinberg, started growing grapes in the Coachella Valley in the early 1950s. The David Freedman Company (named after his father’s step-father) became the largest grape-growing operation in the Coachella Valley, farming over 1,300 acres. In 1970, Lionel broke with other growers and signed the first Collective Bargaining Agreement with UFW.

Today, history books and school textbooks teach this momentous signing, which opened possibilities for farm workers to improve conditions in subsequent contracts. By 1980, the union contract at Freedman—negotiated by UFW VP Gilbert Padilla and the Ranch Committee for the Union, and by Lionel and Billy for the company—provided the best wages and benefits for any farm workers in the world.

When the Company was sold in 1988—just as I earned my pension with my 10th year of service of 500 hours or more—Billy divided the canvas on which the mural was painted, and transferred it to his office in Santa Monica. There, perhaps inspired by his youth in the desert, he made a career as a composer and songwriter, including songs such as “True Colors” and “Like a Virgin.”

This winter he contacted me to let me know that he was moving offices, and would no longer have a wall big enough to house the mural. He said he wanted to donate it. Did I have any ideas about a location connected to the union or Coachella?

I suggested the new Coachella Library, and folks there were enthusiastic. One mentioned having parents who had worked at Freedman; another was a special fan of Billy’s songs. Billy also offered other historic items to the library, including photographs with Cesar Chavez, important archival documents, and two charcoal vineyard drawings, done by Neufeld as studies for the mural.

If only it were so easy to preserve and restore the way that workers were treated at Freedman. Unlike most farm workers in the U.S., Freedman workers were paid double the minimum wage, with unemployment and disability insurance, family health insurance after 60 hours of work in a month, vision and dental plans, paid holidays, a modest pension plan, paid vacations for high seniority workers and most of all, respect. The company sat down with us to negotiate wages and conditions of work, and bargained in good faith to resolve problems.

So much has changed for the farm worker community in the Coachella Valley since the 1970-’88 contracts with the David Freedman Company. Our Congressman, Dr. Raul Ruiz, is from a farm worker family in Mecca. Upward mobility is a possibility.

But the mural is also a reminder of an alternative to today’s brutal California agribusiness system, which depends on the exploitation of a vulnerable population to work in the fields. The mural demonstrates that farm labor could be a choice for people that brings modest but adequate benefits—and pride in producing food for a hungry world.

“Sí, se puede,” we can build a more just system.

The post A Mural Once Familiar to Thousands of Farm Workers Comes Home to the Coachella Valley appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Samuels had been a district attorney, a police court judge, and a Superior Court judge in Alameda County, serving continuously from around 1903 until his death in 1925. The famous author had appeared in his court as a defendant several times. Apparently, the encounters produced hard feelings in London. My aunt, prone to exaggeration, bragged that London had threatened to set off a bomb under my great-grandfather’s house.

My questions about this were deflected—when I asked my dad if the family had known London socially, he told me, “Oh, no. We wouldn’t have known him; he was a drunk”—and so my curiosity took a back seat for 40 years. Until a hotel manager paid me a visit.

I’m an artist who creates murals, often grounded in history. Nearly 30 years ago, I was creating a mural about Amelia Earhart for Hilton, when a manager from a hotel at Jack London Square came by for a visit, and inspired something London-related in me. I’m one of those artists who lets ideas gestate for years and then finds someone to pay me to do what I want. Five years later, in 1996, that Jack London Square hotel manager called me, saying he had 84 linear feet of blank wall.

I’d never even read London, but I had that curiosity grounded in family lore. I started researching London, who like me, was a California kid, and was quickly hooked. I have a history degree and have always been attracted to locations that connect with a subject. In my work, I try to ask, what was the meaning of a subject, and a location, in the past and now. To that end, I often combine the dead with the living, or place characters together who were never actually in the same place at the same time.

Trying to figure out how to do that with London, I read more by and about London, and realized that his experiences and his passion for issues in the early 20th century were the same issues still plaguing us a century later. I also investigated the nature of London’s antagonism towards Samuels and found myself reckoning with a relationship that reveals quite a bit about the economics and culture of the Bay Area, and the country, then and now.

London’s own words, in books and in news reports, and the accounts of witnesses provide a good picture of what happened on June 21, 1910, and after.

On that date, Jack London paused at the entrance to his neighborhood bar and argued with himself. He felt defeated and devastated, having just left his wife in the hospital. Their newborn daughter, Joy, was dead. He needed a drink.

He carried copies of Jim Jeffries’ autobiography, which he planned to read and share with his fellow reporter, to prepare for “The Fight of the Century.” In 12 days, Jack Johnson, a Black man, would meet Jeffries, “The Great White Hope,” for a heavyweight championship. London was to cover the event in Reno; he would bet on the superiority of white men and lose a lot of money.

As London stepped inside the bar, the saloon’s manger Muldowney, knowing Jack’s reputation, grabbed his arm and yelled, “Get outa me bar, you ruffian.” Fists flew; police arrived.

Was London drunk? “Nah,” he declared, “I’ve only had two drinks all day.”

“You butted me,” declared Muldowney, while London claimed, “I was just trying to get away.” Both were taken to jail, each proclaiming his own innocence and declaring the other the villain.

In court, Judge Samuels regarded both men. “I didn’t strike a single blow,” London explained, though Muldowney’s face was red, swollen and lacerated, while Muldowney insisted that “London hung one on me fore I came across with my wallop.” London’s swollen right eye, puffy nose, and discolorations contrasted with his elegant light grey suit, soft white shirt, flowing knotted tie, and the Panama hat in his hands.

The judge asked London, “Were you drunk?”

“There is no way a man may judge the state of his thirst until he has taken at least one drink, and then he can determine whether he wants another or not,” London argued, to the laughter of the entire room.

Samuels reasoned, since no witness could say who punched first, and both appeared equally battered, he’d give them the “benefit of the doubt,” and dismissed the charges. London seethed.

Why was he so angry? London had little tolerance for what he considered injustice—as a result of a childhood scarred by injustice, bigotry, poverty, starvation and hard labor. He’d also had a traumatic experience with the justice system.

In 1894, at 18, London had joined a march across America, a protest of the unemployed. Walking along an empty street in Niagara Falls, a cop approached. Unable to name a hotel, London was forced directly to a jail courtroom filled with other hobos. As each was casually sentenced without a trial, Jack resolved to “expose their mis- administration of justice.”

With a sentence of 30 days, the chain-ganged prisoners were delivered to the Erie Penitentiary. Stripped and shaved, London found his prison garb became his “insignia of shame,” and he felt the “rushing tides of fear.” In that imposing cell block, he learned that to survive starvation, beatings and monstrous depravity, he must become one of them.

“When one is on the hot lava of hell, he cannot choose his path,” he would later write.

That observation came in The Road, London’s 1907 recounting of his prison experiences—but only those, he wrote, “that weren’t unspeakable.”

So, three years later, as London regarded the black-robed man sitting behind his elevated bench in an ornate courtroom, he plotted revenge against this judge: against a non-Christian (Samuels was Jewish), against the inequities of capitalism, and against an unjust prison system built upon the exploitation of men.

London discovered that the judge owned the land under the tavern and accused Samuels of the kind of graft he’d witnessed all his life. The judge denied this, saying that while he owned the land, he had no other connection.

Having sworn to expose misadministration of justice back in Niagara Falls in 1894, London took his vendetta to the press.

“Oh, we were wolves,” he recalled, “just like the fellows who do business in Wall Street.”

Here is what Jack London couldn’t have known about Samuels: that his family had left Prussia before his birth in 1859 and had arrived in America when he was 3 years old. That Samuels studied for and passed the bar exam in 1899 while selling shoes in Oakland, and then went to work as a lawyer, then an assistant DA. That he was deeply involved with the Jewish community and philanthropic efforts. That Samuels’ son participated in a debate in high school, judged by London.

Shortly after the June 1910 barroom incident that ignited London’s vendetta, the author dashed off a story called “The Benefit of the Doubt,” published in the Saturday Evening Post. It’s a misfire, apathetic attempt at irony, a slur against “Judge Witberg,” and a self-portrait of the author as more physically vengeful and more humiliating than London was in real life. There is little of the passion for social justice in London’s greater works, including The Star Rover, The Iron Heel, and The Valley of the Moon.

This certainly wasn’t the only blast my great-grandfather faced—it turns out that my aunt’s bomb threat story involved not London but a different case in 1908. And London didn’t hurt his reputation. When the judge died in 1925, the courts shut down, and flags flew at half-mast.

None of this soured me on London. I went on to create murals at Jack London Square, called “Jack & Friends,” a literary history of the Bay Area. The sad end of the story came around 2009 when a developer decided to install tile over my murals.

The post How My Great-Grandfather Dealt With a Lout Named Jack London appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Twitchell has announced plans for a new Ruscha mural, on the blind wall of the third and fourth floors of an art district hotel, not far from a popular sausage and beer restaurant and the new sales rooms of the Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery. Ruscha is now 78, and it’s his older face, leaner, more knowing, that will look over downtown’s askew street grid. Ruscha will appear to lean his elbows at ease on the roof of an adjacent building, his large hands prominent. They are the hands of a man who makes things with them.

These things—paintings, prints, photographs, collages, films, and artist’s books— have been coming from Ruscha’s hands since the early 1960s. Most critics locate this work somewhere between pop art (because, Ruscha says, he listens to L.A.’s “crass commercial noise”) and conceptual art (because some of it is made on order to a set formula). What Ruscha does, however, is neither pop nor conceptual. There is an art of being in Los Angeles, and that’s what Ruscha does.

Muralist Kent Twitchell with the mural he plans to paint of artist Ed Ruscha on a building in downtown Los Angeles.

Being in L.A., despite the stereotype of its laidback life, isn’t easy. As Ruscha shows, the city is sketchy, repetitive, too brightly lighted when it isn’t shadowed, and flat. He once told interviewer Gary Conklin, “It’s all façades here—that’s what intrigues me about the whole city of Los Angeles—the façade-ness of the whole thing.” The city’s two dimensionality—a quasi-desert’s grand but withholding vista—is in Ruscha’s 25-foot-long panorama, Every Building on the Sunset Strip and in his absurdly expansive landscape paintings with their wide-screen, Panavision aspect ratio. In L.A.’s light, as Ruscha captures it, things may be startlingly present but nothing is near enough to embrace.

In some of those panoramas, a line of text, small and paralleling the horizon, advertises a desire or eavesdrops on a fear to which the setting is indifferent. That indifference, in another context, used to be called the romantic sublime. Los Angeles can’t be sublime (although it evokes terror among some observers). For one thing, L.A. is too much fun. Ruscha’s apocalyptic, funny Hollywood isn’t 19th century landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church’s Cotopaxi, despite their similarities. The Hollywood sign is forever part of the conversation about the way we amuse ourselves. Other than that, he once said of the sign, “It might as well fall down.”

That’s Ruscha the deadpan humorist, craftsman of American-style Dada, accepting things at face value, even the most blatantly inauthentic, and in the process articulating what it means to see Los Angeles. Here, where much merely seems, actually seeing is an achievement. It’s also defiance. In the bleak, monochromatic paintings Ruscha called Metro Plots, where the grid of Los Angeles is rendered obliquely and as if from the air, the street names almost fade into the ashen background, but not quite. This landscape of erasure “could almost be thought of as, well, after the holocaust,” Ruscha told Christophe Cherix of the Museum of Modern Art in 2012, “or … somewhere down the line in our very deep future.” And yet, after the disappearance, by catastrophe or time, of every building on every boulevard of Los Angeles, something would remain. The stubborn facticity of the specific—its resistance—will linger. Ruscha’s conviction (not always firm, however) that something of transient, flimsy Los Angeles persists is his purest gift to being in L.A.

Ruscha’s off-kilter take reappeared in the series of paintings he called City Lights, in which the mercury vapor lamps of decades ago, their white glare making the darkness darker and washing out all details, line streets that diagonal into the edge of the frame.

That kinetic perspective—of something emerging and passing the observer—fascinates Ruscha. To be in Los Angeles is to want to be in motion. It’s part of the thrill of the Standard Station paintings, as well as Norm’s, La Cienega, on Fire, and the Hollywood studio logo in Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights.

Ruscha ties this desire to the film cliché of a speeding train entering the frame, growing larger, and crossing the screen diagonally. “That was kind of cosmic to me; and I felt … there was something sweet about it. It was a sweet spot in my thinking,” Ruscha told MOMA’s Cherix.

Cinematic diagonals animate other works: the heavenly lights of the Miracle drawings, the shaft that cuts through Picture Without Words, and the movie projector light that casts “The End” in The Long Wait.

To be in Los Angeles juxtaposes the dream state of movie watching with the materiality of filmmaking, not just with the disenchantments of the film industry but also with the scratches and skips in a movie while it’s being shown. Those errors are visual junk but important to Ruscha because they reposition the viewer in the present while reminding the viewer that each print has its own history. Angelenos may appear to be immune to history, but Ruscha isn’t. He’s blotted reprints of his Sunset Boulevard photographs from 1966. He drew similar marks through another version of “The End” in Scratches On Film. And he painted a gallery of Western movie icons as if the buffalos, wagon trains, and teepees were grainy silhouettes on decomposing nitrate film stock. The fate of marginal things interests Ruscha, prompting him to re-photograph the commonplace boulevards he first documented in the mid-1960s.

Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles in 1956, when he was 18, when the city was just as adolescent and full of new things for a kid from Oklahoma. They were “modern, sleek things,” Ruscha remembered, and “very jazzy to me, and I thought that was like some kind of new music.” The cognitive dissonances of the city gave his work the conflict he was looking for. The heroism of the city’s unremarkable, persistent things has given the work its poignancy. The steadiness of Ruscha’s gaze at the city—the integrity and moral weight of his observation—gives us the art of being in L.A.

The post Ed Ruscha and the Art of Being in Los Angeles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Cruz is an octogenarian who, in his heyday (the ’70s to the ’90s), was a leader among Chicano muralists. He was also the most Mexican in terms of his choice of subject matter. He lovingly depicts an essential world, ignoring the overwhelming presence of America del Norte. His vision is fixed on the monuments of Pre-Columbian times, the conquest, and the Virgin of Guadalupe, ending with the wars and revolutions that took place a century ago.

In 1981, he painted an enormous, idiosyncratic mural about the Spanish conquest on the wall of Moctezuma Cafe, across the street from Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights. It is not clear where he found the imagery he drew from, but he planted symbols to show the conquistadores as destructive. For example, he included a figure of death speeding toward America on a surfboard as the Spanish soldiers land ashore, a playful touch. In a scene of encounter between the invading Spaniards and native women, an invader holds a hissing snake. Women are shown as submissive, making offerings.

Cruz paints such moments in Mexican history as the carving of the Mayan calendar; the Alamo besieged by tiny, insect-like people; and an elderly Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla starting the revolution of 1810, with an enormous revolver in one hand and a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the other.

In his narratives, the figures have distinct looks and are fully engaged in fighting, conversing, or listening. Couples look at each other with tenderness. In his Last Supper, the apostles are varied in appearance and gestures. In his storefront murals, people wear fashions as timeless as the brown dirt under their feet. Absent from his art are zoot suiters with their classic cars, low riders, farm workers, gang members, mariachis, or local sports teams. The only reminder of modern California I found in his murals is the crouching skeleton surfing the waves following the conquistadores.

I have many questions for Cruz, whom I’ve never met. Such as: What drives you to paint traditional Mexico? Why do you ignore present times?

Once I went looking for him at his favorite bar, but he was not there. I was told that he slept in his troca, parked on the street. On another occasion two years ago—while looking for him at La Princesita Meat Market on Cesar Chavez Avenue, where he had painted a mural—I learned that he had moved to Calexico.

It is a shame that time and vandals are erasing his work. The image of death riding the surfboard has disappeared. And so Manuel G. Cruz remains largely unknown and uncollected. I like his reddish brown California hills, his sense of movement, his passion to record his vision of history and his playfulness as seen in the women’s hats, death on the surfboard, and the arrangement of meats in Princesita Market. The spirit of his images, and the effort that went into them, should not disappear.

The post The Greatest Muralist You’ve Never Heard Of appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I remember a huge mural loomed from behind the library’s reception desk, depicting scenes of Mexican American life in the San Diego area in the late 1970s and early 1980s: a quinceñera celebration, students lifting up their diplomas, a backyard carne asada, a news reporter interviewing a vintage car enthusiast before the painted pillars of Chicano Park. The colors were rich, the images drawn with an appealing cleanliness, the lines easy to follow. I knew nothing about who painted the mural or how long it had been there, but I probably gazed at it hundreds of times over the years. As a child I didn’t fully understand what the images in each panel meant or represented, but I remember regarding the mural’s presence as a sort of silent anchor.

When I finally arrived to check it out, the library was shut down, the 1970s-style brown-on-brown building locked and unused. It turned out National City had built a new library a few years back, down the way in Kimball Park. When I walked over to see if the mural was there, I couldn’t find it. I asked around, spurred both by reportorial instinct and by a more personal desire I couldn’t quite identify. No one knew what I was talking about. But I needed an answer.

Upstairs, in the municipal history archive, a librarian helped me find clippings on the mural’s inauguration, on June 6, 1981. I was less than a year old at the time. “A mural depicting four facets of Chicano life – family, education, friendship and pride, will be unveiled today in ceremonies at the National City Library,” reported the San Diego Union. “Fifteen to 20 students, mostly teenagers, chose the themes. They said they did so because those aspects of Chicano life are often overlooked by the mass media. They painted the mural as part of a campaign by the library to attract more Chicano youths.” It was thrilling to read. I learned the mural’s dimensions-four panels totaling a length of 42 feet. I found that it was created as a project with a civil rights organization called PUEDO, or Proudly United for Educational Development Organizing. And the artists were local kids like me and my siblings.

I asked the librarian if he knew where the old mural might be, but it was a mystery to him as well. The National City officials I asked admitted they lost track of the artwork in the course of moving the public library from one building to another. I dug around for contacts for two artists who coordinated the mural project, David Avalos and Juan Parrino. They explained that the mural emerged in the political current of the time, making it in my view a historical document, a monument to a moment. Parrino told me that the students who painted it chose to dedicate the mural to Luis “Tato” Rivera, a young man shot in the back and killed by a National City police officer in 1975. The San Diego Union didn’t report the detail of the politically charged dedication, but Lowrider magazine did.

I kept digging. I needed to know the mural was okay. Avalos and I met up one day outside the old library and walked over to City Hall together to knock on some doors. We finally met with an administrator in the Community Services Department who promised the city was diligently searching its records and storage facilities to locate the mural.

Sometime later, they found it, in a basement storage room in City Hall. Avalos examined it and noted only a few small tears of damage. Last I checked, National City was looking to put the mural on view again.

The news soothed me. As I realized talking to Avalos and Parrino, and looking at the clips in the municipal archive, the mural is an artifact in my personal history. Its images helped shape my sense of self – as a reader, as a member of my community growing up in South San Diego, as a writer, as a journalist. Now I knew the mural must have had the same effect on other kids, and at least on the young people who helped design it.

Investigating the mural got me thinking about what “home” means to the wandering adult. I’ve lived up and down California. I’ve traveled. I live in Mexico now. My family heritage is in Tijuana. San Diego is my hometown, but it is no longer my home.

Home seems to me less a city or a place than your footprints, your archeology. I needed to find what happened to the mural behind the reception desk at the National City Public Library because I needed to relocate an essential intellectual and creative point of reference. I needed to relocate a fragment of home.

Daniel Hernandez is a journalist and writer based in Mexico City, where he contributes to the Los Angeles Times’ Latin American news blog, La Plaza. He is author of a forthcoming book, Down and Delirious in Mexico City, to be published by Scribner.

*Photo of National City Public Library mural by David Avalos.

The post A Piece of Home in a Lost Mural appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.