Encountering visions of Aztlan: arguments for ethnic pride, community activism and cultural revitalization in Chicano murals.

• Author: LaWare, Margaret R.

Recent essays have shown that arguments can include propositions that are visual as well as discursive (Birdsell and Groarke, 1996; Blair, 1996;). Given the visual orientation of contemporary society and the richness and complexity of visual images, visual propositions may, in certain contexts, be more effective in conveying messages to particular audiences (Foss, 1993). Reasoning takes various forms, and pictures may be instrumental in facilitating types of reasoning that cannot be accomplished discursively. For example, in order for a minority community to argue that its culture has distinct properties that sets it apart from the dominant culture, it needs to show those distinctions within cultural artifacts, including visual artifacts. In the late 1960s and 70s, minority communities in the United States deployed visual images to resist racism, discrimination and social injustices. Walls within urban neighborhoods became a medium for expressing arguments for solidarity, for ethnic pride and for political activism. One of the first "people's" murals painted during this period was the "Wall of Respect," a mural celebrating African-American heroes. Painted in 1967 on an abandoned building in an area targeted for urban renewal on the South Side of Chicago, the "Wall of Respect" became not only an argument for Black pride, but also a reason for the community to resist outside control of their neighborhood (Cockcroft, Weber and Cockcroft, 1977). The mural transformed an abandoned space into a community space, a space for rallying together as a community against the city bureaucracy.

Visual images, therefore, can serve an argumentative function for a community. Contrary to Blair's (1996) assertions that "visual arguments are not distinct in essence from verbal arguments" and that the "power" and "suggestiveness" of visual arguments is gained at the "cost of a loss of clarity and precision (39)," this essay argues that visual images may advocate a fairly specific concept of community development and community identity. Within particular cultural contexts, visual images make tangible abstract possibilities and clarify connections in ways that make them distinct from discursive arguments. For example, while Mexican Americans "do not form a homogeneous group politically, socially or racially" (Meier & Ribera, 1993, p. 6), certain images may remind them of a shared cultural heritage and shared experiences. For example, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patroness of Mexico, has become a symbol of liberation and social justice for Chicanos/as. Placed within a visual context of historical images of the struggle for Mexican independence, the Virgin of Guadalupe becomes part of an argument for defining Mexican American or Chicano/a culture as distinct from "Anglo" culture. As pictures have been used by scientists to demonstrate the evolutionary "progress" of human beings from apes to modern humans by demonstrating a process of mental inference and reasoning (Shelley, 1996), pictures can make an argument for community development, calling attention to unique cultural characteristics and historical events that have shaped a community's progress.

In order to better understand how visual arguments can serve an argumentative function for a community, this essay focuses on a community for whom visual images have played an important role in creating an empowering identity. Many of the "people's" murals of the late 1960s and early 1970s were painted in Mexican American communities. These murals helped to achieve the goals of "El Movimiento," the Chicano civil rights movement, that emerged during the 1960s and extended into the late 1970s and beyond. One of the principle goals of the Movement was to reconnect Mexican American communities with their shared cultural roots by building "greater awareness of and pride in Mexican American cultural uniqueness" (Meier and Ribera, 1993, p. 235). Supporters of the Movement resisted assimilation into the dominant culture, arguing for the recognition of a distinct cultural identity, a Chicano/a identity.

For Mexican Americans or Chicanas/os,(1) many of whom live "with the unique experience of being a border culture between Mexico and the Southwest part of the United States," negotiating a space of identity and community is a challenging and sometimes emotionally wrenching process (Flores, 1996, p. 142). Because of this experience of both literally and figuratively, living within a borderland, Chicanas/os may feel isolated, feeling neither Mexican nor American. As Flores demonstrates in her analysis of Chicana writers, locating a self-affirming identity requires symbolically constructing a "homeland."

Visual images, particularly mural images, have played an important role in participating in the construction of a "homeland," in defining a cultural and communal identity in Chicana/o neighborhoods, particularly in urban areas. When the artist Judy Baca turned to mural painting in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, she recognized that young Chicanas/os in Los Angeles needed spaces where they saw themselves reflected back; the existing built environment did not provide any validation of their own experiences. She explains:

The group of people I was working with was very connected to and influenced by visual symbols-in tattoos, in the kind of writing that went on in the street-but there was no visible reflection of themselves in the larger community. Nothing of the architecture or visual symbols reflected the presence of the people-other than the graffiti. First it was a Jewish community, then Mexican people moved in. What I could see was that any population could move through the place without being reflected in it. Symbols already had significance in this community, and it made sense to create another set of symbols acknowledging the people's commonality. (qtd.... Neumaier, 1990, p. 261).

Baca and other Chicana/o muralists turned to symbols that represented the traditions of Chicanos/as, traditions that distinguished them from mainstream American culture.

The murals discussed in this essay reference the history of Mexico and the Mexican American peoples whose Mestizo culture is defined by a blending of Spanish and Indian cultures and who are distinguished from most other immigrant groups to the United States by the experience of being "descendents of a twice-conquered people"(Meier and Ribera, 1993, p. 5). These murals provide a visible reminder of the cultural connections between Mexican Americans, who are one of the most diverse ethnic groups in the United States(2), by highlighting, through representative images, the notion of Aztlan, a concept which links the pre-Conquest past and post-colonial future, expressing Chicano pride and nationalism.(3) Further, the murals contain portraits that resemble community members, and which consequently make particular arguments about what deeds and which people are memorable. Finally as Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (1993) explains, Chicano/a art reflects a "continual effort toward developing an enhanced art of resistance-an art which is not a resistance to the materials and forms of art, but rather a resistance to entrenched social systems of power, exclusion and negation"(p. 67). The Chicano/a murals constitute an argument by providing an alternative vision, by making visible what institutions of power (political, cultural, economic) have rendered invisible - a self-defining Chicano/a identity.

This essay recognizes the importance of analyzing visual arguments in context, particularly when pictures serve geographically localized and culturally specific concerns and needs. Therefore, the essay begins with a discussion of "people's art," which is also referred to as the "community-based mural movement."(3) In this section, I consider the unique aesthetic characteristics that shape the rhetorical impact of the community-based mural, particularly its use of scale, stylistic innovation and themes and images familiar to the local audience. The essay then turns to the particular context of Chicano murals, focusing first on the historical experience of Mexican Americans in the United States and their ethnic origins and then addressing the particular situation of the Chicago neighborhood where the murals analyzed in this essay are located. Finally, the essay provides an analysis of the murals. This particular grouping of Chicano murals, located on the interior and exterior of a community center, Casa Aztlan, in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, were chosen for several reasons. First, Chicago has been an important location for community-based murals. The Public Art Workshop and the Chicago Mural Group, an artist collective, were organized in Chicago in the early 1970s to facilitate interactions between mural artists working in different communities around the city and to support their activities. Raymond Patlan, the artist who both painted and directed the painting of the original murals at Casa Aztlan belonged to the Chicago Mural Group. In addition, these murals at Casa Aztlan present an interesting case study since they are the product of several different periods of work and several different artists, from the early 1970s to the present. In addition, the Pilsen neighborhood where the murals are located is populated by one of the largest communities of Mexican Americans outside of the Southwest (Barnett, p. 68). Finally, understanding the murals on the interior and exterior of the Community Center as functioning together to construct an argument for a unique cultural identity, responds to theorists who have focused on pictures as isolated, individual expressions (see Fleming, 1996).

People's Art as Arguments for Community Development

Contemporary public spaces are literally filled with a profusion of visual images competing for attention. Many...