The Mexican Muralists in the United States.

• Author: Hernandez Martin, Jorge

Since the mid 1960s, artists' associations composed mainly of U.S. Latinos and African Americans have sought to represent the history and culture of their communities in the nation's public spaces. Traditionally excluded from the "official" world of art, these are artists who depend on community support and participation as well as on state and federal funds in order to render visually the social consciousness, myths, and images of their marginalized cultures.

To understand the roots of this resurgent medium of cultural expression, we must examine the activity of the three great Mexican muralists, Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who worked in the United States in the early thirties. Laurance Hurlburt's book, The Mexican Muralists in the United States, offers that opportunity, with a clear exposition of the painters' development and a plentiful amount of reproductions.

Sprung from the Mexican Revolution, mural painting as practiced by the "big three," as the major figures of the muralist movement are known, is one of the most significant cultural achievements of this historical process. It was Jose Vasconcelos, secretary of education under President Alvaro Obregon, who awarded the first contracts to Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros. The struggle among the country's various social sectors, and the revolutionary ideals of ethnic resurgence, social justice, and development in agriculture, industry, and education, found their definitive artistic portrayals in the images created by these men.

In Mexico's Palacio Nacional Diego Rivera began, in 1929, to re-create the country's history from the theocratic society of the aboriginal people to the workers' struggles of his day, which he explicitly depicted under the symbol of the hammer and sickle. Hurlburt indicates that the last part of the project, completed when Rivera returned to Mexico from the United States in 1936, shows the influence of his experience abroad. Specifically, the proclamation of the imminent Marxist revolution recalls the ideological rhetoric on display in the projects for the New Workers School and the RCA Building of Rockefeller Center in New York, which caused the capitalists of the United States to withdraw their sponsorship of the artist. The controversy...