Chicano Muralism: Border Art.

“This is my home this thin edge of barbwire.”

These lines are excerpts from the book by Chicano writer, artist, and activist Gloria Anzaldúa entitled Borderlands/La Frontera.The New Mestiza. The text was extensively studied in the field of border studies, Chicano studies, decolonial studies, and above all, gender studies. Such deep attention from the academic world is since this 1987 book put in writing for the first time what I tried to bring out in my previous work (The Conceptual Dimension of the Border: The Chicana/o Experience and the Development of Chicana/o Art), that is, the multitude of applications of the concept of border. However, for the purpose of the discourse I intend to carry on, it is more helpful to focus on what these three short verses express. From them, it is clear that, just like for visual artists, barbed wire was the symbol of every type of border for the writer, but also the indicator of a space that can be defined as a "home" and in which one can live in a constant state of nepantla.

Basically, barbed wire was for Anzaldúa, a metaphor for Aztlán: the ancient land from which the Aztecs would have left for the central valley of Mexico to found the city of Tenochtitlán (today's Mexico City). Although not identified in a GPS map and still the subject of numerous relocations and discussions, the territory of Aztlán was tracked down by the Chicanos in Bajalta, California. The hypothesis I want to advance in the present assignment is that this legend constitutes particular link importance between the Chicano Art of the 70s and the Border Art of the 80s as before the form materialization of the concept of border and input for input the development of a strongly site-specific.

In fact, since the history of Aztlán told of ancient territories and, consequently, of old borders, it was semantically reread by the Mexicans of America as yet another proof of the motto repeated aloud during their protests: "We did not cross the border, the border crossed us !" This story became a useful pretext to ideologically and metaphorically claim the homeland and one's own cultural identity since, on the other hand, "the search for identity in Chicano culture is in many ways indistinguishable from the quest for a homeland." This happened above all through the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference of 1969, in which the terms and modes of action of the Chicano Movement were drawn up in the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.

The use of expressions such as "invasion," "reclaiming the land," "our house," "our land," and "Capricious frontiers" should not be underestimated because it already anticipates that the reconquest of Aztlán and continuing on a cultural and ideological level would have assumed real and tangible features.

The Chicanos would have fundamentally given a new shape to their old land and, to do so, they would have used the protest as a weapon to regain possession of their space and muralism as the ideal cement for its reconstruction. This technique is typically Mexican, and even more so is the close relationship it has with revolutions, politics, and struggles for civil rights. This is demonstrated by the artistic tradition of Central America, headed by the famous "tres grandes muralistas" during the Mexican Revolution of 1910: José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. You can see them honored in a work conceived by Rupert Garcìa and painted by Victor Ochoa entitled Los Tres Grandes y Frida from 1978. Below the three pop-art style faces, an inscription reads: "our inheritance from cave paintings to pre-Columbian murals our artistas Mexicanos left us a legacy para el futuro." This sentence summarizes the idea that the past of Mexican art history would have laid the foundations for future art.

Among the cultural claims of La Causa Chicana, there was one in particular that left a visual and concrete testimony of fundamental importance to grasping the complex and delicate relationship between Border Art and space: this is the story that arose from the protest of the Chicanos inhabitants of Barrio Logan Heights, a district of the border city of San Diego located a few miles north of the borderline. It was not uncommon in the 60s and 70s for an inhabitant of this area to spend their entire life in this barrio in close contact with people who shared the same culture, traditions, and language.

Also, because of this, we are often led to have a distorted and negative idea of life and relationships between people within a ghetto, a barrio, or any other ethnic neighborhood of a city. Imagine these places as a reality of isolation, segregation, crime, and urban decay. A barrio is actually much more: it is a place where integration and internal and external relations to the community are frequent, as well as a city context in which a hybrid culture is born and proliferates made of music, literature, traditions, popular festivals and visual arts.

The cultural hybridization and community cohesion of Barrio Logan had a way ofmanifested on April 22, 1970, in the area below the Coronado Bay Bridge. The latter is the bridge that, still today, crosses the bay and connects the city to Coronado Island with a branched highway in several lanes and ramps that pass high above the tiny houses of the barrio. The bridge had been opened to traffic in 1969, but as early as 1968, following numerous requests, the San Diego government had agreed to create a park for the Barrio Logan community on the 1.6-acre piece of land below the intersection of the six elevated ramps converging on the bridge. The underlying community did not well accept this structure due to the intense visual and architectural impact on their neighborhood: dozens of reinforced concrete pillars had dotted the neighborhood, making it shady and ruining the aesthetics of the landscape.

Community-built grudge exploded when the city of San Diego sent bulldozers to build a police station. The event was immediately perceived as yet another injustice inflicted by Anglos society and a second territorial invasion. That slice of the town, although not legally, at least historically and culturally belonged to their community. The inhabitants, therefore, rushed under the bridge with shovels, hoes, and rakes to build their park anyway and carry out a protest that, once again, relied on a close link with the work of the land.

This continued for a week until the San Diego government relented and agreed to leave the area to what is now the Chicano Park: one of the most significant examples of the conquests of the Movimiento Chicano and one of the most prominent visual encyclopedias and heterogeneous Mexican culture in the USA.

The term "eloquent" is not used here by chance since, subsequently, after obtaining the area and building the park in 1973, the celebration began with victory and the entire Hispanic and mestiza culture on the reinforced concrete pillars that supported the bridge. A clear example is the Chicano Park Takeover mural in which an Aztec warrior runs with a flame in his hand and an earthwork scene dating back to the reorganization of the park.

In addition to showing pride, however, the work reveals that "los muros se han utilizados como sitios de encuentro, sirviendo asì como elementos organizativos de expresión alternative. Está claro que nunca fueron concebidos como obras purely decorative." These artistic practices also had didactic purposes: through their vision, the community of the barrio should have learned, recognized, and identified with a vast iconographic, religious, historical, and symbolic repertoire.

Although it was restored and some changes were made in 1987, much of the symbology present is the original one, testifying the desire to transform the appearance of that area to make it similar to the ancient land of the Maya and Aztecs. Along this line, the decorations grew progressively, as long as the area was rendered unrecognizable: the dark forest of reinforced concrete pillars gradually became a dense set of tall decorated columns that supported a modern cathedral with several naves in the open air. The effect obtained was a solid visual impact which means that when you immerse yourself and untangle yourself among these vast images, you do not have the impression of being on the Californian west coast, let alone in the Mexican desert. The representations, their saturated and intense colors, and their simple and direct designs make this urban stretch an "other" area, a hybrid place in which Mexican linguistic codes mix with American languages and evolve mutually transforming.

This resulted from the succession of three main phases and interventions related to artists from different backgrounds. The first phase saw as protagonists mainly the inhabitants of the place and the predominance of themes linked to Chicano nationalism; the second was, however, marked by the arrival of artists from Sacramento and Los Angeles, while a struggle differentiated the third through images against the growing number of junkyards in the barrio.

The surfaces of the murals revisit Chicana, Mexican, and American history; to leave witness to future generations and have been inserted many motifs belonging to the relationship with the earth, with ancient civilizations, with the roots of the Aztlán territory, lost in 1848 and now finally regained. Undoubtedly, the iconographic program made it possible to identify the area as an ancient indigenous setting.

Chicano Park can be seen as a form of opposition between forms of urbanism “utopian” and "dialogical" cities that, contrary to the former, have the appearance of a "whole" in continuous change and dialogue with previous traditions. In order to be able to apply this reading to the case of Chicano Park, we must first distinguish its space into "absolute" and "relative." The first is that of the highway ramps, above which life of the US community flows incessantly, and cars continue to travel at high speeds, unaware of what happens below the bridge. The second, however, is just the one below: the space of the barrio and the community author and primary recipient of murals.

The first is, therefore, "absolute," in the Latin sense of the term (ab-solutus, "dissolved by") anddetached from the context and everyday life of the place where it is located. The second embodies the lifestyle led there, and the set of cultural values developed there and passed down through time.impression of being on the Californian west coast, let alone in the Mexican desert. The representations, their saturated and intense colors, and their simple and direct designs make this urban stretch an "other" area, a hybrid place in which Mexican linguistic codes mix with American languages and evolve mutually transforming.

Before the birth of murals, the difference between relative and absolute space appeared to be much more marked, as the Coronado Bay Bridge passed over the tiny houses of the Barrio Logan was imposed and not agreed. The marked verticality of the bridge pillars violent the horizontality and the wide longitudinal extension of the neighborhood. This attributes to this infrastructure the idea of a masculine element, foreign and intrusive on that feminine space that was the Mother Earth venerated by the Mexicans.

Even the choice of murals is consistent in this regard. One of the functions of this technique is to emphasize the possession and claim the legitimate property of the place in the same way that writers assert power and control over a wall through a plaque, logo, or tag. The continuity between graffiti and muralism consists of a mechanism similar to that of the signature on the canvas with which the artist claims the intellectual property of his work. In this case, it is the set of all the murals to act as a tag of an entire community and a stretch of the city landscape to act as a canvas.

The community dimension was the driving force behind the decoration and use of the park. The influx of several such people makes it possible to consider this park an intervention of public art in its recipient and its author. As in medieval cathedrals, the simplicity of the images and the clear and immediate medallion teach people something and make them grow in their sense of belonging to Aztlán. Muralism is based on the idea of speaking to several people: this is demonstrated by the often monumental dimensions of the murals and their language characterized by a straightforward aesthetic. The union of different codes is also essential since there is a collaboration between images and writings to address recipients of different training and social backgrounds.

In this sense, the Chicano Park can easily be understood as the result of a collective thought that advances against a way of seeing the utopian space and decontextualized. The direct artistic expression of the physical imposition of concrete allowed the Chicanos to show that culture cannot be constrained into narrow categories but that it works only in a constant system of interchange and self- transformation. To send this message, however, the inhabitants of Barrio Logan had to, in fact, symbolically recreate their borders and transform their neighborhood into an enclave called Aztlán. In essence, the territorial metaphor of Aztlán also served to reach the awareness that, to speak of boundaries, it was essential to reflect on the space and the site of the creation of the work of art.

There was later globalization of the concept of border. At the same time and in a similar way to the story of Chicano Park, some artists protested that they could take control of a building in which to make proliferate their art. The latter was the scene of a series of discussions and meetings between a group of artists who gathered under the name of Border Art Workshop/Tallér de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF). The municipality was founded in 1984 by Victor Ochoa, Michael Schnorr, David Avalos, Sara-Jo Berman, Isaac Artenstein, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Jude Ederhart. They boasted different backgrounds, artistic languages, ideas, genres, backgrounds, and cultures: some were American, others were Chicanos, and others were Mexican.

However, the artists of BAW/TAF, together with their collaboration with the group, carried out personal paths that ultimately diversified the initial premises of the group itself. In other words, the creativity of each artist went to the detriment of collective work and in favor of the fragmentation of approaches that would result in the dissolving of the artistic team. The central heterogeneity of the BAW/TAF led to the dissolution and subsequent branching and diversification of the Border Art languages.

With this last theme (the discussion of which I had anticipated in my previous post), my journey on the history of the Chicana identity ends. As I have pointed out, we can begin to speak of Chicano cultural construction only starting from 1848, the year of the famous Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which provided for the cession to the United States of America - which had emerged victorious from the war (between Mexico and the USA in 1846- 48) - of much of the Mexican territory. From this moment on, thousands of Mexicans found themselves living within the borders belonging to a new territory, which should have guaranteed them the same legal, economic, civil, and social rights as other US citizens. In reality, this did not happen, and these individuals, who had suddenly been stripped of both their identity and their history and sewn on new citizenship, continued to feel Mexican in some way, also given the proximity to their native country. The Mexican population who found themselves living on the other side of the border thus managed to preserve their cultural traits, language, and all that network of family, social and economic relationships that linked them to their homeland. This physical-spatial proximity between Mexico and the United States facilitated contacts and migratory flows between the two territories, giving rise to that complex political, cultural and social phenomenon that takes the name of "border crossing." Today, the frontier metaphor is often used by scholars because it allows us to think of a plurality of identities and to look at culture as the product of a process of continuous negotiation (Pratt Ewing, 1998).

I believe that I have gone through all the salient moments that have characterized the identity history of these people both from a historical and cultural point of view. I believe that appropriate images have given greater prominence and clarity to the concepts I expressed. Overall, I am satisfied with the work done. I felt the subject was mine from the beginning. This allowed me to refine my work post after post and to answer my initial question on the current state of Chicanos. Well, I concluded that even if we are no longer facing large demonstrations or long protest marches, the Chicano movement still survives!