Juana Alicia's Las Lechugueras/The Women Lettuce Workers

Juana Alicia's Las Lechugueras/ The Women Lettuce Workers DYAN MAZURANA Las Lechugueras is a thirty- by fifty-foot mural in the Mission District ofSan Francisco, California that depicts six Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, or Chícanos engaged in various forms of harvesting lettuce. Two women harvest lettuce by hand. One ofthese women is heavily pregnant; in her transparent uterus is a fetus. Two other women wrap lettuce-heads in plastic, whilea third leans on a machine forplastic field-wrappinglettuce and gazes beyond. A comparatively larger image of a Mexicano or Chicano is shown liftinga crate oflettuce. All these figures workin a landscape oflettuce rows, lettuce leaves, soil, and machinery, while a plane spraying pesticides passes overhead. A car full ofAnglo men drives along the field's edge behind the workers and the pesticide spray. Barren desert mountains and clouds are seen in the background. Because the number of scholarly investigations ofJuana Alicia's art work is quite limited, and because those that exist do not investigate her murals beyond an iconic or symbolic analysis (see, for example, Drescher 1989, 1991), the complex signs and uniform messages in herwork remain largely unexamined. However, I have found that the political and social visual rhetoric (Eco 1976) generated by Las Lechugueras' signs provide a multifarious arena for analysis. Las Lechugueras is public, community art (Baca 1995), situated outdoors and constantly in dialogue with its audiences. Consequently, from feminist and semiotic perspectives, issues ofauthor-audience communication become paramount (Corti 1978; Eco 1976, 1990). While I carry out a detailed analysis ofLas Lechugueras' images, I also investigate its interactions with its multiple audiences, taking into [Meridians:feminism, race, transnationalism 2002, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 54-81)©2002 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 54 account its historical, architectural, social, political, cultural, and geographical communities and location. My line of inquiry raises such questions as: How does the location of the mural influence communication between the artist and multiple audiences? How is the mural's political and social visual rhetoric interpreted and received by members ofthe community in which it physically resides? In observing how Mexicana and Chicana visual artists have created complex, socially and artistically coded paintings, I was struck by the need for approaches different from those provided by art-historical analysis to interpret these artists' feminist and political messages. By themselves, traditional art-historical methods are unable to address the complex questions I wanted to ask about why certain images were selected over others. What messages were communicated through the images? How do those messages communicate to multiple audiences? I initially turned to feminist art theory and criticism for tools because of their emphasis on gender and the gaze. However, I found that most of these analyses pay scant attention to the work ofMexicana, Chicana, and Latina artists, so they know little about the code-systems these artists might draw from to create their images and messages. Feminist art theory and criticism also has yet to produce a satisfactory theoretical or JUANA ALICIA'S LAS LECHUGUERAS/THE WOMEN LETTUCE WORKERS 55 methodological framework with which to examine the intersection of visual signs ofgender, race, ethnicity, and class, especially with regard to art created for social protest.1 Semiotics and Its Discontents Upon investigation of the broad, interdisciplinary field of semiotics, I realized that, although it too neglected the work ofMexicana, Chicana, and Latina artists, the field offered certain theories and methods, especially the Italian school's concepts and insights grounded in rhetorical concerns, that could serve as a theoretical foundation for my inquiries into the visual images and feminist and political messages produced by Mexicana and Chicana artists. Keir Elam (1980) defines semiotics as the study ofprocesses ofsignification and communication, the processes by which meanings in society are both produced and exchanged. Semiotics provided the means bywhich I could investigate the historical shifts in the formal, thematic, and communicative function ofspecific genres, as well as to account for and analyze individual, innovative works that moved among, or even outside, certain genres. Most importantly, it provided tools to identify and analyze the intricate pathways ofcommunication the artist uses and gave me ways to think aboutvarious levels ofcommunication with multiple audiences. By foregrounding...