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Chicana/o Murals and Indigenism Two Aztec warriors, dressed in full regalia, clasp arms as they engage in a ritual dance with a mountainous landscape stretching behind them. Aside from inhabiting this idyllic environment, these heroes also physically reside within the barrio setting of East Los Angeles, where Ernesto de la Loza’s Danza de las Aguilas (1978) mural is located. How did the meaning of these indigenous figures connect with the mostly Chicana/o and Mexican residents of East L.A. whose own experience was shaped by both urban life and native Mexican traditions? How was political, social, and cultural consciousness meant to be inscribed into this kind of iconography? As seen in the community murals that have transformed the urban landscapes of California since the late 1960s, the rehabilitation of indigenous history and culture became a crucial component in the growing politicization that saturated Chicana/o political thought with the onset of the Chicano Movement , or el movimiento. California became a significant site of mural activity because it possessed a mural tradition spanning most of the twentieth century, and, as art historian Shifra Goldman has written, the West Coast has led “the country in sheer [mural] quantity.”1 But most significantly, the state had endured a bitter and prolonged colonial, expansionist, and postindustrial history that directly and indirectly informed the Indigenist subject matter of these wall paintings. The Indian of the Americas emerged within these murals as a timeless ideal and a fluid allegory of cultural affirmation that reconstructed Chicanas/os’ fragmented past while providing entire communities with a vocabulary that celebrated their contemporary cultural practices. Moreover, the recognition that the continent of America was essentially indigenous territory became one of the most fundamental steps toward decolonization and liberation of oppressed communities. Chicana/o artists employed the monumentality of the public mural to disseminate an iconography radicalized in large part through its indigenizing qualities. These murals cited indigenous culture in a multiplicity of ways and for a variety of different reasons, yet composed part of an aesthetic that I N T R O D U C T I O N Indigenism and Chicana/o Muralism The Radicalization of an Aesthetic 2 W A L L S O F E M P O W E R M E N T continuously sought to firmly establish Chicanas/os’ sociopolitical place in U.S. territory. Indigenism, in the Chicana/o context, functioned as an elastic metaphor of political consciousness that allowed for innovative articulations of cultural and gendered identity. Though many artists outside the Chicana/o community also practiced community muralism, and despite the fact that indigenous imagery was part of a larger whole that defined Chicana/o decolonial consciousness, Indigenism contributed significantly to the politicizing process of Chicano and Chicana mural production. In the social and political context of late twentieth-century U.S. history, the idea of an autonomous and independent indigenous voice necessarily posed a threat to the foundations of postcolonial and capitalist orders. In this introduction, I lay out the theoretical framework that informed Indigenism in California Chicana/o murals from the late 1960s to the turn of the twentieth century. In the process, I argue that through the public mural, Chicanas/os found a unique and effective tool with which to assert agency from the margins. In subsequent chapters of this project, this theoretical analysis provides a methodological foundation that allows me to engage the visual vocabulary of these murals as well as to discuss the activities and aspirations of the individual artists or collectives who created them. Focusing on three major centers of muralist activity—namely, the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the San Francisco Bay area, and San Diego—the question I ultimately want to raise is not whether the “subaltern” can speak, as Gayatri Spivak would posit, for we know that Third World and First Nation communities have achieved varying degrees of agency since the onset of colonialism , imperialism, and postindustrialization. Instead, the focus of this volume is to generate an understanding of the sorts of strategies deployed by the so-called subaltern in order to create a compelling and decolonized frame of self-representation. The Indigenist aesthetic that Chicana/o artists created provides a model for ways in which marginalized communities can empower themselves against the grain of dominant ideologies. The images of indigenous America depicted in many California Chicana/o murals engaged a long history of Indigenist aesthetics and discourse in the Americas. The words “Indigenism” and “Indigenist” here will be distinguished...

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