| Chicana/o Indigenism in the visual arts has found its most radical and provocative expression in the iconography of community murals throughout the United States since the Civil Rights Movement. While muralism is an art form that has saturated urban spaces nearly everywhere in the U.S., California has been a critical site for community muralism due to the astounding number of works found there as well as to its well-earned reputation as a center for Chicana/o intellectual and artistic activity. In this project, I am focusing on the recurrence of Indigenist iconography in Chicana/o murals from the late 1960s to the turn of the twentieth century as it presents itself in three major cities in California where the community mural movement has been the most fertile, namely San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and their surrounding metropolitan areas. In the process, I am generating theoretical frameworks that explain how the Indigenist aesthetic coupled with the public nature of the community mural defined Chicana/o identity politics and cultural nationalism during and after the 1960s. Not only am I identifying the various components that inform the Indigenist aesthetic in Chicana/o mural art, but I am also documenting the changes that this aesthetic has undergone through the years.; By depicting images of indigenous culture and history from the Americas, these artists embraced an aesthetic that rewrote their place in U.S. history and society. Indigenism, as an ideology and aesthetic, emerged during the early decades of the twentieth century in various parts of Latin America, but Mexico in particular. Unlike in Mexico, however, for Chicanas/os, Indigenism was not an institution supported and endorsed officially, but rather a discourse occurring at the margins of U.S. dominant culture. Chicanana/o murals, for the most part, did not grace the walls of major public and government buildings; rather, they decorated the walls along the streets of the barrios and urban neighborhoods through out the country. |
