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Resurrecting L.A.'s Lost Latino Murals

The city’s walls have been one of the few places for minorities to tell their side of history. But too often, even those attempts have been thwarted.
A mural in Fountain Valley, by Sergio O’Cadiz. Shortly after it was painted in 1976 it was attacked with white paint to cover the image of two policemen dragging a Latino.
A mural in Fountain Valley, by Sergio O’Cadiz. Shortly after it was painted in 1976 it was attacked with white paint to cover the image of two policemen dragging a Latino.Courtesy of the O’Cadiz Family
By
Juan Garnham

Barbara Carrasco has clear memories of when the troubles started. It was 1981. She remembers a sketch of her mural on a wall in an office in Los Angeles. In the drawing, some images were circled in purple, some in red. The commissioners of the mural wanted the purple parts to be smaller. “And the red circles were definitively to be eliminated,” Carrasco says. “One of them was one of the Japanese-American internment.”

That incident is part of a new exhibition opening September 23 at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, in Los Angeles, which tells the story of eight murals made by Chicano artists in Southern California that were challenged, censored, whitewashed, and even destroyed.