La Sombra Inquieta de la Placita

by J Michael Walker, 2004 Sumi ink on vinyl paper, 60” high x 96” wide

In 1932, two years after Olvera Street's grand opening, visiting Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros was invited to paint an evocation of Latin American culture on the exterior second-story wall of the Park's Italian Hall.

Some six weeks of furious painting, assisted by twenty students and fellow painters, filled the great space (nearly 20 feet high by 100 feet wide) with a surging landscape framing a pre-Colombian temple.  When the evening before the official unveiling arrived, Siqueiros dismissed his assistants and painted alone through the night to complete the unspoken centerpiece of his vision: the crucifixion of an indigenous peasant under the watchful eye of an imperialistic eagle.

When city fathers and society matrons assembled the next morning, there was little question that Siqueiros' expression lay outside the bounds of their concept of acceptable, positive Mexican culture.  And so, within a half-year the mural received its first application of whitewash: within a year it was completely painted over; and within a decade it was essentially forgotten.

There is, of course, rich bittersweet irony here:  Siqueiros' appropriation of the crucifix (on a wall facing la Placita church) provoked his excommunication from the Plaza; and his greatest United States mural was obliterated by the very people who had rescued its historic site from obliteration