Puebla de Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, founded in 1769 by a Spanish expedition looking for sites for Christian missions and to give themselves-as Enedina Pliego said to me as we rolled along the Pomona Freeway at about seven miles an hour-a romantic past and a good conscience in the present with respect to Mexicans, who did not live on picturesque Olvera Street but, with or without documentation and numbering over a million, lived in the slums of East Los Angeles, whence they were transported in buses or Chevys to West Los Angeles and its Mexican-manicured lawns and rosebushes.
“My grandfather galloped with Zapata in Morelos,” said the old gardener to whom Enedina and I gave a ride from Pomona. “Now I gallop by bus from Whittier to Wilshire.”
The old man laughed, and added that Los Angeles, California, was now where he worked and that Ocotepec, Morelos, was where he spent his vacations, where he sent his dollars, and where he returned to rest and see his people.
Enedina and I exchanged glances and joined the old man’s laughter. The three of us, Angelenos, talked like foreigners in the city, immigrants as recent as those who at that very moment were slipping past the border patrol at the wall between San Diego and Tijuana, between the two Californias. I’d been out of Los Angeles for a year, enough time for everyone, including my girlfriend Enedina, to think I’d left forever, because that was the rule here: you’ve just arrived and you’re already on your way, or you’d just left, you’re always passing through, and it wasn’t true, we agreed, Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans-all of us were here before anyone else, and instead of disappearing there are more and more of us, wave after wave of Mexican migrations have poured into Los Angeles as if they were returning to Los Angeles. In just the past century, the Mexicans fleeing from Porfirio Diaz’s dictatorship came first, then those fleeing the Revolution, then the Cristeros, enemies of the Maximum Leader Calles, then Calles himself expelled by Cardenas, then
“They didn’t manage to erase Siqueiros,” I said cheerfully. I drove slowly, thinking that driving in Los Angeles was the equivalent of “reading the city in the original.”
“Can you imagine his patroness’s rage if she were to see what you and I are going to see?” wondered Enedina, who had come to Los Angeles as an infant with her father, the cameraman Jesus Anibal Pliego, married to my mother, Lourdes Alfaro de Lopez, both of whom had lost their spouses in Tlatelolco and were parents of children who’d lost a parent-pals, friends, and now lovers, Enedina and I.
Los Angeles was transformed into a gigantic Mexican mural, raised like a multi colored dike so that all California-as we three could see it, two young lovers and an old gardener from the hills of Puente-wouldn’t pour down the mountains into the sea in a final earthquake… Leaving. Returning. Or arriving for the first time. From the hills one could see the Pacific through a veil of pollution, and from the foot of the mountains the city spread without a center, a mestiza city, a polyglot city, a Babel of immigrants, a Constantinople of the Pacific, zone of the great continental drift to nothingness…
There was nothing beyond this. Here the continent ended. It began in New York, the first city, and ended in Los Angeles, the second, perhaps last city. There was no more space to conquer space. Now people would have to go to the moon or to Nicaragua, to Mars or Vietnam. The land conquered by pioneers had run out, the epic of expansion was consummated, the voracity, manifest destiny, philanthropy, urgent need to save the world, to deny others their own destiny, and to impose instead, for their own good, an American future.
I was thinking all this, moving forward at a tortoise pace along highways designed for modern hares. I saw asphalt and concrete, but also development, construction, lots for sale, gas stations, fast-food stands, multiplex cinemas, the baroque-and-roll variety of the great city of Los Angeles. Still, in the mind of a young photographer, great-grandson of Laura Diaz, images alien to my vision of the city were superimposed on it: a tropical river entering the sea in a hurricane shout, thunderbirds crossing the Mexican forests, dust stars disintegrating in instantaneous centuries, a poor careless world, and death cleansing its bloody hands in a deep
A ceiba in the forest.
I shook my head to banish all those images and concentrate on my own projects, which are what brought me back to Los Angeles; they gave intelligible continuity to the impressionist waterfall of the California Byzantium. I wanted to put together a book of photographs about Mexican muralists in the United States. I’d already photographed Orozco’s murals at Dartmouth and Pomona; I’d found on the docks of New York the condemned murals that Diego Rivera had painted for Rockefeller Center; and now I was back in Los Angeles, the city where I’d grown up when my mother and her new husband, Jesus Anibal, with his daughter, Enedina, left Mexico in 1970, after another wound named Tlatelolco, to photograph, seventy years after it was painted, Siqueiros’ mural on Olvera Street.
“Olvera Street,” exclaimed Enedina portentously. “The Disneyland of Totonacan tropical tourism.”
What caught my attention was the consistency with which the Mexican murals in the United States had been objects of censure, controversy, and obliteration. Were the artists merely provocateurs, the patrons simply cowards, how could they be so naive as to think that Rivera, Orozco, or Siqueiros would paint conventional, decorative works in the taste of those who were paying for them? The gringo Medici of New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles-blind, generous, and vile all at once-thought, perhaps (this was Enedina’s idea) that ordering and paying for a work of art was enough to nullify its critical intention, to make it innocuous, and to incorporate it, castrated, into the patrimony of a kind of tax-free puritan beneficence.
The old gardener thanked us for the ride and got off at Wilshire in search of a second ride to Brentwood. Enedina and I wished him luck.
“And if you know of a garden that needs attention”-the old citizen of Ocotepec smiled at us-“just let me know, and I’ll take care of it. Don’t you two have a garden?”
Enedina and I went on to Olvera Street.
There we found Siqueiros’ mural, painted on the high exterior wall of a three-story building. The work had been restored after seventy years of blindness and silence. In 1930, a rich California lady who had heard of the “Mexican Renaissance” had commissioned it. And since Rivera was committed to Detroit and Orozco was at Dartmouth, she hired Siqueiros and asked him what the theme of his work would be.
“Tropical America,” answered the muralist with frizzy, tangled hair, flashing green eyes, immense nostrils, and, curiously, a way of speaking in which he constantly interrupted his words with hesitations and little crutches, with “well”s and “hmm”s and “don’t you agree”s.
The patron had a marvelous vision of palm trees and sunsets, according to Siqueiros, quivering rumba dancers and gallant
On the day of the opening, with the old square crowded with officials and society people, the curtain fell revealing “Tropical America,” and there appeared the mural of a Latin America represented by a dark skinned Christ, enslaved and crucified. A Latin America crucified, naked, in agony, hanging from a cross above which flew, with fierce intent, the emblematic U.S. eagle.
The patron fainted, the officials hit the roof, Siqueiros had placed Los Angeles in hell, and the next morning the mural was completely whitewashed over, made invisible to the world, as if it had never existed. Nothing.
Seeing it restored, in place, that afternoon during the first year of the new millennium moved Enedina more than me. The girl with green eyes and olive skin raised her arms and tossed her long hair away from her neck, rolling it into a tight knot that grounded her emotion like a lightning rod. The restored work restored herself, Enedina told me later; it was the diploma proving that the Chicana personality belonged as much to Mexico as to the United States. There was nothing to hide, nothing to cover up, this land belonged to all, all races, all languages, all histories. That was its destiny because that was its origin.
On the other hand, I was too busy photographing the mural, happy that for once a job coincided with one of my own projects, which had been interrupted in Detroit when I was mugged after leaving the Institute of Arts, after I’d
