A SILENT REVOLT ON OLVERA STREET

By Martha C. Daniel

In 1929, Christine Sterling made-over Olvera Street with the drive to create, in what could perhaps be called a delusional imagining, a romantic reincarnation of Los Angeles's beautifully ethnic yesterday.

Horrified by the decay that had befallen the birthplace of Los Angeles, Sterling concocted a plan to create a campy homage to the Mexican and Spanish heritage that shaped the early years of her city. As the area grew (thanks to prison labor supplied by the city) and the set was dressed with actors in ethnic garb, it became clear that Sterling's Olvera Street was a romanticized image of her version of Mexico, a white woman's playhouse where one could play time traveler to a different place and people.

The spectacle was for the well to do and white to marvel at, not for the people of the culture it emulated to profit from.

When Sterling invited Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros to paint a mural in the middle of Olvera Street in 1932, she shouldn't have been shocked by what was cloaked beneath the oilcloth when the artist revealed his oeuvre.

A known Stalinist and communist, Siqueiros worked alongside Diego Rivera in establishing "Mexican Muralism." His art was intrinsically linked to his political worldview, and in a 1921 manifesto, he called for constructive art that bolstered the Mexican proletariat.

After a stint working for Álvaro Obregón's revolutionary government as a muralist charged with building modern Mexican culture, Siqueiros established an artist collective that aimed to use art as "ideological propaganda" as a tool for education and empowerment.

The decade the preceded Siqueiros's journey to Los Angeles and eventually down Olvera Street was a time of intense and very public political radicalization and artistic growth as a result of this entrenchment. So when Sterling and other Olvera Street promoters commissioned Siqueiros to paint an 80-foot mural inspired by the "América Tropical," they didn't get the Mayan dreamland they had hoped for.

According to Mary Pat, a museum guide at the América Tropical Interpretive Center, Siqueiros was only given two weeks to complete the mural, and no design was planned ahead of time. "He did it all on the fly," she said. Which meant he worked mostly unsupervised.

Working with a team of students from the Chouinard Art Institute in downtown, Siqueiros brought in an arsenal of blowtorches, pressure washers, and other nontraditional tools to complete his work. While the students worked diligently on the outer edges of the mural, Siqueiros kept the center section shrouded.

It eventually came to light that during the two-week painting process, he worked under cover of darkness on what became the centerpiece of a major scandal for Sterling and her Olvera Street project.

At the mural's unveiling, the end product painted a less rosy image of Mexican culture in America than Sterling and her promoters undoubtedly hoped for. Siqueiro's mural was an absolute skewering of what Olvera Street was supposed to stand for.

The centerpiece of the mural was a representation of the crucifixion of the cultures that shaped Mexico's ancient history. An American eagle perched above the physical and metaphorical double-crossing of the native victim, the ancient pyramid behind him crumbling. The right flank showed more modern-looking revolutionaries aiming rifles and other weapons at the eagle, suggesting retaliation against the original deceiver.

In the years that followed the shocking unveiling, the mural was covered up. First, only the sections visible from the busy streets below were whitewashed. Over ten years, it was covered completely and remained untouched for decades.

Pat said the person responsible for the total whitewash isn't known for sure, but signs point to Sterling, a woman betrayed by her own vision and by a person whose culture she felt she was protecting.

But Siqueiros's actions weren't motivated purely by his Mexican politics. In Los Angeles, in the area surrounding Olvera Street, poverty plagued the people whose cultural heritage he shared. Mexican Repatriation laws deported American-born people of Mexican heritage to a country they had never called home.

Sterling willfully ignored this reality. Yet, she flung the doors open to a stereotyped version of this heritage, wanting desperately to reincorporate it back into Los Angeles's fabric and thus, America, without protecting the actual people whose very heritage was the basis for their prosecution. In the midst of a square and a street that was supposed to be an homage but ended up looking more like a Technicolor nightmare, Siqueiros saw the need for revolution.

And revolt he did.