RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 8.22.25 JUDY BACA’S GREAT WALL MURAL

The Great Wall of Los Angeles: The Art and History of Latino Muralism

The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of the prodigious “Eighth Wonders” of Chicano art. The public art mural stretches 2,754 feet—over half a mile—along the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles. The painted wall is recognized as one of the longest murals in the United States and is considered a major artistic and cultural landmark in California and the nation.

UCLA professor emerita Judith F. Baca conceived the mural project in 1974, and the actual painting began in 1976. The Tujunga Wash walls were constructed in the 1930s to protect the San Fernando Valley community from flash flooding caused by the Los Angeles River. Baca has always been a highly creative thinker, and her larger-than-life art interest led her to propose a monumental mural project to the Army Corps of Engineers in 1975. The Army Corps had been considering beautifying the Los Angeles Tujunga Wash, and Baca’s idea of a half-mile-long mural on its concrete walls appealed to them.

 

Baca is one of the founders of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California in 1976, an organization central to community-driven public art and social activism. With funding from the Army Corps, Baca enlisted 400 artists, teenagers, and community members to complete the mural project. Throughout seven summers, from 1976 to 1983, the mural team painted the unheralded story of minorities and marginalized people in California’s history on the walls of the Los Angeles riverbed.

Initially, Baca and her team planned for the mural narrative to begin in prehistoric times and end in 1950. In 1984, however, Los Angeles hosted the Olympic Games, and the city expended funds to paint murals on expressways leading to the Olympic Stadium. Baca was one of ten artists and the only Latina chosen to commemorate the mural path from the Pasadena Rose Bowl to the Olympic Stadium in Central Los Angeles.

Baca’s mural on the Harbor Freeway celebrates the first women’s Olympic marathon, depicting a female runner breaking through a wall, symbolizing the breaking of barriers for women in international sports. Baca then took the idea of recognizing prominent men and women athletes on the Great Wall and painted portraits of four Olympic Champions of color: African American woman sprinter, Wilma Rudolf; Native American distance runner, Billy Mills; Korean American swimmer, Sammy Lee; and Filipino American diver, Vicki Manalo Draves.

The visual narrative of the Great Wall of Los Angeles focuses primarily on the Latino experience in Los Angeles and California, but also documents historical events affecting other groups. The mural exemplifies Social Realism, often addressing difficult subjects like racism, exploitation, and civil rights struggles. There are stories and incidents common to Latinos across the Southwest, such as the mass deportation of immigrants and the enlistment and subsequent military service of Latinos in World War II. The uniqueness of the mural is that it is remarkably inclusive. The experiences of Blacks, Asians, and American Indians are also depicted in a number of the 84 mural segments.

The American Indians are the first visual subject of the Great Wall. Before the arrival of the Spaniards in the 1700s, California was the most densely populated Indigenous region in North America. Scholars estimate the Native population of California before 1500 at 300,000. Baca and her team painted the Chumash tribe of Southern California, who engaged in fishing and hunting. In one panel, an Indigenous tribe stands next to a government official with a document noting a “broken treaty.”

Chinese and Japanese Americans are included in two prominent segments of the mural: the U.S. government’s awarding of citizenship to Chinese Americans in 1943 and Japanese Americans in 1952 who had previously been denied U.S. citizenship. Many Chinese Americans living in California had arrived shortly after the 1850 Gold Rush era and had been recruited to build the railroad connecting the U.S. East Coast with the West Coast. When World War II broke out after the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese Empire forces, many of the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were third-generation Americans who had no ties or loyalty to Imperial Japan but were interned at Manzanar and other camps. The Manzanar image portrayed in the Great Wall mural is especially compelling, depicting a woman and child standing next to a barbed wire fence with a background of tents lined up in a sparse desert.

The Jewish community appears in at least three panels: a portrait of Albert Einstein; a scene showing Adolph Hitler as a monster hovering over a presumably
Jewish family; and a panel showing the passenger ship St. Louis filled with Jewish refugees from 1930s Fascist Germany, which Western countries, including the United States, turned away from their ports. In several of the panels, images of Fascism in action ask viewers to question unjust authority.

A mural panel about Black Americans includes an image of civil rights activist Rosa Parks riding in the back of a bus during the days of segregation in the South. The Great Wall devoted one panel to Dr. Charles Drew, a famous African American medical researcher who developed innovative techniques for the long-term storage of blood plasma, which led to the establishment of large-scale blood banks, particularly vital during World War II. Another panel celebrates the musical creativity of Big Mama Thornton, a R&B and gospel singer, and several anonymous Black jazz musicians.

One of the most vivid images of the Great Wall, based on numerous reproductions in Chicano art books, is that of a Zoot-Suiter lying nearly naked on a Los Angeles
sidewalk as a policeman with large, heavy boots stands over him. The Zoot-Suit Riots occurred in 1943 in Los Angeles during World War II. The panel is a reference to U.S. servicemen attacking Mexican American “zoot suiters” who were mostly young hipsters dressed in a gangster-style that was popular fashion among Latino teens. These “Zoot Suiters” were stripped of their clothes and beaten by U.S. Navy and Marine servicemen while the police looked on approvingly.

The Chávez Ravine panel shows the painful process of the city government removing Latino families from their long-time homes and their community to build a new baseball stadium. It is a powerful depiction and a unique story about Los Angeles. Chávez Ravine was a quiet Latino blue-collar neighborhood near the downtown area. When the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, they cut a deal with city officials to acquire hundreds of homes in Chavez Ravine through the city’s application of eminent domain. The mural depicting the violent eviction of Latino families from a working-class neighborhood and a tight-knit community to build a ballpark for the Los Angeles Dodgers is powerful and visually disturbing. The panel shows families being separated by the new roads and highways and a policeman lifting and forcibly removing a Latina woman resident of Chavez Ravine.

Several years ago, my wife Harriett and I had the opportunity to visit the UCLA/SPARC Cesar Chavez Digital Mural lab in Venice, California. The SPARC offices and studios are located in the former Venice jail building. SPARC teachers offer state-of-the-art digital art design classes and utilize technology to create billboard-size murals. The new technology has enabled artists working with SPARC to preserve mural images more effectively. Preservation is needed because the life of outdoor murals is relatively short, especially if they are painted on property that may change ownership. Murals may also be affected by vandalism and tagging and may experience fading from exposure to the weather.
Last month, I revisited the Great Wall for the fifth time since originally seeing it in the early 1980s. I was joined by Harriett and my good friend, Raul Lomeli, a former UCLA History graduate. As we walked the half-mile of the mural path, I recalled Baca’s explanation of what she hopes to accomplish with her murals– an effort to reveal and reconcile “diverse peoples’ struggles for their rights and affirm the connections of each community.” That is an admirable goal, and that goal adds to the impact of the Great Wall as a remarkable artistic achievement.

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Copyright 2025 by Ricardo Romo. ALl photos by Ricardo Romo.