América Tropical: The Mural Olvera Street Was Not Supposed to Become
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Transcript
Olvera Street was created to present a picturesque Mexican past.
In 1932, David Alfaro Siqueiros painted a mural that refused the assignment.
The Mexican artist had been commissioned to create a decorative tropical scene on an exterior wall above the marketplace.
Instead, he painted América Tropical.
The central image showed an Indigenous figure crucified beneath an American eagle while armed figures aimed toward the symbol of power.
The mural transformed a tourist heritage district into a critique of imperialism.
That was not what sponsors wanted.
The work was partially and then almost completely whitewashed.
For decades it survived beneath layers of paint.
The censorship is historically valuable because it reveals the limits of acceptable Mexican identity in 1930s Los Angeles.
Food, craft and romantic mission imagery could be marketed.
A Mexican artist directly confronting American power was another matter.
The same city that celebrated a stylized Mexican past contained intense discrimination against Mexican and Mexican American communities.
Beginning in the late twentieth century, conservation efforts led by the Getty Conservation Institute and the City stabilized the surviving mural and created a viewing platform.
The goal was not to repaint missing sections as if nothing had happened.
The damage and censorship are part of the artifact.
This is a strong final stop because it turns heritage back on itself.
Olvera Street preserved history by constructing a marketable image.
Siqueiros used the same place to argue that history was violent, political and unfinished.