Barbara Carrasco has waited 27 years for this moment. The artist stands in Union Station’s cavernous former ticket concourse and gazes up at her massive mural, “L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective,” as it’s being installed, her hazel eyes wet with emotion.
“This is amazing. My baby’s going up,” she says, one hand over her heart.
Carrasco painted the mural’s 43 panels — a chronological history of Los Angeles, from prehistoric times to the founding of the city in 1781 to the year she created the piece, 1981 — for Los Angeles’ bicentennial. She was a drafting artist for the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, which commissioned the work. It was intended to hang on the exterior of a McDonald’s on Broadway in downtown L.A.
“I’m a Mexican, and I wanted to show a diverse reflection of Los Angeles,” Carrasco said. “This was my chance to show what I wish was in the history books.”
The city had approved Carrasco’s sketches of the mural, but while she was painting it, the agency asked her to remove 14 images from the work in progress. Although much of the imagery is pleasant, like the Hollywood sign and the construction of City Hall, other pictures depict ugly incidents experienced by communities of color. The CRA requested cuts of former African American slave-turned-entrepreneur and philanthropist Biddy Mason, the Japanese American internments during World War II and the 1943 Zoot Suit riots, in which Navy personnel attacked Mexican American youth.
Carrasco refused to paint over her work, and the mural project was canceled.
“They said, ‘Why do you wanna focus on negative images?’ ” said Carrasco, who had involved family members and other artists in the project as well as children from different neighborhoods who helped with the brushwork and also appear in the mural.
“I was very disappointed for everybody, all the artists who worked on it, the young people. It was unexpected. I got a little depressed over it, all this work and then nothing. It was a hold on my life, actually.”
Barbara Carrasco is seen with her mural in 1983. Los Angeles TimesCarrasco’s mural sat in storage for nearly a decade. In 1990, it was displayed for several weeks at Union Station — the only time the work had been shown in its entirety. When the exhibition was over, the work was packed up again and returned to storage, at Carrasco’s expense, in Pasadena.
The mural’s reinstallation at Union Station — an “un-censoring,” as it’s being called — is part of the exhibition “¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege,” co-curated by LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes and the California Historical Society. It’s their offering for the Getty-led Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.
The exhibition explores significant artists or collectives whose public murals were in some way censored, destroyed or neglected. (Featured artists include Willie Herrón III, Ernesto de la Loza, Alma López, Roberto Chavez, Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma, Yreina Cervántez and East Los Streetscapers.) Through documentary photographs and sketches, personal letters and city records, even concrete chunks of murals, the exhibition tells not only the stories of the art and the artists but also speaks to the assertion of — and reception to — Chicana/o identity in public art.
“Barbara’s mural is an amazing example of the themes of the show,” co-curator Jessica Hough said. “The broader issues around censorship are really important; and it speaks to the history of our entire city, but does so from a very specific and feminist perspective. [We wanted] to show that the kind of history being portrayed here, from the perspective of L.A.’s communities of color, is woven together, as it is visually in the piece, and that it matters.”
At a time when the veracity of the government is being called into question and historical monuments are being reconsidered, Carrasco’s mural is especially timely, co-curator Erin M. Curtis said.
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