The Interactive Digital Mural

A Tool for Social Reconciliation from the Local to the Global

• Judy Baca

This story begins with a river. The city of Los Angeles was founded on the banks of this river. There the first Tongva villages were formed in the shade of the trees that brought cooling to the arid desert landscape. The river expanded in the winter, contracted in the summer. The Tongva people moved with the river, and they accommodated its receding and expanding waters. Settlements were formed alongside their villages, the first missions and the first Spanish settlements. But in the 1920s, after a particularly bad period of flooding, our city fathers determined that the river had to be tamed. The river had overflowed its allotted space and destroyed valuable real estate, by then Los Angeles’s most valuable commodity.

As a child, I watched as the river turned to concrete. I think I can trace the beginnings of my career as a political landscape painter to growing up alongside the Los Angeles River and watching its transition. I remember the moment when I came to the flood-control channel and stood with the Army Corps of Engineers’ Aesthetic Recovery Division and looked down at the river. The forty-year-long project was complete: they had constructed a concrete channel for the river to run through for its entire length. The purpose of the new Aesthetic Recovery Division, though short-lived, was to deal with the concrete of the arroyos. They were eyesores. They left dirt belts on either side of the channels, and they divided communities.

The flood-control channels, of course, had many other serious consequences for the land. The concreted river deprived the aquifer of water replenishment through normal ground seepage and carried the runoff swiftly to the ocean, along with all the pollution from the city streets, which affected the Santa Monica Bay. In a sense the concreting of the river represented the hardening of the arteries and created disease in the land. It was apparent to me then, as it is today, that this decision to concrete the Los Angeles River would affect the people of the city for generations to come in subsequent planning and development decisions and a spiritual discord associated with the land.

What I saw was a metaphor. The hundreds of miles of concrete conduits were scars on the land. They were like the scars I’d seen on a young man’s body in a Los Angeles barrio in my early work with the gangs of East Los Angeles. Fernando, my friend and mentee, had suffered multiple stab wounds in gang warfare. I asked him how he was feeling after the attack. “My wounds are healing,” he said, “but my body is a map of violence.” So together, we designed transformative tattoos in an effort to make the ugly marks into something powerful and beautiful. He loved to say he was my greatest artwork.

That day overlooking the channel, I dreamed of a tattoo on the scar where the river once ran, as a metaphor for healing our cities’ division of race and class; I proposed the Great Wall of Los Angeles. I dared not speak aloud the words that I’m saying today: that the concreting of the river was an act of violence against the earth, and healing was needed for both the river and the people who lived along its banks.

I began to understand the notion of the land having memory because of my grandmother, Francisca, an indigenous woman who practiced healing in our family. She asked plants for permission before she took a cutting. She could make a dried twig grow. Everything had a place and a purpose in Francisca’s world. Even what I thought were weeds growing by the water fountain she turned into exquisite vegetables with frijoles. She taught me that the distance between dreaming and making real is very small. Because of her teaching, I have tried to learn to listen to the land and to imagine for artists and for my students the notion of how we can excavate the land’s memory.

Looking at the layers of meaning of the land, we start with its inherent nature. Might a valley site, for example, have been formed by a glacier? What is its current topography? Is it now agricultural fields, shopping malls, housing? All the land has a spirit. It is why every culture believes that it’s important to preserve a place where a significant event occurred—in order to understand what happened there. The spirit in each landscape is made up of all its living elements, and that includes people, animals, and plants. As humans, we enter the land late. History does not begin when we come through the door.

For twelve years I worked with four hundred young people on the recovery of their histories, practicing a connection between each other across race, class, and gender differences. We worked to tattoo the scar—where the river once ran in the San Fernando Valley—with images that would remember our dismembered history. Lifelong connections were made there between all of us. The vehicle for this was art, and the result was the longest mural in the world.

I was an initiator as well as a participant. What I realize today is that I wasn’t much different than they were. I came from the community surrounding the Great Wall, having grown up in the L.A. city school system not knowing my family’s contributions, although I was university educated. I recovered my story along with them.

A relationship exists between the disappearance of the river and the people. If you can cause a river to disappear, how much easier is it to cause the history of the originating people to disappear? We painted 2,700 feet of mural, a half a mile of imagery on the river. We excavated our own stories and those of our families to recover our history, a history that had been left out of the history books. Hundreds of artists and scholars and members of the community contributed time, knowledge, and their own memories in the making of the long wall.

We painted the indigenous plants of the region and the stories of the original Tongva and Chumash people of the region and their relationship to the land, sea, and animals. In giant images we recorded the story of Mrs. Laws, whose refusal to move from her home in Watts changed the black covenants laws that controlled where African Americans and Latinos could live in Los Angeles. We showed the story of the more than half a million Mexican Americans who were deported in sweeps across California during the 1930s repatriations, despite their status as U.S. citizens. More than seventy thousand were deported from Los Angeles alone.

Today, the original children of the Great Wall are grown, and they are returning as alumni to work with another generation of Great Wall youths. I’m proud that the Great Wall has been declared a site of public memory worth preservation by the State of California’s cultural and historical endowment. Sometimes we get it right. And they have funded us with $1.2 million in seed money to begin to repair the historic sections, some of which are thirty-three years old. This restoration is now in progress, along with new sections to be added by another generation of children of the Great Wall.

But as important as it is to remember and record the stories, it is equally important to remember the people who produced the work. Ernestine Jimenez is one of the four hundred young people who worked on the production of the mural. At the time, she was fourteen, pregnant, a gang member on drugs. She was what they called a throwaway kid, a person who would not benefit from this experience. I hired Ernestine.

Thirty years later, when she was forty-four, she was interviewed and asked about the meaning of the wall. This is what she had to say:

The way I grew up, you fight through life. I was raised to believe you don’t like nobody but your own race. Sometimes you don’t even like your own race. In the beginning there was a lot of tension. I think everybody wanted to fight everybody, just the way they looked or the way they looked at them or the way they dressed. But after a time you just started getting to know that person as an individual instead of knowing them as you were taught to. Everybody became good friends. It took a lot of growing up. Also, I wouldn’t have gone back to high school because I wouldn’t have had a role model to push me to go. As long as I stayed in school, I could come back and paint the mural. This mural opened my eyes so much. When we painted the mural of the Holocaust, I met the people that had the tattoos on them, and I learned there was another world harder than mine. Now, even when I’m feeling down, I still walk by here and I thank God I did accomplish something in life.

One gang member at a time. Many of our youth’s primary identification was affiliations as gang members of defined territories in a neighborhood where crossing a street to another territory could mean being shot by an opposing gang. But in our engagement with the river, we all hailed from the same street.

New segments are being developed today that draw relationships between the healing of the river and the people. Young people born in the ’80s are developing a new Interpretive Green Bridge on the Great Wall to bridge the gap that the river has made between two communities. The new Interpretive Green Bridge will be constructed of river debris such as broken glass and plastic and will be lit by photovoltaic lights and solar panels. Visualizing upcoming connections between the history of the river and the people, we are putting another generation to work on reclaiming our history and tattooing the scar where the river once ran.

While my focus has been on healing our relationship to our land by reclaiming our past, my mural work has expanded to include imagining a positive future. For the last ten years I’ve been inviting other artists to work with us to produce an addition to a world-traveling mural on world peace called “The World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear.” Each country to which the work travels produces a ten-by-thirty-foot canvas mural to add to the traveling installation, which assembles into a one-hundred-foot-diameter circle, thus becoming an arena for dialogue. I’m asking artists to participate, not with large amounts of money, not with commissioning capacity, but as one artist to another with the question, “Can we dream together a vision of the future without fear?” What happens when we recover our stories and envision peace?

This traveling mural records the various countries’ visions of the future and is now nine panels strong, with work from Israel and Palestine, Mexico, Russia, Finland, and Canada. Our central panel on “peace,” painted by my team in Los Angeles, is an image derived from our conversations with Hopi elders. We could not envision peace as anything but the “absence of war” at first. What did peace look like? The elders said, “Peace is simple, Judy. It’s about bringing the world into balance, the sun and the moon (male and female), the earth and man, and then maintaining the balance as an action: continually acting in that moment of struggle to maintain balance.” In the struggle to achieve a world of peace, metaphors are a powerful path.