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Have two discussions. Need 150 words initial post and one reply on each discussions. reply i will send later. Refereed to the readings. It’s important to read it and response should be based on the readings.

Discussion 1

What role does cultural expression play in changing people’s minds and promoting social change?

Discussion 2

How did the Mexican Muralism movement impact the Chicano art movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s?

HOMBRES Y MUJERES MURALISTAS
ON A MISSION: PAINTING L ATINO
IDENTITIES IN 1970S SAN
FRANCISCO

Cary Cordov

American Studies, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA

Abstract

This article argues for the importance of murals as cultural texts, consciously formed to

entertain, influence, and solidify local and transnational communities. In 1974, two

teams of artists painted two legendary murals in San Francisco’s Mission District: In

‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros,’’ the trio of male muralists presented themselves as heirs to

famed Mexican muralists in order to solidify their indictment of conditions in the

Americas and counter the participatory role of their patron, the Bank of America. In

‘‘Latino America,’’ the female muralists rejected the Chicano Movement’s emphasis on

Mexican masters and declared a new feminist, collaborative iconography. Although the

murals were dissimilar in terms of gender, approach, and aesthetics, the muralists were

joined in their desire to unite the local Latino community through their depictions of a

shared homeland, or an imagined Latin America. This article highlights the aesthetic,

cultural, political, gendered, and regional dimensions of Latino identities through the

lens of mural creation.

Keywords

community murals; pan-Latino identity; iconography; Mission District

‘ ‘An explosion of human colors ’’ : Murals in ascendance

Since the late 1960s, cultural workers in San Francisco’s predominantly

Latino Mission District have produced an impressive body of literary and

artistic work. Their creative milieu was important in helping to mobilize the

Chicano movement and spurring a Latino cultural renaissance of local and

Latino Studies 2006, 4, (356–

380

) �c 2006 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/06 $30.00
www.palgrave-journals.com/lst

national significance. As a result, reading the iconography and discourses that

pervade their work is imperative for interpreting the ideologies that have shaped

a pan-Latino identity in the United States.

Two key works of the mid-1970s – the murals ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ and

‘‘Latino America’’ – warrant in-depth attention for their high profile in the

community and the variety of cultural juxtapositions they represent in terms of

their content, creation, and history. Both ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ (Figure 1) and

‘‘Latino America’’ (Figure 2) were produced in 1974, and while they share many

of the same ideas and circumstances, they also reflect creative and philosophical

differences that indicate the complexities of defining an iconography, a

neighborhood, and a movement. While ‘‘Latino America’’ continues to provoke

discussion as one of the key works by the influential Mujeres Muralistas, a

cooperative of women muralists, ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ is just as noteworthy

for the publicly confrontational, flagrantly anti-capitalist voice of its three male

artists. In developing a closer reading of these two murals, which are both

homages to Latin America and critical responses to circumstances in the United

States, I will deconstruct a variety of visual narratives to develop a more

complex understanding of the dominant visual and ideological discourses in the

mid-1970s Mission District and in the nation as a whole.

The Mission District’s gradual transition into a predominantly Latino barrio

following World War II was solidified by the late 1960s. According to the 1970

census, Hispanics comprised 45% of the neighborhood population.1 With the

onset of the Civil Rights Movement, the Mission District emerged as a site of

Latino identity.2 Writer Alejandro Murguı́a recalls how the Mission, ‘‘teemed

with painters, muralists, poets, and musicians, even the occasional politico or

community organizer who acted beyond the rhetoric and actually accomplished

somethingy . We had no problem being understood because La Mission was a
microcosm of Latin America, and the whole barrio seemed in perfect sync’’

(Murguı́a, 2002, 118). Murguı́a’s words capture that sense of intimate

community that pervaded much of the culture, though not everything was in

sync.

Residents, activists, city officials, artists, and outsiders sought to define the

community’s public identity in various ways. The issues at stake in publicly

defining the Mission community emerged most visibly in the neighborhood’s

prolific cultural production – literature, theater, film, and the visual arts – which

attempted to define or organize the community according to various political

ideologies. Artists attempted to lay claim to the neighborhood as Chicano, or

Latino, or la Raza, or Pan-American, or Third World, or Leftist, or bohemian,

or embattled barrio, all of which infiltrated local dialogues about who the

Mission belonged to, and who belonged in the Mission. These over-lapping

categories give insight into the inclusions and exclusions of community

organizing. While some terms established allegiances as specifically of Mexican

American or Latin American descent, other terms attempted to build

1 Brian Godfrey

offers this statistic

from the Census,

although, of course,

the Census figures

obscure the presence

of undocumented

immigrants who seek

not to be noticed or

counted (Godfrey,

1988, 150). Raul

Villa describes this

process as

‘‘barrioization’’

(Villa, 2000, 4–5).

2 Most references to

the Mission District

describe the place as a

site of ‘‘Latino’’ or

‘‘Hispanic’’ identity,

as opposed to a site of

‘‘Chicano’’ identity,

since so many of the

residents have roots

in Latin America

outside of Mexico.

Hombres y Mujeres Mura l i s ta s on a Miss ion

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Cary Cordova 357

c d

Figure 1 (a) ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros,’’ 1974. Jesus ‘‘Chuy’’ Campusano, Michael Rios, and Luis Cortazar. Bank of America
building, Mission and 23rd Streets, San Francisco. (b) Detail, David Siqueı́ros on the left holding Bohr’s symbol of atomic energy,

‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros.’’ (c) Detail, a farm worker points to viewers above a crucifixion scene, ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros.’’ (d) Detail,

a caged Ruben Darı́o next to a scene of a doctor and nurse cutting an infant’s umbilical cord.

latino studies – 4:4
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358

cross-cultural coalitions based on shared racial oppression, politics, or class.

The distinctions not only indicate the diverse politics at play in the construction

of a community identity, but also the tensions underlying any amorphous

national Latino identity.

One of the key politics at play in defining the Mission was gentrification. Like

many poor urban neighborhoods during the 1970s, the Mission District was

caught in a maelstrom between development and inner city neglect. One study

shows that, by 1976, nearly half of 260 American cities with more than 50,000

people were experiencing gentrification (Smith, 1996, 37–38). In other words,

members of the working class were being displaced by a middle-class ‘‘gentry’’

b c d

Figure 2 ‘‘Latino America,’’ 1974. Las Mujeres Muralistas. Mission Street between 25th and 26th

Streets, San Francisco. Approx. 250 � 700. (b) Detail, Mission District family, ‘‘Latino America.’’ (c)
Detail, Bolivian devil figure, ‘‘Latino America.’’ (d) Detail, Venezuelan Yare devils, ‘‘Latino America.’’

Descriptions also

reference the

neighborhood as a

site of ‘‘multicultural’’

identity to encompass

the sizable Asian

American, Native

American, and

African American

populations.

Hombres y Mujeres Mura l i s ta s on a Miss ion

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Cary Cordova 359

that sought urban development projects to raise property values and produce

investment returns. In the Mission in the early 1970s, the project most symbolic

of upper middle class redevelopment interests was the construction of two

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations on 16th and 24th Streets. Mission

residents argued that a transit system with easy access to downtown would

displace low-income residents with middle-class commuters: ‘‘Because the land

around the BART stations will become too valuable for poor people to occupy’’

(Los Siete, 1970). While residents battled potentially harmful development

interests, they also faced the opposite problem: criminal negligence and illegal

displacement tactics. Within three years of BART’s opening, 133 fires erupted

within a three-block radius of the new 16th Street Station. If averaged, this

would work out to be about one fire every 8 days. Authorities declared at least

41 of the fires to be arson, suggesting that many local businesses and landlords

sought to collect insurance as a more viable method of earning an income. In

addition, since the fires eliminated low-income properties, they also facilitated

redevelopment projects with greater economic potential (Cruz and Roginsky,

1977, 1; Claudius and Collins, 2002, 1). The pervasive threat of displacement

politically mobilized the Latino and/or working class communities on many

fronts.

Local residents turned to murals as a means of invoking a community identity

and literally saving the landscape from outsider interests, local speculators,

crime, and neglect. As a result, public murals are one of the most visibly

powerful and least studied mediums at work in inner city neighborhoods. Over

the last 40 years, murals have physically and psychically transformed the

Mission District’s landscape and have become part of what defines the

neighborhood. As in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and other

major cities across the country, San Francisco’s community mural movement

gained momentum at the tail end of the 1960s. The roots of the movement are

often attributed to the impact of William Walker’s ‘‘Wall of Respect’’ mural in

Chicago in 1967. Walker and a group of 20 other artists painted the tribute to

African-American culture in the middle of the blighted South Side. While the

work only survived five years, finally succumbing to the city’s urban renewal

efforts, the community rallies that prevented at least two earlier demolition

attempts, and the success of other murals across the country to incite

community activism and visually challenge any intrusion from community

outsiders inspired a movement. By 1971, the year marking the first documented

mural in the Mission, the form was widely recognized as a powerful political

tool.3 Not only did murals pictorially define the interests, ethnicity, and politics

of local residents, but also their quality as a work of art protected old

neighborhood buildings that might otherwise topple to development interests

outside the community, or fall victim to internalized destruction, such as graffiti.

As a result, the process of creating a mural is often just as indicative of

community ideologies and tensions as the iconography in the mural.

3 Alan Barnett cited

the Horizons

Unlimited mural as

the first community

mural in the Mission.

The mural was

painted by Spain

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360

By 1975, local poet Roberto Vargas described the Mission as ‘‘an implosion/

explosion of human colors, of walls being painted by hombres y mujeres

muralistas’’ (Kleyman and Taylor-Sharp, 1976). While a number of artists

contributed to this explosion of images, the artists responsible for ‘‘Homage to

Siqueı́ros’’ and ‘‘Latino America’’ stand out for their close ties to the community,

for their continuing influence on the local aesthetic, and for the substantial

media coverage their work inspired. Various local papers produced short articles

to announce the completion of these two murals, thereby allowing the works to

attain an uncustomary level of recognition.4 The new media attention was

partly due to the increasing visibility of murals, the escalating skills of the

artists, and the introduction of spectacle-friendly events to celebrate a project’s

completion, but these two murals were particularly newsworthy for different

reasons. While the artists of ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ created a media spectacle

designed to undermine their corporate sponsor, the artists of ‘‘Latino America’’

caught attention as one of the first all-female community mural groups. In

exploring the motivation behind the works, the spectacles each work generated,

and their impact, I seek to outline the historical context of the works and

generate a more substantial understanding of the iconographic content.

A tribute to the Mexican masters : Painting ‘‘Homage to
Sique ı́ ros’’

‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ captured local attention not just for its powerful

appearance, but also for its subversiveness. In 1974, the Bank of America

commissioned Jesus ‘‘Chuy’’ Campusano, Luis Cortazar, and Michael Rios to

create a mural above the bank teller counter of its 23rd and Mission Street

branch, seeking to capitalize on the appeal of the mural movement to the local

community. According to a bank official, ‘‘For us, the mural is a symbol of our

desire to offer the best financial services in the Mission District’’ (Bank of

America, 1974). The private commission did not stop the young muralists from

attempting to speak out against their sponsor, a company then undergoing

considerable public relations difficulties as a prototypical symbol of corporate

greed. Only four years earlier, the notorious Isla Vista student riots near UC

Santa Barbara had firebombed the local Bank of America. Shortly thereafter, the

institution became a favorite target for the Symbionese Liberation Army

robberies, and in nearby Berkeley, the bank had to build a brick fortress façade

to prevent angry protestors from continuously breaking its formerly all glass

walls. César Chávez often had criticized the bank for its anti-union activity.

Even just within San Francisco, the new Bank of America downtown highrise

had figured in the displacement of many local residents.

Suffice it to say, the muralists sought every opportunity to distance the

creation and content of their work from the interests of the bank. To justify

painting in such an institution, the three artists likened their situation to the

Rodriguez,

Jesus ‘‘Chuy’’

Campusano, and Bob

Cuff (Barnett, 1984,

126). Shifra

Goldman, in her

expansive overview

of the California

mural movement,

also gave the

Horizons Unlimited

mural the earliest

date of creation

(Goldman, 1990, 36).

However, local artists

Jerry Concha and

Rolando Castellon

both recalled

producing the

Mission Rebels mural

prior to the Horizons

Unlimited mural

(Califas group

interview, 1982, 18).

Regardless of which

came first, in 1971,

the mural movement

catapulted into full

speed in San

Francisco’s Mission

District.

4 A number of

articles appeared to

announce the

completion of each of

these murals. For

‘‘Latinoamerica’’:

Quintero (1974);

‘‘Mural Transforms’’

(1974). For ‘‘Homage

to Siquı́eros’’: Garcia

(1974); ‘‘In a

Monumental Mural’’

(1974); ‘‘Mission

Grads’’ (1974);

‘‘Mission Murals’’

(1974). For both

murals: Albright

(1974); Kamin

(1974), ‘‘Mural Tour’’

(1975).

Hombres y Mujeres Mura l i s ta s on a Miss ion

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Cary Cordova 361

experience of Diego Rivera painting a mural in support of labor in San

Francisco’s Pacific Stock Exchange. Artist Michael Rios remarked, ‘‘as Diego

Rivera said, if the mural serves the purpose of nourishment and enlightenment,

it’s OK even if it’s hung in the Bank of America’’ (Campusano et al., 1974). In

drawing parallels to Rivera and the tradition of ‘‘Los Tres Grandes,’’ or ‘‘The

Big Three,’’ Mexican muralists of an earlier generation, the young men sought

to invoke their artistic lineage and ethnic pride, but also to enable their political

voice.

The parallels to ‘‘Los Tres Grandes’’ were built into the mural. By dedicating

their work to David Alfaro Siqueı́ros, the men honored the Mexican master

painter in the year of his death and cultivated his political and artistic persona.

The trio included a portrait of Siqueı́ros, notably on the far left of the mural, in

the prison garb he wore when arrested for participation in a May Day

demonstration, thus capturing a quintessential moment of his life speaking out

for his beliefs, regardless of the consequences (Figure 1b). Clearly, the artists

drew their work into a larger sphere of cultural relevance by aligning themselves

with Siqueı́ros and the Mexican mural movement’s tradition of dissent.

Moreover, the trio’s public alignment with the tradition of ‘‘Los Tres

Grandes’’ helped them skirt the bank’s attempts at censorship. In this regard,

they were aided by local resident artist Emmy Lou Packard, who not only gave

the group technical and aesthetic advice, based on her experience as a valued

assistant to Diego Rivera, but also had the wherewithal to convince the bank of

their right to freedom of expression as artists. Emmy Lou Packard had moved

her studio to the Mission from Mendocino the year before, seeking a return to

city life. Mission artists welcomed Packard as a local conduit to Diego Rivera

and Frida Kahlo and sought to include her in the community. She, in turn,

provided a leadership role. Campusano expressed his gratitude to Emmy Lou

Packard publicly, stating, ‘‘she argued strongly with the Bank about our civil

rights as artists to express what we wanted’’ (Campusano et al., 1974). The

bank expressed its appreciation more privately, in a letter from the bank’s Public

Information Officer, who thanked Packard for her ‘‘calming influence when

unnecessary and illogical strife seemed to be brewing’’ (Wood, 1974). Packard

provided a voice of sophisticated experience that ensured the success of the

project.

Packard also represented an ideological link to Leftist activism of the

preceding generation, as a long-time peace and First Amendment activist. In

1957, Packard was one of 50 Bay Area artists subpoenaed by the House Un-

American Activities Committee as a result of her reputation for supporting

‘‘radical’’ causes and producing politically oriented art work (Packard, 1957;

Pfeiffer, 1982). When Packard assisted the trio of Campusano, Rios, and

Cortazar with ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros,’’ she not only parlayed her knowledge of

the Mexican muralist tradition, but her experience as an organizer of the Left.

The project initiated a long-lasting friendship and intellectual exchange between

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Packard and chief mural designer Campusano, until his unexpected death in

1997 at the age of 52 years. Packard died the next year just shy of her 85th

birthday. Although a generation apart, the two maintained a close friendship.

Packard served as an ardent supporter of Campusano, arranging his

introductions to Mexican muralists Juan O’Gorman and Pablo O’Higgins, as

well as to César Chávez, whom she knew as a result of her work for the United

Farm Workers (Packard, 1974a, b). In turn, Campusano invited Packard to

participate in the contemporary Mission District scene, leading to her

work

with local venues, such as Galerı́a de la Raza and the Mexican Museum.5 Their

relationship is indicative of the many ideological links that emanated from the

pre-1960s Old Left to the formation of the New Left, as argued by scholar

Michael Denning (1998). However, their relationship is particularly important

for conveying the relevance of the Old Left in shaping Latino civil rights

activism, a less studied phenomenon, as is the degree to which Latinos have

shaped the Left. The cultural workers of the Mission in the 1970s interwove

political ideologies of Latin America and the Old Left into a complex fabric of

community organizing, which was not merely formative for local politics, but

relevant for understanding the many dimensions of the New Left in the United

States as a whole. The work of ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ is only one instance of a

larger shift in the national landscape, representing increasing political

mobilization among Latinos to alter systemic poverty, racism, and blind

capitalism through traditional and innovative community organizing techni-

ques.

For the mural opening, while the bank branch released marketing materials

designed to highlight its community involvement, inviting people to the mural’s

unveiling to win Giants tickets or a trip to Latin America, the muralists

responded with their own media campaign, printing a ‘‘Tres Muralistas’’

pamphlet hostile to the bank, refuting any representation of their work as

supportive of the institution, and organizing an opening ceremony that would

be sure to undermine the wishes of local bank officials. The artists invited their

friend Roberto Vargas to read a poem for the opening reception on June 4,

1974. Vargas had a high profile in the community as the director of the

Neighborhood Arts Program and as a strident activist for local needs. More

diatribe than verse, Vargas entitled his work, ‘‘La BoA,’’ which conflated the

bank’s acronym with the name of a snake and featured bank founder A.P.

Giannini as the character ‘‘A.P.G.O. Money.’’ Bank officials stepped in and

managed to prevent a public reading of ‘‘La BoA.’’ Instead, as a compromise,

Vargas read ‘‘They Blamed it on Reds,’’ an indictment of the San Francisco

police for their alleged murder of Vicente Gutierrez, which did not lack in

hostility, but at least minimized the evil casting of the bank. Nevertheless,

neighborhood residents had an opportunity to read the text of ‘‘La BoA’’ in the

local paper, which published the text alongside an article describing the radical

antics of the muralists (Vargas,

1974).

5 Campusano’s name

appeared regularly in

Packard’s later

calendars, often in

relation to Mission

District events

(Packard notebooks,

1983, 1984, 1985).

Hombres y Mujeres Mura l i s ta s on a Miss ion

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Cary Cordova 363

About the bank, artist Chuy Campusano stated, ‘‘We all know they support

the grape and lettuce growers in California and that they’re involved in Latin

America. I didn’t do the mural for them. I did it for all those people in the

Mission who stand on the long lines in the bank on Friday afternoon’’

(Campusano et al., 1974). Indeed, the central figure of the mural depicts an

agricultural worker extending his exaggerated fist at the viewer, as another man

opens a text to César Chávez’s statement, ‘‘Our sweat and our blood have fallen

on this land to make other men rich’’ (Figure 1c). The Bank was not immune to

the indictment. Indeed, in the bank’s promotional materials, the text was erased.

Despite these minor acts of censorship, the bank used the mural to represent its

exceptional tolerance and belief in freedom of expression. One reporter declared

that the presence of the mural ‘‘is proof in itself that the $41.8 billion-deposit

bank did not attempt to limit the artists’ vision or censor the subject matter’’

(Brouillette, 1974). The bank’s posturing is part of the reason the statement has

survived intact on the mural to this day. Scholar Eva Cockcroft also made the

point that the mural has served ‘‘as a sort of fire insurance for the branch’’

(Cockcroft, 1998, 230). Ultimately, the muralists and Emmy Lou Packard

successfully protected the work from its patron by placing it in a grand tradition

of political art.

Inventing ‘‘Lat ino America’’

Simultaneously, just a few blocks down Mission Street, another mural project

was underway. The mural ‘‘Latino America’’ drew attention because of the

gender of its artists and the large scale of the work. The mural used the talents of

eight women, composed of four lead artists – Patricia Rodrı́guez, Graciela

Carrillo, Consuelo Mendez, and Irene Perez – and four assistants – Tuti

Rodriguez, Miriam Olivas, Xochitl Nevel-Guerrero, and Estér Hernández – to

paint a 70-foot long by 25-foot high wall. While many women artists, including

the lead artists of this mural, had contributed to various mural projects in the

neighborhood, the group was unusual in using only women artists, leading to

the adoption of their group name, ‘‘Las Mujeres Muralistas’’ (‘‘The Women

Muralists’’). According to Estér Hernández, ‘‘People were really shocked that a

group of women were going to do the whole thing, from setting up scaffolds to

doing the drawings to doing cartoons’’ (Goldman, 1994, 213). The end result

was a stunning mural that disproved the long-standing stereotype that mural

painting, especially Chicano mural painting, was a practice best performed by

men. Indeed, their success opened doors and inspired many other women to

pursue the art form, both locally and nationally.

The women artists held an inauguration party for the mural on May 31,

1974, four days prior to the opening of ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros.’’ A poster invited

local residents to enjoy music and food in honor of the work’s completion

(Mujeres Muralistas poster, 1974). Like the men, the women passed out a

latino studies – 4:4
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364

political statement to contextualize their work, though much briefer. Signed by

Graciela Carrillo, Consuelo Mendez, Irene Perez, and Patricia Rodrı́guez, the

statement made clear that the mural was not merely a feminist vision in content,

but in creation. They declared, ‘‘Throughout history there have been very few

women who have figured in art. What you see before your eyes is proof that

woman, too, can work at this level. That we can put together scaffolding and

climb it.’’ Although this statement was in many ways equally militant to the

men’s, all of the articles reporting on the new mural dismissed any radicalism

and instead focused on their more harmonious emphasis on collective creation.

Much quoted or paraphrased was their statement declaring, ‘‘We are four

women who are working. All the work that you see before your eyes was done

collectively. We feel this work is really important because it takes art beyond the

level of individualism’’ (Mujeres Muralistas statement, 1974). The Mujeres

Muralistas gravitated to an approach and a public posture that emphasized

women’s superior collaborative skills.

The emphasis on collaboration was partly to reject their experience working

with men. As Patricia Rodrı́guez recalled, ‘‘for the record, it wasn’t negative in

the sense that the men blocked us or they didn’t let us do anything. It’s just that

they didn’t accept us to work with themy.’’ While the men also collaborated on
their work, the women felt they did not have a substantial voice, leading the

women to seek independent projects and ensure that the artistic visions of all

participants were integrated equally. For Rodrı́guez, ‘‘There was no leader; there

was no director.’’ Not only was this a dramatically different experience from

attempting to work with men, but the collaborative technique also helped

kindle a different direction in terms of the content and ideologies of their work

(Rodrı́guez, 2003).

While the men sought to pay homage to the male Mexican muralists of the

past, the women argued for an entirely new vision. Rodrı́guez stated, ‘‘We didn’t

want to give any more credit to the Mexican painters. We were the new cadres

of painters, right after Rivera. We were those people. Therefore, we had to come

up with something new. And so, this mural historically is one of the most

important in that sense because we break that trend for the first time in history.

We say, ‘we live here, we’re two cultures. We’re an American culture and a

Latino culture’’’ (Rodrı́guez, 2003).

This sentiment was partly embodied in the original title of the work, ‘‘Latino

America,’’ a title also lost to the past. While the mural’s inaugural poster and

statement refer to the work as ‘‘Latino America,’’ scholars of the work never use

this title, instead relying on the names ‘‘Latinoamérica’’ or ‘‘Panamerica.’’6 The

various labels are not necessarily symbolic of a mass error, but rather, indicative

of how alternative names gained more acceptance than the original. The most

pervasive title, ‘‘Latinoamérica,’’ is the official Spanish term for Latin America,

and as a result, suggests the painting’s focus is most directed toward depicting

the countries comprising Latin America. Alternatively, ‘‘Panamerica’’ suggests

6 Eva Sperling

Cockcroft and Holly

Barnet-Sánchez titled

a reproduction of the

work

‘‘Latinoamérica,’’

alongside an essay by

Hombres y Mujeres Mura l i s ta s on a Miss ion

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Cary Cordova 365

more of a hemispheric unity, encompassing North and South America.

However, ‘‘Latino America’’ without the accent maximizes the double meaning

of the work, suggesting how Latinos in the United States are reinventing

America as a nation, as well as articulating a larger kinship to the Américas.

Both ‘‘Latino America’’ and ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ sought to elaborate this

bicultural vision, to explore the complexities of multi-ethnic identities, and to

elicit some sense of community unity, in the face of larger, crippling

socio-economic forces. The forces behind the creation of the murals underscore

the struggle of artists to develop both a new and old iconography. For the

men crafting ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros,’’ nothing could be more relevant than

turning to the Mexican masters of the past. However, for the women painting

‘‘Latino America,’’ nothing was more important than turning away from that

past.

Ironically, rejecting patriarchal structures did not register as militancy. While

critics recognized the efforts of ‘‘Las Mujeres Muralistas’’ as groundbreaking for

women, they also suggested their works did not necessarily serve the political

agenda as much as that of their male counterparts.7 Undoubtedly, the strident

voices of the men, both within the mural and in the public sphere, had set forth

a passionate example. However, the Mujeres Muralistas emphasized their

capacity to offer a less violent voice. They stated that they ‘‘had decided that the

men’s murals of the time had too much ‘blood and guts’ and that they wanted a

more positive image of their culture’’ (Goldman, 1990, 40). As a result, readings

of their work have frequently revolved around the same themes, typically riffing

off the description of their work as expressing ‘‘a pan-American aesthetic where

highly visible images of women and emphasis on ceremony, celebration,

caretaking, harvest and a continental terrain worked toward the creation of a

new mythology’’ (Mesa-Bains, 1990, 76). While this reading is undoubtedly

accurate, this is also a somewhat myopic view. The comments track the work of

women muralists into traditionally feminine and supposedly apolitical terrain –

leaving the political realm to men. In fact, their work was not at all escapist of

political content, but grounded in the overriding political discourses that were

shaping the community’s identity.

A closer look : ‘ ‘Lat ino America’’

‘‘Latino America’’ is fascinating for its complex collage of ideas, not simply

paying tribute to motherhood or indigenous roots, but also invoking ideas about

race, gender, and political power. That it is no longer in existence is both a

testament to the transitory nature of murals, but also to the community’s failure

to recognize a culturally significant historical text. Today, the former home of

‘‘Latino America,’’ which was the Mission Model Cities office, is now a local

laundromat with cream-colored walls that betray nothing of the hot colors that

once flashed on its surface. In contrast, the bank now values ‘‘Homage to

Amalia Mesa-Bains,

their influential

text Signs from the

Heart: California

Chicano Murals

(Cockcroft and

Barnet-Sánchez,

1990, 73). Shifra

Goldman referred to

the work as the

‘‘Panamerica’’ mural

(Goldman, 1994,

213), as did the

‘‘Chicano Art:

Resistance and

Affirmation’’ (CARA)

Exhibition (Griswold

del Castillo et al.,

1991). Patricia

Rodrı́guez has

used the title

‘‘Panamerica’’ in

conversation

(Rodrı́guez, 2003).

Tim Drescher used

the name

‘‘Latinoamerica’’

without the accent

(Drescher, 1994, 22),

as did Marı́a Ochoa

(Ochoa, 2003, 10),

while Terezita Romo

used ‘‘Latinoamérica’’

(Romo, 2002, 177).

7 Many sources

indicate the works

were criticized for

being apolitical (i.e.,

Quintero, 1974).

However, little is

printed that actually

describes the work as

apolitical.

latino studies – 4:4
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366

Siqueı́ros’’ at well over a million dollars.8 While the different valuations may

stem from the failure to take women’s work seriously, the physical location also

was an important factor.

Like any outdoor mural, ‘‘Latino America’’ suffered environmental decay and

was prone to the preferences of changing property owners. A similar erasure

befell Chuy Campusano’s ‘‘Lilli Ann’’ mural (1982), an abstract montage that

alluded to the building’s history as the Lilli Ann garment factory. In 1998, new

owners of the Seventeenth and Harrison building did not hesitate in their

decision to whitewash the mural, likely even unaware of the monetary value

attributed to Campusano’s Bank of America mural (Delgado, 1998). Their

action is indicative of the widespread presumption that outdoor murals are

expendable. However, the destruction of the ‘‘Lilli Ann’’ mural provoked anger

in the community and sparked a landmark case for California’s exterior murals:

the Campusano family sued the property owners and won $200,000 in damages

under the 1979 California Art Preservation Act (Campusano, et al., 1998). The

‘‘Lilli Ann’’ suit showed how legislation was available to protect exterior murals,

but successful cases required extensive community and financial support. The

loss of ‘‘Latino America’’ roused no such attention. Rodrı́guez later remarked,

‘‘It must have been in the late ‘80s. It was just gone. And we couldn’t get

anybody in the city to support it’’ (Rodrı́guez, 2003).

In creating ‘‘Latino America,’’ the artists sought to make the wall visually

appeal to various segments of the Mission’s Latin American community.

Muralists often seek to include signifiers in their work that evoke special

meaning for local residents, but might otherwise go unnoticed among the

general public. In the mural from left to right, the viewer’s eyes shift from llamas

native to the Andes, Peruvian pipe players, a group of Venezuelan Yare devils,

the central holy image of a family in an Indian sun design, a tuiui bird native to

the Pantanal of Brazil, a Bolivian diablada figure, and an Aztecan fifth sun

casting its light on a princess and warrior figure. The bottom of the mural is

framed by a host of maguey plants and cornstalks. The emphasis is entirely on

the indigenous or mestizo heritage of Latin America, and as a result, not only

reminds local residents of their homelands, but also celebrates the survival of

various cultures in spite of Spanish colonialism. Ultimately, this emphasis

creates a parallel between the peasant or Indian classes in Latin America and the

inner city poor in America. The parallel is drawn even more distinctly by one of

the most powerful and least considered elements of the work, the area framing

local Mission District youth (Figure 2b). The youth appear in color, but the

surrounding area is black and white, entirely and purposefully drained of color.

The scene is a nod to the stylistics of newsreel footage, as well as an allusion to

the popular comics-style of many murals in the Mission at that time.9 However,

the empty whiteness also suggests the American urban dehumanization Latinos

must prevent through the cultivation of their indigenous past. The emphasis on

maintaining cultural traditions is part of an overriding dynamic in Mission

8 Campusano

estimated that the

bank paid the

muralists a total of

$15,000–$18,000 for

all related work and

supplies (Albright,

1974).

9 San Francisco was a

center for

underground comix

in the 1960s (‘‘comix’’

Hombres y Mujeres Mura l i s ta s on a Miss ion

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Cary Cordova 367

murals against assimilation. The message is relevant as part of an attempt to

form a community identity apart, and even opposed, to the black-and-white

‘‘American’’ life. Moreover, such an image suggests an attempt to break through

the traditional black and white binary that has dominated the dialogue of race

relations in America. Instead, the multi-ethnic youth depicted in the forefront is

more indicative of America’s complexity and more accurately reflective of the

Mission’s demographic diversity.

The artists’ attempts to represent a plurality of identities was akin to the actions

of community activists, who sought to build solidarity in the Mission by linking

diverse groups under the rubric of ‘‘Third World’’ coalitions. The term ‘‘Third

World’’ already had an extensive history in San Francisco as the means of

generating cross-cultural political action among people of Asian, African,

Indigenous, or Latin American descent. From the ‘‘Third World Liberation

Front,’’ to the ‘‘Third World Student Strikes,’’ to the ‘‘Third World Communica-

tions’’ publishing collective, to the ‘‘Other Sources’’ bicentennial exhibition, the

term had become well established in the rhetoric of community organizing

(Ferreira, 2003; Sandoval, 2002; Salomon, 1998). That the artists of ‘‘Latino

America,’’ sought to pictorially depict the close ties between Latin American and

African culture, abroad and at home, is indicative of their participation in

ongoing ‘‘Third World’’ community dialogues. For instance, images of various

devil figures pay tribute to the indigenous and African cultures of Latin America.

In particular, the towering red figure on the right wears a snake-adorned devil’s

mask and intricate costume traditional to the ‘‘supay’’ figures of carnival in

Oruro, Bolivia (Figure 2c). His appearance is indicative of the diablada, or devil’s

dance, which scholars most commonly locate emerging out of the culture of

enslaved indigenous and African miners, following the Spanish conquest. The

devils on the left, with colorfully painted masks and bright red costumes, embody

the image of Venezuelan Yare devils, which are part of the yearly Feast of Corpus

Christi (Figure 2d). Although Venezuela’s ‘‘dancing devils’’ celebration bears

similarly vague origins to Oruro’s diablada, its indebtedness to African culture, in

addition to indigenous and Spanish cultures, is widely acknowledged.10

Both the Bolivian and Venezuelan devil figures flank the mural’s central

family-sun image and serve as representations of a rich, if oppressed, cultural

heritage, not just for people of African descent in Latin America, but for all of

Latin America and its Diaspora. Similarly, the Aztecan figures on the far right

and the Peruvian musicians on the far left serve as iconographic references to

Latin America’s indigenous roots, as well as lend support to the need for

building community organizing exchanges between Latinos and Native

Americans in the United States. In the 1970s, the Mission was an important

site for American Indian community organizing, not just serving as a common

residential address, but offering important meeting places, like the American

Indian Center and Warren’s Bar (Mankiller and Wallis, 1993, 100). The

muralists sought to invoke their diverse indigenous heritage to align themselves

is used to identify an

underground or

alternative genre of

comics). Local artists,

such as Manuel

‘‘Spain’’ Rodriguez,

Michael Rios, and

Robert Crumb,

encouraged murals in

the comix style with

their influential

murals for Horizons

Unlimited and the

Mission Rebels

(Drescher, 1994, 19;

Ghadishah, 1987).

10 Cynthia Lecount’s

article, ‘‘Carnival in

Bolivia: Devils

Dancing for the

Virgin,’’ provides a

useful discussion of

the history of the

diablada in Oruro,

Bolivia (Lecount,

1999). Julia Elena

Fortun also discusses

the devil dance, as

well as argues for the

importance of the

morenada dance as

latino studies – 4:4
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368

with the concerns of American Indians and the larger Third World community.

The use of the zia, or Navajo sun/star image, in the center of the mural, was

indicative of this linkage (Ochoa, 2003, 49). In representing the African and

Indian roots of Latin America, the mural visually articulated the need for

recognizing the shared concerns of African American, Native American, and

Latino residents in the United States.

Ultimately, the iconography of the painting represented far more ideological

underpinnings than a feminist domesticity, although this element is still pivotal.

The center of the painting is a glorified image of a family with a woman holding

her children, who is soon to give birth to the fetus image superimposed on her

belly. The superior placement of the family in a saint-like frame accords with

traditional readings of the work. Even as a whole, the mural replicates the cycle

of life with the sun giving life to the plants, which in turn feed the people, which

then gives birth to the next generation (Rodrı́guez, 2003). These themes are

readily apparent.

However, the work is not as strictly maternalistic as most surface readings

suggest. While the mother figure bears the central position of power, she is

flanked by the male devil figures.11 The red clothing and animal masks

distinguish the Venezuelan devils on the left from the ornately costumed

Bolivian supay on the right. Along with the prominent placement of male

figures, there is a certain heralding of male sexuality, most evocatively suggested

by the Bolivian diablada’s position next to an exterior red pump that is

strikingly phallic (Figure 2c). Patricia Rodrı́guez has pointed out that she

painted the supay figure at the height of the 1970s gas crisis, and in fact, the

devil’s trompe l’oeil emergence out of the gas pump is to convey her criticism of

the nation’s increasing reliance on oil (Rodrı́guez, 2003; Romo, 2002, 182).

Thus, the mural is just as much an indictment of US consumption, as it is a

representation of family and harvest.

The Mujeres Muralistas did not choose to heighten this political aspect of

their painting, perhaps in part because street murals often steer away from

explicit controversy, so as not to provoke vandals. In fact, painting in the streets

forced the women to produce a less obviously political work than the men

painting in a private corporate institution. However, viewers perceived this

difference more as a product of gender than physical context.

Arguably, the importance both sets of artists placed on audience played the

most critical role in determining content. The men sought to undermine the

bank’s authority to show solidarity with Mission District residents waiting in line.

The women also sought to represent solidarity with their viewers. According to

the Mujeres, ‘‘A lot of people have told us that our work is pretty and colorful,

but that it is not political enough. They ask us why we don’t represent the

starvation and death going on in Latin America or even the oppression of

womenyour interest as artists is to put art close to where it needs to be. Close to
the children, close to the old people who often wander the streets alone, close to

an expression of

African culture in

Bolivia (Fortun,

1961). For a

discussion of the

Africanist presence in

carnival, the work of

Daniel Crowley is

helpful (Crowley,

1984). In addition,

just prior to his death,

Crowley submitted a

conference abstract to

argue for the

importance of

African culture in the

Bolivian carnival, not

just within the

Morenada dance, but

in the entirety of the

event (Crowley,

1999). Luis Arturo

Dominguez provides

a general overview of

the celebration

(Dominguez, 1984).

11 Alternatively,

Marı́a Ochoa has

argued for the many

unintentionally

androgynous figures

featured in the work,

specifically pointing

to the figures in the

zia and the masked

devil figures (Ochoa,

2003, 50).

Hombres y Mujeres Mura l i s ta s on a Miss ion

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Cary Cordova 369

everyone who has to walk or ride the buses to get to places’’ (Quintero, 1974).

Such representations laid claim to positive images as a means of reaching out to

the community, but also obscured the many implicit political images of the mural.

Patronage also played an important and entirely ignored role in the subject

matter of the Mujeres Muralistas. In a 1982 interview, Patricia Rodrı́guez

recalled that it was the director of Mission Model Cities who said, ‘‘you can do

anything on the wall except we don’t want blood or guts or revolutionary guns’’

(Rodrı́guez, 1982, 6). The women welcomed the director’s request, since his

wishes aligned with their own ideals of expression. However, the decision not to

‘‘represent the starvation and death going on in Latin America’’ was not just

based on their choice, but on the command of their patron.

A closer look : ‘ ‘Homage to Sique ı́ros’’

While the women faced criticism for producing apolitical work, the men faced

the challenge of being too didactic or strident at the expense of their aesthetic.

Throughout the work, the artists balanced images of terror, greed, and

technological destruction with representations of indiginism, family, and heroic

men. The painting is undeniably male-centric in its portrayals, just as charged

by the gender of its artists as ‘‘Latino America.’’ However, little exists to convey

the more nuanced meaning of their subject matter, or the complexity of their

iconography and ideology. A close reading of the mural unveils the many

political stances the muralists wished to articulate for the sake of Mission

District residents and Third World people everywhere.

In reading the work from left to right, the muralists began with a devilish

being, easily suggestive of a capitalist pig, who on one side reaches out his

imperialist talons towards a prone, pregnant mother – a likely mother earth.

The devil’s left arm wraps around the shoulders of another man – Siqueı́ros, in a

suit jacket of black and white convict stripes, who holds Bohr’s symbol of

atomic energy aloft in his left hand. For emphasis, the artists duplicated this

scene on the far right corner of the mural, by depicting themselves sketching the

devil and Siqueı́ros, again with the atom in hand. The repetition of the atomic

symbol suggests a reference to Siqueı́ros’ mural, ‘‘The Resurrection of

Cuauhtemoc,’’ painted in 1950 in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. The

work evolved from a series of murals that Siqueı́ros designed about

Cuauhtemoc, the Aztec prince who led the resistance against the Spanish

conquistador Hernán Cortéz. Of the painting, Siqueı́ros stated:

y I presented Cuauhtemoc in armour to signify that Mexico, and in general
weak peoples, should take up arms in order to bring down their enslavers and

executioners. I employed the centaur y to symbolize the conquistador as the
conqueror and destroyer of cultures. The centaur raises in his hand the

symbol of the atomic bomb to represent the form of massacre employed today

(Rochfort, 1993, 192).

latino studies – 4:4
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370

For Campusano, Rios, and Cortazar, the parallel between Cuauhtemoc fighting

the conquistadors and themselves fighting American cultural and political

imperialism would have proved an easy comparison. The artists inserted

Siqueı́ros as their contemporary hero and spokesperson, dressing him in a

business suit, much like Cuauhtemoc appeared in Spanish armor. A touch of

humor is implicit in the conflation between the suit’s pin stripes or prison

stripes, bespeaking the difficulty of differentiating good from evil, or

respectability from criminality. Siqueı́ros holds the atom in his hand as the

ultimate power, representing the power to kill, but also the power of restraint.

Correspondingly, the devil figure, perhaps an American banker or politico,

becomes the contemporary conquistador, sacrificing culture for financial and

technological gain.

Though the mural’s depictions of technology can be read as celebratory – an

effort to please the bank, perhaps – close readers will recognize the mural’s

ultimately grim view of technology. Moving in from the duplicate scenes of

Siqueı́ros, the artists included an image of schoolchildren boarding a bus on the

left-hand side and a BART train on the right-hand side. Seemingly innocuous,

the bus represented the controversial integration of local schools at that time by

busing students (Barnett, 1984, 144). Similarly, while the image of BART, the

area’s new subway system, can be represented as technological achievement, the

serpent-like representation, about to run over the people of the Mission, is more

likely the intent. One of the artists, Michael Rios, shortly thereafter painted

another mural representing BART, showing people forced to carry the burden of

the train on their shoulders. BART provided one of the most dramatic changes

to the landscape in the early 1970s, with two major subway stations within 10

blocks of each other on Mission Street, the area’s central thoroughfare. Train

routes, limited hours, and expensive ticket prices indicated the new transporta-

tion network was more for commuters than local residents, and the emergence

of city plans to turn the stations into South-American-styled tourist attractions

led Mission District residents to view the new system with considerable distrust

(Montes, 1975). Technology, for the Mission District, generally meant an

increase in the division between rich and poor, or displacement. While the artists

appeared to cater to the tastes of the bank, residents could easily read the more

contentious attitudes present in the iconography.

The artists sought not just to be critical, but instructive for their viewers. As

part of the counterbalancing in the mural, the artists introduced two larger than

life portraits of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and Nicaraguan poet

Ruben Dario. Through these two portraits, the artists articulated the need for

political action and cultural expression to work together in the struggle for

human rights. Both men are imprisoned in scaffolding, akin to a 1930s San

Francisco mural by Diego Rivera, ‘‘The Making of a Fresco Showing the

Building of a City.’’ In the Rivera mural, also known as ‘‘Workers in Control of

Production,’’ the central figure is an immense male laborer with a red star

Hombres y Mujeres Mura l i s ta s on a Miss ion

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Cary Cordova 371

pinned to his chest. The red star as the symbol of revolution and socialism

makes Rivera’s political attitudes obvious, and the trio’s homage to the famous

mural then indicates their political stance without having to fight the bank to

include a red star. That the trio did encounter some censorship in the content of

their mural is indicated by the panel of microscopic images to the right of the

portrait of Ruben Dario (Figure 1d). The cells suggest another homage to

Rivera’s work, whose Detroit and Rockefeller Center murals contained

microscopic images with discrete political symbols, such as a hammer and

sickle (Hurlburt, 1989, 163). In ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros,’’ local legend says the

top cell originally contained the seven-headed serpent symbol of

the Symbionese

Liberation Army. Today, however, the top cell is painted white.12

Between the Zapata and Dario figures is the most powerful image in the

mural, of the work in front of César Chávez’s statement, ‘‘Our sweat and our

blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich’’ (Chávez, 1966) (Figure

1c). The phrase hovers over a Christ figure crucified on the ground, a symbol of

the martyrdom of the common people to the wealthy. It is through the image of

the crucifixion that the three artists make their most visible homage to David

Alfaro Siqueı́ros, by introducing a blatant allusion to his famously censored

mural, ‘‘Tropical America.’’ In 1932, Siqueı́ros was invited to paint a work

above Los Angeles’s Olvera Street, which his sponsors hoped would echo the

paradisical tropicalization of the landscape they were attempting to create,

envisioning a vibrant shopping mecca full of piñatas and maracas. Instead,

Siqueı́ros painted symbols of oppression and colonialism, culminating in his

image of a crucified Indian suspended by the talons of an American eagle. While

the sponsors attempted to whitewash the work, over the years, the image began

to show through, seemingly voicing its resistance to censorship and emerging as

a symbol of the continuing struggle (Goldman, 1994, 87–100). In alluding to

the famous image, the men were able to make their homage to Siqueı́ros

complete.13

In looking at ‘‘Latino America’’ and ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ together, the most

obvious juxtaposition is in comparing the role gender has played in the creation

and content of the works. While ‘‘Latino America’’ clearly emerged from a

collective feminist consciousness, ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ is the work of three

men, one of whom later stated, ‘‘I’m sorry we didn’t put more women characters

in the mural. We’ve received some criticism from our sisters for that. But we are

learning’’ (Campusano et al., 1974). While the work is guilty of placing only

men in social positions of power, from the devil banker to the heroic agricultural

worker, women also have visible and relevant, if circumscribed, roles. Just as

‘‘Latino America’’ is not purely feminist – indeed, I would argue it is more

humanist, creating images of power for women and men – neither is ‘‘Homage

to Siqueı́ros’’ purely masculinist in scope. Particularly striking in this regard is

the image of the naked, pregnant woman, prone to various dangers, on one side

of the painting, counterbalanced on the right by the image of a nurse snipping a

12 A conversation

with a bank manager

tipped me to this

story in May 2003,

stating he believed the

cell originally

contained a symbol of

the Symbionese

Liberation Army. In a

telephone

conversation with

Michael Rios on

December 3, 2003,

Rios suggested the

story might be true,

even suggesting that

the cell might have

contained a ‘‘seven-

headed serpent’’

image, but he did not

wish to confirm or

deny the accuracy of

the story one way or

the other.

13 Conceivably, the

muralists also were

echoing another

painting by Siqueı́ros,

his ‘‘Por Una

Seguridad Completa

Para Todos los

Mexicanos’’ (‘‘For the

Complete Security of

all Mexicans’’),

1952–1954, in the

Hospital de la Raza.

The mural features a

man issuing from a

conveyor belt toward

the viewer head first,

latino studies – 4:4
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372

child’s umbilical cord. Not far from the operating table stand three figures

waiting to see the newborn (Figure 1d). The woman with her back to the viewer

wears a shawl that suggests her elder status, and in this context, suggests the

role of the curandera or abuelita unable to participate in the most basic cultural

rite of passage. While one can imagine the muralists representing this scene to

their corporate sponsor as symbolic of the technological achievements of

medical science, it also represents how medicine has displaced the intimacy of

birth from the family and usurped a role of power for women. Ultimately, the

traditional critical distinctions of ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ and ‘‘Latino America’’

as emerging out of a specifically male or female sensibility has cultivated

gendered readings that do not account for the more complex iconography at

work.

Shared vis ions

In reading these two murals, one of the most critical elements is recognizing

how the artists sought to use Latin American indigenous images to assert

strategies for survival in the United States. Most of the images reflect a pre-

conquest purity or mestizo heritage that rejects Spanish colonialism as much as

United States imperialism. The two works even share certain touchstone images

that might appear visually innocuous to some, but certainly would register with

local residents. For instance, the maguey or agave plants, native to Mexico,

sprout like weeds from the bottom of both murals. The plant not only is the

source of tequila and pulque, a traditional beverage, but also a tenacious

survivor against powerful American marketing campaigns for beer in Mexico.

The propensity of the plant to appear like a weed doggedly rising to the surface

bespeaks the ability of inner city residents to maintain traditions and survive

American cultural and capitalist imperialism. That the maguey plant already

heralded considerable iconographic significance is supported by artist Rupert

Garcia’s 1972 silkscreen, ‘‘Maguey de la Vida.’’ The abstract silhouette of the

plant celebrates the physical form and pays homage to its cultural importance.

Many artists have continued to replicate the image, recognizing its cultural and

now aesthetic history within the Chicano movement.

In a statement about their work, Las Mujeres described their intent as

‘‘reaching back to what we came from and understanding that what we come

from is better than this country and this country is making our countries like

what they are like today’’ (Quintero, 1974). Their comment parallels artist

Michael Rios’s description of ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ as an effort ‘‘to make

connections with our past. The primitive consciousness, the way people used to

be in harmony with nature.’’ Indeed, Rios points out the parallel himself,

remarking that ‘‘All the murals that are being done now in the Mission seem to

reflect this feeling: our mural, the one we’re doing in the 24th Street Mini-Park

and the one the women are doing at Model Cities [‘‘Latino America’’] – all going

or upside down. My

appreciation to Holly

Barnet-Sánchez for

this example, which

suggests the muralists

may have been

alluding to Siqueı́ros’

work in an even

broader fashion.

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Cary Cordova 373

back to this primitive vision’’ (Campusano et al., 1974). Rios’ remark and later

murals reveal the level of influence and cross-pollination that was transpiring in

the Mission murals, in spite of some significant differences. This primitivist

iconography continued to appear in many later works, including the 1976

Mission Neighborhood Health Center murals by Michael Rios and Graciela

Carrillo. In reading the words and images of the Mujeres Muralistas and

Michael Rios, a ‘‘primitive’’ vision appeared to mean a return to the purity of

the Latin American/indigenous past.

Examining these murals provides a lens for understanding how community

artists looked to a primitive vision of Latin America as a means of constructing,

protecting, and unifying their neighborhood. Upon examination, at least four

common themes emerge: first, by generating a visually united image of Latin

America, community activists and artists sought to build cultural ties in the

United States that otherwise are complicated by diverse geographic, political,

historical, and cultural borders. Second, the iconography of Latin America

provided a means to visually appropriate the local landscape and subvert urban

redevelopment plans likely to displace residents. Third, the use of Latin

American imagery countered traditional lines of education and articulated

alternatives to mainstream perceptions about history, identity, and culture. And

fourth, the synthesis of the local landscape with the problems of Latin America

provided a means of criticizing American foreign policy and simultaneously

protesting the manifestations of colonialism at home.

Many of the works that emerged out of the Mission District during the 1970s

overtly used representations of Latin America to visualize the idealized past, but

in this way, also circumvented grappling with contemporary political upheavals

and dissension. As a result, the paintings reflected a particular time, since the

ability to represent Latin America as a haven from the United States lost its

meaning as political strife intensified during the late seventies and eighties. The

paintings invoked an iconographic primitivism that was unable to survive the

increasingly brutal human rights violations in Latin America that evolved to a

crescendo during the Reagan Administration in the United States. Perhaps not

coincidentally, the year of the murals, 1974, is the year the Mission’s local paper,

El Tecolote, began to include a world reports section with frequent coverage of

Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Increasingly, owing to political upheavals and

a dramatic influx of refugees and immigrants from Central America, Mission

artists introduced new signifiers, so that in the 1980s, the overall iconography

shifted away from the ‘‘primitivist vision.’’ Works such as Juana Alicia’s

profoundly powerful ‘‘Alto al Fuego/Ceasefire,’’ (1988) or Miranda Bergman

and O’Brien Thiele’s ‘‘Culture Contains the Seed of Resistance which Blossoms

into the Flower of Liberation,’’ (1984) (Figure 3) depicted the struggle of

Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans to survive in the face of threats of

military violence and kidnap murders, while they still paid tribute to the beauty

of the land. The latter mural was one of many painted in San Francisco’s Balmy

latino studies – 4:4
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374

Alley in the summer of 1984 to protest US involvement in Central America. As a

result, almost all of the Balmy Alley murals from 1984 conveyed some aspect of

human tragedy in Central America. Ultimately, the transformation of

iconography is indicative of a profound transformation in the community’s

consciousness and concerns. Politics abroad forced a reconceptualization of

Latinidad in the United States.

Walls do talk : Valuing Artful Sources

In a recent article, scholar Jorge Mariscal passionately argued against the

continuous replication of stereotypes that have portrayed the early Chicano

movement as narrowly nationalist, separatist, and riddled with sexism. With his

comments in mind, these murals serve as useful lenses for developing a more

concrete understanding of the ‘‘competing political agendas’’ and shared

ideologies that have characterized the movement and its cultural production

(Mariscal, 2002, 59). Although the artists of ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ and ‘‘Latino

America’’ were predominantly Chicanos, their iconography was indicative of a

far more expansive pan-Latino identity, in keeping with the diversity of Mission

District residents. Their work was unquestionably gendered in outlook and

content, but also deserving of more considered analysis; specifically, ‘‘Homage to

Siqueı́ros’’ and ‘‘Latino America’’ represented a primitivist idealization of Latin

America that characterized Mission District murals of the early 1970s, and

perhaps hinted at broader national tendencies. The murals argued against

assimilation, against colonialism, and in support of indigenous, pan-Latino, and

Third World coalitions. Overwhelmingly, the representations of Latin America

were lessons on how to live in the United States.

By visually representing the history, significance, and cultural influence of

Latin America in public spaces, artists and community leaders wrestled for

pride, social control, political power, and community identity. Over time, the

Figure 3 Miranda Bergaman and O’Brien Thiele. ‘‘Culture Contains the Seeds of Resistance which

Blossoms into Liberation.’’ Balmy Alley, San Francisco, 1984.

Hombres y Mujeres Mura l i s ta s on a Miss ion

——————————————————————————————————
Cary Cordova 375

landscape and cultural production of the Mission District grew to represent,

both physically and symbolically, a vast expanse of Latino cultural traditions

rooted in the multiple histories of Latin America. Even though the images of

Latin America changed over time, the intent stayed the same: muralists hoped to

educate, politicize, and build solidarity locally. Ultimately, neighborhood murals

conveyed ideologies that the artists consciously and subconsciously presumed

central to a pan-Latino identity.

While a number of books and articles on the community mural movement have

developed helpful chronological essays, pinpointed appropriate artistic attribu-

tion, or cheered the overall accomplishments, the lack of close readings of murals

as cultural texts is astonishing. Too often, the low-brow origins of the mural

movement as ‘‘the people’s art’’ have rendered their significance only as

transparent propaganda or ethnic pride decoration. For instance, scholar Laurance

Hurlburt, in his homage to the superiority of the Mexican muralists, declared,

‘‘however valid the murals of Third World countries (such as Cuba, the Chile of

Allende, Nicaragua) and North American urban ghettoes may be as political

commentary, they often entirely lack any esthetic concern, and many are painted

by ‘artists’ who have no formal artistic training’’ (Hurlburt, 1989, 11). The people

who produced ‘‘Latino America’’ and ‘‘Homage to Siqueı́ros’’ were unquestionably

artists, but whose impact has been continuously dismissed. If nothing else, this

paper calls into question any willingness to take these images at face value.

While the mural movement appeared spontaneously local in growth and

regional in concerns, it actually reflected an extensive national network of

communications and an expansive political consciousness. A variety of national

and international publications circulated to announce new murals and exchange

information on technological innovations. In addition, San Francisco benefited

from established artists, such as Ray Patlán of Chicago and Susan Greene of

New York, relocating to the city, just as other locations benefited from visits by

San Francisco artists, such as Patricia Rodrı́guez’s work in Corpus Christi,

Texas, Juana Alicia’s work in Nicaragua, and Susan Cervantes’ work in Russia.

The movement has had profoundly global implications, with muralists traveling

all around the world to exchange art and ideas. Ultimately, art is one of the

primary methods for creating culture and enabling people to look at the world

differently, as well as propel opposition to the mainstream. The importance of

investigating how values are transmitted through the visual arts is typically

underrated and understudied. Nowhere is this more evident than in our ability

to pass by the voices that shout out from our city walls.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to so many people for making this article possible: Invaluable in

my research was the assistance of Patricia Rodrı́guez, Michael Nolan, Francisco

Camplı́s, and René Yañez.

latino studies – 4:4
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376

In addition, Andres and Sandra Campusano, Patricia Rodrı́guez, and

Miranda Bergman kindly consented to reproductions of the murals discussed.

Suzanne Oboler was a significant motivating force behind this article’s

development, and I greatly benefited from the Latino Studies editorial assistance

of Holly Barnet-Sánchez and Shifra Goldman. Lastly, I express my thanks to

John McKiernan-Gonzalez, who willingly read the article in all its various forms

and always contributed meaningfully to its evolution.

About the author

Cary Cordova’s current research, ‘‘The Heart of the Mission,’’ traces the cultural

histories of Latino artists in San Francisco after World War II. Her work

combines oral history, urban history, art history, and cultural studies. As an oral

historian, she recently produced a series of interviews for the ‘‘Recuerdos

Orales: Interviews of the Latino Art Community in Texas,’’ for the Archives of

American Art, Smithsonian Institution. She has received fellowships and awards

from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Texas Parks and

Wildlife Department; the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at UC

Santa Barbara; and the Manuscript Society. Presently an assistant professor in

American studies at Dickinson College, Cary Cordova received her training in

American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Ghadishah, Sepideh. 1987. Strip Shows. Métier, Summer, p. 7.

Godfrey, Brian J. 1988. Neighborhoods in Transition: The Making of San
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Goldman, Shifra. 1994. Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin
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Goldman, Shifra. 1990. How, Why, Where, and When It All Happened: Chicano Murals of
California. In Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals, eds. Eva Cockcroft and
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Griswold del Castillo, Richard, Teresa McKenna and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano eds. 1991.
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pp. 11–12.

Kleyman, Paul and Barbara Taylor-Sharp. 1976. The Seeds of Creative Community: A
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development of the CETA Arts Program as a national model from 1974–1976. [Quoting
Roberto Vargas, NAP Associate Director, in City Magazine, November 25, 1975. My
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Folklore 58(3/4): 231–252.

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54(3): 59–68.

Mesa-Bains, Amalia. 1990. Quest for Identity: Profile of Two Chicana Muralists, Based on
Interviews with Judith F. Baca and Patricia Rodrı́guez. In Signs from the Heart:
California Chicano Murals, eds. Eva Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sánchez. Venice, CA:
Social and Public Art Resource Center.

Mission Grads Enrich B of A Office. 1974. Mission District News, June 13, p. 1.

Mission Murals in the Mexican Manner. 1974. San Francisco Examiner, June 8, p. 5.

Montes, Ana. 1975. The Mission Redevelopment Plan. El Tecolote, February 28, p. 3.

Mujeres Muralistas ‘‘Latino America’’ Inauguration Poster. 1974. May 31.

Mujeres Muralistas ‘‘Latino America’’ Inauguration Poster Statement. 1974. May 31.
Emmy Lou Packard papers, Box 7, Bank of America files, Archives of American Art.

Mural Tour of the Mission District in San Francisco. 1975. Sunset Magazine, July, 26C.

Mural Transforms a Wall into a Thing of Beauty. 1974. Mission District News, June 13,
p. 7.

Murguı́a, Alejandro. 2002. The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California. Austin,
TX: University of Texas Press.

Ochoa, Marı́a. 2003. Creative Collectives: Chicana Painters Working in Community.
Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

Packard, Emmy Lou. 1974a. Letter to Helen O’Gorman. August 12. Emmy Lou Packard
Papers, Box 5, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo files (13/80), Archives of American Art.

Packard, Emmy Lou. 1974b. Letter to Pablo and Maria O’Higgins. August 20. Emmy Lou
Packard Papers, Box 5, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo files (13/80), Archives of
American Art.

Packard, Emmy Lou. 1983–1985. Notebook/Diaries 12–23. Emmy Lou Packard Papers,
Box 4, Archives of American Art.

Packard, Emmy Lou. 1957. KPFA Radio Transcript: Emmy Lou Packard Interview
Conducted by Lewis Hill. June 13. Emmy Lou Packard Papers, Box 5, Archives of
American Art.

Pfeiffer, Pat. 1982. Emmy Lou Packard’s Palette of Paints and Politics. California Living:
San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle 2: 26–33.

Quintero, Victoria. 1974. A Mural is a Painting on a Wall Done by Human Hands. El
Tecolote, September 13, p. 6.

Rochfort, Desmond. 1993. Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueı́ros. Mexico City,
Mexico: Laurence King Publishing. [Includes partial interview with Siqueı́ros originally
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Rodrı́guez, Patricia. 1982. Califas Interview: Uncorrected Transcript from Califas
Videotape #58–61. Transcribed by Carlos Palado. Califas Conference, Book 2, Archives
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Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New
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Portable Murals: Children’s Book Press and the
Circulation of Latino Art

Cary Cordova

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Portable Murals: Children’s Book Press and the
Circulation of Latino Art
Cary Cordova

Harriet Rohmer (b. 1938) created an independent publishing organization, Children’s Book
Press, in 1975 to challenge the whiteness of mainstream children’s literature and to give
inner city children alternative narratives to foster ethnic awareness and pride. The first 10
books, published between 1975 and 1978, entitled “Fifth World Tales,” became key to the
non-profit’s growth into a major publisher of equitable children’s literature. This article
shows how these first 10 books, ostensibly built on indigenous folklore of the Americas, also
drew inspiration from the Latino communities of San Francisco, California. Most obviously,
all 10 books featured the art of Latina and Latino muralists based in San Francisco’s
Mission District, at the height of a flourishing community mural movement. Few street
murals survived the flux of urban change, such that these children’s books represent an
alternate, physically accessible illustration of this arts community, not unlike portable
murals. Less obviously, it also reveals how the narratives of these books stemmed from the
work of teacher and co-adapter Mary Anchondo (b. 1937) and from the parents and
children of a Head Start pre-school classroom, as well as from a larger Latino intellectual
community invested in myth and folklore. This article traces the unusual origins of these
first 10 books, their publication as a federally funded effort to desegregate public schools,
and these books as art objects of a Latino arts renaissance in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Keywords: Children’s Literature; Harriet Rohmer (b. 1938); Mary Anchondo (b. 1937);
Illustrations; Latino Art; Murals; Folklore

Superhero, or Andean god? The animated images of Viracocha in the 1976 children’s
book, The Mighty God Viracocha/El Dios Poderoso Viracocha, straddled the line between
comic book hero and stone temple icon. California artists Mike Rios (b. 1947) and
Richard Montez (b. 1948) illustrated Viracocha, the great creator deity in the pre-
Inca and Inca mythology in the Andes region of South America, as a gigantic,
golden armored machine with superhero powers (Figure 1), yet their Viracocha also
resembled a famous figure etched into the stone of an ancient temple in Tiahuanaco,
Bolivia. As noted in the book’s final commentary, “on the Bolivian side of Lake Titica-
ca, there exists to this day a number of gigantic stone statues which were already vastly
old in the year of the Inca conquest.”1 One stone figure presides over Puerta del Sol
(Gate of the Sun), one of the few walls left standing to represent the former greatness
of the Tiwanakan empire (Figure 2). Like other presumed images of Viracocha, the
figure appears petite in stature, but wide of girth, with arms spread, staffs in each
hand, and luminous rays of the sun encircling his head.2 Rios and Montez adopted

Visual Resources, Volume 33, Numbers 3–4, September–December 2017
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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this classic iconography, while also reinventing Viracocha as a modern superhero in
order to appeal to contemporary children.

Neither Rios nor Montez had much practice creating children’s book illustrations,
but the two had worked together several times as muralists. They belonged to a com-
munity of artists and activists that were transforming San Francisco’s Mission District
neighborhood into a fertile hub for the city’s community mural movement. Muralists
like Rios and Montez – working jointly as well as in collectives – targeted unsafe loca-
tions, such as Balmy Alley and the 24th Street Mini Park, in order to re-territorialize
visually and reclaim public space for children. Helped along with small grants from
the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), Rios, Montez and other
artists across the nation turned urban blight into dynamic environs.3

Mural painting trained the artists in giving classic images a contemporary rele-
vance, a style that subsequently shaped their book illustrations for children. For in-
stance, one mural by Rios, Montez and Anthony Machado featured the powerful

Figure 1. Mike Rios and Richard Montez, book cover illustration for The Mighty God Viracocha/El Dios Poderoso
Viracocha. Mylar color printing, 9 × 8 inches (23 × 20 cm). Book authored by Harriet Rohmer and Mary
Anchondo, Children’s Book Press, 1976. According to their copyright, the first 10 books from Children’s Book
Press entered the public domain in the mid-1980s.

Portable Murals 333

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feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl (a pre-Columbian deity) surrounded by dancing
children of the neighborhood. As Alan Barnett wrote about the 24th Street Mini
Park, “The park is not only a place for kids to play and grown-ups to rest, it is an en-
vironment that reminds people of their roots and provokes thoughts about how to live
today.”4 The muralists used an iconography that bespoke the transnational cultures of
residents, drawing especially on indigenous histories and mythologies of the Americas,
while at the same time representing the local landscape and the faces of the youngest
residents.

Harriet Rohmer (b. 1938), who created Children’s Book Press in 1975, recruited
Rios and Montez to illustrate her texts. Rohmer sought their aid in her larger quest
to change not only children’s literature but also public schooling. She employed mu-
ralists as illustrators because she believed that their “street” art could aid her vision
and lead to a new form of children’s literature. Like the muralists, Rohmer too
sought to challenge hegemonic narratives and iconographies. Children’s Book Press,
in fact, was among the first publishers to challenge mainstream children’s literature
for its whiteness. As Rohmer wrote, “In 1975, children’s literature in the United
States was what I call a literature of exclusion. Children of color had virtually no op-
portunity to open a book and see themselves, their worlds, or their home languages.”5

Figure 2. Puerta del Sol/Gate of the Sun, stone structure of andesite rock, approximately 12 feet wide by 10 feet
high (3.5 × 3 meters), Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, c. 600–1000. Photograph by Gianni Dagli Orti, courtesy the Art Archive
at Art Resource, NY.

334 Cordova

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Thus, the Press’s first 10 books, published between 1975 and 1978, printed ancient
myths from the Americas as counter-narratives to contest this “literature of exclusion.”
This set of books became key to the non-profit’s growth into a major publisher of eq-
uitable children’s literature.

Rohmer ran Children’s Book Press successfully for several decades, which helped
generate multiple accounts of her vision and leadership, but the early history of this
press is far more convoluted. Rohmer often referred to the experience of enrolling
her son in a Head Start program with teacher Mary Anchondo (b. 1937) as a funda-
mental influence, but minimized the role that Anchondo and the Mission District com-
munity played as originators of this work. Seven of the first books listed Rohmer and
Anchondo as adaptors of this classic folklore, but Rohmer’s name always appeared first,
and later references to Anchondo listed her only as a translator. Anchondo recalled dif-
ferent origins, explaining that she had been researching and recording stories from her
students’ parents for a few years prior to meeting Rohmer. According to Anchondo,
these stories served as the springboard for the first 10 books, and thus also served as
a rare record of memory, history and visual culture in this poor and predominantly
Latino immigrant community. Anchondo gave Rohmer access to these stories and
entrée to the muralists that Anchondo knew as a local teacher and as a former staff
member of the influential Economic Opportunity Council.6 The eclipsing of Anchon-
do’s role, and that of the teachers, parents and larger Mission District community, in
this early history is an ironic twist in the history of a press crafted to create equity in
children’s literature.

In this article, I take a three-fold approach. First, I analyze Rohmer’s early history
as a guiding force of Children’s Book Press. Rohmer played a dominant role in the ap-
pearance and content of her books, but also derived this work from the Mission District
community where she schooled her son. Secondly, I delineate how the first 10 books
gained federal funding alongside the push to desegregate public schools in
San Francisco. In fact, while part of the Press’s activism is contained within the
pages of the books it published, this wealth of evidence may obscure another important
characteristic of the Press: the outreach it conducted in the schools and the local com-
munity. The Mission District neighborhood provided the art and the stories for
Rohmer’s ideas to evolve. Finally, I analyze the ideologies and iconography that deter-
mined the content and appearance of the first 10 books from Children’s Book Press. I
show the strong aesthetic links that existed between the first books and the community
mural movement and unveil some of the tensions that emerged between Rohmer,
Anchondo and the artists. My analysis draws substantially from oral history interviews
I conducted with Rohmer and Anchondo and from my extensive research on the
Latino arts movement in San Francisco.7

I argue that these books became “portable murals.” They surpassed the physical
boundaries that limit wall murals, circumvented the struggles over public space, and
exported the ideologies shared by Rohmer, Anchondo and the artists to the audience
that most occupied their concerns: children. The collaboration, however, was hardly
seamless. Rohmer and Anchondo came from different worlds and recalled the early
history of the press very differently. They both turned to muralists based in the
Mission District to illustrate these books. At the time, many Latino artists in

Portable Murals 335

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San Francisco adopted muralism as a way of publicly expressing their artistry, territo-
rializing urban spaces and rejecting the covert racism of fine arts institutions. Few of
these murals survived, but the books stand as an unusual printed record of their
work in an alternate medium and subject to different patronage. In this article, I inves-
tigate the strong connections existing between Children’s Book Press and the commu-
nity muralists and contextualize the press within a broader cultural movement to
reshape children’s literature and public schooling.

Children’s Book Press drew inspiration from growing public demand that child-
ren’s literature represent children in a more diverse and egalitarian manner.8 In fact,
the majority of literary narratives at the time still presented a white bias, as Nancy
Larrick has demonstrated in her oft-cited article, “The All-White World of Children’s
Books,” published in a 1965 edition of The Saturday Review.9 After surveying 5000
books published between 1962 and 1964, Larrick determined that only 6.7% contained
a representation of an African American, regardless of whether it was a positive or neg-
ative. A similar study of books between 1973 and 1975 surveyed 1775 books and
showed small signs of improvement: 14.4% of these books featured black characters,
but the change remained mostly confined to token representations.10

In 1975, the Council on Interracial Books for Children’s Literature released a study
on children’s literature and Mexican Americans that delivered some similarly alarming
statistics. According to their analysis, fewer than 200 US children’s books published
between 1940 and 1973 were about Mexican Americans. As library scholar Jamie
Campbell Naidoo summarizes:

[T]hose scant few books that purported to represent the Mexican American
experience were written mostly by Anglo-Americans, and were loaded with
cultural stereotypes, historical inaccuracies, and gross misrepresentations.
Often, Mexican American characters were portrayed as dirty, passive,
poor, unhappy, self-sacrificing migrant workers who needed to assimilate
to the U.S. culture. The Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC)
also noted that numerous children’s books claiming to represent Mexican
Americans were actually about the culture and people of Mexico.11

These comments by Campbell Naidoo explain what Rohmer sought to change. In cre-
ating Children’s Book Press, Rohmer sought to create an alternative, both intellectual
and aesthetic, space where children of color could feel proud and empowered.

Although the Press’s first 10 books are now out of print, the history of their crea-
tion and visual iconography is an important reminder of the effort to desegregate
American schools and of the push of cultural workers to challenge the borders of main-
stream American culture. The Press participated in a publishing revolution to challenge
the dominating literary and aesthetic canon and demand racial and cultural integration
of Latinas, Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans into the
US educational system. According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, 317 al-
ternative presses operated in the United States and Canada between 1970 and 1992.12

While these presses represented diverse interests, their emergence also signaled dissat-
isfaction with mainstream children’s book publishing. Children’s Book Press deserves

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special attention not only for its longevity and influence, but especially for its unique
start and its unusual patronage of muralists. Moreover, very few presses, then as
now, operate as non-profit organizations, which was part of the hallmark of Children’s
Book Press activism.

A Start-Up in the Mission

Rohmer’s initial career trajectory had all the markings of a life in politics, not children’s
books. She was the daughter of Hilda Rotenberg (1910–74) and Ben Dorfman (1902–
85), an economist who worked at the US International Trade Commission for most of
his professional life and who chaired the agency under Presidents John F. Kennedy
(1917–63) and Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–73).13 Rohmer grew up in the world of in-
ternational politics in Washington, DC, studied politics and international relations at
Wellesley College, graduating in 1960, and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in
Paris.14 Rohmer’s early life reflected privileges that she usually minimized, perhaps
because doing so might have marked her as an outsider in the increasingly Latino
Mission District.

Fundamental to Rohmer’s political awakening was her experience working in
France in the early 1960s for UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific
and Cultural Organization. Created in the wake of the Second World War,
UNESCO’s mission was to preserve “the cultural heritage of mankind.” Rohmer’s
job provided support for African ethnographic and art films, but her work
exposed her to far more intense conversations about colonialism, cultural preserva-
tion and independence. She landed at UNESCO in turbulent times, as an increasing
number of “Third World” countries gained independence from colonial rule, or un-
derwent “decolonization” in the 1950s and 1960s. For instance, Ghana gained inde-
pendence in 1957, Guinea in 1958, Nigeria and Congo in 1960 and Kenya in 1963.
While many scholars have debated what “decolonization” has meant for these and
other countries, there is no question that this global social change informed
Rohmer’s work.15 Rohmer stated:

being in UNESCO and talking to people from newly independent countries
and understanding what they had gone through, [I absorbed] what the colo-
nial process was about, how indigenous people in their own countries had
been ignored, how their literature had been suppressed.16

Her work at UNESCO profoundly shaped her aspirations for Children’s Book Press,
though she would not begin the Press for another 10 years.

Rohmer then entered the publishing world partly through her marriage to Arnold
Reisman (b. 1934), a poet and painter later known as Bret Rohmer (the Reismans
adopted the name Rohmer as a writing pseudonym). The two met while Rohmer
was living in Paris; they married in Tel Aviv in 1961 and returned to Bret Rohmer’s
home city of New York in 1963.17 The move to New York introduced Harriet
Rohmer to a community of widely known Beat Movement artists and propelled her
into the world of independent publishing. When Bret Rohmer and his old friend

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Diane di Prima (b. 1934) decided to start up a poetry journal together, Harriet Rohmer
provided practical assistance. Their journal, Signal: A Quarterly Review, lasted for three
issues between 1963 and 1965 and featured some important poets, including di Prima,
LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka] (1934–2014), W.S. Merwin (b. 1927), Frank O’Hara
(1926–66) and many others. Harriet Rohmer became Managing Editor because, as
she modestly put it, “I probably was the only sober mind in the place at the time.”18

The Rohmers later ventured into publishing single-author books illustrated by
artists. They set up Brownstone Press in an old warehouse at Union Square – in the
same building as the Factory of pop artist Andy Warhol (1928–87) – and initiated
the publication of a series of books by Bret Rohmer, Diane di Prima, Hunce Voelcker
(1940–90), Joel Oppenheimer (1930–88), John Wieners (1934–2002), David Meltzer
(b. 1937) and more. For Harriet Rohmer, the experience was more than simply prac-
tical training in publishing; she especially appreciated how independence from the bal-
looning publishing industry could facilitate the growth of independent thought. It was
di Prima, according to Rohmer, who modeled an outlook that she also embraced,
“because she was the one who showed me that in order to have a publishing
company, you didn’t have to be Random House. You could just go do it.”19 This ap-
preciation for decentering the world of publishing in many ways paralleled her time at
UNESCO, even if the participants were quite different.

While Rohmer learned the ropes of independent publishing, she also had her first
child and enrolled as a student of filmmaking at New York University. She found a
variety of film jobs, including employment as a writer for a company called On
Film, and working for Jonas Mekas (b. 1922) of the famous avant-garde filmmakers
the Mekas brothers. However, her film work came to an end when she became preg-
nant with her second child. “I was told in no uncertain terms that there was no work for
me,” she recounted.20 The change in circumstances contributed to her willingness to
leave New York. Di Prima encouraged the couple to move to her new city,
San Francisco, which they did in 1969. The move inspired the Rohmers to initiate
some collaborative documentary film projects, but their artistic differences prevented
their completion. By 1974, these artistic differences mutated into irreconcilable differ-
ences within their marriage. Rohmer stated, “By the time that my mom died in May of
’74, I was probably ready to not be with him. And as tragic as it was, everything that was
sort of holding me back was gone.”21 With her move to a new city, the loss of her
mother, the dissolution of her marriage, single motherhood and her career in flux,
Rohmer was primed for something new.

Rohmer’s professional experience shaped in a fundamental way her ambitions for
the Press, but she often concealed this ideological positioning. Instead, she regularly re-
counted the Press’s beginnings through the lens of her personal experience with
San Francisco schools. According to Rohmer, the idea for the Press started at her child-
ren’s Head Start school in San Francisco’s Mission District. Upon volunteering to read
at the school, she discovered that her assigned book, Kay Thompson’s (1909–98) Eloise,
a tale about a wealthy, privileged blonde and blue-eyed young girl living at the Plaza
Hotel in Manhattan, was entirely out of touch with the lives of the children in front
of her.22 As Rohmer remarked, “Here was a day care center that was 85 percent

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Latino, and yet 100 percent of the books there reflected European culture.”23 More ex-
pansively, Rohmer recalled:

So when I got to San Francisco and it became time for daycare, I thought,
well, I’m only accepting Spanish bilingual daycare. I will not be anywhere
else. I figured, okay, step one. So, I ended up in a Head Start program in
the Mission … . And the head teacher was a woman by the name of Mary
Anchondo. … So, I would come and read to the kids, as a lot of mothers
did when we could and we were reading Eloise. … And they are just,
“What is this about?” And I thought, “Yes, what’s this about!” So, I began
to think that we really did need to bring in some books that were more rel-
evant to the kids. And there were a lot of kids from Central America, big Nic-
araguan population in the city at that time, Salvadoran less so, not too many
Mexicans, but a few, Peru, and African Americans. So I said, “Well, we really
need to do something else.” So I talked to Mary and she agreed to help me
because I was going to go to the UC folklore archive in Berkeley and research
the folklore from the countries represented in our daycare center.24

For Rohmer, this memory of reading Eloise spurred her decision to pursue research in
scholarly archives and make more meaningful stories available.
Drawing on practices in ethnohistory, Rohmer researched stories in the archival
records of earlier folklorists and paired these narratives with contemporary ethno-
graphic research. She found plentiful archival records from the early 1900s. Rohmer
stated:

Lots of folkloristas went down there [to Latin America] – 1910 for some
reason was a heyday to go to Latin America to record stories, and to the Phil-
ippines. So I dug into it. It was a long digging into process. And adapted it.
Got Mary to help me with the Spanish.25

The richness of these earlier records was partly a product of noble intentions and co-
lonial nostalgia, as these folkloristas presumed indigenous people were destined to
vanish from the earth. Rohmer, however, did not simply rely on these archives to rep-
licate her stories. At UNESCO, she had learned that, “if you are going to write about
somebody’s culture, you talk to somebody from that culture. I mean, it seems so
obvious nowadays, but it really wasn’t … .”26 Accordingly, she remembered turning
to local Latina elders to verify and elaborate on her stories. Rohmer recalled presenting
her stories to various grandmothers, including artist Carlos Loarca’s grandmother, in
order to give her stories greater authenticity. Her approach was a variation on the
scholarly practice of “upstreaming,” that anthropologist William Fenton first described
in his 1950s studies of the Haudenosaunee, a Native American confederacy based in the
Northeast United States and Canada.27 As John Chance wrote, upstreaming means
“using what is already known about a later time to fill in the gaps and interpret the am-
biguities for an earlier time.”28 By calling on local elders, Rohmer felt she could give her
stories some “ring of truth,” for how these stories might be passed along to young chil-
dren. It was not that Rohmer sought the most authentic narrative, but she did seek a

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narrative that resembled what a grandmother might tell her grandchild. As Rohmer
described:

I began to get the idea that it could have happened a lot of ways, but as long as
she was there, and telling me, and I liked the story, fine, why not. So that kind of
validation process of, are you really telling some kind of folklore that has roots in
the community? In other words, I have an imagination myself, but in this case, I
could use my imagination for what pieces I would choose, because these folklore
epics could sometimes go on for days. It had to ring true with people who might
themselves have told it, so that was sort of a major criterion back then.29

Rohmer recalled borrowing from various sources, including her imagination and her
circle of acquaintances. Many have critiqued the technique of upstreaming for
placing too much faith in historical continuity and contemporary sources, but
Rohmer’s decision to draw on the memories of living family members reflected a def-
erence to people not generally granted expertise.30 Her approach also showed an appre-
ciation for methods in ethnohistory and Native Studies that is not obvious from merely
glancing at the texts.

Anchondo performed a vague role in Rohmer’s recollections, but her memory ac-
knowledged some form of partnership between the two women. On seven of the books,
Anchondo received credit as a fellow adaptor (Anchondo’s friend Jesús Guerrero Rea
co-adapted the last three books). In later references, Rohmer simply described
Anchondo as the official translator. Upon Rohmer’s retirement from the Press, in ref-
erence to Anchondo, Rohmer only wrote, “To the first core group at Children’s Book
Press: Pat Hunter, Robin Cherin, Roger Reyes, Mary Anchondo.”31 Anchondo,
however, recalled that she and the larger San Francisco Latino communities played a
far more significant role in the process.

Anchondo grew up in a Mexican American family in El Paso, Texas, but she also
believed that both her parents had a Native American parent. Her familiarity with the
struggles of indigenous communities also developed through her schooling in the
Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, a settlement of Tigua Indians about 10 miles outside of El
Paso. She obtained a high school degree, began working at various jobs, and got
married. In the mid-1960s, when her husband was unable to find a job in Texas,
they moved to San Francisco, where his parents lived. She found a job as a translator
with the Economic Opportunity Council (EOC), which is where she learned about the
relatively new Head Start pre-school program, launched by President Lyndon Johnson,
to help disadvantaged children prepare for elementary school. She eagerly applied to be
a teacher and soon found herself running her own classroom at Trinity Methodist
Church near 16th and Market on the edge of the Mission District neighborhood.32

Anchondo followed a Head Start lesson plan, but since Fridays served as “free”
days, she adopted storytelling as a Friday ritual. According to Anchondo,

before I accepted the kid, I told their parents, “okay, I’ll accept your kid, but
you have to come and tell me a story. If you are working, then you write the
story and give it to me, and then I’ll translate it into English, and I’ll say it.”
So that was the deal with me.33

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In terms of recruiting parent participation, she added: “I encouraged them by telling
them, ‘What kind of stories did your parents tell you?’ Those were the stories that I
wanted. The stories that they were told by their parents.”34 Anchondo sometimes
helped the parents to research and develop their stories, which she recorded and trans-
lated for future use in the classroom. She also began going back to school at
San Francisco State to pursue these interests and obtain a college degree. She described
almost all of her parents and children as Spanish dominant, so this process of retelling
familiar family stories in English became one of the ways Anchondo instilled cultural
pride and prepared her students for English-dominant classrooms.

When Anchondo decided to pursue a Master’s degree in Early Education from
Lone Mountain College in the mid-1970s, she opted to write about the experience of
developing the Press’s first book, The Magic Boys. She wrote:

A parent in my class told the children a story that captured their imagination.
They had never heard it before. The children started drawing animals from
the story and retelling parts of it. Their enthusiasm led me to pay particular
notice to the possibilities of using cultural materials in the classroom. On in-
vestigation, I found the story to be from the Popul Vuh, the sacred book of
the Maya Quiche Indians, who, in pre-conquest times, were the most pow-
erful nation of the Guatemala highlands. The book’s stories were clear and
simple, and were touched with the magic that children take for real, myste-
rious, and exciting. With the help of parents, students, volunteers, and teach-
ers, I began to work with these legendary stories.35

As Anchondo recalled, along with research, she consulted multiple community
members and academics to develop her stories. Adaption meant “that there might
have been a book already – a book from the culture. But it wasn’t the same, because
this was Americanized by me.”36 Adaption required listening to similar narratives
from multiple people and synthesizing the differences. Anchondo appreciated the
way the narrative changed to reflect life in the United States. Her writings and recollec-
tions tie the first 10 books more directly to the memories of Mission District residents
than Rohmer indicated. For Rohmer, the stories started in the archives and in Latin
America; for Anchondo, the stories started in her classroom and in the United States.
Moreover, Anchondo began this work of storytelling, research and translation at least
two to three years prior to meeting Rohmer. According to Anchondo, “about the third
year that I was doing that, [Rohmer] went and told a social worker, Marilyn, that she
didn’t have any money, and she couldn’t pay for classes, so she enrolled her son in my
class.”37 While Rohmer’s memory emphasized enrolling in Head Start to maintain
Spanish bilingual daycare, Anchondo pointed out how Rohmer also needed to empha-
size her impoverished status to gain entry into the Head Start classroom. Rohmer pre-
sumably passed into a Head Start classroom as a recently divorced single mother with
limited funds, but her elite background, education and Jewishness also made her an
outsider in this immigrant community.

Gradually, Anchondo realized Rohmer could help her publish her stories, and
Rohmer recognized a ready archive and a socially conscious publishing opportunity.

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Anchondo wrote, “I showed her everything I had worked on and we decided to work
together.”38 But while Rohmer made a name for herself in publishing, Anchondo saw
her participation in the process vanish. She stated:

Well, I was always very respectful, because I knew [Rohmer] had a lot of
talent in the publishing part of the books that I had done. And she was
doing the cultures a tremendous favor because she was introducing all the
books. So that’s why I didn’t – but towards the end, when they told me
that she had bought a house and a car and all kinds of stuff, sending her
kids to colleges and stuff. I kind of resented her. Because she took my
concept and she didn’t share in the profits, none whatsoever.39

While Rohmer repeatedly used the Eloise story as an easy narrative to explain the birth
of Children’s Book Press, the anecdote also blanketed over the participation of
Anchondo and the larger community of parents and children in the process. The nar-
rative also helped Rohmer minimize the relevance of other personal and professional
experiences that shaped her vision for the Press: her political upbringing in DC; her
studies at elite institutions, including Wellesley, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and
New York University; her work with UNESCO, in independent publishing and film-
making. Under the circumstances, Rohmer may have found it useful to temper
some of her privileged background, since such worldly experiences might have pro-
voked suspicion and guardedness in a community that struggled with poverty, segre-
gation and racism.

When asked about the Eloise story, Anchondo responded, “She’s just telling a story
because I had books and books. I went to Texas and Juarez and got books from
Mexico.”40 While Rohmer may have read Eloise to the class, the students also were
part of a Head Start classroom led by an energetic teacher committed to decolonizing
her students. She turned to indigenous folklore not because it existed in the archives,
but because these were the stories recounted by her students’ families. As a teacher
trained in indigenous histories, Anchondo recognized the complexities of her
student populations, who may have migrated from Central or Latin America, but
who also identified as Maya, Inca or Aymara.41 As Anchondo described, “Over, over,
and over, I emphasized the self-image of the kids has to be uprooted so that they
can feel well about themselves. And feeling well about themselves, they do better
work. Their mind opens up more.”42

That Rohmer never fully acknowledged Anchondo’s contribution to the Press’s
early history is an unfortunate turn for a press designed to combat colonialism and con-
quest. Likewise, Anchondo disputed any credit to Rohmer for the adaptations, al-
though Rohmer remembered otherwise. Their differing recollections reflected larger
disagreements about where these stories came from, who they represented and what
they signified. Nonetheless, Rohmer, with her capacity to organize and her diverse pro-
fessional experience, made the books happen in a way that Anchondo never felt
equipped to do. Anchondo acknowledged that Rohmer guided the overall process of
publication and funding for the project.43 Rohmer wrote the grant and spearheaded
the project to bring these textually and visually complex documents into print.

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Changing the School Curriculum

While Rohmer saw a need for bilingual children’s books, the school district was not
easily convinced. As she noted, “I really tried very hard to interest the San Francisco
Unified School District. I spent a lot of time with people with bilingual education
and so forth, and they seemed very interested, they thought it was lovely, but
nothing.”44 The lukewarm response of San Francisco Unified School District
(SFUSD) officials was part of a larger resistance to change. Over the course of the
1970s, the school district was the target of multiple lawsuits for its failure to desegregate
and its lack of educational parity. And, just as those suing SFUSD found it necessary to
turn to the federal government for support, Rohmer found it necessary to turn to the
federal government to fund her project.

Initially Rohmer applied for grants of just a few thousand dollars to publish a single
book, but she had no luck. The experience taught her to think bigger. She stated, “If you
want to make an impression, you have to show that your concept is bigger, is more im-
portant, and so it has to be bigger, and you have to ask for more money.”45 Gradually,
her efforts to obtain funding shaped her project in unexpected ways. She changed her
approach from publishing one book to publishing 10 books. In order to apply for
support from the Department of Education, she transitioned the project from just pub-
lishing books, to active outreach. As she explained:

[T]his was an outreach program for authors and artists from these different
cultures to go into the elementary schools, grades K through 6, all over the
city, sample schools, something like 25 of them, and they would select two
classrooms at each site, donate a book to each student. Have the author,
well, it was actually the artist … come in there and talk about these issues
to kids in a way that would excite kids. And outreach, nobody had ever
heard of that. … the idea that we’re going to give away free books, totally
free, and I would take care of the distribution, in my little bus, I would
deliver them in the basement of every school.46

This shift towards public outreach not only helped Rohmer gain support from the
Department of Education, but it also served more explicitly the new agenda of the
Department of Education.

Indeed, Rohmer’s fundraising application overlapped with the new mandate for
school integration. As historian Judith Bentley noted, “Title VI [of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964] authorized powerful new support for school integration from the execu-
tive branch of government.”47 Initially the act empowered the Department of Educa-
tion to withhold funds if a school district remained segregated. Gradually, however,
programs that promised desegregation gained momentum, especially after the 1968
case of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia, in which the
Supreme Court declared that schools had to actively and immediately integrate.48

San Francisco, like most US cities, responded slowly. Although a sharp decrease in
white students conjured the appearance of greater racial diversity, school populations
remained segregated. David Kirp described how the number of white students in the
city’s public schools declined from 46% in 1965 to 21% in 1979. While white flight

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to the suburbs reduced the number of white students, the number of black, Asian and
Hispanic students increased.49 In 1970–71, the city’s school population was 35% white,
28% black, 21% Asian, 14% Latino and 2% other non-white.50 However, as Kirp dis-
cussed, “racial disproportion was greatest in the ninety-five elementary schools. Four
schools were more than 90% white; seven were more than 90% black.”51 Latina and
Latino students also experienced segregation as a result of their residential concentra-
tion in the Mission District, but most of the public discussions about segregation
focused on black and white populations.

The SFUSD implemented some changes to combat segregation, including a con-
troversial bussing program in 1970, but the efforts did not correspond to the scale of
the problem. The courts finally intervened to enforce change.52 In 1971, in the case
of Johnson v. San Francisco Unified School District, the US District Court ruled
against SFUSD for facilitating de jure segregation of its elementary schools. Accord-
ing to the court, the school district knowingly relied on lines of attendance that
maintained or heightened racial imbalances in its elementary schools. The court’s
rulings exerted formidable pressure on the school district to improve, eventually
contributing to the district’s 1978 educational redesign, which prohibited any
single ethnic population to make up more than 45% of the student body.53 That
same year, the court dismissed Johnson v. San Francisco Unified School District, de-
claring that social conditions in 1978 were not the same as in 1971.54 While segre-
gation was not resolved, other cases that more directly targeted the new social
context gained momentum. Regardless of its dismissal, the case of Johnson
v. San Francisco Unified School District thrust the city’s educational inequalities
into the national spotlight.

Children’s Book Press did not offer a quick fix for segregation, but the non-
profit did offer support for Spanish-speaking elementary school children just as
the courts found SFUSD guilty of ignoring the needs of non-English speakers. In
the 1974 case of Lau v. Nichol, the Supreme Court ruled against SFUSD for
failing to provide any accommodation for non-English-speaking students. Sud-
denly, SFUSD and public schools across the country had to offer non-English
speakers a “meaningful opportunity to participate in the public educational
program.”55 While many debated how to incorporate this accommodation, the
inception of Children’s Book Press perfectly meshed with this new bilingual tra-
jectory in the schools.

The Press’s use of creation stories from the Americas and the Philippines as the
content of the first books also invoked, perhaps intentionally, a more subtle critique
of the school curriculum. When the Supreme Court dismantled prayer in schools in
the early 1960s, a wave of protests followed.56 These alternate creation stories not
only served to make oppressed cultures visible; the books also presented a non-Chris-
tian worldview at a time when the religious right was re-demanding the rights of chil-
dren to pray in schools.

In 1975, in the midst of these dramatic events, the US Office of Education granted
Rohmer $69,000 to publish her book series and conduct outreach initiatives in
San Francisco’s public schools. According to Rohmer, she printed 3000 copies each
of the first 10 books to distribute gratis in the public schools.57 All the books

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acknowledge the federal grant in their copyright, but they also include the following
disclaimer: “the contents do not necessarily represent the policies or practices of that
Agency and no US Government endorsement should be inferred.” While governmental
support existed for Rohmer’s project, the government also maintained some distance
from this semi-radical project.

The presence of federal funding was an important component of this non-profit
press’s initial success. The systems of support for these books mirrored the systems
of support for mural painting in the streets. Much as Mike Rios had applied for
CETA funding to support the creation of murals in the 24th Street Mini Park,
Rohmer applied for federal funding to support the creation of Children’s Book
Press. The inverse is just as likely: the lack of federal funds would have limited
the possibility of either of these socially oriented programs evolving. My point
here is to emphasize that these books were tactical enterprises: they were federally
funded, and they were intended to cultivate inclusion of marginalized children in
schools.

Visualizing Social Change: The Ancient Iconographies of Children’s
Book Press

The Press’s first 10 books, published between 1975 and 1978, used ancient myths to
articulate a vision for social change. The technique is perhaps counter-intuitive, but
the use of myth as a template for social change was not unique in the 1970s, a time
when various scholars and social movements embraced folklore’s capacity to de-
center Western ideologies. All books featured classic myths from the Americas
(except for one, Skyworld Woman, which drew on a legend from the Philippines),
and all were printed both in Spanish and English, and illustrated by San Francisco
artists. For instance, The Magic Boys (illustrated by Patricia Rodriguez) adapted the
Popol Vuh; How We Came to the Fifth World (illustrated by Graciela Carrillo)
derived from an Aztec creation myth; The Little Horse of Seven Colors (illustrated by
Roger Reyes) came from Caribbean folklore; and finally The Mighty God Viracocha (il-
lustrated by Mike Rios and Richard Montez) stemmed from the Aymara of the Central
Andes. Rohmer and Anchondo sought out muralists as illustrators because of their ac-
cessibility in the community and because they recognized how their work already
engaged in the art of storytelling. Muralists were skilled at making ancient iconography
relevant to contemporary concerns. And like the murals, these books are art objects,
although they have rarely been represented or exhibited in that way.58

Most likely, Rohmer and Anchondo partnered in the initial recruitment of the mu-
ralists, although Rohmer did not recall Anchondo’s influence. Anchondo regularly took
her students on field trips to visit murals in the area and to the Galería de la Raza, a
Latino art gallery and artist hangout. She recalled:

Those muralistas, you could say, were my friends. And [Rohmer] did some of
that work on her own. She did. But I knew a lot of them. That was because
before I was a Head Start person, I worked for the EOC and I was a commu-
nity organizer.59

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Indeed, Anchondo’s stature and belonging in the community may have helped validate
the Children’s Book Press project. However, Rohmer recalled the recruitment more as
a product of individual patronage:

I started hanging out at Galería de la Raza, and meeting [the curators] Ralph
[Maradiaga] and Rene [Yañez] … and sort of following them, and I had the
idea that these books would be illustrated, not by commercial illustrators, but
by the muralistas because that fit so much more with the kind of popular
stories, stories from the popular culture, that I had decided to publish.60

Rohmer did not turn to professional illustrators, not only because of the higher cost of
their services, but because she realized that using voices from the community would
help her to reach out to her target audience. As she recalled:

I didn’t come from that community. But I certainly hung around a lot, lis-
tened a lot, and asked, I think, reasonable questions, and I had something
to offer, which was very genuine. And which I think they perceived as
helpful and something that extended their work. And for that reason, I
think, they were very welcoming.61

Notably, four of the first 10 books featured artists from a group known as the Mujeres
Muralistas (women muralists). Their group name hardly connoted an aesthetic
mission; the term, however, did communicate the rarity of women in the early days
of the community mural movement. At the very least, Mujeres Muralistas offered a
convenient label to catalogue the multiple collaborations of its members. In various
group formations, the artists Patricia Rodriguez (b. 1944), Graciela Carrillo (b.
1950), Consuelo Méndez (b. 1952) and Irene Pérez (b. 1950) painted a number of
large-scale murals in San Francisco, including an untitled mural in Balmy Alley
(1972); Latino America (1974); Para el Mercado (1974); and Fantasy World for Children
(1975) (Figure 3). While scholars and curators have shown strong interest in the
group’s murals, they have not yet accorded the book illustrations the same attention.62

Rohmer and Anchondo approached the Mujeres Muralistas to illustrate their
books when the artists were at the height of their joint mural making. Rohmer first
published Rodriguez’s The Magic Boys (1975), then Carrillo’s How We Came to the
Fifth World (1976), Méndez’s Atariba & Niguayona (1976) and Pérez’s Cuna Song
(1976).63 What Rohmer and Anchondo initiated as an entirely female, and partly fem-
inist, venture into publishing books for children soon expanded to incorporate the
work of male artists, too. After recruiting the Mujeres Muralistas, Rohmer and
Anchondo reached out to other muralists in the community, including Carlos
Loarca, Mike Rios, Richard Montez and many others.64

The Mujeres Muralistas murals exemplified the kind of visual storytelling Rohmer and
Anchondo sought to incorporate into their books. For instance, Fantasy World for Children
(Figure 3), painted by Rodriguez, Carrillo and Pérez in the 24th Street Mini Park (the same
park where Rios and Montez later painted their image of Quetzalcoatl), offered a dramatic
visual narrative. The mural featured a glorious tropical jungle full of lush plants, people and
animals, all living harmoniously at the base of a waterfall. The unusual selection of animals

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– including a dinosaur, cheetah, peacock, turtle and flamingos – demonstrated the mural’s
“fantasy.” Trouble appeared in the distance in the form of an erupting volcano. Red lava
spilled from the top of the volcano, but stopped against the swirling cold breath of a god in

Figure 3. The Mujeres Muralistas (Graciela Carrillo, Irene Pérez and Patricia Rodriguez), Fantasy World for Chil-
dren, wall mural, 20 × 40 feet (6 × 12 meters), 24th Street Mini-Park, San Francisco, California, 1975. Photograph
by Patricia Rodriguez. Image courtesy of Patricia Rodriguez and the archive of Tim Drescher.

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a regal headdress, who overlooked the land and saved it from destruction. On the other side
of the volcano, the artists depicted an inscrutable sun goddess, who gazed off into the dis-
tance, seemingly oblivious to the potential disaster. The mural had a mythical iconography,
an image of a paradise in trouble, yet saved. Viewers could easily interpret the narrative of
this scene, and perhaps even imagine some backstory for the people or animals in the fore-
ground. The muralists added various enigmatic details, such as two young boys carrying an
enormous snake wound around a stick, or the image of a small monkey looking out
directly at the viewer, all to inspire imagination and encourage creative storytelling for
the children visiting the Mini Park.

Similarly, the first books from Children’s Book Press drew together images of in-
digenous gods, brown people, magical animals, sacred spaces and material culture
rich in symbols, such as traditional textiles, carvings and gold treasures. Unlike the
murals, the books were not collaborative (apart from working with Rohmer and
the book designer Robin Cherin), so they more visibly demonstrated the individual
styles of each artist. Carrillo’s work appeared the most abstract, drawing together
images more akin to collages than storybook scenes (Figures 4 and 5). Pérez

Figure 4. Graciela Carrillo, illustration of the end of the second world for How We Came to the Fifth World, Mylar
color printing, 9 × 8 inches (23 × 20 cm). Book authored by Harriet Rohmer and Mary Anchondo, Children’s
Book Press, 1976.

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instead added many decorative elements to the text, such as fish, bubbles and swirling
sea plants, while the other three tended to keep the text visually segregated from the
illustrations. Both Pérez and Rodriguez leaned towards drawing smaller-scale human
figures. Rodriguez depicted her characters from head to foot in bi-dimensional set-
tings with minimal detail devoid of shadow, while Méndez incorporated dramatic
portraiture. For instance, in Atariba & Niguayona, Méndez portrayed startling
close-ups of her characters, their brown faces covered with face paint, their sizable
black eyes looking directly at the viewers, and their overarching eyebrows transition-
ing into noses with large nostrils and full lips (Figure 6). She shifted back and forth
between these portraits and fabulously elaborate scenes, such as her image of Atariba
and Niguayona in dense jungle, surrounded by giant parrots, toucans, and iguanas, or
her representation of the village healer’s hut (Figure 7). The dramatic differences
between these illustrations underscored the intense collaboration these artists
needed to achieve a cohesive mural.

The books demonstrated stylistic differences, but the technique of the printing
process also enforced a specific approach. As a whole, the process prohibited blending

Figure 5. Graciela Carrillo, illustration of Chalchiuhtlicue for How We Came to the Fifth World, Mylar color
printing, 9 × 8 inches (23 × 20 cm). Book authored by Harriet Rohmer and Mary Anchondo, Children’s Book
Press, 1976.

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or bleeding of colors as that was more expensive. Rohmer adopted a “Mylar Color”
printing process in her first 10 books because of its affordability, but this technique
was very labor intensive, much like print making. The “Mylar Color” method required
the artists and the book designer to use a layer of clear or frosted polyethylene plastic
Mylar film cutouts, available in primary colors – yellow, red, blue and black – or
overlap the Mylar to create a blended color (e.g. blue and red make purple; yellow
and red make orange). The printer then used the Mylar cutouts to make the key
black plate, along with three primary color plates. By pressing each plate from lightest
to darkest color, the printer could “trap,” or overlap colors to create color variations.
Occasionally, the color blocks are offset from their outlines, reflective of the capacity of
the Mylar or plates to shift in position.65 All of the Fifth World Tales featured artwork
with clearly outlined forms and borders, which is certainly common in murals, and
perhaps also a product of the printing technology rather than a shared conscious aes-
thetic choice. Similarly, all of the books featured the hand lettering of artist Roger Reyes
because at the time setting type was so expensive. Anchondo also described how Reyes’s
lettering in The Magic Boys replicated the style of Maya Quiche codices, a point that
emphasized the attention to detail given to each of these books.

Figure 6. Consuelo Méndez, illustration of Atariba for Atariba & Niguayona, Mylar color printing, 9 × 8 inches
(23 × 20 cm). Book authored by Harriet Rohmer and Jesús Guerrero Rea, Children’s Book Press, 1976.

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Rohmer grouped the books under the title, “Fifth World Tales/Cuentos del Quinto
Mundo,” because the term linked the present with the Aztec past. According to the nar-
rative of How We Came to the Fifth World, contemporary society takes place in the fifth
world because the gods of water, air, fire and earth destroyed the four previous worlds.
The current fifth world promised the most stability because the gods shared its rule, but
as Rohmer wrote in her postscript, “this world too is doomed to destruction by earth-
quakes and famine unless a way can be found to banish evil from the hearts of all hu-
manity.”66 The parable taught that those who misbehave will bring destruction, while
those who enable goodness will save the world. Like much children’s literature, the
stories are intentionally terrifying, but usually punishment only came to those who
acted in a cruel or greedy manner.

The darkness and violence of many of these early stories was a far cry from Eloise –
and in that way, perhaps did seem “more relevant” to children living in the margins.
Many of these books displayed fearsome events. For instance, in Skyworld Woman,
Roger Reyes illustrated a goddess splitting her child in half and then restoring life to
each half of his body. This story from the Philippines seemed an outlier in a group

Figure 7. Consuelo Méndez, illustration of the bohique’s hut for Atariba & Niguayona, Mylar color printing, 9 ×
8 inches (23 × 20 cm). Book authored by Harriet Rohmer and Jesús Guerrero Rea, Children’s Book Press, 1976.

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of books from Latin America, but made more sense as a product of Filipino families in
Anchondo’s classroom. Anchondo also linked the publication of this story to the eth-
nicity of Reyes, the artist for this book and letterer for all the books. She recalled, “He
was young, he was also Filipino. That’s why I did a Filipino thing. ’Cause I liked him a
lot. He would show me the pictures and I would tell him … .”67 Her recollection sug-
gests that Anchondo maintained a hand in the production process, even if Rohmer
took the lead.

While the books appeared rapidly within three years of each other, Anchondo had
been working with the stories for several years, continuously drafting and redrafting in
conversation with many other people, and assembling an array of research materials.
She described the process of adapting these stories in more detail in her 1977 report:

The children retold the stories at home and parents came to class to ask about
the stories or add to them. Grandparents and volunteers asked to hear the
stories. I encouraged the people of our Head Start program to talk about
legends they remembered from their childhood, and to express opinions
on the accuracy with which their mythical traditions were interpreted. The
importance of these contacts with adults cannot be overstated. These
adults are the generation that hands down myths and legends to a new gen-
eration in a new country.68

Anchondo worked with the children to create puppet shows and drawings. She collect-
ed material culture for her classroom that reflected the narratives, and developed an
expansive collection of masks from Latin America. Anchondo offered up these
images and material culture as inspiration for the artists.69

Like Anchondo and Rohmer, the artists also turned to archival sources and historic
material culture for their art. As Rodriguez, a Chicana originally from Marfa, Texas, stated:

when you do a mural, it isn’t just for the artists, it’s for the community, it’s a
voice. Therefore, who lives here? Well, it’s all the Central Americans, all these
Latinos from Nicaragua, from Bolivia, from Peru, so well, let’s talk to them.
How can we talk to them? Well, we have to do research. We spent a lot of
time – that was why we went to school. We were using our schooling, but
to educate ourselves and to bring it back to the community and to do some-
thing for our community.70

Perhaps not surprisingly, the artists applied a similar method of research to their work
for Children’s Book Press, pairing classic images from the indigenous history of Latin
America with contemporary street art.

Rohmer specifically sought to hire artists whom she believed grew up with the
stories that formed the content of her books. Referring to her process of interviewing
community members to obtain the most authentic retellings of the legends she had se-
lected, Rohmer explained:

once I had the text that I felt was valid, and that had been validated by the
closest thing that I could find, living descendants of the people who might
have told these stories hundreds of years ago – [who] still do tell these

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stories – and I think that a number of the muralistas felt that they were also
descended from the same tradition. And so, it was a natural pairing. Much
more natural than, say, commercial illustrators.71

Rohmer accorded the muralists an innate familiarity with the material, recruit-
ing members of the Latino community because of their authentic ties to the
literary content. However, the visual content of their work was not so much
a product of native informants as it was an agglomeration of trained aesthetics
and research.

Carrillo’s work exemplified the artists’ capacity to transform classic images into
modernist representations. In the Press’s 1976 book How We Came to the Fifth
World, Carrillo crafted familiar yet unique images of Aztec gods to tell the classic
story of five worlds. Her representation of the fourth world earth goddess, traditionally
known as Chalchiuhtlicue, bore a strong resemblance to a stone statue of a kneeling
Chalchiuhtlicue (AD 1325–1521) in the collection of the British Museum (Figures 5
and 8).72 While both images showed a figure kneeling with her hands on her lap,
her hair divided into two tassels, and a traditional shawl with tassels, Carrillo also
took the opportunity to color this deity and encircle her in a ring of hands. Carrillo’s
portrait of the goddess is a flattened, color-separated mural image of the stone sculp-
ture. The resemblance to the stone statue is evidence of the artist’s efforts to draw on
historic visual culture and simultaneously transform the figure through painterly
abstraction.

Similarly, in her illustration of the end of the second world, Carrillo brought to-
gether multiple layers of the story (Figure 4). Her central image of Quetzalcoatl is ab-
stract, yet draws on popular images of this famous Aztec god found in the codices and
other statuary. Her images of the jaguars on either corner, both likely references to
Quetzalcoatl’s nemesis, Tezcatlipoca, shared more than a little similarity to Aztec rep-
resentations found in the codices. The jaguar on the left appeared simple, yet his form,
especially in terms of the placement of his paws, echoed a depiction of Tepeyollotl, the
thunder-jaguar, also known as a manifestation of Tezcatlipoca found in the Codex Tell-
eriano-Remensis (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris). In addition, the jaguar in
the bottom right corner bore a remarkable similarity to a famous Aztec vessel in the
collection of Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology.

Most, if not all of the other artists for Children’s Book Press engaged in this tech-
nique of reproducing antiquities in a contemporary way. For instance, Méndez provid-
ed detailed images of Taino religious statuary in her representation of a bohique’s
(healer’s) hut in Atariba & Niguayona (Figure 7). On a stone bench in the background,
she gave ample attention to a carved image of a volcanic figure with an elongated face.
Rohmer stated in the book’s endnotes that this triangular statue, often referred to as a
“zemi,” popularly symbolized the Caribbean god Yucaju (or Yucahu). Whether this
statue can be determined to represent Yucaju definitively may not be known, but it
seems likely that Méndez drew visual inspiration for the image from the Puerto
Rican antiquities collection of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC. Her
image is an exact replica of a prehistoric statue collected and donated by George
Latimer (1803–74), a shipping merchant who later served as US consul-general in

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Puerto Rico for many years. Latimer bequeathed a substantial collection of objects from
his travels around the island and elsewhere to the Smithsonian in the late nineteenth
century.73 This small but significant detail served to authenticate, radiate and encour-
age familiarity with Taino culture. Mendez incorporated many such details, displaying

Figure 8. Chalchiuhtlicue, Aztec stone statue, possibly granite, 7 inches wide by 12 inches high (18 × 30 cm),
c. 1325–1521. Collection of the British Museum. Photograph provided by the Trustees of the British Museum/
Art Resource, NY.

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careful attention to clothing, jewelry, face paint and animals that, as a whole, blur the
line between imaginary and authentic material culture.

As these examples show, the Mujeres Muralistas relied heavily on documentary
photography, archeological excavations of ancient ruins, diasporic material culture
and previous artistic representations to create their illustrations. While Anchondo
and Rohmer adapted these stories from classic folklore and archival materials, many
dating back hundreds, and even thousands of years, the accompanying illustrations
also show how the artists crafted their images in terms of old and new iconography.
The artists must have found these commissions challenging, as their patrons sought
something historically accurate, but also shaped by their own creative vision.

As a whole, Rohmer provided an unusual form of patronage for her muralists. She
gave them stories to illustrate, and they provided the illustrations. Artists needed finan-
cial stability but they also believed in the project: to repurpose ancient images and reach
out to children in the fight against cultural oppression. The job of the artists was not
merely to illustrate the texts, but to go into the schools and teach the children about
the stories and their images. The texts combined the aesthetic ambitions of the
artists with the ideological ambitions of their publisher, Harriet Rohmer, who occupied
the complicated role of arts patron, content provider and visionary publisher.

None of the artists Rohmer selected for this project ever limited themselves solely
to making murals, but experimented with a variety of art forms, including fine art
painting, poster making, wood cuts, installation and assemblage. Creating children’s
book illustrations easily fit within a culture of artistic experimentation, plus the
work offered a financial reward that, albeit small, made it more appealing. While the
artists could view their work for Children’s Book Press as a paid adventure into a
new art form, these first 10 books also reflect their shared experience as a community
of muralists in the Mission District. The relatively low-key profile of these books in the
field of children’s literature obscures the ways that Children’s Book Press provided a
real form of employment for rising Latino artists and generated one of the few portable
and lasting representations of the community mural movement (aside from documen-
tary photography). Browsing through these books, the reader can imagine traveling
through certain parks and streets in 1970s San Francisco, especially in the Mission.
There are undoubtedly key differences between the murals and the illustrations.
Most obviously, Rohmer assigned the narrative content to the artists, who then partic-
ipated in a very different process of collaboration and production. Thus, these books
are not exact duplications, but small likenesses, serving as provocative textual compan-
ions to the art depicted on city walls.

Looking Back on Children’s Book Press

When Rohmer first searched for support for her publishing venture, she encountered
significant resistance. As she recounted, “They asked, ‘Who is going to read these
books? We do not have children like that here, and children like that do not buy
books. You will never find a market’.”74 Rohmer’s success with Children’s Book
Press proved that a market for ethnically diverse books existed.

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Rohmer drew on San Francisco’s Mission District as a site of inspiration for her
Fifth World Tales. As Rohmer stated, “I don’t think Children’s Book Press could
have been born anywhere else.”75 There is perhaps a touch of irony in this statement,
as indeed, these first books evolved very much out of the culture of the children,
parents, teachers, academics and artists of San Francisco’s Latino Mission District.
Her efforts to publish these first books propelled Mission District muralists into prac-
ticing another art form. Her books facilitated another way for these murals to exist, en-
abling the work to survive rapid urban change and travel widely.

Since the 1970s, many city murals have been repainted or destroyed, but this first
set of books still offers a provocative reflection of San Francisco’s community mural
movement, as well as delivers a window onto social change in children’s literature
and education. Understanding the cultural significance of these books requires ac-
knowledging that they were used as more than reading tools; they were instrument
for cultural workers to offer a counter-narrative and propel social change in the
schools.

Not unlike the San Francisco mural movement, these books sought to connect
with disenfranchised children and their families and to foster ethnic pride, awareness
and social criticism. Anchondo described how students in her classroom felt kinship
with these stories:

They had heard them, you know, somehow or other. I don’t know who had
told them so. But kids that were from the country from where we were telling
the story would tell the other kids to shut up. They wanted to listen.76

Of course, this initial set of publications also was quite removed from the everyday lives
of children in the Mission. For instance, Rohmer and Anchondo’s decision to prioritize
ancient folklore thrust the focus of all of the stories onto Latin America, not the US
urban life that Latino and Latina children experienced. Moreover, the potential roman-
ticization of the indigenous past skirted the responsibility of Latinas and Latinos in the
oppression of indigenous peoples.

The publication of Fifth World Tales bore some similarities to the Chicano Move-
ment’s complicated appropriation of indigenous histories. Shifra Goldman and Tomás
Ybarra-Frausto wrote:

the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pyramids; Aztec or Maya princes,
princesses, and warriors; elitist religious symbols; and adaptations of monu-
mental sculptures and temple paintings that permeated Chicano visual arts in
all media and techniques are sufficient testimony to this preoccupation with
the indigenous past.77

The emphasis on a shared mestizaje, mixed ancestries, between Chicanas, Chicanos and
Natives facilitated expressions of solidarity, but also obscured ancestral complicity in
Spanish and Latin American colonialism and genocide.

The Fifth World Tales similarly emphasized the indigenous past. The books incor-
porated stories attributed to the Aymara of Bolivia, the Yaghan of Chile, the Chibcha of
Colombia, the Maya of Guatemala, the Aztec of Mexico, the Cuna of Panama, the

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Kiangan Ifugao of the Philippines and the Taíno of Puerto Rico. The Treasure of Gua-
tavita (1978) is one of the few Fifth World Tales to make open reference to the con-
quistadors. Rohmer and Jesús Guerrero Rea adapted the story from a classic
Colombian folktale more widely known as The Treasure of El Dorado. Guatemalan
artist Carlos Loarca portrayed the Spanish conquistadors as vicious in their quest for
the treasure of the Chibcha. The tale gave the upper hand to the Chibcha and the
goddess Bachue, who expelled the invaders and retained possession of their treasure.
This depiction of the skilled and virtuous Chibcha versus the predatory Spanish soldiers
celebrated native resistance and circumvented mestizaje’s complicity in the oppression
of indigenous people. However, the story also presented an important counter-narra-
tive to the celebratory representations of the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus
(1450/1–1506) still pervasive in school curricula.78

Both the stories and the artwork for Children’s Book Press have changed over time,
largely in relation to changing social concerns, leadership and economic circumstances.
From the start, Latino titles represented the bulk of the Press’s catalogue, but the Press
also made an effort to expand and incorporate African American, Asian/Pacific Islander
and Native American literature. Authors of its children’s books have included a variety
of well-established Latina and Latino writers, including Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004),
Juan Felipe Herrera (b. 1948), Francisco X. Alarcon (1954–2016) and Manlio Argueta
(b. 1935). A large number of stories draw on autobiography, such as Luis Rodriguez (b.
1954) writing about avoiding gang life in It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: A Barrio Story;
Amada Irma Pérez (b. 1951) writing about the difficulties of immigration in My Diary
from Here to There; and Gloria Anzaldúa narrating a story of conflict between children
born in the United States and a child from Mexico in Friends from the Other Side/
Amigos del Otro Lado. The Press’s Latino focus is not surprising, given its origins
and subsequent residence in the Mission. In fact, a few of its later stories draw directly
from life experiences in the neighborhood. For instance, Jorge Argueta’s (b. 1961) text,
Xochitl and the Flowers/Xóchitl, la Niña de las Flores, illustrated by Carl Angel (b. 1968),
parallels the real story of a flower vendor who fought against eviction at the height of
the neighborhood’s dot-com boom.

Since its founding, Children’s Book Press publications featured the work of a
diverse array of Latina and Latino artists with ties to the San Francisco Bay Area, includ-
ing Enrique Chagoya (b. 1953), Anita De Lucio (b. 1972), Daniel Galvez (b. 1953),
Carmen Lomas Garza (b. 1948), Maya Gonzalez (b. 1964), Carlos Loarca (b. 1937),
Malaquias Montoya (b. 1938) and Xavier Viramontes (b. 1943). Several of these
artists have played a significant role in the emergence and strength of the Bay Area’s
community mural movement, two have served as directors of the well-established
Galería de la Raza (Lomas Garza and Chagoya) and another has figured prominently
in Sacramento’s Royal Chicano Air Force (Montoya). Many of the artists have
shown their work in key national and international exhibitions, including the
“Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation” show of 1990, the Smithsonian’s “Arte
Latino” exhibition of 2000 and the “Just Another Poster?” exhibition of 2003.

The Press has not only sought out the illustrations of established artists, but it also
has made a space for artists just beginning their careers. While most presses recruit pro-
fessional illustrators, Children’s Book Press actively worked against this practice,

Portable Murals 357

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reaching out to artists who might never have considered children’s book illustrations.
For instance, recalling her experience creating the illustrations for Grandma and Me at
the Flea: Los Meros Meros Remateros, Anita De Lucio described the work of Children’s
Book Press as a kind of “affirmative action for artists.”79

Rohmer retired from the Children’s Book Press in 2001, but the press continued to
produce work. In 2010, the Press celebrated its 35th anniversary. However, in 2011,
economic circumstances were so difficult that the Press ceased operations and sold
its inventory to Lee and Low, a New York publisher. Lee and Low is very much a de-
scendant of Children’s Book Press, as it specializes in stories of diversity for children of
color, although it is not a non-profit organization. The impact of the book catalogue’s
transfer to a New York firm is still to be determined, but 2011 marked the end of an
outstanding run. Like many non-profit organizations, Children’s Book Press could
not survive an economic downturn without substantial support.

Children’s Book Press has been largely ignored by art historians and literary
scholars alike. Similarly, children’s book illustrations are rarely featured in Latina
and Latino art exhibitions, leading this work to vanish from some of the more mean-
ingful examinations of Latina and Latino visual culture. The militant orientation and
artistic contributions of this non-profit organization are easily missed, owing to its
focus on children. Its reach has been widespread, not simply through its continued
productivity but also by the emergence of many other presses that have emulated
its ideological approach and aesthetic style. Undoubtedly, Children’s Book Press pro-
vided a meaningful space for Latina and Latino visual artists and writers to share their
work outside of the traditional art galleries, museums and cultural centers. In fact,
because of their broader diffusion, its published images have reached a much
wider, and more diverse audience than the contemporary art shown in local galleries,
major museums and art catalogues. One thing is certain: in the process of creating
literature for children, Children’s Book Press became a significant, even if largely un-
acknowledged, patron of the arts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

CARY CORDOVA is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies and an affiliate of the
Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in Latina/o
cultural production, including art, music and poetry. She is the author of The Heart of the Mission:
Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco, due out in spring 2017, with the University of Pennsylvania
Press.

1 Harriet Rohmer and Mary Anchondo, The Mighty God Viracocha/El Dios Poderoso Viracocha,
with illustrations by Mike Rios and Richard Montez (San Francisco, CA: Children’s Book
Press/Imprenta de Libros Infantiles, 1976).

2 Referring to the Gate of the Sun, Laurie Schneider Adams wrote, “It is the most recognizable
monument at Tiwanaku,” in World Views: Topics in Non-Western Art (New York: McGraw
Hill, 2004), 96. Esther Pasztory also analyzes the Gate of the Sun in her book, Pre-Columbian
Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 121–3. Adams and Pasztory only referred
to the presiding image as a deity, and not as Viracocha specifically. However, other sources

358 Cordova

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indicated how this frieze image is popularly identified as Viracocha. For instance, Jacqueline
Barnitz linked a painted image of Viracocha to the site in her landmark book, Twentieth-
Century Art of Latin America. Barnitz explained that the representation of Viracocha in
“Triunfo de la naturaleza” [The Triumph of Nature] (1928) by Guzmán de Rojas (1900–
1950) “was based on the low relief carving on the frieze of the monolithic Gate of the Sun in
Tiahuanaco near La Paz.” Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America (Austin,
TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 21–2. Whether or not the Gate of the Sun is definitively
representing Viracocha, contemporary artists have relied on the iconography of the Gate of
the Sun to represent Viracocha.

3 For a history of San Francisco outdoor murals, see Annice Jacoby, ed., Street Art San Francisco:
Mission Muralismo (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2009); Alan W. Barnett, Community
Murals: The People’s Art (Philadelphia, PA: The Art Alliance Press, 1984); Timothy
W. Drescher, San Francisco Murals: Community Creates Its Muse, 1914–1994 (St. Paul, MN:
Pogo Press, 1994).

4 Barnett, Community Murals, 14 and 141.
5 Harriet Rohmer, “Founder Harriet Rohmer Honors a Movement,” 35th Anniversary Speech re-

printed on Children’s Book Press website, http://www.childrensbookpress.org/news-events/
blog/archive/20101013/founder–harriet–rohmer–honors–movement (accessed November 3,
2010), now in the collection of the author.

6 Interview with Mary Anchondo by Cary Cordova, June 9, 2016.
7 Ibid.; Interview with Harriet Rohmer, September 26, 2010; Cary Cordova, The Heart of the

Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, forthcoming).

8 Herbert Kohl, Should We Burn Babar? Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories
(New York: New Press, 1995); Ariel Dorfman, The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone
Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do To Our Minds (New York: Pantheon Books,
1983); Alison Lurie, Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1990); Julia Mickenberg, Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War,
and Radical Politics in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

9 Nancy Larrick, “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” Saturday Review, September 11,
1965, 63–5.

10 Mickenberg, Learning from the Left, 273–4; Joel Taxel, “The Black Experience in Children’s
Fiction: Controversies Surrounding Award Winning Books,” Curriculum Inquiry 16, no. 3
(Autumn 1986): 245–81.

11 Jamie Campbell Naidoo, ed., Celebrating Cuentos: Promoting Latino Children’s Literature and Lit-
eracy in Classrooms and Libraries (Santa Barbara: ABC–CLIO, LLC, 2011), 65.

12 Kathleen T. Horning, “The Contributions of Alternative Press Publishers to Multicultural Liter-
ature for Children,” Library Trends 41, no. 3 (Winter 1993): 524.

13 J.Y. Smith, “Ben D. Dorfman, Was Chairman of US Trade Agency, Dead at 83,” Washington Post,
October 4, 1985.

14 “Harriet Dorfman Wed,” New York Times, May 18, 1961, 32.
15 Caroline Frick discusses the role of UNESCO in global film preservation in Saving Cinema: The

Politics of Preservation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 87–117. Frick also describes how
UNESCO’s approach changed dramatically from the 1950s to the ’80s: “from advocating for the
exchange of information relating to Western notions of culture, art, and science, UNESCO
moved to development agendas celebrating global heritage.” This quote originally appears in
UNESCO on the Eve of its Fortieth Anniversary (Paris: UNESCO, 1985), 15, as well as in Frick,
97. On dialogues about decolonization, see Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization, 2nd ed.
(New York: Routledge, 2004); Prasenjit Duara, ed., Decolonization: Perspectives Now and Then
(New York: Routledge, 2004); M.E. Chamberlain, Decolonization: The Fall of the European
Empires, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization
and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996).

Portable Murals 359

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http://www.childrensbookpress.org/news-events/blog/archive/20101013/founder–harriet–rohmer–honors–movement

16 Cordova, Interview with Harriet Rohmer. Rohmer was an intern with the African Documentary
Film Unit at UNESCO in 1960. Rohmer, “Founder Harriet Rohmer Honors a Movement.”

17 “Harriet Dorfman Wed,” 32.
18 Cordova, Interview with Harriet Rohmer.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Kay Thompson, already a celebrity for her turns as a dancer and performer on stage and screen,

published her first book Eloise with Simon & Schuster in 1955. Hilary Knight’s accompanying
illustrations portrayed Eloise as a girl with flyaway hair, disheveled clothing and a messy
room. Young readers thrilled to the cheeky rebelliousness of a six-year-old girl who lived at
the Plaza, ordered room service and ran around the hotel with limited supervision and oblivious
to decorum. Subtitled inside as “A Book for Precocious Grown-Ups,” Thompson’s dry, satiric
wit also played to adult readers with subversive references to martinis, Coco Chanel and
AT&T stocks. As Marie Brenner wrote, “Eloise gave me permission to rebel.” The book
became an immediate bestseller, launching three sequels, a fashion line, dolls, toys and “a
special room at the Plaza where one could pick up a telephone and hear the voice of Eloise,
high-pitched and childlike.” See Marie Brenner, “The Story of Eloise,” in Kay Thompson’s Abso-
lutely Essential Eloise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 68–76. See also Sam Irvin, Kay
Thompson: From Funny Face to Eloise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

23 Rohmer quoted in Dan Madigan, “The Politics of Multicultural Literature for Children and Ad-
olescents: Combing Perspectives and Conversations,” Language Arts 70, no. 3 (March 1993):
168–76 (172). For other instances of Rohmer using the Eloise story to explain the origins of
the Press, see also Annie Nakao, “Lost Heroes Battle Stereotypes through Bilingual Picture
Books,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 19, 2003; “Q&A: Harriet Rohmer,” School Library
Journal (July 2001): 17; and she also described this story’s influence in her interview with the
author.

24 Cordova, Interview with Harriet Rohmer.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 William Fenton wrote widely on the Haudenosaunee, using their English name, the Iroquois. His

writings are expansive, earning him the nickname “Dean of Iroquois Studies,” but some of his
highest profile work is collected in his book William Fenton: Selected Writings (Lincoln, NE: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 2009).

28 John K. Chance, “Mesoamerica’s Ethnographic Past,” Ethnohistory 43, no. 3 (Summer 1996):
379–403 (379–80). See also Fred W. Voget, “Anthropological Theory and Iroquois Ethnography:
1850 to 1970,” in Extending the Rafters: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Iroquois Studies, ed.
Michael K. Foster, Jack Campisi and Marianne Mithun (Albany, NY: State University of
New York, 1984), 343–57 (on upstreaming, see 347–9).

29 Cordova, Interview with Harriet Rohmer.
30 Scholar Theresa McCarthy delivered a persuasive critique of William Fenton’s oeuvre and the

ways he and other researchers integrated colonialist expectations into their research. Of
Fenton, McCarthy wrote, “His historical upstreaming approach was based on the premise
that modern expressions of Haudenosaunee tradition must have had an historical antecedent
in the early written records about the Iroquois to be valid … . His methodology was based on
the assumption that nothing changes and that tradition is static and immutable. Simpson
calls this practice ‘an authenticating research loop,’ which assumes that an authoritative non-In-
digenous text trumps living Haudenosaunee expertise.” See Theresa McCarthy, In Divided Unity:
Haudenosaunee Reclamation at Grand River (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 60–
72 (65).

31 Rohmer, “Founder Harriet Rohmer Honors a Movement.”

360 Cordova

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32 Cordova, Interview with Mary Anchondo. The Trinity Methodist Church at 2299 Market Street
was destroyed in a fire in 1981. “Fire Destroys Historic Church,” Reno Gazette-Journal, October
12, 1981, 11.

33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Mary Anchondo, “The Magic Boys: The Development of a Children’s Book to Enhance Bilin-

gualism and Encourage Cultural Identity in Young Children” (Master’s report, Lone Mountain
College, 1977).

36 Cordova, Interview with Mary Anchondo.
37 Ibid.; Anchondo, “The Magic Boys,” 23–5.
38 Anchondo, “The Magic Boys,” 28.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 9.
42 Cordova, Interview with Mary Anchondo.
43 Anchondo, “The Magic Boys,” 28 and 35; Cordova, Interview with Mary Anchondo.
44 Cordova, Interview with Harriet Rohmer.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Judith Bentley, Busing: The Continuing Controversy (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), 11.
48 Ibid., 10.
49 David Kirp, Just Schools: The Idea of Racial Equality in American Education (Berkeley, CA: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1982), 84, 108. On white flight, see Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight:
Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2005).

50 “SFUSD Enrollment 1967–2012F (11–10–2012),” RPA (Research, Planning & Accountability)
Data Center, San Francisco Unified School District, http://web.sfusd.edu/Services/research_
public/rpa_student_enrollment/Forms/AllItems.aspx (accessed February 5, 2016). Charles Wol-
lenberg cites similar statistics in All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California
Schools, 1855–1975 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 160.

51 Kirp, Just Schools, 89.
52 Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed, 160–63; Lilian B. Rubin, Busing and Backlash: White against

White in an Urban School District (Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 1972), 201–2.
53 Kirp, Just Schools, 111.
54 Ibid., 82; David Kirp, “Race, Politics, and the Courts: School Desegregation in San Francisco,”

Harvard Educational Review 46, no. 4 (November 1976): 572–611 (573); William G. Howell, Be-
sieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution
Press, 2005), 105–7.

55 Kirp, “Race, Politics, and the Courts,” 604; Rosemary C. Salomone, True American: Language,
Identity, and the Education of Immigrant Children (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2010), 119–75.

56 Engel v. Vitale (1962), and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963).
57 An exhibit on Children’s Book Press at the San Francisco Public Library stated that Rohmer re-

ceived $69,000 to start the Press. “Creating Change through Words and Pictures: Children’s
Book Press 35th Anniversary Event and Exhibit,” September 2010. In an interview with
Rohmer, she recalled a print run of 3000 for each book. Cordova, Interview with Harriet
Rohmer.

58 There are a few exceptions. For instance, there is one recent traveling exhibition of contemporary
Latino-themed children’s books worth noting: Latino Folk Tales: Cuentos Populares Art by Latino
Artists, curated by Sylvia Nissley, March 26–June 9, 2013, the Carle Museum, Amherst, MA. In
addition, the Association for Library Service to Children, which grants many awards, including
the Caldecott and Newberry Medals, created the Pura Belpré award in 1996, to honor a Latina/o
writer and illustrator.

Portable Murals 361

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http://web.sfusd.edu/Services/research_public/rpa_student_enrollment/Forms/AllItems.aspx

59 Cordova, Interview with Mary Anchondo.
60 Cordova, Interview with Harriet Rohmer.
61 Ibid.
62 See Maria Ochoa, Creative Collectives: Chicana Painters Working in Community (Albuquerque,

NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 33–58; Terezita Romo, “A Collective History:
Las Mujeres Muralistas,” in Art/Women/California: Parallels and Intersections, 1950–2000, ed.
Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2002), 177–86; and Cary Cordova, “Hombres y Mujeres Muralistas on a Mission: Painting
Latino Identities in 1970s San Francisco,” Latino Studies 4, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 356–80.

63 Harriet Rohmer and Mary Anchondo, The Magic Boys (San Francisco: Children’s Book Press,
1975); Harriet Rohmer and Mary Anchondo, How We Came to the Fifth World
(San Francisco: Children’s Book Press, 1976); Harriet Rohmer and Jesús Guerrero Rea,
Atariba & Niguayona (San Francisco: Children’s Book Press, 1976); and Harriet Rohmer and
Jesús Guerrero Rea, Cuna Song (San Francisco: Children’s Book Press, 1976).

64 Cordova, Interview with Harriet Rohmer.
65 On Mylar printing techniques, I consulted Dwight Pogue, Printmaking Revolution (New York:

Watson-Guptill Publications, 2012), esp. 180; Nick Paparone and Jamie Dillon with Luren
Enison, Print Liberation: The Screen Printing Primer (Cincinnati, OH: F+W Publications,
2008), 66.

66 Text is from the back cover of How We Came to the Fifth World/Cómo vinimos al Quinto mundo,
adapted by Harriet Rohmer and Mary Anchondo, illustrated by Graciela Carrillo (San Francisco,
CA: Children’s Book Press, 1976). Rohmer signed her name to this description of the fifth world.

67 Cordova, Interview with Mary Anchondo.
68 Anchondo, “The Magic Boys,” 25.
69 Ibid. Interview with Mary Anchondo.
70 Interview with Patricia Rodriguez by Cary Cordova, March 27, 2003.
71 Cordova, Interview with Harriet Rohmer.
72 “Stone Kneeling Figure of Chalchiuhtlicue,” collection of the British Museum, http://www.

britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aoa/s/figure_of_chalchiuhtlicue.aspx
(accessed September 1, 2015).

73 In 1907, Jesse Walter Fewkes wrote on the variable significance of these “three-pointed stone”
figures and on the George Latimer Collection in The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring
Islands (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1970). This book included a plate image (XLVI) of
the three-pointed stone statue that Méndez reproduced on page 2 of Atariba & Niguayona.
The original statue measures three inches in length. A reproduction of the statue also appeared
in Thomas Athol Joyce’s book, Central American and West Indian Archaeology (New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1916) (see plate XVII). Otis Tufton Mason offered a brief history of George
Latimer in The Latimer Collection of Antiquities from Porto Rico in the National Museum (Wash-
ington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1899), 391.

74 Rohmer quoted in Madigan, “The Politics of Multicultural Literature,” 173.
75 Cordova, Interview with Harriet Rohmer.
76 Cordova, Interview with Mary Anchondo.
77 Shifra M. Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “The Political and Social Contexts of Chicano

Art,” in Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo,
Teresa Mckenna and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (Los Angeles, CA: Wight Art Gallery, 1991), 88.

78 James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbooks Got
Wrong, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: The New Press, 2007).

79 Author’s telephone call with Anita De Lucio, September 14, 2010.

362 Cordova

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Abstract

A Start-Up in the Mission
Changing the School Curriculum

Visualizing Social Change: The Ancient Iconographies of Children’s Book Press

Looking Back on Children’s Book Press
Disclosure Statement

fngroup

Drew Von Zweck

YesterdayAug 25 at 1:03pm

Manage Discussion Entry

The Mexican Muralism movement, in a way, provided the layout and foundation for the Chicano art movement in the 1960’s and 70’s. The Mexican American people were tired of being underrepresented and having little to no respect shown for their culture. As in Mexico post revolution, the country was highly capitalistic and modernizing, using the lower class and labor workers as tools to gain more money and power. The influence of the Tres Grandes in Mexico served as inspiration for the Chicano movement as they sought to spread their ideas and concerns through large, captivating public art.

These murals, just as they did in Mexico, served to reinvigorate Mexican Americans cultural heritage and combat the racism they were constantly faced with.

The way the Mexican muralists were able to spread such politically charged content under the supervision of their own government definitely also inspired the Chicano movement to get their message through, even if it means making murals that would eventually get taken down. They were focused on spreading their message and benefiting the oppressed through art, the same way Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros were.

Samuel Boucher

YesterdayAug 25 at 6pm

Manage Discussion Entry

The Mexican Muralism movement played a major impact on the Chicano art scene in the United States. In the mural, ‘‘Homage to Siqueiros,’’ a trio of muralists quite directly placed themselves as heirs of the Mexican mural art tradition. It was not purely in media and technique either. These muralists also countered the participatory role of their patron, the Bank of America in a move mirroring Siqueiros’ own experience in Los Angeles. Cordova writes, “For Campusano, Rios, and Cortazar, the parallel between Cuauhtemoc fighting the conquistadors and themselves fighting American cultural and political imperialism would have proved an easy comparison. The artists inserted Siqueiros as their contemporary hero and spokesperson, dressing him in a business suit, much like Cuauhtemoc appeared in Spanish armor” (371). This trio were directly influenced by the political ideology of their idol as well.

These three men were not the only artists influenced by politics of the Mexican mural movement. It was a wider movement embracing the new Left largely influenced by Latin American politics confronting the foreign policy of the United States (Cordova 374). Another influence can be seen in the theme and subject of the murals themselves. Los Tres Grandes shifted the focus of the work from Catholic and Greco-Roman mythology towards a much stronger focus on the indigenous elements of the Mexican people. In the same way, Chicano artists shifted their focus to their indigenous or mestizo heritage. For example, one famous mural, Latino America, strongly expresses this element. Cordova writes, “The bottom of the mural is framed by a host of maguey plants and cornstalks. The emphasis is entirely on the indigenous or mestizo heritage of Latin America, and as a result, not only reminds local residents of their homelands, but also celebrates the survival of various cultures in spite of Spanish colonialism. Ultimately, this emphasis creates a parallel between the peasant or Indian classes in Latin America and the inner city poor in America” (368). In media, politics, and subject, the Mexican Muralism movement impacted the Chicano art movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Drew Von Zweck

YesterdayAug 25 at 12:07pm

Manage Discussion Entry

Cultural expression is really one of the most powerful ways to mobilize and unify society towards social change. Cultural expression is necessary to express pride, concerns, or any feelings one has about their nation. Without the ability to express ones ideas and roots to their culture, their message becomes much less powerful and relatable. Essentially in order to appeal and to connect to others, people must be able to represent that culture well and allow everyone to feel a sense of belonging and pride. Cultural expression allows for this sense of community that is so important for achieving social change. It is much more difficult to change someones mind when they feel that they are not deeply connected to those pushing for change, or share the same cultural background.

A good example of this is in the Cuban revolution, when cultural expression and art exploded as people began to appreciate the power of art and expression and learn how to achieve change through it. The rise of women’s rights shows a clear example of how cultural expression was used to promote change. The message of women’s rights was embedded into different art forms that not only sought to unify Cubas people but to educate them and show them feminist ideas and issues. This was much more powerful than if the movement sought to separate itself from cuban culture and not include itself or pay respect to its roots in that nation.

Collapse Subdiscussion

Jodi Lo

MondayAug 24 at 10:17pm

Manage Discussion Entry

Cultural expression play a role in changing people’s minds and promoting social change in many different ways. First way defined as people changes their minds due to their own beliefs and thinking, thus, promoting social change. A sociological definition of social change would refer to a “change” of behavior such as family, religion, and so forth. Cultural express can be effected in people’s minds because it gives others the differentiation of looking through different ways of living, beliefs, or even moral. In addition, when society develops greater and greater inclusivity and efficiency, it will beneficently becomes increasingly complex. Cultural expression can provide self-expression by both psychological and physical aspects that cannot be replace.These findings provide evidence of the psychological consequences of the foundational cultural views rooted in historical and institutional practices in particular cultures.

Another social change will be due to pressure and the willingness to pursue a better future. Due to domination and exploitation, people were being forced to change their behavior by groups that are economically and politically more powerful. Cultural expression plays a role in which values and outcomes influence each other, but at the same time it will create conflict and formed a disparate groups. However, social change requires an enormous investment of energy to break pervious patterns of behavior and form new ones. Change is triggered when the demand of opening up of a new opportunity appeared, then the social energy will followed up to face severe challenge. In this point, different cultures meet and blend, explosive energy for social evolution will began. The chance that gives individual the opportunity to determine their own and their society’s needs. Cultural expression incorporates public concerns in developing social policy and economic initiatives.

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