While Los Angeles County celebrates Chicano art with the fabulous "Phantom Sightings" exhibition at LACMA, Orange County deals with its own brown Botticellis the way it always has: with dismissals, ignorance and a can of paint thinner.
Last week, Fullerton City Councilman Shawn Nelson stated during a council meeting that the city should remove a set of 1970s-era murals on a pedestrian overpass spanning a stretch of Lemon Street just south of Valencia Drive. Nelson claimed that the depictions -- classic lowriders, sultry girls in sombreros and fedoras, stylish pachucos and the Virgin of Guadalupe -- might make people think Fullerton sanctions gang activity. The words "The Town I Live In," currently emblazoned on a stairwell, are also dangerous, Nelson said; he's seen gang members sporting them as tattoos. Rubbing out those murals, Nelson insisted, would help the city combat juvenile delinquency.
Nelson's colleagues haven't decided whether to act on his laughably misguided recommendation. Personally, I doubt decades-old drawings of gleaming Chevrolet Fleetlines influence crime rates the way, say, poverty does. And "The Town I Live In"? That's the title of a soul ballad immortalized by East Los Angeles legends Thee Midniters. But the councilman's argument isn't what interests me so much as the way Nelson embodies Orange County's long-standing hostility whenever its Chicano communities try to commemorate their long-neglected past via public art.
Although Orange County can't match the diversity, number or aesthetics of Los Angeles' lively Chicano art scene, we're also no Fresno. Orange County's Chicano murals are spread across multiple cities, but almost all suffer from neglect. Across the street from Anaheim's new Muzeo museum, which is currently exhibiting Cheech Marin's collection of Chicano art, an epic mural depicting Mexican history from the Aztecs to assimilated Mexican Americans is flaking away to reveal its grocery store brick-wall canvas. In Placentia, a 240-foot panorama incorporating everything from Mayan gods to Mexican laborers picking oranges stands forgotten next to a drainage ditch. A garage in Orange hosts a mural created by famed Chicano artist (and Orange County resident) Emigdio Vasquez. Each debuted with much fanfare years ago but nowadays are as forgotten as the Coppertone billboard that once loomed over Interstate 5.
