Editor’s note: After publication of this story, City of Santa Ana officials issued a press release stating the ‘Chicano Gothic’ mural can be saved after public interest and concerns from the community.
Santa Ana has a problem with saving Chicano murals.
Emigdio Vasquez, ‘the godfather of Chicano Art.’, who has painted over 30 murals in Orange County, is no exception.
Restaurants, homes, neighborhood walls, and city halls have been canvasses for the Chicano muralist since the 1960s, and some have been destroyed throughout the years in Santa Ana, sometimes having to be recreated amid city remodels.
Another iconic mural might soon face the same fate.
One of his works, “Chicano Gothic,” a mural where Vasquez reinterprets the American Gothic, a 20th-century painting by Grant Wood, sits idly while a new aquatic center is set to be revamped in Santa Ana at Memorial Park, with construction starting later this year.
Activists, city commissioners, and the community started ringing the alarm earlier this week.
Artists like Alicia Rojas, who is currently working with Artesia Pilar neighborhood on restoring a mural depicting Chicano culture, says there is no sensitive leadership within the city arts and culture offices to save historic murals.
Knowing this, Rojas called on city leaders to help save the mural that is located on public property.
“Part of the conversation with the Public Works Agency was that it wasn’t feasible to move the wall,” said Rojas, who is also a muralist and member of the Santa Ana Community Artist(a).
But Rojas, who, along with other artists, has done recent restoration and preservation in the city of Santa Ana, knows there are alternative routes.
She is working to garner support for a different alternative – meeting with city staff on Tuesday to discuss options.
“We are looking into a method that lifts the image from the wall. The staff didn’t know about it but working with Alicia and myself, we have introduced it to city staff,” said Santa Ana Councilman Benjamin Vazquez, who is encouraging residents to speak out.
Others argue saving the mural should have been engineered into the development.
Santa Ana’s Public Works and Arts and Culture Department did not return calls for comment.
Manny Escamilla, a Santa Ana Historic Resources Commisioner and and Planning Commissioner, said saving murals has been a difficult task in Santa Ana.
“The arts and culture master plan, which we don’t really know this far, doesn’t have a really robust system for reviewing and protecting murals,” said Escamilla.
Then there’s the funding that always seems to elude mural projects in the city of Santa Ana.
There is no budget or guidelines, says Rojas.
“How come the city of Santa Ana doesn’t have a line-item for for mural preservation?” questioned Rojas, who wants the city of Santa Ana to have a more systematic approach to the aging murals across Santa Ana.
The family of Emigdio Vasquez was surprised to hear the news through Facebook posts made by concerned residents.
“We knew nothing about it; we found out through Facebook,” said Rosemary Vasquez Tuthill, 63, daughter of Emigdio Vasquez.
“I look at it this way: would they do that if it was a Diego Rivera mural? Would they just say let’s knock it down and paint it somewhere else? They would figure it out.”
“My dad is equivalent to Diego Rivera, the Orange County Diego Rivera; that’s what the people there have and mean to him.”
Vasquez passed in 2014, but had dreams of restoring his murals before Alzheimer’s set in.
Emigdios children, in recent years, have stepped up to the plate to help restore their father’s work.
Escamilla was impacted when the mural in the Jerome Community Center was removed.
“I grew up with him as a part of my visual understanding of growing up in Santa Ana” says Escamilla.
“The way it’s placed, it really is a gift to a generation of kids and families who used this park,” says Escamilla.
Vasquez was also commissioned by cities like Irvine and Anaheim to create civic public art and tell the stories of the working class.
So why won’t Santa Ana, the city that has proclaimed an “Emigdio Vasquez Day” save his work?
It’s one of the questions Escamilla, Rojas, and others keep asking.
Credit: Courtesy of Alicia Rojas
“I believe that the city did a really important thing in celebrating and allowing this space for that form of cultural expression to happen, and you encouraged it to happen,” says Escamilla.
“So it’s one of the examples of what was best in the city, how we can aspire to create memorable works of art that can transcend now multiple generations that have come across it,” Escamilla said. “It’s our chance at least for me, personally. It’s my chance to try to save a small bit of Santa Ana and history, which I do believe that people care about.”
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