Give Me Life

Iconography and Identity in East LA Murals

Holly Barnet-Sanchez, Tim Drescher

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780826357489
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Chicanismo, the idea of what it means to be Chicano, was born in the 1970s, when grassroots activists, academics, and artists joined forces in the civil rights movimiento that spread new ideas about Mexican American history and identity. The community murals those artists painted in the barrios of East Los Angeles were a powerful part of that cultural vitality, and these artworks have been an important feature of LA culture ever since. This book offers detailed analyses of individual East LA murals, sets them in social context, and explains how they were produced. The authors, leading experts on mural art, use a distinctive methodology, analyzing the art from aesthetic, political, and cultural perspectives to show how murals and graffiti reflected and influenced the Chicano civil rights movement.

This publication is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto
• Introduction
• 1: Setting The Stage: Analytical Frameworks
• 2: Contexts: Historical and Art Historical
• 3: Estrada Courts Entrance Guardians
• 4: Estrada Courts: The Olympic Boulevard Façade
• 5: Estrada Courts: For Residents’ Eyes Only
• 6: Nature Row (by Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino)
• 7: Ramona Gardens
• 8: Mural Corridors: Early Clusters on First Street and Whittier Boulevard
• 9: The Central Corridor: Avenida Cesar Chavez
• 10: Mural Corridors: Soto Street, Boyle Heights, and Elsewhere
• 11: Over The Hazard Hill To City Terrace
• 12: Nonnarrative Chicanismo / Willie F. Herrón III
• 13: Geometry, History, Chicanismo: The East Los Streetscapers
• 14: Representing East Los Murals In 2013
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover