Concrete History

Chicana Muralist Judith F. Baca goes from the great wall to the museum wall.

- Maximilíano Durón

To get the best view of the painted mural known as the Great Wall of Los Angeles, you have to step through some underbrush, peek over a chain-link fence, and angle your gaze downward over the expanse of the Tujunga Wash. The mural stretches for half a mile along the concrete wall of the Wash, a tributary of the concrete-lined Los Angeles River. Tucked away in Valley Glen, a community in the San Fernando Valley, far from the glitz of Hollywood, the mural is an exuberantly colored sequence of images that begins with prehistoric times and ends in the 1950s.

The sweeping narrative—the Wall’s official title is “The History of California”—opens with mastodons and saber-toothed tigers looking across a river, and across time, at a camp of Chumash Indians, some of California’s earliest residents. It moves through the arrival of the Spanish (seen from the indigenous point of view), the mass deportation of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, the turning back of the transatlantic liner St. Louis, loaded with European Jewish refugees during World War II, and the anguish wrought on Japanese Americans by internment.