Heterogeneity in California Chicana/o Muralism

Willie Herrón’s mural, The Wall that Cracked Open 1972 See Fig. 1-2 , critically influenced the practice of mural-making in California. The artist executed this mural at a time when more laudatory images of Chicana/o nationalist ideology were prevalent in various barrios and neighborhoods throughout California. The struggles of the Chicano Movement had created a generation of politically conscious artists who decided to take messages of social justice and equality to the streets through the use of the public mural. But Herrón not only challenged the prevalent nationalist aesthetic of the time, he called attention to the wall as a physical and discursive site of cultural signification. Functioning as a meta-mural, The Wall that Cracked Open underscored the constructedness of mural imagery. Herrón unraveled the illusions behind visual representations and stressed the two-dimensionality of the wall surface. In doing so, the artist was implicitly putting into question the validity and so-called “reality” of mural imagery connected to the Chicano Movement. This work also functioned as a metaphor for what began happening to Chicana/o muralism already in the early 1970s.