Title: TSHA | Chicano Mural Movement
Headings: Chicano Mural Movement
Support Texas History Now
Chicano Mural Movement
This entry belongs to the following Handbook Special Projects :
Currents in Transatlantic History (Used)

Content: Courtesy of the Diocese of Corpus Christi. Image available on the Internet and included in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. Chicano Mural Movement. The Chicano mural movement began in the 1960s in Mexican-American barrios throughout the Southwest. Artists began using the walls of city buildings, housing projects, schools, and churches to depict Mexican-American culture. Chicano muralism has been linked to pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas, who recorded their rituals and history on the walls of their pyramids, and Mexican revolutionary-era painters José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaros Siqueiros, collectively known as los tres grandes, who painted murals in the United States. Two other Latino predecessors were Antonio Garcia and Xavier Gonzalez, who painted murals in the 1930s under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration art projects. In 1933 at San Diego (Texas) High School, Garcia produced March on Washington, which has since been moved to the Duval County Museum. It was influenced by the Bonus March in Washington D.C. the previous year and embodies the idea that President Herbert Hoover failed to rebuild the nation's finances after the stock-market crash of 1929 while President Franklin Delano Roosevelt triumphed in putting Americans back to work. Garcia also painted frescoes for Our Lady of Loreto Chapel at Presidio La Bahía in Goliad, Texas, Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Corpus Christi, and the Immaculate Conception Chapel at the Corpus Christi Minor Seminary (now Saint John Paul II High School).