Redraw

Chicano muralists went crazy on George Washington's home. Raul Baltazar agreed I wasn't totally off. A couple of months ago he and fellow painter Melly Trochez finished six outdoor murals and several indoor paintings at Johnnie Cochran Middle School near L.A.'s Koreatown, named after L.A.'s most famous African American lawyer. The school started life 86 years ago as Mt. Vernon Junior High School, built during an immigrant boom in L.A. that unlike recent trends was fed mostly by arrivals from the Midwestern United States.

What's exciting about the Baltzar-Trochez project is its scale and its role in adding another coat of cultural paint to changing section of Los Angeles.

I'd put the project next to that of any L.A.'s major contemporary muralists, such as Judy Baca or Kent Twitchell. It took Raul and Melly eight months and more than 500 gallons of paint to finish the work, the largest mural is about 40 feet tall by 150 feet wide.

Los Angeles was a boom town in 1926 with a dire need for houses and schools for the hordes of immigrants coming mostly from the Midwest. The city was a movie, manufacturing and oil boom town. Thick oil well forests covered parts of Echo Park, most of Signal Hill, and parts of Huntington Beach now awash with beachside condos. Factories churned out cars, tires and little parts for bigger products.

One of Mt Vernon Jr. High's buildings maintains architectural elements that echo the columns at Washington's longtime home, a reminder of the colonial founding father, America's colonial heritage and the civic institutions he helped build.

Thanks to Baltazar and Trochez that building now has Hindu images, cartoonish and multi-ethnic portrayals of teens being teens, all embraced by the large wings of an eagle. After experiencing tagging on their first works, they canvassed area residents, even local Buddhist monks, to find out what images they wanted on the walls.

With a portable speaker slung on his hip, Baltazar described the work's elements to a couple of dozen people at the work's unveiling. Baltazar said this is the Good Luck Mural, and unlike what adults tell youth about art, this masterpiece is meant to be touched. The uniformed teens didn't have to be told twice. The wanted the good luck on all their bodies.

The idea of placing images partly generated by the students and area neighbors - I told Raul weeks later- fascinated me. It's nothing new, of course. Occidental College researcher Raul Villa in the book Barrio Logos breaks down how Chicano identity arises partly out of struggles over space and the redrawing of that space by outside forces then through a Chicano response, think about the East L.A. neighborhoods sliced and diced by the freeways. And think about the relegation of Mexican Americans - and most other minorities - to various L.A. ghettos until the post World War Two era.

Painter Raul Baltazar agrees that his massive mural project gives the teens at Cochran Middle School tangible images that they helped create and that are part of their cultural heritage. It's not that the Mt. Vernon faux-columns and all they represent aren't relevant. New immigrants bring new stories, Raul Baltazar and Melly Trochez asked and listened to those tales and put them on the school walls to remind everyone why they're important.