Luis Garza: Siqueiros is an innovator.

Ruben Ortiz-Torres: David Alfaro Siqueiros was one of the 3 Mexican muralists.

Carol Jacques: He was an activist artist.

Leslie Rainer: We know that while Siqueiros was in Los Angeles, he was starting what he called a technical revolution in painting.

♪ Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy; the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture and Creative Recovery L.A.; the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Garza: Siqueiros was many things.

He was a soldier.

He was a muralist, an artist, an innovator, a father, a socialist, communist, a union organizer.

He was many things.

And above all, he was a genius.

Internationally renowned for his work through the arts.

Jacques: He was a spy in Spain fighting fascism.

He was an activist.

He wasn't an armchair communist artist.

He was an activist artist.

And he never stopped.

Barbara Carrasco: He influenced so many muralists in L.A., and I think I was one of many that were influenced by him.

Woman: He lived in L.A. for only 6 months in 1932, but in that brief period he made an indelible mark on the city's walls.

Woman 2: The conservation of "America Tropical" is unique because it's here in Los Angeles and it's really a landmark in 20th-century mural painting.

Elena Macchioni: So, when you do the inspection, you should bring with you, like, the previous material from previous inspection forms.

Rainer: We know that while Siqueiros was in Los Angeles, he was starting what he called a technical revolution in painting.

So, while he was here, he claimed at that time that he was going to make this a fully mechanical mural where there was no trace of the human hand and that that was the way of the future.

Woman: What section were you looking at, Leslie?

Rainer: So, I'm looking right here.

Do we see this white?

Woman: You know what?

I don't see it on the photo.

Rainer: So, I think that's new.

Do we want to just take a picture of that?

Tap just lightly on the mural.

And if we find a place that sounds a little hollow... this is probably stable.

It's a very small, limited space.

But if we felt like the plaster was detached and it wasn't stable, we would either find a hole along a crack where we could insert a syringe needle or we would drill a very small hole.

Edgar Garcia: The relationship between the Getty Conservation Institute and El Pueblo really goes back to the 1980s.

After the unveiling of the mural and the "America Tropical" Interpretive Center in 2012, there was a commitment by the Getty for an additional 10 years of monitoring of the mural so that a new generation of staff can look after the mural.

So, to protect "America Tropical" and to ensure its survival for future generations, there's a whole protocol of what we do.

Rainer: The Getty Conservation Institute is an operating program of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

GCI works internationally to advance conservation through a number of model projects.

We have worked on the Tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt, the Mogao Grottoes in China, the archaeological site of Herculaneum in Italy, and a small adobe church in Peru.

Each of our projects is unique and undertaken for the specific reason of advancing conservation in the field.

Garcia: So, 10 years after the opening of "America Tropical" in 2012, the Getty will be really entrusting us at El Pueblo and the city to look after the mural.

We have to make sure that the mural survives, you know, the ravages of just being in an urban environment and to really protect the mural and understand that it involves staffing.

And those are things that are the responsibility of the El Pueblo staff.

Rainer: When we see his technique, we see how he mapped out what he was gonna do on the bare brick before he put on the plaster.

And that's a way that artists work.

When they're doing a mural, they might grid out or do a preliminary design.

Garcia: On a monthly basis, we have to kind of go up close to the mural.

Notice anything that is happening.

Do we see anything on the ground?

Do we see any staining?

Do we see anything that could potentially impact the mural?

But it is something that involves a whole team of young cultural administrators and management to look after the mural.

Rainer: Siqueiros claimed that he used only mechanized tools to paint the mural, that there would not be the trace of the artist's hands.

And for the most part, on the mural, we do see just paint embedded in the plaster substrate, and we think that that was probably sprayed on with a--with a spray gun.

But there are places in this area that was whitewashed, which is better preserved.

We see clear brushstrokes.

Rainer: In 1988, GCI scientists carried out pigment identification, and we know the palette of colors that Siqueiros used.

We know that he used mineral pigments like yellow ocher and raw and burnt sienna, burnt and raw umber, carbon black, and white, and those are the colors that are on the mural today.

What we don't know is how those colors were layered.

We don't know the full buildup of the paint on the mural.

We see areas where it really is almost the ghost of the mural as it was before, almost as though we're seeing the preliminary painting.

Garcia: As someone that is at El Pueblo and myself, in having to look after the history and all the interpretation that we have at the plaza on Olvera Street at El Pueblo, we have to tell the story of early Los Angeles.

We have to tell multiple themes.

We have to discuss lots of topics that many times are not comforting.

♪ Bill Kelley: If you stand in front of that mural today, it's kind of like a ghost.

It's kind of like a phantom of what it once was.

And so, there's something about this sort of-- this archaeological reemergence of the mural that's coming back to life and coming back into a narrative.

♪ Fabian Debora: As a muralist, artist, you know, you tend to get subcontracted at times.

When we're doing graffiti, I was incarcerated as a young man in juvenile hall, and Father Greg from Homeboy Industries, I remember, stepped in and said, "Hey, this kid got talent.

Why are you trying to lock it away?"

And the judge said, "Well, I'm willing to reconsider.

Prove it to me."

But murals is also a form of--of culture, you know.

It's a form of life.

And it has been, at least for us Mexican American.

We have been introduced to murals way beforehand, you know, and I think as murals also served as a very important instrument or tool to fight against social injustices or to be able to reclaim our true core values or values of our people, our gente.

And I've noticed from the Chicano movement, mural Chicano movement, a lot of that was being conveyed in these murals, which was introduced by the tres grandes, I like to call them.

Maestros previous to us that gave us that formula.

Siqueiros, Frida, Diego, and Orozco.

This is what I consider the heart of the space, el corazon, because of my ancestral lineages.

You know, it's important that I create an altar, you know, and that is the heart of the space.

Kelley: 1932, the world Olympics comes to Los Angeles.

It coincides at the same time as the Great Depression.

♪ Arthur Millier, who at the time was the resident art critic for the "Los Angeles Times," wrote that any visitor that came to Los Angeles for the Olympics should spend some time looking at the murals of Los Angeles because it was an important mural center.

Of the 26 murals that he listed as possible destination spots, the vast majority of them were actually indoors and were part of either corporate or civic art commissions.

So, this is a storyline that was already kind of being represented through Muralism when Siqueiros would have arrived, so, this is a very interesting kind of contrast to think about--who's writing that history.

Garza: In the heart of Los Angeles comes Calle Olvera.

Jacques: The legend is that Christine Sterling, who originally envisioned Olvera Street and sold the idea to the city of Los Angeles so they could bring in more tourism.

Narrator: What's this?

Silhouette or crucifix?

Olvera Street.

Here 150 years ago, the city of Los Angeles was founded and known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina... Rebecca Zamora: She's looking for the Spanish-Mexican romance.

She's looking for the caballeros singing.

She said the damas with their--with their mantillas.

And she goes to Olvera Street, which at that time was a paved alleyway.

Garcia: Plaza was in some ways largely forgotten by the new White population, the new growing White population.

So, it became a space that was clearly defined as a Mexican space, and it was in that way kind of treated as something else, something surviving from a time that was no longer there.

So, it was a space that was largely forgotten by the general population.

Zamora: She attracted the financial interests of the Chandlers.

Ortiz-Torres: It's probably the first attempt to do this kind of ethnic thematic park.

Narrator: They carved in the broiling sun.

Mm-hmm!

Further charming proof of Mexican fascination.

You may meet this little fellow with his soulful eyes manana, but he's going now.

Zamora: Her idea was to create a Mexican marketplace where people could interact with Mexicans but not have to go to Mexico.

You had to be costumed in order to have a puesto there.

It's very much kind of like going into Disneyland, that part of Pirates of the Caribbean where they're running around.

Garza: Which becomes the pulse of the Mexican sensibility as interpreted by Christine Sterling.

Ortiz-Torres: Siqueiros gets commissioned to do a mural in this very strange place.

Garza: And they had this outside wall of 18 by 82 feet on the Italian Hall building.

And they looked at that space and they say, "What a wonderful space for a mural."

Jacques: A beer garden was commissioned by the city of Los Angeles when the selling of liquor was prohibited.

Before that prohibition was lifted, they were envisioning a beer garden where people could walk up steps, sit down, have a beer, and look at the beautiful mural.

Garcia: So, the Plaza Arts Center opened in what is now the historic Italian Hall.

Garza: They think, Christine Sterling and fellow socialites and supporters, say, "OK, we need to attract more tourism to Olvera Street."

Garcia: That led indirectly, then, to F.K.

Ferencz seeking out an artist to actually paint a mural on his building, and then that led to Siqueiros' presence there.

Garza: An outdoor mural.

Now, who can do that?

Ah.

Siqueiros.

Rainer: "The theme of this fresco at the Plaza Art Center can be said to be the tropical jungle or the Mexican jungle."

As Siqueiros writes, "In our tropics, we find strong, terrible, predatory trees, which grow very rapidly and twine their long arms like serpents around anything they can lay hold of.

Their coils crush and destroy everything.

Often they entwine the splendid ruins of the ancient cities of Mexico, and then we have a great struggle between trees and stones.

This fight, which is very often seen in our country, we have tried to depict.

So much for the subject."

That's the end of the Siqueiros quote.

However, he doesn't mention that in the center of the composition is a crucified Indigenous figure tied to a double cross surmounted by an eagle with outspread wings.

And he doesn't mention that there are two revolutionaries aiming their rifles at the eagle from a nearby rooftop.

Garza: Let's see if he will do this and we can contain him with the title "Tropical America."

♪ Ruben Ortiz-Torres: The day before the opening of the mural, inauguration of the mural, he paints the image of a crucified Indian.

And also like a couple of snipers, these kind of proto- guerrilla guys that are, like, in--in the corner of the mural, and needless to say, Christine Sterling doesn't like it and it doesn't really work as a sanitized decoration.

Translator: It is important to remember this fact.

I believe that we, the Mexicans of this side of the border, have an obligation to lend our most complete, our fullest support, as much as we can to our companeros who are struggling in the United States.

Without a doubt, my work was destroyed because of its theme.

[Siqueiros speaking Spanish] Translator: Because of the content that I had put into it.

Undoubtedly, there was no other reason.

[Siqueiros speaking Spanish] Translator: I have seen newspaper clippings from Los Angeles and other parts of the United States that show the violent campaign against the theme.

And this starting with Mr. Ferencz himself.

As I said before, he considered himself betrayed by the theme I had undertaken.

[Siqueiros speaking Spanish] Translator: And that is why the mural was attacked.

Garza: The wonderful thing about Siqueiros and his personality was...[speaking Spanish] you know?

He was one-on-one.

There was no pretense.

And so, I hang out with him.

♪ [Man speaking Spanish] Carrasco: "Opening Night" is a mural that was commissioned by Tom Hartman, a museum designer, who then hired me to come and paint the mural with John Valadez and other artists.

And it's about Siqueiros' "America Tropical" mural and what might it have looked like on opening night?

All the people who came to support him are in the mural.

Isabel Rojas-Williams: The main theme here is what Siqueiros tried to convey.

It was that--the exploitation of the indigenous Latino Mexican worker.

Garza: So, the title, "La America Tropical: Oprimida y Destrozado por Los Imperialismos," reflects his opinion of European colonialism dating back to the Espanoles, the French, the Dutch, the English... up until the present imperialism of the United States personified in that crucified figure as a central figure, and the two revolutionary soldiers prepared to do guerra, war, against that imperialism as personified by the American eagle.

Which is on every American coin, of a dollar.

♪ Erin Yoshi: So, this sketch is part of the Great Wall Project, really led by Judy Baca and the Social Public Art Resource Center.

Woman: The concept of the mural was to bring a group of youth together from different neighborhoods who'd had trouble with the police and have them try to accomplish something together that was greater than any one of them individually.

And so, we attempted to paint the longest mural in the world.

But the idea was that we would paint the history of California and put particular emphasis on the part of history that had been left out in history books.

When we began this mural, it was an experiment.

We didn't know what was gonna happen.

Yoshi: We're working now on the continuation of the Great Wall.

So, it originally was from the 1900s to the 1950s.

Just to kind of move your eye through it, it takes you down this path.

And then there's gonna be smoke and fire, and the smoke and fire almost go up and around to bring your eyes back down into the storyline.

So, I really think that that sort of movement through it, you go down here, you come back, you see the birds, it goes here, the fire goes up, and then it comes back down, is very much influenced by the Siqueiros way of making Muralism, is to move your eye through the storyline, but also connecting these stories together as you view it as a viewer.

For many years, I just painted murals.

I didn't paint any canvas because similarly, like Siqueiros, I really felt like art is for the people.

It's accessible.

I look at murals as they're touchstones of the community.

They kind of--you can drive through a community, see the murals that are there, and it kind of gives you the pulse of the community.

But when you spray paint, you kind of have to work with what you have and then kind of play with the distance.

So, for me, I like to get my brain around usually the color palette that I'm gonna use.

These are some variations to make a flower in pink.

I might add in a darker or a lighter here, but I like to usually lay out the colors I'm gonna work with first.

Siqueiros also-- and when he painted "America Tropical," he painted with spray, but he was using a spray gun.

Now many years later, we spray paint.

♪ Ortiz-Torres: He also started experimenting with industrial materials.

He used airbrushes.

He projected images into the murals to trace them.

Acrylic paint was actually invented and developed for him.

The first acrylic paint was develop in--by the Mexican Instituto Politecnico Nacional.

Garza: Siqueiros is an innovator.

Using photographic techniques, cement, spray paint.

All the graffiti artists of today, you have to look to Siqueiros as the granddaddy of spray paint because he's using spray paint, household paints, and photographic work to start stenciling out his image.

Ortiz-Torres: It seems to me that the whole project is a mediatic project.

It's a project that was meant to go viral.

He's aware that the image is going to be destroyed, but that the concept, that the idea is going to last.

♪ Rainer: If there are places where there was just some continuity lost in that, by paint loss, we just dot it in.

Man: Did he use the same technique on portrait?

Rainer: We think so.

We don't have as much written about any single mural that he painted.

Mostly just "Street Meeting" we have things that he wrote about.

And then he wrote that he--for "America Tropical," he was going to use all mechanical tools.

So, I think that that stability is what we're looking for, is that when we look at the photogrammetry from 2021, we don't see any big change.

There are a lot of myths and speculation, uncertainty around who whitewashed Siqueiros' "America Tropical" and for what reasons.

So, within about a year and a half, the mural was partially whitewashed.

The revolutionaries that were in the upper right corner of the mural could be seen by passersby on the street.

So, that was whitewashed soon after the completion of the mural.

♪ Jacques: The legend is that Christine Sterling asked some of the puesto owners to whitewash it because she didn't like it at all.

Garza: The 3 murals that Siqueiros paints here in Los Angeles, 1932, "Street Meeting," "Mitin Obrero."

"America Tropical."

And "Portrait of Mexico Today."

Is a triptych.

Ortiz-Torres: I would argue that the mural that he did in Chouinard, it was probably his most Marxist in the sense that--that again, he was talking about labor relations and labor organization.

Garza: "Street Meeting," which becomes controversial immediately, painted on a wall on the Chouinard Art School, where he's teaching this class and he begins to experiment.

Ortiz-Torres: Chouinard eventually became CalArts.

Millard Sheets: My name is Millard Sheets and I had the pleasure of meeting David Alfaro Siqueiros in the early summer of 1932.

I met him at a series of parties and being a young artist wanting to know more about new techniques, I persuaded him to teach some 8 of us fresco painting.

I was teaching at Chouinard at the time and Mr. Chouinard graciously gave us the building in which to conduct the class, and we had a very exciting experimental period of a couple of weeks where he showed us many different techniques.

It was during this period that he conceived of the idea of doing the mural at Chouinard on one of the walls in the main court.

Ortiz-Torres: The mural was representing a union meeting.

Garza: When you look at it, it takes into account workers, and it depicts Black, White, and a variety of construction workers--Latinos, Mexicanos, the mixture--who are overlooking, listening to this union organizer who is in the central figure in a red shirt representing socialism and--metaphors.

But it's also important to understand because it becomes the first experiment of outdoor murals, the innovation that Siqueiros brings with his work and his curiosity and his experimentation.

♪ Jacques: "Street Meeting" shows us what we can do about it.

He wanted us to organize, so, he gave birth to a lot of activists.

Not only did he identify the problem, he also told us what needed to be done.

Organize, organize, organize and stand up for social justice and stand up for your rights.

Ortiz-Torres: Which, of course, unfortunately, knowing the United States, it all got lost in a discussion about race and racial prejudice that, unfortunately, led to the-- to the destruction of the-- of the mural.

And the reason why the mural was destroyed is that somehow it portrayed a biracial couple.

Rojas-Williams: We're talking about 1932, when biracial gatherings weren't accepted.

Garza: Becomes very controversial because it shows a union organizer with a Black man and child and a White woman with her child and a scaffold full of construction workers listening to him.

L.A. was an anti-union town and they were busting up unions.

It was the L.A. Red Squad, which they were known, because they would target communists, socialists, any activists that were contrary to the city administration at that time.

So, that mural is immediately covered over.

♪ Man: For instance, here you see de-lamination of the material here.

It's come off.

So, there's gonna be some extensive work in here to get that glued back into place.

Woman: Paint and mural experts have started the painstaking job of opening up small sections to determine just how much of "Street Meeting" remains.

Carrasco: I think the legacy of Siqueiros in Los Angeles will be his murals that he made while he was here.

They're so beautifully done, so important to all of us.

Just as important as, like, a lot of the Western European artists are.

He's--he's someone that really should be appreciated.

And so, I think the fact that there's-- they're preserving his murals is also really wonderful because some--some--some murals are--are destroyed or neglected.

Rojas-Williams: Unfortunately, a lot of the issues that Siqueiros conveyed at the time are still existing today.

Garza: And then the third mural, "Retrato de Mexico Hoy," is a commentary on the Mexican government that is going through its own crisis in terms of its post-revolutionary period and being bought out by American interests and bankers who own a good part of Mexico.

Woman: It was found in the backyard of a home in Pacific Palisades, and in 2002 was moved to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Zamora: It's very political.

For the most part, the colors were really good, and either LACMA, the city, private donors, no one could save it.

They literally had to lift the wall up and they put it on a flatbed and they shipped it to Santa Barbara.

It's the craziest thing I've ever heard of.

I think it's the oddest of his, content-wise, of his murals because it was for a private audience, it was in the garden, to boot, so, it--it's still exterior.

It still would have been this experimentation.

There is a pyramidal kind of step structure with what looks like Indigenous women that occupy the space.

James Glisson: Part of the power of this mural is that it's both about--it is both a portrait of Mexico today, back in the 1930s, but because many of the figures are generalized, the way the women are somewhat abstracted, the way the plant life is nonspecific, the way that we can't tell what time of day it is, because of those things, it's not just contemporary.

It's not just a single moment.

It enters into the realm of history in a broad way.

So, he gets to have it both ways.

He gets to have an image about his nation, the culture of his time, but he also gets to think about it in terms of much longer-- the much, much longer trajectories of Mexican history, but also the much longer trajectories of art history.

Zamora: There's a portrait of J.P. Morgan.

There is a portrait of Plutarco Elias Calles.

Treats the themes of imperialism, of the complicity of governments.

♪ Garza: "America Tropical" suffered dual censorship, the first being out-and-out whitewash that covers it.

And the second is the administrative whitewash.

Blacklisting.

If you look at "America Tropical," it was probably the first and most controversial artwork in the history of this country.

Zoe Malot: Is a benchmark case for examining whitewashing in Los Angeles.

Harry Gamboa: In a way, Siqueiros played a role of coming to Los Angeles, similar to many of the filmmakers that escaped Europe as fascism was rising and arrived in the U.S., and also because, I guess, they were sensitized to the America that's here, to realize that maybe there was kind of a dark underbelly here.

Garza: Siqueiros' politics clash.

And he's imprisoned in Lecumberri Prison in Mexico, a notorious jail in Mexico City.

Then he's internally exiled to a town called Taxco.

And in Taxco is where he meets other luminaries like Sergei Eisenstein from Russia, the filmmaker.

Woman: He actually met quite a few L.A.-based people who would help him get through to L.A. Garcia: It goes back to the 19th-century treatment of our Native American population.

It goes back to the treatment of Mexicanos.

It goes back to the way Asian Americans were treated in the 1870s and 1880s.

♪ Kelley: There's a really interesting relationship that goes back to politics and to art.

One of the ways in which we could frame community arts practices here in Los Angeles, this idea of community art making, because it developed a sort of language that was based on a kind of dialogical principle of people working closely with each other, collaborating, organizing, and developing their own kinds of curriculums together.

♪ Aaron Estrada: For me, what I enjoy about the collective is the--is the sharing of resources and also just of skills and just overall mentorship through each individual.

Each--each one individual member brings a lot to the table and then we're able to also give feedback within our own collective.

Uber Lopez: Well, we kind of like--overlapping a little too much.

So, we cut that off and we're gonna see how it's affected.

Man: Yeah, maybe just [indistinct] Harry Gamboa: Los Angeles really promotes amnesia.

This whole idea of Los Angeles having been Mexico less than 200 years ago, no one would ever be able to tell that.

I mean, in fact, probably the only thing that's a document of--of the fact that it was Mexico is kind of a very disturbing monument that's in downtown Los Angeles, and it celebrates the-- the Mormon battalion, the people that were brought in to kill all the Mexicans.

Jacques: When you have no political power, you are whitewashed.

No matter what happens to you, it doesn't matter.

You're whitewashed.

Our faces were invisible.

We were part of Los Angeles in the teens, the twenties, the thirties, forties, and so on to now and... we were whitewashed.

We were whitewashed in history until the Chicano movement started and we began to demand equality.

We began to demand that we be treated the way everyone else is.

Gamboa: Unfortunately, Chicanos have too often been viewed as the other or as an absence overall.

But it's in the sixties and seventies that the whitewash begins to fade and peel off.

And it's also the rise of the Chicano movement.

The Chicanada is rising.

Social upheavals throughout the United States and the world are taking place.

The women's movement.

Black movement.

Asian movement.

Indian movement.

There's all these social upheaval that's taking place in the United States and the artists from each of those communities are also rising in terms of interpreting their communities.

Man on P.A.

: We're protesting against the discriminatory draft laws that give deferments for all the Anglo middle-class people of this country and make the heaviest burden of the war fall on the poor, fall on the Mexicano.

[Men singing in Spanish] Shifra Goldman: The interest in the Siqueiros mural came when I visited Mexico City in 1965 and interviewed Siqueiros.

I also purchased a new biography that had been issued about his life, which showed pictures of the various murals that he had-- of two murals or 3 murals he had painted in Los Angeles.

So, upon my return, I went to see the mural to see if I could photograph it, and the idea, of course, came up at that time that there was a possibility of restoration.

Zamora: Shifra Goldman is a social art historian, activist, educator, and professor.

♪ Garza: All the efforts that we were expending at that time with Shifra and Jesus and myself and a bunch of people, and even with the Getty, it was bureaucratic censorship.

It was a nightmare.

Zamora: She keeps the mural alive by introducing people, by writing about it.

Garza: But it's also, again, the politics of Los Angeles as it is growing demographically and becoming more Latino, more Mexicano, more Chicano, more progressive with various communities that come into alignment and support for the efforts that were expending to conserve this mural and bring it back to the public.

Rojas-Williams: I knew that "America Tropical" was in Plaza Olvera.

There was a little door that not many people knew about it.

Somebody told me the secret and I went in that little door and it happened to take me to where "America Tropical" was.

This is way before the mural was restored, way before it became accessible to the public.

I felt what the Chicanos and-- felt during the civil rights movement here in the seventies.

How the Chicanos were inspired by Siqueiros to go out and clamoring for their rights, for equality.

I felt all that.

Jacques: Let me tell you first why the Siqueiros mural was restored to the point that it is today.

It was a series of circumstances that happened at the same time.

Number one, we had a mayor that was a Chicano.

Number two, we had a council member that had been born in Mexico, first one ever elected.

And number 3, we had a full commission that really cared about Pueblo and Siqueiros.

It was this team of people that needed to be in place at the same time in order to make it happen.

Well, the first challenge was we had to find out what was going on and why wasn't something being done.

So, we had to meet with the Getty.

Once we found out what the problem was, then we could go to work, and the problem was that the Getty had started to preserve the mural in the early 1990s.

But what their concern was, as you painstakingly take off that white paint one little bit at a time, they had no idea what was going to be under the removal of the paint for the restoration.

And their concern was that it was gonna look like scrambled eggs.

Garza: The efforts on behalf of the Getty were not immediate.

That was also 10-, 15-, 20-year struggle to finally bring "America Tropical" back to public view.

♪ Ortiz-Torres: He was interested in the whole idea of the Chicano movement as part of a political movement and a fight for equality, right, which was the leitmotif of his work, right?

To create the society without classes.

That I would like to add that hopefully, we would achieve that without going through some kind of authoritarian way to do that.

But that's another story Anyway.

[Woman and Siqueiros speaking Spanish] Zamora: She engaged him to talk about because they didn't know if it could be restored.

Like, do you bring him back and he can repaint it?

Can it be saved in that sense, or is it just conserved and preserved?

Because that was always a conversation they were having.

And they started talking to different conservators who could speak to what was technically possible for the mural.

And at a certain point, I believe Siqueiros sends a letter and he says, "Stop."

Because they had wanted to restore it.

And he said, "Stop.

It can't be restored.

It shouldn't be restored."

And I think I agree with him.

It's a better story.

Restoring it would have erased the history of it.

Allowing it to exist as an object, as the phantom of an object, is the object itself.

Rojas-Williams: Many iconic murals have been whitewashed in our city for different reasons.

The first reason nowadays is gentrification.

Second is the lack of funding to restore murals.

So, you know, the state or the city doesn't provide funding for restoring our murals.

So, many of them are just fading away.

Among those is, for example, "Resurrection of the Green Planet" by Ernesto de la Rosa in Boyle Heights.

That is a very important mural that speaks about the issues that we're living today with global warming.

And there is no funding to restore the mural, so, you hardly can see it.

♪ The murals on the 101 freeway and the 110 freeway that were created in 1984 for the Olympics.

All those murals have been tagged and you cannot see them any longer, and there's no money to bring them back.

Judy Baca and the 110 freeway.

"Hitting the Wall."

Then is Barbara Carrasco, created in 1981, a huge mural with many different panels that spoke about the history.

Is called "L.A.

History."

Which it was banned for decades because the subject was too controversial.

♪ Barbara was asked to delete certain segments of the mural.

She refused.

So, the mural was put in storage for decades, and just recently, this mural has been acquired by the Natural History Museum.

Carrasco: He inspired me so much, you know, to really think about what kind of work you're creating and who's it gonna affect, what kind of effect it's gonna have on your community.

Gamboa: Kind of shows the disrespect that's shown to murals in Los Angeles.

Many of the murals that have been created by Chicanos have been destroyed.

Carrasco: And if we say to--yes to their censorship, then--then you're next.

The other artists are next.

It's gonna be controlled by--by them, whoever commissions you to do something, and I go, "And you're no longer an artist."

Malot: Any example or any mural that's been whitewashed or subsequently destroyed through the city or through property owners, I think has to be analyzed in the same framework or with using Siqueiros' "America Tropical" as--as an example, because it fits in with this much larger establishment of regulatory processes from the city, civic leaders, boosters, and elites as well as property owners in creating a certain image of Los Angeles and whitewashing anything that doesn't fit with that image that they want to create.

Yoshi: Muralism is one of the art crafts that has to be passed down.

So, it's from master to journeyman to apprentice.

And at some point, you're in one of those categories.

Actually, at the time, when Siqueiros' team taught a Muralism class and Judy Baca was the only woman in the class, and at the time, and so, I think it's a really interesting thing that she actually got to learn from his team the way that he did Muralism.

So, that legacy is then passed down to the next generation, and I think it's really an honor to be able to be in that same line to learn these same tips.

Kelley: One of the things that we also forget about Siqueiros' time here is that he also came to teach.

And so, he spent a lot of time teaching, sharing ideas with students.

And so, there's an important kind of pedagogical collaborative, dialogical kind of component to Siqueiros' time here that kind of brings all these things together.

Both teaching, collaborating, organizing, dialoging.

These are all tools that Siqueiros knew and understood, both as an artist, but also as a labor organizer and a political kind of activist.

Alfredo Diaz: And the Siqueiros mural being down, down the street, we were talking about, you know, that essentially being my favorite mural because of what it represents now, you know, about like--that it was whitewashed and it-- it sort of exists with the-- with the sort of the community aspect of it that everyone sort of comes together and tries to preserve something and tries to pull it back out, you know, and there's this--this rally around that--this image that barely exists, you know, that's sort of-- it's fading as it goes.

Oscar Magallanes: There's no way of really saving it or recreating it.

And there's so few murals of Siqueiros.

Diaz: Right.

Magallanes: They were all destroyed except for the one in a private residence that nobody could really see.

Diaz: Right, and that this one is so vibrant.

You know, you can see it from the county jail, you know.

Magallanes: Right.

What were those colors that Siqueiros were using?

Was using back then, right?

Diaz: Right.

Magallanes: Yeah.

Yeah.

These are-- Sam Wohl: There's no color documentation of the original, right?

It's all black and white?

There's that black and white photo.

Diaz and Magallanes: Mm-hmm.

Diaz: Yeah.

Magallanes: Yeah.

Kelley: As famous as Siqueiros was, and as important his presence was here in the city, I think that his legacy is still yet to be written.

I still think we're trying to figure out what that means.

Garza: The 3 murals that Siqueiros paints here in Los Angeles, 1932, causes controversy.

Jacques: "America Tropical" tells us what the problem is in Los Angeles.

Even though he was whitewashed and boarded over, it's been impossible to erase and whitewash his message.

Garza: So, within a short time after he does that second mural, his request for an extension to his visa is denied.

When I meet Siqueiros in 1971, as part of the American delegation that travels to Budapest, Hungary, at the World Peace Conference, last day, him and Angelica, his wife, invite me to an art school where he's giving a presentation, a lecture.

And as we're leaving, I photograph him in those two iconic shots, one of him pointing and the other one of the portrait shot of his face, and one of Angelica, where she's got her fist up because they're getting into this little Volkswagen car and it's "la despedida, adios," And she turns to me and she says, "Luis, como dicen ustedes.

Chicana Power."

And that's the moment, that photograph of Angelica with the fist.

Garcia: For now 10 years, folks go in and out of the space.

Schoolchildren, older people.

It's ADA accessible so everybody can really access the space in a way that it never could before.

But it definitely raises the question of what we will do as active citizens, as Angelenos, to protect the heritage that we have through our multiple mural movements.

[Siqueiros speaking Spanish] Translator: Naturally, I support the struggle of the Mexicans, of the Latin Americans in the United States... [Siqueiros speaking Spanish] Translator: Since it's of major importance to our own struggle.

♪ Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy; the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture and Creative Recovery L.A.; the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs; and the National Endowment for the Arts.