David Alfaro Siqueiros: Murals as Political Resistance in Mexico and LA

Mexican muralism emerged as Mexico's representative artistic movement after the Revolution, similar to how France has Impressionism and Germany has Expressionism. President Álvaro Obregón sought to create national identity through art, and José Vasconcelos proposed visual education to address high illiteracy. The first mural, 'La Creación' by Diego Rivera in 1922, established the foundation. The three great muralists—Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco—were commissioned to paint public buildings. Muralism was guided by a utilitarian philosophy viewing art as a tool for social and political education, with art serving a social purpose and communicating political ideas, particularly those of the left.

Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros were three of the most important Mexican muralists of the 20th century. They are collectively known as the Mexican Muralists. All three were Mexican artists who created large-scale public murals depicting Mexican history, culture, and social issues. They were also friends and contemporaries, though not all three married Frida Kahlo (only Rivera did).

Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was the most Mexicanist, with his disciples coining much Mexican iconography. As a Communist Party member, he believed in proletarian revolution and material progress. He studied indigenous art and organized the first Mexican popular art exhibition in 1922. For Rivera, painting is creation, not reproduction—speaking truth and interpreting it. He combined love for indigenous Mexico with enthusiasm for industrialized North America, seeking union between both poles. He maximized architectural space integration, using cubic spaces to narrate history as ascending spirals. José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) viewed freedom as supreme value, maintaining critical distance from political parties. He believed creation starts with conflict, and themes are means, not ends. His tragic aesthetic stems from the impossibility of knowing the absolute. He proclaimed American identity, seeking a new American art. David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974) participated in the 1911 student strike and revolution. Like Rivera, he shared optimism about the future and interest in the proletariat, exalting the revolution with didactic intent. Unlike Orozco, he proposed class struggle, rejected individualism, and exalted collective creation. He proclaimed the aesthetic of the machine and praised speed, coinciding with Italian futurism principles. His technical innovations included using air guns and metallic surfaces, introducing sculpinture, and experimenting with exterior mural techniques. Mexican muralism emerged from a desire to educate senses, taste, intellect, and spirit of individuals and popular populations by painting on public walls where access was casual and free. It created a national school with universal dimensions, animated by humanistic nationalism encouraging all inhabitants regardless of social position.

The three greats (Los Tres Grandes)—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—were commissioned by post-revolutionary Mexico to create educational murals rebuilding national identity. Rivera, influenced by European Cubism in Paris, brought narrative storytelling to public art. Orozco invented spray paint and created three-dimensional murals that enveloped buildings, shocking audiences with unflinching critiques of both government and revolutionary violence. Siqueiros, politically radical, attempted to assassinate Trotsky. Together, they established muralism as a powerful tool for social commentary, influencing Jackson Pollock and transforming American art.

In the 1920s, Mexican painters were hired by the government to create murals telling the story of the Mexican Revolution and the aims of the new government. The three most famous painters from this movement were Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, collectively known as Los Tres Grandes (the Three Great Ones). Each had a significant impact in demonstrating how murals could define governmental aspirations and tell complex narratives about society.

Public art installations can become platforms for political messaging and propaganda when the public who funded them uses them for such purposes. This represents a shift from purely artistic expression to social and political communication, which can be both a strength and a weakness depending on the artist's intentions.

Public art serves as a form of social intervention that reaches people in their daily environments. The artist explains that when you go to the street, you have a responsibility because the street demands that people absorb everything in an unconscious way. Public art can deliver messages that people receive without even consciously processing them, similar to how propaganda works. This approach allows artists to communicate directly with communities in their natural spaces, bypassing traditional gallery or museum settings.

The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) represents a significant Marxist tradition in aesthetics, attempting to connect Marxist theory with Romantic and philosophical traditions. Political movements, particularly fascist ones, strategically use aesthetic discourse to create 'pânico moral' (moral panic). The Soviet Union underwent aesthetic transformation from Constructivism (form dominating content) to Socialist Realism (content dominating form). The Cold War included aesthetic warfare, with both superpowers using art exhibitions to promote ideologies. Benedict Anderson's concept of 'Imagined Communities' explains how nations are constructed through shared aesthetic and cultural narratives. Historical documents reveal that CIA-funded exhibitions in the 1950s specifically promoted artists like Pollock as representatives of American freedom, demonstrating how aesthetic choices in art exhibitions were deliberately shaped to serve political and ideological purposes.

Socialist Realism required art to actively promote the state, going beyond censorship. Murals like 'Building the Republic' from 1952 showed entire society working together toward Marxist utopia, depicting industrial workers, farm laborers, women, and children singing the same patriotic song. The communists also built the 1,200-foot-tall TV Tower to demonstrate atheistic state power, though cynics noted a huge cross reflected on its mirrored ball.

Public art serves dual functions of decoration and political/educational messaging, from Diego Rivera's murals to Civil Rights Movement community art. Governments throughout history—from Nazi Germany to contemporary democracies—have intervened in public space through mandatory art requirements like the US Percent for Art program and France's 1% commande publique. This creates tension between urban art's association with social critique and its increasing institutionalization, raising questions about whether institutional support undermines authentic critical practice.

In February 1931, Los Angeles authorities conducted a mass roundup of Mexican immigrants, creating a climate of fear that led to the forced expulsion of approximately 1 million Mexican and Mexican-American individuals across the United States; this event demonstrates how economic crisis and discriminatory policies can result in mass deportation based on ethnicity rather than legal status, affecting both undocumented immigrants and American citizens of Mexican descent.

During the Great Depression, the United States deported approximately 400,000 to 2 million Mexican-Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens, through coercive means including forced removals from hospitals, discriminatory employment practices, and mass roundups; this mass deportation, driven by economic panic and anti-immigrant sentiment under President Hoover's administration, was based on the flawed premise that removing people from the workforce would reduce unemployment, yet a 2017 study found it had no positive effect on employment rates, and the U.S. government has never officially apologized for these actions which remain largely omitted from standard U.S. history textbooks.

Post-war Mexican-Americans continued fighting for economic survival, demanding minimum wages and overtime pay. The labor rights we now take for granted—including the eight-hour workday—were won through thousands of workers confronting police and authorities during the 1920s-1930s, with many dying in the struggle. Simultaneously, McCarthyism swept the nation, with Senator McCarthy and federal authorities persecuting suspected communists. Mexican-American and Mexican labor movements—including doctors' strikes and railroad workers' movements—were labeled communist infiltrations. This political climate enabled authorities to cancel development projects that might have benefited displaced communities, demonstrating how Cold War paranoia served powerful interests.

During the Great Depression, over one million people were deported from the United States to Mexico, with estimates suggesting 60% were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. This mass expulsion occurred nationwide, from Alabama to Alaska and Los Angeles to New York. Many deportees had lived in the U.S. for 20-30 years, held documentation, and had U.S.-born children. The state of California later issued an apology and erected a memorial in downtown Los Angeles to commemorate the victims.

During the Great Depression, the US government and local authorities expelled approximately 2 million Mexican immigrants, including 60% who were US citizens with Mexican heritage. Authorities conducted nighttime raids in Mexican neighborhoods, arresting people from their beds and transporting them to Mexico in trucks like cattle. Many victims were US-born citizens who only spoke English and had no family connections in Mexico. The deportation was not primarily economic but served as a scapegoating mechanism to avoid addressing the Depression's root causes. This event demonstrates how the US has repeatedly deported its own citizens based on ethnic heritage.