ABSTRACT
In 1932, Californian conservationist Christine Sterling commissioned Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros to paint a mural in Los Angeles’s El Pueblo neighbourhood as a kind of urban-revival project cum tourist attraction. Naturally, El Norte begins by exploring the colonisation of North (and South) America by conquistadors and the empires they represented. The New World, viewed by the European empires as a potentially lucrative source of wealth, engendered fierce competition, even within individual nations’ own colonial missions. As much as the exploration and subsequent white settlement of the American West was driven by political, economic and social forces, it was also catalysed by individuals. Indeed, as Gibson notes in her compelling discussion of transplanted Hispanic culture, ‘in a shared Anglo-Hispanic popular culture, who or what is “Hispanic” remains unresolved.
