ABSTRACT
Murals [1] have become one of the significant media through which the Chicano/a ethnic community defines itself while protesting against social injustices perpetrated against it by mainstream Anglo culture. [2] Describing the Chicano identity in a uniform or monolithic manner, many early painters claimed to speak for their historically silenced people. Over the years, Chicano muralism developed into a blend of voices as new artists expanded the early versions of Chicano identity to include issues or characteristics left out by earlier artists. Latorre documents how Chicana muralism, for example, evolved out of a reaction against Anglo cultural oppression and the narrow, hyper-masculine rendering of Chicano identity that dominated the earliest depictions. [3] The iconography of Juan Garduño and David Rivas Botello represents Chicano muralism’s hyper-masculine point of view, [4] in which artists turn Aztec, Mexican and Chicano men into athletic warrior [5] archetypes while reducing the women of their own community to either sex objects or the means of male reproduction. Chicana muralists such as Yreina Cervantez and Judy Baca, on the other hand, have developed a public visual language that resists the binary gender and race constructions of the hyper-masculine Chicano cultural resistance. Theirs is a gender-inclusive and often multicultural vocabulary of working and, sometimes, sporting women and men. [6] While Chicano/a muralists do not see sport as part of their ethnicity, they often apply sporting images as metaphors for the social advancement of marginalized groups or interpret sport as an activity uniting different ethnicities.
