Latinx street art illuminates the immigrant experience and history of labor in Texas, countering societal erasures.
When Rob Linn茅, PhD, professor in the Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences, was 12, he spent a summer living in Guadalajara, Mexico, as part of a Boy Scout exchange. His host mother took him on a tour of the famous Orozco murals, a series of fiery political frescoes painted by left-wing artist Jos茅 Clemente Orozco. 鈥淚 felt I was walking through a spectacular, larger-than-life comic book,” he remembers. 鈥淭he images were so powerful, and they told stirring stories of the people overcoming great oppression.” A decade later, just beginning his teaching career in Austin, Texas, at a predominantly Latinx school, Dr. Linn茅 鈥渉ad another epiphany sparked by murals.” The textbooks he was given for class did not reflect his students’ cultural heritage, so he turned to the murals adorning local neighborhood walls as inspiration. When asked to study these 鈥渢exts,” he said, 鈥渟tudents came to life, given the chance to talk seriously about these works in a way that validated their families, their life experiences and their histories.”
Now, Dr. Linn茅 is revisiting the art form in a new article, 鈥淟atinx Murals of Texas: Memorials to Immigrant Experience, WorkingClass History, and Solidarity,” part of the edited collection听Where Are the Workers? Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites听(University of Illinois Press, 2022), which makes a strong argument for its transformative potential. 1 Murals, he asserts, can 鈥済ive voice to the underserved and underrepresented while facilitating community pride and inspiring activism.”
In recent years, politics has infiltrated American educational institutions. News reports detail the banning of texts by states and school boards, the omission of historical topics from curricula and the censoring of educators. Relying on museums, memorials and other historical sites for insight into what Dr. Linn茅 calls the 鈥渟harp edges of history” is not a safe bet, either. Although these sites do 鈥減lay a vital role in educating the public and enlivening civic discourse,” he writes, they often don’t tell certain stories for fear of ruffling influential feathers.
The history of labor in Texas suffers from similar representative distortions, chief among them the fallacy that there is no history of labor. In fact, the only labor memorials in the state are roadside historical markers. 鈥淧rogressive politics in the region has remained especially timid and apologetic in recent decades, in part because working-class people have been so successfully cut off from any history of resistance,” Dr. Linn茅 notes in the article. Murals across Texas tell a different story, however.
Since the Mexican American muralism revival of the 1960s, Latinx street artists in big cities and small border towns alike have proclaimed their pride on the walls of grocery stores, community centers and schools. Their murals are a 鈥渃reative bricolage” that mix imagery from ancient Mexican history with 鈥渟lice-of-life images of farm life, soccer and home cooking,” effectively countering the 鈥渘egative representations (or invisibility) offered up by mainstream media and educational institutions.” But these bold, colorful pieces do more than memorialize culture鈥攖hey bring to life the hard-fought struggles of the Texas labor movement that have been erased from schools and museums. 鈥淏y juxtaposing images of the barrio with great revolutionary heroes and labor leaders,” Dr. Linn茅 writes, 鈥渢he artists were encouraging the viewer to consider their material lives and pocketbook issues in the framework of a larger political past, present and future.”
If marginalized voices are destined to be excluded from today’s institutional memory, 鈥渨e can go to the streets and the local community to make sure our students get a full education that isn’t so whitewashed,” Dr. Linn茅 says. But in order to keep these alternative sites of history alive, he believes, we must actively engage with them. Even as new generations of artists continue to conjure their own histories on neighborhood walls, the public can honor Latinx working-class culture by seeking out street art to absorb its messaging. Through this collaborative process, he concludes, marginalized communities are able to 鈥渢ell their own stories, memorialize working-class histories written out of the ‘great men’ texts, and build the solidarity needed to take on the continuing fights for social and economic justice.”
鹿Linn茅, Robert. 鈥淟atinx Murals of Texas: Memorials to Immigrant Experience, Working-Class History, and Solidarity.” Where Are the Workers? Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites, edited by Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti. University of Illinois Press, 2022.