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"Art and Culture of the American Labor Movement"
Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende
Kunst, (West Berlin), Spring 1983
See p.33

C October 1982

MEXICAN AND CHICANO WORKERS IN THE VISUAL ARTS
by
Shifa M. Goldman

(Fig. 1)

Those colorful murals that one can see nowadays throughout the Southwest in which figures like Captain Luis de Velasco are depicted in all their finery might well be balanced by a few murals showing Mexican migratory workers sweating in desert cement plants, in the copper mines of Morenci, the smelters of El Paso, and the great farm-factories of the San Joaquin Valley. Captain de Velasco and his colleagues may have discovered the borderlands but Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico have built the economic empire with exists in the Southwest today.
- Carey McWilliams1

It must be said immediately that images of Mexican workers2 in the visual arts of the United States were practically non-existent before the 1960s except in documentary photography. Such images as do appear glamorize the Spanish conquista dores and missionary fathers, or idealize "caballeros" and "vaqueros" (Mexican