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Goldman 11

Post Office (started 1941, completed 1948) to the traditional [[underline]]conquistadores[[/underline]] and friars. Panel 17, [[underline]]Building the Union Pacific[[/underline]], shows Chinese and white workers only. Located hard upon the fertile San Joaquin Valley where thousands of Mexicans worked in the crops, this multi-ethnic San Francisco mural cycle gives no hint of these workers and the great farm strikes of the 1930s.
Over thirty years were to pass before artists engaged as an important subject the presence of Mexican workers. Chicano artist Emigdio Vásquez's oil painting [[left-margin]](Fig. 4)[[/left-margin]] [[underline]]The Gandy Dancers[[/underline]] pictures the Mexican laborers who maintained the railroads. Though the image was adapted, with color, from [[underline]]"The Family of Man[[/underline]], a huge 1955 photography exhibit with a well-circulated catalog organized by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Vásquez remembers such scenes from his childhood in the citrus-growing areas of Southern California. He has not approached the photograph with the vision of a photorealist painter, but as a social realist with strong class consciousness. In the raking light of early morning, the men work as teams, pushing their weight against the railroad ties. The tracks stretch into the distance in a desolate country area; one can sense the continuing monotony of the work, and the men sweating long hours under the sun.
Vásquez has also gone to a photographic source for the figure of a Mexican boilermaker from the railroad shops of Albuquerque, New Mexico which he included in his mural [[underline]]Tribute to the Chicano Working Class[[/underline]] (see Fig. 1). The stern-faced dignified older man in blue overalls and shirt, striped cap, and goggles, is taken from the captioned picture book [[underline]]450 Years of Chicano History[[/underline]] which, with [[underline]]The Family of Man[[/underline]] and New Deal photographs from the Farm Security Administration (many reproduced in [[underline]]450 Years[[/underline]]), has proved a pictorial gold mine for Chicano artists seeking to recreate their history. Vásquez is alive to those photographs that offer dramatic possibilities for his paintings. From the same book he took the two women working in agriculture, one standing, one stooping, that make the connective between the boilermaker, the