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Goldman                  23

[[underline]]Farm Labor Organizing in the Sixties[[/underline]]. A multitude of visual images, as well as theater, film and dance emerged with the organization of California farmworkers in 1965 by Cesar Chavez. The outpouring of cultural expression from working class Chicano artists, many studying in colleges, universities and art schools as a result of the political movement, was so passionate and pervasive that it has been dubbed a "renaissance", parallel to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s with one important exception: these artists neither came from, nor pretended to the middle class. Like the Harlem Renaissance which turned to African sources and the Black movement of the 1960s which did likewise, Chicanos looked to Mexico for inspiration; to its pre-Columbian, colonial, and revolutionary cultures; to Olmec, Maya, and Aztec art; to the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexican independence, which was carried at demonstrations and painted on innumerable walls and canvasses; and to Emiliano Zapata, leader of revolutionary Mexican farmers and landless peasants.
A very early two-panel mural painted in 1968 by Antonio Bernal on the building that housed the Teatro Campesino in Del Rey, California, is a clear exposition of the pictorial sources and ideological associations the Chicano art movement was to utilize in the following decade. Organized as a linear procession of flat figures, like Maya painted walls at Bonampak, one of the panels shows pre-Columbian aristocrats in a single file; the other features figures of the 19th and 20th century Mexican, Chicano and Black revolutionaries, militants, and civil rights activists. From left to right are La Adelita, a legendary woman who fought in the Mexican Revolution; Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata; Joaquin Murrieta, a miner (from either Sonora or Chile) who became a "bandit" in the face of Anglo oppression in California; Cesar Chavez holding the [[underline]]huelga[[/underline]] (strike) banner; Reies Lopez Tujerina who led the land grant movement in New Mexico; and two Black figures representing (possibly) Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.