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Goldman

26

Two California murals also deal with farm labor.  In the center of a blue map of the United States, Ernesto Palomino of Fresno (in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley) painted a stylized truck whose flatbed opens to our vision tow symmetrical rows of farm workers huddled on either side of a madonna and child, an eagle, and a large sun with radiating rays borrowed from the logo that appears on every box of Sun Maid raisins.  Instead of the pretty red-bonneted young woman holding a tray of grapes, Palomino shows us the miserable conditions in which the workers who pick them are transported to the fields.  The contractors drove open or stake trucks which were loaded with fifty or sixty workers -  men, women and children, as well as bedding and equipment when transport was to a new region.  Palomino's truck is one used for day laborers who were arbitrarily picked from make work gangs assembled on street corners at dawn - a practice that was bitterly fought by the union in favor of rotational hiring halls.

[[margin]] (Fig.16) [[/margin]] The History of the Chicano is an 80 foot mural painted in Santa Ana College by the Chicano student organization MEChA directed by Mexican born architect/designer Sergio O'Cádiz working with fifty students.  It features - along with farm workers, the huelga eagle, and a clenched brown fist - a direct transposition of the crucified Indian from Siqueiros' Tropical America.  For the eagle, the artist substituted a more direct symbol of money; the dollar bill with unbalanced scales of justice.  Beneath this figure, a mourning woman sits beside a tomb labeled "Ruben Salazar."42  Moving toward the future are Chicano workers of all kinds, and a 1940s scene of Pachucos in their distinctive dress with a customized car painted by Emigdio Vásquez.