Painting in the River of Angels

Bienvenidos a El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles del Río de Porcincula, otherwise known as “El Lay” in street vernacular. I am a born and raised Angelita, increasingly a minority in our city of immigrants, where most Angelenos are now from elsewhere and do not know its original name or History.  

I was born in Watts, where I lived with my mother, grandmother, and two aunts, at a time when Watts was largely African Americans who migrated from the south to urban centers after the war. The 1965 Watts uprising, still charred into the city’s landscape, was one of the largest in American history, and was caused by the same inequities that led to subsequent uprisings in 1992. My first experience seeing art was watching Simon Rodia climb the towers in Watts (named “Nuestro Pueblo” by the artist) with broken dishes strapped to his belt to create one of Los Angeles’s first public artworks. Today there is a school named for me just five blocks from my family’s tiny one-bedroom duplex. In the intervening years, the community has shifted demographically in that Watts is now over 74 percent Latino, but it has remained largely unchanged in its poverty status and living conditions. The Judith F. Baca Arts Academy, an LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) school, is a statement from the community about their aspirations that their children be encouraged to defy expectation and to dream creatively. 

Our beautiful city is a giant stretching nearly fifty miles across, from the lush green gardens at the ocean’s edge to the arid inland deserts. Its diversity of landscape parallels its diversity of people. With 225 languages spoken in our city schools, LA is home to the largest diasporas of people from many countries, including Mexico, El Salvador, the Philippines, Korea, China, and Thailand. The only city that exceeds Los Angeles in its Mexican population is Mexico City. 

Memories of our origins are apparitions in the landscape. They are Spanish-language or native names that appear on your GPS while driving down the “San Diego” freeway toward the “San Fernando Valley,” or on your way to “Topanga Canyon” and “Pacoima.” The names call us to another time as we transverse the land between the founding missions of San Gabriel de Archangel and the Mission San Fernando rushing in our cars across the city on the long-traveled Camino Real route planned to be a one-day horseback ride apart by the Spanish missionaries in 1771. 

The story of Los Angeles, like many great cities, begins on the banks of its river. Remnants of the Zanja Madre (Mother Trench) have just recently been excavated near Chinatown’s edge marking what became Sonoratown, named for the first Pobladores from Sonora. The Los Angeles River, like many rivers in drought-prone regions, expanded and contracted in the rainy season. The original Chumash and Tongva—“the people of the Earth”—accommodated the river and lived for thousands of years along its banks. After the particularly bad flooding of the 1920s, the city fathers determined that the river needed to be tamed. The river had overflowed its allotted space and destroyed valuable real estate, by then already Los Angeles's most valuable commodity. The 1930s began a decades-long process of concreting the Los Angeles River. 

When the forty-year-long concreting project was complete, it was the largest public works project in America. Its completion gave rise to the New Aesthetic Recovery Division at the Army Corps of Engineers. Its purpose was to deal with the effects of the concreted arroyos. They were eyesores. They’d created dirt belts along the river and divided communities. The concreted river, of course, had many other serious consequences. It carried runoff water too swiftly to the ocean, bearing pollution from our city streets, affecting the Santa Monica Bay, and depriving the aquifer of water replenishment. In the 1950s my stepfather became an aircraft worker after leaving the service, and my family moved from Watts to a restricted housing covenant in Pacoima, designated for minority workers of the aircraft industry. As a child I watched as the river—the arteries of the land—were hardened into concrete conduits and miles of arroyo disappeared. I think I can trace the beginnings of my career as a political landscape painter to growing up alongside the Los Angeles River. 

Standing at the river’s edge, I saw the concreted arroyos as scars in the land. I dreamed of a “tattoo on the scar where the river once ran,” and an endless narrative that would recover the stories of those who were disappeared along with the river. This began my years of working in the Los Angeles River, recovering the disappeared through the creation of visual histories in the river. With over four hundred youth and hundreds of descendants of the original peoples, we attempted to heal both the river and the people. Our narrative work "The Great Wall of Los Angeles," currently measuring one half mile, is an evolving chronology of memory from the land recorded with our hands and paint, and now flowing along the river where it all began. 

Judith F. Baca is an artist and professor emerita at the University of California in Los Angeles. She is the CEO and artistic director of Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) and focuses her creative energy on the UCLA@SPARC Digital/Mural Lab.

Originally commissioned in 2020. Copyright © The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Great Wall of Los Angeles is reproduced with permission. Judith F. Baca © 1976, The Great Wall of Los Angeles. Courtesy of the SPARC Archives, sparcinla.org