Corazon/Aztlan, Chicano Park

1973-2007

Rodríguez, Celia; Castañeda, Tomás; Torres, Salvador

San Diego, CA, USA

This mural occupies a public park in San Diego, California. The mural is entitled Corazon/Aztlan and fills the underside of an exit ramp of a large traffic bridge in Chicano Park. The title references both the Sacred Heart and Aztlan—the paradisiacal homeland of the ancestors important in both Aztec and Chicano history.

At the top center of this painting, the eye refers to both a well-respected community healer and the universal awakening of human awareness. The heart below the eye is both a common Catholic image (the Sacred Heart of Jesus) and a reference to Aztec worship. The veins and arteries represent the bloodlines that bind families together across generations. The couple at bottom left represents the oldest generation in the mural. Younger people appear across from them and above, in the spaces created between the beams that support the highway that runs above the park.

The patrons of this mural project were local residents of San Diego. The artists—most of whom were also from California—included both formally-trained painters as well as volunteers. This particular mural represents the work of Tomás Castañeda, Celia Rodríguez, Salvador Torres, and others.

The mural took form in at least four stages. The first stage was executed by local volunteers working with house painting rollers. Later stages were created by recognized Chicano painters, some of whom used pouncing—a technique for transferring large scale designs to a wall before painting, known from the European Renaissance.

Chicano Park was founded in the early 1970s, and the murals were added soon afterwards. Before 1848, Mexico had owned this land but the neighborhood (or barrio) became home to Mexican-American residents in the late 19th century. During a heightened moment of Chicano activism, and in response to Chicano protests and legislative lobbying, the city set land aside for a park in the 1970s. This mural was reworked and restored in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

These murals draw from pre-Hispanic imagery, colonial iconography and contemporary design to lend local Chicano identity and history visual and material form. As public paintings with diverse historical sources, these paintings also echo the creative reworking of cultural traditions so fundamental to the visual culture of Spanish America, be it indigenous, African or Spanish in origins.

© 2000, J. Sternbach

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Murals: Chicano Park

Cockcroft, Eva Sperling and Holly Barnet-Sánchez, eds. 1993. Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Robles, Kathleen and Richard Griswold del Castillo. Project Directors. Murals: Chicano Park.

Rosen, Martin and James Fisher. 2001. “Chicano Park and the Chicano Park Murals: Barrio Logan, City of San Diego, California.” Public Historian 23 (4): 91-111.

Vargas, George. 2000. “A Historical Overview: Update on the State of Chicano Art.” In Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Cultural Trends. D. Maciel, I. Ortíz, and M. Herrera-Sobek, eds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.