Olvera Street mural ‘America Tropical’ may see the light of day

ITHAS taken so long for the city to unveil the lost Olvera Street mural by Mexican master David Alfaro Siqueiros that the recovery itself is becoming historic. For 40 years, activists and art lovers have sought to reclaim Siqueiros’ controversial “América Tropical,” which was whitewashed shortly after it was created in 1932 with a searing social message for a turbulent time.

Plans to restore the monumental artwork for public viewing have seen more ups and downs than the business cycle. The big surprise, however, is that supporters now agree that the plan may actually be on the road to completion. Don’t bet the farm on it, but the new target date is September 2010, to coincide with the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, the social upheaval that spawned the mural movement.

Even the folks at the Getty Conservation Institute, which painstakingly conserved the 80-foot mural, are expressing optimism about the city’s renewed efforts to exhibit the mural for the first time in more than seven decades. These are the same people who got so frustrated with the bureaucratic foot-dragging four years ago that they threatened to pull out of the project and take their millions with them.

What made the difference? Getty Institute director Tim Whalen credits Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for making the mural a city priority after taking office in 2005. “We couldn’t be more delighted with the mayor’s active engagement in the project that has allowed for the whole process to move forward in a way that we had not experienced to date,” said Whalen.

Public art requires political will. In a city where there are shamefully few significant civic signs of the cultural influence of Latinos, it took Latino political power to finally treat the mural for what it is, one of the city’s cultural treasures.

Siqueiros was commissioned to paint the mural on a second-story wall of the Italian Hall near the north end of Olvera Street. It shocked and inspired people from the moment it was unveiled, revealing its central image of an Indian peasant crucified under an American eagle. The work was soon whitewashed and almost forgotten until the 1960s when Chicano activists and art historians started a campaign to rescue it, as much for its political message as its cultural value.

Hollywood director Jesus Treviño (“NYPD Blue,” “Third Watch,” “ER”) helped spark the renewed interest with a 1971 documentary that includes a taped interview with the artist. Treviño said this week that Siqueiros at one point had offered to paint a new mural to replace the original, and had actually started work on “América Tropical 2” in his Cuernavaca, Mexico, studio. The artist died in 1974 before completing the sequel that would have given a modern twist to the social theme some say remains relevant today.

“The mural is a metaphor for the whitewashing of our own Chicano history in Los Angeles and the Southwest,” Treviño said. “We still have injustices, but when we speak up nobody wants to hear about it. So maybe the mural is still trying to tell us something.”

Rather than trying to restore the original, the Getty has worked to conserve what’s left of it.

“Regrettably, it’s now a shadow its former self, almost like an archaeological remain,” explained Whalen.

That presents a challenge for exhibiting the piece without disappointing the public, which may expect the vivid colors normally associated with Mexican muralism. Some have even suggested projecting a color image of the mural onto the real thing. A replica of what the mural might have looked like will be featured at the nearby Sepulveda House, which will serve as an interpretive center for exhibitions, lectures and the like. Plans also call for creating a viewing platform and a sleek canopy to protect the mural from the elements. The current budget is almost $8 million, half from the Getty and half from the city.

Incredibly, the project had never been put into the city’s construction pipeline until after Villaraigosa took office. Instead, it languished as a project of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, the once-troubled agency that oversees Olvera Street.

The mayor accomplished the turnaround by appointing new people to key posts and giving them a direct command: Just do it. Among them were Christopher Espinosa, director of capital projects; Robert L. Andrade, general manager of El Pueblo; and Mahmood Karimzadeh, the city’s principal architect. “This is your baby. Go. Get it done,” Karimzadeh recalled the mayor telling him. “And he was serious.”

These aren’t art experts. They’re people who know how the bureaucracy works. A key move was making the mural a formal capital improvement project monitored by something called the municipal facilities committee.

“You have key people [on the committee] asking crucial questions on a weekly basis,” said Andrade, who spent 18 years in the budget office before taking charge of El Pueblo in 2006. “That’s the key to getting a capital project done in this city.”

That doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing from here. A public project with so many constituencies faces an endless grind because everybody wants to have a say in the result. The latest input came Thursday from members of the Cultural Affairs Commission, several of whom objected to the latest version presented by the architectural firm of Pugh + Scarpa of Santa Monica, which has been working on the project for seven years. “Because it’s taken such a long time, people come to it with fresh eyes and start the process all over again,” said Gwynne Pugh, an architect and engineer, talking about the lengthy process. The current conceptual design had already been scaled back from an earlier one that featured a larger viewing platform closer to the mural. But it was considered too costly and intrusive. Thursday, some commissioners complained that parts of the new design were too modern for Olvera Street.

“I love modern and I love traditional and I love historic, but I really resent when I see architects fighting for their own voice,” said commissioner Gayle Garner Roski, a painter. “It [El Pueblo] has a place in all of our hearts, and when we pollute it with Modernism all we do is take away from it. Don’t tell me it can’t be done in a traditional way, because it can.” That drew an immediate response from commissioner Richard Montoya, an actor and author known for his work with Culture Clash. In Mexico City, he noted, old and new often coexist in juxtaposition. In passing, the iconoclastic comedian took a swipe at “whatever our ideas are of ethnicity and purity, which is a very funny word.” Montoya made a successful motion to approve the schematic plans, noting that they “actually do fit with what was a very modern period [1932] and a very forward-looking muralist.”

The project team -- including all the mayor’s men -- retreated with diplomatic assurances to take the latest input into account. Although advisory committees can always be overruled, the city knows it needs everybody to sign off before the plan goes to final design and bid for construction. The team literally huddled in the lobby, with Espinosa wrapping his arm around Andrade to demonstrate the municipal phalanx they’ve formed to overcome every hurdle. “We’re all hugging each other like this,” laughed Espinosa, as if closing ranks to win the approval of all parties. “We won’t let anybody get away from us.”

agustin.gurza@latimes.com