Mural Lauds Chavez and UFW Struggle

Before the dedication ceremony for his 15-square-foot mural of Cesar Chavez at San Fernando Middle School, artist Frank Martinez was fretting over his speech.

“This is the part that I don’t like,” said Martinez, 72, a resident of Pacoima who has painted and designed murals for the Olympics and the Smithsonian Institution.

He didn’t need to worry. It was the images he created and the emotions of the occasion that swayed the crowd.

The mural--sponsored by the school’s Parent Center center and CultuAztlan, a group promoting Latino culture in the Valley--depicts Chavez during a protest march, scenes of farm workers in the fields, religious icons and flags of the United States and Mexico.

Martinez painted the mural on the Parent Center over three months. It was finished in June, but the summer break delayed the unveiling until Sunday. Near the end of an almost two-hour dedication ceremony, a United Farm Workers flag covering the mural was lowered, and it was finally Martinez’s turn to speak.

“It’s very hard for me to put into words,” he told the crowd, “because one of the things I do best is to express things visually.”

During his brief remarks, he had to stop a couple of times to regain his composure. “Excuse me for breaking down,” he said.

He was not the only one.

“I was almost breaking down myself,” said Lillianna Vasquez, a director of the center. She said she would miss having the artist at the school. “He worked so hard on this,” she said.

Martinez’s assistant on the mural was Steven Corralejo, a Los Angeles Mission College student living in San Fernando. “He was a great teacher for me,” Corralejo said.

The ceremony also included a skit by three actors who recreated performances that union organizers used in the early days of Chavez’s movement to educate farm workers.

One of the performers, Ernesto Hernandez of Indio, had traveled with Chavez and actually performed the skits in the fields.

“We wanted to create something more visual,” he said. Hernandez played an intimidated worker, coping with a boss wearing a pig mask and a club-wielding “goon.”

In the days when the skits were held in the back of pickup trucks, Hernandez said, the real bosses used to try to intimidate the performers.

The ceremony brought back memories three decades old. “I almost cried myself,” Hernandez said after the presentation, “because of the songs.”