In the mid-1960s, Denver was at the forefront of the national Chicano movement. Activists concerned about land rights, labor rights, cultural identity, and a lack of equitable education lived, worked, and organized in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. Originally a mixed immigrant community of people working in nearby railroad stations or flour mills, by the mid-20th century it had morphed into a majority population of Hispanos and Native Americans mexican. In the 1960s, led by Rodolfo “Corky” GonzalesTHE Movement Crusade for Justice was born in Lincoln Park and was informed by the Spiritual Plan of Aztlan, a pro-Indigenous manifesto advocating revolutionary Chicano nationalism and self-determination for all Chicano people. This movement spawned other liberation-oriented efforts, including the Chicano Art Movement – embodied, in Denver, by an emerging culture of muralism.
Emmanuel Martinez began painting murals in Lincoln Park in 1968. His daughter, Lucha Martínez de Luna, told Hyperallergic:
My father decided that he was going to paint a mural on the facade of the building where we lived. It was definitely a community mural, a paint-by-numbers sort of thing. After he finished painting the mural, the housing authorities came out and told him that it needed to be erased. There were many community organizers active in the neighborhood at the time, and they started a petition asking that the mural remain. In a confrontation with the housing authority, the community basically said, “If you evict this family, you have to evict everyone. So they backed off.
Emanuel Martínez became a full-time muralist for the city of Denver, painting hundreds of them on buildings, inside schools, and on bridges, among others. At the time, it was a win-win situation, as “the city was spending a lot more money removing graffiti than hiring me to do murals.” he explained in a previous interview.
Lucha Martínez de Luna is the founder of Project Chicano/a/x Colorado Murals (CMCP), an organization committed to the protection, promotion, and preservation of Colorado’s community mural heritage. She is also an archaeologist, currently dividing her time between the Front Range region of the United States and Chiapas, Mexico, where she conducts her fieldwork. Around 2010, during her intercontinental journey, she began to notice that the murals she had grown up with were disappearing. The one her father had painted on the facade of their building in Lincoln Park no longer exists, nor the city in which she grew up. “Every time I came back, there was something else missing in the neighborhoods.” She began to conduct oral histories with the mural artists and gained access to their archives in order to have historical images of the murals. In 2018, she founded the CMCP and soon found herself entangled in the bureaucracy of historic preservation entities, both state and national.
She began working with Denver City Council Speaker Jamie Torres to secure designation for Lincoln Park to become a Historic Cultural District, which was reached in August 2021, and she successfully earned a National Historic Trust designation that protected approximately 40 murals located throughout the state. In 2022, the National Trust named the Chicano/a/x community murals of Colorado to its 2022 list of The 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in America.
In the case of “Huitzilopochtli», painted in 2008 by David Ocelot Garcia, preservation took the form of the literal salvage of a whitewashed mural that had been buried under a layer of white paint. The mural depicts the Aztec earth goddess Coatlicue and her son, Huitzilopochtli. Rendered primarily in a complementary palette of blue and orange, an abundance of water flowers surround Coatlicue, symbolizing a cycle of healing and renewal. A marijuana dispensary rented the building in 2020 and the tenants decided to cover the mural. After the community and its leaders protested, the company apologized and funded its restoration. Garcia traveled to Los Angeles and studied the techniques of Social Public Art Resource Centerwho has developed a process for restoring wall paintings with MuralShield, a consolidant that can restore pigments to their original shine. The app was successful for “Huitzilopochtli” and will be used to restore other murals on the endangered list, starting with “Urban dope, urban hopepainted by Martínez de Luna’s father in 1977. Measuring 16 feet by 350 feet, it is Denver’s largest mural that was whitewashed in the 1990s.
While the mural is salvageable, Martínez de Luna reports that the neighborhood itself has been demolished, a victim of the rapid gentrification that has made Denver the second most gentrified city in the United States. Hyper-gentrification has many toxic tendrils that pervade the kind of work CCMP is trying to do.
Many of these murals were painted in redlined neighborhoods, and the practice of redlining did not allow people who lived there to buy their own homes. The buildings never belonged to the community and the land is now worth much more than the buildings. The owners of the buildings can essentially opt out of the sale and the buildings are where the murals live and are demolished.
Another key problem identified by Martínez de Luna is the current anemic definition of what is worth protecting. While the designation of La Alma Lincoln Park as a Historic-Cultural District in 2021 was a positive development, the city did not include the protection of the murals as part of the designation. “The murals are classified as painting on a wall in Denver, and their artistic, cultural and historical value has not been recognized at all. How do you protect something that is classified as “painting on a wall”? »
At times the battle to save the murals seemed to be difficult. Still, Martínez de Luna says media support and increased cultural awareness since the BLM movement took off in 2020 has made this work easier. Murals are more than a cultural aesthetic; Martínez de Luna shares the opinion of many contemporary scholars that they are living texts, a multimodal composition based on tlacuilolitztli, the Aztec concept of writing. As a scholar Nora K. Rivera wrote“A mural is read by interpreting its images, and each meaning-making experience is influenced by the contexts surrounding the symbol(s), place, writer and reader.”
The CMCP’s sense of urgency to put as many murals as possible on the endangered species list is simple and pragmatic: the early muralists working during the Chicano rights movement in the 1960s are aging rapidly. “My father and some of these other artists are over 70,” Martínez de Luna said. “If we want to do restoration work with the original artists, we have to go extremely fast.”
