‘I haven’t seen any murals like this’: Art pays homage to Chicano lowrider history

A lowrider automobile membership in San Diego is memorializing its historical past by making a mural in Chicano Park, a nationwide and Mexican American cultural landmark.

The Brown Picture Automobile Membership, based in 1970 and one of many first lowrider automobile golf equipment in San Diego, is constructing a five-story mural on a bridge pillar, impressed by lowrider paint job methods. With a sweet apple and root beer shiny end, it consists of 30 kilos of gold metallic flakes — sufficient to color 18 lowrider vehicles.

Henry Rodriguez, 66, the membership’s president, stated the mural pays homage to the membership’s historical past and cultural influence courting again a long time.

“I wish to present our era up there,” Rodriguez stated, “what we did once we took over the park, once we did our low driving, our membership, the issues that we did within the ’70s.”

Chicano Park is beneath the San Diego-Coronado Bridge in Barrio Logan, previously Logan Heights, a predominantly Mexican American neighborhood. The mural replicates pictures from Rodriguez’s picture album, an archive that includes membership members, lowrider automobiles, posters of occasions the membership hosted, and the “takeover” of Chicano Park, when residents of Logan Heights gathered collectively in 1970 to droop the development of a freeway patrol station on the land designated for the park.

“I don’t suppose this has ever been accomplished,” Rodriguez stated. “I haven’t seen any murals like this.”

The mural is being made utilizing conventional airbrushing methods used to color a lowrider automobile, based on Cindy Rocha, 38, certainly one of eight artists engaged on the mural.

Rodriguez stated that the mural’s lead artist, Victor Ochoa — one of many pioneers of San Diego’s Chicano artwork motion — got here up with the thought so as to add the flakes after taking a look at one of many vehicles within the picture archive.

Denise Sandoval, professor of Chicana and Chicano research at California State College, Northridge, and one of many foremost students on lowrider tradition, referred to as the mural “historic, and the one place it might occur could be Chicano Park.”

“The mural is such an necessary a part of Chicano historical past that’s tied to the Chicano motion, the place artists grew to become academics, educators, storytellers,” Sandoval stated, “actually instructing us the worth of utilizing artwork to specific our emotions, our passions, our hopes — particularly in a spot like Chicano Park, that’s born out of social justice.”

The Brown Picture plaque, a logo of the automobile membership that’s often displayed on the again of a lowrider, is featured on the peak of the mural and is now a logo locally.

“The mural is displaying that low driving isn’t all these stereotypical adverse issues. The automobile golf equipment have been pivotal in bringing the neighborhood collectively,” Rocha stated.

Whereas the mission is being partially funded by Rodriguez and his wife, Janine, Brown Picture is in search of donations from the neighborhood by holding fundraiser occasions to assist obtain its aim of $50,000.

The mural is anticipated to be accomplished in late February or early March.

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