L.A. River's 'Great Wall' Redefines American History

If you listen closely to the Los Angeles River in Valley Glen, you won’t hear the trickle of flowing water. Instead, you’ll hear the clanking of artists hard at work, their backs pressed against the unforgiving mid-summer heat of the San Fernando Valley.

Listen closer, and you’ll hear something else rise from below:  The story of unsung heroes.

The Great Wall of Los Angeles peeks out through the fence that borders the Tujunga Wash flood control channel, catching the eyes of passersby and beckoning them to come stand awhile and learn about the dynamic stories of minorities in California, starting from prehistoric times and stretching over a half-mile into the 1950s, making it the longest mural known in the world. On Saturday, the mural will be rededicated after undergoing a major renovation.

Judith Baca, a 65-year-old local artist and the mastermind behind the Great Wall, began the mural in the summer of 1976 through her nonprofit Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), bringing the gray-cemented walls of the river to life by splashing on it a multitude of vibrant colors, and simultaneously revising the historical narrative of California through the eyes of people of color.

“It’s really the whole story of the people of the United States," Baca told Studio City Patch. Also a professor of Chicano studies at UCLA, Baca added, "The American story of indigenous people, immigrant people, and what they contributed to the alternate story. What all these people of all ethnic groups contributed to the making of California."

In 2005, Baca and her team of artists began repairing the wall’s deterioration from the previous three decades, using special chemicals and techniques to undo damage from the sun, pollution, delamination and flooding.

Since June, the artists and volunteers have worked 8- to 12-hour days—sometimes in the triple-digit heat—descending with their equipment down a rickety ladder into the concrete conduit and subjecting themselves to unpredictable evacuation alerts and flash floods.

Artists, The Next Generation

Baca and her team, some of whom worked with her as teenagers in the 1970s and are now professional artists in their late-40s, are finishing up the last 100 feet of the mural, which was created over four summers and with hundreds of volunteers.

The speed of the restoration is a reflection and an evolution of Baca’s life work: the art of healing through the power of collaboration. Her project on the Great Wall, which she spearheaded at age 30, was two-fold: to tell an alternate history and to create a program of youth intervention.

Baca took disenfranchised youth from rival gangs and broken homes and taught them to drop their spray cans and violent behavior and pick up brushes to paint the stories of their ancestors.

“Judy Baca is just a force of nature,” said Mimi Morris, executive officer of the California Cultural and Historical Endowment, which provided over $1.2 million in grants to the Great Wall restoration. “She believed in the capacity to make an important contribution. She helped [the youth] see that they could have a voice through accepted art means, not just graffiti-ing over someone’s art piece. And through that, they were really transformed.” 

Restoring the wall means more than restoring paint, it means restoring something in the community that the original wall stood for.  In today’s fast world of corporate mindsets and competitive individualism, Baca reminds younger generations about collaborative work behind the concept of murals. 

“Kids are telling me that there aren’t many places anymore in which the cooperative, collaborative work that the Great Wall represents happens,” Baca said. “There is a necessity of a commons, a public space, and the public’s relationship to that is critical. This is a reminder that there is a common wealth. It includes the creative minds and capacity of its artists and of its people, and that people can work together to make something grander than they can make individually, and that we can take those people who are considered to be the most lowly of all and engage them in a process that looks for their stories, their families' stories.” 

To Baca, the concretization of the Los Angeles river in the 1930s represents a man-made scar inflicted in an attempt to control the natural landscape, which had once ebbed and flowed with the seasons.  As the next focus after the restoration, Baca will collaborate with the wHY Architecture firm in Culver City to design and build an eco-friendly interpretive bridge that connects the two sides of the river and allows visitors to get closer to the mural and read the stories of each section. 

The idea is to create a relationship between the history of the river and of the people, and that a deeper appreciation will emerge by sharing that history with others. SPARC has raised $1 million for the bridge, but needs $80,000 more to build it.    

The community is still reverberating from the effects of the Great Wall. Improvements can be seen, such as increased night visibility from the lights installed to view the wall after dark, which will also allow neighborhood residents to enjoy the surrounding park on warm summer nights. 

The wall brings walking tours and increased visitors to the city, enhancing cultural tourism. It has also become a magnet for artists from all over the country and the world. The historical content of the wall is also discussed in local institutions.

"Grant High school and Valley College both incorporate the Great Wall into their curriculum,” said Jeremy Oberstein, director of communications for Los Angeles Councilmember Paul Krekorian, who will be speaking at the Sept. 17 rededication ceremony. “It’s something that’s used by the community and beloved by the community.”

Perhaps one of the greatest testaments of the Great Wall’s role in the community is that in the 35 years of its existence, its artwork has never been marred by graffiti. 

“It’s amazing because it means the mural is speaking to the community and resonating with the community," said Adriana Macias, 30, a volunteer and UCLA graduate from Pacoima. "Most of the time you get graffiti when the community is against what is going on. When you get a mural like this that speaks to everyone, that speaks of a history that’s not generally told, the community will respect it.” 

The wall’s content in 1976 was a revolutionary statement to the world, revealing stories that many people had never heard. Now, as the years have made those stories more mainstream, some people have questioned the relevance of the wall today. 

Baca, talking as her brushstrokes revived Albert Einstein’s faded wrinkles, explained how stories on the walls are more pertinent than ever—pointing to scenes of the Great Depression or poignant deportation sequences. 

Baca said the wall was created at the beginning of multiculturalism and now America is in a state of postculturalism. 

“You go down this wall and you can see which immigrant group after the next became the basis of the industry of creation and wealth," Baca said. "And at the same time, we didn’t want their integration into the overall society. Now, I see the same thing going on. We are not post racial, we have very severe issues in how we perceive the value of people by race and class. The issues change, but there is a similar problem in terms of failure to recognize that we are a nation of immigrants.”

The future sections of the Great Wall, which will tell the stories of the 1960s to the 1990s, will begin by depicting the '60s revolution in a way that has never been depicted in the United States in a public space before, Baca said.

Another generation of history came to the Great Wall in the form of an unexpected visitor. Ford Roosevelt, the grandson of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, resides three blocks from the Great Wall in Valley Glen and said he has admired the mural and the story behind it ever since he discovered it more than 20 years ago.

Roosevelt has a personal connection to the wall through his grandfather, who had enacted the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, putting thousands of muralists to work on the infrastructure of the United States. Today, with the nation's economy struggling and high unemployment, Baca said our country needs another project like the WPA.

“There’s a whole history that’s really interesting to me of murals as a political statement and political art, of telling a story,” said Roosevelt, remembering the many murals which flourished across the country during the WPA, most of which are disappearing. “You can walk along the Great Wall of Los Angeles and have a better idea of California history and world history than you can from reading any textbook.”

Roosevelt is president of , a North Hollywood-based nonprofit that helps youth from low-income backgrounds go to college, graduate successfully and come back to change their own communities. He hopes to introduce Baca’s team of artists to his students as a positive example of expressing yourself through art.

“Artists are a window, in many ways, to what we aspire to be," Roosevelt said. "They have captured the dreams of every generation on that wall. Both the hopes and nightmares."

Holding on to Humanity

With every level of government now lacking funds, does Baca feel that mural painting is a priority? She said she recognizes there are issues of crucial importance, such as health care, but she said it should not be an either/or situation, and that it should include both. Instead of choosing one, she says the country should end the misuse of money on areas such as the war on Afghanistan or on a local level, graffiti prevention, which criminalizes youth.

“We are taking graffiti from walls, but we are not thinking of how to divert those youth into more productive measures," Baca said. "It’s not that they shouldn’t paint, it’s that they should be given a place to paint. It’s not that they shouldn’t express themselves, it’s that they should be taught the proper place for expression, and given opportunities.”

When budgets are tight, Baca says the first thing people think about is to cut funding for the arts.

“And yet, it’s where the human spirit dwells," Baca added. "You make a terrible mistake, if you disappear the arts. If you allow the loss of the murals, you will never get it back. It’s unrecoverable. This is what makes life more congenial. It’s the place we are most human.” 

The rededication ceremony of the Great Wall of Los Angeles is on Saturday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Information can be found on at the SPARC website. 

(Also check out videos about the project above and the gallery of photos of the project along the Tujunga Wash, courtesy of Ford Roosevelt.)