Passage IV

The Great Wall of Los Angeles

Judith Francisca Baca believes a mural can tell a story and that a largeness of it gives its creator an amplified voice. It began in the summer of 1976, Baca led the creation of what is likely the longest mural in the world, the Great Wall of Los Angeles.

This tourist attraction, painted on the concrete wall of the Tujunga Wash, a flood-control channel in the San Fernando Valley, is over thirteen feet high and almost a half mile long. The project was commissioned by Los Angeles city officials, those wanted well-known local muralist Baca to beautify the channel area. She took this opportunity to bring the people of multiethnic Los Angeles together to produce a narrative mural of their stories.

Baca imagined the mural, on the channel wall as a timeline. It would proclaim the historical experiences of California's people's, focusing mainly on the experiences of women, the poor, and minorities. She wants as many people as possible, especially young people, to help create the mural.

(53) For guidance, they interviewed hundreds of city residents, historians, and social activists. The subjects they picked ranged from: Dust Bowl refugees to civil rights activists, Olympic champions to labor organizers, land disputes to the growth of suburbia.

Next, area artists drew miniature sketches of the scenes on grids. After that, they created a blueprint of the mural including "bridge images" that wove them together. A huge grid was traced onto a smoothed and sealed section of the channel wall, and the blueprint sketches were outlined onto it. The drawings were then painted, over numerous summers, by Los Angeles teens in groups recruited with the help of outreach organizations.(59)

In 1983, the mural was finally finished. Dozens of professional artists, over four hundred teens, and thousands of other community members. had contributed to the Great Wall of Los Angeles, a celebration of the many voices of the city.