This collection of original artwork from the touring show, America en la Mira, represents about seventy-five percent of the original works in the show. The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center came to "own" these images, by default. The show came to UCLA in 1980 and was left here, we have been the caretaker since. Researchers who would like to indicate errors of fact or omissions in this finding aid can contact the research center at www.chicano.ucla.edu

This prefatory essay by Alfonso Espitia huerta, Director del Museo de Arte Contemporano de Morelia is illustrative of the show's intentions: AMERICA EN LA MIRA as a collective expression of the groups that work in support of culture from the Mexican Front is an incredible synthesis of the libertarian ideals of all epochs of our continent. There is a generation torn apart by the aggressions of totalitarians, which for most of the nations in continental America, lives and endures in a climate of anti-culture, with signs contrary to Bolivar, Washington, Hidalgo, Morelos, Marti, F.D. Roosevelt, Zapata, Guevara, Whitman, Neruda, heroes who fought for the freedom of the world, from their impressive nationalist position. This generation has found as a dignified escape, an aesthetic expression enriched/informed by historical consciousness. They are youth that by exercising their universal rights expose their ideas and feelings, to connect with their people; and addressing critical problems of the community with a critical/analytical spirit. They demonstrate that the formal attitudes of simple traditional rhetoric can always be overcome and that if we have a glorious past of struggle, rather than remembering it with nostalgia, it'd be best to think of solutions that could achieve a real change of our old and ominous order, so limited by group interests and transnational forces. And they urge artists to return to the path of intellectual heroism from within the profound aspects of public art, not to create utopias, but the new world that we all hope for. Therefore, it turns out to be a great incentive to contemplate the handful of painters, who despise the abstract ambiguity and the bad conscience of old mistakes made during the revolutionary struggle; they continue struggling to exalt the spirit of the American man. While it is true that the Mexican plastic has suffered a bourgeois gap, our duty is to put ourselves at the forefront of humanism, taking up again the inclination for the public art of Posada, Atl, Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros. In this way, we will again find the identity between history, dignity, and art, and not to continue being trapped in the modest, poor, and inadequate expression of underdevelopment. You are then welcomed, the gifted men of fine perception, intelligence, will, and fantasy, who do not conform to the tough requirements of the established power/status quo and who escape the traditional modes of transmission of knowledge, achieving the expansion of art through renewed theses of social conscience.

5 linear feet