Updating L.A.’s Cultural Complexion

Like this city’s cultural complexion, the south wall of Dearden’s department store in downtown Los Angeles is changing.

Painted 15 years ago with scenes of ancient Mexico--Toltec stone sculptures, a towering Mayan pyramid and a mighty Aztec warrior--the wall looks different these days, as artist Eloy Torrez creates a new mural that bespeaks contemporary Latino life in Los Angeles.

“It’ll be like Latino a la Norman Rockwell,” Torrez said recently.

About one third of the old mural remains, but passers-by now see about two-thirds of the new: A young, Latino mother presents her year-old girl with a birthday cake. The infant’s father and siblings watch, enrapt, and her grandmother smiles from a rocking chair. Palm trees peak through a window.

The vast majority of Dearden’s largely Latino clientele were immigrants from Mexico, when, in 1973, store managers had a commercial art company paint the romantic depiction of their shoppers’ homeland.

Today, Mexican immigrants still make up about half of Dearden’s patrons. But over the last 10 years, there’s been a big increase in their non-Mexican Latino customers, store officials say.

Advertising manager Manny Gutierrez said that, today, 45% of Dearden’s shoppers are from San Salvador and others are from Cuba, South America and elsewhere in Central America.

Store officials commissioned the new mural primarily to communicate that Dearden’s, founded in 1910, has served the Latino population from “Generacion tras Generacion” (Generation to Generation). But store officials also wanted their new mural to reflect the new makeup of their clientele. It’s impossible to tell where the Latinos in Torrez’s work are from.

In fact, the family members, friends of his, are all first-generation Americans, said Torrez, who was born in New Mexico. “The woman with the cake is my girlfriend . . . the man, her husband, is my brother holding his daughter . . . and the old lady is the grandmother of a friend,” said Torrez, who has painted two other local murals, one, downtown, of actor Anthony Quinn, the other, in Hollywood, called “Legends of Hollywood.”

Still, Torrez was thinking universally when he designed the artwork, scheduled for completion late this year. “Every nation has a love toward family,” he said. “I want to appeal to the Chicano, but also to every man in the street who walks by here.”

And, while Torrez’s family scene is clearly contemporary--fashionable pumps and dresses for the women--it alludes to earlier times when completed, he said. Above a fireplace mantel will be a painting of the Mayan pyramid shown in the old mural, now covered over.

The new mural is scheduled for completion by Dec. 1, Gutierrez said.

A public rally to urge passage of the Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts--and the $25 million it could generate in arts support--is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Tuesday at City Hall. The rally is to begin outside on the building’s Spring Street steps, then move inside to City Council chambers, where the endowment will receive its first critical vote by City Council members. Rally organizers say all artists, art lovers and others are encouraged to attend.

The California Afro-American Museum has recently acquired several artworks now indefinitely on display. Among the artists whose works were acquired are Henry Tanner, Betye Saar, Robert Colescott, Romare Bearden, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett and John Biggers.