History is a River: Judy Baca and the Great Wash of Los Angeles

Judy Baca on a scissor lift (1983). © SPARC. Image courtesy of Judith F. Baca, the SPARC archives, and LACMA. Photo: Linda Eber.

The Tujunga Wash is a 13-mile stream that flows through the San Fernando Valley. It is a major tributary to the Los Angeles River, which, in the dry season, is not saying much, since both the Wash and the River become mere trickles. There is an old myth about the Tujunga, which translates to “place of the old woman” in Tongva. In this myth, a matriarch, whose daughter has been killed in a water dispute, retreats to the mountains and turns to stone.¹

The stream itself has also turned to stone, concretized over decades of urban development, and it is within one of these concrete flood channels that artist Dr. Judith F. Baca painted The Great Wall of Los Angeles. Commissioned in 1974 by the Army Corp of Engineers, Baca’s mural was meant to beautify the drab infrastructure. She and a team of local adolescents painted the half-mile-long history directly onto the concrete, a timeline of Los Angeles’s development beginning with the mammoths in 20,000 BC and culminating in a tribute to the 1984 Olympic Games. After a nearly decade-long process of research, organizing, and painting, the wall was finally complete.²

The first time I saw the mural in 2023, it was a particularly hot July afternoon. The wash had all but dried up. The wall was dusty, monumental, as if it had been there forever. Despite all its color, the wall and its environment was not the dynamic Los Angeles I had come to recognize. Baking in the summer heat, I gazed at a relic from a lost century. A past set in stone.

That fall, as the Tujunga began to flow again, Judy Baca began to paint. In Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall, an exhibition that ran from October 2023 to July 2024 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Baca transformed a gallery into a temporary studio. She and her team from the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) had started the years-long process of creating additions to the painting in the Tujunga Wash, an expansion that will eventually extend the piece by another half-mile. The goal: to update the wall’s historical timeline, adding vignettes from the 1960s through the 2010s.

I visited LACMA that winter and had the chance to observe Baca’s team painting. As I entered the gallery, I was greeted by the sounds of laughter, of conversation, of shoes on polished floors. To my left, a scissor lift buzzed as it raised an artist high into the air. She was coloring a new panel labeled “East L.A. Walkouts,” the 1968 protests lead by Chicano students. One of their demands: a rectification of LAUSD’s white-washed historical curriculum.

The right-most portion of the panel was still only ink. In blue outline, students gathered in front of an old school building, carrying signs reading: “SCHOOLS NOT PRISON,” and “NO MORE RACIST TEACHINGS,” among other things. The left-most portion of the panel was slowly being filled in—three women’s hats had been painted a dull rust, emblematic of the Chicano paramilitary organization the Brown Berets. And the panel itself, I noted, was far from concrete—in fact, it seemed to be made of a flexible material, spooled on either end, continuously unfurling as the painters worked from left to right.

This was far from the dusty monument I had visited in the summer. It was fluid, dynamic: more of a performance than an object. I had a feeling that this performance was the entire point of the piece, wherein the process of not only art-making, but history-making, was on full display.

It goes without saying, but the Tujunga flood channel is designed to, well, flood. In fact, in 1983, just as The Great Wall was nearing completion, flooding wiped away the painters’ scaffolding.³ Additional funds were raised to offset this loss and complete the painting.⁴ But this has not prevented the wash from flooding in the decades since—nor has it prevented the wall from baking in the California sun, or shaking through its frequent earthquakes. This is no white box; it is precarious urban ecology.

As such, the mural undergoes continuous, though minor, restorations during the dry season—especially since 2011, when SPARC finally initiated The Wall’s first major restoration.⁵ The painting is a rather unstable object; it is not fixed, but instead undergoes minor replacements and revisions. The paint on the wall, like the river that washes it, is never the same.

Active worksite of The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976). © SPARC. Image courtesy of Judith F. Baca, the SPARC archives, and LACMA. Photo: Linda Eber.

Digging in the river during the production of The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976). © SPARC. Image courtesy of Judith F. Baca, the SPARC archives, and LACMA. Photo: Linda Eber.

The history depicted in The Great Wall was not an established one. In the 1970s, according to Baca, there were no shelves in “the library” devoted to Chicano history, to Black history, to a history of L.A.’s working poor.⁶ Instead, Baca proposed the creation of “an alternative form of history.”⁷ This was a history largely unacknowledged in the Valley, which had been redlined for decades and whose teachers once specialized in “Americanization,” a grim euphemism for the assimilation of Mexican children into “American” culture.⁸ Baca’s new history would be written by “ethnic groups—including women in the various groups—in a manner not taught in public schools.”⁹ This history—of Mexican farmers, of Jewish refugees, of Black students, of women laborers, of gays and lesbians—she dubbed a history of the People.¹⁰

In order to recover this history, Baca had to research not decades, but millennia. This was not a one-woman job. At first, Baca attempted to secure support from the Department of Recreation and Parks but had to pivot due to censorship.¹¹ To evade city interference, Baca—alongside artists Christina Schlesinger and Donna Deitch—founded SPARC and hired teams of artists and local historians who would conduct research alongside schoolchildren.¹² These youth and educators worked together to excavate the under-told stories of the region’s most forgotten people. Many of these histories had never been—and some- times are still not—officially recognized. But by taking the most scoffed-at historical claims seriously, the researchers did not just study history. They created it.

Take the panel featuring Thomas Alva Edison. He faces us, backgrounded by an illuminated cityscape, Los Angeles at night. In his left hand, a lightbulb; in his right, a piece of film. And then, floating above the city like an ancient UFO: an Aztec pyramid. A woman made of corn whispers something into Edison’s ear—the secret of electric light? This is alternative history in a mythic form, an allusion to a Mexican legend in which Edison was descended from Aztec kings.¹³

Another panel—this one a part of the new addition—depicts the Cooper Do-nuts Riot, a pre-Stonewall queer uprising on Main Street. Men on the roof of a shop hurl a slew of pink-frosted donuts at two cops. A trans woman raises a donut in defiance. Two men kiss in the foreground. Yet, the reality of these events is contested. The uprising left behind no articles in the L.A. Times, no police reports, no verifiable eye-witness accounts; if queer people did throw coffee at cops, it left no official record.¹⁴ Although it is now largely accepted as part of L.A.’s queer history, the story springs from John Rechy’s 1963 novel City of Night; it is a fiction, a fabulation, or perhaps an exaggeration of a real event.

The inclusion of these panels puzzled me. The anecdotes are somewhat ahistorical—not verifiable by the archive. They seem out of place next to much more “concrete” historical panels, such as the East L.A. Walkouts, Japanese Internment, or The Red Scare—events which are clearly rooted in archival evidence. At first, I thought Baca might be distorting history and taking artistic liberties. I now realize it is precisely this artistic liberty that frees history from the prison of empiricism. If history is only what can be evidenced, then what are we to do when the evidence is burned, sold to the highest bidder, or painted over in white? Baca critiques this kind of history-making. Instead, she responds to archival erasure by opening up the historical record to speculation. She allows fiction to fill in the gaps, and in some cases to account for the unfathomable, for historical catastrophes. For example, on The Great Wall, colonization is explained by the legend of Queen Califia, who seduced the Spanish into seeking gold and silver on California’s shores.

Today, Aztec Edison reclaims the advancement of technology from the so-called genius of a white man and dares to locate that genius in an Indigenous lineage. Cooper Do-nuts gives retrospective voice to queer and trans people, canonizing them in history despite official attempts to erase them. Whether these stories are strictly factual is irrelevant; the designation of history lends power to myth. From her place in the present, Baca changes the definition of history itself. History is not set. It can always be retold, revised, flooded over, repainted.

Judy Baca painting The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1983). Image courtesy of Judith F. Baca, the SPARC archives, and LACMA.

Judy Baca working on Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall (installation view) (2024). © Judith F. Baca. Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA. Photo: Museum Associates/LACMA.

Today the Tujunga is a shallow but steady stream, like the blacktop under a carwash. As I write this, the students at Flintridge Preparatory School, near Altadena, are presenting The Great Wall of Los Angeles, an exhibit curated by the seventh grade class. A friend of mine attended the presentation and sent me a video: Two students read shyly from their notecards, discussing a panel called “Immigrant and Indigenous People Build California.” The poster behind them analyzes images of Chinese immigrants, fishing boats, oranges, the railroads. This exhibit—now a tradition at this small middle school—is just one of many ways students across the Southland continue to engage with Baca’s wall as curriculum.

These are not the first students to be enraptured by The Wall. The painters were students as well, many from starved corners of the city. SPARC had to “find homes for those who had to be runaways”¹⁵ from abuse and gang activity. Never a mere wall, the mural was mutual aid. Its legacy has never been just the painting or the history that it illustrates, but always the process in which the painting came to be, a process of care and ongoing education. The Wall asks not “What is the history?” but “How does our history help us live together—right here, right now?”

As another fire season returns and the wash runs dry, I can’t help but dwell on Los Angeles’s horrific present: neighborhoods up in flames, ICE ripping parents from their children, the denial of life-saving healthcare to working people and to our trans friends. Funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, once crucial to projects like Baca’s, rescinded. Histories foreclosed. And I feel stuck, as if the great march of time will abruptly end in total apocalypse. I am reminded of Tujunga, that old Tongva woman paralyzed by grief, and I wonder if we, too, will turn to stone forever.

But then I remember the first time I saw the wall, how wrong I was in calling it a monument, how The Wall’s apparent fixity was only an illusion. The Wall continues onward, a testament to the resilience of those people whom the wall historicizes, a people who have long managed to survive despite abandonment, denial, redlining, brutality. The Wall is already unfurling, incomplete, changing. History is not fate, but a practice. Not concrete, but a river.

Judith F. Baca, Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall (installation views) (2024). © Judith F. Baca. Images courtesy of the artist and LACMA. Photos: Museum Associates/LACMA.

Judith F. Baca, Painting in the River of Angels: Judy Baca and The Great Wall (installation views) (2024). © Judith F. Baca. Images courtesy of the artist and LACMA. Photos: Museum Associates/LACMA.

Sean Koa Seu is a writer, dramaturg, and critic. He writes about representations of the Southland in art, film, and literature. His work has appeared in The Rebis and in zine form at the L.A. Art Book Fair. He is currently pursuing an MA in Aesthetics and Politics at CalArts.

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