Erased and Destroyed Monuments and Murals --- Los Angeles

Ms de la Loza has come up with several monuments, murals, places, and venues that have been whitewashed, plowed under, changed, or destroyed. These are all, she feels, important for histories of Chicanos, gays, the poor --- those masses who don't have the tax-deductible dollars to erect their own memorial sites.

What she and her organization --- The Pocho Research Society --- do is to research such areas, and, under the cover of night, and with great secrecy, they set their own markers to replace (or supplement) those that may already exist.

For instance, at the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial, the official plaque to the Mormons and soldiers who unwillingly came west over a century ago, reads

TO THE BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN
WHO WITH TRUST IN GOD
FACED PRIVATION AND DEATH
IN EXTENDING THE FRONTIERS
OF OUR COUNTRY TO INCLUDE
THE LAND OF PROMISE.

The one dandied up by the Pochos reads

TO THIS LAND OF PRIVATION AND
WOMEN FACED WITH MEN OF DEATH
EXTENDING GOD IN THE BRAVE
COUNTRY WHO TRUST OUR
PROMISE IN THE FRONTIERS.

The Field Guide to L. A. pinpoints seven areas including a tribute to "displaced refugees" in Boyle Heights, several gay bars in central city, the East L. A. murals of the 1970s, the Chavez Ravine area (home of many Mexican Americans) razed in the 1950s, and the complete whitewash of a wall painted by David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1932. The city fathers were apparently dismayed by the huge crucifix of a spread-eagle "Indigena" in the middle of all the vines and spooky trees and what appears to be snakes, aortas and small and large intestines. (Getty Museum is trying vainly to save what little of the mural remains after so many years of neglect not to say whitewash; their efforts do not include reconstruction --- just an attempted refurbishing; it looks pretty dull when compared to the original.)

Ms de la Loza's book is nicely done, if a bit confusing in layout. There is a touch of anarchy to the whole thing, since those who go about by night sticking their own plaques above the official L. A. bronzes do tend to be secretive. It is not all that serious, though. At Fort Moore, it is claimed that there could be found a collective of underground inhabitants named "the lizard people" from 5,000 years ago. It is said that they built hundreds of tunnels, some reaching to the depth of 1,000 feet. They were reputed to be "part of the origin of the human race."

Ms de la Loza does not deny this; she even suggests that they might have come from "deep space" ... and in the Illustrated Guide, there is a poster of General Kearney, the Fort Moore Hill Cemetery, and what looks to be a lady of visiting royalty with half-scabrous face and hands, a Dame of Grand Lizardry as it were.

--- Mary Tise, M. A.