In this statement, Gilbert Sanchez Lujan, a founding member of the Los Angeles Chicano art collective Los Four, recounts his personal history as a Chicano artist and an advocate for Chicano art. He cites his curatorial practice in an exhibition of Mexican-American art at East Los Angeles Community College in 1964 as having a profound influence on his understanding of Chicano art. He goes on to detail his experience of the turbulent sociopolitical upheaval that characterized much of the 1960s, including his participation in the United Farm Workers struggle and the series of high school walkouts that served as a catalyst for the Chicano Movement. Sanchez Lujan writes that his participation in the Chicano Movement incited a shift in the focus and intensity of his art, which became more politicized and explicitly directed toward the amelioration of the Chicano experience. He discusses his role in the development of art discussion groups, which he called “Mental Menudos” after the typical Mexican stew menudo, geared toward developing ideas on channeling community participation and art into positive social action. Sanchez Lujan goes on to discuss numerous other elements of Chicano culture that have influenced his production over the years, including architecture, the visual presentation of Mexican food, lowriders, graffiti, the zoot suit, and the iconography of pre-Columbian art, and altars. Finally, he discusses two of his screen prints, in which lowriders decorated with indigenous iconography progress towards either Aztlan or Tenochtitlan. In these prints, Sanchez Lujan attempted to represent the Chicano history of myth adoption, underscoring the idea that the contemporary Chicano identity is, at least in part, predicated on an ancient cultural heritage.
