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• 1 2018-07-19T22:00:51-07:00 Taking Place: Mexico and the Counterrevolution in Los Angeles in the 1920s 4 plain 2018-12-10T18:47:13-08:00 The Mexican Revolution took place at the corner of Seventh and Flower Streets, from 11-25 November 1922. Although few Anglos took notice, that location presented, for two weeks, an exhibition called Artes Populares en México, planned and funded at the highest levels of the triumphant Mexican government of Álvaro Obregón to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Mexican independence from Spain (1821) and its own first year in power.[2] This important exhibit has been all but lost to the history of Los Angeles. It was the second venue for the exhibit, the first taking place in Mexico City itself the previous year.
  
  The elaborate revolutionary ideology of the exhibit was the work of the greatest thinkers of the first social revolution of the twentieth century. In his new post as Minister of Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública) Jose Vasconcelos brought with him into power such legendary artistic-­intellectual figures as Dr. Atl (nom de guerre of Gerardo Murillo), Adolfo Best Maugard, Alfonso Caso, Manuel Gamio, Roberto Montenegro, José Clemente Orozco, David Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera. They had all spent the revolutionary decade formulating a rich political and aesthetic philosophy that exalted precolumbian civilization and indigineous folk art, and fused it with modernist (especially and cubist and futurist) ideals imbibed in Europe and North America.[3] The most dramatic and lasting achievement of this cultural movement was the great fresco mural movement, launched in this same year.[4]
  
  La Raza Csic external link
  http://www.filosofia.org/aut/001/razacos.htm
  
  In his classic book, La Rza Cosmica ()Vasconcelos argued that a “cosmic race” of mesitzos was poised to topple the Euro-American hegemony of the whites
  
  
  could not have entered more hostile territory than it did in Los Angeles. The reigning theory of the spatial regime of Los Angeles was to prevent race mixing and working­-class organization. Harrison Gray Otis and his son-­in-law Harry Chandler effectively cleared the Los Angeles metropolitan spatial territory for the privilege of the self-proclaimed white race and its capital investors.
  
  Just days before the Artes Populares exhibit opening, the Red Squad of the Los Angeles Police Department had raided an I.W.W. meeting at the tavern called “Bucket of Blood,” arresting ­thirty-­five labor organizers on “criminal syndicalism” charges.[5] 
  
  By the 1920s the Otis-Chandler oligarchs had won the battle for the public spaces of Downtown, but the avant garde kept a visible presence in Jake Zeitlin’s bookstores in the Central Business District.
  
  For residence, much of the community clustered in “Edendale,” now called Silver Lake, just northwest of Downtown, north of Wilshire following Alvarado north into the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. This had been one of the earliest “movie colonies,” clustered around the Silver Lake Reservoir, including Walt Disney’s first studio on Hyperion Ave (1926-1939).  Progressives and creative artists settled in this “Bohemia” on the shores of Silver Lake because, as Daniel Hurewitz has compellingly recounted, they found mutual support, the synergies of creative stimulation, and a physical setting that gave the sense of a pastoral retreat from the bustle and conflict of the city [note].
  
  The most prominent leftist in Los Angeles during the 1920s was the prolific Upton Sinclair, whose circle included the lawyer-journalist Carey McWilliams and novelists Louis Adamic and John Fante. Zeitlin’s bookshop on Hope St near Sixth “became a mecca for a generation of unproven young artists, writers, and bibliophiles who found inspiration in Zeitlin’s enthusiasm…”  Zeitlin’s bookshop always had an exhibition space, where he showed the photography of Edward Weston, and such Southern California painters who were then pushing boundaries, such as Millard Sheets and Milfred Zornes.  McWilliams and Zeitlin, like many in their circle, lived in Edendale/Silver Lake [note]
  
  The artist/bohemian colony in Edendale actually grew in symbiosis with the founding of several art schools in Westlake Park, just south of Silver Lake on Alvarado, at Wilshire Boulevard. The first, the Otis Art institute (1918), was partially underwritten by LA Times founder and publisher, Harrison Grey Otis himself. The second was founded by the Nelbert Murphy Chouinard (1879-1969). Chouinard developed a close working relationship with Walt Disney, as supplier of trained artists.  The school, personally directed by Nelbert Chouinard herself (until its merger into CalArts in the 1960s), counted a long line of influential alumni and sometime students, such as Edward Ruscha, Jackson Pollock, and the great Disney animator Jules Engel. In 1945 longtime Chouinard instructor Herbert Jepson spun off his influential Jepson Art Institute at 2861 West 7th Street, which flourished in the early 1950s [note]