Judith F. Baca: La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra: California

In 1996, Judith Baca was commissioned to create a piece for the USC student center. Like other pieces she has completed before, her work was met with resistance and censorship of the visions she had produced. The work titled La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra: California was accepted on the premises of creating a work to acknowledge the history of Mexicanos and Native people on this land now known as California, but the USC administration had other ideas. In a transcript created by Judy to show the contention and friction she faced from the President Samples, as he interjects on her piece depicting the strong brown goddess rising from the land with mouth wide open, almost in a grito, in a traditional Japanese-style. He asked why she had to be so angry, inattentive of the fact that a metal border fence is being pinned to her back. He was confused about the blood coming from her, depicting the literal blood our ancestors shed to form this land, but it is understandable for him to have missed that point when he also goes ahead and asks why there are (Native) Indians in a Mexican work. In the words of Judith Baca, “Do you really not know”?

A piece of the original image Judith had produced di end up censored, erasing an image depicting a lynching, agreeing with it as unacceptable but a true fact of history. The witty responses she had for the president made me laugh and smile but I cannot help but flinch at the fact that she has to go through these measures to produce and defend her work. Even then, when the student center was torn down, the mural was then moved to a much less accessible area in Graduate dorms finishing the school’s censoring process. I look at this image and see a lot of strength and honor in my people and stunned at the amount of detail and subtle imagery Baca can place in her pieces. There is so much that can be said about a single painting, and one can go on and on, and I think that is another kind of extra magic that Judith works have.