Rebels in Diaspora

Abstract

San Francisco’s Mission District is well known for its vibrant and diverse Latinx murals that began in the late 1960s. Yet little is known of the few Central American muralists who contributed to its community mural movement in the 1980s and 1990s. The eighties were a pivotal decade in which artists of Central American descent began to participate in creating activist murals representing and critiquing the civil wars then occurring in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. This article provides a new understanding of the roots of Salvadoran American murals that were manifested as a direct response to the US intervention in the Central American civil wars. I examine the history of two artists/muralists of Salvadoran descent: Herbert Sigüenza and Isaías Mata, who painted murals in the Mission District from 1982 to 1992 in solidarity with the Central American liberation movements. Although Sigüenza and Mata relied on individual experiences as visual artists, there are significant parallels between them as they negotiated painting from within the country—the United States—that openly intervened in the Salvadoran civil war. In an era when artists of non–Central American descent were responsible for the majority of murals created in San Francisco in solidarity with Central America, this article presents a thorough examination of the motivations that drove two Salvadoran artists to create their own solidarity murals. I show how Sigüenza and Mata contributed a revolutionary and anti-imperialist perspective in their murals based on their diasporic subjectivity. My sources are archival documents, visual analysis, and oral history interviews conducted with Sigüenza and Mata.