4 -- Las Luchas Del Mundo

1984
Willie Herron
24'H (west)
1'6"H (east)
x 90'W

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The Piece

With a title that can be translated as either The Wrestlers of the World or The struggles of the World, the mural adjacent to the Alameda Street Overpass uses metaphorical and representational imagery to convey both meanings. At the center of what appears to be a television screen, lines of tracer bullets frame wrestlers, outlined in a ghost-like computer graphic style, battling in front of a Spanish church. A cluster of colors between the wrestlers is an abstraction of the crowd on Olvera Street when seen from the perspective of the plaza bandstand. Against a dark, agitated sky, two flags twist in the wind. Herron called the flag with the torch, symbolizing the Statue of Liberty, a Liberty Flag, while the other flag, with its five Olympic rings, refers to the 1984 Olympic games. The mural also incorporates a trompe l'oeil effect: by the illusion of shadows, the television screen, which incorporates the official Olympic colors, appears to float off of a grey background of monograms depicting the events of the summer Olympics.

Herron selected this site because of its proximity to El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument and because it was the closest one available in the Olympic mural program to East Los Angeles, where he grew up and where the area's Hispanic population is concentrated. His original design was initially rejected by the Olympic Organizing Committee because they felt the masks, which Herron put on the wrestlers to accurately portray the costume and theater of the sport as it is played in the Latino community, were too reminiscent of the hooded terrorists who broke into the Israeli Olympic compound in 1972. Herron made the change but added a political statement by putting helicopter lights in the sky as a symbol of the establishment's control of Los Angeles.

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The Artist

Willie Herron (1951- ) was born and raised in East Los Angeles. Without formal art training, he executed The Plumed Serpent, The Cracked Wall and Mercado Hidalgo within a one block area near his home. Although all three were completed in the early 1970s, they remain among the most original and visually powerful murals in the city. The Olympic freeway mural was Herron's first since 1980, when he completed Black and White Moratorium Mural with Gronk at Estrada Courts. Highly controversial, it portrays police actions during the 1970 demonstrations in East Los Angeles when Los Angeles Times reporter Reuben Salazar was killed. Herron completed a work for the MacArthur Park Public Art project and has been exhibited in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the national exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation. In addition to being a graphic designer, he leads a band called Los Illegals.