Dear Editor,
Culver City’s official Hispanic Heritage Month programming recently included a PBS documentary screening of América Tropical: The Martyr Mural of Siqueiros, held at the Wende Museum. Students were told they were encountering a great artist of “social justice” and “equality for all.” One could be forgiven for thinking, after such a screening, that David Alfaro Siqueiros was basically Martin Luther King with an airbrush.
The truth is less convenient. Siqueiros’s most famous Los Angeles mural was not “celebrated” but whitewashed shortly after completion. Why? Because it depicted a crucified Mexican peasant beneath the imperial eagle of the United States, flanked by revolutionaries. In the 1930s, this was not civic uplift; it was a provocation. The promoters of Olvera Street had invited him to paint a festive tourist backdrop. What they received instead was a Marxist indictment of the host country itself. It was not erased because Americans feared “social justice.” It was erased because it was propaganda delivered under false pretenses.
And propaganda was exactly what Siqueiros intended. He was not some vague champion of equality. He was a lifelong Marxist, a Mexican Communist Party militant, a man who once led an armed assault on Leon Trotsky’s house. His art was a weapon of class war, his loyalties given to Stalin and later to Castro’s Cuba. To recast him as a neutral advocate of “justice for all” is not just misleading — it is dishonest. If that were truly his creed, Orwell never wrote a word worth reading.
Which brings us to the Wende Museum. Its stated mission is to preserve and make accessible Cold War–era art and artifacts, especially from the Eastern Bloc, and to provide context for understanding historical and present-day change through exhibitions, scholarship, education, and community engagement. Context is the operative word. And yet, in sponsoring this event, the Wende lent its name and venue to a presentation that stripped Siqueiros of the very ideology that defined him. A museum devoted to providing historical context ended up serving its opposite: a curated narrative without the marrow of truth.
What students received instead was cultural baby food: a flavorless moralism stripped of bones. The man who praised Castro’s Cuba as a socialist paradise, who excused Stalin’s crimes, who declared art to be a weapon, was recast as a benign “social justice” mascot. This is not education; it is the bleaching of history in the service of sentiment — at best. At worst, it is the indoctrination of a new generation.
If Culver City wishes to teach its students about Siqueiros, by all means do so — but do it honestly. Show them the wall on Olvera Street and explain why it was whitewashed. Show them his speeches praising revolutionary dictatorship. Show them how easily “justice for all” can become a slogan for its opposite. That would honor Hispanic heritage with rigor, not sentiment. And it would honor the Wende’s mission — providing context, not concealing it.
Pedro Frigola
