I used to think murals were just decoration.
Then I spent three months in Los Angeles, walking through Boyle Heights and East LA, staring at walls that seemed to pulse with anger and pride and grief all at once. The Chicano Art Movement—which exploded in the late 1960s and early 1970s—didn’t just create pretty pictures. It weaponized visual language, turning spray paint and brushes into tools of cultural survival. Artists like Judith Baca, Carlos Almaraz, and the collective Los Four carved out space in a design world that had systematically erased Mexican-American voices. They mixed pre-Columbian iconography with lowrider aesthetics, Catholic imagery with revolutionary fervor, creating something that felt both ancient and urgently contemporary. And here’s the thing: this wasn’t art for galleries—it was art for the people who lived there, who walked past it every day, who saw their own faces reflected in those towering figures.
When Political Resistance Becomes Visual Grammar
The movimiento didn’t invent protest art, obviously. But it did something specific: it turned mestizaje—the blending of Indigenous and Spanish heritage—into a design philosophy. You can trace this lineage directly to modern graphic design. Bold typography with hand-drawn imperfections. Saturated colors that refuse to apologize. Compositional density that packs every inch with meaning. I’ve seen this aesthetic recycle through skateboard brands, streetwear labels, album covers for hip-hop and punk records.
Wait—maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. The United Farm Workers flag, designed by Richard Chavez in 1962, used that stark black eagle on red background. Simple, right? Except it became one of the most recognizable symbols of labor rights in American history. The Chicano movement took that lesson and ran with it, understanding that visual design could transmit cultural memory faster than any manifesto. Turns out, when you’re fighting for visibility in a society that wants you invisible, every poster becomes a battlefield.
Rasquachismo and the Aesthetics of Making Do
There’s this concept in Chicano art criticism called rasquachismo—roughly translated as “making do with what you have,” but that definately doesn’t capture it. It’s an aesthetic of bricolage, of taking discarded materials and transforming them into something audacious. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto wrote about this in the 1980s, describing how Chicano artists embraced the “ugly,” the excessive, the deliberately tacky as resistance against Anglo minimalism.
I guess it makes sense that this philosophy would seep into contemporary design. The maximalist posters you see now—layered textures, clashing fonts, intentional “bad” taste—owe a debt to rasquachismo whether designers realize it or not. It’s the visual equivalent of code-switching, of saying “we exist on our terms.” And honestly, in an era of sterile tech-bro minimalism, that feels almost radical again.
How Institutional Spaces Finally Started Paying Attention
The irony is thick.
Museums that once ignored Chicano artists now stage major retrospectives. LACMA’s 2011 “Asco: Elite of the Obscure” exhibition. The Smithsonian’s ongoing digitization of Chicano movement archives. Sotheby’s selling Almaraz paintings for six figures. On one hand, this represents hard-won recognition—artists who worked in the margins finally getting institutional validation. On the other hand, you have to wonder what happens when revolutionary art gets absorbed into the very systems it criticized. Does the bite disappear? I’ve met younger Latinx designers who feel conflicted about this, who love seeing their visual heritage celebrated but worry about appropriation, about the movement’s radical edge getting sanded down into “diverse content.” The truth is probably messy and contradictory, like most things involving art and commerce. But the visual vocabulary remains—those bold diagonals, those unflinching faces, that refusal to be small or quiet or palatable. You see it in Instagram graphics for social justice campaigns, in protest signs, in the visual language people reach for when they need to say something that matters. The Chicano Art Movement didn’t just impact design history. It gave people a way to see themselves as worthy of monumental scale.
