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El SARAPE (Center Panel) - by DANIEL DE SIGA - 2001, Toppenish, WA

BACKGROUND ON THE Sarape Mural:

When artist Daniel DeSiga completed the 100' x 15' mural "El Sarape," in August, 2001, the Mexican community celebrated with a barbeque and block dance with live music sponsored by the Farm Workers' Clinic. For many years, members of the Mexican community of Toppenish, Washington had been petitioning the local Mural Society to recognize their contributions to the region in an historical mural. "El Sarape" became the 60th Toppenish mural, and the first to depict the arrival of bracero workers from Mexico during World War II.

Dr. Erasmo Gamboa, historian of the Bracero program in the Pacific Northwest, wrote a dedication for the mural on July 23, 2001:

This mural pays tribute to the generation of young Mexican Laborers known as Braceros that began to arrive in Toppenish in October of 1942. At the time, the fury of World War II consumed the energies of this nation and Mexico came to our aid.

We asked these men to leave their homes in Mexico and journey to the Yakima Valley to help harvest the food necessary to feed the country and to defeat our adversaries in Europe and Asia. By the end of the war, thousands of Braceros had made an important contribution by 'saving the crops' in Toppenish and surrounding Yakima communities.

This artistic work honors the wartime Braceros and conveys the recognition they justly deserve. It is dedicated with the hope of fostering a new era of harmony among all the residents of Toppenish and between Mexico and the United States.

As the name "El Sarape" suggests, the mural tells its story in the form of vignettes painted within frames formed by the geometric pattern of a traditional Mexican blanket in the Saltillo style, which originated in northwestern Mexico and traveled into the American Southwest. Fringes and a red-striped border take up 10-foot sections on each side of the mural, while a dozen colorful scenes are painted across the 80-foot central portion, boldly divided into six major sections by red "tapestry" borders that give the mural its overall blanket pattern.

At the top-center of the mural stands a tall older farm worker, with a weary expression but poised upright, cultivating the crops with a long-handled hoe; to his right and left are six other laborers dressed in blue work clothes, bending over to hoe or to harvest. The group thus forms a human pyramid or triangle, but the underlying story recalls the organized farm workers' struggle of the 1960s for humane working conditions: the two laborers at top center-right employ the notorious short-handled hoe that required them to stoop down, close to the ground, in order to weed the fields. Their faces obscured by straw hats, they are the only figures in the mural whose faces we cannot see.

The American flag appears at the left top corner, with profiles of World War II soldiers, including one Mexican American in uniform, and the Mexican flag appears on the top right corner next to four campesino men, one of them the mural artist himself. Other vignettes show braceros arriving on a 1942 steam engine locomotive, workers cooking beans over a fire in front of a "tent-city" labor camp, carrying sacks of potatoes to a table for supervisors to weigh, receiving instructions from a foreman in front of the U and I Sugar plant, attending a "fiesta parade" (the only panel which includes women), and listening to official announcements about the bracero program in front of the Washington state capitol building in Olympia. Like other Chicano/a, Latino/a and Mexican-American murals, "Serape" invokes a community's history, shared experiences, struggles, celebrations, and a communal identity.

DeSiga-"El Amor" Paintings

Daniel DeSiga, Artist & His Works:  Evergreen State College