“Guadalupe Represents La Cultura ”

In Lamont, a Latinx-majority agricultural town deep in the heart of California’s Kern County, an unsanctioned mural-shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe quickly became a center of devotion. The muralist, Jorge Guillén, initially set out to touch up and complete an image of Guadalupe, one of the most ubiquitous figures in the Americas. But beyond Guillén’s intention, his artwork assumed a new life, that of a shrine complete with a regular cycle of observers and devotional objects. This chapter situates Guillén’s work in the broader historical context of Chicano muralism in California, drawing out the politics of space claiming which animates the mural. It then suggests that the acts of devotion at the mural transcend the mural’s intended purpose, leaving observers to see how it constitutes a mural-shrine. Neither merely a shrine nor just another mural, the street corner mural-shrine, as suggested by Guillén, represents la cultura.