By Isabel Ngo
This article originally appears in the California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship Catalog, produced by Los Angeles Performance Practice in partnership with the California Arts Council. This activity is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov
An illustration of a dark-skinned Indigenous girl wearing a white dress is at the center of Innocence, a mural decorating one of the Estrada Courts buildings in Boyle Heights. The girl was inspired by the designs of traditional Mexican dolls, and she stands in front of a vibrant landscape depicting mountains, the sun’s rays, animals, children, and the changing times and seasons.
Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Innocence by artist Norma Montoya, who painted it in 1973 as part of the Chicano Mural Movement. During this period, Mexican-American artists throughout the Southwest created murals celebrating their cultural pride and communities on the walls of schools, churches, city buildings, and housing projects such as Estrada.
Estrada Courts has its own long history in East Los Angeles. It’s been around since 1942 and was one of the first racially integrated public housing projects in the country. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, artists painted more than eighty murals there. They are iconic examples of public art in Los Angeles, and some even consider Estrada to be where the height of the Chicano Mural Movement began.
Over the decades, Innocence, as well as Norma’s other murals at Estrada, Fish of the Future and Dreamworld, have been worn down and damaged. But thanks to her Legacy Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council and a grant from the Eastside Arts Initiative, Norma Montoya, now in her seventies, has been making progress on a full restoration of Innocence that will be completed this year. The recent grant has also funded two paid internships for high schoolers to assist with the restoration and community engagement events for local families to enjoy.
Much of Norma’s work aims to empower the children and younger generations of Los Angeles. Her mural designs are fantastical portals inspired by fine art, children’s book illustrations, and the neighborhood kids themselves. Fish of the Future (1976)—an immersive underwater scene with different fish species, corals, kelps, as well as a single sinking boot—was inspired by a spontaneous conversation with the children one day, after she found out that many of them had never gone to the beach.
“I was telling them that the fishes are so many different colors and from all over the world,” Norma recalls. “And one little girl says, ‘Well, what happens if I’m at the ocean and I drop my slipper—my sandal, my chancla. Where would it go?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, if you drop a chancla in the ocean, it would probably eventually sink down to the bottom.’ And so that’s when I decided to put that boot inside the mural. Because someone had lost their shoe, and that’s where it went!”
Everyone was welcome to help with the murals at Estrada Courts. Norma worked primarily with younger, elementary school children who lived there, but the murals also drew in older kids who wanted to spend time with their younger siblings and cousins. The murals offered a safe space for children from the whole neighborhood to just have fun, and also an alternative for older kids who faced the peer pressure of joining a gang. Norma kept an eye out for the young “stragglers” hanging around the area, whether they were out of school for truancy, on their way to their probation officer, or if they didn’t have clothes or supplies for school. “Those are the ones that I try to pull in, you know, to paint with me for a little while, and for us to just chit chat and talk.”
As a woman artist, Norma has also experienced the “machismo world” of the housing projects. “The gangsters, the older guys, they see me as a threat for some reason,” she explained, referring to the verbal harassment she gets from gangsters who want to claim their territory and are not aware of the history of Estrada. Locals are wary of muralists who simply come and go—artists who get their grants, finish their murals over a weekend, and then leave without interacting much with the community.
But in Norma’s case, “I never left Estrada,” she says, having built relationships with the families since the early ’70s. “I’ve always been here. If you ever go to a residents’ meeting, you’ll see me there.” Some of the kids she painted with, now grown up, come back to the Courts to visit their aunts and uncles, and she recalls how the senior citizens always watched out for her. “They’re still my friends. We kind of all grew old together.”
She’s a living witness to how the murals brought the larger community together. “We had so many outsiders helping us to get these murals put up and get free paint, free brushes. We had a food truck coming in … we’d go to a burrito stand down the street and ask the local guy if he could get us some tacos or some food for the kids.” Community members like the late Miguel “Mike” Duran, who was a probation officer and later a beloved counselor for youth gang members, had worked with the local Soroptimist Club to provide painting supplies for the children.
In addition to her work at Estrada, Norma Montoya was a teaching artist for thirty years through the organization Theatre Of Hearts/Youth First. She led art workshops for students and at-risk youth at public schools, alternative schools, and juvenile halls throughout LA County. Her last project with Theatre Of Hearts was a mural designed and painted in collaboration with the young women at Central Juvenile Hall in 2019. Norma’s other public murals include Niños del Mundo (1975) at the historic Chicano Park in San Diego, which she painted with the late Charles “Gato” Félix through a mural exchange program between local artists from Estrada Courts and San Diego’s Logan Heights, and Peasant Saint (2001) in Little Tokyo, which she painted with her daughter Yamilette Montoya Duarte.
Norma has completed forty-eight murals throughout her career and has received numerous awards from the cities and districts where she’s worked. Filled with memorable stories, she also has a collection of more than 350 photographic slides documenting the murals and community activities at Estrada Courts in the early ’70s—likely enough to develop a documentary or other visual archive on East LA’s local history. “The history of Estrada Courts needs to be documented,” she says, for the sake of the whole community. “I’m so, so proud that we got this fellowship. It’s not my fellowship. It’s a fellowship that a lot of us worked for.”
Muralist Norma Montoya, photographed by Argel Rojo
