Denver Airport Mural connection to Revelation

Judith F. Baca
SPARC Murals - Social And Public Art Resource Center

I think that her own words probably best explain its meaning.


"My mural for the Denver International Airport, entitled La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra, is of a personal nature. My grandparents came from Mexico to La Junta, Colorado during the Mexican Revolution. They followed the course traveled by thousands of other Mexican families, from Chihuahua to the United States through the historic northern territories of Mexico (Texas, New Mexico, Colorado) via the "Ellis Island" of the southwest, El Paso. It is a story that has been little chronicled and one for which I am anxious to create a visual record.

My mother was born in La Junta, educated in Colorado’s segregated school system, and raised in its’ segregated housing in the ‘1920’s and 30’s. Recently, she was successful in petitioning the governor of Colorado to intervene in the segregated graveyard of her hometown that maintained only Anglo graves. Due to my mother’s insistence, the Governor mandated preservation and maintenance for my grandfather’s grave and those of the other Mexicans who were buried in the Mexican section of the La Junta cemetery.

The simple fact that, even in death the bodies of racially different people were required to remain separate, was what moved me to create an artwork that would give dignity to the Mestizo’s story and the stories of countless others who toiled in the mines, fields, and railroads of Colorado. Not only to tell the forgotten stories of people who, like birds or water, traveled back and forth across the land freely, before there was a line that distinguished which side you were from, but to speak to our shared human condition as temporary residents of the earth."

Continued at:

La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra for the Denver International Airport

She didn't do the artwork. It was a man named Leo Tanguma. Maybe there was more than one...

Denver Airport

I'm sorry, although she did have a mural exhibited at the Denver Airport, you are right that it was not the one that you mentioned in the OP. When I read her story of how even in death people were buried separated by race, I thought that was why the coffins were included in the mural. Please acccept my apology.



This is what it said on the correct artist's site.

Humanity, represented by multi-racial children, is shocked and saddened at finding our natural world in a trampled and abused state. Surrounding the youthful group are endangered or extinct wildlife species. The bewildered children view the Snow Leopard, said to be the most beautiful of the large cats, laid out lifeless before them displaying its exquisite fur and colors. To the left, a young girl gazes at a Great Auk in a display case, a vanished species made extinct in 1844. On the right front, a young boy touches a display case containing the last of the Passenger Pigeons, a species existing in immense numbers throughout the Eastern U.S., and finally extinguished in 1914. Shown also are a harpooned Gray Whale, a Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle enmeshed in a fishing net, and a wall mounted buffalo head. Fluttering over the central scene, is an agitated Quetzal bird, with parts of a display case ominously surrounding it, as if foretelling its extinction.

Behind these central images, a fire rages, consuming a rainforest, while in the foreground we see endangered plant life, such as the Holy Ghost Orchid, from Panama, the Flower of the Gods, South Africa and others. In the immediate foreground are three concrete coffins, each containing a young girl clutching cultural articles. These three girls symbolize our own humanity as victims of our self destruction, notably through war, slavery, genocide, exploitation and violence of all kind.

Leo Tanguma - Chicano Muralist

He admits that everything is symbolic. The Freemasons built that airport and dedicated it to the "New World Airport Commission". Everything they do is symbolic...and has deeper, occultic meanings.