Qualla: Presencia de América Latina

Presencia de América Latina: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gherm, CC BY-SA 3.0. You read it like a book, right to left, beginning with the gods. On the walls of the Casa del Arte in Concepción, the Mexican artist Jorge González Camarena painted the entire saga of Latin America across 300 square meters of acrylic on rough stucco. He worked from November 1964 to April 1965 with a team of Mexican and Chilean painters and a model named Alicia Cuevas, and what they produced is less a picture than a procession. Pre-Columbian deities, the violence of conquest, the birth of a mestizo people, and finally the flags of nearly twenty nations rippling across the top, all crowned by verses from Pablo Neruda. Its subject, stated plainly, is the brotherhood of the peoples of the Americas.

Image: Gherm | CC BY-SA 3.0

Presencia de América Latina: The Gods Come First

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P. Jara; A. Guerrero, CC BY-SA 4.0. The story opens on the right panel, in the world before Europe arrived. From the depths a woman rises with fish in her hands, the riches of the sea made flesh, beside the green mask of Tlaloc, the rain god. Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent who stands for culture itself, coils ...

Image: P. Jara; A. Guerrero | CC BY-SA 4.0

Presencia de América Latina: The Birth of a People

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gonzalo Soto Proboste Cyborgsoto, CC BY-SA 3.0. The central panel turns to the creation of a mestizo America, and here the mural grows tender and unflinching at once. The Spanish soldier and a Native woman form what the artist called La pareja original, the Original Couple, the parents of a blended people. They walk across lay...

Image: Gonzalo Soto Proboste Cyborgsoto | CC BY-SA 3.0

Presencia de América Latina: Wounds and Flowers

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fotografía tomada por Farisori; Autor del mural: Jorge González Camarena, mexicano; Propiedad de la Universidad de Concepción, Chile, CC BY-SA 3.0. The left panel does not pretend the history was painless. A nopal cactus, emblem of Mexico, merges with the climbing vines of the copihue, Chile's national flower, binding the two nations that gave the mural its artists. But the nopal is pierced through with daggers, a frank ackn...

Image: Fotografía tomada por Farisori; Autor del mural: Jorge González Camarena, mexicano; Propiedad de la Universidad de Concepción, Chile | CC BY-SA 3.0

Presencia de América Latina: A Continent's Flags and a Poet's Voice

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlBustos, CC BY-SA 3.0. Across the very top, the flags of the sovereign nations wave in geographic order from south to north, beginning at the right with Chile and the condor and ending with Mexico and its eagle and serpent. The sequence runs through Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, ...

Image: AlBustos | CC BY-SA 3.0