LACMA

1944 Mexico City, Mexico Wearing a zoot suit, speaking Spanglish, and billed as "the only authentic pachuco," pioneer border-crosser German Valdés, aka Tin Tan, triumphantly returns from his Juárez/El Paso self-exile to dazzle sold-out Mexico City music-hall crowds. Mexican traditionalists bemoan the entertainer's pocho ways as a "barbarian invasion from the North." More than two decades later, Tin Tan politely declines an offer by the Beatles to stand among the luminaries gracing the cover of their Sgt. Pepper's album. He asks, instead, that a photo of a Mexican tree take his place. A phantom sighting. 221 JUNE 29, 1955 Oaxaca, Mexico Mexican curandera Maria Sabina gives psychedelic mushrooms to a vacationing J. P. Morgan banker from New York City. In 1957 Life magazine publishes the mind-alter- ing experience in a travel article titled "Seeking the Magic Mushroom." Among its impressionable readers is Timothy Leary. As news spreads, subsequent acolytes to Sabina's sacred mushroom ceremony in the remote Oaxacan village will include Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Pete Townshend, and Bob Dylan. Rock music is forever changed. 1943 Mexico City, Mexico In perhaps the most bizarre transaction in baseball history, the Mexican government trades eighty thousand war labor- ers to the United States so that Negro Leaguers Quincy Trouppe and Theolic "Fireball" Smith can play baseball in Mexico during World War II, avoiding mandatory defense jobs. The U.S. government approves the trade. OCTOBER 1932 Los Angeles, California Two years after the opening of a quaint, colorful Mexican marketplace on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles (a project spearheaded by socialite Christine Sterling), exiled Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros is commis- sioned to decorate the busy tourist attraction with a mural. Titled America Tropical, his work depicts a crucified indig- enous man capped by an American eagle. Within a year the mural is whitewashed. Beginning in 1988, the Getty Foundation and the City of Los Angeles join to conserve the mural, eventually spending $7.8 million to restore this allegorical depiction of United States imperialism. What was once a fake Mexican village becomes the historical site it always aspired to be. 1956 Los Angeles, California Enforcing a rarely observed law requiring cars to be raised a certain height above the street, LAPD officers begin ticketing the newest cultural expression of the postwar East L.A. barrios: lowriders. In response, local resident Ron Aguirre gathers surplus parts from old World War II planes and creates a hydraulic system that lowers and raises his '56 convertible at the flick of a switch, thus evading the California vehicle code. Chevy Impalas can now hop at will. The "low and slow" car culture is born.

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