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This is what Leda Ramos teaches her working-class Latinx and immigrant students: art allows you to archive the patterns of life and wonder about social change. Leda’s parents immigrated to Los Angeles from El Salvador in 1957 and landed in Echo Park, where she grew up with Brazilians, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, an elderly woman who had ridden in a Conestoga wagon from Oklahoma, and a hippie family whose mom didn’t wear bras. As a child, Leda was awestruck by the magic of the carrom board, a game from India, so she made her own and put it in a grassy, overgrown space in her backyard. It would become a community center of laughter, flirting, roughhousing, and playful competition—a sacred social geometry of the play of neighborhood kids.

After stints at highbrow museums, Leda chose the path of the underpaid adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. As I tour her studio in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, she points to a piece of graphic art outlining her immigrant story—it includes an image of her dad—“El Hijo”—in El Salvador, a web of cacti, and a plane in the upper right corner. Next to this piece is a digital painting Leda made with her students of the CARECEN mural Migration of the Golden People, by the artist Judy Baca, which includes scenes of activist Rigoberta Menchú, farmworkers marching with faces wizened from working in the fields, police beating nonviolent protesters on the dirt road of a small village, the lush Central American landscape.

Leda is working in the tradition of Central American and Mexican American political art, in which public art—murals, paintings, posters, and today T-shirts and stickers one puts on a laptop cover or a street sign—documents and awakens us to moral harm. Most famous in this tradition is Diego Rivera, but Leda was moved to awe by David Alfaro Siqueiros, who was brought to Los Angeles from Mexico to teach muralism and paint Tropical America: Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism, which depicted the brutality of capitalism toward immigrants. It was whitewashed, literally, by the Los Angeles City Council before eventually being recovered and restored by the J. Paul Getty Museum.

“Transmigración del moderno Maya-Pipil” (1997) mix media on blueprint paper. Artist Leda Ramos. Leda Ramos Collection, Central American Memoria Histórica Archive, Special Collections and Archives, Cal State LA University Library.

Leda dwells on an artwork she created for the exhibition, Central American Families: Networks and Cultural Resistance, at the Cal State LA University Library as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the Department of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies at Cal State LA. Her piece has images of a Latina in cap and gown, people in ghostlike sheets protesting the dictator Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala, her family’s immigration to the United States, and a Radio Sumpul radio tower, which broadcasted music and stories warning Salvadorians of U.S.-trained military death squads nearby. Dolores Huerta, who founded the United Farm Workers of America in 1962 with Cesar Chavez, gave the keynote speech that day. Leda’s artwork was on walls nearby. Huerta closed her talk as follows:

When we talk about our history, we are talking about the history of the United States of America. . . . It’s our turn and this is our moment. So let’s celebrate Chicano studies by making more history.

Of her work for that day, Leda tells me: “When I honor Dolores Huerta, I am honoring my Salvadoran mother and my Indigenous ancestors.”

When visual art moves us to awe, it can change history. Studies report that we find art that progresses from one tradition, say realism, to another, and art that deviates from artistic conventions of the time and shocks us with the new, to be more powerful. More surprising and awe-inspiring cultural forms—whether they be visual art, New York Times stories, music, or urban legends—are more likely to be shared digitally and to transform how we perceive the world. Susan Crile’s art archives the horrors of torture. In Leda Ramos’s art and teaching, she and her students archive the place of the immigrant within a political narrative of a history of colonialism and violence, protest, and change. We feel shock and awe at this life pattern of subjugation, and wonder what we might do to end such oppression.

A Life of Visual Awe