Over four decades of painting murals, Victor Ochoa has earned a reputation as a driven activist, gifted muralist and a proud Chicano.
Well known for his work in Chicano Park and his role in San Diego’s Chicano Arts Movement, the southeast San Diegan’s work often focuses on culture, identity and politics while reaching an audience near and far. For example his pieces have appeared in Mexico City, Barcelona, New York, Vancouver, Cuba, and Ireland and beyond.
Yet despite being responsible for the creation of more than 100 murals, an ongoing involvement with a variety of community organizations, and an injury to his shoulder that makes it harder to paint, Ochoa shows no desire to slow down. It’s a drive that received a boost last month when California Arts Council designated him a Legacy Artist Fellow, one of 21 artists so named.
The fellowship, which was awarded to three San Diegans, comes with a $50,000 award and is intended to recognize well established artists with 10 or more years experience in a variety of artistic mediums who also have demonstrated leadership and generated social impact through their work.
Actors Alyce Smith Cooper and Macedonio Arteaga Jr. are the other San Diegans recently receiving the honor.
Ochoa was interviewed about it Wednesday while painting three stories up on a scaffold at the site of his latest project in Chicano Park.
“At 73, to receive this type of grant, it’s perfect timing for me,” he said. “It just makes me work even harder.”
Born in Los Angeles and raised by parents who were from Mexico, Ochoa displayed a talent for drawing at an early age. His childhood jobs often incorporated art in some respect. For instance, one of his earliest jobs was in a Tijuana photo shop where he learned to develop and edit photos. He had planned to get a part-time job as a field worker, but his mother often told him, “Do what you love to do.”
His family’s time in Los Angeles in the mid 1950s did not come without struggles. His parents were undocumented, and when he was 7, the family was removed from their home in east LA by immigration officials under “Operation Wetback,” an Eisenhower-era campaign that resulted in the largest mass deportation in U.S. history. Beside its racist name, its military-style tactics uprooted hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants — some of them American citizens— and shipped them to Mexico, often to unfamiliar places.
Ochoa’s family relocated to Tijuana. He says now that the “border always intervenes” in his life.
But his time in Tijuana led Ochoa’s perspective to evolve, he said, before he returned to LA in his teenage years. It enabled him to learn Spanish — a language his parents dissuaded him and his sister from speaking in LA out of fear it might attract the attention of immigration officials.
“My attitude, the Chicano attitude, was developed on the way back to LA,” Ochoa said. “I spoke Spanish, learned a bunch of Mexican history and cultural things, like dance.”
Ochoa moved in with relatives in LA to finish high school and went to college in San Diego, where he enjoyed his studies at San Diego City College and San Diego State University, where he received a AA in technical illustration and a BA in art, respectively.
Living in San Diego also meant he was closer to his parents, who still lived in Tijuana.
While in college Ochoa became involved with Chicano activism in Barrio Logan. He was among a group of activists, artists and community who took over the land underneath the San Diego-Coronado Bridge in 1970 to protest the planned construction of a California Highway Patrol Station. The group insisted that local officials keep their promise for a park in the neighborhood.
A few years later he and other artists were the first muralists in Chicano Park, now known as the largest concentration of Chicano murals in the world with more than 80 paintings.
“I paint murals from the attitude of the ’60s and ’70s, which is kind of issue-oriented,” Ochoa said. “I want people to be proud of who they are. The history of the community is really important to me.”
Part of what Ochoa loves about mural work is that it is widely accessible in a way that fine art found in a gallery is not. He also ires its community focus.
He says muralists get immediate on their work, because people in the community often voice their opinions as they by and see the work in progress. This allows him to learn more about himself and to better incorporate community opinions into his work, he said.
“It’s not just a Victor Ochoa mural, it’s a community mural,” Ochoa said.
Ochoa has a long history as an activist and educator. He has served on the Chicano Park steering committee and was part of the restoration project, he has been an arts consultant for the Jacobs Foundation, and he co-founded the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park. The Centro is a multidisciplinary community-based arts center devoted to producing and preserving Indian, Mexican, and Chicano art and culture.
Through it all he has also spent a great amount of time working with young people, teaching at MAAC Community Charter School for over a decade and at Grossmont College for another two decades. He also taught at the University of California San Diego and San Diego Mesa College.
“When you do art, once you get into it, you go into this other realm,” Ochoa said. “For me it is like going to church or something like that, and that’s why I love when young people feel that spiritual energy and then they build from it.”
Going forward, Ochoa has no shortage of projects on his mind. He’d like to update the façade of Centro, start a parade that goes from National City to Barrio Logan, finish a mural he is working on in Chicano Park and continue helping young artists and muralists develop.
“I am proud of who I am and who my community is,” Ochoa said. “I want to continuously teach that new generation.”
