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When Judy Baca was young, her grandmother
would take her on the trolley from their Watts home
to the LA’s downtown Central Market

& they’d pass Simon Rodia’s Nuestra Pueblo
which he shaped from what he could find
along railroad tracks, digging in his yard:

steel rebar, mortar, tiles, mirrors, sea shells,
bottles. The Watts Towers, 17 of them, spiral,
interconnected, 95 feet high, built without ladder

or scaffold on 107th Street by Italian immigrant
& construction worker Simon Rodia
single-handed over thirty years.

For five summers beginning in ’74, artist/teacher
Judy Baca undertook a half-mile long mural,
The Great Wall of Los Angeles

with 400 inner-city kids. Her dream:
to give these ‘naïve hands’ a place to leave
their name, share their story. They called it

‘the sewer,’ that Tujunga Wash flood channel
on whose walls they created vibrant public art:
the history of LA from the pre-historic times

to Zoot Suit Wars & Japanese internment.
A professor emerita, Judy Baca hoped for years
to paint decades more of LA’s history.

That’s happening now—not in the broiling sun
but in a place with shade & toilets, the LACMA
on Wilshire. Baca calls the murals, ‘a tattoo

on the scar where the river ran.’ The Sixties’
Chicano Movement & Watts Renaissance,
depicted in grand scale, as visitors observe.