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
In our evolution as a most cultural primate, humans have been finding awe in visual art for tens of thousands of years. Our aesthetic capacities for creation and appreciation have allowed us to see the geometries of the natural and social worlds and navigate those worlds with greater intelligence. Across history, awe-inspiring visual art has allowed us to find hints of what we make together of the ever-changing mysteries of life. Visual art allows us to directly experience awe and enjoy its individual and collective benefits. In the service of promoting cultural evolution through changing minds and history, visual art has shocked and awed people into new ways of seeing the world. These themes ran through a series of stories Steven Spielberg shared from his life of visual awe.
Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, hosted a small gathering in Los Angeles on technology and social progress, which I was lucky enough to attend. When it was my turn to present, I spoke of how to measure awe in the chills, in tears, in the vagus nerve, in the voice and face, and in the DMN, and how awe moves us to wonder and saintly tendencies. As I was talking about the chills, Steven raised his hand. I paused my presentation and, in a slightly absurd act, called on him. He told the story of being awestruck at seeing his new grandchild being born, Kate leaning into his leg while sitting on the floor.
Later that night I happened to sit next to Steven and Kate when out for dinner. They spoke of their careers in film and painting. Of West Side Story, the 2021 remake that Steven had just wrapped up. Of the funeral for Kirk Douglas, who used to frequent Steven’s mom’s restaurant in LA to flirt with her. Stories about how the crying was so intense on the set of Schindler’s List that one actress needed three days of therapeutic intervention to recover from re-creating this awesome archive of the horrors of the Holocaust.
I had to ask:
Steven, what was awe like for you as a child?
Without missing a beat, he recalled seeing his first film when he was five. His dad, an engineer involved in the invention of the computer, took him from their home in Camden, New Jersey, to a theater in Philadelphia. As they inched forward in a long line near the brick walls of the theater, young Steven, holding tightly to his dad’s large hand above, thought they were going to the circus. Instead, it was to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth from 1952. After a wave of disappointment, Steven started to attend to the film’s grainy images. Two trains career down the tracks. A character in a car drives alongside, trying to warn them. To no avail. The trains collide and cars fly everywhere, bodies hurtling into space. Young Steven felt suspended in time, wonderstruck. Awed.
At home, Steven began crashing the cars of his model train set. His dad had to repair the trains repeatedly, so he let Steven borrow the family video camera instead, which he used to stage and film more than one hundred toy train wrecks. No damage was done in this realm of the imagination, just the sacred geometry of make-believe destruction.
One night his dad gathered him up and hustled him into the car. They went to a field and lay on their backs on blankets. A meteor shower washed over the sky. Steven recalls the light, the profusion of stars, how vast the night sky was, and his experiments with seeing—directly, or out of the corner of the eye—fleeting patterns of stellar awe.
It was this wonder of life he hoped to give to others in E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
As Steven asked for the check, he summed up why he still goes to movies and makes movies for others:
We are all equal in awe.
NINE THE FUNDAMENTAL IT How Spiritual Life Grows out of Awe
As I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.
• BLACK ELK
Twant me, ’twas the Lord. I always told him, “I trust to you. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me,” and he always did.