Vincent Valdez and Ry Cooder: El Chavez Ravine

Vincent Valdez and Ry Cooder: El Chavez Ravine features Valdez’s oil painting on a 1953 Good Humor ice cream truck portraying the forced removal of a predominantly Mexican American community for the construction of Dodger Stadium in the late 1950s. 

In 2004, Cooder invited Valdez to collaborate and create a painting to align with his album “Chavez Ravine” (2005), a musical interpretation of the neighborhood’s history. Posing a visual contradiction between the eviction and the ice cream truck, Valdez depicts Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, former LAPD Chief William H. Parker, J. Edgar Hoover, and displaced families. 

Shown alongside Valdez’s preparatory materials, El Chavez Ravine draws from the style and history of Mexican and American muralism and Chicano car culture. 

Recently acquired by LACMA, the work is a monument to a disturbing chapter in L.A. history and symbolizes struggles across the country about affordable housing, eminent domain, gentrification, and discrimination.

Credit: Overview from museum website