Godfather of Chicano Murals was also an activist, novelist, artist, Teatro Campesino member

Antonio Bernal was more than “the first Chicano muralist.”

Sure, his iconic 1968 mural of farmworker leader César E. Chávez flanked by the likes of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata served as the backdrop for dozens of presentations by Teatro Campesino.

The artwork was resurrected in 2021 in Del Rey and holds honor at a small plaza that includes picnic benches and other murals touting the community’s original name of Rancho del Rey del Río.

Bernal, whose full name is Antonio Bernal Hopping, only drew two murals. The second one was in the late 1980s at Garfield High School in East Los Ángeles.

The Los Ángeles public school teacher left education to join Teatro Campesino was also an author, blogger, painter, commentator and actor.

Bernal, who lived in Fresno until a few years ago, died Sept. 1. He was 86 years old.

He was a civil rights fighter who was friends with members of the Black Panthers.

He shared space with Jane Fonda at an anti war rally on the steps of Los Ángeles City Hall. He sang ‘Guantanamera’ with Pete Seeger at the Hollywood Bowl.

“This story of my father’s has been building over many decades,” said his son, Hugo Hopping, at an Oct. 21 celebration of his father in Del Rey.

“My dad passed away on the 1st of September. Of course, it had to be Labor Day for an old Marxist, it was kind of a joke played on him. He would like to have gone out on May 1st.”

The memorial drew about two dozen people who reminisced about Bernal while enjoying food/drinks and listening to movimiento music by Agustín Lira and Patricia Solórzano.

“Bernal was a lifelong activist, and among his friends were members of the Black Panthers, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Brown Berets, and El Teatro Campesino,” Gabriela Rodríguez-Gómez wrote in ‘The Artist as Eyewitness: Antonio Bernal Papers, 1884-2019.’

Bernal thought he’d go into the movies

Bernal was born in México in 1937, and grew up assisting his father in decorating Spanish colonial furniture. As a teen, he took part in theater productions in Fresno and Visalia, and later studied dance with the San Francisco Ballet.

He befriended flamenco dancer Carmen Amaya in 1959, and the next year he enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Arte Teatral of the National Institute of Fine Arts in México City. There, he befriended emerging movie and television actors like Héctor Bonilla, Enrique Aguilar, Socorro Avelar and Rita Macedo.

Bernal left acting in 1962 and returned to California where he enrolled at The Art Center School in Pasadena. Within a year, he was involved with the Congress of Racial Equality and became familiar with issues in the Black community. He documented the Chicano Movement in photos and drawings.

He graduated with honors from the Art Center College of Design in 1966.

Bernal joined Teatro Campesino in 1968 when the farmworker theatrical troupe founded by Luis Valdez and Agustín Lira set up shop in Del Rey.

At the 2021 ceremony in Del Rey, Bernal recalled performing in France in 1976 with Teatro Campesino and singing ‘Le Internacional’ in Spanish at the Sorbonne “with hundreds and hundreds of people singing in different languages.”

Bernal thought he’d get involved in movies, “but it was only Luis and Danny,” referring to the Valdez brothers.

“I started running around with a friend of mine who was an actress in Televisión Centro (in México City) and did a lot of television there,” said Bernal. “So my life just scattered.”

The teatro, he said, “was a moment in my life and that was that.”

Lira, the Teatro Campesino co-founder, said Bernal was “a very talented man.”

“It’s kind of difficult to round out the whole picture about Antonio, but he was strong. He was tough, and he was very honest about his feelings,” said Lira. “A lot of people didn’t like him because of that. I do miss him.”

Del Rey mural was resurrected in 2021

On the facade of the UFW headquarters, Bernal’s panel of murals shows a soldadera (and Adelita or female soldier) holding a saber, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Joaquín Murrieta, Chávez, Reies López Tijerina (holding the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.

The panels were used as backdrops for Teatro Campesino performances. Retired educator/folkloric dance instructor Vicki Treviño and local artist/curator Carissa García located the original murals, which were acquired by the AltaMed Art Collection.

In 2021, artist Mauro Carrera and volunteers recreated the mural.

Hugo Hopping, in an obituary he wrote, said his father embraced being Chicano but never politicized it.

“He considered himself an internationalist Mexican-American and would resist any form of nationalization of identity, but would not turn or look away from being framed as a Chicano artist,” Hopping wrote.

“He saw identity as necessary but not the main driver of history and he sought more scientific channels by which to understand, define, and emancipate humanities from repressive systems and empires.”

Bernal participated in the Aug. 29, 1970 National Chicano Moratorium, an anti Vietnam War rally that resulted in the Los Ángeles County Sheriff’s death of newspaperman Rubén Salazar.

In 1973, he lectured in Chicano/o Studies at Cal State Los Ángeles before relocating to México City. There, he met Belén Miranda, an activist, labor leader and anthropologist. They married the following year, and divorced in 1985.

Bernal relocated to Los Ángeles and became a teacher of Spanish at Garfield High School. He retired in 2005.

“In the last 10 years of his life, he spent a lot of time with the houseless and homelessness issues,” said Hopping. He even sat down and did designs for types of housing that could address that problem.”

Hopping has set up a Substack page – https://antoniobernalmemorial.substack.com – where people can find out more about his father.

Bernal Hopping is survived by his sons Alex Hopping and Hugo Hopping, his daughter Gabriela Miranda, and his grandchildren, Malcolm Recinos, Amara Hopping, Violeta Hopping, and Costa Guldager Hopping.