Flowers for the living: Calla Lillies and the Politics of Representation

Bowie Sharp

Hernández, Judithe La Bruja y su Gato, 2009 pastel on paper Paper: 30 x 44 in. Framed: 27 1/8 x 34 7/8 in. Courtesy of the Artist Riverside Art Museum (RAM)

The streets of Los Angeles are quieter than usual. In neighbourhoods once buzzing with life, the fruit vendors are missing from their usual corners, the sounds of commerce have dulled, and storefronts are boarded up. A hush of unease drapes the city like a morning fog. Here, where the Hispanic or Latino community makes up 46.9% of the total population, fear has settled into daily life. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, stepped-up deportations, and the looming threat of family separations have cast a shadow over entire communities. Amid these tensions, it is more important than ever to examine the art and voices of Mexican American communities, not only as creative expressions, but as acts of resistance, cultural preservation, and testimony.

In a city as diverse and ever-changing as Los Angeles, art has always been political, but today it carries a new sense of immediacy and urgency. For the city’s Mexican American and Chicanx communities, whose communities and livelihoods have endured generations of struggle, art is both shield and sword. The act of creating art can become a tool to navigate memory and grief, and a demonstration of defiance against historical erasure. In this climate, imagery of the calla lily (a flower that has long symbolised both mourning and resilience) has emerged as a subtle but powerful allegory for survival.

The calla lily’s symbolism runs deep in Mexican and Mexican American visual culture. Though traditionally associated with death and funerary rites, the flower also signifies transformation and the cyclical nature of life. Its sculptural, trumpet-like form is often seen in altars and offerings, particularly around Día de los Muertos. However, the calla lily is more than a decorative flourish. It carries potent symbolism for the emotional complexities of grief and rebirth in duality with purity and beauty. In artworks by Judithe Hernández and Diego Rivera, the flower appears as a witness to histories of cultural endurance through violence and structural injustice.

Judithe Hernández’s La Bruja y Su Gato (2007), housed in the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, depicts a woman cloaked in a purple robe and turquoise skirt, with a skull mask evoking both Mexican folk tradition and the specter of death. She kneels before several bunches of calla lilies, her hand connected to the skull-faced cat beside her by a red ribbon that weaves towards the flowers. The lilies, traditionally linked to funerals and mourning, amplify the tension in the image: they evoke the omnipresence of death but also suggest the possibility of spiritual transformation. The image visualises the blurred lines between the living and the dead, the domestic and the spiritual, the beautiful and the grotesque. Like much of Hernández’s work, it is both steeped in folklore and grounded in contemporary urgency.

Hernández, Judithe Juárez Quinceañera, 2017 pastel mixed-media on canvas 40 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist Riverside Art Museum (RAM)

In Juárez Quinceañera (2017), another work by Hernández in the same collection, a young woman in a traditional quinceañera dress and elaborate headdress stands against a backdrop of smeared, bloody handprints. Her headdress echoes Aztec sculpture, and her mask bears an expression of peace (or is it despair?). In her hands, she holds two calla lilies. These flowers, which are rich with funerary and spiritual significance, become a token of innocence and femininity shadowed by violence. They signal the dual burdens faced by Mexican American girls: coming of age in a culture that celebrates them while society simultaneously endangers them. The calla lilies underscore the work’s emotional complexity, and reference the dialogue between femininity, ritual and mourning.

The interplay of femininity, endurance, and mourning also pervades Diego Rivera’s The Flower Vendor (Girl with Lilies) (1941). Rivera, whose mural work helped shape Mexican visual identity in the twentieth century, returns time and time again to the motif of the indigenous flower seller. In this painting, a young girl kneels, her back bent before a towering cascade of calla lilies. Her figure is small, almost overwhelmed by the weight of the flowers - signalling the burden of cultural labour and historical grief. Rivera’s lilies are not just beautiful; they mourn centuries of colonisation, but also honour the dignity of native life. The funerary symbolism of the calla lily is ever-present – they signify centuries of loss, yet carrying them becomes an act of endurance and resilience.

Rivera, Diego The Flower Vendor (Girl with Lilies), 1941 Oil on masonite 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, California)

The many political murals across Los Angeles are just as important as visual acts of resistance. Yreina D. Cervántez’s La Ofrenda (1989–90), painted beneath an overpass on Second Street and Toluca, turns an unassuming utilitarian structure into a site of cultural remembrance, a monumental ofrenda. At the centre is a portrait of activist Dolores Huerta, surrounded by glowing votive candles, protective palms, and calla lilies in full bloom. Created in solidarity with Central American refugees fleeing violence in the 1970s and 80s, the mural also speaks powerfully to the realities of immigrant life in Los Angeles today, where the threat of ICE raids and deportation casts a shadow over daily existence. Texts by poets Sara Martinez and Gloria Enedina Alvarez, inscribed across open hands and mountainous landscapes, speak of survival, migration, and the trials of border crossing. Here, the calla lily plays a vital role: nestled among devotional symbols like the Ojo de Dios and Mesoamerican deities, it reinforces the mural’s message of resistance and reverence. While evoking mourning, the lilies also signify regeneration and continuity, offering a visual ofrenda not just to Huerta but to all who resist displacement and state violence. As a symbol, they become an anchor for political hope and sacred care, which is particularly resonant in an era when Latin American communities remain under siege.

Photo: City Wide Mural Program, SPARC (social and public art resource centre)

Both in galleries and public spaces, works like these become an instrumental part of making sure Mexican American voices stay heard in the art world. To exhibit, write about, and discuss Mexican American and Chicanx art today is to affirm presence in the face of disappearance, to safeguard cultural memory where it is threatened, and to fight for justice where it is denied. In a city where Latinx communities have historically shaped neighbourhoods, labour movements and cultural life, and where far too many live in fear of deportation or detention, these artworks insist that cultural identity is not marginal, but foundational. The calla lily, in all its contradictions, stands as a visual anchor in this ongoing struggle: marking loss, yes, but also the will to remain and rise again.