La Memoria de la Tierra: UCLA

Located on the north side of Ackerman Union, the mural is made up of three 26-foot-long glass panels. The left panel portrays Westwood, long before UCLA, with a shimmering light-blue outline of Royce Hall where it sits today.

This mural is a piece of land in memory, including Westwoods original people and the land rivers original state. The story of Westwood flows over the three, 26-foot long panels; starting off is a tribute to the land, detailing where the Los Angeles River had once flowed and where the Gabrielino/Tongva tribes and native flora and fauna thrived.

In the second segment, homage is paid to many men and women who have impacted UCLA and its Bruin community. The middle panel is built around a trinity of women who opposed the colonial rule by Spanish missionaries in California in the late 1700s; Angela Davis, civil rights activist and former UCLA faculty member, who was fired by the University of California Board of Regents for her association with communism; and Dolores Huerta, iconic labor leader who worked with Cesar Chavez on behalf of farmworkers.

The future of the campus is on the right, with rhizomes (long, narrow channel-like roots) filled with the faces if other significant people, many of them faculty, who are doing the work to bring UCLA into the future and ensuring that UCLA remains in harmony with the land. The third panel was designed “to tale the knowledge hat comes from the university and [spread] it widely.”