The Fight To Rescue The Works Of A Forgotten Mexican Artist In Orange County

Artist Román O’Cadiz crouches down, dips his brush into freshly poured black paint, and adds the finishing strokes to the raised letters that spell out his grandfather's name.

He takes a step back and gazes at the finished mural, the painted words “Sergio O’Cadiz” gleaming in the sunlight.

The concrete relief mural in the entry plaza of Fremont Elementary School in Santa Ana was originally created by his grandfather, J. Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma.

In the last month, it has undergone a much-needed restoration led by the Santa Ana Community Artist(a) Coalition, a grassroots collaborative that works to promote and preserve public art through community-driven mural arts projects. The family of the late artist, who died in 2002, was also involved.

“It's cathartic,” said Román O’Cadiz. “It alleviates some of this frustration that my family has felt, and how his work hasn't been represented or appreciated in the way that we always felt it should.”

Decades ago, J. Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma was a prominent artist in Orange County, where he settled in the early 1960s after moving to the U.S. from Mexico City. O’Cadiz was instrumental in creating art for several of the county’s public buildings, including Cypress College, where an imposing brutalist concrete relief mural he made for the school’s library building still stands.

He created the Fremont Elementary mural in 1973, with the assistance of community members. The concrete mural spans two walls, set back from the street in Santa Ana’s Artesia Pilar Barrio, a historically Mexican American neighborhood just a few miles west from downtown.

The mural incorporates images like the sun, pyramids, and galleons, symbols that connote Mexico’s rich history. Over the years, neglect has taken its toll — there has been natural wear and tear, like UV damage and environmental degradation, and school district staff at one point changed the original color scheme of the stained concrete design. Still, O’Cadiz’s piece remained a timeless, powerful emblem of Santa Ana’s Mexican American community.

Peeling back the layers

Maria del Pilar O'Cadiz recalled the shock and dismay she felt upon seeking the extent of the damage to her father’s mural.

“It was tragic,” she told LAist. “These murals need to be conserved for our historical cultural patrimony, and it's a crime against the humanity of this community to destroy them. So this restoration is a realization of one of my lifelong dreams, and I'm full of joy for it — but it's unfortunate that we have to do it.”

Maria del Pilar O'Cadiz, the artist's daughter, visits the Fremont Elementary mural restoration site on June 9, 2023.

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The process of removing layers of saturated acrylic paint that were applied to the mural had to be done with care. It entails applying a special solution created by MuralColors, an L.A.-based business that produces art and architectural materials. In what is known as “delamination,” the solution was gradually applied to the piece in segments. Then a pressure washer was used to remove the paint without destroying the original art.

It’s a fraught but rewarding process, said Alicia Rojas, restoration project director and a founding member of the Santa Ana Community Artist(a) Coalition.

“This restoration carries a great responsibility and it’s important to us that we honor Sergio’s brush and vision," Rojas said. "It's a process that goes beyond the individual artists and parties involved — it's about our collective work, to uplift and amplify his art.”

Now, O’Cadiz’ intrinsic deep-relief patterns — rhythmic linear arabesques, abstract geometric designs, and Mondrian-like pops of primary colors — appear as ebullient as when the mural debuted 50 years ago.

The Fremont mural is one of two O’Cadiz pieces being restored at Santa Ana schools. An O’Cadiz mural at Monroe Elementary School is earmarked for restoration next. Santa Ana Unified School District officials say they recognize the district’s lapse in stewarding the murals over the years.

“Unfortunately, we have not always kept murals that had historical significance because we didn't understand,” said Robyn MacNair, art administrator for the school district. “We want to prevent that from happening again.”

A rich artistic legacy

Not all of J. Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma’s works have survived over the years, but he looms large in Orange County arts history.

“His work makes OC stare uncomfortably at what it never dreamed of when it came to its Mexicans: unapologetic. Proud. Talented. Successful,” wrote Los Angeles Times columnist and author Gustavo Arellano in an essay for a retrospective exhibit of the artist’s work and legacy at Cypress College in 2019. He quoted O’Cadiz from a Times article dating to the 1970s: ‘My idea of America,” the artist told the newspaper then, “is the right to be as Mexican as I want.’”

Roman O'Cadiz, the artist's grandson, sits among the products used to wash and revitalize the 1973 mural at Fremont Elementary in Santa Ana.

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O’Cadiz’s family shared recollections of the artist and his accomplishments with LAist.

Born in Mexico City in 1934, O’Cadiz attended the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) to study architecture, and along the way studied with legendary painter Diego Rivera.

He first established himself as an architectural designer, lending his talents to some of Mexico's landmark modernist construction projects and public works. According to his family these include the Museo Nacional de Antropología (Museum of Anthropology) in Chapultepec Park, on which he worked as part of the design team.

In 1961, O’Cadiz came to Orange County to work with renowned architect William Blurock, who is credited with designing hundreds of schools and colleges in California and around the world, along with other notable buildings. O’Cadiz joined Blurock’s firm as an architectural conceptual draftsman, his family said.

Orange County buildings that O’Cadiz contributed to include the Cypress College Library, home to one of his more famous concrete murals from 1967; the Santa Ana City Hall, home to a 1972 concrete relief mural; and Century High School in Santa Ana.

Though trained as a modernist, O’Cadiz introduced his expressive forms and diverse surfaces into the brutalist architecture of the era. His diverse body of work included paintings, drawings, graphic designs, sculptures and public murals.

Whitewashing history

But over the years, many of O’Cadiz’s works have been destroyed, most recently a well-known painted mural on Raitt Street in Santa Ana that had been deteriorating; after a solo artist tried to begin restoring it without permission, the property owner had it painted over in 2019.

In 2000, part of O’Cadiz’s Santa Ana City Hall relief mural was removed for a building renovation, his family said; sculptural fountains created for Fountain Valley's Civic Center in 1962 were eliminated and replaced with a prefab fountain.

A signature reading "Sergio O'Cadiz 73" is still visible on the mural at Fremont Elementary in Santa Ana.

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Another well-known loss was a 625-foot-long painted mural in Fountain Valley’s Colonia Juarez neighborhood, which O’Cadiz painted between 1974 and 1976. With the help of community members, the artist depicted the story of Colonia Juarez’s heritage and cultural history — images that ranged from the arrival of Mexican peasants in California at the time of the Mexican Revolution to a scene of police in riot gear dragging a Chicano youth to a patrol car.

That last scene, according to the family, cost him city financial support for the mural. O’Cadiz finished the mural with his own money, but couldn’t raise enough to seal it properly. It deteriorated over time, and the city destroyed and replaced the wall in 2001.

Rediscovering art that's 'like jazz'

Cypress College held its 2019 retrospective exhibition after completing a restoration of O’Cadiz’s monolithic Library Mural, outside what is now the Cypress College Complex building.

And as his Santa Ana school campus murals are being restored, local students have been learning about the artist.

In the weeks leading up to the restoration, the Santa Ana school district’s arts program and the artist coalition invited 20 SAUSD visual and performing arts high school students to learn about O’Cadiz.

Students attended a series of workshops, including a lecture from the artist’s daughter, Maria del Pilar O'Cadiz, who works as an associate program director in UCLA's engineering school. The students created their own art at Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center, and took in a walking tour of remaining O’Cadiz murals in Santa Ana, along with other community murals.

Local Santa Ana artists work on restoring the O'Cadiz mural at Fremont Elementary.

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The restored Fremont Elementary mural will be officially unveiled Friday afternoon.

Meanwhile, the Santa Ana Community Artist(a) Coalition is getting ready for its next O’Cadiz project — the mural at Monroe Elementary, on which work starts next year. One of those working on the restoration will be multidisciplinary artist and coalition founding member Roger Eyes R. — a former Monroe student.

Eyes recalled the first time he saw O’Cadiz’s art as a child.

“I just remember walking up to the school and going, ‘What is that?'" he said. “I had never seen art like that, it just blew my mind. It was like jazz.”