A 30th-anniversary celebration for Third World House’s “Solidarity, Peace and Progress” mural will be held at 6 p.m. Friday. Maria del Pilar O’Cadiz, OC ’86, painted the mural 30 years ago with her father for her first-year Winter Term project. Her father, Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma was a prominent southern California muralist who was part of the Chicano Mural Movement in the 1970s. Pilar O’Cadiz is returning to Oberlin to speak about the mural and her father’s work over dinner in Third World House.

The mural runs most of the length of the Third World House lounge and depicts a variety of international leaders and activists, including Ghandi and Mao. This variety of images comes from the collaborative nature of the work. Before painting the mural, O’Cadiz gathered input from Third World House residents on whom they wanted to include to represent people from developing nations and residents of Third World House.

“[Third World House’s mission] is to be a safe space for marginalized people and social activism,” said College junior Miata Rogers, a current Resident Assistant in Third World House and organizer of the anniversary event.

Working off the suggestions she received, O’Cadiz and her father incorporated their own touches, such as an Aztec sun to celebrate their Chicano heritage and images of factories and buildings that O’Cadiz Moctezuma often used in his art to represent progress.

The piece in Third World House is one of the few murals by O’Cadiz Moctezuma still fully intact. His work was recently featured in the America Tropical Interpretive center, which is associated with the Getty Museum. Pilar O’Cadiz, now a research specialist at University of California Irvine, has been restoring some of her father’s murals in Los Angeles. In a phone interview with the Review she explained that she sees mural creation not only as an “aesthetic creative process” but also as a way of “creating a historical memory.”

However, the history of the mural itself had been lost until recently.

“It’s been kind of a secret as long as I’ve been at Oberlin at least,” said Rogers. “No one has known who the people in the mural are; no one has known who created the mural.”

The idea for a 30th-anniversary event in honor of the mural first came about when Rogers overheard alumni visiting for last year’s Latino Alumni Reunion discussing the mural. Rogers found out O’Cadiz’s name and contact information from last year’s Latino/a Community Coordinator Eli Covarrubias. From there, through the funding of the Alumni Association, Rogers was able not only to set up the 30th-anniversary event but also to create a plaque for the mural in order to identify the artist and the figures in the painting.

Rogers said, “I kind of did this on a whim to do something that everyone’s been interested in doing.”