Mexico underwent a dramatic cultural revolution in 1920, and from this revolution sprung a new type of art. ‘Los Tres Grandes,’ as they came to be known, were three men, Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, who painted legendary murals depicting anti-capitalist and Revolutionary themes. This paper discusses the works of David Alfaro Siqueiros, a revolutionary Mexican mural painter, and his involvement in the Modernist movement in the United States. I first explore Siqueiros’ Los Angeles mural America Tropical and argue that he created it to be a strong political statement in a time of national turmoil. I explore the iconology and iconography of the piece that combined ancient Maya symbolism with modern techniques, creating a wholly new form of publicly available art. I also highlighted the importance of the location of this mural in a Los Angeles district that relies on white tourism for survival, and contrasted it with a mural highlighting the suffering of Indigenous people in the United States and America as a whole. Focusing on his time spent in the United States, I also explore his artist-relationship with the modernist painter Jackson Pollock and Siqueiros’ apparent influences on his style. Finally, I will discuss the influences that Los Angeles art culture had on Siqueiros, including a change in his mural style from individualistic to collectivist.

Public Perception surrounding the sexual exploitation of adolescent girls in history is marred by the manipulation of social elite classes. Bestselling books on Madame De Pompadour, the royal mistress to King Louis XV, falsely claim Madame De Pompadour facilitated a brothel of adolescent poor girls for her royal lover to sexually exploit. While her true involvement was much less proactive, the shifting of blame from established elitists like Louis XV to outsiders like Madame De Pompadour is a long-standing practice within elite upper-class culture. A study of eighteenth-century court behavior aids in illuminating the reasoning behind modern day cases of sexual exploitation within elite classes including that of Jeffrey Epstein and his sex trafficking ring. These “self-fashioning” outsiders, Pompadour and Epstein, infiltrated high social ranks without elite backgrounds and disrupted the established authority within elite culture. By comparing eighteenth-century to twenty-first century elite culture, this literature review is an attempt to understand how attacking an outsider to upper class culture, instead of high-ranking members, has been historically used to maintain the social elite established order. A review of academic research provides some answers for how members avoid public scrutiny for sexually exploiting adolescent girls and how manipulating public attention has been a historically prevalent tool in diverting responsibility to the “self-fashioning” outsider. With future research, we can expose how “self-fashioning,” in the context of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, carried over into elite culture practices of the eighteenth century and is still prevalent in the twenty-first century. This future research can aid in shedding light on centuries of abuse and recycling of misinformation.