By Deborah Vankin/Contact Reporter – LATimes.com – Photo Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times
It was 1979 and Emigdio “Higgy” Vasquez was 11. His father, Emigdio Vasquez, often called the godfather of Chicano art in Orange County, drove him to a mural he was painting in the working-class, largely Mexican American Cypress Street neighborhood close to where they lived; many residents worked at the fruit packing house down the street. Vasquez’s mural, on the side of an apartment building garage, depicted the faces of Chicanos: Cesar Chavez, citrus farmers, rail workers, miners.
