Bernal, Antonio (b. 1937 -) Antonio Bernal is an artist, activist, actor, teacher, and writer. He is often referred to as the “first Chicano muralist” having painted the Del Rey mural at Teatro Campesino in 1967 when he was an actor with the group. He was born in 1937 in Altadena, California, to Forrest Hopping Sr. (1894-1967) and María Luisa Bernal (1900-1995). His father was a U.S. citizen of Anglo descent who worked as an artist, an interior decorator, and stagehand, creating props for movie sets in the Los Angeles area. His mother was a performer and singer with an operatic voice, born in Hermosillo, Mexico. He had an older sister, Ana María Hopping, who was born in 1932.

Bernal moved around a lot as a child. Within months of his birth, Bernal’s parents left Los Angeles for Mexico City, settling in Colonia Mixcoac, a colonial enclave in the southern part of the metropolis, where they lived in an ex-convent. In 1945, his family moved back to the U.S., to Santa Barbara, California, where he attended Harding Grammar School (now Harding University Partnership School). Three years later, in 1948, the family was in Three Rivers, close to the location of the Kaweah Colony, his father’s birthplace near Sequoia National Park. The Kaweah Colony was a utopian community to which Bernal’s father had been the first child born into when it was first created.

Bernal attended Three Rivers Grammar School, and later Woodlake Junior High, then Mount Whitney High School in Visalia, California. After graduating from high school in 1956, he dedicated some years to training as an actor and dancer. Bernal attended the College of the Sequoias in Visalia briefly and then traveled to Mexico in 1957. He returned there with his father and met Mexican actress Socorro Avelar (1925-2003), with whom he would remain friends the rest of her life. Later that same year, he returned to California, this time to San Francisco. After a stint working at the Bechtel Corporation as a file clerk, in 1959 he began to study dance with the San Francisco Ballet. By 1960 Bernal was back in Mexico and acting. He began studying acting at Mexico City’s Escuela Nacional de Teatro del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes de México (INBA) and focused on the stage. He met and became friends with many of Mexico’s actors, including luminaries from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. In his own estimation, he “failed at acting,” leaving Mexico to return to California at his sister Ann’s request in 1961.

By 1962 he was on scholarship at the California Art Center, and soon to be deeply involved in various civil rights struggles of the time. In particular, he was involved in the Congress of Racial Equality beginning in 1963.[1] He graduated from the California Art Center in 1966 (now the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena). In 1967, his father died. That same year he moved to Fresno, where he worked various jobs, including a stint with the city’s welfare department. In 1968, he became involved with the Teatro Campesino.

A lot happened in that year: the massacre at Tlatelolco, the Chicago convention, the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Bernal was witness to all. It was also at this time that he became a key participant in the Chicano Movement. In 1970, Bernal moved back to Los Angeles again, settling in East LA. He worked for the Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency (EYOA), which administered Head Start and the Teen-Post program, among others.[2] Enamored of Maoism, he became involved with various radical groups, most notably the Brown Berets, the Black Panthers, and the Congreso Obrero, participating in numerous protests. He was a participant in the Chicano Moratorium, the protest of August 29, 1970, in which Rubén Salazar was killed.

At this time, Bernal turned to teaching, as a livelihood. In 1973, he was teaching Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. That same year, he met his wife Belén with whom he raised three children, Hugo, Alex, and Gabriela. The following year, 1974, he left for Mexico City, where they lived in Colonia Navarte, and later Ciudad Azteca and Jardines de Santa Clara (1976). Bernal held a variety of jobs, working in Colonial Rom at a language institute (1977), at the embassy school, Relaciones Culturales (1978), the Escuela Mexicana-Americana, and in Echegary (1979) as a union organizer. In 1983, Bernal relocated his family to East LA and began teaching at Garfield High School, where he remained for twenty-three years, retiring in 2005. He and his wife, Belén, divorced in 1985. At Garfield, Bernal taught Spanish to the predominantly Mexican American student body. He also painted a mural there, still preserved on the second floor of the high school. He was an inventive and dedicated teacher. His teaching methods were unconventional but effective.

Bernal flourished as a painter during the 80s and 90s. Then in the 90s he began to travel even more. He made regular trips to Cuba and traveled to Africa, Europe, Mexico, and South America. He currently lives in Fresno, California where he continues to write and paint.

This is an abridged version of Charlene Villaseñor Black’s biography on Antonio Bernal. For the full-text version, please see [name of publication, 2020].

[1] August Meier, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (University of Illinois Press 1975). CORE was founded in Chicago in 1942. For a map listing CORE protests and actions by year and city, see http://depts.washington.edu/moves/CORE_map-events.shtml . There were a number of housing protests in Los Angeles and Santa Monica. [2] https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt7m3nf5pb/ (finding aid at USC, The Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency of Greater Los Angeles”