Between 1935 and 1936, J. R. Willis was commissioned by the Gallup public schools, through the Public Works of Art Project, to create a seven-part mural series on Southwest history (which still hangs in the Gallup High School library). Willis’s murals depict major events of Spanish and American colonization of what is now the United States from a Eurocentric perspective.
This mural begins the series and sets the stage for the history presented with an inaccurate and biased map of Spanish exploration of Central and North America in the 1400s and 1500s. The map conflates and drastically oversimplifies the political geographies of Central and South America and Africa. The same is true of the travel routes of Christopher Columbus (1492–1502), Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1527–1536), and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (1540–1542), with a few curious “loop the loops” thrown in. Cabeza de Vaca and Vásquez de Coronado feature prominently in the mural series.
