"Hispanic Art in the United States," a traveling show of 30 painters and sculptors has recently been on exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art in Santa Fe. It caused a lot of comment before it closed on April 10, 1989.

There is a tendency these days to mix up art and real life, so it is possible to imagine some upscale Hispanics being offended by the gritty underbelly sensibility that dominates the show. There may be art folks who find themselves indignant at the idea of artists being shown in a prestigious forum "just because" they are Hispanic or conversely worried that the artists are being ghettoized by being group-ed this way, the way people used to worry when there were a lot of shows of so called women's art.

Whatever aspect of this show anybody chooses to get touchy about will be nowhere near as complicated as the reality behind the art. After all, Latin culture is already a richly interwoven historical stew. When you mix that with the other national and racial layers that make up the US culture you have embroidery of countless resonances.

The Hispanic show is loaded with influences, from German Expressionism to Neo-Expressionism, all mixed with traditional Latin popular arts. There are carved Santos and macabre paraphernalia from El Dia de Los Muertos. A painted relief, Mocking Me by Santa Fe artist Rudy Fernandez shows a bird perched on a cactus near a patched heart and a big knife. It is the visual transcription of a million Mexican ballads where the lover's heart has been stabbed by disappointment. If the show is vulnerable to the charge of not being very original, so is every comparable exhibition in these less than inventive times.

What we get from this ensemble is a distinctive mythology, a kind of barrio poetry whose inescapable authenticity makes considerations of politics, sociology and history seem as petty as a frozen dinner.

It is a vision of life lived closer to the bone than most middle class people dare to contemplate. Roberto Gil de Monte's little painting Recuerdeme portrays a cadaverous smoker in a carved frame decorated with skulls.

In this world, there are no buffer zones between gaiety and violence, affection and cruelty, vivacity and death. Here is life watched with one eye on the raw meat of reality and the other rolled backward in its socket staring at magic wafting from monstrous flowers like purple perfume.

The earliest artist here is Martin Ramirez, who died in 1960 in Auburn, California, after 30 years in a mental hospital. His art, all created during his illness, is grossly pigeonholed as psychotic with its compulsive linearity and quality of a haunted mind-map, but it has such imaginative originality that it influenced the Chicago artists Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilson.

Ramirez' visionary insight recurs variously throughout the exhibition. Felipe Archuleta of Tesuque, NM and Gregorio Marzan both sculpt animals in a folk like style. Marzan's have a carnivalesque glitter; Archuleta's the rawness of tribal sculpture. Both are striking for their lack of sentimentality. Animals are not cute when one knows them intimately as both a source of food and as minor deities inhabited by powerful spirits. The primitive belief in the interchangeability of human and animal souls shows up so often as to be an inescapable, and certainly spontaneous, theme. It is humorous in Gilbert Lujan's barrio world where young dandies and their girls are all stylish dogs. It is satirical in Paul Serra's Mad Dogs, where canines are joined by a guy with a briefcase to bay at the moon.

Cesar Agusto Martinez paints iconic portraits of the gentle implacable good old' boys of the barrio. In Hombre que le Gustan Las Mujeres he shows a fat guy wearing a skinny mustache and his undershirt. The Virgin Mary is tattooed on his chest, a sweet young thing on one arm and a naked vamp on the other.

This aesthetic is not new. A street-gang mentality runs through it linking the old pachucos to the new Marielitos. Look at Frank Romero's The Closing of Whittier Boulevard with its face down between the cops and the low-riders.

The question of whether any Hispanic American artists have left the aesthetics of the barrio for the aesthetics of the mainstream presents itself naturally, even if it does not make any difference. Well of course, they have. Ibsen Espada paints in the fashion of a late European Abstract Expressionist and Carlos Alfonzo looks like Jackson Pollak just before the drip paintings.

Patricia Gonzalez puts one in mind of Jennifer Bartlett and Manuel Neri joins Bay Area figurative art to ancient Greece. Maybe Robert Graham is the most surprising artist at this party. His pristine bronzes of nude females appear to have escaped not only the influence of the barrio but also the fingerprints of the mainstream. He has achieved as species of absolute distinction by doing something perfectly simple, sculpting the iconic female nude just right. Yet in this company he fits in with surprising ease, like the prodigal come back from a European university, suave and cosmopolitan but relaxed in the old casa. He shares the prevailing preoccupation with physical vigor, iconic archetypes and magical obsessions.