He was a founding member of the Chicano collective, Los Four that consisted of artists Carlos Almaraz, Beto de la Rocha, Frank Romero and himself.
[citation needed] Six months later, his family relocated to East Los Angeles, California, where he spent his childhood and adolescence, except for some time in Guadalajara in 1944 or 1945.
[citation needed] As a young teenager, Luján was heavily influenced by the Afro-American music scene in Los Angeles, for instance listening to Johnny Ace and Mary Wells.
[citation needed] By this time of his graduation in 1973, East L.A. had become a hotbed of socio-political and cultural activity, as the Chicano Movement became a turbulent and exciting social force in the communities the U.S. Southwest.
The first of these was held at Camp Hess Kramer, which was, according to Luján, "a Jewish camp that allowed Mexican-Americans to meet there to talk about educational disparities that we had in East L.A."[3] In 1969, Luján curated a Chicano art show at Cal State Long Beach, and during the show's run, met with various artists associated with East LA art journal Con Safos.
Luján was invited to become art director of Con Safos, and through this work, he met with three other like-minded Chicano artists and formed Los Four in the Fall of 1973 at the University of California, Irvine.
The Yellow Brick Road, which was built to run from the plaza (which is currently being demolished to build a high-rise with chain restaurants and businesses) to the train platform, is a prominent motif taken from the 1939 classic movieThe Wizard of Oz, a movie which was an inspiration to Luján's work.
[citation needed] Magu's artwork became famous in its own right throughout the 1980s and 1990s as it used colorful imagery, anthropomorphic animals, depictions of outrageously proportioned lowriders, festooned with Indigenous/urban motifs juxtaposed, graffiti, Dia De Los Muertos installation altars and all sorts of borrowings from pop-culture.
His art also even has Western influences and has cited a fondness for, “Giacometti, Picasso, and Henry Moore,”[9] It is through his work that he tries to unite the different cultures and attempts to get people to understand that the “Chicano is American."
In his monograph, "Aztlán to Magulandia", Luján reflects upon his works and describes the life long journey he underwent for his art while looking at themes such as history, mythology, and as his own Chicano heritage.
[12] Mapping Another L.A. displayed a variety of works from Chicanx artists in order to demonstrate the developments that occurred in the 1960s for the sake of carving a space for marginalized groups.
Also, in Lujan's 1986 Cruising Turtle Island, he depicted another lowrider, traveling through a "wildly tropical, urban landscape, with a dog person in the lower right corner looking on".