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Scene one, take one, roll one.

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Okay, so if you could tell us a little bit about Ayutlal coming to Chicago.

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Well, I grew up in a very small town in Necola, Ayutlal, Jalisco, which was around 2000 at that time,

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but it was pretty much spread in a valley, lots of mountains.

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And at the time that I was there as a child, they had just built a dirt road that went through there.

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This town happened to be on the way of a very popular place called Talpa,

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which is where a virgin was supposed to be doing miracles.

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So it was actually an exciting place to be at, and that's probably why they built that road.

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Pretty rural people made their living by planting corn.

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They had their own cows and had their own gardens and things like that, fruit gardens and vegetable gardens.

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That was in contrast to Chicago, where the house I remember where we moved to didn't have even a yard.

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It was one big apartment building, and my mother was very concerned about safety,

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so we spent most of the time inside the house, which was a two-bedroom where there was usually three or four kids,

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and we got up to eight people, so it was quite crowded.

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The coming, the change, the switch was quite shocking.

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When I was used to going hiking up the hills by myself or just with another kid, even at the age of eight,

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we usually accompanied our cousins going hiking, or we went to the river to wash clothes.

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Here we couldn't go out at all, so the restrictions, the limitations, and that sense of fear, too.

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We didn't know many people around in Chicago. Over there we knew everybody.

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The other things was, again, I was so used to the mountains,

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and we had two rivers that sort of framed the town with mountains on the other side,

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and so I missed it terribly. I missed that.

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The weather was completely different. Different climate over there was usually in the 70s.

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We had our dry season and rainy season here. We came in the fall, so winter was quite a surprise.

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With the snow, I was curious initially, but after a while it was just too cold.

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It was very different. I'd forgotten the flavor.

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I tried very much to forget the emotional flavoring of this big change, rather big change.

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I am picking you up pretty good here, Ron.

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Oops, sorry.

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Here it's still a little bit. Same two, take one.

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It's a lot quieter now.

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Okay, Sue.

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Okay, so if you could tell us a little bit about the background of the problems in the community and the coming of the murals.

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Okay. As a child and a teenager, there was a strong sense of isolation, of being different, and not in a good way.

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The difference was negative. There were few people like me in the neighborhood,

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and we didn't have the same kinds of shelter, the same kinds of food. Everything was very different.

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There was also a lot of sense that we couldn't do anything about the isolation, the problems, which were a lot of gang violence,

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city services not being provided, et cetera, et cetera, just a lot of things.

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So we started going to Howe House, which in the early 70s became Casa Aslan,

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which was a place for immigrants to go and find services and find about information.

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And it was going to Casa Aslan, especially after they started painting murals,

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that I think the community, as well as myself, broke from that sense of isolation.

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Okay, very good.

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Scene three, take one.

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Okay, Sue.

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So tell us a little bit about the murals at Casa Aslan.

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For a child's eyes, or even a teenager's, when you are feeling, again, very isolated,

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seeing these giant figures on the wall of people that looked like you, of people that you read about as you were growing up,

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people that my grandfather used to talk about. He didn't know how to read and write, but he could tell us stories about the revolution.

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It was like bringing memories of home, memories of home.

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So they had a special coloring, emotional coloring, besides the vibrancy of the very murals themselves.

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And they became a way that I felt as a community, we were expressing our memories of home and our hopes for the future.

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Some of the murals at Casa Aslan, the initial ones, again, were pretty much of sort of a revolutionary theme, which is what we needed.

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And then, one day, we felt that we had a break free, something had to change in the community.

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And the fact that these were paintings of people who had successfully changed things, that was very important.

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And so there was layer upon layer of emotional impact, so that going there was inspiring overall.

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We'll come back to anything you think we're missing.

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Scene four, take one.

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I think what the murals provided the observer, and that's people in the community, was with a visual image of integration,

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or at least transition from past homeland to present home.

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And you will find in a lot of the murals, either skylines of Chicago, and skylines are usually a rural place, or maybe like an island, things like that.

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So it brought, in a sense, generations together, because, for example, in my house, we talked about, oh, this is the way it was, and that's the way it was back home.

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And that was integrated.

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Usually, or at least some of the murals provide with a transition, a transition, visual transition, where you're here in the new home.

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Certain murals that have more of a pessimistic, or at least a realistic, depiction of what was going on in the neighborhood, then go from the heroic past with temples of the Aztecs,

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and then to depictions of the city, where there's crime and gangs and pain and suffering, and the optimistic ones, the ones that I think sort of go beyond just a realistic depiction, then offer a solution, a way out of that.

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So it unified generations.

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Parents could tell their kids about the past and their roots, which they felt proud of, and offered, in a sense, hope that the future could also be glorious.

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Again, the themes, there was a lot of glorious past heroic events.

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And so it's not surprising at all to see Indian symbols, historical Indian themes, together with new things that are going on in the city, here in Chicago, mostly.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.