Take a look at .화 I would say when I first saw it, it had a great impact on me.
And right away I said to myself, well, I think I'm going to try to portray some type of message to the teenagers of my age.
And it just had to be the mural that inspired me the most that I've ever seen.
The message is that the people, not all of them, but a large group of people are still to keep their neighborhoods.
This mural that reflects what's going through our minds, our problems.
I think what I see and I find moving is a progression.
I almost feel that part of what's happening within this mural is something that has happened in my own life.
Through education, indeed, I have reached heights that I never thought would be possible.
Hundreds of murals crowd the streets and alleys of Chicago's Hispanic neighborhoods, broadcasting messages about courage and pride, old country culture, and a new way of life.
Artists from all over Latin America join with Chicago painters to create vivid statements that help define the community.
The mural movement began in the 60s, sparked by an influx of new immigrants and the turmoil and creativity of the times.
Using symbols and vibrant images, the murals create a common language, easily recognizable and understood.
They draw on a tradition of wall paintings in Mexico, but tell their own story about people determined to make their mark in a turbulent northern city.
Teacher and psychiatrist Olga Nuno came to Chicago from the small village of Ayutla in Mexico at the age of nine.
Her family settled in the Pilsen neighborhood at the time when wall paintings were first beginning to appear.
The murals played an important role in opening up communication, not only in the community, but within families as well.
I know that in my own family, as we were getting over the shack of moving to such a different place, there was a lot of silence.
And I think the silence had to do with not finding words to express how the changes had affected us.
It slowly, almost in a way that it could not be perceived, allowed us an avenue for communicating events, experiences, but also emotion.
Emotion about the past as well as the transition into the present.
Okay, nos vemos.
Adiós.
¿A dónde vas a querer ir hoy? ¿A dónde quieres ir? Painting heroes is important in sort of carrying that sense of you are important as a people.
But the heroes painted, the selection is also important.
I don't know how much of it was done consciously by the artists, but the choices were just excellent.
They were just the kind of choices the community needed.
They needed people who were not traditional.
These people who were breaking out, who had made themselves known through breaking with the old order of things.
Benito Juarez, Morelos, again, these were all people who protested their situation.
They confirmed, and I thought solidified, our growing sense.
There's a problem, we've got to do something about it.
There's a combination of old and new in some of them.
And I'm glad that whoever painted them also painted that because some of the first ones were mostly about Mexico or Puerto Rico as this wonderful place.
And my parents liked those because, oh, you know, it was a picture of home.
But for our generation that was going to school, there was no way that we were going to go back.
Economically, it was impossible.
I think that part of this movement of the murals and getting more involved politically was because there was now a group of people who said, this is home and we've got to make the best of it.
I liked the ones that had depicted some kind of protest.
Again, I felt that we needed to express outrage, that people were living in such poor conditions that they needed help and nobody seemed to notice.
The murals were the first time, I think, that it was public.
This is how we felt.
I think that was the inspiration that allowed me to nurture the curiosity so that I took paths that my family had not taken before.
I went to college and then decided to go to graduate school, went into medicine, and after that, psychiatry.
The first thing that these murals did, I think they sort of sparked a process, a process which first began by being able to identify with something positive.
To me, the murals hit someone that I knew about, that looked like me, that shared history, so it gave, it affirmed a sense that I am valuable if only because I'm a human being.
I started photographing those murals because the community, I don't know what's going on, but we're losing a lot of property through fires.
The city wants the land and their buildings, and they tore down those buildings.
I don't know if someone else is doing it.
I started photographing those murals in order to resolve.
I was doing it for myself.
I never done anything for any other people, and I don't belong to any group.
I just go out, grab my camera, and I said, I know they're going to tore down that building, and I want to maintain, and I want to keep that painting with us, that piece of art that reflects our life.
That's one of the reasons that I always go out and photograph the murals.
I not only try to do it in an artistic way, just taking the picture.
And there are times that I present the pictures to some of my friends.
I would let them know where this mural was, and they feel sad about it because we lost something.
Gas company worker Ivan Justiniano came to Chicago from Puerto Rico when he was a teenager.
He makes a hobby of photographing murals around his Logan Square neighborhood.
The murals, when we see it, when I see it, I see that they represent the Latino community, the Puerto Rican community.
When I see the paintings, to me, I see my own life in a way.
Those murals are telling us continuously, remember the reasons why you come to this country.
Don't forget who you are.
The color of the murals I go to any Caribbean country, and you see the color.
That's the first thing you see, even the houses.
Here, that was something that I noticed when I came.
There was no color.
That was gray and white.
The only color that you could see was from the streetlights or neon signs.
The mural Every morning when I go to the bus stop to wait for the bus, there's a group of people, I mean the students, they're going to school.
But none of them drop a quarter there to buy the newspaper.
Well, they're telling that we're in front of the mural, but that mural will tell them not to drop out from school, to stay out of drugs.
There's so much information there.
They may laugh at the guy because he's drunk and he's on the floor.
But the artist is telling them, this could be you if you don't keep looking toward the future.
And every time when they had to walk to get the bus, they had to pass by them.
And they lean on them, they know it's there.
And probably they're the ones that the artist wants to reach when they put those murals there.
They want to tell them continuously.
I may not see what the artist wants me to see, but I create my own.
And I give credit to those guys who are doing it.
But in a way I believe they represent what's going on.
You know, what's happened to us every day, drugs, drop out, no housing.
Look around you, you have to do something.
I mean, we're not going anywhere.
We're part of this community.
We may not have the power on the media to let people know that we're here to stay.
But that mural there is telling the people, you know, we're here to stay.
I grew up in a neighborhood where there were lots of gangs.
And that was a big influence on me.
My artwork when I was in eighth grade, seventh grade, had to do with boys smoking or guys and gangs with tags.
I didn't realize that it was a negative influence.
I thought, wow, this is great.
My brother is in gangs.
All my friends are in gangs.
So I just draw about it.
Well, it turns out that the more I realized that gangs were just ruining things, that they were beating up on people or beating up my brother or threatening my life, threatening my family's life, I started to put my artwork against gangs.
So my artwork just was saying, you know, just let's cool down on this and realize what life's more about.
Sandra Antogiorgi, high school student and muralist, was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Chicago.
In her artwork, she confronts school and community problems.
I've always wanted to help people do my art.
That was something that I've always wanted to do.
I needed someone to help me.
No one really was there for me.
And different artists that I would look at, different artists that I admired, their artwork would help me a lot.
So I think that's what I've always wanted to do.
I want to help someone just like they helped me.
Certain murals that would attract me the most were the type that had a lot of activity in them, that had lots of people inside of it moving like crazies or holding up flags.
And just that they were pretty active.
Those are the kind that would attract me.
To me, they had earth tone colors and the colors were kind of bright in a way, something about them.
And those are the type of murals that would always catch my attention and make me stare at them for a long time.
When I first started painting murals, it was hard for me because I was always used to painting in a small area.
I was afraid of drawing on a mural.
I was always afraid to pick up my pencil or my paintbrush and draw big.
I always thought that it was going to come out wrong.
But when you do it, you realize that you draw the person inside of your mural.
You make them look at it and want to walk inside and join you.
My Curie High School, Miss Matthews wanted us to paint a mural to put up so all the students could see it.
I have one of the men walking to the White House.
He's on a gold road where they're all at.
And he's walking to the White House.
That's like success and it leads to graduation.
That's what I wanted to get across.
Most of my friends were dropping out of high school, getting pregnant or into drugs and things.
Maybe they'll learn something from it.
You never know.
They used to say, that pregnant girl shouldn't be there, Sandra.
It's too big.
Why don't you shrink it down? And I'd say, well, it's a problem.
People have to face it.
Or isn't that too violent? Why do you have that drunk person? And I just tell them the mural has to do with everything.
It has to do with the youth.
That's what I'm trying to focus on, the youth.
And don't tell me you don't drink because everyone else, you know, they're starting to get really involved in that.
As in murals, as in my own artwork, I want a person, the viewer, to know who I am.
I want the person to want to go inside the mural, walk inside, just feel it and feel the energy that I want to portray.
Or feel the thought that I'm thinking and feel just exactly what I'm feeling.
And it's always been important to me to let the viewer know what was going on in my mind and in my heart and just what was going on in my life.
Hopefully, I'll be able to paint a lot more murals.
I'll be able, people will ask me to paint more murals.
I'll get paid for it or I can show an example of how the community's growing or it's not growing or how negative it is or how positive it is, different things like that.
If not, maybe I can go to, they'll invite me to Mexico or Puerto Rico to paint or Paris.
I really want to be invited somewhere to paint.
I think that would be great to paint a mural somewhere else having to do with me and the people will be able to say, that's Sandra, you know.
And that's what I want right now.
That's what I'm trying to work at.
Not only a mural, though, and everything else, just artwork itself.
All art is political.
Okay, the reason I say that art is political is because everything that is painted has got to do with the environment, politics, or what's happening in the community.
A native of Texas, Jose Guerrero was a factory worker for many years.
He began to paint murals to express the views and feelings of neighbors and coworkers.
The mural at the Chicago Park District tool room where we paint the mural deals with the people working in the park.
So it includes women, men, black and white.
And of course, the reason it's important is because a lot of the workers participate in doing it.
Well, not a lot, but at least six or seven, you know.
And the rest of them participated in either criticizing it or supporting it, you know.
Some liked it, some didn't, you know.
Some said that there should be more women, and some said that in the first place they didn't have enough women working there.
In reality, they don't, you know.
In the landscape, you know.
We did it during the wintertime, you know.
During dinnertime, in the afternoons, or whenever it was snowing hard, you know.
We didn't have nothing else to do.
Well, we had a lot to do, you know.
But we took time to do it anyway.
The murals in each community call for different themes for the simple reason that, like in Chicago, there's different ethnic groups.
If you're the one in the black community, you will call for something different, let's say in a Polish community, you know.
There are people who are working or members of the working class.
That doesn't mean that their backgrounds are the same, you know.
For instance, there was one done at McDonald's on Valmont and Poleski, who has dealt with the Polish culture.
And it has a lot of costumes that the Polish people wear.
It talks about Polish struggles.
In the Mexican neighborhood, there's different things, such as the struggle with the farm workers, the demonstrations against immigration.
So, of course, it calls for a different theme, like the mural Si Se Puede.
It was dealing with the farm workers and the community.
Carlos Cortez, Ray Vasquez, and me and the other artists and myself, we tend to say that we're mostly culture workers.
We see it as something we're doing not only to educate ourselves, but to educate also the community.
Like, when we're painting, we're artists.
People see us and say, that's the artist, or that's a muralist.
Or like the kids in the neighborhood, some people say, that's a mural man.
But there's nothing wrong with people who want to be called artists or whatever.
It's alright with me, just that I myself am more comfortable being a culture worker, like Cortez or like Marco Ray, or like many, many other artists.
None of the murals are just painted for the hell of it.
All I have to deal with is specific situations.
And like we have said before, maybe somewhere in the 21st century, other people will learn from us too, and they'll say, well at least they contributed not only to the art community, but to the working class.
Because working people don't just work, go to the fair and come back, they do a lot of things.
They read politics, they discuss politics.
In my case I discuss politics and also do art.
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