![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/dnb-2026-balmy-muralists-03.jpg\")
<\/a>A mural in Balmy Alley shows the deterioration over time as the wood beneath the paint cracks and ages.<\/p>\nTIRSO G. ARAIZA: They\u2019re different murals from different times. At the start of this project, we were walking down this alley, looking at the murals, lamenting their condition, saying to our friends, we should do something about this, we\u2019re going to lose these murals.<\/p>\n
The mural Irene P\u00e9rez painted<\/a> [in the 1970s] was restored once, I think in the \u201990s, and then it was forgotten. We decided to restore it because we knew its history. We knew it had been painted so long ago, and she was the only one left from that generation of \u201970s muralists. So we found Irene P\u00e9rez and asked if she\u2019d be interested in restoring her own piece. She had the courage to go back and redo it and was happy we\u2019d managed to get the funds.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s Juana Alicia\u2019s, done in the \u201990s \u2014 also a pretty old mural, and I don\u2019t think it has ever been restored in almost thirty years. Three others were also in bad shape, the paint peeling and fading. Sometimes the city would rather fund a brand-new mural than restore an existing piece. That forces the artist to sacrifice a piece with tremendous historic and cultural value. It gets forgotten, and eventually the mural\u2019s gone. Most murals restored in the Mission have been restored by the artists themselves. But artists can\u2019t afford to do the restoration work themselves. When there\u2019s no support, it doesn\u2019t get done. \u00a0Our original proposal was actually to restore ten \u2014 we didn\u2019t get all ten approved, but we got six. I think we should keep forming a collective around this, to show that it\u2019s possible.<\/p>\n Tell me about the subject of the mural you\u2019re painting here.<\/p>\n JA: This is a memorial \u2014 an homage, a song \u2014 to Monsignor \u00d3scar Romero. He was an amazing human rights defender, assassinated while saying mass in his church in El Salvador, in the mid-1980s, by a CIA-trained murderer. He\u2019s beloved in El Salvador, but his legacy belongs to all the people who struggled against the repression in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, and who continue to do so, because it isn\u2019t over.<\/p>\n I painted my first homage to Monsignor \u00d3scar Romero here in Balmy Alley thirty years ago, in 1996. I wanted to restore that mural, but the wall is crumbling \u2014 it\u2019s not really restorable. So I reinvented the mural. Thirty years later, I have better painting skills, I hope, than I did then.<\/p>\n The butterflies embroidered in his cloak are an immigrant-rights symbol, aren\u2019t they?<\/p>\n JA: In Mesoamerican tradition, when someone dies, the butterflies carry their soul to the next life. They\u2019re a symbol of migration. We migrate, and butterflies migrate. You can see my granddaughters have already started to paint them, because they couldn\u2019t keep their hands off it. We\u2019re going to organize some community events so people can bring their children to paint more.<\/p>\n What\u2019s the story of the murals on Balmy Alley? How did this all start?<\/p>\n JA: Irene Perez painted one of the first murals in Balmy Alley, in 1973, I think. Then there was Patricia Rodriguez, who was one of the original Mujeres Muralistas, and Ray Patl\u00e1n, who was a muralist here too. They both lived on the alley, and they got together with a bunch of us to form a collective called PLACA, in 1984. There\u2019s a lot of history here on Balmy. I first did an earlier mural about the genocide in Guatemala, in 1985. And then I did this first one of Romero in 1996, because the Guatemala mural had gotten pretty badly tagged by then.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n How would you describe yourself \u2014 a cultural worker, a muralist? And why are you doing this?<\/p>\n JA: I\u2019m doing it because I love it, and I love my neighborhood. I love my community, and I love the work \u2014 the human rights work. Monsignor Romero\u2019s message is more pertinent than ever, given the current imperial administration we have in the United States \u2014 not that this country hasn\u2019t always been an empire, because it has. But it\u2019s very important to keep hope alive, to keep insisting on our rights, human rights, and to hold up the work of human rights workers all over the world, whether they\u2019re artists, or priests, or farmworkers. Whoever is doing the work.<\/p>\n It sounds like your role as an artist is also kind of a historian\u2019s role.<\/p>\n TA: This project was born out of a historical interest, not wanting to lose the legacy of the painters who came before us. Ray Patl\u00e1n, Patricia Rodr\u00edguez, who was a member of Las Mujeres Muralistas; Chuy Campusano \u2014 are gone. Their work has disappeared with them.\u00a0<\/p>\n We don\u2019t want to lose our art, our legacy in this neighborhood. We\u2019ve been here so many years, doing this work of painting the walls for so long. We want to keep it for future generations. Of course some murals will disappear, but new ones will come. Young artists are coming up \u2014 Lucia, the Twin Walls Mural Company, Trust Your Struggle \u2014 all these young people painting new murals, which is fantastic. The older generation is here to support them. So when a mural is gone, beyond restoring, it\u2019s wonderful that someone new can come and paint a new one in its place.<\/p>\n You\u2019re an example of a certain kind of cultural worker, a certain kind of artist. People look at you as combining art and politics in a particular way.<\/p>\n JA: Well, I think artists need to work from their conscience. To paraphrase Alice Walker \u2014 we need to leave the world more beautiful. But we have to activate ourselves in times of repression. We have to illuminate and lift up the voices of resistance to the daily waves of despair, the daily ugliness we\u2019re fed in the news. We need to give people alternate images.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know about being a cultural worker or political artist, I\u2019m not trying to go for a label, and I\u2019m not a pamphleteer. I don\u2019t want my work to be so didactic that it becomes a pamphlet. My work connects to our human nature, and the nature all around us. It responds to things beyond the headlines. It responds to our spirit, and to the unity we\u2019re all bound in.<\/p>\n Even more than that \u2014 maybe this is true of muralism in general, but your work in particular looks out, rather than looking in.<\/p>\n JA: I think it looks in, too. It needs to be introspective, but yes, it looks out as well. Not looking inward created some of the mistakes our movements made in the \u201970s and \u201980s \u2014 rolling over our interior lives, prioritizing a materialist interpretation of Marxism, of socialism, without really considering the role of the heart and the spirit as part of our movements. That alienated a lot of people \u2014 a lot of people of color, a lot of women \u2014 because it didn\u2019t take into account the depth of our oppression, or our interior lives, or how we needed to respond in our personal lives \u2014 so that we could transform the world in a more sensitive way. The personal is political, right?<\/p>\n TA: I was a cartoonist for a newspaper in Mexico. Sometimes you see things going on that you\u2019re not happy with, and you want to say something about it. The only way I had to do that was through a cartoon. And of course whatever you do is going to be read as political by somebody, because your work reflects who you are.<\/p>\n I see myself as an artist, and I think everything anybody does is, in a sense, political. What we do isn\u2019t decoration \u2014 it\u2019s not just about making the walls look nice. We make political comments with the work. We say things with it. When you look at a mural, you see a reflection of what\u2019s going on. So in a way, we\u2019re political artists. We\u2019re political workers.<\/p>\n<\/a>Muralist Juana Alicia describes her mural as an homage to Monsignor \u00d3scar Romero, who was assassinated while saying mass in his church in El Salvador, in the mid-1980s, by a CIA-trained murderer.<\/p>\n<\/a>Muralist Tirso Araiza beside the original mural of Oscar Romero painted by Juana Alicia 30 years ago.\u00a0 The calligraphy shows the landscape style from Central America.<\/p>\n<\/a>Muralist G Molina helps prepare a wall for Juana Alicia Araiza.<\/p>\n<\/a>Chris Gazaleh paints a mural about Palestine at Lucky Street Alley.<\/p>\n<\/a>A muralist works on restoring her mural, one of the first murals in Balmy Alley.<\/p>\n