This is the second in a series of neighborhood mural tours for the San Antonio Report “Live Like a Local” section.
How does a young suburban punk wind up becoming a caretaker for the Chicano culture of San Antonio’s West Side?
“Just sh— talking with, you know, tall boys under the oak tree at Tacoland listening to punk rock music,” said artist Cruz Ortiz, standing in front of the first mural attributed to San Anto Cultural Arts, the nonprofit organization which would eventually create more than 50 murals throughout the city (and counting).
On a sunny midweek morning in early fall, Ortiz led a tour of important Westside murals that helped establish San Antonio’s current flourishing mural culture and connect the present day with the city’s deep heritage and cultural traditions.
The OG on Chupaderas
Beyond sh— talking, Ortiz and friend Manny Castillo decided they wanted to make murals, but realized they might need more than the usual punk rock, DIY (do-it-yourself) no-budget, no permission approach. The 1990s West Side was in need of reinvigoration and offered ready opportunities for community engagement.
The two fledgling muralists recruited painter Juan Miguel Ramos and together undertook years of diligent volunteerism, community relations, fundraising, research into mural traditions and the gritty work of painting to reinvigorate a local history of Chicano muralism.
They started their mission in 1993 on the corner of West Guadalupe and Chupaderas streets, where the blank wall of a pawn shop beckoned. In their early 20s, Ortiz, Castillo and Ramos knew they could not purport to represent authentic Chicano Westside culture without learning from the neighborhood.
“A good muralist will pay attention to the community, will go in and research,” Ortiz said. “Actually what we did for all of our murals is we would knock on doors and ask everybody, ‘What do y’all want to see in your neighborhood?’”
The San Antonio skyline was the No. 1 request, Ortiz said, laughing lightheartedly, which is why it appears in so many of the early murals. To that was added blooming nopales, a spiky agave plant, a Mesoamerican sunrise, Teotihuacan-style Aztec pyramids and a gaggle of gun-toting gangbangers rendered in a cartoon calavera style influenced by Mexican illustrator José Guadalupe Posada. Above it towered a rendering of a young girl bearing a banner with the word “educación” emblazoned in all-caps.
Though googly-eyed, the gangsters were no joke. At the time, gang wars plagued the neighborhood. Every night residents would hear gunshots, then reports of kids who’d been killed the following day, Ortiz said.
“That’s something that we wanted to address, we need to somehow talk about how do we stop gang violence, and obviously it was education,” he said, which became the main theme of the mural. Through being aware of the deep cultural history of San Antonio and its precolonial heritage, kids might come to appreciate their ancestry, ultimately “getting out of that mentality of violence as a solution to anything.”
Ortiz and Ramos would invite kids from the neighborhood to paint with them, establishing a tradition of cooperation, collaboration and mentoring young artists that the San Anto Community Mural Program continues to this day.
The ‘church mural’
Around the corner on the side wall of the building that would come to house San Anto Cultural Arts, formalized as an organization in 1997, neighborhood residents asked for a Jesus-themed mural. Artist Mike Roman not only gave them a monumental head of Jesus bearing a crown of thorns, but purposefully incorporated two barred windows to make a statement on how incarceration affected the neighborhood’s population. Two angels reach down to anonymous human arms extended from the barred windows above a banner reading “paz, salvación, amor.”
Castillo and Ortiz would make a practice of “seeing how the mural behaves” in its community setting, whether they attract graffiti or tags or admirers and picture-takers. One day they saw a forlorn woman, recognizable from among the prostitutes frequenting Guadalupe Street, standing quietly before the mural. Ortiz said she told them, “They don’t let me in the church … so this is where I come for church.”
Ortiz said that nexus is what differentiates a true community-driven mural from murals made for “Instagrammability” or commercial purposes.
“When a community mural does its work, when a mural or an image is able to behave on a level that incorporates not just the culture but the spirituality of a neighborhood, of the people,” it realizes its true power, he said.
Further east on and near Guadalupe Street, which Ortiz called the “mero weso” — the backbone — of the West Side, other murals speak to important issues affecting the community.
A Colorado Street mural on police brutality, titled Piedad (Piety), was created in 2003 by artist Ruth Buentello, who had earlier assisted Alex Rubio (now known simply as Rubio) on a 2001 mural adjoining the Educación mural on Chupaderas Street.
Another mural by Roman nearby on Colorado Street, titled You Are Not Forgotten and painted in 2006 from actual photographs made by Vietnam veterans and their families, now serves as the backdrop for the city’s annual Veteran’s Day commemoration.
Ghosts and apparitions
Some murals, however, do not survive.
Murals once populated the walls of the Cassiano Homes Apartments along Apache Creek but have long been painted over, their peeling surfaces and faded colors victims of age and weathering.
Ever cognizant of history and heritage, Ortiz said those murals born of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s were a primary inspiration and a reason to keep the mural tradition alive.
Another lost mural was made by Mary Agnes Rodriguez, whom Ortiz considers a prime mover of Westside artistic culture, on a small building facing the corner of South Zarzamora and West San Fernando streets. Ortiz recalls the mural as The Stages of Domestic Violence, a forthright depiction of familial abuse based on the artist’s own experience meant to warn, instruct and heal others.
Today, the wall stands ghostly white, an “apparition” in Ortiz’s terms. “There’s nothing wrong with the cycle of life [of a mural] in that sense,” he said, recalling the “DIY” (do-it-yourself) punk rock ethic that formed him. “They go up, but then they’re gonna fade and they’re gonna chip and they’re gonna fall apart, and it’s never going to be the same.”
The Cassiano Homes murals were already gone by the time he and his cohort started their work. “So we already knew going into this that this is just gonna last for a little bit, and that’s okay. Because it was to help heal a small portion of that generation, that small community, for that time, for those moments,” Ortiz said.
Inner City Development
One institution that Ortiz insists must not be forgotten in the history of Westside muralism is Inner City Development, the neighborhood nonprofit started by community advocates Patti and Rod Radle in 1968.
After that Tacoland talk with Castillo in the early 1990s, Ortiz left a well-paying construction job to volunteer with Inner City Development, which provided room and board in exchange for 15 work hours per week. He’d work with kids in the recreation room, help feed neighborhood residents who lined up daily for nutrition, help with the annual Halloween haunted house and Christmas toy sales, then set to working on his fledgling mural program with Castillo, Ramos, and others.
Patti Radle lent a hand making neighborhood connections and supporting mural projects. In 2001, she would be instrumental in creating Peace and Remembrance, a mural on San Patricio Street near Trinity Street dedicated to remembering victims of violence in the community. An early image of the piece shows 50 names, but during the mural tour, Ortiz noted that the number had more than doubled.
Still, the resilience of Westside residents in keeping their neighborhood thriving is what impresses Ortiz most, and the gallery of colorful, engaging murals reflects their spirit.
In total, the living gallery of Westside murals stand as markers of the local culture and keepers of tradition, just like other, more formal institutions in the city.
“This,” he said, gesturing broadly to the neighborhood, “this is the museum.”
