Carlos Velazquez may be as close as anyone in San Jose to being an expert on the city’s historic murals.
So it’s natural that people would ask him where to find the public art representing the city’s Latino culture. There isn’t a good answer.
“There’s very few left, and they’ve been systematically just painted over, not been taken care of,” said Velazquez.
The slow loss became an urgent community issue with the sudden gray-washing of Mural de la Raza, a favorite in the mural bike tour Velazquez organized early last year. The mural, which had been on the side of a now-shuttered Payless ShoeSource on Story Road since 1985, was painted over in August as the property was sold to a new owner. That sparked protests and a $5 million lawsuit from the artist.
Velazquez said the loss hit a raw nerve in a Hispanic community already feeling under siege from displacement and gentrification. The murals were supposed to be a permanent marker of San Jose’s Mexican-American roots, which go back to its founding as a Spanish town in 1777.
“We’re seeing this erasing of the community, and now we’re seeing the literal erasement of our community in a mural, as well,” he said.
Velazquez, who grew up in San Jose and works for the city, said that he only recently began noticing some of the historic Latino murals.
Though the city still has about eight remaining, at least four others have been lost, painted over or removed in the past five years. Among the lost murals is Mexicatlan, which was on the corner of Sunset and Alum Rock avenues in the Mayfair neighborhood, not far from Mural de la Raza. Muralist Guillermo Aranda filed a complaint with the business in the building where his mural once was, eventually settling in 2015 for an undisclosed amount, he and his attorney said. Under the 1990 federal Visual Artists Rights Act and California law, muralists must be given advance notice before their work is altered or removed. Earlier this year, a federal judge awarded $6.7 million to 21 graffiti artists in New York whose work was destroyed in 2013.
Gregorio Mora-Torres, a professor in San Jose State University’s Mexican-American studies department, said Mural de la Raza and Mexicatlan are part of a Mexican and Chicano artistic tradition in which murals serve as a kind of “public textbook.”
Following the Mexican revolution in the early 1900s, artists such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco were looking for ways to educate the general population, much of which was illiterate.
“Diego Rivera thought it would be a great idea to paint public places and remind or re-teach the populace who can’t read about their history,” Mora-Torres said. “That tradition was picked up by Chicano artists in the 1960s.”
Many of the murals by Chicano artists depict civil right activists and community heroes, as well as Mexican and indigenous images that draw from San Jose’s Hispanic history.
There was also a connection between U.S. and Mexico-based muralists. In 1990, Mexican artist Gustavo Bernal Navarro painted three murals in San Jose when he was invited by the Foro Democratico Mexicano, a group focused on informing local residents about politics in Mexico, according to a news article at the time. Only one remains.
His mural, La Medicina y la Comunidad (Medicine and the Community), at the Gardner Health Center on East Virginia Street southeast of downtown, shows the blending of modern medicine and traditional healing practices, a major focus of the center.
Elisa Marina Alvarado was a program coordinator at the clinic at the time. She said Bernal Navarro met with staff and community members to decide what to paint.
“It was very, very exciting and I found it very respectful, as an artist that was not that familiar with healthcare, that he would build the imagery from interviews and from research, community based research,” Alvarado said.
Bernal Navarro had been active in the muralist movement and politics in Mexico since the 1970s. In the book Mexican Murals in Times of Crisis, Bernal Navarro talked about a mural he painted in Mexico City, which he presented as a collaborative process with the community.
“I started with paint the people in the barrio gave me, los chavos (the kids). My aim was to grab the attention of the barrio so that the barrio might begin to create its own working dynamic. One of self-defense, of cultural construction, and from there power, power to be able to remove from power whoever they wanted,” he said.
The two other murals Bernal Navarro painted in San Jose are gone — one, on the side of what is now KIPP Heartwood Academy on King Road, was painted over some time between 2011 and 2013, based on Google Street View images of the school. The other was on a Gish Road building once occupied by the Service Employees International Union. A spokesman for SEIU said a member was able to confirm the organization had offices there in the 1990s but couldn’t remember a mural.
Alvarado was particularly interested in how Bernal Navarro painted the health center’s mural because in the 1970s she participated in painting a series of murals at a low-income housing project in East San Jose. She said the kids in the housing project were excited to participate.
“I remember first I would do outlines, big sections, and let them paint in the color, coloring the outlines I would create,” she said. “Then I actually created a border around the mural that was sectioned off into little individual frames, and I assigned to the children little spaces to paint.”
Velazquez, the sometimes-tour guide, looked for that housing project mural but said it appeared it had been painted over and replaced. When she did the work, Alvarado only took one photo of a detail in the mural — a photo she couldn’t find. Back then, the muralists weren’t really thinking about the long-term care of the art they were creating, she said.
“I look back now and I think, you know, I was naive not to inquire about that. I’m going to come paint a mural, and so how do I know it’s going to be taken care of?” she said. “What if somebody tags it? What is the commitment of the facility to take care of the mural because it really is public art? It’s not just the belonging of that property owner, but it becomes something that belongs to the community.”
Mora-Torres also believes the murals were a public benefit, and their loss has been a blow.
“In the absence of written history, murals are the best way to disseminate that history. And when you wipe it out, it’s like wiping away people’s history,” he said.
