Have you seen this new Idaho mural? It uses Mexican folklore to share a message of resilience
For several weekends in a row, a group of local Latino students and artists gathered to paint their life stories.
The results of their hard work — under the direction of Nampa artist Chris Fonseca — is a towering two-story, 2,700 square-foot mural on the side of the Hispanic Cultural Center called “Cultural Resilience,” easily visible to anyone driving down Garrity Boulevard in Nampa.
But passersby taken with the image of the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, depicted as the god of wisdom in some Meso-American and Aztec myths, might not notice he’s rising out of “seeds of change” students painted along the bottom. Each hieroglyph tells one student’s unique life journey — and the things they learned and overcame on the long path of resilience.
“I was kind of trying to direct this whole thing in a way of like how do you deal with your pain, you know, especially with resilience,” Fonseca said. “There’s skirting around the pain, and then there’s actually going through it.”
The completed mural is the end result of over 70 hours of work and cultural research that was fueled by community involvement through art education and material donations. During Saturday sessions in one of the classrooms inside the Hispanic Cultural Center of Idaho, students would spend time crating a sentence to describe their path in life. Then, they would translate that sentence into Mayan hieroglyphics that would eventually be painted on the bottom of the mural.
The theme of cultural resilience resonated with many of the students, and not just because some of the work on the project occurred amid nationwide protests against racial injustice, and during a pandemic that is disproportionately affecting Latinos in Idaho and across the country.
“With me, it has helped get everything out because I was so used to keeping all my problems in,” said Lizette Del Hoyo, 14, who joined several other local teenagers in the class and art project. “Using art helped me let them (problems) out, and like, I have no stress anymore.”
Fonseca and his brother Mike, who helped with the project, said they wanted the participating students to understand that in the midst of political upheaval and stressful changes in the country and the world, their voices and perspectives mattered in the bigger picture. They hoped local residents would take the time to explore the intricacies of the mural, investigate the hieroglyphic interpretations on a handout inside the cultural center, and develop their own meanings for the mural.
“We have so many answers at our fingertips, but really, we lack great questions,” Fonseca said.
