Young Mexican immigrants bridge 'here' and 'there' with mural
September 17, 2012
by Elisabeth Perez- Luna
With all the million tears I cried, I could build a
stairway to Heaven and bring you back home," he wrote.
The mural is called "Aqui y Alla" or "Here
and There." With it, Ortiz wanted to give a voice to adolescents from both
sides of the border.
Expressions of loss and longing
"The Mexican immigrant teens that work directly with
us in this project, immigrated at the ages of 9 and 10 with their parents and
family members and some of them on their own.
"For some of them, it is very difficult to talk
about that journey and crossing, but also, they find themselves with many
family conflicts of the fact that they were left behind by their parents at an
early age and then they came to be reunited with their parents here in
Philadelphia. There's a relationship that's broken," said Ortiz.
Ortiz is not new to the mural art project system of
bringing people together to tell their personal stories. In this case, she also
worked with four painters from two Mexican public art collectives from the
border cities of Chihuahua and Juarez. She trained them to collect stories and
artwork from teens in their cities and invited them to Philadelphia to
collaborate with young Mexican immigrants here.
The process was a revelation for street artist David
Flores, a member of a graffiti arts collective in Juarez.
"This project was groundbreaking for me as an
artist," said Flores in Spanish, "because Michelle taught us to use a
more ambitions approach to street art in terms of size and permanence. We went
from fast wall graphic work and gallery painting to doing enormous collective
murals."
After climbing up the three-story scaffolding, Ortiz
describes a stylized Aztec calendar that forms one of several large circles in
the mural.
"You have these two circles that will represent a
young lady who has arrived with a map of South Philadelphia behind her, and
then you're going to have a young boy that actually has a map that represents a
mapping of Juarez and Chihuahua along with a specific map from Puebla, which is
where most of the Mexican immigrants are coming from to Philadelphia,"
explained Ortiz.
'We see ourselves as artivists'...
