Saving the Garfield Murals
I just got a disturbing email from a good friend of mine from HS (thanks Noe!). Apparently, the current high school principal, Guadalupe Paramo, is whitewashing student-painted murals at my old HS.
Seriously, that was one of my favorite things about that campus, because honestly, there isn’t much to take a gander at there. Inner city barrio school with way too many kids. Around the time of my class, more and more student painted murals started to come up, and as unprofessional as they may have been, they were cool and created pride. I have to admit that the school mascot – a bulldog – with aztec headdress in the Mexican colors is a really cheesy thing, but I loved it! It combined so many things, what we are, were, and where we came from. It made that stupid bulldog just a little more relevant.
And now, the principal is getting rid of any of the murals that she doesn’t think are worth looking at anymore. Last month, the LA Times had an article about what is going on there. There is this space mural with colliding asteroids/meteors, “I don’t know what that represented,” Paramo said. “An explosion? Rocks?”. *headdesk*
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Hey- I wanted to share what my boy and I are currently working on. We were incredibly moved with an article that was in the Los Angeles Times recently regarding the whitewashing of murals at a local high school. We are incredibly concerned because the murals represent the history of the community the school is in as well as the Latino community. The murals are currently in danger of being destroyed and it saddens us deeply as they are historical accomplishments that should be preserved and not erased. My boyfriend, Joel and I have constructed a site and urge you to visit it and please lend us your support by posting comments on our board, passing our link around to your friends and family. We’d also love to list you on our website as supporters of the cause – Save Garfield’s Murals. Please visit us @ http://www.savegarfieldmurals.com/ |
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Daisy, Thanks for sharing, this is distressing news. Something similar happened to St. Alphonsus School (just across Atlantic Blvd. from Garfield) a few years ago. The school and church community had come together over the course of a few months back in 1992 to raise money for a project to beautify the school and surrounding community by planting trees and painting murals. A few years later under a new principal, the murals were painted over. This principal also dismantled the Parent’s Club and stopped sending out the school newsletter in Spanish, so I see her destruction of the community’s murals as a symbol of more concrete actions that result in the community’s disempowerment. I hope we can mobilize on this before another misguided principal causes more damage to the students and community. It might even be possible to restore the murals that were whitewashed. Have you contacted the Mural Consevancy of Los Angeles (http://www.lamurals.org/)? They are the ones responsible for preserving the murals along the 101 freeway and elsewhere in Los Angeles. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, I’m forwarding your message out to my contacts (cc:’d to this message), including some Garfield alums. Jeannette 🙂 |
So I am not sure where to go from here. First start by spreading the word, and I think I will go and join the site, see what is going on over there. We can’t just let this be.