Juana Alicia's newest project:
"La Llorona" mural, San Francisco Mission District

Come to the July 10, 2004 fundraiser at Mars Cafe! (pdf flyer here)

How you can help

   Juana Alicia is presently creating a new mural, entitled “La Llorona” (“The Weeping Woman”) for the corner of York and 24th Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. This is the current site of her 1983 mural “Las Lechugueras.” Juana Alicia is currently raising funds to replace the deteriorating Lechugueras mural with the new Llorona mural.

     In her imagery and practice of art, Juana Alicia attempts to break down traditional barriers between genres, media and categories, combining the personal with the political, the public with the private, to create images that are simultaneously decorative, educational, critical and celebrational. Her art often pays homage to ancestors and contemporary, living people.  Through her paintings, artist and educator Juana Alicia seeks to create visions of hope by reflecting histories of both trouble and triumph. These images also project the possibility of asserting our highest human values in scenarios of a compassionate world. In the past twenty-five years, Juana Alicia has created over thirty murals and a large body of drawings, prints, paintings, mixed media and ceramics.

     Although the Llorona Mural Project is a work of art, its “work” is to support environmental and social justice and raise awareness about water issues. The new mural will illustrate the effects of globalization on our natural environments, both urban and rural. The work reveals environmental conditions, crises and hopes shared by the local Latina/o, indigenous, and other communities of color who share the sacred ground we call The Mission. The planet and our physical bodies are composed mostly of water. Water connects and affects all of humanity and all life on the earth.

     This mural seeks to educate viewers about the central importance of water in our lives, and about the crisis we face with regard to its scarcity and contamination. The mural will also celebrate the role that women play as caretakers of the environment, using as it’s central protagonist “The Crying Woman” of Mexican history and legend. The new Llorona mural, like her predecessor, will focus on women and environmental health and justice. Juana Alicia created the existing Lechuguera mural in 1983, and it is one of her most published works. It has traveled across the world as an image on book covers, postcards, posters, and via the Internet. Because the existing wall has deteriorated excessively, it will need to be resurfaced and this process will necessarily wipe out the existing work. Instead of re-creating it from “scratch”, the artist has elected to create a new, updated work on the topic of working women and the environment.

     The mural has lent its message about the struggles of farm workers to many organizing struggles and has received wide exposure; Juana Alicia is satisfied that the Lechugueras mural has lived a long and fulfilling life! Las Lechugueras depicts the dangers of pesticides, factories in the fields of California, and the menace of the field bosses and immigration service while it honors the strength of Mexican women farm workers and the beauty of our natural environment. The new mural will address the worldwide environmental crisis over water. The new piece will celebrate as a heroine La Llorona, the much-maligned mythical Mexican woman who haunts the riverbanks in search of her lost children. For Mexicans and Chicanos, La Llorona is the protagonist in an oral history rooted in the conquest of Mexico. It’s a story that is still told to children today. There are many versions of the story, but over many generations, children have been warned to stay away from the river banks because La Llorona might capture them, mistaking them for her own children. Often it is said that she herself drowned her children in a fit of rage, insanity or despair, though other versions portray her as saving them from enslavement and conquest. In Juana Alicia’s mural design, she reclaims La Llorona as a heroine instead of presenting her as a crazed victim, which is frequently the case. In the image in the planned mural, La Llorona will be pictured in the act of saving her lost and “at-risk” children, and the river will be pictured as a source of life, beauty, and restoration. The mural features diverse scenes of environmental struggles over water: The U.S./México border; Cochabamba, Bolivia and the Narmada River Valley in India.

     In the center of the composition, a thirty foot tall Chalchiuhtlicue (the Aztec goddess of the water), surrounded by clouds and mountain waterfalls, gives water to the world. The ancient lake Texcoco that once covered the Valley of Mexico emerges from the mists that make up her skirt. To the left of the goddess, Bolivian peasants defeat the fat cats of corporate domination in a fight for the water rights of their country, and to the far left, the farmworkers of India’s Narmada Valley hold a protest by refusing to leave their flooded homelands, threatened by an enormous dam project. To the right of Chalchiuhtlicue, we see the Llorona herself, embracing one of her children, while extending her hand to those still in the water. She revives the spirits of her children and preserves the planet for future generations. Behind her is the nopal, symbol of Chalchiuhtlicue, the cactus that flourishes, gives fruit and flower despite the harshest of conditions. Its secret is an internal reserve of water. To the right of the Llorona, the Women in Black of Juarez march alongside the Rio Bravo (Rio Grande), demanding to know what has become of the murdered daughters of the border. A maquila (border sweatshop) pours pollution in the background. , reviving the spirits of her children and preserving the planet for future generations.

     The Llorona mural is a new addition to Juana Alicia’s body of work which bears witness to the deepest challenges of our communities, and to the marvelous potential of our imaginations to transform crises into triumphs of the spirit. Juana Alicia’s work can serve our local community and its organizations that serve our civil rights and equal opportunities as well.

Bibliographical Resources for the Llorona Mural Project

• Barlow, Maude and Tony Clarke (2002) Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water, New York, NY: The New Press.
• Basu, Amria, Ed. (1993) The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women’s Movements in Global Perspective Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Davis, Mike (2000) Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City, New York, NY: Verso Press.
  Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic, Eds. (1998) The Latin@ Condition: a Critical Reader, New York, NY: New York University Press.
• Galeano, Eduardo (1973) The Open Veins of Latin America. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
• Louie, Miriam Ching Yoon (2001) Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory, Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
• Macy, Joanna R. with an introduction by Thich Nhat Hahn (1999) World As Lover, World As Self, , Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.
• Nelson, Barbara J. and Najma Chowdhury, Eds. (1994) Women and Politics Worldwide, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Ruiz, Vicky and Ellen Carol Dubois, Eds. (1994) Unequal Sisters: a Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 2nd Edition. New York, NY: Routledge.
• Schultz, Jim (2002) “Bechtel Corporation vs. Bolivia's Poor” The Democracy Center On-line. http://www.democracyctr.org/
• Schultz, Jim (2000) “Bolivia's War Over Water” Earth Island Journal, Fall 2000 Vol. 15, No. 3.
• Sen, Rinku, Ed. (1995) We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, United States Rural Mission of the World Council of Churches. Geneva, Switzerland: WCC Publications.
• Shiva, Vandana (2002) Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit, Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
• Shiva, Vandana (1999) Stolen Harvest: Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

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