Beautiful Aprons, Salvadoran Policemen & Lotsa Paint
Public Park Mural Painting
In the midst of this mad-shoveling snOMG day, thought I’d post on warmer memories… specifically, painting a mural in the dappled sunlight of a public park in San Salvador - El Salvador’s capitol city - this past November.
In addition to muraling at an El Salvadoran school, I was given the opportunity by Glasswing International to design a mural for a massive 300-foot cement wall bordering a public park in San Jacinto. San Jacinto is a neighborhood in San Salvador that unfortunately suffers greatly at the violent hands of gangs. It was also devastated during El Salvador’s bloody civil war in the 1980s. Despite the violence, there is of course still a neighborhood and community deserving of good public spaces.
Glasswing came in to revitalize a large public park via a plethora of projects: gardens, shrubbery, graffiti clean-up, and mosaic chess boards on the park benches. Basically creating a more inviting place to gather and hang out. My job was to help “wake up” the long cement wall on the park’s border, and integrate it into an enlivened place. As is the way with public art, it was important that the mural be related to the park, and to the community. How to go about this as a complete outsider to the community?
The park is dedicated two historical figures: Miguel Cervantes (author of Don Quixote), and Felipe de Soto, a Salvadoran composer and musician. Taking inspiration from the park’s namesakes, I designed a concept that entailed scenes of Don Quixote that transitioned into musical staffs flowing along the wall. I sketched out the designs, and met with folks from the San Jacinto neighborhood association (awesome community-caring people) to discuss them. I love this aspect of public art: it makes it truly community-oriented.
Fun side note: My personal favorite part of the mural is the Dulcinea character, inspired by Don Quixote’s love. Her likeness is inspired from women of El Salvador, specifically the apron. Many women in El Salvador wear the most amazing aprons! It is a sign of their personal livelihood. The aprons come in all colors and designs, and its just quite fun to apron-sight while traveling through the country. 
ANYWAY, enough about aprons. After a design idea was agreed upon, I got to work painting in the outlines of the design, which volunteers would later fill in with color. I just needed to provide the structure for their creative juices to run free once they got their paint.
This outlining process took several days of toiling in the park. The first day of outlining, military guards stopped and asked me what I was doing — totally super friendly, and apparently that kind of questioning is just par for the course here. No big deal. The next day, however, was when I was suspected of being an illegal graffiti artist by the San Salvador police. THAT is not par for the course, and truthfully it kinda scared me. Thankfully, Glasswing staff member C was there to help me that day, and her Spanish is of course light years better than mine.
The whole situation went something like this: Three hours into our painting day, we notice some tough looking policemen on motorcycles staring and pointing at us from about 50 feet away. We keep painting, looking over our shoulders uncertainly at them every once in awhile. Finally, one motorcycles over to us. We stop and look at him. He slowly gets off his motorcycle, takes off his gloves, and juts his chin out folding his arms across his chest. Being Spanish-deficient, I don’t fully understand his words, but the body language is speaking loud and clear: ‘I am in charge and you guys are in trouble.’ My eyes dart between the officer and C as they went back and forth:
You are not allowed to just paint on these walls. … But we have permission from the mayor to be here… Who are you with?…. Glasswing International…. And so forth and so on, I couldn’t really decipher much more than that. The tough policeman motorcycled back to his crew. They stood in a circle talking and radioing for another half hour gathering information, I suppose. We keep painting (heck, we’re on a deadline here! There’s only so much sunlight left). Two policemen then came back and told us that although we had permission from the mayor, it was possible that we needed paperwork to be filled out in order to make a mural. So, they were going to go somewhere and find out if said paperwork was indeed necessary, and if it was, they would come back and we would have to stop painting. All I could do was nod and smile and say “Gracias!” Happily, those police never came back, and we finished the mural outlines. Phew.
Okay, so the outlines are done. Next, I get on a bus and visit Guatemala, hike up a volcano, do some mountain biking, and come back to San Salvador four days later for the big volunteer day the San Jacinto park. The mural team is thankfully huge, and everyone tackles the wall at once, filling in colors to all the designs.
It was a day surrounded by enthusiastic people, and a wide-grinning super-happy neighborhood association. Everyone worked so hard and amazingly the 300 foot mural was completed in several hours.
Check out the full photo album of the mural’s creation.
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