Beyond the Wall: Youth Muralism and the Politics of Collective Representation

Amid the current administration’s escalation of repressive immigration tactics, muralism is a critical spatial practice of resistance engaging with cultural representation, historical erasure, urban territoriality, and collective memory. It emerges as a counter-hegemonic mode of cultural production that reclaims discursive and material space for marginalized communities.

This project proposes an intergenerational, community-centered mural initiative that engages local youth in Sunset Park, in collaboration with Mixteca, a community organization addressing needs in health, education, and legal issues for Mexican and Latin American immigrants, and Mi Casa Es Puebla, which promotes cultural preservation rights for Puebla-born immigrants.

Latino muralism often draws on transnational iconographies—from Mexican traditions and Indigenous cosmologies to street art—creating a hybrid visual language. This challenges Western modernist paradigms, embodying a “border epistemology” that reflects diasporic plurality and resists authoritative urban histories. It has the power to reposition community aesthetics as critical sites of knowledge. When conceived participatorily, muralism becomes simultaneously a pedagogy and democratic cultural labor. 

Through bilingual storytelling and design workshops with an indigenous muralist Juan Manuel Martínez Caltenco (Atlixco, Puebla) and a Mexican writer Francisco Chavez, the project will engage local youth to collect narratives of migration, displacement, and resilience. Inspired by early 20th-century Mexican muralism, this initiative will reactivate its radical communal spirit in a contemporary context by transforming the walls of Mixteca’s new building in Sunset Park into declarations of memory, labor, and identity.

Despite Latino contributions to New York’s fabric, these communities are often absent from official narratives, thus, muralism will become a form of epistemic resistance—inscribing alternative histories rooted in lived experience, affect, and visual iconography. The mural will function as both cultural artifact and spatial praxis, resisting gentrification’s sanitization with narratives of rootedness.