A seed of growth
Mexican artist Raul Sisniega says the resilience of Pilsen residents was ‘something worth talking about’ in mural
‘Semilla,” a mural in Pilsen by Mexican artist Raul Sisniega, starts with a seed and ends with a forest. The 14-feet-tall, 40-feet-long mural spans a brick wall of All Care Dental, 1918 S. Blue Island Ave., and features reality-bending Mexican imagery meant to represent the neighborhood and its origins as a Mexican American enclave.
“I heard stories from older people, like first-generation Mexicans in Pilsen, of how they got there and all the difficulties they had to struggle with and then, like 40 years later, see how it grew,” says Sisniega, 42, who lives in Mexico City. “To me, it was something worth talking about.”
Sisniega says he spent two weeks checking out Pilsen before getting to work in 2021 on “Semilla,” which is Spanish for “seed.”
“I think it’s important to understand the context of where you’re going to paint so that you don’t act like an invader,” Sisniega says.
The mural fades in from a series of pixels — to represent the various aspects that make up a person, the history behind them and those who came before. The bits come together to form a profile of a face.
“I was thinking about a nonbinary character with brown skin that is created by the pixels of their history,” Sisniega says. “Like a young person created by the stories of the past, each story being a pixel.”
Also emerging from the pixels: a pair of brown hands, planting the bean seed that grows to become the rest of the mural.
“I added the frijole, the bean, as the symbol of that horrible word the Mexican workers are called,” Sisniega says. “I wanted to take that concept and create something more positive.”
From there, a sprout grows into a vicious-looking snake. Flashing sharp teeth, it’s supposed to represent those who planted their seeds in Pilsen decades ago and struggled for their place in the city.
Sisniega says he was “trying to represent the force and will of the Mexican community who got there and the way they worked to make Pilsen the way it is now.”
A two-headed snake, more hands and monster-like figures spell out the word “Semilla,” with the letter “a” represented by the silhouette of a person connected to other people.
“If you’re not looking for it, you almost miss that it spells a word,” says David Girón, 29, a Pilsen resident who helped create the mural. “You almost miss that it spells ‘Semilla.’ And I think that’s part of the detail: losing yourself immediately in the big picture and seeing this great, beautiful thing, but, when you dive in closer, you see the message.”
Girón was one of the dozen or so community members who helped Sisniega with the details of the mural, mostly filling in blank spaces and adding final touches. Volunteers were coordinated through Pilsen Arts & Community House, a nonprofit agency.
Girón, a third-generation Pilsen resident, saw the immigrant experience represented in the block-long mural.
“You feel so fragile, you feel so weak when you come somewhere on your own,” Girón says. “And maybe the journey was a struggle. It usually is. And when you get here, you’re brand new. It takes a community like Pilsen to motivate you.”
Another volunteer, William Guerrero, 21, who goes by “The Kid from Pilsen,” saw his own father’s journey from Mexico to Pilsen, where he had four children, in the piece.
“My father came from a long way to plant his seeds and having the fortune enough to have four treasures, making sure we triumph,” Guerrero says.
Teresa Magaña, a cofounder of Pilsen Arts & Community House, helped coordinate the project with Sisniega. It also has featured some of his work in an exhibition. She says her organization had been eyeing the massive wall for a few years as a potential mural canvas and wanted to ensure that the work would contribute something to the neighborhood.
“People really take their time and stand in front of a lot of murals in the neighborhood and ask themselves questions or see what it invokes in them,” Magaña says.
She says Sisniega’s fusion of contemporary and traditional styles was a good fit.
“At first glance, it looks very folk and traditional in the sense of this indigenous imagery,” Magaña says. “But once you look at it a lot closer, there’s all this more modern, futuristic tones to it.”