Mother Nature
Mural on Yuma business depicts desert ecosystem
The chance to celebrate desert landscapes and ecosystems inspired artist Mariela Varela to create a mural customers and passers-by can see on the facade of Desert Water, a business at Avenue B and 8th Street in Yuma.
Titled “Mother Nature,” the mural is the second painted by Varela, a San Luis, Ariz., native on the side of the building that houses the business belonging to her stepfather, David Lara.
“It represents life in the desert, its vegetation, its landscapes — at that beauty that nature gives us and that we many times don’t value,” Varela said.
“Though a lot of people don’t think so, the desert is filled with life,” she said. “It’s amazing how vegetation and animals adapt to it. That is what I wanted to be seen in the mural.”
Varela recently was hired as an art teacher at an elementary school in Minnesota, but because the campus has been shuttered amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she has used the free time to complete the mural.
She hopes the mural will remind passers-by that for all its apparent harshness, the desert is a delicate ecosystem that must be protected.
The concept for the mural was her own, she said. “It began with a design and changed a little in the the painting, but it continues being the same idea.”
Her prior mural was the idea of her father. It depicted Jose Maria Redondo was part of a pioneer family in Yuma, an entrepreneur and one of Yuma early mayors, and Jose Ricardo Flores Magon, an early 20th century anarchist who sought the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz, a dictator who ruled Mexico with an iron hand for three decades.
Although seemingly unrelated subjects, Redondo and Flores Magon had the Yuma Territorial Prison in common. As a territorial lawmaker Redondo played a key role in bringing the prison to Yuma. Flores Magon went on to serve a sentence in the prison for violating U.S. neutrality laws in his campaign to oust Diaz.
Having painted the murals in Yuma, Varela says she hopes to paint a mural in San Luis, her hometown.