Art illustrates Mission’s triumphs, struggles
We spent the other afternoon walking though the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District with Cary Cordova, who knows the Mission, its art and history like the back of her hand. She wrote the book.
Cordova is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a native San Franciscan. Her book “The Heart of the Mission” takes a long look at the Latino art scene in the Mission, which she feels is both neglected and underappreciated.
The reasons are simple and complicated: “It is racism and a kind of elitism,” she says. Racism is a universal problem in this country, but she thinks the Bay Area has a particular kind of elitism — a fascination with East Coast and European cultural values, as if San Francisco and the bay region were smaller outposts of New York.
But San Francisco’s Mission is not New York, which has a strong Puerto Rican element in its Latino mix. San Francisco has Mexican, Central American and other Latino flavors — and the result seems to be uniquely Mission in style.
Cordova is interested in music and dance and all the arts, but the most obvious art in the Mission is in your face — painted on the walls, in doorways, in parks and shops. These are murals and paintings of serpents, eagles, musicians, flowers, people, workers in the fields, Latino heroes and villains, appearing in political dramas, legends and folk stories, all in vivid color. They are everywhere.
We began in a cafe, where Cordova, always the professor, talked about the history of the art and the Mission School of artists. Then she led a small tour. We skipped the famous murals of Balmy and Clarion alleys. Instead we went to a bank lobby, a BART station plaza and a mini playground.
It is a world of outdoor art, but one of Cordova’s favorites is inside a bank lobby — it is called “Homage to Siqueiros,” painted in 1974 at the Mission Street Bank of America branch, off 23rd Street.
It was done to honor David Alfaro Siqueiros, the great Mexican muralist, and to celebrate the Mission’s Latino culture. BofA commissioned it as “a symbol of our desire to offer the best financial services in the Mission District.”
“It was there for people waiting in line at the bank to see representations of their own culture,” Cordova said.
But the bank got more than it bargained for. “As you can see, the mural has a radical tinge to it,” Cordova said. The artists — Jesus Campusano, Luis Cortazar and Michael Rios— worked in their own political views, even a line from Cesar Chavez, “Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich.” Hardly banker’s talk.
Rios did another mural at the plaza outside the 24th Street BART station, this one showing a BART train as a giant snake riding on the backs of the people, “like technology in the form of a serpent,” Cordova said.
It was in the old San Francisco leftist tradition, like the artists who painted the murals inside Coit Tower and in the grand lobby of the Rincon Annex post office in the 1930s — radical art on the walls.
Like everything else in San Francisco, the Mission is under siege, from high tech, high rents and gentrification. It’s no place for struggling artists.
Two visions of the Mission come together at the corner of 24th and York streets. On one corner is the venerable St. Francis Fountain, on another is Pop’s Bar, both repurposed from the neighborhood’s Irish and Italian past. The customers in both places there are mostly young and hip. And not Latino.
Just up 24th Street is the Brava Theater, which Cordova calls “a critical space for Latino arts and culture.” In the other direction is a marvelous mini park, with a children’s playground. The walls of the surrounding buildings are covered with murals. And there is a 120-footlong ceramic serpent, representing Quetzalcoatl, the mythical Mexican beast, and a favorite of neighborhood kids.
On the York Street side is a huge mural, all in blue, of La Llorona, the ghostly weeping woman of Latino mythology. You can hear her at night, it is said, crying for the children she has lost.
This small corner may be the heart of the Mission.
Cary Cordova, on the mural in a Bank of America lobby “It was there for people waiting in line at the bank to see representations of their own culture.”