The Guardian, January 26, 2020: ‘Whitewashed’: how gentrification continues to erase LA’s bold murals
Kathy Gallegos remembers the first time she saw John “Zender” Estrada’s striking mural of an Aztec warrior flanked by two eagles. She was parking behind a music venue in Highland Park, a heavily Latino working-class neighborhood northeast of downtown Los Angeles, and couldn’t help noticing the bold imagery of a piece that Zender had painted in the wake of the 1992 riots to urge ordinary Angelenos to “resist violence with peace”.
“I remember thinking, that’s a really nice mural,” Gallegos recalled. “Next thing I knew, the place was bought and it was gone.”
Some of Highland Park’s most revered muralists have themselves been priced out of the neighborhood. And there is a sense, among those who grew up with them in the 1990s and 2000s and are still hanging on – either because they own their own houses or continue to live in rent-controlled apartment buildings – that what’s at stake is an essential piece of the city’s soul. “Those of us born and raised in LA know the significance of murals, and those who aren’t from here don’t know,” said Irene Narvaez, the principal of Highland Park High School who grew up locally and now encourages student mural-painting on her own schoolyard. “There’s more about social justice and history in these murals than my students can learn about in books.”
