Community Spirit Al Fresco

Texas history received another colorful interpretation this fall when Rice University sophomore Josef Sifuentes and his father, Jesse, completed a giant mural in East Houston.
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Stretching 75' x 15', the mural covers an outside wall of Cash America Pawn at the corner of Telephone Road and Dumble Street, and it depicts the state’s history from a Mexican American perspective.

“Since Texas used to belong to Mexico, and we are always being influenced by Mexico, we decided to combine Mexican and Texas themes,” explains Josef, a Martel College sophomore.

The three-part mural unfolds in a story-telling fashion, with the left side representing the past, the central portion the present, and the right side the future. In the left corner, a Mexican woman stands on a wooden pier, holding a fishing pole as she looks at a flaming sun set over the coastal waters. On the shore, a giant pre-Columbian pot is juxtaposed against a series of oil refinery tanks that lead to the Houston Ship Channel.

Grabbing center stage is a Mexican American woman playing an accordion. She is framed by two agave plants and is surrounded by a Texas longhorn, the San Jacinto Monument, a jackrabbit, an armadillo, and a horned lizard. Behind her, the Houston skyline rises from the horizon.

In the right section, a rocket disappears into the sky while a bald eagle glides toward a freeway. The mural also pays tribute to Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died in the Challenger space shuttle explosion. Her smiling face appears on the backdoor of a red caboose.

The painting has proved popular with the surrounding Hispanic community. Josef says that as he and his father were completing the mural in August, members of the community would honk and give the thumbs up as they drove by. Even those youths who once scrawled graffiti on the wall have shown their respect by not vandalizing the artwork.

The idea to create the mural came from a coalition of civic groups led by the organization Keep Houston Beautiful. After the pawnshop agreed to have the mural painted on its wall, the coalition commissioned Sifuentes’s father, an art teacher at Austin High School, which is two blocks from the shop. Jesse created the drawing for the mural with contributions from Josef, whom he hired as his assistant.

Father and son worked side by side for three months until the mural was finished. They primed the wall white and then drew a grid of one-foot squares over the entire space. Next, they copied the drawings from a master sketch onto the wall. “When my father and I were doing the mural,” Josef says, “we would look at each other and say ‘Man, we are painting a mural.’” Josef painted several parts of the mural, including the accordion player who is the centerpiece.

“It was kind of daunting,” Josef admitted, “but art is something that I have always been very confident about.” He has helped his father work with children to paint two other murals in East Houston: at the Mason Park gym and at Ingrando Park.

Josef is majoring in mechanical engineering and art, and he plans to combine the knowledge and skills of his two interests to seek a job in engineering design. “Art and mechanical engineering both deal with creating working compositions,” he explains. But he will continue painting as a hobby—the pleasures and the rewards of creating a work of art are too great to ignore.

“Years from now,” he beams, “I’ll be able to point and say, ‘I painted that.’”

—David D. Medina