Life's Work

#8/27 offers a story about "the power of art"––I try to believe this is possible! (Another story, out of 27 days of "columns," from my book, "Secrets..."[<https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QKBKNMQ>).

LIFE'S WORK

At first, passerbys just looked on with bemusement as the young woman climbed the scaffold each day to work on her huge 40' by 180' mural.  All she appeared to be doing was just slowly covering the cement wall under the freeway with black and white circles.  But within the abstract design were thousands of faces beginning to peer out at whoever bothered to look closely.  And the faces were of very old men and women dressed in rags.  For those spectators who had the patience to scan faces for a few minutes, occasionally the miracle happened -- they saw a relative, some friend, themselves as they would appear in a mirror, forty or sixty years hence.  

What Juniper Huerto had dedicated her life to do was to paint portraits of each person from the surrounding neighborhoods, babies, teenagers, parents, everyone as they would look when they became old.  She had spent months going from door to door asking for photos from the families to include in the mural.  Most people were flattered by the attention of the young, pretty, chicano woman, digging out some snapshots from the family album for her to use in the art work. Folks were charmed by her sincerity, conned into thinking that they were to be exactly reproduced in paint on her mural in all their youthful glory. But even the gang members she portrayed on her wall seemed to be humbled at first sight of their faces aged 50 years.  It was as if the fact of their old age and eventual death had sobered up an entire neighborhood.

As Juniper added paint to the mural, her mixed soup of faces extending itself along the cement wall a millimeter at a time, more and more people stopped to watch. And when they saw a picture of themselves they were changed forever.  People started mellowing out, treating each other with respect for a change.  Young kids who saw themselves as old people in Juniper's mural suddenly reversed their attitudes, ceased beating and robbing "the old farts" on whom they had preyed in the past.  Although the police had warned her that it was much too dangerous to continue working in the East L.A. neighborhood, she had kept right on painting, even after the cops had given up patrolling.  

Juniper began the mural in September, 1988, and finished it in October, 2007.  She finally descended the scaffold for the last time at age 39.  Entombed in the massive picture were over three-thousand portraits, almost half of all men, women, and children from her neighborhood in Watts, California.  Two years later the mural and overpass were demolished for a new Interstate 15.