#28 - Seeds of Solidarity


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​Former location: 1711 Guadalupe St.
Date: June 2005
Artists: Mary Agnes Rodriguez and Jose Cosme
Dimensions:​
        Seeds of Solidarity commemorates Westside community leaders who work together to make the community stronger and healthier. When Cosme and Rodriguez first set to work on the mural, the building on 1711 Guadalupe was Hope Action Care, a clinic that offered HIV testing and addiction rehabilitation programs. The artists wanted to combat the stigma attached to HIV and drug use by celebrating the strength of the Westside community. To communicate health-and well being, the mural incorporates plants and milagros traditionally used in curanderismo. Poet and Westside native Raul Salinas is the mural’s central figure.
Content and Design
    The central figure in the mural is poet Raul Salinas, painted as an indio with la virgen de Guadalupe tattooed on his chest. Salinas has a halo around his head and stands in front of a wooden cross. Artists added an extra piece of wood to the top of the building facade to extend the cross.  Salinas holds one scale in each hand, weighing a heart against a feather. Jose Cosme, who designed the Raul Salinas portion of the mural, explains that the scale with the heart and feathers is a judgment image, testing if the heart is pure or if it has been contaminated by negativity and hate in the world. For Cosme, this is a call to humility:
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“Humility to me is not thinking you’re better than anybody, smarter than anybody, even though I guess there’s no way to measure that...You should never look down on anybody for any reason, like “they’re just heroin addicts” or whatever, especially when you don’t know the story.”
        The ribbon winding from left to right bears the name of the clinic Hope Action Care. The left half of the mural features the portraits of different Westside community leaders, while the right portion pays tribute to indigenous healing practices and curanderismo. The woman on the left beneath the Justicia banner is Emma Tenayuca, raising her fist in the struggle fork workers’ rights. Beneath Emma is Rosy Castro in a black dress [reference bio] [find text beneath her]. The man in the blue shirt is David Gonzales, a local artist and co-founder of Guadalupe Cultural Arts. Next to him, a girl holds a poster that reads “Support Arts,” representing the vision behind the Guadalupe. 
         The tall building in the background just beneath the word “Action” is Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, a Catholic parish just a few blocks from the mural. The grey-haired man underneath the church is Father Carmelo Tranchese, a Jesuit priest who pushed for the creation of the Alazan-Apache Courts, one of the first large-scale public housing projects in the country. To the right of the building door, Patricia Castillo of the P.E.A.C.E. Initiative leads a march in front of her organization’s banner. The girl with the painted face is Patricia’s niece, Alexa. 
          Mary Agnes Rodriguez painted most of the right half of the mural. Two campesinos work on either side of an indigenous woman with a basket of corn seeds, cobs, and husks. In the upper right corner a hand releases three white doves, symbols of peace. The hand also releases milagros, healing emblems used in the healing practice of curanderismo. A nopal plant, common throughout Northern Mexico and South Texas, grows in the bottom right corner of the mural.
        Seeds of Solidarity was drawn and painted entirely in freehand. This approach means the mural has some idiosyncrasies; for example, Cosme pointed out that Raul Salinas’ right arm is twisted oddly. It also allowed the mural to unfold organically. The bare trees that fill the background of the mural were copied directly from the trees behind the Hope Action Care building, bare because the artists painted in winter. Mary Agnes used her own hand as the reference image for the hand releasing the doves: she held up one hand as a model and painted with the other.
History
    The building for Seeds of Solidarity was originally occupied by Hope Action Care, a non-profit clinic that provided free HIV and STD testing and rehabilitation programs for drug and alcohol addictions. The clinic was placed prominently on Guadalupe Street to reach prostitutes and heroin addicts, and the owner wanted a bright, positive mural to honor leaders in the Westside community. Jose Cosme and Mary Agnes Rodriguez worked together to design the mural, brainstorming Westside leaders and arranging their portraits in a coherent scene that related to community health and wellness. The artists presented their design to the community through surveys and meetings and received almost entirely positive feedback.
    Including Raul Salinas in the mural was especially important for Cosme because Salinas had been a mentor to him. Manny Castillo took Cosme and a few other artists and musicians to Kansas for a NALAC conference when Salinas was receiving a lifetime achievement award for his poetry and activism. Cosme explains why he chose Salinas’ image for the mural:
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Upon receiving his award, [Raul] simply said, ‘I’m just a man.’ And to me, you know, he’s a poet, a man of words, but he didn’t say much. That’s all he said, ‘I’m just a man.’ Kept it simple. But to me it spoke volumes...I took a picture with him afterwards...He’s from here [the Westside] and his story was that he grew up in the hood, got in trouble, went to prison, was politicized and educated, came out, and he tried to do something with his life, something positive. He worked with at-risk kids. I admired him, I looked up to him. I was able to work with him in Austin...we did a few projects together and I consider him a mentor. I admire him, respected him, loved him...He fit the name of the place, Hope Action Care. It catered to heroin addicts and at one point he was a heroin addict. This guy came from that to helping people,  changing people’s lives. To me that was like, wow, because growing up in the hood, [being a heroin addict] was one of the lowest levels. Sometimes we see others as not human...I thought it was cool that he can go from that, let that go, and go towards changing other people’s lives, helping them see."
Jose Cosme and Mary Agnes Rodriguez painted this mural to help people see each other with love and bring hope to people in a dark place. Cosme laughs, remembering how he got to know so many prostitutes who worked on the Westside:
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Hope Action Care was a clinic that catered to prostitutes. They would give them tests and condoms and whatnot. So prostitutes talked to us and it’s funny becoming familiar with prostitutes, right, because when would you know a prostitute on that level? But they became human. Because a lot of times we demonize others because we don’t understand, we don’t understand that they are human, they have feelings, they have struggles...One of the people that saw that mural mural was my cousin. She was a heroin addict, she was a prostitute, and I didn’t really talk with her, right? But one day I did see her and she was like, ‘Hey, I didn’t know that was your mural on Guadalupe! I saw it and I took a picture.’...My cousin, she didn’t know that was my mural, she was there walking the street and was touched by this mural.”
The mural also brought people into the Westside and helped them to see it in a new way. Cynthia Medina, a professor of social work at Our Lady of the Lake University (OLLU), sent her students to work on the mural. Medina explains that “This particular project was important because we were able to partner with an agency that is dedicated to our West side community and its rich heritage and strengths.” Jose Cosme remembers OLLU getting emotional at the end of the project. “Their reaction was, ‘I learned trust,” Cosme recalls.
​       Community members packed the clinic courtyard and spilled into the sidewalk and street. Raul Salinas came to bless the mural. Cosme remembers that at first, Salinas couldn’t find himself in the mural:
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​I remember Raul walking up to it, you know, and you have to back up to see the big picture. I remember him walking up to it and being like, ‘Where am I?’ Because you have Mary’s little paintings and if you’re seeing that, ‘Where am I?’ [I said to him] ‘What do you mean where are you, you’re right there, in the middle!”
       Much has changed since Raul Salinas blessed the mural in June 2005. In 2008, Salinas passed away. Hope Action Care closed. In 2014, Christian P. Rios bought the now-vacant building to create an arcade and painted over Seeds of Solidarity, replacing it with a psychedelic graphic illustration of monsters and buildings titled “Dreamonoids.” Community opposition to the whitewashing exploded on Facebook, but it was too late to save the mural. Many community members still grieve the loss. Patricia Castillo cries when she remembers how her father, who recently passed away, loved the mural:
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​It was such a powerful image of who we are and our power and our strength and our resilience and our willingness to struggle, to fight for who we are and what we believe in. It was such huge imagery for this little bitty rickety building...Rosy Castro was on it, leaders from our community, leaders we revere and look up to, and some of them that are now dead. Jose and Mary’s work...brings life to the neighborhood and to the community and it gives us permission to see ourselves in those murals...This is my dad right here, standing in front of that mural. He loved that mural...because I was in it. My niece is in it..and Raul Salinas, oh my god, he’s an icon in our community! That’s a big loss.”
When Cosme first heard that Seeds of Solidarity had been painted over, he was angry and disappointed. Since 2014, Cosme says he still misses the mural but has come to feel peace about the loss:
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​To me, it was not cool on any level that he did that [painted over the mural]...because first, you’re coming into a community that you’re not a part of...and not that people can’t come in, but be respectful. And I used to be a gangster so to cross someone’s work over? On every angle that I looked at it that was not cool...But it wasn’t about me, it wasn’t about my ego...I think the mural touched people who it was supposed to touch, even though it’s gone now.”
      One of the artists Cosme most admires is Mexican “Big Three” muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Siqueiros painted an 80x18 foot mural in Los Angeles called America Tropical. Like Seeds of Solidarity, the central figure in Siqueiros’ mural is an indigenous Mexican on a cross. Also like Seeds of Solidarity, the mural was whitewashed and only rediscovered in the late 1960s, over thirty years after its completion. Millions of dollars were spent to restore the mural. Perhaps one day people will recognize the value of Seeds of Solidarity as a historic piece of Westside art and invest in uncovering the mural again.
About the Artists
Jose Cosme grew up in Puerto Rico and San Antonio. In San Antonio, he’s lived on the South, East, North, and West sides, but considers the Westside home. Cosme remembers making art ever since he was little: tracing pictures in the condensation on old refrigerators, molding faces of mud, building structures out of sticks, and winning elementary school poster contests. Once afternoon, his mother showed one of his drawings to his grandfather, Art Gutierrez. Art took one look and said “One day, he’ll be a great artist.” Cosme stored this memory away as a guiding light. To this day, he still says “Art saved my life.”
       In high school, Cosme started working with Andy Benavides from the 1906 Gallery. Benavides referred Cosme to San Anto Cultural Arts, where he started working as a volunteer on mural projects. Everything for Everyone and Nothing for Ourselves was Cosme’s first mural as a lead artist. He then went on to co-lead Seeds of Solidarity with Mary Agnes Rodriguez and lead Trinity Street on his own. Cosme was also involved as a tour guide and spokesperson for San Anto, overcoming his natural shyness with his strong belief in the mission of San Anto Cultural Arts. ​
“I knew how important the organization was and what it did for people. It gave them a sense of power and belonging. Even the murals themselves, it’s a public piece, so I put it out there and it’s not about ego. It’s not about me. People take ownership.”
Mary Agnes Rodriguez: One day in 1999, Mary Agnes went to eat at her cousin’s deli on South Alamo and Beauregard Street. While she waited for her food, she picked up a copy of El Placazo Community Newspaper and noticed a call for artists to submit designs for the newspaper’s header. Mary Agnes submitted four and was pleased to notice that one appeared on the header of El Placazo’s next issue. Mary Agnes kept submitting drawings to the newspaper for publication and people from San Anto Cultural Arts became curious about the identity of this reserved but prolific Westside artist. Finally, after Mary Agnes submitted an impressive large design to the newspaper, the current CMP Coordinator Cruz Ortiz insisted on meeting her. Mary Agnes met Manny Castillo, Cruz Ortiz, and rising CMP Coordinator Alex Rubio at the Inner City Development offices. When she showed them a drawing of the Virgen of Guadalupe, Rubio suggested a 3D mural as a nicho for the Lady of Guadalupe. Thus began Mary Agnes’ involvement with the mural program. Since then, Mary Agnes has lead or co-lead six murals: Nicho para la Virgen de Guadalupe, La India, Breaking the Cycle Seeds of Solidarity, Barrio Wellness, and El Poder de Muralismo: Cuentos Son Arte, but never stopped submitting to the community newspaper.
Outside of San Anto, Mary Agnes is an established multimedia artist. Her work has been featured in multiple museums and cultural centers,  a major touring exhibition organized by Cheech Marin. Her work usually depicts her Westside community, with overarching themes of peace and social justice. Mary Agnes is a dedicated activist and community volunteer with organizations like the City of San Antonio’s Historical and Design Review Commission, the Public Art Commission, San Jacinto Senior Homes, Alamo City Community Marching Band, and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. Mary Agnes currently works at Mujerartes, a ceramics studio designed to train and employ women of the Westside.