Muralist Berenice Badillo, along with an all-female arts collective, is reimagining — and expanding — her mural as part of a broader ongoing restoration project
From the base of a pillar on a bridge over Chicano Park, artist Berenice Badillo fine-tuned details of her mural paying homage to strong women.
It’s something Badillo has done before. She first painted the mural 27 years ago, but this time, as she restores the work for a new generation, she has an all-female crew behind her, new motivation, knowledge, and a renewed vision.
Her 1997 artwork “Mural in Chicana Park” will add “Tú Puedes, Mija” — You can, my daughter — to its name, she said. “I really wanted to fight for this mural to be for women, about women, by women,” Badillo said.
Badillo plans to complete the restoration before this year’s Chicano Park Day celebration, slated for April 20.
This past week the team put up the scaffolding and began the installation of seven massive canvases that make up the colorful — and now 60 feet tall — mural. The prior one was 37 feet.
The renovation is part of an ongoing mural restoration project at Chicano Park — a historic landmark that houses the largest collection of outdoor murals.
Badillo, 49, a Chicana artist and licensed marriage and family therapist, wants to inspire more women to tell their stories through art.
Her inspiration came when she was a teenager and visited the park in Barrio Logan for the first time. What caught her attention were all the murals with “stories and images that looked like me and the people around me.”
Standing in front of artist Mario Torero’s mural “La Virgen,” she promised herself to one day paint a mural on site. And so she did, but it wasn’t easy.
“It became my ultimate goal,” the Emerald Hills resident said. Badillo said it was possible thanks in part to the guidance of her late professor and artist, Michael Schnorr.
In both the original and the new design, images of strong women stand out from bottom to top.
Badillo explained that a condition for the restoration was that the mural had to be “as close as I could to the original design.”
“I kept the ideas of the first one, but I grew from that.”
The 1997 version showed Badillo wearing a shirt honoring activist Patricia Marín. Above, an elderly woman ripping apart images that depict racism or police brutality.
In the new one, two young girls replace her image as a message to a new generation. The restored version also features Josephine Talamantez, one of the park’s co-founders. Both designs maintain the concept of little girls climbing up with the help of other women.
Through the first mural Badillo denounced racism, sexism and anti-immigrant stances in her community, something she lamented that nearly three decades later still continues.
“(In the mural) you see a lot of the same images, but you also see updated protesters,” she said. “You see the Brown Berets, the Black Lives movement, there’s also LGBT, there’s lesbians in there because they also have not been represented in Chicano Park and they need to, or Afro-Latinas, so we made sure to add that in this pillar.”
Conditions have also changed. Back then, Badillo would borrow the scaffolding from her old job at a homeless shelter and go to work on the mural without a helmet or proper shoes.
“For me coming back and having this Rolls-Royce scaffolding and a whole crew that it’s so amazing ... it makes me cry for that girl that just wanted so badly to be heard that she risked her life.”
The planning process started around 2022, while the team helped with painting from their own houses. Badillo kept the essence of the previous mural, which was also painted on canvas, since at that time she was unable to paint directly onto the concrete due to a protest at the park. “So like a giant sticker, I stuck this giant canvas in there.”
This time Badillo is joined by the women from XoQUE, a border arts collective she co-founded.
“It’s an honor to be able to paint in such an iconic and sacred space,” said artist Selina Calvo with XoQUE. “It’s just one of those things you always dream of having the opportunity to do, and it was definitely amazing to be able to help her restore her piece and be a part of that history.”
Badillo calls this opportunity “an amazing gift.” She was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2023. “I was really upset that it had to happen at this moment,” she said. “But I feel like this mural really healed me and helped me through this process.”
She said she is now cancer free. “I feel very grateful that my effort loved me back,” she added. “That’s what I’m trying to give to the community.”
Staff photojournalist Alejandro Tamayo contributed to this report.
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