After the better part of a year of work, students from Fort Vancouver High School unveiled Friday afternoon their vibrant mural at the Vancouver Police Department’s West Precinct building, something they hope will endure as a symbol of community as long as it hangs.
The students began painting amid a national discussion about police brutality, and Manuel Avalos, who has since graduated and is taking classes at Washington State University Vancouver, said once the students knew where the mural was going, the context became front-and-center in their minds.
“Since we found out that it was going to be here, we were thinking about it,” he said. “We wanted it to be an important thing that this mural was about unity and it was about community, not just us showing off who we are.”
Avalos was a member of MEChA, the student club that painted the mural, while in high school.
MEChA stands for the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, or the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, and is a national student group focused around Chicano and Latino students.
“They’re young people that are trying to become leaders in the community, who see stewardship as a beautiful thing, and are eager to share what they have, their gifts and their talents, to make the community better,” said Rodolfo Serna, the mural artist who worked with the students.
The club made another mural, at the school, the year before. Diane Avalos-Leos, who works with one of the school district’s family-community resource centers and sits on the police department’s Diversity Advisory Team, connected the club with the department for the new mural project, and the students went to work.
The project took about 30 hours of labor, spread out over several months and among roughly 25 students.
Club members, department staff and city officials gathered at the precinct’s lobby Friday afternoon to celebrate the mural’s official unveiling and dedication, and Avalos told them the club’s two murals are among the things he’s proudest of accomplishing.
“This is what we feel has actually represented us, and actually made a difference,” he said.
He recalled how surprised the high school community was when the club’s first mural went up, and added the new one might perk things up a bit around the station, too.
“Not to knock on the designers here, but there is no color here,” he said, to laughter.
Police officers work in a serious business, he said, but “It’s very important for them to smile too, so I hope that this mural will bring that to them.”
Serna said the mural’s stippled, contrasting-color style reflects certain Native American artwork and his work. But, he said, the more specific elements of the roughly 6-by-16-foot mural come from the students.
Pictured on the vibrant canvas are lions, butterflies, trees, rivers, the sun and an Asian-style dragon — “All of these really representing the youth that were working on the piece,” Serna said.
Another theme the students wanted to broach was social justice, he said, so also pictured are apartheid fighter and former South African President Nelson Mandela, Civil War-era abolitionist Harriet Tubman, Chief Seattle of the Suquamish Tribe and labor leader Cesar Chavez.
“Every day we see these white walls, these blank walls, but today, for as long as that mural’s up there, everybody will be able to experience this mural and experience ideas that we don’t always think about, that are presented by these figures,” he said.
For the unveiling, Serna and his 8-year-old son Mateo, started off with a song of gratitude from Mesoamerican native traditions.
Teo Huerta, a senior at Fort Vancouver and MEChA club member, said he hoped the mural reflects ideas of trust and bonding between police and their communities and within communities themselves.
“We are diversity, but we are also unity,” he said. “There were many ways to say we are united as one, but I think one of the most powerful ways to convey that message of unity is not through just the action of voice and speech, but the action of visualization, which comes back to all these great leaders.”
Vancouver Police Chief James McElvain joined in the praise, saying approving an opportunity for the department and community to work together on a project like MEChA’s was the easiest job of all.
“If this is a representation of the future of Vancouver,” he said of the students, “then we’re in good hands.”
