Latin music plays as students and their families congregate around an exterior wall at Carbondale Middle School.
The ten student artists for the mural about to be unveiled recently immigrated to the United States from Latin America. They created the mural to display their memories from their home countries — Guatemala, El Savlador, Colombia, Mexico and Honduras.
They are called up to the front of the crowd, and the tallest of the students take the top corners. They rip off the fabric covering.
The mural is colorful, with an ocean and mountains, an American flag and different flora and fauna adorning a brick wall.
The students worked on the art piece for the last two weeks, and unveiled the final product Monday.
The Carbondale-based nonprofit VOICES runs the student immigrant art program, called the Hero’s Journaling Project.
It aims to help local immigrant youth process their experiences and lean into their perspectives through visual journaling.
Gabriela Mejia is VOICES’ project director. She combined the students’ artwork into one large, colorful mural. At the unveiling, Mejia said that art can help young immigrants express difficult or challenging experiences.
“For them to share their stories of their travels and what they experienced is sometimes not a thing that happens,” she said. “It’s an outlet for them to express themselves if they want to share anything.”
For one of the students, Jamie, her favorite memory from home is dancing in the rain with other kids.
“She says that it is also a memory that many people from Latin countries have,” Mejia translated for the student, who spoke in Spanish.
English language development teacher Mary Hernandez worked with Mejia to facilitate the project. She said that being able to merge teaching English with artistic expression is a dream come true.
“It allows so much more freedom and deep processing of their experiences in their own way and in a safe place,” she said at the unveiling. “It’s just a broader form of expression and a freer form of expression, so it opens them up to a lot of things that they couldn't normally say with language barriers.”
Students will collaborate on two other, similar murals over the next two years at the school.
