The Murals of Jalatlaco II.

Now you see it now you don’t.

Before going out with my camera I will often walk about and see things I want to photograph. Considering the lighting I will then return at the most auspicious time. On other occasions I have photographed something and when passing by that location a few days later I will see with surprise that the object I photographed no longer exists. I love spirea vanhoutii in full bloom and about three years ago I walked all over Matamoras snapping really great pictures of it. (If I say so myself!) To my shock, many of those same shrubs were cut down to the ground a few days later. Fortunately I have the pictures. I say fortunate because spirea is an old tyme shrub, nobody carries it, nobody plants it, and many people are apparently determined to make it extinct.

There is a restlessness about painting here in Oaxaca: there is always someone out painting something. Sometimes it will be a new mural or a coat of paint that appears and other times it will be same that disappears. As a result in my wanderings I always remind my self: Now you see it and likely tomorrow you wont.

Two blocks down from the preceding mural, this brings us to the corner of Aldama and Antequera, we find this strange example. It appears to show an African person, whether male or female I can not say, a row boat in front of a cave(?), a bat and some reeds. While most murals here make reference to the past or the present, this makes reference to nothing that I can understand. But I liked it because on that corner we can see two sides of the coin: a designed and well executed mural on one wall and hideous graffiti around the corner. Fortunately that is now gone.

Just down the street to the west there was this nice little painting and I often took this street home because the painting was so jolly and it made me feel so good. (I feel Good!) Alas. In the pandemic, the painters came...I believe in Oaxaca house painters and muralists are considered essential services...and so my neighborhood pick-me-up is no more. But I will say, the house looks nice.

PS. Just across the street from the larger mural and facing it there is a long wall that is always well painted. Great care is taken to send someone out to eradicate the most recent graffiti. There was a very large tree in the large garden inside the wall and a large part of it overhung the wall and at a particular time of day it cast lovely leaf shadows on the pristine wall. I went there one recent morning to photograph the shadows at exactly eleven A.M. and to my shock and surprise I found that another essential service, tree trimmers, had just finished lopping off all of the tree’s branches. Now, I could draw it from memory but of course it just wouldn’t be the same.