La Llorona Project, San Francisco
Juana Alicia created her new mural titled “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” in the spring of 2004 at the corners of York and 24th Streets. With fiscal sponsorship by The San Francisco Women’s Center and the Galeria de la Raza, the support of Las Trenzas Latina Student and Alumnae Organization of UC Berkeley, and funding from The Potrero Nuevo Fund, The San Francisco Mayor’s Neighborhood Beautification Fund, the Greppi and Leone family and private donors, the artist was able to complete this project on women, water and globalization, located in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District.
The Llorona mural is located at the site of Juana Alicia’s 1983 mural project, Las Lechugueras (The Women Lettuce Workers), which depicts farmworkers and their battles against working conditions and pesticide poisoning in California. Given a 90-day warning in 2001 that the mural would be destroyed because of water damage to the wall, Juana Alicia developed the La Llorona project to pick up where Las Lechugueras left off.
With La Llorona, Juana Alicia engages environmental struggles involving women around the world, foregrounding the classic Mexican myth of the woman who allegedly drowned her children and is damned to weep for them. As interviewer Leticia Hernandez describes the mural:
La Llorona weaves the stories of women in Bolivia, India, and at the U.S. Border together. It highlights Bolivians in Cochabamba who have fought to keep Bechtel Corporation from buying the water rights in their country; Indian farm workers in the Narmada Valley protesting in the flooded waters of their homes against their government’s irresponsible dam projects; and the women in black protesting the unsolved murders of women in Juarez, in the shadow of the Rio Bravo and the maquiladoras (sweatshops).
Juana Alicia wishes to thank the following individuals for assisting her with the project in many ways:
San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano, Marine Andoh-Alle, Claudia Avila, Marta Ayala, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Mario Chabl?, Bruni Davila, Tony Deifell, Monica Enriquez, Brooke Estin, Susana Gallardo and her students, Jami Gazzaniga, Miguel Gonzalez, Tirso Gonzalez, Harmony of Pop’s Bar, Leticia Hernandez, Sarah Hussain, Ann Leimer, Eliana Kaya, Barbara Lekisch, Beatriz Leyva-Cutler, Teresa Mejia, Mayahuel Montoya, Alma Muñoz, Mardie Oakes, Brooke Oliver, Jeffrey Palacios, Panaderia La Mexicana, Carolina Ponce de Leon, Enrique Ramirez, Regina Ramos, Justin Lee Regnier, Diana Ritchie, Elba Rivera, Odilia Galvan Rodriguez, Rachel Rosen, Patricia Velazquez, Esperanza Verdin, John and Valerie Watson, Nathan Zackheim and all my relations.
Read an interview with Juana Alicia about the Llorona project