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we started a girl scout group at Cook middle school and most of the girls I believe maybe they're all first generation um, from Mexico, I kept noticing through our meaning process that their worlds are very small. They're um, they're as probably most adolescents are there. Um,

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they just hadn't thought much about their community or about the world at large other than you know themselves and and their classmates, we started taking them to proceed eyes in the mission district and showing them what a mural was first we talk to them about a

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mural and we just couldn't seem to get the concept. And then when we did that, we went to the Mission district of san Francisco and they saw these murals, you could, you could visibly see them be touched by it. We went to san Francisco and murals.

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We went walking around like seeing the murals of uh, there was a big mural about cesar Chavez, it was like, it was in, in the school, it's our first time painting a mural for Roseland. I think it's fun because we get to be with our friends

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for for like a certain time. I think it's a nice thing to do because we represent the community. They felt that Latinos don't have a feeling of ownership in this neighborhood and they felt that this would help make Latinos feel more incorporated. There's some words down

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here like it says hope and then we trust we translated and it's um, it's better inside that's, that's the same thing as whole and then honesty they didn't really translate it over here. But um, love, health and peace means means this. And then we started a

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process with the artist brian where um, he just had them sketch and they don't imagine themselves as Skechers. So they just took a long time for them to even to put anything on paper and they really were putting what I saw as insignificant things on paper.

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Um, brian on the other hand, ended up after a couple of meetings finding their essence. He came in and he sort of, he interpreted artistically what they were saying. A lot of folks who were, my instructors essentially kind of imparted into me a certain wisdom and,

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and, and ethos and really, I mean really this is absolutely true and I sort of want to impart this into them uh, largely by by treating them uh, with respect and treating the mural. Although my standards are really high, I'm trying to treat the mural almost

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as if it were a joke. It's kind of like this big fun thing that we can now do you know? And uh, I'm also trying to reach out to them in my extremely limited crude um, pre high school spanish. They have a lot of challenges just

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in their daily existence. They don't have a lot of money. They are getting paid for this project that is huge to them. We have laid down expectations of work ethic and if they are on the scaffolding, they need to wear their hired hats, Their faces will

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be about four ft by four ft. They'll be really uh significant. And I knew that they got it when on the first day when we came down and one of the girls looked at the mural across the way and she goes, whoa, this is going to

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be up forever. I can tell people that I did this, this is in my neighborhood. And suddenly I thought she had a pride in her community that she didn't have before. She had an ownership that she didn't have before.