Arts and Culture Research Multimedia
This collection of resources and original research about the historic murals of El Pueblo features a range of materials, including a series of videos created by filmmakers Raúl Aguirre & Netza Aguirre based on interviews with artists. These materials were developed to support ongoing study and preservation of the murals as part of Sunnyside Foundation’s reinvestment in the site.
A key El Pueblo project of Sunnyside Foundation’s reinvestment efforts in the Southside is the restoration of El Pueblo’s historic murals, in close partnership with the Arts Foundation of Tucson and Southern Arizona and other campus and community collaborators, including at UArizona. These cultural treasures are visual expressions of the legacy of the site, especially the center’s spatial identity as a node of Latine, Indigenous and mixed heritage cultural and political empowerment—contextualized by such forces as the Chicane movement of the 60s and 70s, environmental justice advocacy, and the center’s leadership in spearheading intergenerational services for a diverse Southside community. A key resource for exploring the visual culture of the Southside, the murals hold in place meaningful expressions of such themes as community self-determination, love of land, spirituality, cultural pride— all deploying a range of unique aesthetic styles and iconography.
While more exist around the original buildings of the El Pueblo Neighborhood Center, the following titles and muralists have been identified and confirmed: David Tineo and Danny Garza, Nuestra Raza, Gente Unidas (1979), located on Building #1, North Wall and Building #4, East Wall, on Irvington Road; Scott Egan, Untitled (1986), located on Building #4, North Wall on Irvington Road; Cynthia Reyes Aponte, Celebration of Life (1985), located on Building #6, South Wall; Martin Moreno, Nuclear Alternative (1980), located on Building #2, South Wall; Cynthia Aponte, Honoring the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui Nations, located on Building #5. North and West walls on Irvington Road.
Here we spotlight a few signature artists and murals with a curation of information and resources to support further investigation and creativity about the origins, influences and future activation of these pieces of historic public art.
We would like to acknowledge support for the research, study and documentation about El Pueblo’s murals from the Sunnyside Foundation (SF), the office of Congressman Raul Grijalva, the Frank De La Cruz Library, the Arts Foundation of Tucson and Southern Arizona as well as UArizona’s Department of Public and Applied Humanities (PAH) 420: Innovation and the Human Condition Spring 2023 & Fall 2025, “The Murals of El Pueblo,” the Center for Creative Photography, Special Collections, with funding in part from the Marshall Foundation and the Arts|Humanities|Resilience (
Nuestra Raza, Gente Unidas (1979) Arts and Culture Research Multimedia David Tineo and Danny Garza
Painted by David Tineo, one of the most significant Tucsonan muralists to have gained national recognition for his work within the Chicane arts movement, Nuestra Raza and Gente Unidas are arguably the site’s most iconic pieces of public art. In particular, the pair of murals anchor the site’s historic link to the Chicane movement, using iconography that signal such key concepts as mestizaje, the imagination of Chicane identity as a product of racial mixture, or Aztlan, the ancestral and spiritual homeland of the Aztec-Mexica. Frank de la Cruz, beloved El Pueblo librarian and one of the earliest historians of the site, writes this of the murals:
“At El Pueblo, Tineo used native colors to depict the strength of the culture. On the build-ing to the east of the complex he has painted a head with three faces representing the Mexican race. To the left is Native American; to the right is Spaniard; the middle face is Mestizo, the two combined in a new race, barely 450 years old. The Mestizo is offering a man and woman some modern battle weapons-pencils and pens. On another building [wall], actors mingle with warriors. Side by side at the left are the Aztec soldier, the Mexican revolutionary and the bato (street kid), each in his time the front-line battler in conflicts between opposing cultures. On the right there are women representing the arts. Tineo stresses the fact that the Chicana's influence is felt, and theater and music and painting are often forms of their expression. At the center, the hand with the flame, the past and the present, depict the birth of hopes and dreams.”
Additional sources on David Tineo and Chicano muralism, in Tucson and beyond can be found in the site’s references document.
Celebration of Life (1979), Honoring the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui (1980) Arts and Culture Research Cynthia Reyes Aponte, Raúl & Raúl Netza Aguirre, Jacqueline Barrios
Two of the murals that grace the historic buildings of the El Pueblo Neighborhood Center were painted by Cynthia Reyes Aponte. The only woman artist in a group that included Martin Moreno and David Tineo, Aponte’s contributions includes the mural Celebration of Life, a panorama of the stages of life commemorating her brother’s passing, and Honoring the Tohono O’odham and the Pascua Yaqui Nations, four vignettes representing the themes of ceremony, landscape, harvest and prayer. In addition to a video created by Raúl and Raúl Netza Aguirre with the artist, resources featured here include a gallery of images and notes from a conversation, or “platica,” conducted January 29, 2024 at El Pueblo Neighborhood Center with the artist.
Nuclear Alternative (1980) Arts and Culture Research Martin Moreno, Raúl Netza Aguirre
Nuclear Alternative presents a striking vision of the center’s participation in environmental justice movements throughout the various eras of its existence. In this most explicit representation of the values of sustainability and peace, Martin Moreno brings into relation his background as a son of migrant workers, iconic Tucson mountains, religious imagery and his own convictions as a pacifist. The mural is a tribute to the survivors of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and is uniquely the only mural at the site to be paired with a natural living element, an olive tree planted before the artwork. Resources featured here include a gallery of images and notes from a conversation conducted by Netza Aguirre with the artist in 2025.
Image gallery: