El Pueblo Mural Restoration
Arts and Culture MultimediaThis 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 (