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Torres Jessy

Professor Batty

English 101

February 26, 2017

Contra La Posibilidades

The mural I chose was painted by an artist named Hector Rios. The mural has a

timestamp of 1995. The mural was painted on the side of a building that served as a group home

in the city of Van Nuys. Oddly enough, it was torn down and now a new building called The Zev

Yaroslavsky Family Support Center, which is a one-stop shop for social services opened to the

public. The focal point in the mural are the baby faces that are stack on top of one another

positioned in a pyramid fashion with a white girls face with blue eyes at the top. The second was

a black boys face, at the bottom of a Hispanic childs face along the side with a native childs

face. Giving the blue eyed girl a sense of power, a superior position over the other boy's faces.

Located to the left of the stacked faces is a picture of a man climbing a rope. Under the male

figure shows a stack of books giving the look of a stairway structure. On each spine of the books,

they have words written on them as follows: Education,Values,Dreams. At the top of this

book mountain, it shows sun rays beaming down on the climbing man. Rios used also bright and

illuminating colors on this side of the painting giving it the sense of a place you wanna be. On

the right of the faces shows a picture of a waterfall with a man falling down in the middle of it

and falling with him is a bunch of trash. Free falling with the two is the words lost hope and a

sign that says unemployment Rios also painted this side of the mural with gloomy dark colors

to help bring a sad effect to it. My impression from the mural is no matter what minority

background one comes from, we need to show the man we too are important and even with the
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already prefixed odds we can all grow to be great! Although some may wonder what possible

problems or predetermined issues do we have if we live in the greatest country in the world, two

of the setbacks are dropping out of school, high unemployment rates for minorities. As shown by

the depiction of books, falling man, and child's face.

Rios put as the first step in the mountain of books education. This lead me to do some

research on statistics during that time. I looked into the year 1994 and what I found through the

National Center for Educational Statistics website was a very detailed percentage and count of a

number of drop outs through out the states. Honestly, I somewhat blindly pre-judged understood

more after viewing the stats. What these stats showed where that the higher income class

population consisted of ten percent out of hundred drop outs. Fifty-seven percent of the middle-

income class dropped out and in the lower, in come class, thirty-one percent had dropped out. Its

interesting the middle class where it gets weird is when one looks at the status for ethnicity, so

out of those three incomes, fifty-five percent of all where white drop outs, second highest

percentage rate is Hispanics with twenty-one percent; the third place was blacks coming in at

nineteen percent. This now made sense giving that we minority (Hispanic and blacks) already

come from nothing, we are less likely to drop out. The privileged white don't have to prove them.

By default whites already have that comfort and social stability, so why strive and graduate when

all they have to learn is the family business?

The unemployment sign falling is painted under the words lost hope along side the

falling man. This is what provoked my next research when I came across the Bureau of Labor

Statistics and looked up the unemployment rates at the time, which again, in this case, is 1994.

The information that I discovered here is very depressing and shade light on why an artist like

Hector Rios would go out of his way to paint this mural. On this website, the statistics showed
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that whites unemployment rate was four percent at the time. Hispanics are three times over

sitting at twelve percent, and blacks at thirteen percent. Seeing this sheds more light why Rios

wrote lost hope because even after you graduate and educate your self the job space gets filled

in with a white person three times over then it would if you had a shade darker then white.

Luckily you and I are not in that present moment because although the ranks don't change the

percent ratio is smaller. It is actually cut in half compared to those percentage rates of that year.

Another reason why I picked this mural I recall seeing it every morning on my commute

to and from school. I never really stopped to think what the message was until now. Oddly

enough I don't think I would have understood it that much then as I do now being a male

Hispanic in twenty-seventeen. Witnessing the many obstacles I did growing up in this

community and what I will face in my lifetime but I strive to have my foot towards a better

direction to help all minorities not just my shade or background. That is why I think the message

to this mural is no matter what minority background you come from a show the man that you too

are important and matter, even against all your prefixed odds as a minority.
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Worked Cited

Bureau of Labor Statistics.Unemployment rates. 1994.Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, CA

Metropolitan Division. https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet . Accesssed April 2017

The National Center of Education Statistics. High school dropout and completion rates over the

1972 through 1994, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs96/r94/r9410a.asp . Accessed April 2017