Shell Town Mural Will Go for the Big Picture

For two years, veteran muralist Victor Ochoa has had his eyes on a 4,000-square-foot, outside wall of a Balboa Elementary School building.

Soon his hands, and those of close to 200 people working with him, will paint the blue exterior with the colorful images that have played in his mind.

“The community is now geared up to getting some colors up on the wall,” he said, noting that a workshop is set for Dec. 21 at the school, 1844 South 40th St., to start sketching out the images of the artwork. When completed in nine months, the 20-by-200-foot mural will be the largest in San Diego County.

At the workshop, Ochoa will explain the roles of participants in the mural project. He is counting on help from about 100 Balboa Elementary pupils, 40 teen-agers and 40 adults from the area, which is also known as Shell Town. The local effort should make it clear that, like many of his other projects, the product will be a community mural and not “a Victor Ochoa” mural, he said.

Participants will work from a 20-foot portable model of the mural that Ochoa painted after surveying the surrounding community. He sent out 1,200 questionnaires on what residents wanted in a mural, has studied San Diego’s anthropological roots, and has strived to envision what the magnet elementary school’s pupils have to look forward to. “The first two-thirds of the project,” as Ochoa calls his research, is completed.

About $10,000 in grants and donations was raised to develop the mural, Ochoa said, but more work lies ahead. Participants in the project will learn methods of mural painting, including graph, projection, free-hand and air brush techniques, he said.

More importantly, the finished product will give community residents a sense of cultural pride and an appreciation for art, Ochoa said.

“It’s a kind of a sense of community when you have something like a monument (painted in the community), and a mural stands for something you respect,” said Ochoa, a muralist for 17 years who works with San Diego schools under the California Arts Council. He uses Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park as his base of operations.

“We don’t think of the arts when we’re poor,” Ochoa said, noting that Shell Town is among the poorest areas in the county. “We have to think of survival.”

Margarita Carmona, principal of Balboa Elementary, agrees that the mural could elevate the community’s self-esteem and help bolster “a sense of community and togetherness . . . because it’s going to be the longest mural in San Diego” and will depict Shell Town.

Ochoa, 38, said he has worked with communities such as Shell Town, which he calls “belly buttons of the barrios,” for more than 15 years. His last major project, completed in the summer of 1985, was an 11-by-185-foot mural called “Labor in San Diego” that greets passers-by at 25th Street and Commercial Avenue on the Logan Heights branch building of the county Social Services Department. The mural focuses on the lives of the area’s working-class residents.

Currently, the Normal Heights artist is in charge of coordinating pupils at Sherman Elementary School who are painting part of the same Social Services Department building with images they developed in a project called “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.”

Ochoa is also working with Memorial Junior High School on a 35-by-60-foot mural with a strong message against smoking. He also has helped conceptualize and paint murals at Sweetwater High School and San Ysidro Middle School, he said.

The four sections of the mural at Balboa Elementary will be chronologically organized, starting from the right end with images depicting the city’s rich indigenous culture and ending at the left end with depictions of how high technology might affect the future of Shell Town’s youth.

The mural will include a portrait of Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the European explorer credited with discovering the Pacific, in a pre-Colombian setting that includes examples of Aztec and Maya architecture, Ochoa said. Indians will be seen peering through bushes as they witness the approach of Spanish ships.

Ochoa said he is still researching the question of which time period this section of the mural will depict. He is looking for details on what the San Diegueno Indians looked like and what types of plants were here before the Spanish colonized North America.

The next section of the mural will be connected to the previous one with an image of the Coronado Bay Bridge, and will depict a girl in a classroom, a school bus and a girl sculpting a bust of Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata. The focus here will be on recognizing the importance of education, Ochoa said.

Ochoa calls the the third section of the mural “the street scene.” He believes that the neighborhood surrounding the school is considered one of the oldest barrios in San Diego. Again, this section will concentrate on images that capture the type of activity that is popular with youth in the area. It will include renditions of a 1950s lowrider and teen-agers dancing to the sounds of a giant “ghetto blaster.”

He said the section will also acknowledge the community’s increasing ethnic diversity by depicting recently arrived Laotian residents as well as the blacks and Latinos who predominate.

The mural’s final section will include symbols suggesting that the influence of high technology will be inescapable, even for Shell Town. On Ochoa’s model, a boy is shown typing on a keyboard as he stares into a computer monitor that is apparently programmed into the future.