RESEDA : Students Pay Tribute With ‘Memory Wall’

Four months after their friend, Luis Hernandez, was killed in a drive-by shooting, Cleveland High School students have completed a mural in his memory.

The “Memory Wall,” finished this week, pays tribute to Hernandez and 10 others who have died by accident, disease or homicide.

The 15-foot-high wall in a campus walkway is adorned with a tree, a rose and the image of an open book with the names of the dead. Those listed include a coach and a volunteer who died of illnesses, and four Cleveland students who were slain in the last three years.

The artists are 12 youths, some of them former taggers and members of rival Latino cliques at the Reseda high school.

Barbara Yanuck, IMPACT coordinator for Cleveland, said she called the muralists together after Hernandez’s death to try to redirect their grief and yearnings for revenge. She provides gang intervention and counseling under a federal grant.

In exchange for space to create the mural, Yanuck asked them to help clean up graffiti around the school and refrain from scrawling more. The students were asked to memorialize all those who have died in recent years, not just Hernandez.

“If you let these kids have something positive to do, it will get them the recognition they would have gotten doing something negative,” she said.

Cleveland Assistant Principal Bob Kinseth said the school has received some complaints about the mural, but he denied that it romanticizes gang life or street violence.

“We don’t consider it a depressing wall,” he said. “It celebrates life.”

The artists clearly were enjoying their finished product. They hovered around it on a lunch break recently, and they are already planning other murals on campus.

The mural “helped us out. Instead of trying to look for revenge and be sad, it’s something positive,” said muralist Gustavo Ortiz, 17, a friend of Hernandez.

“It’s not glamorous,” he added. “I’d rather have my friend alive than do that mural.”