Introduction

Memorial murals are symptoms of New York City’s racial and socioeconomic polarization. They proliferate in certain neighborhoods and cannot be found in others, evidence of the city’s evolution into a segregated urban core where certain neighborhoods have suffered the consequences of deindustrialization, urban renewal, fiscal crisis, and gentrification more than others. Poor conditions in the negatively affected communities have led to their ghettoization. Economic, environmental, and social degradation are entirely intertwined enough to propel each other, a process that peaked for New York City around 1990. Even though the city has bounced back from its fiscal crisis, thus mending many of the deplorable circumstances that plagued New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, extremely unjust conditions persist in recent years. According to the 2000 Census, the Bronx, an outer borough of New York, had a poverty rate of 31% and in certain neighborhoods it was as high as 43%. Disease and violence follow the decay of neighborhoods and in 1998 a Latina woman was eight times more likely to be infected with HIV/AIDS than her non-Latina, white counterpart. The same year, African American males age twelve to twenty-four accounted for 17% of single victim homicides yet only accounted for 1% of the population.
These revealing statistics have been studied by criminologists, policy-makers, doctors, and sociologists alike. Expert urbanists have researched and documented the health, quality of life, and income gaps that have caused the current unjust conditions. It is difficult to understand polarized New York City without contextualizing and humanizing the related statistics, numbers, and ratios.
Memorial murals do just that. They place youth deaths in a socio-cultural context. Although memorial murals are markers of death, they are no tombstones; these colorful solemnities are public art, ironically livening neighborhoods by coloring them
in-- albeit not in the lines. What began as graffiti transformed into an artistic and cultural movement. Today, New York City is considered the “capital” of memorial mural walls, with neighborhoods in the South Bronx and central Brooklyn hosting the bulk of them. Although the memorial mural “heyday” ended in the late nineties, pieces remain in the neighborhoods’ public space and have been incorporated into the fabric of communities. Melvin Delgado, the only scholar who has addressed memorial murals in depth, wrote, “memorial walls are reminders of if not indictments against, civil society’s inability or unwillingness to address the systematic poverty and the pervasive racism that promote that rampant flow of drugs and guns into inner city communities.” These walls reclaim space and history. Often, in their content, they retell stories and reveal injustices glossed over by the mainstream media. Memorial murals humanize victims and by extension, they humanize entire communities.
Intentions and Questions
My intention in exploring memorial murals has been to decipher their role in communities. I know why their images move me, but I wanted to find out how they affect the people who walk past them every day. As an urban studies student, beautiful memorial murals give faces and names to the unjust urban conditions that I study in class and in books. Beyond that, I am attracted to issues surrounding public space, art, community development, and social justice, all topics nicely tied together by memorial murals. But I could hardly expect the walls’ significance to be the same for everyone. As an outsider, I took the subway and/or a bus to get to the murals; ultimately, they were destinations for me. But for people living amongst them, the memorial murals are part of their streetscape. They walk past the walls on their way to work, the grocery store, school, or any other outing, unlike myself, who stops, examines, and studies the images.
How could I learn the meaning of memorial murals if my experience with them was so entirely different than that of community members? Community members themselves were destined to have quite different experiences of these murals. I addressed this issue by going back to the basics and adjusting my questions. Instead of trying to decipher how certain memorial murals affect communities, which inevitably leads in opposing and dispersing directions, I took a step back and began asking, “what is a memorial mural?” With an interdisciplinary urban studies spirit I braced myself for a diverse array of answers. As it turned out, memorial murals meant different things to different people in the same community. They are commemorations, art, graffiti, color, life lessons, political statements, and part of mourning rituals.