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A group of activists, artists and local residents gathered in the wee hours Saturday morning to paint a sprawling street mural honoring the lives of homeless residents in San José.
As the sun came up over the Gardner Community Center, organizers trickled onto a stretch of West Virginia Street to start chalking in the dark. Laden with paint, buckets of chalk and doughnuts — and while dodging the occasional car — activists began laying down the artwork they want to inspire passersby to feel both empowered and part of the larger social justice movement that’s swept the Bay Area this summer.
“I hope that they appreciate the art and the beauty of it, but that it makes them think — it makes them think about their neighbors and the messages contained in it,” said Shaunn Cartwright, a homelessness advocate and organizer. “And I hope they feel represented, whether they’re housed or unhoused.”
Cartwright and several other local activists drew inspiration from the Black Lives Matter mural that activists painted near Backesto Park on July 4th. Working with local tattoo artist Benny Arana O’Hara as the chief designer, the team voted on the 14 phrases that best encompassed their intersecting messages.
The finished product — emblazoned with sun-orange, lavender and turquoise — shows two fists pounding, with their thumbs almost touching in the middle, as a collection of Spanish and English words like “resilient,” “orgullo” (pride) and “mental health” dance around them. A vertical scarlet stripe cuts through the center to symbolize the systemic practice of redlining, which shunted Black and brown communities out of neighborhoods and services for decades across the U.S. and the Bay Area.
Briena Brown, 21, an upcoming senior at San José State University, joined the festivities to represent the San José/Silicon Valley NAACP. Last month she was one of 16 artists chosen to paint a block letter in the Black Lives Matter mural along Palo Alto’s Hamilton Avenue.
For Brown, the mural shows the inextricable connection between homelessness and racism. A whopping 20% of San José homeless residents are Black as compared to just 3% of the population, while Latinx people make up another 41% as compared to 32% of the population, according to the 2019 city homelessness census. And it’s personal, too: Her father was a homeless student at San José State before her.
“It’s very interconnected to me — most of the people who are homeless are BIPOCs,” Brown said, meaning Black, Indigenous and people of color. “We had all that time during the pandemic to think. We stayed home, we were reflecting. We were doing all this shadow work with ourselves and our communities so that when this movement started, it started something new, because we didn’t have distractions.”
As a growing team of about 50 people began painting over the chalk outline, bobbing their heads to “Funky Town” and “That’s The Way (I Like It),” volunteers set up a T-shirt tent and prepped for a hand sanitizer and food drive. Soon local politicians like Supervisor Dave Cortese and California State Assemblymember Ash Kalra took the mic.
“In San José, we see the most egregious examples of income inequality. You see the tale of two valleys, with the working class that’s being crushed under the weight of this enormous amount of wealth — because the wealth in no ways comes into the communities that not only need it the most, but helped to create that wealth,” Kalra told the crowd.
That feels increasingly relevant in the surrounding neighborhood, said Patricia Palomares-Mason, 61, who’s lived down the block for 40 years. Sandwiched by freeways on two sides, the neighborhood was primarily Latinx in the 1970s and is now about 45 percent Latinx and 40 percent White, with median incomes slightly higher than the county as a whole, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Just behind the mural, Biebrach Park is a frequent target of police who come to prey on unhoused people, Palomares-Mason said.
“Children are not eating. Elders are not eating,” she said, choking up. “Everyone complains about the homeless, but what are they doing?”
The mural, she said, is a “message that needs to be heard.”
Staff writer Leonardo Castañeda contributed to this report.
