Photo by Lydia Chávez

The new digital mural went up at the Galería de la Raza earlier this month. There is also a wonderful show, Carving Through Borders, which will be up until September 9th.

The Galería’s website explains the mural collaboration:

“Blooming In The Midst of Gentrification” is a collaboration between youth from People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights (P.O.D.E.R.), Galeria De La Raza and CultureStrike. The young activists from P.O.D.E.R. collaborated with CultureStrike artists Susa Cortez and Julio Salgado on a billboard that portrayed some of the things they are doing to fight back against gentrification. They specifically wanted to hight light their #PUEBLOTE campaign where P.O.D.E.R. has organized with Mission residents to reclaim public lands for community use based on community planning efforts that bring together the knowledge and experience of neighborhood residents.

For an archive of the digital mural project, go here. 

I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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