In June 2023, the CSUCI Legacy Mural was completed to celebrate California State University Channel Islands’ 20th anniversary. The mural was painted entirely in acrylic, applied through a variety of techniques including sprayers, brushes, and rollers. Its imagery was shaped with input from students, faculty, and staff, who collectively defined their “legacy” on campus. To gather perspectives, I visited four different classes, held public forums, and met virtually with various BIPOC-led campus organizations to discuss and shape the imagery.
Commissioned by the Center for Multicultural Engagement, the mural reflects social and local narratives. My design emphasizes depicting the distinct stories and knowledge shared during these forums as a collective landscape accessible to viewers. Unlike written or spoken language, the images are not arranged in a particular order or hierarchy. Instead, the mural presents these conversations in an open layout, inviting viewers to navigate the composition and continue defining their own legacy.
My attention to nature is more than decorative. Based on conversations with students and faculty, water and land emerged as central elements in both campus and local experience. Camarillo’s landscape has been transformed by colonization, agriculture, and port industries. Within the mural, the land highlights narratives of nature in relation to people. In this way, ecology is framed within a historical context that reaches beyond recent industrial development. For example, roots, soil, and plants connect stories across panels. On the left wall, Western Sycamore leaves and Elderberries—both native and crucial to Chumash culture—bridge student voices with local knowledge and Indigenous futures. Similarly, water brings life to the land, animal siblings, people, and stories. In the design, environmental justice serves to advocate for conditions that enable students to thrive in their journey through higher education.
Many students also expressed the importance of depicting fields and farmworkers—some to acknowledge their surroundings, others to honor their families’ efforts. Student stories of grandfathers in the Bracero Program connect to current migrant worker rights, Black migrant farmers lifting communities through racist policies, and AAPI/Chicano-led movements that established today’s labor protections. Land and roots serve as connecting symbols of these movements, cultivating access to higher education and nurturing solidarity for the future.
The historic portraits throughout the mural flow like water. Local leaders such as Carmen Ramirez, John R. Hatcher III, Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong, Irene and Bedford Pinkard, Lucy Hicks Anderson, and Cerisa House Wesley—alongside the work of historian Frank P. Barajas—emerge like fog or mist on the front right staircase. These portraits appear in conjunction with student movements represented on the upper right wall. The back staircase honors the legacy of Black students who led pivotal integration events in U.S. history, alongside the Third World Liberation Front, who organized for the creation of the nation’s first ethnic studies programs. Together, these portraits celebrate student values and voices centered on unity and justice. This fluidity also carries into painted musical instruments and the Jarabe Mixteco dancer, evoking rhythm as an unspoken, abstract form of legacy—symbols of generational knowledge and cultural foundations for students.
The images and colors invite viewers to experience the mural in cycles, like a wave. Black-and-white portraits of the past interact freely with colorful symbols of present and future students. This open representation of time reflects the conversations I shared with CSUCI students of all ages, faculty, and my artistic mentor, Yreina Cervantes.
The figure of a masked student acknowledges our generation and the pandemic’s impact on higher education from 2020 to the present. The character raises a fist above a fallen Junípero Serra, symbolizing growth and acknowledgment of harm done to Indigenous people and land—especially Chumash people and indigenous neighbors. This figure is surrounded by portraits of student activists, Maya Angelou’s poem And Still I Rise, the healing California Fuchsia plant, and the messenger hummingbird. Together, these symbols create a regenerative energy that flows across all panels through the eyes of the viewer.
As Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros once said, “Murals are to be seen with the legs.” While retracting from the ableist framing of his words, the CSUCI Legacy Mural is meant to be experienced in movement—seen and navigated in person rather than only through social media or photographs. Students, faculty, and community members are invited to give the artwork infinite perspectives and meaning through their daily interactions.