Photographs taken of the five murals completed in Ataco.
Murals completed in April 2010
Para El Bienestar de los Niños (For the Good of the Children)
A visual metaphor for raising a baby as a bean that needs water from a nurturing hand to sprout.
A child sits between work and studies. From his mind a kaleidoscope of ideas emerge as he watches a group of children playing “Avioncito.”
A family shows their daughter a window to the world.
A painting made by children contains wishes of what they want to be when
They are flanked by two large portraits of young girls, behind one of which a paintbrush flows into a river teeming with fish. Nahuatl codices of animals and their environment line the bottom of the mural.
Las Memorias de Ataco (Ataco's Memories).
The eldest woman of Ataco carries the water from the lake, now
extinct. Fahrolitos hang from the
branches of a tree in honor of the tradition held by the people of Ataco.
Tomas Fidias Jimenez stands before the village of Ataco. It symbolically represents the earliest city built on a lake. Beneath him is part of an
undiscovered Mayan ruin.
Madres Tejadoras(Sowing Mothers)
The Mother Weaver- is the weaver of life and with colored threads on her
loom flowing in two directions from the center wall, she transforms them into water
and the land.
The threads from the loom transform a second time to become clotheslines
upon which Ataco women tending to their family chores hang laundry.
The clothes they hang contain
their dreams; on the first shirt a woman takes her child and leaves a raging abusive
partner, on the second her husband becomes a loving father tending his child, on
the third, she becomes a graduating student and in the foreground two young
women are depicted as a students and artist. In the background women travel far distances on the cobbled road to wash
their family’s laundry.
The final panel contains the completed weaving in which all the women of
Ataco have participated and present to their community. It contains a weaving
of la ceiba tree, la maiz, frijol, and agua, the sacred resources needed to
nurture and sustain life.
Aguas Dulces, Aguas Negras, Aguas Dulces Otra Vez
(Sweet Waters, Black Waters, Sweet Waters Again)
Clean water flows down from the volcanoes. It runs through the ancient ruins of Ataco, symbolically drawing clarity from the past. A severed ceiba tree cuts off the river as trash burns in the distance. The hand of a young woman and the spirit of the jaguar halt deforestation and the polluted river.
A torogoz oversees a coffee field and an indigenous drummer stands next
to traditional spools as they turn cotton into thread.
Las Raises the Ataco (The Roots of Ataco)
Mayans are found to the
right of a large gold jaguar head playing flutes and performing rituals that
have since evolved into current traditions in Ataco.
Graphics
based on ancient pre-Mayan stonework from local archeological
sites winds around the wall to remind the Ataco community of their
Mayan history.
The images represent the continual human presence in the
area from c. 1800 BC onward to present day, in which a still hidden
city lies
beneath the cemetery and local coffee farmlands. Intricately carved
jaguar heads are found next to a large
snake, behind which water flows through the carved stones.
