The project began in an NMSU public history class taught by former history associate professor Peter Kopp in the spring semester of 2015, where a history graduate student was documenting murals painted at NMSU during the Great Depression under the federal Works Progress Administration.
Source: NMSU Newsroom
By Sarah Kimmerly
Photos: Courtesy
Cover Photo Caption: Norma Chairez-Hartell and Jerry Wallace stand in front of a mural by Tony Pennock in the public garden on Panlener Street. (Photo by Sarah Kimmerly)
From the sides of buildings to bus stops and electrical boxes, murals adorn the streets of the Borderlands. Ten years ago, New Mexico State University alumna Norma Chairez-Hartell ’10 ’16 began a mission to document these murals and their stories. Today, the Murales Fronterizos project has catalogued over 750 murals across Las Cruces and El Paso.
“Once you start looking at murals, you can’t stop,” Chairez-Hartell said. “You start seeing what’s important to people. There’s a lot of value in people’s identity, and how they see themselves in the murals.”
Upper Left: “All Between Land and Air” depicts a woman with flowing hair surrounded by hummingbirds and plants. The mural was created by “The people of Las Cruces and Nanichcon, Jaycee Beyale, Warren Moytoya, Patience Sabaque, Shawna Dayish, Randy “Saba” Q, Jose Coronado and Elisabeth Stone in 2015. (Photo by Josh Bachman); Lower Left: This mural, painted by Tony Pennock, sits in a community garden behind the United Methodist Church on Panlener Street in Las Cruces. (Photo by Sarah Kimmerly); Right: “All Between Land and Air” depicts a woman with flowing hair surrounded by hummingbirds and plants. The mural was created by “The people of Las Cruces and Nanichcon, Jaycee Beyale, Warren Moytoya, Patience Sabaque, Shawna Dayish, Randy “Saba” Q, Jose Coronado and Elisabeth Stone in 2015. (Photo by Josh Bachman)
The project began in an NMSU public history class taught by former history associate professor Peter Kopp in the spring semester of 2015, where a history graduate student was documenting murals painted at NMSU during the Great Depression under the federal Works Progress Administration. Chairez-Hartell was documenting murals in Las Cruces. The two students combined their projects, and at the end of the class they took the project beyond NMSU and into the local community. Joined by Jerry Wallace ‘07, current director of the public history program and history assistant professor, the group expanded Murales Fronterizos into a multi-city campaign to preserve the history of public art and the people, places and ideas reflected in each piece.
The team met with community members like Representative Gabe Vasquez ’08, former Las Cruces city counselor Miguel Silva ’90 and Saba, a well-known local graffiti writer, to define what constitutes a mural, who has ownership of it and how to best document them. Then, they divided Las Cruces into a grid and combed through the neighborhood to begin the documentation process.
In 2020 and 2023, Wallace was named as a Mellon Faculty Fellow for the Humanities Collaborative between the University of Texas at El Paso and El Paso Community College. With his grant, they expanded their project to El Paso, adding more than 500 murals to their inventory.
“In my vision of this, we’re kind of like conduits,” Wallace said. “I want to create a digital archive where we’re preserving these murals so people can come back and see what artists were thinking about in 2016 or 2020 or 2025.”
The Murales Fronterizos project helps create a community timeline, preserving art in the time and place it was made. For example, a river mural might represent agriculture for one community, and a place of crossing for another.
In 2015, Norma Chairez-Hartell, right, helped begin a project to document murals across Las Cruces. With the help of Jerry Wallace, the project expanded to El Paso. The Murales Fronterizos project now boasts a database of over 750 murals and plans to expand to include murals from Ciudad Juárez. (Photo by Sarah Kimmerly)
“Murals really reflect identity,” Chairez-Hartell said. “Anyone can go back to these archives and be able to see what was going on during this time period. It’s evidence of what was happening and what people’s sentiments were at that time.”
With new murals popping up and others painted over, there’s always something to add to the inventory. The ever-changing canvases of Las Cruces and El Paso continue to bring the Murales Fronterizos team back together – even the local community members are sending in tips and photos of new murals. In the future, Murales Fronterizos plans to include murals from Ciudad Juárez.
“The murals are often done by people that have long-standing roots in the community, and they’re often tying in these historical ideas about what that community has been over time,” Wallace said. “We’re hoping to keep this going, I’ve never thought that it ends.”
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