When Julio Salgado was a student at Cal State Long Beach in 2006, the word “undocumented” carried a heavy weight.
He founded the For Undocumented Empowered Leaders organization in 2007 to help other undocumented students succeed, later graduating from the university in 2010, and just last week, Salgado completed his first mural at the CSULB Dream Success Center with fellow immigrant artist Myisha Arellanus.
“Back then being undocumented was very secretive … you had to be very careful with who you [disclosed] your status [to],” Salgado said. “Now the fact that we’ve come so far that we have a whole center that’s dedicated to supporting undocumented students, it’s amazing.”
CSULB’s Dream Success Center exists to “provide holistic services, resources, and support to members of the Beach community impacted by immigration policy,” according to the center’s website.
The Dream Success Center reached out to Salgado about creating a mural due to his artistic background and work with undocumented students. Although Salgado graduated from CSULB with a degree in journalism, he has been making his signature, colorful graphic illustrations for years, usually including LGBTQ, Black, brown and Indigenous people.
Salgado reached out to another immigrant artist about doing a collaboration on the project. Arellanus has been painting murals “rooted in community engagement” since she was 16 years old, making her a perfect fit.
The two had worked together on previous projects which focused on “highlighting folks who are undocumented,” Salgado said. They first met over a decade ago while protesting student arrests and deportations at San Bernardino Valley College.
“It was great to have a partner who I trusted who understood the vision,” Salgado said. “Myisha used to be undocumented as well so [with] what we were trying to tell with this image; it was important to me to bring on someone who understood my work and understood where I was coming from and understood the message.”
Arellanus has been prolific in her work, having collaborated on or restored over 30 murals and having painted 10 original pieces so far in her career. Some of her California creations include a mural in Koreatown on the sixth floor of an affordable housing building, a marine life mural on a laundromat on Fourth Street and Redondo Avenue in Long Beach and a mural depicting Black and brown college students at the California State University of Northridge, to name a few.
“As undocumented immigrants as People who have migrated, it’s not pretty and pink all the time, it’s tough and I’ve experienced that. But as an artist, I wanted to also make sure to capture the joy of being an immigrant.”
Julio Salgado, Long Beach-based artist
The two artists learned new techniques from each other over the course of a week, working on the mural in eight-hour increments. Salgado described having to learn new painting techniques, since he had never made art on a wall before, and Arellanus said her challenge was in finding the right mix of colors each day to match Salgado’s usual bright illustrations.
Salgado designed the mural, sketched the outline and painted the 13 students on the mural, while Arellanus painted the background imagery in the painting, depicting marigolds, palm trees and a beach.
Arellanus is also a CSU graduate, though she almost didn’t attend college due to her undocumented status when she was in high school. She recalled being scared to disclose her status to people and having to “speak in code just to ask for resources.”
“There were no places back then where you could just go and ask openly and that’s what the centers are now in a lot of campuses, and a lot of grassroots organizations have become those spaces,” Arellanus said. “And the mural is just a visual representation of that. It depicts the history specifically of CSU Long Beach, but I can tell you that it parallels many other places … where it’s very similar histories of where the students made it happen.”
The artists also reached out to current CSULB students involved with F.U.E.L. and The Dream Success Center to find out what they wanted to be depicted in the mural. An in-person meeting along with several surveys allowed students to request additions and themes to the painting.
Students requested the inclusion of an LGBTQ flag to represent queer students, the history of undocumented students at CSULB being incorporated and of course, the use of Salgado’s ultra-bright, complimenting colors to represent the various communities affected by immigration.
“I used a lot of color and I did that on purpose because when we think of quote-unquote immigrant art, we think of sadness, we think of victims, we think of the bad moments, which is real,” Salgado said. “As undocumented immigrants as People who have migrated, it’s not pretty and pink all the time, it’s tough and I’ve experienced that. But as an artist, I wanted to also make sure to capture the joy of being an immigrant.”
