Many Amherst Latinx students, including myself, painted Newport’s new mural this semester. Before I arrived at Amherst College, the Newport basement had a different mural by different artists at the time. Newport is a dorm catered to Latinx students and La Casa (an attachment to Newport) is catered to Spanish-speaking students. The Amherst Latinx students put together a project in collaboration with Paul Schroeder Rodriguez, who I was taking a class with at the time of the beginning of this project) encourages us to continue this pursuit of community and art.
The new mural, painted by Colectivo Morivivi ( an all-women collective producing art and activism based in Puerto Rico), came to life with the help of the artists, the Amherst Latinx students, and the legacy of previous Amherst students. Seeing friends and community come together over consecutive weeks to work long hours on the mural was inspiring. When Colectivo Moriviv came to talk about the mural in the El Desierto class I am taking, the design currently has multi-layer and dimensional spaces that travel across different places and times to represent the various things to the Latinx identity and representation. In Amherst, we unite with all Latinx identities in academic spaces but now extend into living spaces. I am moved by how small a community we are, yet we need to keep our community together by reviving what it means to be a student and what it means to be a part of the Latinx community at Amherst. There is a duality in the mural, one of two sides that clash, between our previous mural and what it means to have this new mural, what previously existed, and what we are now.