There is an artistic current running beneath the surface of the Mission District — and Juana Alicia helped create it. Now splitting her time between Yucatan, México and the Bay Area, she still sees this historically Latino, working-class neighborhood as foundational to who she is as an artist and person. “I spent so much of my life on those walls and streets,” she says. The neighborhood is better for it, with her vibrant murals challenging viewers to reconsider the stories that shape who we are.
You don’t have to go far to see this work in action, just pause at the corner of York and 24th to take in the vast blue mural of La Llorona. Typically feared as a haunting figure, Juana Alicia reimagines La Llorona as a protector to the vulnerable and marginalized. She is pictured alongside women from Bolivia and India, a symbol of unity between the seemingly disparate. In Juana Alicia’s alternative tellings, the stories that define us are transformed into tools of empowerment.
Juana Alicia turns familiar narratives upside down, seeking to create a new “visual language and vocabulary.” With her paintbrush, she invites us into new ways of seeing ourselves, each other, and the world. As an artist, teacher, and mother, she views her work as “citizen-making,” shaping individuals who question harmful stories—especially those casting women and immigrants as victims or villains. Instead, she paints women as “empowered protectors and warriors of justice,” grounded in the truth of our interconnection.
Juana Alicia’s work poses the question: What if the true myths aren’t about haunting spirits but about our disconnection from the land and from each other?
For Juana Alicia, everything is linked — her Mission District murals, the cenotes of Yucatan, and global conflicts like those in Gaza. Each holds its own context, yet all are tied by a common thread of destruction to land, culture and life. Of Chicana-Jewish background, Juana Alicia knows and feels this in painfully visceral ways. “I can’t tolerate or live with [what is happening in] Gaza,” she says, Her latest piece, Not in Our Name, inspired by Käthe Kollwitz’s The Mothers, speaks directly to the atrocities unfolding in Palestine.
From gentrification to war to the daily microaggressions women endure, Juana Alicia’s art surfaces both suffering and resistance, urging a more united response. The underground rivers of Yucatan, threatened by government-permitted waste dumping, represent both the beauty at risk and the source of strength that will sustain us in acts of resistance.
Juana Alicia’s latest exhibition, Cenote de Sueños, opened in Sonoma Valley Museum of Art on September 21st and spans different eras of her prolific career. Juana Alicia imagines a world where cenotes—life-giving underground pools—are “controlled by the local pueblo” and symbolize a return to partnerships with the land and each other, instead of relationships marked by extraction or exploitation.
There are moments where such dreams feel aspirational, but that is why we need our underground ríos. We need their currents of poetry, music, teatro, and art. Juana Alicia’s murals remind us that alternative ways of living aren’t just dreams — they’re realities waiting to be realized in the streets we walk every day.
