San Antonio celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month with vibrant community murals honoring culture, identity, and resilience.
SAN ANTONIO — As Hispanic Heritage Month continues, San Antonio is honoring its culture, not just with food and music, but with color, history and paint.
Across the city, vibrant murals illustrate powerful stories of identity, resilience and community pride. Many of the works can be found on the city’s West Side, where art has long served as a vehicle for expression and storytelling.
One mural, titled “8 Stages in the Life of a Chicana,” captures the journey of a woman through the lens of culture and family. It was created with the help of San Anto Cultural Arts, a nonprofit that has commissioned 66 public murals since the 1990s.
“Here, this is her family,” said Keli Rosa Cubanoc Romero of San Anto Cultural Arts, while describing the mural. “We’re paying homage to her parents that have already passed. La Virgen de Guadalupe, which is prominent in almost all houses around here.”
Cubanoc Romero explained that the imagery resonates deeply with the community.
“The skin tones are brown, people of Mexican-American and Mexican descent, and so this is like her family, when she’s growing up,” she said.
Each mural acts as a canvas of shared memory and education, often created with direct input from the communities where they are painted. One striking example can be found at the corner of West Commerce Street and North Navidad Street. There, a mural titled “La India” features a Mother Earth figure surrounded by bold colors, the sun and moon, and tributes to women admired by neighborhood residents.
“She talked to the community, they really wanted to highlight women—because the owner of La India is a woman,” Cubanoc Romero said. “So she created this Mother Earth tree using these big, bold, beautiful colors, and highlighted different women that people in this neighborhood look up to.”
Beyond their visual appeal, the murals offer artists a deeply personal outlet.
“This is a very personal thing for me, because I feel representation is important,” said muralist Rudy Herrera, who has been painting in San Antonio for nearly a decade. His style is influenced by ancestral art forms.
“It’s kind of flat, real linear style,” Herrera said. “It’s something we’re kind of familiar seeing because our ancestors had that styling. We saw it first before outside influence.”
Block by block, San Antonio’s murals are transforming walls into works of cultural preservation. More than just art, they are landmarks, lessons—and lasting legacies.