Part of the 34th Street Wall now reads “In Honor of Fallen Women.”
About 18 UF students in the Latino Hispanic Organization of Graduate Students painted the purple and green mural this month. The mural commemorates women killed in Latin America.
Three Latin American women inspired the mural, said Diego Juárez, the president of LOGRAS.
Berta Cáceres, a Honduran environmental activist, was murdered in her home March 3 for her work protecting Honduras’ land.
Marina Menegazzo and María José Coni were Argentine college students killed while traveling without a man in Ecuador. Silhouettes of the college students walking up a mountain can be seen in the mural.
Juárez, a 24-year-old UF wildlife ecology and conservation graduate student, and Macarena Deij Prado, a LOGRAS member, said the three women’s stories angered them.
“We decided to do a mural because it was making a statement,” Juárez said. “We said, ‘These are recent problems and events that have happened, but that’s only an example of what’s happening around the world.’”
The group decided to paint a mural in late March to honor Women’s History Month and recent events, he said.
It took about nine hours to sketch the mural and about seven hours to paint it, Juárez said. The other members’ desire to paint the mural surprised him.
“I wasn’t sure in the first place if we were actually going to make it, and then people were so enthusiastic about it,” Juárez said.
Juárez and Deij Prado, a 28-year-old UF art history graduate student, said making the mural created a sense of community among members.
“It’s part of our history, and we wanted to just say something about that,” Deij Prado said.
UF students in the Latino Hispanic Organization of Graduate Students sketch the plans for the mural they painted on the 34th Street Wall in memory of women killed in Latin America.
