Latino artist might have to whitewash his own mural

many aspiring artists, Alfonso Salazar had big dreams guess handbags long ago, and also the kind of day job that keeps such dreams alive. He was stuffing hot dogs at a fast-food Der Wienerschnitzel in San Jose when he noticed the inviting, blank wall on a restaurant across the street.

"I wanted to show my family what I had learned," he recalled this week. "They got me through college." So he asked Daniel Bravo, the owner of El Tarasco Mexican Food, if he could paint a mural of a Tarascan warrior. They had something in common -- Tarascan heritage. Bravo hailed from Michoacan, Mexico, home of the Tarascan people of ancient Mexico. So did Salazar's father.
"I got $500 for painting the mural," Salazar said, "plus about $250 in burritos."
really don't want it to go," he said. "But what choice do I have? I was going to paint over it myself. I don't have the money to pay someone to do it." Upon hearing this, Salazar objected.

"If you can't save it, Daniel, will you at least let me do it?" he asked. "At least let me help?" Taken aback, Bravo blurted, "What?" Yes, Salazar said, he would whitewash the first mural he painted the year after graduating from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, the same mural he sees every day on his way to work as a clerk at the St. James Park post office. He would get his daughters and friends to help him say goodbye to his mural.

"It's a lesson to be learned," he said. "You have to let go."

Murals are as old as prehistoric cave drawings, but they just don't fit the modern world very well. Unlike movable paintings or sculptures, most murals are stuck on walls the artist doesn't own. If the sun doesn't get them, an indifferent landlord or bulldozer will. San Jose knows this story too well.

Last year, Millard Sheets' excellent mural depicting the history of the summer fashion trends Santa Clara Valley would have gone down with the old terminal at Mineta San Jose International Airport had the artist's son not saved it by simply peeling it off the wall, even after experts said peeling wouldn't work. Several years earlier, a downtown building owner whitewashed a well-known Daliesque crucifixion mural without telling the artist, not that the artist could have stopped it.

Barbara Goldstein, the city's public art director, said the Visual Artist Rights Act of 1992 generally requires mural owners to give artists 30 days to remove a mural before destroying it. However, "El Tarasco" predates that law. His best option, she suggested, might be to take a high-resolution digital photo that could be replicated somewhere else.

"I might do that," Salazar mused. "I have a friend with a camera."

For him to do it himself, as painful as it would be, there might be some catharsis and closure," Veca said. "He will be able to keep control that way."

The final decision probably belongs to landlord Jeannine Reynolds, who said by telephone that the building has been in her family's hands for many years.

"I really haven't thought about it," she
power balance said.

But she asked about the history of Salazar's mural and other privately owned murals in the city that have been preserved.

"I need to think about it and take another look at it," Reynolds said.