Intra-mural Activity Painting project brings cultures together in Milbridge

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There’s nothing distinctive about the Milbridge Town Hall. It lives in a white building, down a side street, next to the town office. There’s a stage. A basketball court. A restroom out back. The walls are painted a grayish color with pale blue trim. At the front of the room, propped up against the wall, a paneled mural catches your eye like a rainbow does in a cloudy sky.

At the top, the words “buscando oportunidades” stand out in bright yellow. The English translation, “looking for opportunities,” is painted in delicate cursive over the yellow letters. On one side, mesquite trees morph into human forms, depicting a father protecting his wife, who cradles a baby under her arm. On the other side, birch trees also represent a family, though they stand a bit farther apart.

The roots of the birches spell out “Maine.” The roots of the mesquite trees spell “Mexico” and “Honduras.” Their branches come together in the middle, and it’s unclear where the mesquite leaves off and the birch begins.

“It’s just like that – they come together and we can’t really tell where one begins and the other ends,” said Candace Austin, who has taught English as a second language to the town’s growing Hispanic population since 1996. “These migrant workers have come to stay. They’re rooted here.”

The blueberry harvest has brought migrant workers to this Washington County town for decades, but several years ago, offers of year-round work at a local sea cucumber processing plant led many of them to stay. With a population of 1,279 people, nearly 100 of whom are of Mexican or Honduran descent, Milbridge has become the third-most-diverse community in Maine after Portland and Limestone, according to the 2000 census.

“This is a very safe and happy place to bring up your kids if you’ve been on a migrant route,” Austin said. “This is a place where they’re welcomed for their difference.”

Austin has spent much of her time in Milbridge working in schools, in people’s homes and in the community, teaching English as a second language and looking for ways to make the transition easier for the former migrant workers. In turn, members of the Hispanic community recently started teaching Spanish to the English-speaking population in the evening.

“In a normal migrant situation, the workers just live on a field,” said Austin, who now works for Training and Development Corp.’s Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker Project. “They haven’t been part of a community. One family moved 25 times – once every two months.”

Austin wanted to do something that would reflect the changing face of the town and also bring the natives and newcomers closer together. She enlisted the help of Alahna Roach, an educational technician at Milbridge Elementary School who recently graduated from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts with a degree in art. A mural was the obvious choice.

Mexico has a rich tradition of mural painting, brought to the forefront of modern art by Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Siquieros. These painters had no interest in art for art’s sake. Rather, they drew from historic, traditional themes of a social nature. As the Oxford Companion to Art states, “Mexican art has been above all a public art.”

This mural is no exception. During April vacation week, Austin and Roach set up shop in the Town Hall, armed with plenty of paint, pencils and some art books for inspiration. As the week went on, dozens of community members stopped by to paint or to lend their support. The mural evolved as more people became involved, but the original idea – “buscando oportunidades,” looking for opportunities – remained.

“When Candace gave me the idea for a mural, I went to Rebeca Ortiz and her sister Lorena,” Roach said, sitting in the library. “They went crazy with it. They started brainstorming ideas, differences between family structures, family size, religion. They saw themselves as coming to this area and coming to America looking for opportunities – coming for education and coming for jobs.”

The mural was unveiled during a multicultural, multigenerational Mother’s Day celebration at the Town Hall that drew quite a crowd. There was singing, dancing and plenty of food.

“There aren’t a lot of opportunities to get together in a rural community,” Roach said. “Everybody really welcomed the opportunity to get together, even though we’re so un-used to it. … A lot of people here have been eager for the kind of diversity the [former migrant workers have] brought. This project really brought people together.”

That was what Roach had in mind when she designed the mural – the community coming together like the trees in Austin’s yard – so close that it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. In the mural, the Mainers are represented by birches, which are common Down East. The trees form a family, but they aren’t as close as the mesquites, which represent the Mexican and Honduran community. Austin explained that Mexican families tend to be larger and more closely knit than American families, so the “father” tree stands protectively over his wife and child.

Monarch butterflies, which migrate from Mexico to the Northeast every year, are scattered throughout the mural.

“We are interconnected every year by the migration of the butterflies – they are at home there and they are at home here,” Austin said.

For many of the families that have moved to Milbridge, life was similar to that of the butterflies. Some would spend six months of the year in one area and the other six months following the harvest from state to state. This constant state of motion made it hard for the workers’ children to make lasting friendships.

“It wasn’t that great,” said Lilia Flores, 18, who just graduated from Narraguagus High School. “We’d go to a new school and make friends and then we’d be off for another place.”

Her sister Edith, 21, will visit Mexico this summer to marry a man she met in Florida, where the family lived for many years. After their honeymoon, the couple will return to Milbridge.

“This is the first time I ever lived in a state for two years – no moving around,” Edith said. “I could never imagine me in Maine [before I came here]. When I heard the name Maine, it was way up north. … but here we are.”

For the Flores sisters, moving to Maine was a little easier than it was for some of the other children in the community. They had lived in the United States most of their lives, though they never really had the chance to settle down. Rebeca Ortiz, 15, is finding the transition a little more difficult because of the language barrier. She and her family stayed in Michocan, Mexico, while her father worked the migrant circuit to support them.

“My dad moved around a lot, but he liked Maine,” she said.

She didn’t grow up speaking English, and her tutor, Roach, didn’t grow up speaking Spanish, but they found that art was bilingual.

“It’s now still difficult, but it’s more easy than when I came here,” Ortiz said. “I like most drawing.”

Though she was reluctant at first, Ortiz soon threw herself into the mural project, sketching the symbols of her native country over Roach’s drawing.

“We started to find different things here and in Mexico,” she said. “We started to think and put the ideas in the mural. It took awhile.”

She found differences in the landscape and the vegetation, but the most striking difference was in the ways families interact.

“In Mexico, when you marry, you’re married for all your life,” Ortiz explained as she sat at a table in the library with a group of other community members. “A lot of families have many children, like my grandmother had 12.”

Faye Bushey of Steuben, who owns Sisters Crafts in Milbridge, started taking Spanish classes at the library so she could communicate better with her potential customers. She sat nearby as Ortiz spoke.

“Here, we’re family, but we’re farther apart, not as close in proximity,” she said. “We have two totally separate cultures, but we’re so much alike. There’s one common thread.”

Roach spoke up.

“Looking for opportunities, education and jobs for your children,” she added. “That’s something that people who live here want for their children and something that people coming here from Mexico want for their children as well.”