There's a new mural in the historic village of Yalbac, in the Orange Walk District.
Carmen Carillo, the woman who coordinated its creation along with 6 artists from Palmar told us about the deep meaning behind the complex piece of art. She says it's in honour of the village's forefathers who had the strength and the fortitude to build and build the village until it became what it is today.
Here's her guided look at the new mural in her town:
Carmen Carillo, Muralist
"We had first we had, in that section there to my left is the, when the people came out they were evicted from Yalbac and you can see they burnt down the houses, the destroyed the crops. They destroyed everything that the people had worked on for generations, generations because the village was burnt twice. Once in the early 1800s and then again in 1934 so, um, the mural is showing the coming of the people, the way they came from the train to the barge, and they were ditched into barracks to live in tents for two years. That is where many people died and when they arrived here there was typhoid fever going around. It was an epidemic and many of the families disappeared due to the typhoid epidemic, and then you come over this side where we show the people constructing all over, making, building their houses, using the natural resources from around here and also the new families that have emerged and the tradition how it's being."
"We owe honour and homage to our ancestors who came from Yalbac to start building here in this new site. I think that we have not done justice to them by honouring them and accepting that it was due to their hard work that we now have a community to call our own and also because I believe that we should save our culture, our history, our traditions, which are already dying. If you notice today the girls danced and there was no boy. So, we need to embrace our culture a little more, we need to give it more meaning. We need to give it more value and I think that that is where we are failing as a community. And that's why I wanted to plaster the image of the coming, of the pain, of all the heartache, of all the difficulties they had to go through so the we can teach our new generation to value what they have."
"We can see a group of modern villagers, modern-day builders, which we have teachers, doctors, stylists, musicians, and all of those we have in our village so we make a tribute to all of them also."
Email
Print