CANCUN.— For just over a year, in the most dangerous neighborhood of this city, neighbors and society have formed a community.
Children who until six months ago could not leave their homes, today enjoy the streets through the appropriation of spaces and the painting of murals; The neighbors cooperate and seek to make Villas Otoch Paraíso a safe place for the development of their children and to finally live in peace.
The children didn’t go out, they stayed watching TV, playing, we created barriers, not even the hallways were safe, you didn’t know when something could happen, so we kept them locked up. Before it was only when night began to fall and then not even during the day (you could go out), because anything would happen and we began to delimit,” said Elizabeth Morales, a resident of the place.
With government projects, but above all that come from civil society such as Villas de Colores and Street Art Cancún, and the will of its inhabitants, little by little Villas Otoch becomes a place where they can go out and live together.
I saw the area very dangerous, very deteriorated and that no one really did anything, out of fear, and I said: ‘I’m going to get involved in this (…) we said yes, I do want to change this, for the area to change, for the cleaning of the Parking changes (…)’, people began to get involved little by little and we created a WhatsApp group and everyone participates, even the children, it’s nice,” said Mrs. Elizabeth, a neighbor.
Villas Otoch Paraíso is a subdivision created in 2007 and has 14 thousand homes, it is considered by the authorities to have the highest crime rate in the entire state, even on the peninsula where homicides and drug sales prevail, at least five out of every ten homicides in Cancun occur there, in what are known as favelas.
Luz Lezama, who has a store there, maintains that there are actually many people who are from Cancun who are not bad, but that everything has been due to a bad reputation.
Through bazaars that are organized on WhatsApp or Facebook, more than 120 neighbors have financed more than 50 murals that decorate the streets, the project is called Villa de Colores y Street Art Cancún, it is organized by Tonatiuh Moreno, a Cancun citizen who seeks give a new perspective to this place and above all, rescue public spaces.
In recent weeks, national and international artists have been participating in Expo Street Art Cancún, in which the community decides whether or not to paint the murals proposed by the participants. Sebastián Bucheli, Colombian artist, believes that this artistic activity provides a hopeful outlook for its inhabitants.
The exercise of muralism is to have a social focus, it dedicates the spiritual and physical transformation of spaces, expanding the social function that they have and thinking about the social work that exists with the communities, it is to generate new social fabrics that allow the opening of new things (…) we have to as artists bring new tools to provide a much more hopeful outlook for people,” says Bucheli.
Here you can access news in real time
Know the most viral in Facebook Trending
Read the columnists of Excelsior Opinion
clm
