Saturday, October 31, 2009

Mission Scenery



Unlikely arrangement of planter boxes along the roof line of a small business in the Mission engaged in the marketing of cremations. The bright wispy grasses must be emblems for ascending souls.



Details of a freshly painted mural expressing neighborhood patriotism in one of the alleys (I forget which) parallel to Guerrero out around 20th.



Without lucky shadows it might be difficult to make visual claims for either the beat-up cactus protruding through its bars or for the curlicue numbers tacked to a wooden board.



In Dolores Park this more-than-life-sized statue presides from a height. Its plinth reads: Miguel Hidalgo, Libertador de Mexico, 1810. The land where San Francisco is located now was barely inhabited in 1810. Only the Mission existed then, housing a few missionary priests from Spain and their "acolytes" (those indigenous people who could be recruited, and who died in great numbers from European diseases). The U.S. government had not yet fulfilled its manifest destiny and seized this part of the world from the Mexican government.

The statue came later, long after the thinly-justified American conquest had become an established fact.