SAN MARCOS — Community members are working to remove racist graffiti discovered Tuesday morning on a newly-painted mural at San Marcos Middle School.
The vandalism was discovered all over the campus, including over an in-progress mural featuring the school’s name and lion mascot painted just this last week in a partnership between Cal State San Marcos and the middle school.
Xuan Santos, a professor of sociology and criminology and justice studies at CSUSM, said volunteers showed up on June 27 to continue work on the mural when they discovered the vandalism. They immediately began work to remove it and touch up the mural.
The graffiti included various monikers, illustrations and racist slurs directly next to the mural.
“They did defacement across campus, but came to the mural and out of the blue wrote all these derogatory terms,” Santos said. “They defaced the mural, defaced the wall, shamed the campus and [reminded] us very quickly that racism and anti-people-of-color is an issue in North San Diego County.”
Staff from the middle school and university had been in talks about a community project for four months and decided to do a mural on an old wall near the school gym.
Work on the mural started last week once school let out for the summer, with community members, formerly incarcerated individuals, and students and staff from San Marcos Middle School and CSUSM all contributing, Santos said.
Manny Rodriguez, a sociology student at CSUSM and volunteer who helped paint the mural, said he was saddened to see the derogatory vandalism but that “this won’t discourage us from continuing to do the right thing.”
“It’s frustrating to see that people would just come over and write and express themselves in that form. I was pretty frustrated, mixed emotions, sad … why would somebody go out of their way to do something like this when you have people giving their hard work to make this a better place?” he said.
Santos added that he believes the racist language in the graffiti could be targeting the school’s principal, who is Black. The vandalism has been reported to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, he said.
San Marcos Unified School District spokesperson Amy Ventetuolo said law enforcement had identified the individual responsible and is taking the lead in the investigation.
“We’re so saddened and devastated that this mural that’s being worked on has been vandalized,” she said. “But the amazing talented artists, they’ve been the ones working on this mural, their response was amazing. They’re there right now getting back to work painting the mural.”
