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When German fascists bombed civilians in the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso responded with a painting. The mural-sized Guernica was interpreted as a “plea against the barbarity and terror of war” and was quickly regarded as a masterpiece that powerfully portrayed the suffering of innocent victims of violence.

Recent tragedies connected to the San Antonio area have also inspired artists to react through art, particularly in mural-sized paintings meant to capture the immediacy of the moment while preserving the memory of innocent victims.

After Army Spc. Vanessa Guillén and Pvt. Gregory Wedel-Morales were murdered at Fort Hood in 2020, Air Force veteran and trauma survivor Larissa Martinez responded by organizing a mural painted by Gerardo “Ghost” Cazares, a fellow vet who had served in Guillén’s unit.

After the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, hometown artist and gallery owner Abel Ortiz-Acosta responded by organizing the Healing Uvalde project, a massive effort to create 21 monumental portrait murals honoring the 19 students and two teachers who lost their lives.

And when Dallas painter Roberto Marquez learned of the deaths of 53 migrants in the sweltering chamber of an abandoned semi-trailer in South San Antonio, he packed up his painting gear to begin work on a Guernica-style mural that would help turn the site from a place of tragedy into a monument of mourning and memory.

Driving south last week on Interstate 35 to visit the Quintana Road site where the migrants died, the route presents seemingly portentous symbols.

The Somerset Road/Cassin Drive offramp reads “Exit Only” in stark, cautionary yellow. Along the frontage road, a semi-trailer sat idle, offering no hint of what’s inside. Reaching Quintana Road, where the migrants were found, the street sign reads “Dead End.”

The area itself had been desolate, with little evidence of human presence beyond a salvage yard, a culvert and railroad tracks running along the rutted, narrow, neglected asphalt roadway.

Now, 9600 Quintana Road is filled with life, a spontaneous conglomeration of ofrendas to the dead that is known informally as the Los 53 Migrantes Memorial.

Covering an area about the length of a tractor-trailer is a massive mural painted by Marquez, who goes by the artist name Robenz, behind a row of crosses along the roadside festooned with flowers, candles, ribbons, water bottles, photos, handwritten signs and flags representing Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, countries from where the migrants hailed.

When San Antonio therapist Sandragrace Martinez went to the site to pay her respects, Marquez had already set up his initial 28-foot-long mural. Martinez realized that people visiting to mourn and witness needed water and shade to beat the summer heat.

First, Martinez and husband Michael Gallegos organized an effort to provide coolers, ice and bottled water, and they next set up portable tents to shade the sun. She soon took on the role of caretaker of the site as the memorial grew more elaborate and drew more and more visitors.

Martinez’s husband and son are artists, and they run a small gallery called Twisted Puerta on the near West Side. For her, the memorial functions like an artwork, turning a focused moment in time into a shared experience.

“For me, the entire thing is a piece of art,” she said. “It’s not just the mural, or just the crosses, or even the tents. There’s a lot of crying that went on underneath those tents. There’s a lot of stories that have been shared by migrants. There’s benches across the street, and those benches have become somewhat like confessionals. They talk about the driver of the truck, they talk about forgiving and they talk about how they’re not perfect, either.”

Marquez has made himself no stranger to tragedies the world over. As a migrant from the tiny Mexican town of La Cantera near Zacatecas, Marquez relates to migrants and refugees both in his adopted home of Texas and all along the border — and far beyond as upheavals on other continents capture his attention.

Most recently, he traveled to Poland and Ukraine, first to help refugees where he could, then to tell their stories through paint. After the Russian military bombed civilians in Ukrainian cities including Kyiv and Mariupol, Marquez made himself available to help search for victims in the rubble and to move corpses from mass graves to burial sites.

After the bombing of a bridge in Irpin, Marquez traveled there to paint a mural to be hung on the ruins.

“I go and pick up my paint brushes and my canvas and start telling the story of what was happening there,” he said, comparing his work as a pictorial storyteller to that of the journalists who cover atrocities.

San Antonio videographer Alejandro DeHoyos also traveled to Ukraine, first as a missionary and humanitarian volunteer driving medicines, bulletproof vests and tourniquets to Lviv and east of Kharkiv. He ended up staying for a whole month to make a documentary for his Passport Preachers series.

In addition to his work as a documentarian, DeHoyos makes art — including a recent video for San Antonio art rock band Buttercup — and understands artistic mediums such as video, music and painting as ways to tell stories and connect traumatized people to hope.

“As an artist, as a filmmaker, I believe it’s about telling a good story, a joyful story, because that’s part of the human experience,” he said. Whether the stories are told visually or in music, an expression in art “can break tension, can bring laughter into a situation that can seem so dire and so hopeless.”

Eliciting a smile in the midst of great pain can relieve the burden of trauma, DeHoyos said, if even just for a moment.

“I was in a war zone. The cities I was in were being bombed, you know? People were dying,” he said. “But the camaraderie, the joy to be around these other people, to be able to bring joy, to share joy. Oh my god, that’s it.”

The Uvalde massacre happened almost literally in Ortiz-Acosta’s backyard. The native of Zaragoza, Mexico, migrated to the U.S. with his family at age 7, settling in Uvalde in 2004 to teach art at Southwest Texas Junior College. Both of his kids attended Robb Elementary, and the family has good memories of the school.

The day following the shootings, he heard a student’s daughter was among those killed and saw her father on television vowing that the deaths would not be in vain.

Ortiz-Acosta was moved immediately to honor the children and teachers through art, figuring the building that houses his downtown art gallery could hold a mural or two.

With the support of a prominent Chicano art supporter and contacts throughout Texas, his idea quickly grew to become the Healing Uvalde project: 21 separate murals, each a heartfelt portrait intended to capture the essence of a life cut too short, “so we can never, never forget them. And we could start to heal somehow because I know art heals.”

San Antonio artist Cristina Sosa Noriega is one of more than 50 artists enlisted to create murals, in consultation with the families of those lost. Working from photographs, sentimental objects and family memories, Sosa Noriega depicted the bright smile of Amerie Jo Garza, an aspiring artist who “was sassy and lit up a room.” An artist’s palette and sunflowers ground the image, with Garza wearing the only dress she approved of, lavender-colored with a lace front.

“She didn’t really like wearing dresses, but she would make the exception because that one was her favorite color,” Sosa Noriega learned from Garza’s mother.

Sosa Noriega also included the Bronze Cross posthumously awarded to Garza by the Girl Scouts of America, bestowed for heroism because Garza called 911 during the shooting to try to get help.

Sosa Noriega said the process of painting Garza was “very emotional. I really wanted to do her justice. I wanted to create something that would look like her, that would feel like her, that when her family saw it they would feel some sense of comfort.”

Ortiz-Acosta said a primary goal of the project is to comfort the families, in part by being involved in the murals — sometimes directly.

When San Antonio artist Ana Laura Hernández began painting her mural of Maite Yuleana Rodriguez, family members showed up with refreshments and helped out by painting alongside Hernández and her assistant Gabi Magaly.

“That’s the whole idea, is to allow the families to make their mark on the mural,” Ortiz-Acosta said.

Having the family there was “just wonderful,” he said. “When I saw that, I said that’s what it’s all about.”

This story has been updated to correct the date of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

Senior Reporter Nicholas Frank moved from Milwaukee to San Antonio following a 2017 Artpace residency. Prior to that he taught college fine arts, curated a university contemporary art program, toured with... More by Nicholas Frank