The Walls Speak. From Muralism to Graffiti at UNAM

Walls always remember. Its true fusion goes beyond architecture. They are not limited to being a load-bearing element; they rise as the foundation of memory. Since the human being understood its own presence in the world, we have aimed to leave a mark that could withstand time. Then, the wall—whether it was a cave’s wet stone, a temple’s wall, a public building or a faculty’s hall—became the collective canvas par excellence.

Maybe the first conscious artistic gesture of humanity was that impulse of drawing something on a wall. In places like Altamira o Lascaux, those figures were not just decoration: they were a medium of transmitting the sacred, of assembling the chaos through symbols. There a language was invented, one that, millennia later, lives on: public art as a social and spiritual art.

In Mexico, that dialogue with the walls never stopped. The Maya and Mexica cultures continued painting their worldview on surfaces that were at once structure, record, and expression. Later, with the Conquest and the Viceroyalty, the walls became instruments of evangelization and power; mural painting was confined to spaces of authority. But it was after the Mexican Revolution that the wall regained its collective vocation. From José Vasconcelos’ vision emerged a movement that would transform the relationship between architecture, art, and public discourse: 20^th-century muralism.

GRAFFITI WAS BORN URGENT, IRREVERENT, AND ANONYMOUS, GAINING POLITICAL AND POETIC DENSITY AND TURNING IT INTO A CRITICAL MIRROR OF CONSUMERISM, WAR, AND INEQUALITY

Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros understood that the public wall is a political and educational territory. In buildings, schools, and markets, they reinstated art as an essential public good, transforming the visual map into a critical image of the country. The Colegio de San Ildefonso was the cradle of this renaissance: on its walls, in 1922, a pictorial revolution began that would transform Mexico’s visual consciousness.

UNAM took this spirit to another level. Our Ciudad Universitaria (central campus) became an open-air museum where the murals of O’Gorman, Siqueiros, and other artists were integrated into the architecture like an ideological fabric. Their surfaces not only decorate: they are the essential expression of the building that speaks of education as a transformative and collective force.

But the walls are not static. In the second half of the 20th century, when the city began to become rougher, a new form of mural conversation emerged: graffiti. Unlike institutional muralism—planned, monumental, enduring, and institutional—graffiti was born urgent, irreverent, and anonymous, gaining political and poetic density and turning it into a critical mirror of consumerism, war, and inequality.

At UNAM, this encounter between muralism and graffiti happens every day. The campuses function as systems where the institutional and the spontaneous coexist, and each faculty is a visual laboratory that expresses the struggles and hopes of the community: feminisms, environmental causes, student protests, and political slogans. In these spaces of free thought, the walls cease to be physical boundaries and become symbolic surfaces where social and aesthetic tensions are imprinted, where the community recognizes itself, engages in discussion, and transforms.

In the end, muralism and graffiti share the same pulse: the need to use public space to say what matters.

Colegio de San Idelfonso
Apoderarse de todos los muros, pronunciada en 1936, revela la intención de Orozco de utilizar los espacios públicos y la arquitectura para la expresión artística y la comunicación de ideas, entablando un diálogo con el entorno y la sociedad.



Alberto Castro Leñero describió su mural  como un intento de conectar el muralismo tradicional con el arte contemporáneo, creando una “grieta” para ligar la tradición a su generación, abordando la migración y la vida social mexicana, no con relatos fijos, sino con un ambiente y una gran marcha de figuras en movimiento que invitan a reflexionar sobre el presente, utilizando soportes y elementos que dialogan con la historia del espacio.

“Desplazamiento”, Alberto Castro Leñero, 2025

Alberto Castro Leñero

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