Brentwood mural an inspiring vision of a changing Long Island

Whenever Marjelin Arias looks at the mural she helped design on the side of a Salvadoran bakery in Brentwood, she sees more than a colorful telling of the immigrant story in America.

Across a brick wall outside the Jocoreña Bakery on Wicks Road, the mural acts as a sort of immigration timeline: the often risky trek, an unfamiliarity once that journey ends, and finally, a new life in a different country.

Within the mural's many colors, Arias, a Central Islip High School senior who arrived from El Salvador two years ago to reunite with her mother, sees her story.

"We all go through different walks and we don’t know what to expect," Arias, 18, said in Spanish on Thursday outside the bakery at an event celebrating the new mural, "Crossing Borders."

"The strength is in ourselves because whatever the walk," she said, "the journey is to find an exit to live that dream."

The mural takes up the wall of a Brentwood bakery that makes bread and other sweets familiar to locals with ties to El Salvador and other Latin American or Caribbean countries. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Brentwood's population is 75.5% Latino, or 47,072 residents, the most of Long Island's seven hamlets and villages with majority Latino populations.

Between 2010 and 2020, Long Island's Latino population increased by 33.5%, and now makes up 20.2%, or 589,384, of the overall 2.9 million population on the Island, according to the Census.

Segundo Orellana, a muralist for 30 years, oversaw the students who completed the mural, among five projects in Islip Town since May he either did on his own or with help.

Orellana's murals include flags of countries in either the Caribbean or Latin America, a reflection of more people from both regions coming to live on Long Island.

"It’s important for me that kids and adults identify with their culture through art," Orellana, an Ecuadorian native, said in Spanish.

Margarita Espada, founder of Teatro Yerbabruja, an arts center in Bay Shore, said the mural can spark discussion.

"I believe [the mural] brings social engagement and empowers the community because, with beautification, it also brings economic development," Espada, a native of Puerto Rico, said.

Viewed from left to right, the mural begins with a mother holding her young daughter, their facial expressions restive or uncertain. Behind them sits farmland. Ahead of them, the Manhattan skyline outlined in the distance. Musical instruments — a saxophone, an acoustic guitar, a keyboard — float across a powder blue sky.

The profile of a woman of color looks out from the skyline back at the mother and child. At the mural's end, three children of different ethnicities stand, wrapped in an American flag near a version of the Stars and Stripes shaped like a heart.

"A lot of who we are is our music, our traditions, our language and that’s what you see," said Dafny Irizarry, president of the Long Island Latino Teachers Association, which helped the students develop and refine the mural's interlocking themes.

Irizarry, from Puerto Rico, said the students "shared that at times, there are some who might want to paint a picture of us, of our youth and our community that is sometimes inaccurate or sometimes incomplete. This mural shows our story."

Julio Paulino owns La Placita Deli, next to the bakery, and the whole building. Paulino said initially he worried that the mural project meant graffiti.

Then Paulino heard it was a project involving high school students painting about something he knew well. He then changed his mind.

"This is an immigrant neighborhood and I think the painting shows all about immigrants, the American dream," said the Brentwood resident, who is from the Dominican Republic.

Arias and the five other female students, all of whom are people of color and reside in either Brentwood or Central Islip, spent three weeks after school and on weekends working on the mural.

Wuraola Balogun was among them. Also a Central Islip senior, Balogun said she wants people to look at the mural and see community, unity, and the "struggles of how people get to this country and make a living for themselves."

"I still have a story of coming to this country," said Balogun, 17, who was born in Nigeria.

"Different people in different communities formed America," she said.

Legis. Samuel Gonzalez (D-Brentwood) sponsored the project through a Suffolk County Omnibus Grant, which comes from hotel, motel tax and is used for cultural and historical purposes.

For Arias, the mural project and its aspirational themes have her thinking about her own future.

"My dream is to go to a university to study art," she said. "After I finish my studies, I want to become an art teacher and teach whoever wants to learn about the art."