Progress of the Sueños Oak Cliff Community Mural Painting project on Monday, June 27. Photo by Victoria Hernandez.

Despite the temperatures hitting above 90 degrees throughout July, community members have been coming out to spend hours outside of J&E Express on West Clarendon Drive.

It wasn’t just to soak up the sun, but to participate in the Sueños Oak Cliff Community Mural Painting project. 

The mural on J&E Express is the first of many pieces planned for 11 local auto shops in west Oak Cliff. Jerry Figueroa, owner of J&E Express, said that the inspiration for the murals came from the conversations surrounding the West Oak Cliff Area Plan.

Known as WOCAP, the goal of the area plan is to provide “a long-range vision for land use, urban design, transportation, mobility, infrastructure, open space, and community concerns around gentrification, displacement, and revitalization.”

“That started right during COVID,” he said of the WOCAP process. “So for two years, unbeknownst to me, there was a lot of potential zoning changes that were going to take place in this community.”

Figueroa said that the original plan was “very imperfect” and that many neighbors pushed back on it. He became involved after Yolanda Lameda came to his shop to let him know about WOCAP.

“She was literally out here doing the city job, informing the community of what’s going on,” he said.

Lameda helped inspire him to start attending the community meetings to speak his mind regarding the area plan. Figueroa said those gatherings became very confrontational at times.

“The people that were there, they did not want to be there,” he said. “The people were really, really pushing back on this area plan.”

In a previous version of WOCAP, automotive-related businesses were prohibited. Auto mechanics on Clarendon organized in response, with mechanic-shop owners speaking out to remove that restriction.

During that process, Figueroa said a common response was that automotive shops were “unsightly.”

“And we were like, ‘Well, you know what? Unsightliness can be fixed, right?’” he said. “It’s not a problem that can’t be fixed. So during those talks with the automotive shops, we came up with an idea: how do we beautify our shops? How do we do that? How do we mobilize ourselves to do something about it, and show everybody in our community we want to stay, and also get our community involved. So we talked about the murals … and that was something we talked about in 2022.”

The area plan was adopted by the Dallas City Council in October 2022, with the final scheduled authorized hearing of WOCAP for the Hampton/Clarendon rezoning passing Aug. 13, 2025. 

Almost a full year later, the first auto shop mural is nearing completion with support by community donations, fundraising by Somos Tejas and a grant from Texas Woman’s University.

Issy Martinez, an Oak Cliff native and a recent BFA graduate of TWU, was brought on to the mural design process by her former art professor Giovanni Valderas. Valderas was also active in the WOCAP process, attending nearly every meeting according to Figueroa.

Martinez first heard about the project from Valderas in 2024, and the two of them worked with Figueroa on the design process starting in January.

“I wanted the Virgin Mary, and I also wanted a lot of people working and doing all these jobs that we do around here,” Figueroa said. 

Martinez added that the first version of the design was too simple and lacked a point, going through over a dozen versions to today’s final version.

“So that’s when I knew I needed to start actually going back to my childhood, going to my parents’ childhood, because my family were all from here, and I wanted to take bits and pieces of what’s actually around here in the shop,” Martinez said. “So I noticed the barber, ladies selling flowers, the paleta man, nails getting done. I did notice some kids; they were running to go get the paleta, so I took mark of everything I saw here, and I wanted to take a snapshot and include it into this mural. And then I also wanted to include just how we are Hispanics and Mexicans, just how we are a community of hard workers.” 

Those hard workers were shown through a person picking strawberries, a police officer, a graduate and a doctor, to name a few depicted in the piece. 

“Some people come to this country with nothing, and they work all these jobs from the fields, selling flowers to working in restaurants, whatever they got to do to make it ahead and doing all these sacrifices for their children to be in better places and spaces that they’ve never even dreamed of,” Figueroa said. 

Local business owners and community leaders are also highlighted in the piece, including local activist Sylvia Collins who was killed in the May gas explosion at The Clyde apartments.

“If you look at the mural, it’s like from the fields to your plate,” Figueroa said. “We do just about anything, and to some people it means different things, right? To some people it means resistance. Art is a form of resistance. Art is a form of resilience, or art as a form to prepare your community to come out and do something about it, right? Or community outreach or community empowerment.”

The block party celebration of the piece is planned for Sunday, Aug. 2 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. at J&E Express and to help raise money for the future murals. The finished mural will be on full display, plus a vendor market, back-to-school resources, lowriders, food, and music.

J&E Express is located at 2220 W. Clarendon Drive.