Hinda Adan strings together a bracelet with beads at the Cully Stands Together event in Northeast Portland.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra / OPB
The night before an annual cleanup event in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood in April, volunteers arrived at Trinity Lutheran Church to find hate graffiti — including a Nazi symbol — on the wall of the foodbank facing the church playground.
Word quickly spread through the community.
Residents and supporters paint a mural on the wall of the church food bank tagged with hate graffiti. Anyone was invited to paint part of the mural.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra / OPB
The next morning, community members showed up to the church and school with paint brushes, and they showed up again on Saturday — two months after the incident — to celebrate diversity at an event called "Cully Stands Together."
“We didn’t want to rush, you know?” said Tony DeFalco, deputy director at Verde, an environmental nonprofit, and coordinator of the Living Cully Project. “We wanted to be on our timeline, not on the timeline of the haters.”
The multicultural celebration featured music, food and the painting of a mural — a large replica of an oil pastel project one student put together in response to the incident. At the bottom of the mural are the words "Love one another."
Trinity Lutheran Christian School Principal Chris Herold.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra / OPB
“That is the message of this event,” said Trinity Lutheran Christian School Principal Chris Herold. “I think it’s important for the community to respond when these things happen and just remind each other of who we’re trying to be.”
DeFalco, who is Mexican-American, said the immediate reaction to the graffiti incident has largely been one of resilience, but also fear, especially for the community’s immigrant population. He says the incident represents a larger, nationwide problem.
“The larger movement of hate crime in our country and in Oregon that [the incident] represents to come into our community I think just … hit really close to home,” he said.
Dancers from Grupo Lol-bé pose for a photo after performing Mexican cultural dances.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra / OPB
But Amity Cunningham, a parent of a fourth and seventh grader at the school, said she wants her kids to remember the way the incident brought the community together.
“It’s more about teaching them to look at all the people show all the love for us as opposed to ‘look what somebody bad did to us,’” Cunningham said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if this became an annual thing.”