By Adrian Florido
Fronteras News Desk

SAN DIEGO — On Sunday, residents of San Diego’s Sherman Heights neighborhood woke up to find an important community mural had been vandalized.

The mural adorns the outer wall of a Market Street store, where for more than 30 years it’s depicted scenes from the neighborhood’s Mexican-American community.

But on Tuesday, Liliana Garcia-Rivera and another community activist were working to remove the spray-painted letters they discovered splashed across the mural Sunday morning.

Garcia-Rivera is one of several people depicted in the mural. She and other neighborhood youth painted it in 1980, under the tutelage of local muralist Mario Torero, and she says this is only the second time it’s been maliciously defaced in all that time.

Sherman Heights has long coped with graffiti and gang problems, but this stretch of wall — filled with symbols of Latino pride and activism — has always been respected even among taggers.

Garcia-Rivera said the vandals were from a different neighborhood, because they painted an “X” across a depiction of a young man shaping his hands into the letter “S” –- a symbol for Sherman Heights — an act suggesting a neighborhood rivalry may be the motive.

And she said that act, more than the vandalism itself, was what concerned her, because…

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