A city-funded mural unveiled Aug. 20 in Alum Rock Village honors a football champion, an educator and a playwright — the placement counterpoint, blocks away, to the East San Jose murals the city has been unable to save.

On South White Road, at the Y Market in Alum Rock Village, a wall that had said nothing now says three names. As San José Spotlight reported (external source, opens in a new tab), the piece went up Aug. 20 and puts three figures with deep East Side ties on public view: Jim Plunkett, the Heisman winner and two-time Super Bowl champion who quarterbacked the Raiders; Roberto Cruz, the educator who helped found the National Hispanic University here and died in 2002; and Luis Valdez, the playwright and filmmaker. It sits at the gateway to Alum Rock Park, and it folds in the neighborhood's own visual memory — the old Hollywood-style Alum Rock sign, the equestrian culture that once ran through these hills.

The wall was not cheap, and that is part of the point. The money came from District 5: Councilmember Peter Ortiz set aside a $100,000 pot in the city budget for murals across the East Side, and this is one of them. The spending rides on the city's East San Jose Economic Revitalization Framework, a plan to shore up commercial corridors in a district residents say has been passed over. Ortiz cast the mural as a fight over authorship — residents, he said, are done letting outsiders decide "who East San Jose is."

Who ends up on the wall was settled by the people who live near it. The muralist, Francisco Ramirez, came up through the Alum Rock schools, James Lick High among them (external source, opens in a new tab); residents and business owners were asked whom they wanted to see. The East Side, Ramirez said, could finally "have our heroes." Guadalupe Cruz, who taught in Alum Rock for 30 years and lives minutes from the site, saw her late husband painted young — the black hair and beard he wore when she met him. "They captured my husband well," she said.

The timing is worth sitting with. Blocks away and days apart, other East San Jose murals have been painted out entirely, on private walls the city has no power to save. This one exists because the district paid for it and picked it. Walk South White Road tomorrow and the difference is just a wall that stayed — three faces, and $100,000 deciding they belong there.