“Everything is good. The food is good. The music is good. The experience is good,” says Elton Monroy Duran of Detroit’s Mexicantown community. Since 2014, Duran has been making his mark on the neighborhood, painting many murals that highlight its people, history, and go-to hot spots. The Mexican muralist, who was named a 2023 Kresge Artist Fellow, made the city his home after landing here with the idea of saving up for an art career in Europe.
Instead, he found his true calling—transforming the city’s once “invisible” Mexicantown into a boldly visible, larger-than-life canvas celebrating the Latinx experience. Earlier this year, the neighborhood’s commercial core along Bagley Street and West Vernor Highway was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Bagley-West Vernor Historic District.
“I was thinking this community isn’t well represented visually,” Duran says. So, “out of love for this community, out of appreciation, out of being one more immigrant,” he began painting mural after stunning mural of everyday people, icons, and ideals that make the neighborhood’s identity visible. The workers, the teachers, the poets and dancers, the revolutionary women. “Sugar Man” Rodriguez. Frida Kahlo. Cinco de Mayo. Over two dozen large-scale paintings by Duran line Mexicantown’s walls.
City Spirit, a mural by Martin Moreno and George Vargas, in Mexicantown
Photo by Ray Lozano/Visit Detroit
Also known more generally as Southwest Detroit, the neighborhood “has been like a fountain, a source of inspiration,” he says. “Not only because of the vibes, the feeling of being here, but because of the amazing stories.” One of the best ways to explore this now-kaleidoscopic enclave is by following the art.
Visit Corpus Art Detroit and the Plaza del Norte Welcome Center
Mexicantown Restaurant sign
Courtesy of Visit Detroit/Sara Srinivasan
Duran opened his Corpus Art Detroit in 2024 to create an inclusive space for the community and visitors alike to engage with art. Plan a visit to Corpus to start your Mexicantown experience with a painting party, workshop, or private event. “It’s therapeutic,” he says. “Everyone who experiences painting a canvas has at least that hour of focus on creating art and forgetting about their troubles.”
Just a few hundred feet away on Bagley Street, one of Southwest Detroit’s main drags, step into the Plaza del Norte Welcome Center. Turn your attention to the muralist’s palpably joyful Reconnecting Bagley Street mural in the lobby, which represents the symbolic unity of the neighborhood despite the “urban renewal” that ran a freeway through it in the 1960s. In the painting, community leaders dance in the street next to celebrated businesses, while legendary Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera hover ethereally in the sky.
Back outside and across the freeway, Duran’s enigmatic Frida Kahlo portrait stares out against a background featuring a variegated rainbow sun based on Huichol art. The two-story-tall artwork is on the side of Xochi’s Gift Shop.
After viewing this almost psychedelic take on Kahlo (who herself famously honed her artistic voice during her time as a Detroiter in the early 1930s), head inside to symbolically visit Mexico. “Everything in Xochi’s was made in México by artisans,” Duran says. “And the mural is like a window to what you can find inside. When you come in, you can smell that you are somewhere else by the leather.”
Get pastries at Mexicantown Bakery and see more murals
Mexicantown Bakery
Courtesy of Visit Detroit
Go two blocks north to Southwest Detroit’s other major street, Vernor Highway (named for James Vernor, the pharmacist who created the quintessentially Detroit vanilla ginger ale that’s said to be the oldest surviving soft drink brand in the U.S.). Before the rest of your self-guided street art tour, Duran recommends Mexicantown Bakery to fuel up with tres leches cake or pan dulce and an horchata iced coffee.
In the shadow of the Most Holy Redeemer Church, Duran has painted a poignant, nearly three-story homage to the story of immigrant agricultural workers in Michigan. The Dream Picker shows a worker with his right hand over his heart and a red apple in his other hand, extended as if in offering.
The mural was inspired by the owner of the insurance agency on which it is painted—the grandson of fruit pickers who came to America “holding a dream on one hand and the heart on the other,” the artist says. If you view the mural from the back of the building along Junction Street, the church will be in your view twice—in the mural and in real life behind it.
Down the street, between E & L Supermercado and Hacienda Mexican Foods, Duran’s Cinco de Mayo piece draws a throughline from the Mexican army’s 1862 defeat of French forces at Puebla to the Southwest Detroit community’s fight for its rights. Emblazoned across the wall in Spanish and English above a scene incorporating Mexicantown’s present-day parade and the 20th-century ranchera singer and actor Pedro Infante is “Respect for the rights of others is peace,” a line from México’s 19th-century president Benito Juárez. “My journey in Detroit has been a journey of learning the amazing history of the city, the light and the dark moments,” Duran says. “I was unwrapping a gift.”
Continue on Vernor to Duran’s painting Duality (at 7306 W. Vernor), which explores the multitudes within the real people of the community: the roofer who’s also a filmmaker, the mother who’s a teacher and activist, and more. “They were sharing with me all their stories, and all their stories were a big inspiration,” the muralist says.
Eat Mexican food and go to the Matrix Theatre Company
Loop back east toward Corpus Art Detroit to dine on some of the best eats in Mexicantown and see a Duran artwork or two. If you’re in the mood for a quick, authentic bite, visit Tamalería Nuevo León, complete with its Duran mural of norteño icon El Piporro.
“When you see the mural there … always talk to [owner] Suzy,” Duran says. “She tells her own insights about the community, being born and raised here, how proud she is. Those tamales taste different when you know who made them.” (Pro tip: Bring cash.)
To enjoy Southwest Detroit entertainment, Duran recommends catching an event or workshop at Matrix Theatre Company. You can also sip an aperitivo before dinner at the newly opened Tigris, a place that Duran is curious to try with a hi-fi listening bar and guest DJs.
For dinner, head to Detroit’s oldest Mexican spot, Mexican Village Restaurant, where you can eat Caldo Can-Cun (a spicy chicken soup with rice, avocado, and cheese that the restaurant popularized) alongside Duran’s Revolutionary Women mural.
Following Duran’s street art and recommendations through Mexicantown makes for a day steeped in the vibrancy and culture of the neighborhood. Perhaps more importantly, it will give you an art-filled experience in keeping with the artist’s mission: “I am hoping to start a trend of art being part of life.”
