During the first five years of the 1940s, Arango’s paintings were censored and taken out of galleries, so in 1946 she decided to travel to the United States and then to Mexico. There, she enrolled in the National School of Fine Arts, directed by Federico Cantú, where she learned fresco technique and studied the work of Mexican muralists. When she returned to Medellin in 1947, she created a mural at the Compañía de Empaques in Medellín, owned by her brother-in-law, that depicted the cultivation of fique, an agave grown for fiber.