Ricky Armendariz, “Last Ride of Juan Diego o [I left my corazon in Mexico].” Courtesy of the Centro de Artes.

I have followed post-modern art for some time, but I did additional research to see how this topic applied to Latino art. Post-modernism emerged in the late 20th century as a reaction against the rules and certainty of modern art. Post-modernists argued that art can be many things. The Tate Modern in London, one of my favorite museums in the world, defines the post-modern as “associated with scepticism, irony, and philosophical critiques of the concepts of universal truths and objective reality.” The definition I particularly liked described post-modern art as an art movement that “tends to favor irony, mixing styles, quotation, pastiche, and questioning the idea that art must have one ‘correct’ meaning.” The artists in the Centro de Arte exhibit all met this criterion.

Ivanna Bass Caldera of NPR commented that in the Centro de Artes exhibit, “Not all of the pieces featured in the exhibition were necessarily connected to Latino humor. In post-modern art, the viewers are known to have different interpretations. As one example, Nain Leon displayed a series of photographs depicting Whataburger fries and condiments as larger-than-life atop Monahans Sandhills State Park.” Curatlor Vikky Jones added that this Postmodern “takes on funny,” gathering “artists with a range of humor stemming from the Latinx and Chicanx point of view.” Jones added that “because there are so many types of humor, it is a dynamic way for people to relate, and I hope that the audience will appreciate the sensibilities, parodies, caricatures, observations, and nuances of these artists.”

A view of Juan de Dios Mora’s 3D sculpture. Courtesy of the Centro de Artes.

The Centro de Artes exhibit encourages a humorous perspective, and medical researchers have found that humor improves coping, builds resilience, and helps interrupt negative thought patterns. Sharing humor with others can ease tension, deepen relationships, and enhance communication and support. Research highlighted by the Mayo Clinic and Mental Health America shows that humor can also reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, improve self-esteem and social skills, and activate the brain’s reward system.

Raul Rene Gonzalez, “Cecelia Discovers Life in Another Galaxy.” Courtesy of the Centro de Artes. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

There are 35 artists in the Centro “A Postmodernist Says ¿Qué?” exhibit. One of the most well-known is Rubio. Over the past two decades, Rubio has emerged as one of San Antonio’s most prominent postmodern artists. Born in San Antonio’s Westside, his art contributions and mentorship to young artists date back four decades.

I first learned about Rubio in the early 1980s when he joined the mural arts team at the Community Arts Program at Cassiano Homes. Over one summer in the mid-1980s, Rubio, as a lead muralist, was assigned an art apprentice, Vicent Valdez, who is today one of America’s best known Latino artists. At the time, I was preparing a slide show on Texas murals for the Institute of Texan Cultures [ITC]. The slideshow “Mural Art in Texas” included over 500 slides and at least 50 images of the San Antonio Cassiano Homes murals, several of which were completed by Rubio. The “Mural Art in Texas” slideshow was shown daily on the ITC Rotunda for more than 25 years.

Héctor Garza, “Chamuscado.” Courtesy of the Centro de Artes. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Rubio’s style is often described as bright, energetic, and rooted in the tradition of Latino barrio art, with strong curving line work and mural-scale composition. He also founded and managed spaces for emerging artists in San Antonio, including R Space and Rubio Gallery-South. In 2007, Rubio received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. He has had work shown in regional and national exhibitions. His public art includes pieces for San Pedro Creek Culture Park and San Antonio’s civic and cultural programming.

Rubio, “Cervesa Xtra.” Courtesy of the Centro de Artes.

Rubio’s notable works include Aqua (San Pedro Creek Culture Park, 2018), a long, wavy, blue‑toned mural on ceramic tile, 7 × 47 feet, that evokes the flow of San Pedro Creek and its role in sustaining San Antonio’s Latino communities. East of downtown San Antonio, Rubio contributed to the Vortex, a large‑scale mural that he conceived and executed with youth artists in Blue Star’s MOSAIC program. The Vortex mural was later preserved and restored as part of the San Anto Cultural Arts’ Mural Preservation Initiative.

One of Rubio’s paintings in the Centro exhibit is titled “El Rob.” There is definite humor in this Rubio painting, beginning with the crooked and deformed facial features of “El Rob” and his long golden goatee. Some might consider the figure grotesque. The eyeballs are profoundly large, as is the elongated tongue, which hangs largely outside of the mouth with a jewelry barbell, one of the many objects of body-piercing jewelry on Rob’s face. “El Rob” sits in front of two different beers, one with the name “Borracho Beer” and the other labeled “Lit Beer,” placed on a small table.

Rubio, “El Rob.” Courtesy of the Centro de Artes.

Eva Marengo Sanchez’s presentation at the Centro “Third Date” is playful and light and reminds us that in stressful times—such as periods of burnout or isolation—finding moments of humor and joy can be especially beneficial. When we laugh, we are able to create psychological distance from problems, making challenges feel less overwhelming and easier to manage.

Sanchez has been featured in stories by Texas Public Radio and Texas Monthly. On her website, she explains that her paintings are carefully crafted with attention to detail, scale, and composition. “Each painting,” she adds, “represents themes in my life that tell a larger story about geography, identity, and culture.” Sanchez paints canvases in her studio, murals on tall buildings, and is a star in the Latina art scene.

Eva M. Sanchez, “Third Date.” Courtesy of the Centro de Artes.

In her “Third Date” painting, Sanchez includes bottles of beer and Coca-Cola in a plastic grocery bag. Particular food and drinks, Sanchez reminds us, “can transport and connect us with past and present, important events, and particular periods in our lives.” Food, especially Sanchez tells us, “is the way I express my family history, life in San Antonio, and contemporary Mexican-American culture.” Sanchez’s interest in objects’ ability to tell stories is central to her practice, and she thoughtfully selects and depicts personal, meaningful subjects.

In another section of the Centro exhibit, I encountered the work of Borderland and post-modern artist Ricky Armendariz, known for challenging traditional ideas about originality, beauty, and artistic authority and admired for his post-modern artistic humor.

Ricky Armendariz, “Last Ride of Juan Diego o [I left my corazon in Mexico].” Courtesy of the Centro de Artes.

Armendariz acknowledges a deep passion for Borderland culture and Chicano lifestyles. In the tradition of border art, he has a passion for cars and lowriders. His painting in the Centro exhibit, “Last Ride,” has all the characteristics of a barrio classic “cholo” ride. A bald American eagle dominates the passenger side of the lowrider car, flying high about the New Mexico/Texas mountain range where snakes and nopales abound, revealing Armendariz’s passion for nature and western landscapes. There is also a small rendering of the Virgin of Guadalupe with a kneeling devotee humerously suggesting that this is indeed a precarious ride.

Ricky Armendariz, Home studio. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In Armendariz’s early works, the American landscape and the hybridization of Mexican, American, and Indigenous cultures informed much of the content of his work. His art has also included an abundant portrayal of birds, rabbits, bears, buffalo, and coyotes all representing the past and present of his life in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

Ricky Armendariz, “Ya me voy a therapy.” Courtesy of the Centro de Artes.

In portraying migration’s apocalyptic movements, Armendariz substitutes nature’s four-legged animals and birds, bees, and butterflies as representatives of human migrants. He assigns animal-human symbolism and connectivity to affix human cultures across time. In his own words, Armendariz affirms that many works are “tied to our current state of the border, the exodus of people from one country to another, looking for a better life.”

Raul Rene Gonzalez, Self Portrait. Courtesy of the Centro de Artes.

In another painting, Raul Rene Gonzalez offers a self-portrait photograph with the colors of the American flag adorning his mustache, goatee, and large beard. The blue color of the flag background covers the left side of his beard with specks of white for stars. On the right side, his beard is painted red and white. One wonders if this is a statement of identity, of being Mexican American? There is also a second self-portrait of Gonzalez patiently looking at the tiny hands of his children, placing hair clips on his beard. The hair clips are colorful, and his passive observation of the process adds to the humor of the situation.

Raul Rene Gonzalez. Courtesy of the Centro de Artes.

Heriberto Luna, “The Universal Game.” Courtesy of Blanton Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

José Francisco Treviño spent his life painting his hometown of Austin and the surrounding region of Central Texas. He was committed to painting the Chicano experience– its struggles and cultural beauty. In doing so, he helped define a Chicano artistic voice that never fully left the city that raised him.

Born in 1941 and raised in South Austin, Treviño showed an early instinct for drawing. As a child, he sketched political figures from the newspaper. At William B. Travis High School, his talent blossomed. As a teen, he joined more seasoned artists selling his drawings and paintings on Guadalupe Street at the edges of the University of Texas campus. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Treviño’s path was largely self-directed. He developed his artistic style through observation, relentless practice, and a deep personal study of art history, forming a visual language that drew from Mexican muralism, surrealism, and the lived experience of Mexican American life.

The Blanton Museum of Art. UT Austin. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Austin was not yet recognized as a center for Chicano art. But in the years 1965-1975, a new generation of Mexican American artists arrived in Austin and became creative strategists and leaders of the new Chicano Art Movement. In the first wave, Carmen Lomas Garza, Santa Barraza, and Amado Pena, who had been undergraduates together at Texas A&M Kingsville in the late 1960s, joined muralist Raul Valdez in forming the League of United Chicano Artists [L.U.C.H.A], a Chicano art movement. They participated in creative exercises with local Austin Chicanos Jose Treviño, Luis Guerra, and Luis Gutierrez. After Garza and Barraza left Austin in the late 1970s, printer and painter Sam Coronado, a UT Austin graduate at the time, joined Treviño and his art associates to keep the Chicano arts fires burning.

José Francisco Treviño, Untitled, 1985. Graphite on paper. Courtesy of Blanton Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In the following decade, Treviño was joined by Sylvia Orozco of Mexi-Arte and La Pena co-founders, Cythnia and Lydia Perez. Together, they began shaping a new design and momentum for a new cultural movement rooted in identity, resistance, and community. Treviño stood among them, a founding presence in the collective Los Quemados [the burned ones], a group born out of exclusion from mainstream exhibition spaces. Their work, like their name, spoke to both marginalization and creative fire.

José Francisco Treviño. Gilberto Cárdenas collection, 1986. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Treviño’s most iconic image, Uno de los Quemados (1974), is a self-portrait engulfed in flames. Wearing the uniform of a working man, Treviño confronts the viewer directly. The image represents a declaration of identity, tied to the collective he helped build and the broader Chicano movement that sought visibility and voice.

José Francisco Treviño, “Los Quemados.” Courtesy of Mexi-Arte. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Luis C. Gonzalez—widely known as Louie “The Foot”—emerged from the vibrant cultural and political currents of the late twentieth-century Chicano movement as a distinctive artistic voice rooted in Sacramento, California.

Gonzalez’s work frequently engages themes of Chicano nationalism, mestizaje, and pre-Columbian cultural legacy. His ambition, as he has stated, was “to become a writer of Chicano stories,” a goal realized through the seamless integration of textual and visual forms.

Luis C. Gonzalez [Louie “The Foot”]. Courtesy of the Blanton Art Museum. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Born in Mexico City in 1953, Gonzalez migrated with his family to Sacramento, where he came of age, completed his education, and began shaping a creative practice that fused visual art, language, and activism.

The nickname “Louie ‘The Foot’” originated from his habit of arriving on foot to marches and demonstrations, a gesture emblematic of his humility and dedication. That grounded sensibility extends into his daily life; for many years, he worked as a rural postal carrier, maintaining a direct and sustained connection to the communities that inform his art.

Gonzalez’s artistic trajectory began in the late 1960s, a formative period marked by social upheaval and the rise of Chicano cultural consciousness. Gonzalez was a founding member of the Royal Chicano Air Force [RCAF], which developed a distinctive community spirit that blended satire, cultural pride, and political engagement. Art historian Carlos Francisco Jackson noted that, as members humorously mythologized their identity—claiming to “fly adobe airplanes” and adopting mock military ranks and regalia—the collective forged a powerful and accessible visual language rooted in community solidarity.

Within this environment, Gonzalez found both purpose and platform. His work is perhaps most closely associated with silkscreen posters produced in support of the United Farm Workers, which combined bold graphics with direct political messaging. His lifelong commitment to social justice—particularly labor rights and grassroots activism—remains a defining thread throughout his art.

Equally significant is Gonzalez’s innovative use of poetry. In his 1976 silkscreen “Cortés’ Poem,” for example, Gonzalez employed wit and satire to interrogate the historical legacy of colonialism and its enduring role in shaping inequality for Mexican Americans. His silkscreen print, Just Another Poster? achieved particular prominence as the thematic image for a major national touring exhibition on Chicano graphic art, underscoring his central role within this tradition.

Through decades of sustained production, Luis C. Gonzalez has cultivated an art practice that is politically engaged, linguistically inventive, and deeply rooted in community. His work continues to affirm the power of cultural expression as both resistance and celebration.

Heriberto Luna, a Los Angeles–based Chicano artist born in Mexico City in 1976, has developed a body of work that bridges Maya iconography with contemporary experience. By incorporating pre-Columbian imagery alongside personal and cosmic elements, Luna embellishes pre-Columbian imagery with contemporary and personal elements. Luna adds, “I strive to embody the intersection of Mexico’s history, in all its depth and beauty, with the lived contexts of my era.”

Heriberto Luna, “The Universal Game.” Courtesy of the Blanton Art Museum. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Luna’s painting at the Blanton Museum, “The Universal Game,” depicts an ancient Maya ballgame player to honor both the historical Indigenous practice and his Mayan cultural heritage. In his artist’s statement, Luna offers: “I ground my work in Mayan iconography, using richly textured backgrounds and a chromatically satisfying palette of complementary colors to draw viewers into the world of the painting.”

The Maya figure in Luna’s painting wears an elaborate, ornamented headdress, a protective yoke around his waist, and knee padding. Curator Claudia Zapatsa comments that “the rules and practices of the ballgame vary, with every aspect of the court and its associated rings and heavy rubber ball signifying the Maya’s interpretation of the cosmos and the mythological battles of the underworld.” Luna details the figure with symbols based on ancient Maya hieroglyphs, further exploring Mayan history

Grounded in Mayan iconography, Luna’s paintings are distinguished by richly textured surfaces and a chromatically resonant palette of complementary colors that draw viewers into immersive visual worlds. Recurring motifs—such as the “cosmic hummingbird”—suggest transformation, migration, and spiritual endurance, linking ancient cosmologies to contemporary identity.

Mexi-Arte Art, Austin, Texas. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Luna’s work also carries a ceremonial quality, merging personal mythology with collective memory and inviting reflection on humanity’s past, present, and future. Luna believes that by studying and teaching cultural ancestry, it becomes possible to recognize humanity’s strength and spiritual capacity and to imagine new futures grounded in that awareness.

Raised in East Los Angeles, Luna’s artistic development was influenced by muralism, community activism, and Indigenous traditions. Family narratives—of a grandmother remembered as a Mayan shaman and a grandfather aligned with the revolutionary legacy of Emiliano Zapata—form a symbolic foundation for his practice, reinforcing themes of resistance and spirituality.

At La Tierra de la Culebra, an urban art park in Northeast Los Angeles, Luna developed his skills as both an earth sculptor and painter, while also engaging deeply with Aztec dance and drumming. These formative experiences instilled discipline, cultural pride, and a sense of purpose. Between 2002 and 2005, he apprenticed on major mural projects with the influential East Los Streetscapers and artists Paul Botello and Margaret Garcia.

Central to Heriberto Luna’s practice is his commitment to community engagement and mentorship. Through his teaching with organizations such as Theatre of Hearts, he has worked extensively with underserved youth, fostering artistic development and cultural awareness. His practice extends beyond the studio, functioning as both creative expression and cultural stewardship.

Sam Coronado at his Montopolis studio [Austin]. Photo by Ricardo Romo, 2012.

These three Chicano artists featured at the Blanton Museum represent a declaration of identity and struggle by Latino artists for visibility and voice. The artists affirm the power of cultural expression as both resistance and celebration. The exhibit educates viewers about cultural continuity and the transformative potential of art.

Mago Gándara, “Female flying over the town playing guitar,” Oil on Canvas, 2010. Courtesy of Mexican American Cultural Center.

On view through June 7, 2026, the show features over 100 works—including oil paintings, watercolors, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and personal writings by Gándara—many shown publicly for the first time. In the MACC’s second Main Gallery exhibition, the art show outlines key components “To recognize Gándara as the first ‘Chicana Modern Abstract artist in our region who broke from traditional depictions of people and nature.”

Born in El Paso during the Great Depression, Gándara first received artistic recognition in grade school for a drawing contest, and later, a supportive teacher affirmed her artistic potential during high school. After graduating in 1946, Mago pursued art studies—first at El Paso Technical School, then at Texas Western College (now UTEP)—supported by her mother’s wartime savings. Her formal art education placed her under the influence of notable instructors, including Spanish sculptor Urbici Soler, best known for his monumental Christ the King sculpture atop El Paso’s Mount Cristo Rey, symbolizing sacrifice and transcendence.

Mago Gándara, Courtesy of Mexican American Cultural Center.

Graduating with a BFA, Mago taught art at Bowie High School in El Paso but felt constrained by family tensions. When her studio was vandalized, she determined to pursue her art independently. Mago saved money from teaching and enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949. There, she experienced artistic freedom and community for the first time, drawing inspiration from the museum’s collections and from working with nude models—an experience denied in El Paso. She pursued further studies at the Chouinard Art Institute and the University of Southern California, earning her master’s degree from Antioch College.

In Dr. George Vargas’s excellent essay on Gándara, we learned of her difficult life in postwar Chicago. She devoted all of her time to her children and seldom drew or painted. She found Chicago increasingly bleak, marked by racial tensions and personal isolation as a new mother. In 1952, Mago Orona and her family moved west in pursuit of the post-war American dream. Although she dedicated herself to raising her children, she struggled to balance family life with her passion for art.

Gándara lived in California from 1952 to 1970, and then returned to the borderlands. After her relocation to El Paso, she taught Chicano Art at El Paso Community College, where she began developing the idea of the “art warrior,” an artist guided by purpose and spiritual strength, inspired by Carlos Castañeda’s Journey to Ixtlan.

Mago Gándara, Courtesy of Mexican American Cultural Center.

At El Paso Community College, Gándara proposed a “sculptural mural” for the new Valle Verde campus—a vision combining art, education, and desert symbolism. With determination, she secured college support, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and admission to Antioch University’s University Without Walls program to complete a master’s degree in bicultural art education. Her thesis project became the large-scale mural Time and Sand (1973–78), marking her emergence as a leader in community-based and Chicano public art.

She lived in El Paso for a decade and moved to Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city across the border from El Paso, in the mid 1980s. In Juarez, where she lived for 25 years, she transformed her home studio, CUI, into a magical creative space filled with mosaic murals, sculptures, and lush plant life.

Over time, Gándara’s artistic instincts became a means of personal liberation from a difficult marriage. Her early work included The Machineries of Hope, a nine-panel mural critiquing modern mechanization. Through these projects, Mago began transforming personal struggle into universal, humanistic art and found her voice as a woman artist.

Mago Gándara, Courtesy of Mexican American Cultural Center.

Art Historian Dr. George Vargas described Gándara as a “Mexicanized Georgia O’Keeffe,” reflecting her powerful reinterpretation of the desert landscape and modern forms. Dr. Vargas found in her work influences from Pre-Columbian art, Byzantine mosaics, and Modernist movements from Mexico, Europe, and the United States. Ramon Cardenas noted that Gándara chose abstraction to render her imagery. She Depicted, Cardenas stated, “the border’s landscape and people through free-flowing lines, abstract forms, and color theory, to express universal human emotions of love, anger, yearning.” The oil paintings and watercolors in the exhibit reveal how she incorporated a modernist approach to landscapes and portraiture. Through abstraction, she portrayed border landscapes and family life.

One of Gándara’s best-known murals in Juarez, El Milagro de Tepeyac (1993–present), honored the Virgin of Guadalupe and her pre-Hispanic roots as Tonantzin, the Aztec earth goddess. The mural depicted the Virgin descending from the heavens toward Juan Diego, blending Indigenous and Christian imagery — a visual metaphor for Mexican mestizo identity and spiritual fusion. Gándara funded the mural project by selling small “milagro” mosaics and drawings, transforming each purchase into a symbolic act of faith and community support.

Mago Gándara, Courtesy of Mexican American Cultural Center.

Her perseverance and belief in collective creativity culminated in eventual grant support from Los Murales of the El Paso Junior League, enabling the completion of a mural that united artistry, spirituality, and community engagement. According to art historian Arteaga Roberto Carrillo, some of her works were influenced by Aztec themes, such as those displayed on La Avenida de los Aztecas and in the Tourist Information Center for Chamizal in Juarez.

Gándara is considered Texas’s first female muralist. Teresa Palomo wrote in the Handbook of Texas that Manuel Acosta painted Iwo Jima, perhaps the earliest of El Paso’s known Chicano murals, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars office in 1966, and that in the early 1970s, Mago Orona Gándara painted at least two murals as a solo artist, Señor Sol and Time and Sand.

Mago Gándara. Exhibit entrance. Courtesy of Mexican American Cultural Center.

The concept of border art emerges from the cultural and historical reality of the U.S.–Mexico border—an expansive, complex frontier where two nations sharply divided by wealth and politics nonetheless share intertwined cultures. This 2,000-mile region represents a dynamic space of mestizaje—the blending of Mexican and U.S. American heritages. For Latino artists, this cultural fusion inspires new forms of expression and identity beyond rigid categories of “Mexican” or “Chicano.” In 2011, Gándara relocated permanently to her Altura Street studio in central El Paso, where she continued to create until she died in 2018 at age 89.

Mago Gándara, “Female flying over the town playing guitar,” Oil on Canvas, 2010. Courtesy of Mexican American Cultural Center.

Curator Ramon Cardenas framed Gándara as an artist who lived and worked amid the dualities and contradictions of life on the El Paso–Juárez border. The MACC exhibition reveals her as a Chicana Modern Abstract pioneer, whose groundbreaking murals and sculptures reshaped public art in the region. The exhibit presents Gándara as a Border Art Warrior, whose art fosters community cohesion and offers a shared vision of cultural unity, turning creativity into both a survival strategy and a form of resistance.

Admission is free, with MACC open Wednesday through Saturday (10 a.m.–6 p.m.) and Sunday (11 a.m.–3 p.m.).

A Chicano mural in El Paso’s Segundo Barrio at Sacred Heart Church. Mural inspired by the early murals of Gándara. Mural by Cimi and Blast, 2018. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The UT Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art is currently featuring ten Chicano art prints from the Gilberto Cardenas-Dolores Garcia collection. Among those on exhibit are Carlos Cortez, Leo Limón, and Alma López, discussed in this story.

Carlos Cortez, “Braceros de Texas” . Courtesy of UT Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Graphic artist Carlos Cortez was a Chicago-based writer, poet, illustrator, muralist, and activist. He is best known for his prints and illustrations that address labor rights, union organizing, and culture. As a longstanding Chicago community activist, Cortez was integral to the founding of the National Mexican Museum of Art in Chicago.

During World War II, Cortez was sent to federal prison for 2 years for refusing to be drafted because it went against his pacifist/socialist views. It was during those long months behind bars that Cortez began to dream of art as a weapon of conscience. He saw that a woodblock or linocut print could voice protest as powerfully as a picket line.

After his release, Cortez settled in Chicago, the city that became both his studio and his battleground. In a small workspace he dubbed Gato Negro Press, Cortez printed hundreds of images—miners with calloused hands, farm workers beneath a brutal sun, poets and laborers bound by solidarity. Each print was a manifesto carved in grain and ink.

UT Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

His dedication to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), one of the first labor organizations to organize Mexican workers in the southwestern United States, is reflected in Cortez’s numerous articles, short stories, poems, book reviews, photographs, comic strips, and linoleum-cut illustrations published over the years in the union’s newspaper.

Deeply influenced by Mexican artist and printer José Guadalupe Posada, Cortez forged a visual language both bold and compassionate. Like Posada, he gave voice to the voiceless. He also wrote corridos, political hymns, and stories, chronicling the everyday realities of laborers for the Industrial Worker, the newspaper of the IWW.

In mural and print, Cortez immortalized those who toiled in fields and factories. His hands carried the mission his parents began: to lift art from the gallery into the street, from the private collection into the public voice. By the time of his passing, the works of Carlos Cortez hung in community centers, union halls, and museums—including the Smithsonian Institution.

Carlos Cortez was a people’s artist in the truest sense—a craftsman of conscience who made art speak the language of struggle, peace, and dignity.

Leo Limón’s print in the Blanton exhibit, “Hummingbird Spirit,” touches on the artist’s love of pre-colonial Aztec and Maya cultures. Limón is best known for his vibrant murals and prints produced at Self Help Graphics & Art, where he helped build one of the most influential Latino art institutions in the country.

For the past 50 years, Limón has been a premier printmaker and cultural activist whose career has been deeply intertwined with the growth of the Chicano art movement and the communities of East Los Angeles. His work brings together color, humor, and public presence, transforming everyday urban space into a site of cultural affirmation.

Leo Limón with UCLA professor Raymund Paredes. [1990] Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Limón was born in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, in 1952 to a working-class Mexican American family. His parents’ early life in Chavez Ravine before displacement by urban renewal left vivid stories of a lost community that shaped his sense of belonging. In an interview with art historian Karen Davalos, Limón explained that as a teen, he developed a fascination with visual language that fed his emerging artistic eye. His childhood brimmed with sensory memories—radio music, television’s glow, family gatherings, and neighborhood rhythms—that deepened his connection to Mexican culture.

The 1968 Chicano Blowouts at Lincoln High School awakened Limón’s political awareness, while Saturday art classes and the Otis Art Institute linked art to community activism. A sports injury redirected his energy toward creative expression, which later expanded as a combat photographer during his military service. Limón’s life reflects discipline and imagination—an artist shaped by barrio memory and the enduring search for self and meaning.

Leo Limón, “Hummingbird Spirit.” Courtesy of UT Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Limón’s relationship to printmaking deepened through a friendship with Master Printmaker Richard Duardo, whose knowledge and generosity opened the door for Limón to begin silkscreen and stencil work. Limón credits Duardo with teaching him major techniques and helping him understand the possibilities of print as an art form. At Public Art Center and later at Self Help Graphics, Limón learned to cut stencils, handle color separations, and work with the logic of layered images.

At Self Help Graphics, Limón also helped develop the annual Día de los Muertos celebration and contributed to the Atelier printmaking program, both of which became important platforms for Latino artistic expression and intergenerational mentorship. His images of dancers, skulls, hearts, and Indigenous symbols reflect both joy and seriousness. He speaks about Day of the Dead not only as a celebration, but as a space to think about death, sacrifice, and responsibility.

Self Help Graphics art space in the 1990s. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Later, Limón also found success on the Westside through galleries and collectors, especially through Robert Berman’s gallery. Yet even there, his work retained its connection to the barrio and to the symbolic language he had built over time.

One of Limón’s recurring motifs, the heart, grew into a major visual signature. The heart became not just an image, but a gesture of exchange. For Limón, art remains both philosophy and activism: a way to renew ancient ideas in modern form, connect LA’s urban life to Mexica cosmology, and honor the mentors and women who shaped his world. His canvases aren’t just paintings—they’re living stories where every symbol and stroke carries the history and heartbeat of Chicano art.

Alma López’s print in the Blanton’s exhibit, “Mnesic Myths,” is a 1999 screen print that reworks Aztec-inflected imagery in a contemporary Chicana context. The images show one woman kneeling over another sleeping woman, a composition that recalls the myth of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, with floral, aquatic, butterfly, and rainbow motifs surrounding the figures.

López is a Mexican-born Chicana artist whose digitally based work reimagines Mexican and Catholic imagery through a feminist, queer, and politically critical lens. Her art is especially known for challenging traditional images of the Virgin of Guadalupe while exploring gender, sexuality, colonization, racism, and Chicana identity. López’s art is closely engaged with Mexican and Chicana/o traditions reimagined through the artist’s queer and feminist experience.

Born in 1966 in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, López later moved to Los Angeles, where she became deeply connected to the city’s Chicana and queer art communities. She earned degrees from UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine, along with photography training at UCLA Extension. López is particularly interested in increasing the visibility and respect towards Chicana and Mexican women.

López’s best-known works include the “Our Lady and Lupe and Sirena series,” which helped establish her as a major figure in contemporary Chicana art. These works use digital collage and print to merge Catholic iconography with Indigenous references, creating images that question patriarchal cultural narratives and reclaim space for women and queer identities.

López’s 2001 digital print, “Our Lady,” became widely controversial after being shown in Santa Fe, where Catholic leaders and activists protested the work. The backlash became part of the artwork’s public meaning, turning the piece into a broader debate about censorship, representation, and the rights of Chicana artists to reinterpret sacred symbols. López responded by emphasizing that her work centers strong women and the lived realities of Chicanas rather than emphasizing shock value or simple provocation.

Alma López, “Mnesic Myths.” Courtesy of UT Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

López is important because she helped expand digital art within Chicana/o art and made feminist, queer reinterpretations of cultural icons visible in a major way. Her work continues to matter for the way it links artistic innovation with activism, especially around body autonomy, Indigenous memory, and resistance to censorship.

In a 2026 Daily Art Magazine essay, “Alma López: Crossing the Borders of Identity, Sexuality, and Religion,” by Iolanda Munck, López discussed an East Los Angeles mural titled “Las Four.” The mural consisted of actual photographs depicting young women who lived in local housing projects. The women referenced in the background are Dolores Huerta [one of the leading contemporary civil rights activists], Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz [one of the most famous Mexican feminist poets of the 17th century], Rigoberta Menchú [a central contemporary revolutionary from Guatemala], and lastly, one of the soldaderas representing the women fighting in the Mexican revolution.

The artists all illustrate the way works on paper and murals played a major role in raising public consciousness and bringing history and cultural icons to a wider audience.

Marta Sancez, “Men working on the railroad”. Courtesy of the artist.

A professional artist for the past four decades, Sánchez has created artwork inspired by traditional Mexican folk art expressions. Her art is also deeply influenced by her Catholic Latino upbringing and Mexican folk art in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas. Sánchez uses spiritual and cultural images to honor everyday people, such as railroad workers. Her vibrant works often address themes of identity, migration, family memory, and social justice. Two of her new works, “Thanksgiving on Seguin Street” and “Abuelita Señora Blanca,” have been recently acquired by The Cheech Museum in Riverside, California.

Sánchez’s art journey began at an early age when she taught herself to draw. Her appreciation and understanding of art grew as she ventured downtown by herself on the city bus to browse through the art bookshelves of the San Antonio Public Library. As a teenager, she attended Fox Tech High School, where she excelled in Commercial Art classes. She took an interest in photo-realism and also learned drawing.

Marta Sanchez, Train yard series. Courtesy of the artist.

Following high school graduation, Sánchez enrolled in the art program at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, where she received partial scholarship assistance. After two years, she transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, and she majored in Fine Arts. During her years in Austin, she worked part-time as a waitress at the famed Cisco’s Bakery on 6th Street on the Eastside of the city, which reinforced her Chicana cultural roots.

To find her voice as an artist, Sánchez gained inspiration from Austin’s many cultural events, exhibitions, plays, and jazz sessions. The Texas capital city also supported the emergence of local Chicano artists Raul Valdez, Luis Guerra, and Jose Trevino during the early 1980s. Sánchez wrote: “My work slowly turned from being purely artistic to becoming art that served a purpose as I evolved from being a student to an artist, to a Chicana artist.”

Marta Sanchez. San Antonio, Texas. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

During her years at UT Austin, she collaborated with several art lovers and patrons. Sylvia Orozco of MexiArte and Cynthia and Libby Perez of La Pena Art helped her introduce Chicano art to a larger audience. The Perez sisters moved to Austin from San Antonio to attend the University of Texas. In 1981, they opened a restaurant, Las Manitas on Congress Avenue, where they excelled in serving Mexican food and exhibiting Chicano art. Sánchez had several of her artworks shown at Las Manitas. Three years later, Sylvia Orozco and Sam Coronado of the UT Austin Fine Arts Department teamed up to open the Mexican American art center Mexic-Arte near Las Manitas.

Sánchez developed as an artist while at UT Austin, but decided by her senior year in college to pursue a graduate degree that would also prepare her as an art educator. In 1982, she earned a BFA in Painting from the University of Texas at Austin. The following year, she enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at Temple University in Philadelphia. At Temple University, Sánchez took the opportunity to participate in the university’s education abroad program in Italy. In Italy, she visited the ancient site of Pompei. There she studied the Roman Retablos–art on flat tin plates, an ancient process similar to the later era of retablos found in Catholic churches throughout Mexico.

Marta Sanchez, “Retablo for the Women of Juarez”. Courtesy of the artist.

As a result of growing up in San Antonio, Sánchez has been fascinated with retablos and railroads. Her family lived a few blocks from the large train yards of San Antonio’s Eastside, and she often watched trains come and go from her family’s porch. As a child, she also admired the train track patterns and the hundreds of trains gathered at the railyards daily. “There I would draw the landscape full of trains and wonder about their departures and arrivals.”

The railroads came to San Antonio 120 years before any artist took an interest in them. Sanchez considered the railroad key to San Antonio’s early economic development. Trains brought immigrants and manufactured goods to the city and made the shipment of economic resources such as cattle and agricultural products possible. Moreover, Mexican workers helped build the railroad lines and depended on the trains for moving to and from San Antonio to harvest crops in the Midwestern states and California, Oregon, and Washington.

Marta Sánchez, “Braceros.” Courtesy of the artist.

Sánchez approaches her art about trains with the idea of sharing art and history. She has been painting and teaching art in Pennsylvania for the past 30 years, but Sánchez remains deeply committed to her Texas roots. She wrote: “Regardless of where I am living, I will always be the Chicana from San Antonio, Texas.”

Marta Sanchez, Train series. Courtesy of the artist.

Although she remains a very accomplished artist, Sánchez also earns a living as a museum teacher at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and as an art instructor at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She has taught extensively—over seventeen years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and currently at St. Joseph’s University, Springside-Chestnut Hill Academy, and the Woodmere Art Museum. She also serves on the board of The Print Center in Philadelphia and works with the Brandywine Workshop and Archive, a major Philadelphia print-making institution.

Marta Sanchez, “Cry Uvalde”. Courtesy of the artist.

Sánchez has many current projects, including creating an egg cookbook based on cascarones, colorful painted eggshells filled with confetti that are popular at Easter and Fiesta celebrations in San Antonio and cities with large Latino populations. A longtime community arts advocate, she co-founded Cascarones por La Vida, a project that combines artmaking with social action. Since 1992, she has organized artists and youth to create and sell confetti-filled cascarones each spring, donating proceeds to families and children affected by HIV/AIDS. The project reflects her belief that art should serve and unite communities.

El Jardín, en memoria de mi abuelita la Señora Blanca Estela. oil and enamel on aluminum. Gift to the Cheech Museum by Harriett and Ricardo Romo.

Sánchez’s recent bodies of work continue to document San Antonio’s rail yards and explore the history of Carpas [traveling Mexican circuses]—linking personal memory, cultural storytelling, and historical recovery. She collaborated with poet Norma E. Cantú of Trinity University in San Antonio on Transcendental Train Yards (Wings Press), pairing her Carpas-inspired serigraphs with Cantú’s poetry. Sánchez also continues her retablo paintings and is currently working on an historical painting portraying Mexican Bracero workers in the United States.

Marta Sanchez, Virgin Guadalupe. Courtesy of the National Museum of Mexican Art.

Mark Menjívar’s Murmurations. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Menjívar, a UT San Antonio art professor, is known for engaging in long-term collaborations, oral histories, and community-based research to address topics such as access to food, capital punishment, migration, and border issues. In his long-term projects, he creates frameworks that bring together students, community groups, and leaders for critical dialogues about issues that affect their lives.

Mark Menjívar’s Murmurations. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star.

Over the last two decades, Menjívar has worked on over twenty multifaceted projects. In the Contemporary mid-career survey, Blue Star curators highlighted a selection of projects, such as the refrigerator or photo project and the Luck Archive, and debuted new works.

The Luck Archive features collections of artifacts displayed that are not about being lucky or unlucky, Menjívar tells us. Rather, “It’s about the truths and lies we tell ourselves to feel safe, the hopes and dreams we carry, and the things that connect us and make us human.” Menjívar’s book, The Luck Archive, contributes to our understanding of the project’s purpose and outcomes. In a foreword to the book, artist Harrell Fletcher writes: Menjívar “has spent years engaging people in airplanes, bingo halls, grocery stores, tattoo shops, parks, and baseball stadiums, and on the streets and in their homes. The result is an ongoing exploration of the intersections between luck and the beliefs, superstitions, and traditions people hold dear.”

Mark Menjívar, The Luck Archive. Courtesy of the artist.

The physical Luck Archive contains more than 450 entries that include rings, coins, clovers, charms, patches, underwear, sports superstitions, lottery strategies, day trader insights, animal stories, dolls, games, crystals, seeds, cigarettes, rainbows, and more, collected in photographs and accompanying explanations of the objects. Menjívar admits that he created something from nothing, and about something that may be nothing, or may be more important than we could have known had he not made it obvious for us.

In his book, The Luck Archive: Exploring Belief, Superstition, and Tradition, Menjivar noted that the Luck project started over a decade ago when he began organizing the stories, objects, and photographs about people’s ideas about luck and good-luck objects into a publicly accessible collection.

Mark Menjívar’s Luck Archive. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star.

Harrell Fletcher, who has followed Menjívar’s career for decades, noted that the San Antonio artist uses photography (and various other media and approaches) to explore aspects of life that are normally hidden from view. Today, especially with the advent and acceptance of socially engaged art practices, Fletcher wrote, “it is possible to operate transparently, as Menjívar does, in more involved, inclusive, and participatory ways.” The UT San Antonio professor has used his practice to investigate everything from the food in people’s refrigerators to the effects of the civil war in El Salvador.

The first project that really crystallized Menjívar’s conceptual approach was the refrigerator photography work. While looking for food in his refrigerator, he thought about how the issues of food insecurity and hunger impacted so many Americans. In the early 2000s, Menjívar spent two years living in a Bolivian shantytown where 80 percent of the people lived at poverty levels, so food and hunger were not distant issues but part of daily life. He worked with San Antonio social justice advocate Michael Nye, spending time, listening, getting to know people aligned with his own values, and asking Nye how he might explore food.

Mark Menjívar, The Refrigerator Project. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Sta

That project, Refrigerators, received national attention—from awards in Santa Fe to segments on The Today Show, National Geographic, and NPR’s Splendid Table. Menjívar’s refrigerator images circulated in dozens of magazines and went viral online years later. But for Menjívar, one of the most important lessons of that success was realizing that while the visibility mattered, what mattered even more was the integrity of the relationships and the processes in communities. The work taught him something about his own ego and about staying grounded in why he makes art in the first place.

Mark Menjívar, The Refrigerator Project. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star.

Another significant project featured in Murmurations is focused on bird migration. Menjívar told us that about five years ago, while walking along the San Antonio River Walk, he heard the song of a painted bunting—a small, brilliantly colored bird. This small bird breeds mainly in the southeastern and south‑central United States (including much of Texas) and winters farther south into Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Menjívar recognized the bird song, and it struck him that this tiny bird might have been heard by his family in Puerto Rico or El Salvador just a week earlier. The migration path of the painted bunting reminded him how close we actually are—far apart on a map, but connected through small creatures that move freely between our hemispheres.

Mark Menjívar, Migration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

That bird migration thought led to a project called La Misma Canción: The Same Song, exploring the interconnectedness of the Americas. A large fabric mural that covered a whole wall of the exhibit was constructed by young people in Prescott, Washington, in collaboration with artists Amanda Evans and Tia Kramer. The Prescott school serves a mostly migrant farmworker community—about seventy percent of the children are from families who came from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Mark Menjívar, Migration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Under Menjívar’s directions, the students began by drawing a map linking all the places their families came from. Together, they researched ten species of migratory birds that travel through those same regions each year. Rather than drawing freehand, the students traced the birds’ outlines using photographs from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which also helped fund the project. Tracing leveled the playing field. Menjívar explained that this project required scanning hundreds of tracings and printing them on fabric using high-resolution digital printing—600 DPI, which gave the surface incredible clarity. The final banner still hangs on the school campus, Menjívar proudly explained, welcoming migratory birds and honoring the journeys that connect people.

Mark Menjívar, Migration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Early in his artistic career, Menjívar joined a collective called Borderland and began working near the U.S.–Mexico border. The group explored how to imagine borders differently—fluid, humane, even reversible. Inspired by Swedish-American artist Claes Oldenburg’s manifesto project “I Am For An Art…,” Menjívar began leading workshops where communities completed phrases like “I am for a border…” or “I am for a city…” The answers were poetic and profound. At the exhibit, Harriett and I read posted index cards that stated: “I am for a city that feels like a warm blanket,” and “I am for a border that rolls up like a rug and can be put away in the closet.” These collective writings become public installations—hundreds of voices shaping new civic and spiritual possibilities.

For this exhibition, Menjívar expanded the concept. He asked visitors to respond to the prompt, “I am for a future…” Visitors to the Contemporary gallery are asked to add their own sentences to the walls—hoping aloud for a future of love, peace, or unity. Some even stay to talk about what it means to act on those hopes. Menjívar also asks visitors to respond to questions printed on a large picnic table, such as “If you’re caring for the planet, what small actions can you take today?”

Mark Menjívar, “I Am for a Future…” Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Menjívar seems to be achieving his goal to realize art inspired by “social sculpture,” a concept from the artist Joseph Beuys. The concept suggests that art can shape society itself through ideas, words, and participation. Menjívar concluded by telling us: “Every project I do asks how we shape the world and one another. You’re shaping me right now just by listening and asking questions.”

Mark Menjívar, Murmuration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Mark Menjívar’s Murmurations. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Menjívar, a UT San Antonio art professor, is known for engaging in long-term collaborations, oral histories, and community-based research to address topics such as access to food, capital punishment, migration, and border issues. In his long-term projects, he creates frameworks that bring together students, community groups, and leaders for critical dialogues about issues that affect their lives.

Mark Menjívar’s Murmurations. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star.

Over the last two decades, Menjívar has worked on over a dozen multifaceted projects. In the Contemporary mid-career survey, Blue Star curators highlighted a selection of projects, such as the refrigerator or photo project and the Luck Archive, and debuted new works.

The Luck Archive features collections of artifacts displayed that are not about being lucky or unlucky, Menjívar tells us. Rather, “It’s about the truths and lies we tell ourselves to feel safe, the hopes and dreams we carry, and the things that connect us and make us human.” Menjívar’s book, The Luck Archive, contributes to our understanding of the project’s purpose and outcomes. In a foreword to the book, artist Harrell Fletcher writes: Menjívar “has spent years engaging people in airplanes, bingo halls, grocery stores, tattoo shops, parks, and baseball stadiums, and on the streets and in their homes. The result is an ongoing exploration of the intersections between luck and the beliefs, superstitions, and traditions people hold dear.”

Mark Menjívar, The Luck Archive. Courtesy of the artist.

The physical Luck Archive contains more than 450 enrtrees that include rings, coins, clovers, charms, patches, underwear, sports superstitions, lottery strategies, day trader insights, animal stories, dolls, games, crystals, seeds, cigarettes, rainbows, and more, collected in photographs and accompanying explanation of the objects Menjívar admits that he created something from nothing, and about something that may be nothing, or may be more important than we could have known had he not made it obvious for us.

In his book, The Luck Archive: Exploring Belief, Superstition, and Tradition, Menjiar noted that the Luck project started over a decade ago when he began organizing the stories, objects, and photographs about people’s ideas about luck and good-luck objects into a publicly accessible collection.

Mark Menjívar’s Luck Archive. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star.

Harrell Fletcher, who has followed Menjívar’s career for decades, noted that the San Antonio artist uses photography (and various other media and approaches) to explore aspects of life that are normally hidden from view. Today, especially with the advent and acceptance of socially engaged art practices, Fletcher wrote, it is possible to operate transparently, as Menjívar does, in more involved, inclusive, and participatory ways. The UT San Antonio professor has used his practice to investigate everything from the food in people’s refrigerators to the effects of the civil war in El Salvador.

The first project that really crystallized Menjívar’s conceptual approach was the refrigerator photography work. While looking for food in his refrigerator, he thought about how the issues of food insecurity and hunger impacted so many Americans. In the early 2000s, Menjívar spent two years living in a Bolivian shantytown where 80 percent of the people lived at poverty levels, so food and hunger were not distant issues but part of daily life. He worked with San Antonio social justice advocate Michael Nye in Bolivia, spending time, listening, getting to know people aligned with his own values, and asking Nye how he might explore food.

Mark Menjívar, The Refrigerator Project. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star.

That project, which became known as “You Are What You Eat,” traveled widely, was published with Trinity University Press, and received national attention—from awards in Santa Fe to segments on Good Morning America, National Geographic, and NPR’s Splendid Table. Menjívar’s refrigerator images circulated in hundreds of magazines and went viral online years later. But for Menjívar, one of the most important lessons of that success was realizing that while the visibility mattered, what mattered even more was the integrity of the relationships and the processes in communities. The work taught him something about his own ego and about staying grounded in why he makes art in the first place.

Mark Menjívar, The Refrigerator Project. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star.

Another significant project featured in Murmuration is focused on bird migration. Menjívar told us that about five years ago, while walking along the San Antonio River Walk, he heard the song of a painted bunting—a small, brilliantly colored bird. This small bird breeds mainly in the southeastern and south‑central United States (including much of Texas) and winters farther south into Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Menjívar recognized the bird song, and it struck him that this tiny bird might have been heard by his family in Puerto Rico or El Salvador just a week earlier. The migration path of the painted bunting reminded him how close we actually are—far apart on a map, but connected through small creatures that move freely between our hemispheres.

Mark Menjívar, Migration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

That bird migration thought led to a project called La Misma Canción: The Same Song, exploring the interconnectedness of the Americas. A large fabric mural that covered a whole wall of the exhibit was constructed by young people in Prescott, Washington, in collaboration with artists Amanda Evans and Tia Kramer. The Prescott school serves a mostly migrant farmworker community—about seventy percent of the children are from families who came from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Mark Menjívar, Migration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Under Menjívar’s directions, the students began by drawing a map linking all the places their families came from. Together, they researched ten species of migratory birds that travel through those same regions each year. Rather than drawing freehand, the students traced the birds’ outlines using references from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which also helped fund the project. Tracing leveled the playing field. Menjívar explained that this project required scanning hundreds of tracings and printing them on fabric using high-resolution digital printing—600 DPI, which gave the surface incredible clarity. The final banner, Menjívar proudly explained, welcomes migratory birds and honors the journeys that connect people.

Mark Menjívar, Migration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Early in his artistic career, Menjívar joined a collective called Borderline and began working near the U.S.–Mexico border. The group explored how to imagine borders differently—fluid, humane, even reversible. Inspired by Swedish-American artist Claes Oldenburg’s manifesto project “I Am For An Art…,” Menjívar began leading workshops where communities completed phrases like “I am for a border…” or “I am for a city…” The answers were poetic and profound. At the exhibit, Harriett and I read posted index cards that stated: “I am for a city that feels like a warm blanket,” and “I am for a border that rolls up like a rug and can be put away in the closet.” These collective writings become public installations—hundreds of voices shaping new civic and spiritual possibilities.

For this exhibition, Menjívar expanded the concept. He asked visitors to respond, “I am for a future…” Visitors to the Contemporary gallery are asked to add their own sentences to the walls—hoping aloud for a future of love, peace, or unity. Some even stay to talk about what it means to act on those hopes. Menjívar also asks visitors to respond to questions printed on a large picnic table, such as “If you’re caring for the planet, what small actions can you take today?”

Mark Menjívar, “I Am for a Future…” Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Menjívar seems to be achieving his goal to realize art inspired by “social sculpture,” a concept from the artist Joseph Beuys. The concept suggests that art can shape society itself through ideas, words, and participation. Menjívar concluded by telling us: “Every project I do asks how we shape the world and one another. You’re shaping me right now just by listening and asking questions.”

Mark Menjívar, Murmuration. Courtesy of Contemporary at Blue Star. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Wifredo Lam, Madame Lumumba. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Born in 1902, Lam resided in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, a municipality in central Cuba known for having the largest and most productive sugar plantations on the island. Lam’s father, a Chinese immigrant, came to Cuba in the 19th century to harvest sugar cane crops. His mother, of African and Spanish descent, traced part of her heritage to African slaves brought to the region to work in the plantations in the 1800s. Over his six-decade career, Lam’s mixed heritage would define much of his art.

Wifredo Lam, Astral Harp. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In 1916, Lam and his family moved from the Cuban countryside to Havana. That year, at age fourteen, Lam enrolled in the Escuela Profesional de Pintura y Escultura, Academia de San Alejandro in Havana. His exhibitions at the Salon de Bellas Artes convinced him to become a painter. His birth community of Sagua la Grande noticed his artistic talents and awarded him a grant to study in Spain. In 1923 Lam left Cuba to study in Madrid where he spent hours at the Prado Museum studying the great masters of Spanish painting, particularly Velázquez and Goya. While at the academy, Lam explored his personal and artistic identity. He also became part of a community of modernist intellectuals and artists, and MOMA curators noted that he “experimented with modern idioms like flattened space, bold outlines, and patterning.”

Wifredo Lam, Self-Portrait II. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In Spain, he married, and his wife Eva gave birth to their son Wifredo Victor. Tragedy struck the Lam family when his wife and young son died of tuberculosis. His grief led to numerous paintings of mother and child. Lam also grew closer to his friendship network and joined a political organization connected to the Republican forces in the fight against Spanish General Francisco Franco. MOMA curators noted that after joining the Republican army to defend Madrid against the fascist forces of Franco, Lam engaged in creating propaganda posters against Franco’s fascist army.

War has never been good for artists. The Spanish Republican army forces placed Lam in a munitions factory where toxic fumes resulted in chemical poisoning. Sent to Barcelona to recover, Lam composed one of his largest paintings, “Las Guerra Civil” [1937], which MOMA noted, “heralded his arrival as a modern and politically committed artist.” Forced to paint on kraft paper due to wartime scarcity, Lam responded creatively to the medium, using it to explore the boundary between painting and drawing. The interplay of material, scale, line, and blank space would become a hallmark of his practice.

Wifredo Lam, Madame Lumumba. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Lam wrote of this painting, originally commissioned for the 1937 Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale in Paris, “I am drawing a painting of big proportions... an anti-fascist subject, not very beautiful but very true and real.” The flat, churning scene depicts a violent confrontation during the Spanish Civil War in which figures with grimacing, masklike faces struggle against one another. Lam’s painting of the horrors of war reminded me of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” completed in 1937 that was shown at the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition and drew worldwide attention.

Wifredo Lam, The Spanish Civil War. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

While in Barcelona, Lam also secured a letter from a friend of Picasso to introduce him to the famous artist in Paris. Lam fled Spain and arrived in Paris in 1938. He met with Picasso, who introduced him to his artist friends, including Joan Miro, Fernand Léger, and Georges Braque. Among Picasso’s vanguard art collective was Andre Breton, a key figure in the surrealist movement. Picasso also introduced Lam to his gallery associates. One of Lam’s earlier paintings of a mother and child, completed in Madrid, was instrumental in his breakthrough to international status when the MOMA purchased the “Mother and Child” painting from a Paris dealer in 1939.

Wifredo Lam, Mother and Child. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

War continued to torment Lam and caused his exodus from Paris in 1940 when the Nazis invaded France. He fled to Marseille, France with Breton and friends and eventually found passage to the Caribbean island of Martinique. A short video shown at the Lam exhibit, narrated by MOMA Director Christophe Cheriz and MOMA Latin American Curator Beverly Adams, noted that both the United States and Mexico rejected Lam’s entry. After a short stay in Martinique, Lam returned to Cuba.

Back in Cuba, Lam reconnected intellectually with his new artistic crusade, a coupling of the influence of Oceanic art with that of African art. His works also touched on his opposition to colonialism. In March 1943, the MOMA exhibition, The Latin American Collection, featured Lam’s gouaches Mother and Child and Satan.

For his most famous painting, La Jungla, Lam glued together two large pieces of kraft paper. He first sketched the composition in charcoal and then used layers of thinned oil paint over the initial drawing. Lam’s figures feature faces reminiscent of African masks, handlike feet, elongated legs, and male and female attributes. Adams, who curated the MOMA exhibit, noted that Lam’s figures “are placed within a Caribbean landscape, intertwined with broadleaves, tropical fruit, and sugarcane. This setting recalls Cuba’s history of slavery and indenture, while also signaling the resilience of Afro-Caribbean cultures.”

MOMA Book with La Jungla on the cover. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Collection of Harriett and Ricardo Romo.

La Jungla was acquired by MOMA in 1945. Referring to La Jungla painting, poet Aimé Césaire, whom Lam met in Martinique, wrote that “La jungla imagines a constant re-creation of figures and their context, a revolving, as if they were both entering and leaving the world made for them. Rather than being static plant/humans, they become, unbecome, and ultimately transcend the impenetrable space of the sugarcane field.”

During the late 1940s, Lam’s new success as an international artist allowed him to divide his time between Europe, Havana, and New York. Lam received major recognition in the 1950s and 1960s, including winning the Grand Prix of the Havana Salon and the Guggenheim International Award in 1964. These awards solidified his status as a leading figure of global modernism. Prestigious museums in Cuba, Haiti, the United States, France, Sweden, England, Mexico, Moscow, and Prague featured Lam’s solo exhibitions.

Wifredo Lam. The artist frequently depicted hybrid female figures as priestesses or spirits connected to Santería and other Afro‑Cuban religions. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In 1954, Lam moved to Albissola, Italy. He established a studio there in 1960 with his wife, Swedish painter Lou Laurin, and began exploring ceramics and later metal sculpture, often reworking the same hybrid personages that populated his paintings. His son, Eskil Lam, wrote, “Albissola, a traditional centre of Italian ceramics, was a hub of excitement, activity, and artistic exchange at the time my father was there. My mother called it ‘Albissolamania.’ It was this spirit of collaboration and friendship that first brought my father to the Italian coastal town of Albissola, just west of Genoa.”

Wifredo Lam, Portrait of Lydia Cabrera. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

During the 1970s, the last decade of his life, Lam collaborated with a Milan printmaker, Giorgio Upiglio, at the Grafica Uno workshop. His involvement with printmaking intensified through frequent working stays in Milan from the late 1970s onward. In these trips, he typically spent about a week at a time in Milan, experimenting with etching, aquatint, and lithography, which allowed him to sharpen the motifs of his mature style in graphic form. His love of poetry allowed him to maintain a sustained dialogue with poets through illustrated books and portfolios. He illustrated many journals and poetry books for friends and acquaintances.

MOMA Book with Wifredo Lam on the back cover. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

Wifredo Lam passed away in 1982 and is remembered as a major 20th-century modernist painter whose career bridged Europe and the Caribbean. An art critic with the journal Artsy noted that Lam “fused Surrealism, Cubism, and Afro-Cuban spiritual imagery into a distinctive visual language.” It is exciting that Lam’s work is receiving the recognition it deserves.

Adriana Garcia, “May You Grow in Knowledge…” . Courtesy of the Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Following the poetry reading, the large crowd of visitors at the exhibit engaged in conversations about the show’s artistic themes. Many of the works dealt with the political, economic, health, social, and cultural marginalization of Latina women in Texas. Joan Frederick, an artist in the exhibition, noted, “I painted this surreal landscape to represent the bonfires raging in this dark night of today’s world, where my spirit rises above the chaos to turn into gold, stay steady, and keep trying to change negative into progressive change.”

Ann Wallace, “We are the children? Family Separation”. Courtesy of the Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

We heard discussions about the growing vulnerabilities of the status of women in education. Several college art students and university faculty members spoke of the recent Texas higher education policies affecting women and minorities. The New York Times reported that the Texas A&M System, governing some of the largest public institutions of higher education in Texas, will ban advocacy of “race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” without higher‑level administrative approval. Such degrees are creating a chilling effect on classroom discussions about race, history, and gender.​

Jessica Fuentes, writer at the art journal Glasstire, recently commented on the growing negative effects of the pending consolidation of gender- and race-based programs at Texas universities. She agreed that the “degradation of gender- and race-based initiatives sets us back nearly 40 years in education, but beyond the erasure of these programs is the reality of how new guidelines around what can be taught or discussed in the classroom will do ever more damage.” She added that “putting tight restrictions on classroom rhetoric means that university courses, where discourse is supposed to take place, are silenced.” Fuentes questioned the value of a university education if academic and artistic freedoms are being terminated.

Edma Lugo Martínez, “La Chamana.” Courtesy of the Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Lead curator Terry Ybanez’s painting honored three prominent Texas community leaders. Her painting includes a portrait of Rebecca Flores, a leader in the United Farm Workers’ [UFW] presence in Texas. Appointed by Cesar Chavez as State Director of the UFW in Texas in 1975, Flores became one of the most prominent UFW leaders outside of California. Ybanez’s portrait of Patricia S. Castillo, Founder of the P.E.A.C.E. Initiative, represented an influential domestic-violence advocate and mentor to women, teens, and community leaders. The portrait of Nickie Valdez is Ybanez’s recognition of the 1976 Co-founder of Dignity/San Antonio, one of the city’s longest-running LGBT Catholic organizations.

Terry Ybañez “Hummingbirds/Colibries.” Courtesy of the Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Over the past twenty-five years, Terry Ybañez’s life has been filled with painting, teaching, and community service. For seventeen years, from 2004 to 2021, she taught art at Brackenridge High School. Ybañez attended Brackenridge as a high school student, where she organized art events and shared ideas and art skills with her high school friends and classmates. As a preschool, middle school, and high school teacher, Ybañez influenced many talented Latina and Latino artists.

Ybañez is retired from teaching but is actively engaged in painting and preserving the cultural heritage of her San Jose Mission neighborhood. The mission and surrounding area are part of the San Antonio UNESCO World Heritage site. Ybañez has worked with other community activists to support parks and the preservation of historic spaces near the mission where she lives and has her art studio. She eagerly awaits opportunities to expand her work as an artist.

A painting, “Where Trouble was Brewing,” by San Antonio artists Manola and Maria Ramirez, portrays a woman with her face partially covered and raising her fist, suggesting struggle and resistance. The Ramirez sisters collaborate on many of their art projects.

Manola and Maria Ramirez, “Where Trouble was Brewing”. Courtesy of the Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Manola credits a Life Drawing class at San Antonio College as transformational to her art career. Her art teachers commented on her creative talent and encouraged her to seek an art degree. After two years at San Antonio College, Manola and her sister Maria both transferred to The University of Texas at Austin and were admitted to the UT Art Department. The sisters excelled in art classes and graduated with Bachelor’s of Arts degrees in 2018.

The Ramirez sisters returned to San Antonio after graduation and today operate an all-female collaborative space known as Lavaca Studios in Southtown. There they create, teach, and provide artistic resources to the community. Several years ago, the Ramirez sisters completed a mural in the Southside, which Glasstire praised for its “graphic aesthetics, use of color and font, and whimsical style.”

Liliana Wilson, an immigrant from Chile who has been living and working in Austin, makes social and political statements with her art. As a first-generation Latina immigrant, she addresses her concerns for the plight of humanity by looking at global issues, such as migration, climate change, and social justice.

Wilson’s work in the exhibit reminds us, for example, that immigration is not just an American issue; it is a worldwide phenomenon, and the news media provides daily evidence of tragic events affecting migrants. Every continent and most countries of the world are affected by migration issues, either losing or gaining migrants.

Liliana Wilson, “Cruzando”. Courtesy of the Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Wilson’s painting of a young boy standing on a discarded truck tire represents the immigrant’s journey. Many of the crossings of the Rio Grande are accomplished with inner tubes and floating devices. The painting reveals that teens often make the dangerous trek to the United States unaccompanied by adult or family members. Over the years, many of Wilson’s works have touched on the subject of migration. Sadly, today the Latino communities are consumed with horrid accounts of deportation.

The painting also brought back memories of my childhood in San Antonio’s Westside. Some of the teen boys in our barrio were very poor and could not afford toys or bikes, objects common to middle-class families from the neighborhoods to the north. There were no playgrounds in the barrio, and kids played with tires and other discarded items.

Adriana Garcia’s portrait of a young woman surrounded by plants is radiant and hopeful. In the bottom-left corner, she depicts a small girl on her knees with a watering can, planting corn in a brown field with a bright blue sky behind her. The dominant figure is a young Brown woman positioned at the center of a colorful sphere with blue swirls.

Adriana Garcia, “May You Grow in Knowledge…” Courtesy of the Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

There are large yellow sunflowers attached to her upper body, and Garcia placed Indian jewelry on the young woman’s ears and wrist. In explaining her artwork, Garcia once wrote: “I create as a way to document the lives I’ve shared, (which) provides a way to honor a person’s existence and make visible the marks they have imprinted upon me and the environment-- a legacy left as well as those still to come.”

Ashley Perez. NT. Courtesy of the Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Many of the artworks in the exhibition were familiar to the Centro audience. I had to confess to Centro CEO Malena Gonzalez-Cid that the work and the enthusiasm of those attending the exhibit opening overwhelmed me. If I had the time and space to write more, as a start, I would add discussion on Ann Wallace’s work that documents “Family Separation”; Ashley Mireles, “Terminal Migration”; Anita Valencia, “Sor Juan de la Cruz”; Edna Lugo Martinez, “La Chamana”; and Veronica Castillo’s ceramic sculpture. The exhibit included colorful and inspiring works by Lorena Young Medillin, Ashley Perez, Gloria Sanchez Hart, Ethel Shipton, and Kim Bishop. Too much exciting art is a good problem to have. The exhibit will be on display at the Centro Cultural Aztlan until April 16, 2026.

Lyn Belisle, “The Relic Bearer”. Courtesy of the Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Cruz Ortiz, Portrait of Olivia. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Ortiz’s approach to life was shaped as a young boy by his family’s religious commitment to serving the poor in the borderland communities of El Paso and Juarez. To undertake their Jesuit missionary work, Ortiz’s family gave up their home and life in Houston, traveling with their three children in a pickup truck to the border city of El Paso.

The younger Ortiz recalls many visits to Juarez, Mexico, where his family joined the Jesuit missionaries in delivering food and attending to the social needs of those living next to the large urban trash dumps of Juarez, among the poorest families in Mexico. These experiences gave Ortiz a greater understanding and appreciation of people living day by day on the edge of starvation and social deprivation.

Cruz Ortiz, Educación, San Anto mural. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Missionary work on the Border was consuming, and ultimately, the Ortiz family moved to Schertz, Texas where they continued working with the Jesuits. The move also enabled young Cruz to start high school in a community just north of San Antonio. Only a handful of Latino kids attended his high school, and Ortiz found it perplexing that the counselors pressed him to enroll in trade-related classes.

Ortiz enrolled in vocational classes, specializing in welding, which he mastered over his four years of high school. When he was not taking those classes, Ortiz expanded his artistic skills by learning printmaking and silkscreening. Numerous high school friends played in Punk-Rock bands, and they asked Ortiz to design and print posters advertising their music gigs. He also silk-screened T-shirts with band images and slogans.

Cruz Ortiz. Late 1990s painting. Gift to the SA Public Library from Harriett and Ricardo Romo. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In the early 1990s, Ortiz met Manny Castillo, a drummer at TacoLand, and artist Juan Miguel Ramos. He credits both for supporting his early efforts to become an artist. Ortiz’s teen years had been limited to the small projects of designing and printing posters and T-shirts. Manny Castillo was a musician who loved art, and Juan Miguel Ramos was an emerging artist who played in a band and loved to paint. The three bonded, founding in 1993 the San Anto Cultural Arts, a vulnerable Westside non-profit cultural organization. San Anto’s goals were straightforward--to beautify the Westside with murals. Ortiz painted his first mural, “Educacion,” on the street corner of Chupaderas and Guadalupe.

Ortiz completed his college education at UTSA in 2000 and took a job teaching high school. While at UTSA, his approach to art took on new meaning and purpose following the discovery of Chicano history and Chicano art books in the campus library.

Cruz Ortiz, San Anto mural on the Westside. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

My most recent conversation with artist Cruz Ortiz at his art compound in South San Antonio began with a question about his philosophy of art. He answered, “There are no rules at all with art.” In his art, he sees parallels among struggles in Ireland, Palestine, and South Texas, focusing on public art as an act of education, resistance, and survival. He is a big admirer of the Latin American print movements for their power to disseminate revolutionary imagery, valuing printmaking as both an aesthetic and a political medium.

Ortiz links artistic freedom to the ability to shift fluidly between painting, clay, printmaking, welding, woodcarving, tile, performance, video, and film, insisting his job as an artist is simply “to make,” while history later decides how to read the work. He also acknowledged consistently resisting being boxed solely into Chicano or identity-based categories, even as that history is an important part of his work.

Cruz Ortiz. Juan N. Cortina and his Borderland ranch army. Featured in the Queretaro, Mexico art exhibition. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Ortiz’s art transitioned into socio-political art following George Floyd’s murder in 2020. When the Mellon Foundation launched the Monuments Project, a major initiative in direct response to the racial justice uprisings in the U.S., Ortiz found his niche. The goals of the project were to rethink monuments, memorials, and public storytelling spaces in the U.S. In its initial stages, Mellon artist grantees questioned how history was taught in public schools, who was commemorated, who was missing, and how monuments reinforce or challenge white supremacy. In San Antonio, a statue of William Travis, a slaveholder who died at the Alamo, was removed from a downtown park. Cruz painted a portrait of Juan N. Cortina, a South Texas Mexicano rancher who resisted Anglo occupation of South Texas.

Ortiz and other Latino artists celebrated the Mellon Foundation’s support of projects that “reimagine and rebuild commemorative spaces” to tell a richer, more inclusive story of U.S. history. Latino artists know that this is especially difficult in Texas, where legislators have passed laws banning books about race, racism, and civil rights , as well as titles that discuss systemic racism, U.S. racial history, or antiracist ideas, including memoirs and youth and young adult novels centering people of color.

Cruz Ortiz with his puppet show. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

These books often feature teen protagonists or themes of adolescence (identity, friendships, family, sexuality, school, and coming-of-age). In the 2023–24 school year, about half of all banned books in Texas featured characters who represented people of color, and nearly 40% had LGBTQ+ characters. Local librarians say that book bans on stories of migration, race, and ethnic identity directly affect San Antonio’s majority‑Latino student population.

As a serious student of art history, Ortiz took an interest in Paul Klee, the Swiss-German artist whose work in the pre-WWI era is known for its childlike lines, symbolic shapes, and vibrant color harmonies. Studying Klee and other artists working under fascism, Ortiz noticed the grotesque puppets Klee made for his children and a broader pattern of artists like Alexander Calder, Frida Kahlo, and Joaquín Torres, who also made puppets during periods of political oppression. These artists chose to focus on joy and play as a form of resolve rather than protest imagery likely to be censored.

Cruz Ortiz completed works. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Inspired by Klee and his resistance to fascism, Ortiz’s newest major body of work includes puppets and a marionette theater, which he initially approached with humor but came to see as a serious, historically grounded project. Ortiz reflected on his earlier work painting protest murals and posters—staking a claim to land and community—as important but ultimately not “enough” for him. The puppet and circus-based performances are quieter yet “almost political action,” aligning with traditions such as Luis Valdez’s farmworker theater and Mexican circuses. These performances brought joy and education simultaneously to audiences. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Cesar Chavez’s union organizing drives teamed with the Luis Valdez Teatro Campesino. The Teatro performers created joy followed by a political message–Don’t buy grapes!

Ortiz’s first puppet performance developed almost casually; he built puppets from studio scraps, his chef brother from Austin proposed pairing a dinner with a puppet show, and a small family audience ended up in tears, revealing the emotional power of the format. Drawing inspiration from Calder’s nonverbal circus, Ortiz structured the show as a series of silent circus acts set to corridos, with simple staging, costumes, and repurposed materials, and later adapted the marionette theater for a family day performance at the San Antonio McNay Museum of Art and other institutional settings.

Cruz Ortiz. Studio collection. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Ortiz discussed a difficult but productive relationship with clay. His early ceramic attempts literally exploded because of impurities in the local clays he collected. Rather than abandon the material, he began harvesting clays from different South Texas rivers—Rio Bravo/Rio Grande near Laredo, the Nueces near Cotulla, and San Antonio-area riverbeds. He uses the clay for ceramic works, but also creates painted works where the distinct clay colors correspond to specific waterways, turning regional geology into a material art map.

Ortiz stresses reading about art history and seeing “real” artworks in person—Van Gogh, Diego Rivera, Klee, Munch, and others—as essential, arguing that artists across time leave “messages” for future artists that can only be unlocked through long study. For Ortiz, this study informs his current choices: using puppetry, corridos, circus, clay, and print to echo historical creative responses to crisis (songs, quilts with coded stitches, pottery, weaving) while addressing contemporary social and political conditions in the United States after treaties and battles that reshaped the Southwest.

Cruz Ortiz painting in his studio. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In his website biography, Ortiz notes that he “is interested in the exhausting narratives searching for love and the sense of belonging.” He adds, “Most of my works are created with a sense of exigency, only so I can keep up with the ever-evolving ideas and visual manifestos eager to be revealed.” Ortiz has demonstrated that there are no rules–and no boundaries with art–and we marvel at his performance.

Cruz Ortiz in his printing room. Photo by Ricardo Romo, 2021.

Carmen Lomas Garza, La Sandía. Courtesy Centro de Artes. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

As a 1991 study-abroad student in Helsinki, Martinez learned new painting styles and enjoyed visiting museums, which expanded his appreciation and understanding of art. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Ravenhurst in Amsterdam in 1999.

Jesús Toro Martínez. San Antonio Central Library. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

As a conservationist, Martinez frequently devotes weekends to cleaning up Salado Creek in Northeast San Antonio. Tall oaks and green shrubs are a hallmark of the creek, which flows for more than 15 miles from west to east in a northern section of San Antonio. Heavy rainfall and Texas storms bring trash, such as paper goods and plastic bags, to the creek from the adjacent bedroom communities. Martinez helps to pick up the trash and has portions of it shredded into confetti-like material, which he colors and attaches to his canvases.

Jesús Toro Martínez. Digital art. San Antonio Central Library. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Martínez frames his Central Library art project as a “trash to art to digital art” continuum, emphasizing that his practice evolves with “what’s current with the world,” including environmental concerns, sustainability, and the idea of a near “zero footprint” by reusing and reformatting existing materials rather than generating new material waste.​ Martinez is fond of nature scenes, and many of his recent landscape works are from the Texas hill country. The forms that make up his body of work are, in his words, “individual visual statements” designed to show his “creative soul and impact the emotional souls of others.”

Jesús Toro Martínez. San Antonio Central Library. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

For the Central Library exhibition, Martínez collaborated with an international team to produce digital and video components of his art. A photographer based in Tel Aviv documented the physical works, while a video editor in Mexico City multiplied and sequenced tens of thousands of still images to create looping films. Martinez likens the video process to traditional animation or cartoon production in which thousands of images are woven together to create a continuous sense of motion. The video results in one or two looping pieces that “mesmerize” viewers who sit and watch them cycle.​

Jesús Toro Martínez. San Antonio Central Library. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

As I visited with Martínez at the Central Library, he often returned to the idea that his practice is both environmentally responsive and aesthetically ambitious. By turning discarded plastics, tires, political signs, and construction debris into complex landscapes and immersive digital environments, he challenges viewers to reconsider value, waste, and beauty in the contemporary world. Martinez described the digital works to my wife, Harriett, not as static “cut-and-paste” images but as animated environments in which elements seem to float, fly, and move like windblown forms; the images create an optical illusion of being immersed in constructed landscapes.​​ The exhibition is innovative and is scheduled to run through December 31, 2026, at the San Antonio Central Library, 1st floor.

Another current exhibition in San Antonio is at the Centro de Artes. The Madre_Land installation is composed of memories in the form of art, artifacts, and altar installations by 27 South Texas borderland artists and scholars, including those emerging in their careers and those already established. The first-floor gallery mirrors the layout of a South Texas house. The art installations also pay homage to historic family-owned businesses because sometimes a neighborhood café or panaderia is a home away from home for generations of families.

Julysa Sosa, Altar de la Recámara: Mujer, Ollin, Memoria (The Altar of the Bedroom: Woman, Movement, Memory). Courtesy Centro de Artes. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Artists of Madre_Land celebrate familial aesthetics and explore bicultural themes in traditional and experimental styles that capture elements of intergenerational Texas-Mexico border culture. An installation with cowboy boots at the foot of a small bed and a flower bouquet by a mirror captures the essence of a South Texas casita. Exhibition curator Bonnie Cisneros introduced the exhibit: “Enter through the portal of the front porch, step into the corazón of the kitchen, chill in the warmth of the dining room, sit a spell in la sala, reflect in the sanctuary of the bedroom and its adjoining night garden, step afuera into the collaborative artist altar, kids’ patio, backyard shrines, arbol de la vida, garage, and the crocheted chicken coop.”

Carmen Lomas Garza, one of the established artists in the exhibition, was born in 1948 in Kingsville, Texas, a bilingual Mexican American community. As a teen, she taught herself to draw by watching her mother paint. She earned a B.S. in art education from Texas A&M University–Kingsville and moved to Austin to attend graduate school. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she joined other Chicanos in the new Chicano Movement. Lomas Garza wrote, “The Chicano Movement of the late 1960s inspired the dedication of my creativity to the depiction of special and everyday events in the lives of Mexican Americans based on my memories and experiences in South Texas.”​

Carmen Lomas Garza, “Baile”.Courtesy Centro de Artes. Gift of Harriett and Ricardo Romo to the Central Library. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In 1975, Lomas Garza moved to the Mission District of San Francisco and joined with La Raza Galeria artists in making Chicano art visible. In public presentations, Lomas Garza has spoken about goals of making “art that heals the wounds inflicted by racism, art that elicits recognition and pride among Mexican Americans, while at the same time serves as a source of education for others not familiar with our culture.”​

Suzy González, an emerging artist and art professor, has a large installation with several sections in the Madre-Land exhibition. Gonzalez wrote of her work: “My enthusiasm towards decolonizing consumption and art is intertwined with remembering the lessons that the earth has to teach us. I work with plant materials and manipulated art supplies to consider identity, solidarity, and resistance.” A multidisciplinary artist, educator, writer, curator, and organizer, Gonzalez’s art practice explores identity, decolonization, and social justice.

Suzy Gonzalez, Sacred Ancestral Maiz (diptych). Corn stalks, silks & tassels from the artist’s garden, acrylic, corn husks, deer corn, Monstera, Sago Palm, and resin. Courtesy Centro de Artes. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Working in what she calls “mestizx media,” González combines ancestral materials such as corn husks with contemporary supplies to reflect on mixed heritage and resistance to colonialism. Gonzalez commented, “I work with natural plant materials like corn husks in conjunction with manipulated art supplies to consider identity, mixedness, and resistance. The corn husks represent the skin of the figures, recalling Mesoamerican beliefs that our very beings are created from maíz.”

Beto De León, Tormentitas, 2025: Acrylic on cotton fabric. Sueños de Pasiflora, 2025, Chain link fence, crepe paper, floral wire, and tissue. Courtesy Centro de Artes. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Her themes often include environmentalism, Mesoamerican cosmology, political activism, and veganism. Her choice of materials evokes Mesoamerican beliefs that humanity was formed from maíz. At the same time, she is dismantling hierarchies between folk and fine art. Through her work, González seeks to open spaces for intercultural dialogue, compassion, and healing grounded in the wisdom of the earth. She wrote that her public “artwork has included themes of celebrating contemporary artists and activists, histories of the land, native plants and animals, and concepts of love and solidarity.” Intending to “open doors to compassion and healing,” she creates art through her “own intersections and to strive for intercultural conversations” in her community. Gonzalez teaches visual and new media arts at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio and holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from Texas State University.

Destiny Mata, in collaboration with her abulo, Luis Mata b. 1988. Working For Mi Gente. Courtesy Centro de Artes. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Bonnie Cisneros’s exceptional curation of the exhibit required three years of planning and organizing. Her South Texas birth and San Antonio upbringing have given her a keen understanding of Mexican American traditions and culture. Cisneros is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and has been awarded artist grants by NALAC and the City of San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture. Her poetry, essays, and interviews appear in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, El Retorno, Chicana/Latina Studies, Buckman Journal, La Voz de Esperanza, ¡Somos Tejanas!, and Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Moonlighting as DJ Despeinada, Cisneros collects and spins Tex/Mex/Latin records from all eras.

Bonnie Cisneros con la exhibición de “La Música de la Casa” por Sylvia Mendoza Aviña, PhD, y su mamá, Juanita Mendoza. Courtesy Centro de Artes. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Rubert García, “Homenaje A Frida Kahlo”. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Mari Carmen Ramirez, Curator of the exhibit, wrote that although Frida Kahlo had been well-known to members of the artistic and cultural intelligentsia in the United States dating back to the early 1930s—when she accompanied Diego Rivera to San Francisco, New York, and Detroit (1930-33) — “her work and image did not circulate broadly in the U.S. until the 1970s, when the Chicana/o movement, or El Movimiento, turned her into a standard-bearer for its own cultural and political causes.”

During the early rise of the Chicano Movement, community and student activists, as well as writers and artists, drew inspiration from Mexican history and culture. Across the Southwest, Chicano artists painted murals that featured resistance by the Aztec chief Cuauhtémoc, as well as hailed the Mexican Revolution heroes Emiliano Zapata and the women soldiers known as the Adelitas. Ramirez notes that Chicanos “strongly identified with and promoted [Frida’s] radical political views and activism regarding notions of ethnicity and class, which paralleled the focus of their own resistance to dominant white Anglo society.”

Ester Hernandez, “If This Is Death, I Like It”. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Chicano/a artists active at Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco–René Yañez, Rupert Garcia, and Amalia Mesa-Bains–began to explore Mexico, their ancestral homeland. They visited the Museo Frida Kahlo (Casa Azul) in Coyoacán during the mid-1970s and saw Kahlo’s paintings and possessions, including her collection of folk art. By that time, the Chicano Art Movement had created hundreds of murals in Los Angeles and San Francisco that adorned the cities’ Latino communities. Judy Baca began her famous Great Wall of Latino murals in the San Fernando Valley, and Carlos Almaraz, Los Four, and Asco had exhibited in major Los Angeles museums.

In the United States, Frida’s emergence as a cultural icon exploded after the publication of author Hayden Herrera’s Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo in 1983. For Chicano artists, the iconization of the Mexican artist had begun earlier, in the late 1970s. Chicano artists from the Galería de la Raza, the community art space in the San Francisco Mission District, took the lead in raising her profile in the US. The Galería de la Raza oranized an homenaje (homage) to Frida Kahlo in the late 1970s that proved transformational. Texas native Carmen Lomas Garza led the artistic charge forming a planning committee, assisted by Amalia Mesa-Bains, Rupert Garcia, María Pinedo, and Kate Connell. The Frida homage opened as Galería’s Día de Muertos on November 1-2, 1978.

Rupert Garcia, “Septiembre” [Calendar for Galería de la Raza]. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Carmen Lomas Garza, whose lithograph of a community dance is featured in the Houston exhibit, moved to San Francisco in 1976, where she became involved with Galería de la Raza and the broader Latina/o artist and activist community. Lomas Garza had years of experience as an art activist. She participated in the Chicano movement organizing in Kingsville, San Antonio, and Austin. She explicitly framed her practice as a response to discrimination and racism, describing her art as a way to “heal the wounds” of those experiences and to provide affirming images for Mexican American audiences.

Carmen Lomas Garza, Altar for Frida Kahlo (Altar para Frida Kahlo). Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

During her early years as an artist, Amalia Mesa-Bains, a native of Northern California and also an activist artist, installed her first altar for a Day of the Dead exhibit titled “Five Woman Altar” at San Francisco’s Galeria de la Raza. Among the five women featured in the 1975 altar was Frida Kahlo. At the Galeria de la Raza, Mesa-Bains also prepared ofrendas for Frida and Diego [1977] and Homage to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz [1981]. These two important exhibits demonstrated her devotion to feminist subjects.

Marcos Raya, Frida the Last Portrait (Frida el último retrato). Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Allied with Lomas Garza and Mesa-Bains, Rubert Garcia also paid homage to Frida. His Frida image emerged as the first and most widely recognized of the Chicano Frida portraits. Garcia’s silkscreen prints of the Mexican artist with Indigenous skin tones are among the earliest Frida screenprint renditions. His Frida was inspired by a 1973 trip to the Museo Frida Kahlo. He created the Fridas for the “September” page in Galería’s 1975 poster calendar, a yearly fundraising effort. One hundred and twenty-five calendars circulated Garia’s Kahlo image to the Northern California Chicano/a community.

Juan R. Fuentes, “Frida”. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Art historian Ramón Favela noted that Garcia’s use of “Frida’s distinctive close-up face was an expression of indigenous and political, cultural, artistic pride in things Mexican and non-European.” Curator of the Houston exhibit Mari Carmen Ramirez suggested that by highlighting Kahlo as a Brown, Chicana/o, and Latina/o artist, by extension have drawn attention to their own racial and cultural identities.

Tony Ortega, “Frida y Diego nos muestran México “ (Frida and Diego Show).Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

East Los Angeles artist Richard Duardo created two of the Fridas in the Houston show and helped print and reimagine a demure portrait of Frida by Raul Caracoza. The three Duardo prints received prominent exhibit space in the Frida: Making of an Icon exhibition. Duardo was my student both at Franklin High School near East Los Angeles and in a summer Upward Bound program at Occidental College. I am honored that my long-time association with Duardo helped connect him to Texas collectors and institutions.

Richard Duardo prints. L-R: Raul Caracoza “Young Frida” [Green] , Richard Duardo, “Salma as Frida”, and Richard Duardo art [Frida with Loteria]. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The many Chicano/a artistic renditions of Frida in the Houston exhibition and the insightful essays in the exhibit catalogue stimulate thoughts about gender, race, and class. Frida dressed herself as a mestiza and Indigena, but she painted herself as white or European. Chicanos saw her as a Brown goddess. Charlene Villasenor Black noted in the catalogue that “by emphasizing the Indigenous aspects of Kahlo’s mestiza heritage, Chicana/o artists elevated her as a Brown icon.”

Yreina D. Cervantez, “Homenaje a Frida Kahlo (Homage to Frida Kahlo)”. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Influenced by the artist Rupert Garcia, others “created portraits that also emphasized their own Indigenous heritage.” Frida’s openness about sexuality, feminism, and her activism also inspired Chicana/o artists. I loved the Frida: The Making of an Icon show and learned much about Frida Kahlo, who was a very complicated person. She has become a world-wide recognized artist, and she continues to inspire Chicana/o artists to explore their own heritage and their own lived experiences.

Judy Baca as Las Pachuca. Photos by Donna Deitch. From Las Tres Marias. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.*

Coronado rose from humble beginnings on San Antonio’s West Side to national prominence in Washington, D.C. Born February 21, 1936, near the Alazán-Apache Courts, he often described himself as “a product of the streets,” a youth who faced hardship before enlisting in the military at sixteen—an act he said “turned his life around.” Over 29 years of service spanning the Air Force, Army Reserve, and Air Force Reserve, Coronado served in Vietnam, Spain, Germany, and Panama, earning the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, and numerous commendations.

Coronado was one of the few American experts on Latin America who deeply understood the region’s military, government, business, and political dynamics. Fluent in Spanish and well-acquainted with Latin America’s diverse cultures, he traveled extensively throughout every country and many islands in the region. His colleague Lt. Col. Arch Kielly spoke of Coronado as a de facto U.S. military ambassador; he built enduring relationships with influential Latin American officials, fostering trust and cooperation crucial to U.S.–Latin American relations. His diplomacy and insight were invaluable to the Inter-American Defense Board (IADB), whose president—often a senior U.S. general—entrusted him with delicate assignments requiring both tact and firmness. Coronado’s ability to resolve misunderstandings that might have led to diplomatic conflicts reflected his rare blend of cultural empathy and leadership.

After retiring from the military, Col. Coronado continued his national service in veteran and civic leadership. Appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, and later nominated by the President and unanimously confirmed by the Senate as Director of the Selective Service System (SSS), he served with distinction. He used his national platform to advance public engagement and cultural inclusion, establishing the annual Hispanic Heritage Month celebration—a milestone later expanded under his advocacy from a week to a full month in 1988. His initiative earned him presidential recognition and the affectionate title “Padrino of Hispanic Heritage Month.”

Known for his personal charm, integrity, and ability to bridge communities, Coronado enlisted the help of celebrities, military leaders, and civic figures to promote civic responsibility, using public service messages that aired nationwide. A graduate of Our Lady of the Lake University (BA, 1975), he remained committed to San Antonio, mentoring youth and supporting veterans long after leaving federal service.

Honored in the U.S. Congressional Record and named the 2025 Grand Marshal of San Antonio’s César E. Chávez March for Justice, Coronado’s legacy endures as one of humility, cultural pride, and public devotion. He passed away peacefully on February 7, 2026, at his home in San Antonio, two weeks before his 90th birthday—leaving behind a lasting example of service and leadership dedicated his life to strengthening understanding between the United States and Latin America.

Ricardo Romo

Frida Kahlo, “Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird. 1940. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In addition to numerous paintings by Frida Kahlo loaned from Museums in Mexico, the US, and private collections, the Museum of Fine Arts exhibition features over 80 intergenerational artists from around the world. Mari Carmen Ramirez aimed to place Kahlo’s art in dialogue with these artists, some of whom were her contemporaries, while others had not yet been born at the time of her death in 1954. The curators proposed that all artists included have or had “an acknowledged relationship to Frida, whom they consider a core reference.” Featured artists, noted the curators, “recast their appropriations of Kahlo’s facial and bodily features, motifs, or stylistic elements into innovative proposals that transcend their inspiration to comment on pressing issues of their own place and time.”

Frida Kahlo, “Portrait of Miguel N. Lira. 1927. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Frida, now a recognized world-famous artist, was born in Mexico City in 1907. Her father was German-born photographer Carl Wilhelm [Guillermo] Kahlo. Her mother was Mexican-born Matilde Calderón y González, a mestiza from Oaxaca with Indigenous and Spanish ancestry. Frida often emphasized her mother’s heritage when constructing her own public identity as Mexican and mestiza. She frequently wore a Tehuana dress, highlighting Indigenous roots in her self-portraits. At age 22, Frida married the world-famous artist Diego Rivera. He was 20 years her senior.

Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress. 1926. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Frida Kahlo is known for establishing unique and creative art styles to construct and project a multifaceted persona. The curators explained, “From early on, she rejected the notion of a fixed identity, wielding her art and appearance to project a multivalent sense of Self, which included: the avant-garde artist and intellectual, the liberated flapper, the self-taught painter, the mestiza, the political activist, the enamored and devoted wife, the bisexual woman, the transgressor, and the disabled artist.”

Over her lifetime, Frida Kahlo created more than 100 paintings. Many of her self-portraits enhanced her notoriety for her distinctive attitude toward her disabled body and nonconforming sexuality. The Museum of Fine Arts curators noted that in numerous self-portraits, Frida “depicts herself with a slight mustache and a unibrow, often wearing dresses and braided hair but occasionally in masculine garb with cropped hair.”

Diego Rivera, “Tehuantepec Costume”. 1929.Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

When Andre Breton, theoretician and leader of the Surrealist art movement, invited Frida Kahlo to show in Paris in 1938, the exhibit brought her, for the first time, international attention. Mari Carmen Ramirez noted that before the Paris show, Kahlo had never had a solo exhibition, did not consider herself a professional artist, and had sold few works. “Her experiences in New York and Paris,” wrote Ramirez in the Fine Arts exhibit catalogue, “encouraged her to become a painter in her own right, subsequently presenting herself as Frida Kahlo and not Frida de Rivera.”

For the New York and Paris exhibitions, Frida produced a new body of work that included “Self Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky.” Trotsky, a Marxist revolutionary strategist and writer, helped lead the Russian Revolution and later opposed Stalin’s rise to power. Trotsky spent the last years of his life in exile in Mexico, arriving in 1937. He was granted asylum by President Lázaro Cárdenas after Stalin forced him from the Soviet Union. He initially lived with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo at the Casa Azul. During his stay at their home in 1937, he had a brief romantic affair with Frida. Trotsky was assassinated in Coyoacán, Mexico City, in August 1940.

Frida Kahlo,” My Dress Hangs There”. 1933-1938. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Following the publication of Hayden Herrera’s masterpiece, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, published in 1983 by Harper & Row and its translation into twenty-five languages, Frida became a global sensation. The world further learned about Frida following her prominent inclusion in the 1990 exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries. My wife Harriett and I saw “Splendors” at the San Antonio Museum of Art and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Herrera’s book and the Splendors exhibition, organized collaboratively by major New York, San Antonio, and Los Angeles museums, boosted Frida’s rise as a cultural icon and coincided with the rise of feminism in the United States and Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. Frida’s artistic works and the many identities explored through self-presentation in her paintings and dress styles “provided the perfect context for intellectual and artistic engagement with Frida and the validation of her transgressive Self,” noted the Fine Arts Museum curators.

Frida Kahlo, [Still Life 1951] “I Belong to Samuel Faslicht”. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Frida: The Making of an Icon stands as an artistic marvel of the 21st century. The imagery is so powerful that one’s first thought after leaving the exhibit is to return to see it again. The impressive collection of her art demonstrates the ways Frida evolved as an artist. In her 1931 painting “Frida y Diego,” she places herself petite and clearly in the shadow of Diego. In the powerful 1946 painting “The Wounded Deer,” Frida represents herself as an injured deer with multiple arrows through her body. In a 1949 painting, she cuddles Diego Rivera like an infant in her lap.

Frida: The Making of an Icon is a remarkable art and history exhibition. In addition, our knowledge of Mexican art and its worldwide influences has been greatly enhanced by the extensive catalogue. Viewing the exhibition and reading the well-researched essays in the catalogue gave Harriett and me a greater understanding of the phenomenal impact and commercialization of Frida Kahlo.

Abraham Angel, “Self-Portrait”. 1923. Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits did not emerge in a vacuum. She was widely read, well-informed, and familiar with examples from the history of art stretching back to the Renaissance. But she was also inspired by her contemporaries, including Abraham Ángel.

Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In the words of Mari Carmen Ramirez, “Kahlo’s struggles as a disabled woman, distraught lover, and striving artist echo those of millions of individuals around the world, making possible her transmutation into a symbol of resilience to gender biases, physical ailments, professional marginalization, and hardship.” Frida’s legacy is kept alive in memory of her remarkable qualities and in her complex artistic expressions of life experiences.

In my next essay, I will explore how Frida inspired Chicano and Latino artists in the United States. I will begin with analyzing the excellent essay “Chicana Frida” by Adriana Zavala and Angelica Becerra.

A Frida Kahlo Wall. Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Gigi Morales, “El Espíritu de la Soldadera”. Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Latinos were the first Europeans to settle North America, founding St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565. Before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth
Rock in 1620, Latino mining families from Northern Mexico forged new towns in New Mexico starting in 1598. More than 100,000 Latinos lived in Mexican communities in the Southwest when Anglo-American settlers began arriving in the 1830s-1840s. The life of Southwestern Latinos changed dramatically with the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1848.

The Mexican War had its origins in the post-Texas Independence movement of 1836, when Texas officially became a Republic. The Republic of Texas claimed a vast territory encompassing parts of what are now New Mexico and Colorado. Under the Act of December 19, 1836, the First Congress of the Texas Republic declared its southern and western boundary to be the Rio Grande from its mouth to its source, and from there due north to the 42nd parallel. This line swept in the upper Rio Grande valley (including Santa Fe and much of today’s New Mexico), including a broad wedge of High Plains and Rocky Mountain country reaching into future Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming.

Noe Garza, “Resistencia.” Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

When James K. Polk campaigned for the U.S. presidency in 1844, he promoted the concept of Manifest Destiny that encouraged U.S. territorial expansion, especially in Texas, California, Oregon, and New Mexico. Polk supported the annexation of Texas, knowing U.S. statehood for Texas would inflame tensions with Mexico, which still regarded Texas as its own province.

A disagreement over the boundary claims between Mexico and the newly created Republic of Texas led to war in 1846. After Texas entered the Union in 1845, the United States claimed the Rio Grande as Texas’s southern border, while Mexico insisted the boundary was the Nueces River, 150 miles to the north. In July 1845, President Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to Corpus Christi, Texas and by late 1845 had positioned about 3,500 troops near the disputed frontier.

Samuel Agustus Mitchell. [Land Claims by the Republic of Texas]. “State of Texas in 1846”. Courtesy UT Austin Benson Latin American Collection. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In January 1846, Polk instructed Taylor to advance into the contested zone between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, an area Mexico regarded as its territory. Mexico perceived this as an invasion. On April 25, 1846, Mexican cavalry attacked a small U.S. detachment in this disputed region, killing and wounding several and capturing dozens. President Polk used this clash as the trigger, arguing in his May 11, 1846, war message to Congress that Mexico had “invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil.”

Raul Servin, “The Destiny of the Latino in the USA.” Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, marked one of the most consequential events in the Mexican American experience and the history of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. The treaty brought an end to the Mexican-American War (1846–1848)—a two-year conflict that reshaped both nations. Under the Treaty’s terms, Mexico ceded approximately 525,000 square miles, or 55 percent of its territory, to the United States, including present-day California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Wyoming. In exchange, the U.S. paid Mexico $15 million—roughly five cents per acre—and assumed certain debts owed to American citizens. More importantly, the treaty established the Rio Grande as the official boundary between Texas and Mexico, settling years of territorial dispute dating back to the Texas Revolution of 1836.

Jim Haught, Untitled. Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

For the nearly 100,000 Mexicans living in the annexed territories, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised civil rights, property protection, and freedom of religion, along with the opportunity for Mexicans living in the Southwest to become U.S. citizens. About 90 percent chose to become American citizens, anchoring Mexican cultural continuity in places like Santa Fe and San Antonio, cities established long before the United States existed. Yet, although the treaty professed to guarantee equality, Mexican Americans soon faced loss of lands, discrimination, and disenfranchisement, setting the stage for ongoing struggles over identity and rights–struggles that continue to resonate today.

Eduardo Garcia, “Border Wall Scream”. Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The war’s aftermath severely weakened Mexico politically and economically. Just weeks after the Treaty’s signing, the discovery of gold in California accelerated American migration westward, intensifying pressures on Mexican and Indigenous communities already displaced by the Mexican War. Loss of territory and sovereignty contributed to decades of political instability in Mexico. Meanwhile, in the United States, debates over whether the new territories could allow slavery inflamed national tensions, helping to sow the seeds of the American Civil War.

Luis Valderas. Untitled. Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also reflected the limitations of 19th-century American democracy. It excluded Native Americans and enslaved people from its protections and referred to Indigenous nations as “savage tribes,” thereby denying them citizenship. The U.S. military’s subsequent campaigns against native peoples throughout the Southwest continued until 1886. The capture of Apache leader Geronimo ended the Indian Wars. However, Native Americans in these regions did not obtain full citizenship until 1924, and some, such as those in Arizona and New Mexico, only gained voting rights after World War II.

Kim Bishop, “We Carry You”. Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Largely ignored for more than a century, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo emerged as a powerful symbol during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s. Activists like Reies López Tijerina invoked the Treaty to demand the restitution of stolen land grants in New Mexico, and Chicano students studied its clauses as part of a rediscovery of Mexican American history and identity. The annual celebration of Segundo de Febrero (February Second) revived awareness of this pivotal event, particularly in regions like Texas and New Mexico, where the Treaty’s legacy remains entwined with daily life.

Héctor Garza, “La Lucha Sigue”. Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In San Antonio, this reclamation of history has found expression through art. In 1977, the Centro Cultural Aztlan launched the first Segundo de Febrero Exhibition, curated by Ricardo Jasso under the directorship of Ramón Vásquez-Sánchez. This groundbreaking exhibition invited Latino artists to interpret the Treaty’s historical and emotional weight—its promises and betrayals, its borders and bridges—through visual language. Over the past 49 years, the exhibit has evolved into a national model for artistic reflection on Mexican American identity, or Mexicanisimo, within the United States.

Juan De Dios Mora, “Así Como Voy Así Llego.” Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Artists exhibiting at the Centro blend historical memory with contemporary politics, linking the 1848 border redefinition to ongoing struggles over immigration, deportation, and belonging. Many recent works—including those created amid contemporary political rhetoric and heightened scrutiny by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—depict border patrol agents, migrant families, and symbolic landscapes such as the Presa Falcón reservoir, reminding viewers that the Treaty’s consequences continue to shape lived experience along a border that remains both real and psychological.

Celeste De Luna, “Necrocitizen.” Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The observance on February 2 is vital, argues the Mexican American Heritage Association, because it transforms the historical memory of 1848 into collective action, giving Mexican American communities a space to honor our origins, assert our cultural presence, and reaffirm that Mexican American history is an essential thread in the broader American story. By gathering on February 2 each year across the country, Mexican Americans not only remember the moment our identity was born, but we also strengthen the intergenerational bonds that ensure the Mexican American story continues to be carried forward with dignity, pride, and purpose.

Daniel Burgess, Map of North America, 1839. [Land claims by the Republic of Texas]. Courtesy UT Austin Benson Latin American Collection. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Alejandro Díaz, “Burrito”. Courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.

Díaz grew up in the deep Westside of San Antonio, residing in various neighborhoods that were nearly 100 percent Mexican American. As a boy, he attended Guadalupe Catholic School on El Paso Street, only blocks away from several popular Mexican panaderias [bakeries], molinos that made fresh tortillas daily, and corner stores that sold barbacoa on the weekends. The Westside was largely an immigrant community born out of the 1910 Mexican Revolution diaspora. San Antonio was the largest urban center in South Texas, and the city’s link to the Rio Grande border two hours away by car, impacted the daily lives of its bilingual residents.

Díaz’s art career began in earnest after he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1987 with a BFA degree. He returned to his hometown of San Antonio and was included in a show at the San Antonio Southwest Craft Center the following year. His social commentary through art was well received. Díaz’s popular “Make Tacos Not War” neon sign was featured at the Xicanx: Dreamers + Changemakers | Soñadores + creadores del cambio, a sweeping exhibition at the Contemporary at Blue Star in San Antonio in 2024.

Alejandro Díaz, “Make Tacos Not War,” 2007, neon on clear plexiglass. Photo: Contemporary at Blue Star.

Patricia Ruiz Healy, who has known Díaz for more than two decades, wrote that Díaz developed his distinctive work while growing up in San Antonio, Texas, and living in México City from 1990 to 1994. She added: “This background deeply informed his art, which reflects the complex and visually rich cultural environment of South Texas and Mexico.” While residing in México City, Díaz was part of an inner circle of artists who lived and worked around the Calle Licenciado Verdad. A 1990s‑focused publication titled Licenciado Verdad, Vol. 1: Groups and Spaces in Mexico Contemporary Art of the 90s explicitly names this tenement and street as a key locus for Mexico City’s contemporary art networks, underscoring its role as an address that included studios, living spaces, and informal exhibiting/meeting sites. In 1994, his first solo show opened in Omaha, Nebraska.

Díaz returned to San Antonio in 1994 and created art while working at the famed Liberty Bar off Broadway and Grayson. One of Díaz’s most transformative art moments came about at the Liberty Bar. The restaurant sent Díaz to Linda Pace’s home to cater for a small dinner party. He and Linda met in the kitchen. He vividly recalled the meeting: “I told her I was an artist, and we got carried away in a lengthy and engrossing conversation about Texas art and artists. She wanted to know everything.” All of this occurred before the creation of Artpace and the Linda Pace Foundation. In 1996, Díaz was selected as one of the first Texas Residents of ArtPace.

Alejandro Díaz at the Ruiz-Healy Art forum. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Díaz moved to New York City in the late 1990s and received an MFA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Hudson, NY, in 1999. Although Díaz had moved to New York City, Alix Ohlin of the Texas Observer included Díaz in his 2001 story titled “San Antonio Art: Down Home and World Famous.” Ohlin noted that Díaz was the founder of Sala Díaz, a San Antonio Southtown art gallery situated in a “dilapidated white house that sits slouched on a shady street about a mile south of the sprawling downtown.” Gregory Sandoval, ArtPace’s program coordinator at the time, visited the gallery often, noting that many artists were resisting going to New York or Los Angeles and staying close to home; “they’re putting their money into doing their own galleries, finding their own alternative spaces, getting their work seen there.”

Alejandro Díaz, “Robed Figure”. Courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.

In 2003, shortly after completing his graduate studies, Díaz was asked to create a large-scale artwork for the Havana Biennial, which resulted in the creation of “I (Heart) Cuba” [I Love Cuba], an installation of free souvenir items emblazoned with the artist’s twist on the familiar “I Love New York” slogan. The Cuba Heart art project gave Díaz the recognition he needed as a New York artist, and a few years later, he was commissioned by New York City’s Public Art Fund to create four large-scale sculptures along the historic Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

Alejandro Díaz, Untitled. Courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.

Ruiz Healy Art produced a beautiful catalogue of Díaz’s work for an exhibit of his paintings at her San Antonio gallery on January 24, 2026. The gallery hosted an artist’s talk that Harriett and I attended. We were curious about Díaz’s artistic approach to his most recent paintings. I was instantly drawn to a series of painted shapes subtitled Texas, Spain, and Mexico. Le Flore, a San Antonio poet and artist, observed a painting of soccer goals and explained: “The soccer goals seen in Spain and Mexico express those countries’ joy of sport, competition, athleticism, and pride.” LeFore found that the oil rig that Díaz had painted to represent Texas also served as “the goal,” adding “it is a solo machine that works tirelessly but nonetheless, behaves like a sport to its investors, landowners, and its betters.”

Alejandro Díaz, “Egyptian Morning”. Courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.

Díaz and LeFlore teamed up to lead the discussion of Díaz’s gallery exhibit. LeFlore stated that in Díaz’s paintings, there is “an art that emerges as inspiration, creation, and existence–becoming inseparable.” Díaz’s painting of a boat on a dark lake with a moon shining on the water says something different to each viewer. LeFlore saw the presence of a boat in a vast space with pink clouds overhead and a full pink moon to indicate movement. He added. “We’re all coming from somewhere in order to go somewhere else. The movement is what counts, especially its serenity.” I also found a sense of motion in Díaz’s painting of a horse bridled to a manned cart loaded wth harvest. I was also moved by Díaz’s use of color. A tall mountain, reminding me of rural Mexico, was painted in blue.

Alejandro Díaz, Untitled. Courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.

The gallery discussion turned to Díaz’s artistic approach and what inspires him to paint. After acknowledging that Díaz is always reading and learning about great artists, LeFlore added that “Alejandro paints what makes his heart beat as he explores all the rhythms and mysteries of his life experiences. He paints paintings that wonder and wander.” With regard to a question about a painting of a room that included a bed, a chair, and portraits hanging on the wall, Díaz acknowledged the influence of painters like Vincent van Gogh, who had done a similar painting called “The Bedroom” (the Yellow Room). LeFlore concluded that Díaz “paints images that are beautiful and psychologically powerful; the tonality, the iconography, the contrasts, the stillness–all united in service to Alejandro’s artistic intentions.”

Alejandro Díaz. “Color Fields”. Courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.

Díaz is internationally known and his artwork has been collected by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland; the Fundación Colleción Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; the RISD Musem of Art, Providence, RI; the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA.

Alejandro Díaz, Untitled. Courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.

Díaz closed his remarks explaining that in these new works, he has found meaningful creations that bring him peaceful calmness. The carefully chosen colors and simple images are reflections of his Mexican and Chicano memories. Ruiz Healy proposed that Rooms and Places encourages self-reflection and philosophical inquiries about one’s place in the world. The exhibition will be on view at the San Antonio gallery from January 21, 2026 to February 28, 2026.

Alejandro Díaz, Untitled, Texas, México, and Spain series. Courtesy Ruiz- Healy Art.

Alejandro Díaz at the Ruiz-Healy Art exhibit opening. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Fausto Fernandez, “Burden Narratives While Stuck in Traffic in Pursuit of an Obligation at the Port of Entry”. Courtesy of the McNay Art Museum. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Phoenix, Arizona artist Fausto Fernandez grew up in the twin border cities of El Paso/Juárez and maintains deep ties to the regional art scene through his studio practice and public commissions. He earned dual BFAs in graphic design and painting from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2001, commuting daily across the border during his studies, an experience that continues to inform his work’s layered sense of movement, translation, and border crossing.

Fernandez identifies as a mixed-media collage artist, working primarily in painting, public art, and community‑engagement projects.​ He frequently works in series, drawing on mathematics, technology, border culture, Navajo textiles, mythology, and community life. Figurative and abstract elements interweave as metaphors for human interaction and social dynamics.​ Fernandez’s borderlands upbringing informs recurring interest in U.S.–Mexico crossings, infrastructure, and shared everyday experiences, such as border crossing traffic and the port‑of‑entry environment.​

Juárez/El Paso bridge crossing. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Fernandez’s composition on display at the McNay, “Burden Narratives While Stuck in Traffic in Pursuit of an Obligation at the Port of Entry” [2023], includes collages, paper, and paint to depict a traffic jam at the US-Mexico border. The McNay curator noted that Fernandez “positions the border as a third space, or a transition between cultures.” Abstracted images of cars are layered as if they are lanes of traffic, using repetition to call to mind the tedium of waiting to cross the border. The colors and textures Fernandez employs recall rusted metal or pools of oil, an aesthetic present in many of the artist’s works.

Fernandez’s paintings have been described as vibrant “explosions of color,” where translucent layers of paint partially obscure and reveal archival images and his own photographs, producing a dynamic interplay between control and spontaneity. His diagrams, schematics, and blueprints are used as metaphors for systems, rituals, and the architectures of contemporary life. In some series, he incorporates materials such as asphalt or gunpowder, linking his abstractions to ideas of infrastructure and fragility.

Another Borderland artist born and raised in San Antonio, Nivia González, demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent from an early age, holding her first solo exhibition at the San Antonio Witte Museum at just seventeen while a student at Alamo Heights High School. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in studio art from San Antonio’s Trinity University, attended the Cooper Union art program in New York City, and completed a master’s degree in art education at the University of Texas at Austin.

González rose to prominence during the 1980s and early 1990s and was a nationally recognized Latina visual artist. She created the artwork for the covers of notable books such as The House on Mango Street (1983) and Woman Hollering Creek (1991) by Sandra Cisneros and By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998) by Alice Walker. Rejecting the romanticized stereotypes often imposed on women of color, González’s paintings asserted dignity and cultural pride.

Sandra Cisneros’s book with Nivia Gonzalez’s image. Courtesy of the McNay Art Museum. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

One of Gonzalez’s most significant achievements was the founding of the Bexar County Jail Arts program in 1986, where she taught art to inmates in the Bexar County criminal justice system. Through the guidance of Gonzalez, a group of inmates created a large-scale mural that was used as the backdrop for Pope John Paul II’s visit to San Antonio in 1987.

Beyond gallery circles, Gonzalez’s art appeared in settings ranging from the Smithsonian Latino Center in Washington, D.C. to community spaces and cultural centers. At the height of her career, González received numerous public art commissions and continued to produce new work with the help of her twin daughters, who occasionally assisted her in her studio. A devastating car accident in 1997 caused a traumatic brain injury and partial paralysis of her dominant hand, but after nearly a decade of rehabilitation, she resumed painting, continuing to create radiant portraits of Latina women with enduring devotion and grace.

Nivia Gonzalez, Untitled. Courtesy of the McNay Art Museum. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Gonzalez’s colorful piece at the McNay includes a framed portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe overlooking a tabletop still life of watermelon, fish, and papaya.

The McNay curators have long admired the talent of El Paso Latino artist Luis Jimenez, and the museum has numerous works by him, including his famous “Man on Fire” sculpture in the patio sculpture garden.

The large alligator print by Jiménez [which Harriett and I proudly donated to the museum] is currently on display in the McNay Print Gallery. The alligator has an interesting history. From the 1880s to the 1960s, El Paso’s San Jacinto Plaza housed live alligators, making the plaza a popular tourist attraction featured in newspapers and postcards. By the 1960s, city officials relocated the alligators to the city zoo due to safety concerns.

In the 1990s, Jiménez was commissioned by the City of El Paso to create a public artwork commemorating the plaza’s historic live-alligator fountain.​ The resulting sculpture, commonly called Los Lagartos or Plaza de los Lagartos, consists of fiberglass life-size alligators placed at the center of the plaza, explicitly honoring the former alligator fountain. Jiménez’s work on the alligator sculpture led him to create the large alligator lithographic print, which is currently on display at the McNay.

Luis Jiménez, “Alligator”. Courtesy of the McNay Art Museum. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Jiménez’s father’s electric sign company, located a few short blocks from the Rio Grande, specialized in neon signs, a trade and business that the senior Jiménez hoped to pass on to his talented son. The young Luis Jiménez grew up in El Paso learning how to spray paint, weld, and mold glass in his father’s shop.

In 1965 Jiménez journeyed to Mexico City to study art. In Mexico City, the leading art capital of Latin America, Jiménez found himself surrounded by a vibrant artistic culture. On the UNAM campus where he studied, bold and colorful murals by David Alfaro Siquiros dominated one of the entryways.

A mural in El Paso’s Segundo Barrio portrays Luis Jimenez‘s “Border Crossing” image. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

After the stay in Mexico City, Jiménez journeyed to New York City, where he joined a highly dynamic art scene heavily influenced by pop art. Jiménez was one of many struggling artists living in New York City during the late 1960s. In New York, Jiménez constructed the seven-foot-tall Man on Fire bronze sculpture.

Jiménez was influenced by watching television in horror as monks set themselves on fire in protest against the Vietnam War. Jiménez explained in one of his interviews that the sculpture, on a universal level, serves as a visual symbol of courageous action in the face of oppression and recognized the disproportionately large numbers of Chicanos who were drafted into the military and sent to Southeast Asia.

Luis Jimenez working on his Cesar Chavez lithographic drawing. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

On June 13, 2006, Jiménez was working in his studio in Hondo, New Mexico on a large commissioned mustang sculpture for the Denver Airport when the massive 50-foot sculpture slipped off a rope and fell on him, crushing him to death. We are grateful that Jiménez’s work lives on in his numerous sculptures, paintings, and lithographs on view in museums and public spaces, as well as in numerous publications about borderland artists.

Los Angeles artist Frank Romero’s “Bailando” [Dancing], a watercolor on paper, is also currently featured in the McNay Print Gallery. The work portrays a joyful couple dancing to the music of two Mexican musicians, one with a red guitar and his companion with an accordion.

Romero is one of the most multifaceted and talented Chicano artists of his generation. In his 50 plus years as an artist, he has produced exceptional works as a painter, a sculptor, a ceramicist, a muralist, a graphic designer, a draftsman, and a photographer. Romero’s art has been exhibited in major U.S., European, and Japanese galleries.

Frank Romero, “Bailando”. Harriett and Ricardo Romo gift. Courtesy of the McNay Art Museum. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

From his teen years on, Romero always thought about becoming an artist. At age fifteen, while attending Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, he began taking weekend and evening art classes at the Otis Art Institute. While attending Cal State Los Angeles, Romero worked part-time with the Los Angeles County Student Professional Program, where he was assigned work in graphic design, photography, and archival management.

Romero met the talented Chicano artist Carlos Almaraz at Cal State, and Almaraz was a central figure in major collaborative art projects in later years. Romero moved to New York City in 1968 and found work in design and production for Penguin Books and later as Assistant Art Director for Ballantine Books. When Romero returned to Los Angeles in 1970, he joined A&M Records as a creative designer.

Frank Romero teaching a ceramic class in East Los Angeles. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

In 1973, Romero, Almaraz, Roberto de la Rocha, and Gilbert “Magu” Lujan formed an art collective which they named Los Four. Their 1974 exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Four: Almaraz/ de la Rocha/ Lujan/Romero, was a breakthrough for Chicano art. Los Four was the first Chicano exhibit in a major U.S. museum and the first to receive mainstream media coverage. The planning and successful opening of the Los Four exhibition complemented the opening of the Exposición Chicanarte exhibit in 1975 at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery that also included works by Romero.

East Los Angeles neighborhood near Frank Romero’s studio. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The McNay Art Museum has the work of these and other Chicano artists in its permanent collection, and the curators continue to find creative exhibits that feature Latino art.

Luis Jiménez, “Man on Fire”. Courtesy of the McNay Art Museum. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Huichol Painting in the Rockefeller Latin American Collection. [Yarn and ceremonial art]. Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Patrick Martinez, a Pasadena-California-born, Los Angeles–based artist of Filipino, Mexican, and Native American heritage, has a new contemporary piece, “Jaguar Garden” [2024], featured in the SAMA collection. The Dallas Contemporary Museum noted, “Through his multidisciplinary practice, Martinez creates works that reflect on the ever-evolving landscapes of Los Angeles, considering the passage of time and its impact on the lived environment and consequently on the multicultural communities that call it home.”

Martinez’s mixed media work at SAMA includes a painting that incorporates distressed stucco, ceramic tile, vinyl signage, security bars, flowers, and other LA streetscape materials. SAMA curators noted that his “landscape” is created to evoke working‑class neighborhoods and their socio‑economic pressures. The curators explained, “The colorful neon lights, stucco, ceramic tiles, and faded graffiti in Patrick Martinez’s work appear to be taken directly from a local storefront.”

Patrick Martinez, “Jaguar Guardian” [2024]. Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The array of materials and imagery Martinez uses to construct layered surfaces of his “landscape paintings” connects far-reaching time periods and histories in exploration of memory, cultural hybridity, and the changing urban landscape. Martinez also incorporates Mesoamerican imagery. The open-mouthed jaguar in the SAMA piece is drawn from the murals of the Cacaxtla archaeological site in Central Mexico (650-950).

Mexican artistic influences are evident in the works of several other Latino artists in the SAMA collection. Alberto Mijangos is listed as Mexican, perhaps more accurately, Mexican-born, having lived for many years in his adopted home of San Antonio, Texas. His “Rodeado de sonido / Surrounded by Sound,” an oil, acrylic, and mixed-media work on canvas, was completed in San Antonio in 1988.

Alberto Mijangos, “Rodeado de sonido / Surrounded by Sound.” Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The SAMA curators note that in this painting, intense red and deep purple hues are accentuated by a richly textured surface. They explained that during the 1980s, “Mijangos began employing an abstracted T-shape as a compositional device to explore the expressive qualities of color in a series he referred to as ‘T-shirt’ works. The T-shape references a common T-shirt and the religious cross, imbuing abstract forms with spiritual and symbolic meaning. Mijangos spent his early years in Mexico City and eventually settled in San Antonio in the 1950s.

Mario Perez is a Texas painter and photographer rooted in the Rio Grande Valley with a long and active career in Houston and San Antonio art circles. He has had a parallel career working behind the scenes in museums and galleries as a preparator and installer.​ He studied graphic design in Houston and subsequently pursued painting and photography, exhibiting his work across Texas.

Mario Pérez, “Encarnación.” Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

While living in Mexico City during the 1990s, Mario Perez was inspired by rotulistas (sign painters) and the landscape scenes he observed pictured on the backs of city buses. Perez recognized the art’s erosion by exhaust, weather, and time, and recognized the symbolic potential of the deteriorated landscapes, which he simulates by sanding down his paintings. In his SAMA painting, “Encarnación,” Perez draws attention to the illusion of representation on a flat surface by layering crisp lettering atop a faded image—a conceit echoed in the title, “Encarnación.” This signifies the concrete form of an abstract concept reflecting his interest in vernacular typography, commercial graphics, and street‑level visual culture between Texas and Mexico.​

Glasstire characterizes Perez’s paintings as materially dense, “messy” abstractions with streaks, blots, and pools of paint, often occupying square canvases that emphasize process, gravity, and accumulation.​ Perez’s paintings engage with ideas of foreground and background, surface and depth, allowing underlayers or previous decisions to remain visible as a kind of archaeological record of the art-making process.​

A large painting by Jesse Treviño of the San Antonio Mexican theater, “El Alameda” [1980], hangs in an alcove as visitors enter the SAMA Latin American Collection area. Treviño was born in Monterrey, Mexico, but moved to San Antonio at age five. He grew up on the city’s Westside and attended a Technical and Industrial High School where he studied commercial art. [I lived on the same street as Jesse Treviño’s family and attended the same high school two years ahead of him].

Jesse Treviño, “El Alameda.” Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The Alameda Theater was completed in 1949 as a Spanish-language movie theater and performance space that promoted Mexican American culture. The beautiful, ornate Alameda was the city’s first desegregated movie venue. The Alameda Theater featured the best and newest Mexican movies. As a young boy in the 1950s, Treviño and his nine siblings frequently visited the movie house on Houston Street, along with Westside residents of all ages.

In Treviño’s painting of the iconic building, the Alameda is pictured in bright daylight with great precision and detail. The SAMA curators noted that the building’s “vibrant past is replaced by vacant windows and missing marquee panels that signal its impending closure.” Treviño recalled, “The year I painted it, it seemed like no one cared about it. That’s why I painted it.” His work monumentalizes an important site in an act of Latino cultural preservation.

Jesse Treviño in his San Antonio studio [1988].Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Treviño is a renowned San Antonio artist whose paintings and large-scale public artworks have left an indelible legacy in this city and beyond. He gained prominence in the 1970s with photorealist depictions of people and places in the Latino community. The “El Alameda” painting is a gift of Ernest and Aimée Bromley to the SAMA Latin American art collection.

In explaining another recent acquisition, SAMA curators noted that photographer Al Rendon’s gelatin silver 1993 portrait of Tejano music icon Selena Quintanilla-Pérez “exemplifies both celebrity iconography and a visual archive of Tejano cultural production in late twentieth-century Texas.”

Rendon’s early 1980s assignments for the San Antonio Fiesta Commission deepened his connection to Mexican and Tejano experiences, which led to steady work with the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. There, he documented annual conjunto festivals, ballet folklórico presentations, cinema festivals, and other cultural events. He photographed participants at the Guadalupe Center’s Inter‑American Book Fair, capturing writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, and Maya Angelou.

Al Rendon, “Selena.” Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

Rendon’s photographs of Flaco Jiménez, Santiago Jiménez Jr., Emilio and Raulito Navaira, and especially a young Selena, mark milestones in Tejano music history. When Rendon took the 1993 photo of the young Selena, she had just released “Live!” [Selena Live!], an album that later won the 1994 Grammy Award for Best Mexican-American Album, making her the first female Tejano artist to win a Grammy.

SAMA curators recognize that Rendon’s photograph of Selena illustrates the “interplay of grace and fashion and underscores the negotiation between timeless self-presentation and the spectacle of performance. To her fans, Selena’s poised, self-assured presence embodies the aesthetics of Latina empowerment within the broader framework of US-Mexican visual culture.” The curators concluded, “This portrait merges documentary traditions with formal precision and emotional impact, securing Selena’s enduring role in regional and Transnational cultural memory.”

Al Rendon in his Southtown studio. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

The Rendon Selena portrait is part of a donation to SAMA of over 550 serigraphs, lithographs, artist portfolios, and photographs by Chicano and Mexican artists that Harriett and I have acquired over five decades. We have collected Chicano and Mexican art for the past 56 years, with the intention of enjoying it in our home, supporting artists, and sharing our collection with museums, libraries, and universities so that others can know and appreciate this art.

Marisa Moran Jahn, SAMA “Gateway.” Courtesy of San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

San Antonio Botanical Gardens. Tianyu Arts and Culture design. Photo credit Ricardo Romo.

I recalled from my weekly reading of articles on staying healthy that getting 150 minutes of moderate exercise and two days of muscle strengthening per week were recommended. Increased physical activity is associated with numerous health benefits, such as reduced obesity, reduced osteoporosis, lower blood pressure, enhanced child development, and overall improved mental health.

San Antonio Botanical Gardens. Tianyu Arts and Culture design. Photo credit Ricardo Romo.

The decision to exercise more and improve physical health led me to consult the excellent report, “The Power of Parks to Promote Health: A Special Report” by Lisa W. Foderaro and Will Klein. These researchers found that parks promote health by serving as an ideal venue for physical activity, helping to reduce obesity and lowering the risk of numerous diseases. The report begins with a quote by Dr. Howard Frumkin of the Trust for Public Land, who noted, “If we had a medicine that delivered as many benefits as parks, we would all be taking it. Parks deliver cardiovascular benefits, fight loneliness, combat osteoporosis, counter stress and anxiety, and more. And they do those things without adverse side effects and at minimal costs.”

San Antonio Botanical Gardens. Tianyu Arts and Culture design. Photo credit Ricardo Romo.

Over the last decade, I have visited the top ten U.S. cities with the largest Latino population, which include, in order of size: New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, Phoenix, Chicago, Dallas, San Diego, San Jose, and Miami. I walked many times in Central Park and strolled on the public beaches of Los Angeles and San Diego. However, it came as no surprise to me that the Trust for Public Land has found serious disparities in access to the outdoors. In an analysis of the 100 most populous American cities, neighborhoods where most residents identified as Black or Hispanic had access to an average of 43 percent less park acreage than predominantly white neighborhoods.

San Antonio Botanical Gardens. Tianyu Arts and Culture design. Photo credit Ricardo Romo.

The Special Report by Foderaro and Klein provided an excellent blueprint for improving the health of Latinos in urban areas. The report found that “Parks promote health by serving as an ideal venue for physical activity, helping to reduce obesity and the risk of numerous diseases.” Other similar research has found that art also counters stress and anxiety and can add to positive mental health.

My favorite park in San Antonio is Brackenridge Park near the headwaters of the San Antonio River. Founded in 1899, Brackenridge is one of the oldest public parks in the state of Texas. Children love the park because it offers ample outdoor areas, 300 acres, where they can run and ride bikes safely. Public outdoor spaces offer many benefits for adults as well. A study conducted by several Scottish researchers found that parks contribute to community well-being. The authors, who examined nearly 500 studies published over the past ten years, concluded that the benefits of parks were substantial. Their key findings revealed that “Physical health, mental wellbeing, and life satisfaction are all enhanced through access to and use of parks and green spaces.” The researchers also found that “parks create important opportunities for social integration.”

San Antonio Botanical Gardens. Tianyu Arts and Culture design. Photo credit Ricardo Romo.

I love Brackenridge Park because of its historical significance. Indian tribes lived in the current park area along the headwaters of the San Antonio River thousands of years ago. Archaeologists and historians have uncovered Indian campgrounds dating back 12,000 years along the river banks. The park is also adjacent to the Witte Museum, and school tours of the museum spill over to the picnic benches of the park. The giant cypress and oak trees of the park assure plentiful shade for young and old.

San Antonio Botanical Gardens. Tianyu Arts and Culture design. Photo credit Ricardo Romo.

Dr. Kathleen L. Wolf, a nature scholar, noted that 40 years of research have demonstrated sufficiently that parks and green spaces “support human health and wellness.” It is a well-known fact that San Antonio has a large number of residents suffering from chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and respiratory problems. Parks, Dr. Wolf argues, are “particularly relevant” if they offer “walking and bike paths, and playing fields.”

Latino Lowriders provide cultural art in Brackenridge Park. Photo credit Ricardo Romo.

After reading numerous reports about the benefits of parks and gardens, I invited my wife, Harriett, to join me in visiting the 40-acre San Antonio Botanical Gardens north of Downtown. [An easy ask since it is one of her favorite places in the city] Foderaro and Klein observed that “Spending time in natural areas, whether walking or reflecting in a garden, is a powerful strategy for improved physical and mental health. There is a vast body of evidence documenting the health benefits, such as reduced anxiety and depression”.

Latino families across generations gather at Brackenridge Park. Photo credit Ricardo Romo.

Foderaro and Klien also found that studies of both adults and children confirm the astonishing range of mental and physical health benefits contact with nature provides. Benefits include lower blood pressure, less anxiety and depression, better mental concentration, healthier child development, enhanced sleep quality, and more.

The fact that parks offer so much in terms of good physical and mental health makes me wonder why some cities do so little to build or expand existing parks, gardens, and green spaces. Additionally, the soft signals that tell people the park is safe and welcoming should be attended to. According to researchers, this means inclusive programming, art installations, and cultural events that make all groups feel welcome.

Brackenridge Park provides a calm place for relaxation and gathering with friends and family. Photo credit Ricardo Romo.

In the coming year, I plan to promote parks and outdoor spaces, additional cultural arts programming, ample parking, hiking trails, and walking paths. I would also like to see more family days, additional free admissions, inclusion of art and cultural activities, and outreach to wider audiences to encourage Latino families to enjoy parks, botanical gardens, museum grounds, and other public open spaces.

San Antonio Botanical Gardens. Tianyu Arts and Culture design. Photo credit Ricardo Romo.

Michael Menchaca. San Antonio, TX. Credit R. Romo

Vincent Valdez, “Just a Dream…” exhibit. Courtesy Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Credit R. Romo.

Vincent Valdez in his studio. Courtesy Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Credit R. Romo.

Quinceañera in Downtown Los Angeles. Credit R.Romo.

Arthur Lopez. Santa Fe, New Mexico. King Gallery. Credit R. Romo

San Antonio Riverwalk near SAMA. Credit R. Romo

Mural on the San Antonio Riverwalk north. Credit R. Romo

Food Delivery in New York City. Credit R. Romo

Scherezade Garcia-Vazquez, UT Austin Art Professor, in her New York City Studio. Credit R. Romo

A New York City Dominican Cigar Shop. Credit R. Romo.

Regina Moya, artist. Day of the Dead, San Antonio, Texas. TX Credit R. Romo

East Los Angeles artist Margaret Garcia in her studio. Credit R. Romo.

Matachines dancers at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, San Antonio, TX Credit R. Romo

Matachines dancers at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, San Antonio, TX Credit R. Romo