Michael Tracy tapped
the mother lode of beauty
—
the
teeming ecosystem of the Chihuahuan Desert and the timeless
meander
of El Rio Bravo del Norte
— to make a life in art
BY MARÍA EUGENIA GUERRA
This, our second issue of Tragaluz, is dedicated to Michael Tracy, a son of Cleveland, Ohio who lived and worked in San Ygnacio for 46 years.
Tracy, 80, died at his home on June 15th, leaving a vast legacy of art created in the historic buildings that became his studios. History will long note his work in architectural, historic, and cultural preservation. He will be remembered, too, for his uncompromised environmental and political convictions.
E. Luanne McKinnon, Tracy’s longtime friend, chronicles in an essay on pages four and five the driving fuse that empowered his work and “his unremitting voice as an artist and writer.”
On the pages that follow are the remembrances of friends, some in the permanent orbit of Tracy’s sun, and others not always, but nearby. Those pages include, too, the photographs of Roger Haile, who by kindly making them available to Tragaluz, provided an invaluable visual narrative.
Those remembrances include references to Tracy’s volatility, eccentricities, the curmudgeon and cantankerous factors hard-wired to his personality, but they also spoke of generosity, kindness, wisdom, respect, his love of beauty, and his immense, unwavering environmental commitment to the Río Grande.
You may also enjoy in this issue a look at the history of the Laredo Film Society; the upcoming theatrical productions of the Laredo Theater Guild International and the Laredo Little Theater; local filmmakers Marcela Morán and Edwardo García; Noé Cuellar’s erudite essay, Pobrecito, A Vanishing Art; Maite Gomez-Rejón’s recognition for her Hungry for History podcasts;
a story about the first Latina ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize - Cristina Rivera Garza, for her memoir, Liliana’s Invincible Summer; how Casa Ortiz celebrated in art, artifacts, and music Laredo’s 269th Birthday; and the upcoming exhibit by former Laredoan Miki Rodriguez, Transitions, at the Laredo Center for the Arts; and that of Los Angeles based artist Salvador de la Torre’s Principe Azul at Casa Daphne.
Thank you for reading Tragaluz
A Program of Daphne Art Foundation
Editor
María Eugenia Guerra
Contributors
Eric Avery, M.D.
Maritza Bautista
María Eugenia Guerra
Ryan Cantu • Seyde García
Karen Gaytan • Roger Haile
Jorge Santana • Gabriela Treviño
Design
Vantage GFX
(956) 307-8984
tragaluz@daphneart.org
P.O. Box 6238
Laredo, Texas 78042
Cover photo by Eric Avery, M.D. San Ygnacio Artist
A Borderland Journal of Arts and Culture
Roger Haile
Not your ordinary artist, neighbor, or friend: Remembering Michael Tracy
BY E. LUANNE McKINNON
Not all great artists live in cities. Both Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso, seeking liberation in isolated environs, left Paris for the French countryside. In Antibes, having survived WWII, Picasso painted scenes in tones of grey; and, at Giverny, the gardens inspired Monet’s Water Lilies of 1887-89. In the 1940s and ‘60s, Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin each departed New York City for northern New Mexico. These women established residencestudios in remote places, Abiquiu and Taos, and were influenced by the southwestern light and landscape in original modes.
Michael Tracy, born a mid-westerner, came of age as an artist in Texas. But he had ample opportunities to live and work in New York, especially during the early 1980s. He spent time with his university friend, Julian Schnabel who introduced him to his art dealer, the incomparable Mary Boone. Despite Tracy’s elegant exhibition of “corn icons” shown at Boone’s Soho gallery in February of ‘82, and being drawn to the drama and high-stakes of the downtown art scene, Michael had already established his foothold in Texas borderland terra firma.
For nearly 50 years his large-scale paintings; semiecclesiastical sculpture; bronzes; collages and works on paper; handmade books; videos; and, prints were either made or conceived of in San Ygnacio. An itinerant traveler and consumer of world cultures Michael had studio-residences in Mexico City and Guanajuato, and completed lengthy expeditions to Egypt, India, Russia, and cities across Europe. In those places he made art, sketched in notebooks, wrote, and gathered ideas and materials to be used once he returned home. In the truest fashion of a European atelier, a collective of artisans worked to create gigantic tin coronas for Stations of the Cross series and smaller sculptures; furniture, textiles; candle sticks; and weavings; and assistance in the preparation of pigments and canvases. His studio-compound was otherwise a one-man factory.
But it was in 1978 when Tracy’s Galveston studio on the historic Strand was threatened by fires that prompted his departure from the Gulf. He had lived there since the early 1970s when in ‘74 he created his first major performance work, Sacrifice I: The Sugar in the former Imperial Sugar Company’s warehouse. As the lore goes, distress about the possibility of his artworks burning up was shared with Jeanne Adams, a well-connected friend from Corpus Christi. She had driven through San Ygnacio on her way home from Nuevo Laredo and suggested the village to him as a possible perfect place in which to realize his epic output. Howard Barnstone–famed architect of the Rothko Chapel in Houston –also understood Michael’s plight and sent him on his way by
lending him a car. Rolling into the sleepy historic village, a FOR RENT sign was posted to one of the houses. The owner, Mercurio Martinez, came out and as destiny would play a hand in Michael’s future life, they learned of one another’s deep connections to St. Edward’s University. Perhaps because of that friendly first encounter, Michael was trusted to rent the house.
Having then moved to San Ygnacio by 1978, in the early 1980s and into the ‘90s he worked long hours in what he called the “outdoor studio.” This was nothing more than the ground outside the Mercurio Martinez residence. In the heat of the day under the unforgiving South Texas sun Michael applied color to canvases and wooden icon structures, one after another. Elements of border soil and dried grasses became ingredients of the work’s natural aging intermingled with thick swaths of gel and acrylic paint. In an exquisite array of pieces from that period, the monumental Stations of the Cross: To Latin America is a masterpiece. Fourteen 12-foot-tall canvases were highly encrusted, leathery, dark in color. The format for each station was shaped like a medieval altar painting; and each was crowned with one-of-a-kind gigantic tin corona, in the tradition of effigies of the Madonna and other saints found in devotional worship in Mexico.
MICHAEL TRACY
The outdoor studio adjacent to the Martinez House.
The Michael Tracy Foundation
As both a painting and an object, high art and craft, Tracy’s Stations paid homage to the internationally famous cycle of black paintings of the Rothko Chapel; but his cycle remains singularly unique in its Third World context. The Stations marked a potent new statement in contemporary art. They testified to the risk of bringing heroically-scaled monochromes, or single-colored paintings into the realm of the sacred. As Adam Weinberg, Director Emeritus of the Whitney Museum of Art recently observed, Michael Tracy’s, “unsparing yet elegiac approach upended art historical and religious tropes and reconceived the notion of ‘the sacred’ for the present.”
Continuing with an exhaustive range of large-scale projects, the penultimate work of his career was Sacrifice II: The River Pierce that took eight-years of planning. Enacted on Good Friday April 13, 1990, the Houston scholar, Robert Tejada summarized the live ritual as, “200 artists, writers, activists, friends, neighbors, and a documentary and support staff” [that[ joined in a “binational procession and sacrifice”— the ritual destruction of Cruz: La Pasión (1982–87) . It rained that day. I remember it well as a member of the “faithful” crowd that followed behind the large cruciform. It was encrusted with milagros, iconitos, braided hair, dead flowers, and crowned with bull horns and mounted to an elaborate cart pulled by a pair of mules through the muddy terrain. The processional wagon stopped along the rugged trail to acknowledge the Via Dolorosa of Christ’s suffering. Coming upon the banks of the Rio Grande, the cross was dismounted and set afloat and afire. As the New York curator and writer, Edward Leffingwell recalled, “A chorus recited the names of the principal rivers, lakes, and waterfalls of Latin America and recounted the Stations of the Cross as adapted from the writings of the Liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff.” And in his characteristic mode of calling out injustices, Tracy claimed that this offering, or sacrifice, “…would spark and move more than agenda-like interest in the giant problems of mankind with regard to water, to rivers that never wanted to be borders, never were designed by nature to be thought of or treated as despicable boundaries….”
Michael Tracy never wavered. He never departed from a trenchant belief that art saves lives. He loved the devotional altar pieces of the early Renaissance; he loved the power of the figure in masterworks by Caravaggio; he loved the Madonna and Child paintings of the 15th c Flemish artist, Hugo van der Goes; he loved the gold mosaics of the Italian Byzantine era; and, he came to love the splendors of India and the rituals of Vedic culture and its palette of saffron and fuschia. These comprise his last works, including an unfinished series that remain intact in his studio following his passing on June 15th.
San Ygnacio provided the perfect realm for his unremitting voice as an artist and writer.
His worthy outcry against injustices to humanity and the environment, taken as a whole, established him as one of the most important American artists of his generation. Museum curators and directors, gallerists, scholars and poets, friends from over the years made the pilgrimage to him, to talk and eat and see.
His works are included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Fine Arts Museum and The Menil Collection in Houston; and, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. The McNay Museum of Art in San Antonio will present his first posthumous exhibition in 2025. And, on view at Houston’s Menil through the Fall of 2024, Cruz de la Paz Sagrada is featured in the exhibition, Longing, Grief, and Spirituality Since 1980.
With a deep bow of gratitude, Rest in Peace, Michael. You taught us so much.
(E. Luanne McKinnon, PhD is the organizer and editor of a forthcoming, two-volume monograph on Michael Tracy. The publication aims to promote his legacy with new scholarship on a range of his works, some of which have never been seen.)
The Menil installation featuring Cruz: La Pasión on left foreground and 10th Station to Latin America: Jesús Despojado de sus Vestiduras on right; and a triptych in left background 11th, 12th, and 13th Stations to Latin America which is now on permanent view at the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis, MO.
The River Pierce: Sacrifice II. Cruz: La Pasión being immolated by Eugenia Vargasin St. Louis, MO. David Crossley
Hickey-Robertson
Ohio native who made his home in San Ygnacio in 1978 leaves a vast, invaluable legacy in art and the preservation of border culture, history, and architecture
What follows are remembrances of Michael by those who knew him.
Eric Avery, M.D.
Artist
San Ygnacio, Texas
I met Michael Tracy in 1974 in Galveston. I told him I wanted to take a break after completing my medical studies at UT Medical Branch to make art. He invited me to stay in one of his studios in San Ygnacio.
I have known him 50 years. He was the model of a working artist who also mentored the careers of young artists.
He will be remembered for his love of color and beauty. The bright colors of his palette came from flowers like the Zinnias that grow in the flower and vegetable garden inside the walls of the Treviño-Uribe Fort and the spectrum of orange and yellow marigolds he experienced in India. The dark colors are from Mark Rothko.
One of the most significant of his aesthetic expressions of his love of beauty was the jewelry he created.
Undaunted by the fatal diagnosis last Fall, he became a distillation of himself.
Maritza Bautista
Executive Director, Daphne Art Foundation
Laredo, Texas
My friendship with Michael was a warm, turbulent whirlwind. The stories I had heard about him in the decades before we officially met, made me uninterested in him. His way to connect with others seemed to be too matter-of-fact and binary; deeply charming or woundingly harsh.
09.30.43 - 06.15.24
The time that I did know Michael, he allured me with his gracious wisdom. He was one of my favorite people to discuss issues about art with, especially how they impact our South Texas region. Our conversations encompassed all the realms of the art world - from community to institutions. His stories were always vivid and so was his memory; untamed and intellectual.
Michael was genuine in his gesture to make someone feel special. In a way, I’m honored he liked me enough to wreak havoc on me.
He will always be a cultural treasure in my heart.
María Buchanan Housekeeper & Cook
San Ygnacio, Texas
Michael tenia su carácter, pero era de muy buen corazón. Tenia una manera muy exigente de pedir. He wanted to straighten out the world if only it would move to his rhythm.
We had a moment working out how we would work together. I asked him, “You want my respect? Respect me.”
His time in India changed his appetite. I was now cooking with spices I had never used - curry, sumac, turmeric, ginger, and nutmeg. He patiently taught me how to prepare Indian food.
I was entrusted with the washing of his clothes, which I took to my house to wash. When my washer stopped working he gave me the money to buy another one. He also believed only I could be entrusted to lay out his medications.
When he was diagnosed with leukemia last year, he doubled down to do as much as possible in a day. The day before he died he told me, “I appreciate what you do for me.”
In those eight months he had after the diagnosis many friends came to see him, some he had not seen in a long time. He wanted to complain, but I told him, “Cayate! They are here to show you they love you.” He said, “I know. This is the last time we will see each other.”
He did a lot for San Ygnacio. He gave it life with the restoration of the fort. Children who attended the summer camps here
MICHAEL TRACY
Roger Haile
Roger Haile
SOHO, 1980
learned about the environment and the natural world around them. The Plaza came to life with all the plants and trees he added.
Some who live here, some who have never spoken to him, have asked, “How can you work for him?” He was strict about how he wanted things done, but he could also be kind. Hardly anyone knew that in the world of art he was a famous and wellrespected man.
There are people here whose lives he changed. I am one of them. I will miss the conversations we had when we prepared meals.
He went quickly. We did not see him suffer physically. He left with his dignity.
Alyssa Cigarroa Founder and President of Daphne Art Foundation
Laredo, Texas
Setting out from Laredo for a visit with Michael in San Ygnacio always felt like embarking on an adventure. The drive through the tranquil, unpopulated Rancheria on both sides of the highway provided a soothing, contemplative respite from the pace of life in Laredo.
Visiting Michael was an immersive experience, a journey into his world. We would walk the grounds of the River Pierce Foundation, and with each visit I discovered a new space filled with his paintings and brilliant works of art, ranging from vibrant bursts of color to sculptures and scenes that felt excruciatingly intricate. These pieces evoked a spectrum of emotions that seemed to capture both pain and complexity.
Eventually we would find ourselves at his exquisitely set table, engaged in philosophical and intellectual conversations that stretched late into the night. At evening’s end, he would see me out, the purple neon sign on his home illuminating the quiet, dark night as I drove away. Each visit with him left me feeling as though I had shed layers of my being to be able to have had these deep exchanges with him. Michael had a gift for piercing your soul and challenging your beliefs.
While working on this issue of Tragaluz, I have learned more about Michael Tracy’s life and his stellar accomplishments in art. I deeply wish I had known him better, and for longer.
Last winter in San Ygnacio, in Michael’s company, Javier García, Maritza Bautista, and I stood in a room with his trilogy. As a serene light streamed through the skylight, the name Tragaluz for this publication was conceived. We dedicate this issue to Michael.
Tricia Cortez
Executive Director
Rio Grande Intl. Study Ctr.
Laredo, Texas
Michael Tracy’s legacy was one of uplifting the historic and precious community of San Ygnacio. He elevated San Ygnacio’s profile through his creation of the River Pierce Foundation and by restoring the fort and other historic buildings, as well as sponsoring programs and events that captured our imagination of this little South Texas jewel.
I worked with him during our struggle to prevent the confiscation of vast swathes of public and private lands by the feds to construct the Border Wall. His efforts put San Ygnacio on the map. Our Coalition was able to save 71 river miles in Webb and Zapata counties from destruction.
Michael was feisty, direct, and extremely opinionated - and unapologetic for it. His unique, inimitable style will be deeply missed.
Alejandro Cortinas
Studio Mgr., Fabric Artist San Ygnacio, Texas
For the last year I have helped prepare Michael for the workday in one of his studios - breakfast first and setting up the Nebulizer and oxygen. He would catch up with his emails, and then we would plan the day’s work, which was largely preparing for the February 27, 2025 exhibit at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. We worked around a 3-foot by 6-foot maquette of
Roger Haile
the gallery space that his 60 works of art would occupy. Between his notes and mine, we knew which and where pieces would hang in the McNay.
He focused largely on completing un-finished pieces. The days were different, but the work was constant. He was very present and clear.
Depending on which studio he would work in that day, I would put the completed work away from the day before and make sure that there was water, ice, red rags for clean-up, cold wine, and his music - Philip Glass, chants, bongos, Indian music, and spiritual music on repeat. I would also moisten the paints. At the end of the day we would walk across the plaza to his house or drive there. I would fix his supper and eat with him. He would work at the computer a bit with the Nebulizer and oxygen in proximity.
He was very aware of time, the time left. He wasn’t going to waste it. More than once he wondered out loud, “Why am I still here?” He said he wanted his ashes scattered in the Ganges and the Río Grande, in places he loved and where he had painted.
Michael really was looking forward to June 19, the day the writer Adam Weinberg, Director Emeritus of the Whitney Museum in New York, would be in San Ygnacio to interview him for a book called Sacred Spaces
I didn’t think Michael would be gone this soon. He was still filled with energy and passion for art.
I am fortunate to have worked at his side and to have helped him through this year, all while listening and learning about art from the narrative of his life and his work.
Marilyn De Llano
Longtime friend
Laredo, Texas
Our friendship dates back to a party at Whitey (Helen) Watson’s sculpture and ceramic studio on Houston Street in Laredo.
In Michael I met a great friend that night. I was often a dinner guest at his house in San Ygnacio. There was always someone interesting, important, or accomplished in art to meet there.
The art he collected was unique, as was his library, and his curiosity and knowledge of history. What he created, what he absorbed, what he talked about revealed his brilliance. How fortunate I have been to have counted on him as my friend. I will miss the comfort of him.
Viviana Frank Architect Laredo, Texas
I have known Michael for 34 years.
But my family had known him for many years before.
He and my aunt Marti were very good friends. She just turned 100 years-old in April.
They met through Howard Barnstone, her step-son, and had the type of friendship only two titans could have. Based on artistic vision and mutual spirit guides, art entrepreneurship, philosophical battles over nuances would separate them for months and sometimes years, but then they were friends again.
We met him through my sister Jackie who had suggested we consider moving to San Ygnacio, but Frank and I became friends with Michael because there was a deep connection with family through my aunt and Howard, and architecture.
We fell in love with San Ygnacio through Michael’s eyes, the art he produced and exhibited there, and the architecture he preserved.
Frank and I were married in his masterfully preserved home and studio compound in front of one of his triptychs.
We lived very briefly in San Ygnacio. One evening Michael came over to the house as he would, and we would visit. I was there with him sitting on the couch. He said to me, “Tomorrow’s my 50th birthday,” and continued, rather extemporaneously, that he moved to San Ygnacio because he wanted to live in a place where he could bake his canvases in the sun. He said, “I push and pull the surface medium as it bakes over months sometimes until I see that it is done.”
We had a really good talk that night that included Titian and foreshortening. He was sweet, and shared like only Michael could.
I will always remember him as the friend who with a canvas made a skin of the universe with the sun for all of us to see, sometimes with joy, sometimes with angst. Only a beautiful brilliant mind can do that. That was Michael.
María Eugenia Guerra Journalist
Laredo,
Texas
I became persona non grata for Michael Tracy over a story I wrote in an early issue of LareDOS in the mid-1990s about an art intervention in Guerrero Viejo in which Pratt and UTSA architectural students, guests of the River Pierce Foundation, expressed themselves in paint on a couple of the centuries-
Roger Haile
Marilyn De Llano
old sandstone buildings of the abandoned historic town. I took offense and wrote about it.
I believe Michael’s livid response was, “No little rinky-dink newspaper is going to un-do what I am trying to do.” He did not condone the defacing paint, but he didn’t want the account of it in newsprint.
But then, suddenly it just happened, we became friends, though not as constants, but with cyclical lapses and happy resumptions over many years - a pattern I would later comprehend.
It is with Michael over daybreak coffee at our ranch near San Ygnacio or at the table at the Rickles House across from the Fort that I enjoyed long conversations with him, always taken by the eloquence of his vast vocabulary, his gestures, his passion for the topic, and sometimes his unsolicited advice.
Books, writers, and writing were a regular part of our discourse. His reading list was, of course, light years ahead of mine. Invariably, I would leave the Rickles House with a bookFrederick Seidel’s poems in a volume called Nice Weather; Alex Krieger’s account of the saga of Cabeza de Vaca’s barefoot journey across North America; Mariana Yampolsky’s The Edge of Time.
I opened the Krieger book today, happy to read the inscription in Michael’s signature hieroglyphic font written with a Sharpie on a dry blank page thirsty for his thoughts.
Janet Eager Krueger Artist Encinal, Texas
Those who crossed paths with Michael never knew what they were in for. He was caustic, outspoken to the point of rude, and touchy. His artwork, his opinions, his personal style were perplexing to many. He was a force of nature: always unpredictable, and surprisingly generous.
He supported school art projects from San Ygnacio, to Laredo and north to Encinal. Grants from the River Pierce Foundation were easily applied for and quickly awarded. He once spent the night with us at the ranch after the public opening of a project in Encinal. After the event we spent the evening at our home and had a far-ranging conversation about the value of providing art
projects to schools in small communities.
We also touched on our different religious outlooks and whether those not born and raised in the area were likely to stay in isolated locations such as ours. He asked if my husband and I intended to stay long at the ranch.
When I said we would live out our lives here, he responded, “I doubt that, you’ll be gone in a couple of years.” Ironically Michael would, too, be bound to the area spiritually and culturally, and in the end he lived out his life on the border.
Over time we crossed paths. He had a lovely rewarding laugh - but most often he represented every synonym in the Thesaurus under irascible. I was honored to consider him a friend.
Joe Perez Friend
San Ygnacio, Texas
Zapata County was named after a man beheaded for his revolutionary vision. Michael Tracy was a revolutionary in the art world, and it is befitting that he chose San Ygnacio as the place to enact his rebellion against all that was unjust.
Michael was a world class citizen who championed human rights. Deeply committed to the disruption of complacency, he met opposition of these beliefs with fiery condemnation. Michael was a man who insisted that you live feeling being alive. Simply sitting around, pondering and not acting on your vision was not sufficient for him, and he was not willing to accept mere ideas. He insisted that you act on them.
I met Michael during the last few years of his life, and I was immediately drawn to his philosophies. Since his passing, I have often wondered about all those who knew him longer than I had and the incredible journey they must have experienced having him as a friend. Our friendship was exceptional to me. I am humbled to have known Michael Tracy. He will forever be in my thoughts.
Christopher Rincón Executive Director
River
Pierce Foundation
San Ygnacio, Texas
I first met Michael in1990 when I was 20 and he was 47. His first retrospective, Terminal Privileges, was the inaugural exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston, at the time the newest and toniest temple of contemporary art. I was in my second year of art school at UT- Austin.
Roger Haile
He had just delivered an electrifying lecture about his current work, which ended with a short video about his eponymous art collaboration Sacrifice II: The River Pierce, 13.4.90. Michael had all the glittering trappings of a 1980s celebrity, despite his monastic demeanor, and that night he was surrounded by a throng of wellheeled groupies, art school faculty, and a collector or two.
The introduction to Michael that evening came through Carlo Kilp, a slight, disheveled German antiquarian who lived in Guanajuato and Austin.
I took Michael up on his offer to drop by the print-making studio at UT where he was doing a residency. An exchange about Mexican colonial churches would come to define the relationship I could not see coming. He extended a Thanksgiving invitation to visit him in San Ygnacio.
It was an inspiring visit. I would learn quickly that everything he did was unconventional, original, and slightly weird, but also purposeful, stylish, and refreshing.
As our relationship developed, I felt invincible and empowered because I had found the man that I knew I’d spend the rest of my life with.
Though our 30-year “marriage” had ended in 2013, and we had separated, we were still bound by what had been our lives together, the depth of what had been our partnership, and by the significant, successful historic preservation work we had undertaken through the River Pierce.
In 2023, an oncologist gave us the devastating news of Michael’s diagnosis. Death was no longer an eventuality; it now had a time stamp on it.
I feel now as though I had rehearsed for mourning to welcome death, like the Buddhist sage who embraces sleep as a rehearsal for his own death.
Death has come now, and we sit together like old friends, remembering how much we both loved Michael.
Gayle Rodriguez
Owner, Gallery 201
Laredo, Texas
Who was Michael Tracy to me?… Brilliant. Daunting. Honest. Insatiable. Loving.
There was with him never enough knowing, feeling, seeking, questioning, experimenting.
He set the bar high for himself and everyone else; when he himself or another might not reach it, he forgave.
He was creative in every aspect of his life - what he wore, the homes he opened to us, the attention to detail in the food we prepared and shared, and the neo-baroque art and jewelry he created...all done to please himself, his audience, and every one of us.
Michael leaves an enormous void in my life - an empty space no one could ever fill, as he was my friend...and I was his. We tore down the walls of convention and accepted each other for exactly who we were....no excuses or apologies needed.
Gigi Guerrero Rodriguez River Pierce Camp Director Retired Educator
I met Michael 35 years ago through my brother Andre. Michael’s intensity scared the living daylights out of me, but we proceeded to plan for a River Pierce summer camp for the children of San Ygnacio and Zapata. Historic San Ygnacio with the fort and its old sandstone buildings was the perfect setting for the camp that would include local history that dated to the indigenes and the Spanish Colonial era, culture, art, environmental preservation, the value of water, field forays into the natural surroundings of the Río Grande, archaeology, and keeping journals. There were lessons in biology and botany, and later gardening, bee-keeping, the use of herbs, and yoga.
The camps were successful for 25 years, and for me very rewarding.
It comes as a surprise to many that Michael Tracy was shy about taking credit for the good things he created in the community. If he came to a camp day, he hung out in the kitchen of the Guadalupe and Lilia Martinez home watching from a window. On other occasions, he would simply drive by a couple of times past the shaded area where the camp convened, just checking.
When the campers wanted to thank him for sponsoring the camp, he had to be pulled from the kitchen.
Roger Haile
Roger Haile
Former campers, many now adults, recall that their proud parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles were always part of the audience when project presentations were made at the end of the session.
A silent partner in the camp’s success, Michael was committed to the community and its children. He wanted those kids to have experiences they might never have had. What he did was heartfelt. I am very grateful that he afforded me the opportunity to teach there.
Dr.Jerry Thompson
Regents and Piper
Professor of History
Texas A&M International University Laredo, Texas
Michael Tracy was a good friend of mine and my wife, Sara Cabello.
I came to know and appreciate Michael’s art when he came to San Ygnacio from Galveston in 1978 and 12 years later when he staged The River Pierce: Sacrifice II, 13.4.90. A long procession of worshippers, as if in a movie set, paraded down to the banks of the Río Grande on Good Friday and in protest of the toxic state of the river, watched in awe as Michael cast adrift a big black cross on a small barge, and then set the cross on fire. Michael could be pompous, argumentative, opinionated, egotistical, eccentric, and downright cantankerous. I found him lovable. I came to appreciate his absolute brilliance while consuming concoctions that Michael called lunch that he must have observed in some far corner of the universe or dreamed in a nightmare.
There was not a topic, be it cartel violence in Mexico, the growing chasm between the wealthy and the poor, the craziness of contemporary politics, climate change, and the frightening decline of the environment, that Michael could not discuss without an impressive degree of wisdom.
If Michael liked you, he would tell you to your face; if he disliked you, he would also tell you so. Few in San Ygancio appreciated his art and many found him excessively peculiar. I will always remember Michael clad much as The New York Times observed him, in an Indian kurta standing among the cacti so common to the Texas desert.
Michael’s highly expressive contemporary art, so laden with
the influences of Mexican Catholicism and Hindu pageantry, may not be his lasting legacy. Michael may have had a deep understanding of what some would call the human soul, but I think he is most likely to be remembered for his creation of the River Pierce Foundation and spending over a million dollars in grants and donations to restore the historic architecture of San Ygnacio, especially the Treviño-Uribe Fort, complete with its fabled sundial, before which I stood in awe as a young man over 50 years ago.
Here’s to you, Michael. You will be profoundly missed.
Anne Wallace
Artist
San Antonio, Texas
I met Michael Tracy in Galveston, where I grew up, in about 1976. My mother had met him through a mutual friend, Houston architect Howard Barnstone. She helped him find a studio on The Strand. Michael was passionate, opinionated, and had a great eye. His observations about my work on the occasions he visited my studio have stayed with me.
In 1979, I translated the catalogue for his first show at the Galleria Pecanins in Mexico City. Michael suggested I stay at the Hotel Isabel, near the Zócalo, where he was also staying. He introduced me to el centro histórico, cantinas, and restaurants.
The morning of the opening, he tapped on my door at 5:00 a.m. to take me to the Mercado Jamaica, the flower market. He wanted my help working with a woman and her son to make a huge floral mural for the second-floor entrance to the gallery. The tribute was made of a thick straw mat lashed to a wooden frame. The woman taught me how to jam a narrow, rolled steel tube through the straw, insert a single flower, then pull the tube out the bottom of the mat, leaving the flower snug against the straw. She, her son, and I worked all day. Thousands of flowers, pulled through the steel tubes, one by one. The process tore up my hands. I barely had time for a manicure prior to the opening reception. (“A qué se dedica Ud.?” the startled manicurist asked me.)
At the reception, I met Michael’s friend and collector, Carlo Kilp, who asked me to house-sit his place in Puentecillas, a rancho outside Guanajuato, for a couple of months. I ended up staying in Guanajuato and working at the university there for nearly six years.
Roger Haile
Media artist, electronic audiovisual producer, composer, and performer Lizett Montiel, working under the name Rizu X recently released “Watcher.” The 3-track EP, written and produced by Rizu X, was released by Overlap Records, an international label based in Ecuador. The label describes “Watcher” as Rizu X’s “concept of finding the balance between technology and nature. Considering that the state of the current world is constantly monitored, private life is almost nonexistent. Reconnecting to the outside world makes us reflect on the present moment, the value and meaning of life away from algorithms and virtual reality.”
LTGI in rehearsals for Roald Dahl’s joyous girl power romp, Matilda the Musical; opening night July 18
Tickets on sale for performances through July 28
BY MARÍA EUGENIA GUERRA
The Laredo Theater Guild International’s (LTGI) production of Matilda the Musical is underway with rehearsals for its much anticipated opening night of July 18 on the stage of the TAMIU Center for Fine and Performing Arts.
The LTGI is bringing to life the captivating Tony Awardwinning masterpiece of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s musical based on Roald Dahl’s Matilda.
Time Magazine named Dahl’s beloved 1988 children’s novel one of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of all time.
According to the Music Theater International website, Matilda “revels in the anarchy of childhood, the power of imagination, and the inspiring story of a girl who dreams of a better life.”
The musical has won 47 international awards, including Britain’s Olivier Award.
Despite her self-absorbed parents who “unlove” her and who do not support her wish to attend school, Matilda, of her own volition, becomes an avid, informed reader at a very young age. Possessed of telekinetic powers, she helps fellow students at CRUNCHEM HALL navigate the punishing ill will of headmistress Ms. Trunchbull, an ex-javelin and shot put Olympian who openly loathes children - especially little girls with braids - and upon whom she heaps Draconian measures of discipline.
Ms. Trunchbull meets her Waterloo in Matilda and the solidarity of the students who have been at the mercy of the cruel headmistress.
Karol Batey and Rolando Vela are co-directors of the LTGI production. Henry Meja and Jessica Verastigui are its producers.
Leanna Bernal is the production’s choreographer. Stephanie Solis Schnyder is the costumer. Celia Hernandez is teaching voice. Bobby López will conduct the orchestra. Noah Blievernet is the set designer.
“This cast has a dozen younger actors with little to no stage experience. The teaching and the sharing have been wonderful. The seasoned veterans of the stage are enjoying working with the younger actors, and the little ones are having a blast,” said Mejia.
“Our company will move into the TAMIU theater in midJune, with the set being installed in the last week in June,” he added.
CAST
Kadence Cardenas and Heide Godinez portray Matilda in alternating performances. Alex López portrays the ill tempered Ms. Trunchbull and Allie Howland the role of the benevolent teacher, Miss Honey. Ricky Castillon and Lisa Martinez portray Matilda’s parents, and Adán Villarreal Matilda’s brother, Michael.
Other cast members include Mara López, James Peryam, Melina Maldonado, Francisco R. Vera, Gerardo Cantú, Cynthia Gutiérrez, Deborah Gallardo, José Villa, Cirian Martinez, Arturo Soto, Ricardo “Ricky” Guerra, Barbara García, Minnah Sophia Mota, Lucca Garza Santos, Emma Flores, Stella Alyssa García, Mariana Ascencio, Josue, Valeria Montemayor, Liana Sillas, Fernando Flores, Cynthia Mata, Carisa Romo, Addison Cavazos, Aurora Mariana Chapa, Damaris Guzman, Rogelio Santiago Montoya, Cruz Paredes, Raul Ramos, Regina Ramos, Reme Laurize Ventenilla, Bailee Garza, Lucy Batey, Chris Rodriguez, Marcelo Mireles, Giada Garcial, and Orlando Valdez.
Producer Mejia urges Laredoans who love theater to “act fast to find the best seats in the house to secure the magic.” Tickets are on sale at the LTGI website. In addition to opening night, performances are set for July 19, 20, 21, 25,26, 27, and 28.
LTGI’s Matilda the Musical promises to engage its audiences with the story of a four-foot nothing kiddo’s triumph over gargantuan adversities. It’s a story, too, about justice, karmic consequence, and kindness found — peppered with moments of hilarity and told with live music, song and dance, and the orchestrated work of the largest cast in LTGI’s 15-year history.
Vocal coach Celia Hernandez works with the cast of LTGI’s production of Matilda the Musical, which opens July 18 at the TAMIU Fine and Performing Arts Center.
Courtesy Photo
Meet artist Lalo García whose work gives voice to under-represented populations that are parts of the whole cloth of Mexican and Mexican-American culture
BY MARÍA EUGENIA GUERRA
Edwardo (Lalo) García began a lifetime romance with art when as a nine-year-old he took souvenir pictures in La Sierra Huasteca near Queretaro on the feast day of the Virgen de Gudalupe with a 4 x 6 Graflex camera.
An able assistant to his father, he would graduate to a handmade air shutter Noba, a Mexican Daguerrotype camera for shooting 5 x 7s and 8 x 10s. “It had a hair trigger shutter so that you had to master its speed,” he recalled.
Despite his dislike for the commercial aspect of souvenir photography, the love of imagery never left him.
Born in Laredo, García grew up in Queretaro, returning to Laredo when he was 20. He took formal art instruction at Laredo Junior College with faculty members Martha Fenstermaker, Dan McGinnis, and Dr. Cain Budd.
“I took life drawing with Ms. Fenstermaker and learned how to draw the human form. From Mr. McGinnis I learned design and sculpture working limestone to create resilient abstract or figurative forms with a chisel and hammer. Dr. Budd’s classical guitar classes brought me to to the realization that sound was a perfect accompaniment to image,” he said.
“Art has been a priority in my life, but the reality is that you have to earn a living to have art in your life, so I pursued IT classes and training in accounting, and have worked for a nonprofit for the last 20 years,” García continued.
Video and sound are central components to his art, and so is the desire to give voice to the under-represented populations that are large parts of the whole cloth of Mexican and MexicanAmerican culture. “Those under-represented include the people of the hybrid culture of the frontera,” he said, adding, “and they include those who are discounted and disenfranchised because of the tone of their skin.”
He contnued, “Those distinctions of light and dark should not be made. Beauty is portrayed in a certain way to make sure everyone stays in their lane. People who live on the edge of society are made to believe they aren’t worthy or that they are outcasts, when in fact it is those laborers, hourly wage earners, housekeepers and many others who are a valuable part of our community.”
García’s artistic endeavors come to life under the name of Tres Tekuanis. Tekuani is the Nahuatl word for beast. He said the three Tekuanis represent the three aspects of existence - mind, body, and spirit. It is those aspects with which he connects with those who experience his art.
He said that sound is his favorite medium, whether it comes from an instrument or a toy. “Sound evokes motion, and it connects us. Listening to music might bring on dancing and that builds bridges,” he said.
“I have learned how collaboration works. It changes your thinking, and you are able to see that some ideas have their
moment and you go with them,” he continued. He cited the video short, “Ingles sin Fronteras”a clever play on the ad for “Ingles sin Barreras” that he made with artist Gil Rocha. The video won first place in Commissioned Collaborations in last February’s MIRAAA Media Fest.
On June 21st’s Make Music Day, García and Webb County Heritage Foundation co-worker
Andrea Ordoñez staged the live performance of accordionist Michael Lara’s mesmerizing rendition of the cumbia “La Zenaida.”
The crisp, clean video recording of that performance inside the Villa Antigua Border Heritage Museum attest to García’s mastery of capture of image and sound.
At trestekuanis.com you can experience García’s video of guitarist Emmanuel Garza Huerta performing an original composition, “Improvisación en Re Menor” accompanied by the birdsong at Slaughter Park.
While García presents the distilled essences of the music, the musician, and the backdrop in those recordings, he also manages to convey the intrinsic harmony of them.
Courtesy
Photo
ESSAY
The origin of the Laredo Film Society
We had three aims: to empower, to educate, and to exhibit
BY GABRIELA A. TREVIÑO
The genesis of Laredo Film Society is telling for the reason that the organization was born in non-place, but rather, a space- cyberspace. Because of this space, people across nations, generations and unable to meet in a physical sense were able to create a bridge of communication based on a mutual understanding.
On Nov. 20, 2017, Karen Gaytán posted the following message on a Facebook group she created with members of her friends list:
Karen and I had previously met on the set of a film that was shot in Laredo in 2015. I had heard that they were hiring Production Assistants, so I applied. I was one of about 15 other PAs, and Karen worked as the director’s assistant. After production wrapped, we remained in touch and realized our mutual interests.
In her Facebook post, the words “local film club/society” shone like glow worms as I read them. Five years prior in 2012, I was a summer intern at the Austin Film Society, where I accidentally learned about the ins and outs of the non-profit arts sector.
I say accidentally because I did not sign up for the internship because I was passionate about learning about non-profits. Honestly, who is? But it was promised that upon successful completion of the internship, participants would be placed on a listserv for production jobs in Texas. This was my main reason. Yes, I was excited to work unpaid for a summer because it meant I would be a mere candidate for a real job.
At the Austin Film Society, I learned about how the organization was founded as a film club and how they grew into a tiny yet mighty org that juggled several projects. What I admired the most was how firm their grasp was on local arts growth. They are the kind of org that has meetings with Hollywood directors in one room and plan after-school programs for local youth in the other. They also worked with the City of Austin to convert an old airport hangar into a fully-outfitted production studio.
Back to 2017. I was a year into my graduate program at UNAM in Mexico City. I believe that that day in 2017 was a defining moment, almost as though I had been preparing for it my whole life. I felt a dull gnawing ache inside me – that familiar longing for a place, for home.
That winter break, Karen and I met after work and started filling out state filing papers we didn’t really understand as
20-somethings. We wrote a mission statement that highlighted three aims, “To empower, to educate, and to exhibit.” The concept was to use film as a tool for social transformation. Through the exhibition of film as an educational resource, the public would empower themselves with what they’d watch and process.
We spoke with other local non-profit heads about what this undertaking meant and to ask how they have been able to flourish and share their mission with Laredo. Julia Orduña of Laredo Border Slam, Margarita Araiza of the Webb County Heritage Foundation, Viviana Frank of CityMakery, and Sarah Ann Mockbee of the Austin Film Society were all fountains of vital information in those first few years of learning how to function as an organization within a society like Laredo.
We took our name Laredo Film Society as a goal to grow into something resembling the Austin Film Society. That has always been the point – to take everything we have learned in our lives and to apply it, to create a space for future generations to feel comfortable expressing themselves through art and making a name for Laredo as a place where movies are made and loved.
In February 2018, we received our non-profit status from the Texas Secretary of State, and you can insert a very overused cliché here.
A look back at MIRAAA Media Fest
MIRAAA’s success sent a clear signal that media art thrives in the borderlands and has a home here.
MIRAAA Media Fest in its second iteration was a two-day, two-city short film festival that took place at ENTRE Film Center in Harlingen and at the Laredo Center for the Arts during two consecutive weekends back in February.
The festival was conceived from an idea to present alternative narratives that reflect borderland communities with hopes to spread a compelling vision that inspires a collective spirit to thrive where resources for experimental media arts are scarce.
Sometimes all that is needed is a seed.
MIRAAA 2024 was organized by Minnesota-based graphic artist and video editor Natalia Rocafuerte, originally from the Rio Grande Valley (RGV); McAllen-based multidisciplinary artist Josúe Ramírez, filmmaker C. Díaz, and multidisciplinary artist Andrés Sánchez; and Laredo-based multidisciplinary media artist Maritza Bautista, electronic A/V producer and media artist Lizett Montiel a.k.a Rizu X, and LFS board members and film enthusiasts Andrea Ortiz and Norma Ortiz.
The mission of MIRAAA is to empower border artists to explore non-traditional storytelling and media through collaboration and experimentation to illuminate underrepresented voices in an accessible way. Typically, there are fees to submit work into film festivals and limits to when the work was produced. MIRAAA made it all free to submit and attend.
Presented as a joint effort between RGV-based Trucha and ENTRE Film Center, and Laredo-based agencies Daphne Art Foundation and Laredo Film Society, MIRAAA became the 956 festival that collectively brought over 300 border residents to celebrate animation, documentary, narrative, and experimental films created by artists along borders around the globe. The festival also highlighted the work of 28 filmmakers from the Texas-Mexico border alongside five commissioned new works by artists in Laredo and the RGV.
The Laredo segment of MIRAAA added a visual art exhibition that showcased media-work by 17 artists including Marcela Morán, Gabriela Treviño, Jorge Escudero, Juan Reyes, Martha Viera, Nestor, Gabi Emilia, and Gerardo Cadena, to name a few. The exhibit included films, photography, light, sound, and awe-inspiring video mapping by Cynthia Cardenas. A confessional booth conceptualized by Victoria Ramos welcomed passersby to contribute recordings of their innermost thoughts and revelations.
MIRAAA commissioned 12 artists and paid them stipends to produce original films. The collaborations were unique in the pairing of artists who typically do not work outside of their comfort zone, offering them the opportunity to grow creatively alongside someone with whom they have never worked with or met. The work of the paired collaborators was to conceptualize and create a new short film in advance of competition in six categories – best documentary, narrative, animation, experimental, collaboration and a people’s choice award. The films were screened in both cities and judged by the audiences who viewed them.
Four Laredo artists won for Best Collaboration. At ENTRE Film Center, Jason Litman and Isabella Guardiola were
selected for Best Collab for their film Never Never Land, in which an angsty teenager runs away to Laredo and discovers its bizarre nature. At the Laredo Center for the Arts, Gil Rocha and Tres Tekuanis (Edwardo García) won Best Collab for Ingles Sin Fronteras, which satirized English language tutorials sold on TV infomercials. The fronterizo in the film just wants to learn enough English to buy beer and ask ladies to dance.
Laredoan Celestino Marina Jr. was selected for Best Animation in both cities for Amigo, a film that chronicles the heart- wrenching journey of a young boy who befriends his anthropomorphized piñata
During the Collaboration program, Adoa and DJ Veneer, also commissioned collaborators, performed a riveting live score performance during the screening of their film Border Curios, an audiovisual meditation on border culture, identity, and traditions that span from the contemporary MexicanAmerican syncretism present in neighboring cities from different countries.
MIRAAA’S success sent a clear signal that the oft-repeated narrative of the borderlands as badlands of strife and conflict, has overlooked that art thrives here, has a home here, that art has a heart that heals, nourishes, informs, enriches, and transforms.
(Karen Gaytan and Maritza Bautista contributed to this story.)
Filmmaker Marcela Morán: la frontera through the lens of authenticity
Moran’s perspective is honed to capture in film the humankind essence of the borderlands
BY MARÍA EUGENIA GUERRA
Award-winning filmmaker Marcela Morán is an associate professor in TAMIU’s College of Arts and Sciences Department of Psychology and Communication.
Her most recent accolade for a documentary was the April 2023 Cine Verde 14th Annual Environmental Film and Arts Festival award for Cardboard Scavengers, the cartoneros, who daily pick up boxes left on sidewalks by downtown Laredo merchants, and then sell them to a recycling facility in Nuevo Laredo.
The industry of this effort has provided a vital revenue stream for many Nuevo Laredo families, some for generations.
The subjects of Cardboard Scavengers are a 56-year-old woman named Chole, a second-generation cartonera, and her husband Beto. They have worked together at this for 40 years.
Morán filmed them at work in the summer of 2019.
While Chole articulated details of her life and the work of being a cartonera, the camera takes in the gathering, flattening, and binding of bundles, and stacking the behemoth taller-thanthe-pickup pile of cardboard that will be driven to Nuevo Laredo at day’s end.
The truck remained parked in one place while Chole brought new piles of cardboard on a customized trike – two-wheels in the front, one wheel and the seat with pedals in the back. A welded angle iron rack above the axle of the front tires contained the cardboard she would ferry to the truck.
Chole is well aware that the work of cartoneros saves trees and she looks into the camera to say so several times. She says American cardboard is superior to Japanese cardboard. She states that their work on the U.S. side is not part of the American dream. She would like to have a better quality of life, to own a store in Nuevo Laredo. And she has a message for AMLO (López Obrador), the president of Mexico, reminding him to hold to his campaign promise to help the impoverished of Mexico. She says he could make things easier for the cartoneros at the federal aduana inspection station upon their return to Nuevo Laredo.
Morán took the film into post-production in the fall of 2019.
COVID-19, however, closed the border for almost two years, keeping the Nuevo Laredo recyclers from crossing to Laredo.
The last of the work for Cardboard Scavengers was completed after the pandemic. Laredo artist Maritza Bautista collaborated
with Moran on the making of the film.
What Moran saw in the industry of cartoneros, she said, was that on the border “it is the the least privileged that are doing most in terms of participating in sustainable practices.”
Cardboard Scavengers also received Best Direction recognition in the Environmental Film and Screenplay Festival in September 2023.
Morán — who earned an undergraduate degree in RadioTV-Film at the University of Texas-Austin Moody College of Communications, and a terminal MFA at Ohio University’s College of Fine Arts — has been a member of the TAMIU faculty since 2003.
Over the last 20 years, she has taught narrative, experimental, and documentary film production and film studies courses. She has also taught film and digital photography, literature and film, and has overseen the capstone communication internship course since 2012.
At the graduate level, she introduced Mexican and Latino Cinema, and Ethnography and Documentary Production in the Border Region.
On rotation, Morán teaches Film Studies, Film History, Internship, Filmmaking Production I (Narrative filmmaking), Filmmaking Production II (Experimental and Documentary Filmmaking), Video Editing and Post-Production I, Video Editing and Post-Production II, Mexican and Latino Cinema (for the Master of Arts in Communication), and Ethnography and Documentary Production in the Border Region (for the Master of Arts in Communication.)
“I am drawn to telling the stories of others. The people I interview are the informants of the films I make. I don’t want to take someone’s story and tell it myself. I want to feel it, but have them tell it. It is a process, and as trust builds, there’s an excitement about the authenticity of a real story being told by real people. The story will tell itself. I may use inter-titles, but not a narrator,” she said.
“It is in editing that you decide when the story has finished. There’s a relief when it is done, but there’s also a moment of wondering how it will be received,” Morán continued, adding, “Film is demanding. A good outcome requires reading, a list of open-ended questions, focus, an outline, a bit of a script, and a list of visuals.”
Morán grew up in Nuevo Laredo “in the arts,” she said. “As a child I attended dance school and took piano lessons. My tias in Laredo were artists. I always wanted creativity in my life,” she said, adding that her own schooling in Laredo and having family there allowed her the duality of feeling at home in both places.
While life on the frontera likely encouraged the creativity she sought, it also formed her perspective and honed it to capture in film the humankind essence of the borderlands.
Courtesy Photo
Marcela Morán
Maite Gomez-Rejón accorded 2024 Latino Spirit Award for Hungry for History podcasts
Culinary historian’s research casts a wide net with cooking classes, lectures, curation, and writing
BY RYAN CANTÚ
Last month, Laredo’s own Maite Gomez-Rejón was one of only 16 people to earn the 2024 Latino Spirit Award bestowed by the California Latino Legislative Caucus. She was the only recipient in the field of culinary arts, with the other recipients ranging from sports to science, including Dr. José M. Hernández, a former migrant worker turned NASA astronaut.
“I received an email telling me about it, and I thought it was spam,” said Gomez-Rejón. “It was amazing being recognized. You work so hard, and you don’t really think anybody is paying attention, and then this happens.”
Gomez-Rejón wears many hats at the intersection of art and gastronomy. In 2007, she founded ArtBites, her umbrella brand and website that oversees cooking classes, lectures, curation of educational exhibits, and written publications. Currently, she is knee deep in research for Season 2 of the Hungry for History podcasts. Along with actress Eva Longoria, the two discuss topics on everything regarding Mexican food, past and present, ranging from farmworker justice to the early origins of tomatoes and potatoes.
Though Gomez-Rejón has made a life in Los Angeles, her work casts a wide net across Mexico and the Southwestern United States. Much of her current research focuses on the life and work of Josefina Velazquez de Leon, a pioneer of Mexican gastronomy who taught cooking classes at her home in Mexico City and published over 150 cookbooks during her life from 1899 to 1968. Velazquez de Leon was the subject at an exhibit that Gomez- Rejón curated at LA Plaza Cocina, a teaching kitchen and event space inside LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles.
“I’m fascinated by this idea of forgotten people, forgotten stories, who has the right to tell certain stories, and in telling stories that have not been told,” said Gomez-Rejón. She believes that preserving these stories is particularly important with somebody like Velazquez de Leon, much of whose original work
Chef and culinary historian Maite Gomez-Rejón is pictured at the 22nd Annual Latino Spirit Award with her husband David Trachtenberg, brother Alfonso Gomez-Rejón, and her mother Beti Gomez-Rejón. She received the award from the California Latino Legislative Caucus for her Hungry for History podcasts.
and writings were discarded by her family after her death, and who was then largely overshadowed by celebrity newcomers like writer Diana Kennedy. Gomez-Rejón also mentions how many of Velazquez de Leon’s cookbooks were donated by late food writer Barbara Hanson, who pioneered mainstream writing about immigrant cuisines while working for The Los Angeles Times Similar to Velazquez de Leon, Hanson faded into obscurity after being replaced by renowned food writer Jonathan Gold at The Times.
“I’m driven generally, but this award was just an extra push to keep going, keep creating, keep working, because people are paying attention,” she said. “As a Latina, you cannon fire other generations.”
Gomez-Rejón is an ideal candidate to carry the torch from her inspirations like Velazquez de Leon, but above all, she credits her mother, Beti, who joined her at the awards ceremony in Sacramento.
“The most incredible thing was being there with my mom. She’s the one who encouraged me to go to art school and culinary school. I think she knew me well.”
Courtesy Photo
Pobrecito, A Vanishing Art
Rasquachismo, emptiness, and art en el centro de Laredo
BY NOÉ CUÉLLAR
Artists’ process notes for Nestor Intervention on the Historic Plaza Theatre of Laredo, Texas on March 25, 2023, sponsored by Daphne Art Foundation, presented by Cultivarte Laredo and Future Vessel, in partnership with the City of Laredo. Written in 2022 while in C-Studio Residency and revised in 2024.
Ex/change and super/imposition
Invisible forces transform. They make flowers wilt and candles melt. Fake candles and flowers imitate the forms and functions of their referents (with limitations), representing a phenomenon of an inorganic evolution. Part of industrial processes informed by nostalgia and greed, fake candles and flowers proliferate in all colors, and some are even scented. Aboard a timeline of simulation, they are symbols of resistance to change.
The occupation of multiple things in one spot prevails in Laredo’s historic downtown: an old restaurant sign that hasn’t been covered to show that it is now a nightclub, a high-end store that appears to be a currency exchange that isn’t either, a toy store that is a shoe store that is no longer. Fountains are the river where the homeless bathe when they are not seen turning corners into temporary homes.
In her book Historic Laredo (2001) María Eugenia Guerra describes downtown Laredo as “a shadow of its prosperous 50s and 60s self. Much of the Deco charm, fluted limestone, and colored tiles have been veneered with tasteless, nondescript modernity.”1 The state of things appears to reflect a sinister heritage of the economic boom of the 1970s. Toy babies are on sale half a block from a mountain of broken adult mannequins tossed in a vacant storefront. Spanish and English alternate, the peso and the dollar (devalued or not) are exchanged, and so on, vice versa, in flux, etcetera.
Rasquachismo and the void
Nestor’s configurations comprise second-hand objects. As compositions that allude to rasquachismo, they point to its first and third of three degrees as described by art historian Josh T. Franco: a “[h]ome-made context of arrangements of objects,” contemplated upon “specifically in a contemporary art setting.”2 More in such a mindset than in a setting, these configurations, momentarily placed in the abandoned yet illuminated Plaza Theatre, are an offering to Laredo culture.
Rasquachismo is described by scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto as “a particular type of sensibility, not a style because a style is something that is frozen, but a sensibility of something that is always changing, like culture itself; a sensibility that is understood especially among the working class.”3 Exemplifying “an oppositional way of seeing things,”4 rasquachismo shows in Nestor’s juxtapositions of objects and situations yet out of place, fuera de lugar. Echoing the strategies of the Italian Arte Povera, conceptual signs, objects, materials, and the forces between them are meant to provoke familiarity and curiosity in the witness of this arte pobrecito
For Ybarra-Frausto, rasquachismo figures “a sort of voluntary
post-modernism, a dynamic sensibility of amalgamation and transculturation that subverts the consumer ethic of mainline culture with strategies of appropriation, reversal, and inversion.”5 Seen this way, Laredo in itself is an inadvertent masterpiece of rasquachismo. As creativity and gesture, Nestor’s take on rasquachismo is an intentional means to reflect upon emptiness and what is at hand, the patchworks of make-do, al ahí se va, and devotional offering, ofrenda.
Scholar Johannes Fabricius describes historical alchemy’s psychologically projective qualities as being underlined by an ‘abhorring of vacuum by nature.’ This is described as the ‘illumination’ sought after by alchemists, who ‘plunged into dark voids’ to activate the unconscious by means of free association and visionary experiences.6 Not dissimilarly, Ybarra-Frausto describes rasquachismo as something akin to a “barrio baroque style” in which “[s]imilar to the baroque style of art, all spaces must be covered with ostentatious decorations. An extreme fear of emptiness or “horror vacui” is present […] We suffer from fear of lo vacio; that’s why we cover all walls like altars. We decorate them with pictures, flowers, lights, and countless things.”7 Furthermore, rasquachismo figures as “an aesthetic form born from envisioning a surplus where there is only the emptiness of poverty.”8
Ghostwriting and phantasmagoria
A ghostwritten rasquachismo shows cultural residues of a superfluous prosperity. Bouquets of fake flowers, candles for every esoteric occasion, toy feces, and even a crown of thorns made of plastic are products of an inorganic (industrial) evolution all too easy to find in downtown Laredo shops. Staticlike images, too. Where does indifference lead?
Such disorientation resonates with broader issues today with effects that are no less than psycho-spiritual. At the leading edge of anthropology of images, art historian Hans Belting describes a “new realm of digital fictionalization” that “deprives [the viewer] of [their] in-born capacity to distinguish media from images.”9 Belting says that “[most] new images have no material substance [and] lack [a] distinction which [separate] external pictures from internal images.”10
Referring to the work of anthropologist Marc Augé, Belting mentions that this “new dimension of fictionalization has altered the relation of circulation between the individual imaginaire, such as a dream, the collective imaginaire, such as a myth, [and] fiction,”11 further quoting Augé how “we all have the feeling [of being] colonized without really knowing by whom.”12
Intervention and land acknowledgment
Nestor Intervention took place not on the inside, but upon the façade and surroundings of a hollow Plaza Theatre, en el centro.
This event occurred on the unceded land of the Alazapas, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, and Carrizo/Comecrudo peoples, among other tribes. You are asked to join in acknowledging
their communities, their elders both past and present, as well as future generations; and also the exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples, including those on whose land this event occurred. This acknowledgment attempts to demonstrate a commitment to beginning the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.
References
1 Guerra, Historic Laredo, 66; 2 Franco quoted in Anderson, “A lesson in “rasquachismo” art,” https://www.si.edu/stories/ lesson-rasquachismo-art; 3 Ybarra-Fausto quoted in Rosales, “Rasquachismo ¿y qué?,” 220; 4 Ibid; 5 Ybarra-Frausto, “Notes from Losaida: a Foreword,” in Velvet Barrios, ed. Gaspar de Alba, xviii; 6 Fabricius, Alchemy, 10;7 Ybarra-Frausto quoted in Rosales, “Rasquachismo ¿y qué?,” 220-221; 8 Ibid., 221; 9 Belting, “An Anthropology of Images or Iconology,” 32:46, https://youtu.be/f7LWGKQXOxM; 10 Ibid; 11 Ibid., 34:02; 12 Ibid.
Noé Cuéllar is an artist born in Laredo and is currently based in Chicago, where he works in research for arts integration. He is founder of Future Vessel, a repository of musical experimentation by Coppice (with Joseph Kramer) since 2009, and solo works as Nestor since 2018. His work has been presented in the US and abroad, and published on numerous artist-run music labels. www. futurevessel.com
Seyde García led the group meditation at Gallery 201 on Make Music Day.
Francisco Mendoza
Matamoros native Cristina Rivera Garza awarded 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Letters and Drama
“This is a book that I wrote with my sister. It’s not just a book about her.” - Cristina Rivera Garza
BY JORGE SANTANA
Matamoros native Cristina Rivera Garza has won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Letters and Drama with the memoir-autobiography, El invencible verano de Liliana / Liliana’s Invincible Summer
The prize is the first for Mexico in this category and a major literary accomplishment not only for Rivera Garza, but also for the increasing visibility of the violent epidemic of crimes against women in Mexico.
The compelling center of Liliana’s Invincible Summer is the murder of Rivera Garza’s sister at the hands of her boyfriend.
In Mexico, crimes against women are relegated to a special dark place in the law, common in what is a predominantly male chauvinistic country.
Rivera Garza, M.D. Anderson Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and director of the Ph.D. program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, is a MacArthur Fellow who has been accorded multiple international literary awards for poetry, novels, essays, and short stories.
She has the distinction of being the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in 2001 for
her novel Nadie me verá llorar and again in 2009 for her novel La muerte me da.
Of Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Rivera Garza said, “This is a book that I wrote with my sister. It’s not just a book about her.”
Thirty years after the murder, Rivera Garza returned to Mexico and discovered boxes of letters and miniature notes written by Liliana. The silence was broken, and there began Rivera Garza’s journey for justice for her sister.
Though the book offered Mexican authorities the case on a gold platter, Liliana’s murder remains unsolved. Rivera-Garza has said that it is justice and not forgiveness that fights loss.
Of Liliana’s Invincible Summer the Pulitzer judges wrote “… a genrebending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister, murdered by a former boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism, and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss.”
The Pulitzer Prize is regarded as the highest national honor in journalism, letters and drama, and music.
Cristina Rivera Garza
LLT in rehearsal for Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka Jr.
Production is part of LLT’s Children’s Summer Musical Production
BY TRAGALUZ STAFF
The Laredo Little Theater’s (LLT) Children’s Summer Musical Production of Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka Jr. is in rehearsal for its July 18 opening night.
The production is directed by Lisa G. King, with Dr. Joe Crabtree as Musical Director. A.B. Barrera is the show’s producer. Cristina Greco and Patricia J. Godines are the choreographers.
This adaptation of Roald Dahl’s fantastical tale features songs from the 1971 film that were revamped for the recent prequel movie of 2023.
The LLT production features live vocals.
Willy Wonka Jr. follows enigmatic candy maker Willy Wonka as he stages a contest by hiding golden tickets in five of his scrumptious candy bars. Whoever finds these tickets wins a tour of the Wonka factory, as well as a lifetime supply of candy.
Four of the five winning children are insufferable brats, but the fifth is a likable lad named Charlie Bucket, who takes the tour in the company of his equally amiable grandfather. The children are to learn to follow Mr. Wonka’s rules in the factory — or suffer the consequences.
Cast members are Alexa Gonzalez as Candy Man, Daniel Alva as James, Isabella Pici as Matilda, Bryce Gonzalez as Simon, Natalie Neigh as Jane, Isa Sánchez as Lizzie, Victor Ramos as John, Bobby Diaz as Harry, Leonardo Leal as Peter, Danica VelaCuellar as Charlie, Kimberly Manning as Phryne Trout, Gerardo
Alva as Augustus Gloop, Kiara Chinchilla as Mrs. Gloop, Mia Barrera as Veruca Salt, and Ray Gonzalez as Mr. Salt.
Also Miranda Ahumada as Violet Beauregarde, David Peña as Mike Teavee, Monserrat Sánchez as Mrs. Teavee, and Jack Paul as Willy Wonka.
The Oompa Loompa are Annabel Izaguirre, Azul Flores, Lucia García, Olivia García, Eva Gonzalez, Chris King, Vicente Navarro, and Sebastian Serna.
Ensemble cast members are Ariana Alva, Melody Arias, Aaron Cantú, Zoe Longoria, Alden Sánchez, and Andrea Somarriba.
The Set Design and Construction team members are Dianne Addison, Guillermo López, and Carlos Vela-Cuellar. Costumers are. Lisa G. King, Roxi U. Vela-Cuellar, Alberto Guajardo, and Dianne Addison. Abelina Limon is the hair, wig, and makeup mistress.
The show is set to run from July 18 to July 21, and July 25 to July 28. Tickets will be available at $15 per person. The LLT is located at at 4802 Thomas Avenue.
For more information, visit www.laredolittletheatre.org.
The cast of Willie Wonka Jr. follows the the play’s script in preparation for its July 19 opening night at the Laredo Little Theater.
Courtesy Photo
Casa Ortiz presents unique gifts on the occasion of Laredo’s 269th birthday
Artifacts including swords, cannonballs, coins and bullets on display BY
JORGE SANTANA
Historic Casa Ortíz and the Webb County Historical Commission celebrated the City of Laredo’s 269th birthday with two well-executed history-related presentations, live art, and a fourth that threw attendees into high animo gear.
LAREDO PARANORMAL RESEARCH SOCIETY
Ismael Cuellar, founder and president of Laredo Paranormal Research Society (LPRS), shared a narrative for the artifacts and relics that LPRS members have found. Among the artifacts he displayed were swords, cannon balls, coins, and bullets - some presumed to be from the Battle of Laredo during the Civil War and other conflicts on the river banks.
Other items in the LPRS display included dinosaur bones and meteorites.
The LPRS collection, which has been discovered in weekend digs over the last three decades, adds vital information to the 269-year history of Laredo. The dinosaur bones, of course, speak to a time before history.
JESÚS NAJAR
Jesús Najar, a former resident of Laredo and a passionate architect and historian, offered his presentation to an attentive audience.
His narrative focused on the massive historic and architectural losses (13 City blocks) of the Azteca
neighborhood when the Juarez-Lincoln Bridge was built to connect with IH-35 in the late 1970s. Many of the lost structures - homes and businesses eradicated and reduced to piles of stone - represented the Spanish vernacular architecture of the 1870s.
The international bridge and its surrounding footprint of government inspection facilities truncated the Azteca’s passage to downtown.
Najar is Preservation Texas’ Architectural Programs Manager and Central Texas Program Officer. He has over 15 years of local, national, and international experience managing preservation programs in the private, government, and non-profit sectors.
It is fitting that the setting for his topic of historic preservation was in Casa Ortiz, a home built almost 200 years ago and now the home of the Laredo Cultural District.
PAINTING EN VIVO
Framed by blue and white Spanish tiles, Casa Ortiz curator Monica Carroll created a painting during the four hours the event lasted. She presented a landscape of Laredo inspired by her vision of its birthday. Visitors had a chance to discuss the live painting with Carroll as she created it.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LAREDO
The morning at Casa Ortiz culminated with the noon appearance of the Laredo Philharmonic Chorale performing a unique operatic version of “Happy Birthday” arranged and conducted by Joe Crabtree.
Preservationist Jesús Najar
LPRS artifact findings
Jorge Santana
Jorge Santana
Jorge Santana
Joe Crabtree and the Laredo Philharmonic Chorale.
Transitions, an exhibit of the work of Miki Rodriguez, opens Sept. 6, at the Laredo Center for the Arts
“Laredo’s in my blood. I carry it with me, and it’s in every single layer of my work.”
BY RYAN CANTÚ
This fall, the Laredo Center for the Arts will honor another distinguished icon of the city’s arts scene. Miki Rodriguez was born and raised in Laredo, where she taught art at local public schools for 30 years.
“Laredo’s in my blood. I carry it with me, and it’s in every single layer of my work,” she said.
Rodriguez describes her upcoming exhibit, Transitions, as coming “full circle” since she first exhibited at the Center during its very early years in the 1990’s. Along with fellow artist Janet Kruger, that exhibit focused on drawings with pencil. Her life with art began much earlier, when she was already experimenting with oil painting before her 10th birthday.
In recent years, Rodriguez hit a wall with traditional painting. “I got to a place in painting where I just felt like my work was imploding, it got so crowded on the surface of the canvas with paint, and I was just ready to move on with something else,” she said, adding, “It wasn’t going to be a new form of painting, it was going to be a new medium.”
La Chispa - 50”x 44” Recycled fabrics and clothing, found objects, plastics, embroidery threads, acrylic paint, machine stitching, hand stitching.
When Rodriguez moved to San Antonio a little over a decade ago, she expanded her repertoire by taking classes in clay and fabric. The latter has become her primary focus, which she describes as a broad medium that encompasses not just textiles but cardboard, paper, wiring, and found objects. Her current work transcends the two-dimensional canvas, consisting of multiple found objects and textiles that form intricate and colorful patterns and designs.
“About 95 to 98 percent of my work is recycled materials. I do not buy any new fabrics anymore at all. If I need a specific color, I’ll go to a thrift store and find what I need,” she said.
La Chispa (the spark), is a classic embodiment of the new work she will feature at the upcoming exhibit.
“It’s a protest piece,” she said. “When Covid was around, there was a lot of talk about caring for people and how certain groups like African Americans and Mexican Americans were getting
less care than others. So you had this social tension building, but nobody could talk to each other, and then this thing happened with George Floyd, and something had to explode.
“
La Chispa is the idea of the spark that started it. Every little piece in there is one soul, one person, and the entire surface is my perspective of the energy of protests as if you were flying over it. Very chaotic and fired up.
“It never goes away, the impact and trauma of experiencing this, even if you weren’t standing in front of this protest,” she added.
Rodriguez’s focus on trauma and healing has its roots in her long career as a teacher, which ingrained the sense of art as a healing force. She recalls that she would see students come into class troubled but leave lighter due to the meditation process of creating art. Though Rodriguez recently retired from teaching, she continues her healing path while completing a program at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing.
“I’m really excited for the show. Respectfully, I’m okay with whatever people think, whether they like it or are skeptics or are not comfortable with the work. It’s okay and I accept that. But I’m speaking my truth, and I’m able to say who I am, and that’s that I’m an artist and a healer.”
LPO’s 45th Season opens Oct. 27, 2024
Orchestra and Chorale continue mission to engage, enrich, and entertain
BY MARÍA EUGENIA GUERRA
The Laredo Philharmonic Orchestra’s 45th Season - opens Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024 with “Celebration!,” featuring the music of Shostakovich, Walker, Stravinsky, and Elgar.
The season’s second performance, “Sounds of the Season” kicks off the holidays on Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024 with yuletide favorites, including sing along selections. The program features both the LPO Orchestra and Chorale.
“Classical Gems,” on Sunday, March 30, 2025 features masterworks by 18th century composers Vivaldi and Mozart. The Chamber Orchestra and the Chorale will perform.
The season finale on Sunday, May 18, 2025, “Tell Me a Story,” presents the music of Lieuwen, Ravel, and Rimsky Korsakov. The performance features the Chamber Orchestra and the Chorale.
Héctor Agüero is the Artistic Director of the LPO and serves as Associate Professor of Music and Director of Orchestral Studies at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.
Founded in 1980 by Dr. Ray Keck III, Sue Killam, and others, the LPO established a legacy of excellence in providing musical performances that fulfill its mission to engage, enrich, and entertain the community, particularly children and students.
Concert locations will soon be announced.
Scan the QR code to purchase tickets.
On Make Music Day Michal Lara filled the bright,open space of the Villa antigua Border Heritage Museum with the cumbia “La Zenaida.”
Courtesy Photo
Looking for Ghosts: the Juan Juarez exhibit at the Laredo Center for the Arts
Exhibit evokes the sense of houses emptied of human life to make way for memories that may linger
BY SEYDE GARCIA
Juan Juarez returned to his hometown on June 7th to present Looking for Ghosts , a photography exhibit that began as a summer vacation documentation of his family’s homes over time and how they have been transformed by the decay of abandonment.
Juarez, an associate professor of arts at Syracuse University, approaches images through the intersection of various media including photography, painting, collage, video, installation, and digital mediation.
When Juarez visited the Border Is A Weapon exhibit at the Laredo Center for the Arts in the summer of 2022, he was surprised by how much the art scene had grown in Laredo. To see contemporary art here made him want to be part of the art conversation in the community.
Juarez’s photographs, which are set against gray panels, evoke
the sense of houses emptied of human life to make way for the memories that may linger.
His work is distributed in three main spaces of the gallery. Two gray wings of mounted art provide entry and exit to these areas.
The outside panels of unframed photographs evoke a sense of wear and loss over time, much like the sight of sunlight through a broken windowpane or a cactus somehow growing out of nothing more than a bit of dirt on the roof of a building long ago left to the extremes of nature. Juarez’s photographs invite an intimacy with elements that once were part of a familial dynamic.
The playlist curated by the artist adds the element of loss and heightened trepidation.
The Juan Juarez exhibit is on view at the Laredo Center for the Arts until August 2nd.
Salvador de la Torre: Principe Azul
Exhibit opens July 19 at Casa Daphne
BY MARITZA BAUTISTA
Salvador de la Torre (they/he), Jalisco-born, Laredo-raised, and Los Angeles-based visual artist, returns to Laredo for a solo exhibition titled Principe Azul at Casa Daphne, beginning July 19.
A principe azul is the knight in shining armor, fairy tale representation of love in stories about princesas. For this exhibition, de la Torre creates an installation of ceramics, drawings, photos and sculptural works that encapsulates a reveal-type party challenging heteronormativity, and the expectations children are branded with at the beginning of their lives that “define their destiny,” according to the artist.
“Principe Azul” is reminiscent of celebrations like genderreveal parties, baby showers, and First Communion celebrations con todo y recuerditos. The artwork encompasses many layers and is a “coming home” show for de la Torre since their medical transition and having realized they are their own principe azul.
De la Torre earned a BA in Art from Texas A&M International University and a MFA from California State University, Fullerton. Their work has been exhibited in Southern California, Texas, Georgia, Tijuana, Taiwan, and Berlin.
De la Torre is dedicating “Principe Azul” to queer youth and folk who have not come out for fear of revealing their authentic selves. Presented by Daphne Art Foundation the exhibition on view at Casa Daphne, located at 1420 Washington Street, until September 6.
