Bryan Rindfuss
Beyond T-shirts
Art, music and skateboard culture collide at San Antonio’s Cat Palace BY BRYAN RINDFUSS
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inding one’s true calling in life can be an elusive challenge. But for San Antonio native Jesse Garza, that lightbulb moment arrived quite early in life. While in middle school, Jesse found himself in his friend’s dad’s print shop. He and his pals were there to obtain T-shirts for their straight-edge hardcore band Straightforward, a scene prerequisite. “It was a mind-blowing experience to see his dad taking our artwork and cutting the stencil out, applying that to the screen and then physically printing the T-shirts,” Garza recalled. “I don’t even know how to describe it, really. It was probably one of the most memorable things I experienced in my childhood. And it was crazy because my buddies were just like, ‘Oh cool, we’re gonna get shirts!’ But I’m over here just fascinated with the possibilities [of screen printing].” Garza dove straight in without hesitation. He purchased a screen-printing kit from a craft store and started making “all kinds of crazy shirts” — including a tribute to the early ’90s band Gameface that his wife Dawn still owns to this day. “Back in 1989 or 1990, that was just something that was unobtainable,” Garza said. “To a kid, you didn’t think you could design a T-shirt. You always thought: If you want to be cool, you buy this shirt. I was like: If you want to be cool, you fucking make your own bootleg shirt. That’s the ultimate.” Little did he know, those DIY tees would help him land a job at a professional print shop and pave the way for the Cat Palace — a multifaceted operation
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CURRENT | April 20 – May 3, 2022 | sacurrent.com
that marries his lifelong interests in art, music and skateboard culture.
Finding a balance Jesse and Dawn Garza are classic high school sweethearts. He went to Harlandale, she to McCollum, and they met through friends at a gig. In a scenario fit for an indie rom-com, Jesse gave Dawn a demo tape with his phone number on it, she called him and they’ve been together since. They married on Valentine’s Day 25 years ago and have an uncanny knack for completing each other’s sentences. Jesse Garza started working at one of San Antonio’s busiest print shops straight out of high school. “I learned proper screen printing from them,” he said of the job. Three years and a few other gigs later, he’d gained enough experience to break out on his own and took a leap of faith with Dawn at his side. One of their earliest jobs together was a sizable T-shirt order for the landmark Mexican restaurant Mi Tierra. “They had faith in us, and we printed manually for them for a few months,” Garza said. “That was a major boost that allowed us to buy an automatic press right away. After that, everything just blew up.” The Garzas expanded quickly, hiring employees and eventually moving into an 8,000-square-foot warehouse filled with expensive equipment. They chased down big contracts from high schools and once printed 10,000 T-shirts for the San Antonio Spurs. But somewhere along the way, they realized
Jesse Garza
From left: Jesse and Dawn Garza are the dynamic duo behind the Cat Palace; a before-and-after photo of a vintage skateboard deck restoration.
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that being “big” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “We were like, this isn’t even us,” Dawn Garza recalled. “We really were trying to be a bigger company, and we were getting there,” Jesse Garza continued. “But it ultimately was not me to be that aggressive with trying to be successful. Everybody wants money. … But I want to be happy. I want enough money. I don’t want to have this giant business — and be responsible for so many people — just to have a lot of money.” Those realizations inspired the couple to scale back to the smaller operation they now run with help from Dawn’s nephew PJ and two of their three sons. Situated on a rustic plot in Selma, their amusingly dubbed Cat Palace is named in honor of the felines that came with the wooded property. “We knew that if we didn’t catch them and get them fixed that it was never going to end,” Dawn Garza said. “Jesse went to some feral cat classes, and they gave him discounts to get them fixed.” “We’ve fixed so many cats,” added Jesse Garza, an animal lover who arguably became a “cat person” by circumstance. In addition to assisting with pest control, the resident felines serve as spirit animals for the print shop and on-site skate park, appearing in various interpretations on artist-designed T-shirts, posters, stickers and skateboard decks.
Carving a niche “I’m not a sales guy,” Jesse Garza confessed. “And neither is my wife. But the way we survive now is from
