Tell Me Más! The Tears of a cholo: Rudy Marco Herrera

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“I’m going as a scout, hunting for resources and ideas that might be liberating or sustaining now, and in the future…in a long-standing interest in how a person can be free and especially how to find a freedom that is shareable.” 

“You Look at the Sun” from Art in an Emergency

Olivia Laing, 2020

“Cast una ofrenda of images and words across the page como granos de maíz.” 

Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality 

Gloria Anzaldúa, 2015 

1.   I was surprised to learn of Rudy Herrera’s fear of heights, considering he recently spent an average of 15 hours per day, 30 plus days in a row, in a Genie ® S-1245 telescopic boom lift, strapped into a blue metal cage measuring 4’ x 4’, hovering anywhere from six feet up to wayyyyy higher up above the parking lot at Houston and Jefferson on the northern tip of downtown San Antonio, Texas, as he and his crew primed, outlined, painted, and sealed a 105’ x 70’ mural on the historic Kress Building in, as Herrera describes it, Home Depot paint on 100-year-old brick laid by tíos.

The mural is entitled The Last Parade and is part of Centro San Antonio’s Art Everywhere initiative which, and I quote from the org’s website, “makes downtown beautiful and playful…and puts local artists (small-business people) back to work and lends downtown businesses a bit of coolness.”

If we’re going to use the word cool, I would like to state right off the bat that Herrera’s mural is also refreshing, invigorating, joyous, and really….more than a bit radical. It’s startling actually. 

The Last Parade  confronts its visitors with color and story, and comforts many of us. Makes us take time to patch together the story of the brown girl atop a mutant vendado azul leading a parade of a beat-up bear with a robot in his pouch. 

Visual storytelling is a trait sometimes lost on modern muralists, so when I saw what was happening at the Kress, I knew I wanted to learn more. Over a year of quarantine had me yearning for community, and the parking lot on Houston became a little oasis where I could take my kids and let them watch the progress of this fabulous thing, week after week after week. 

I must’ve visited The Last Parade site at least five times in total whilst working on this story. I brought my daughters, my husband, my mom. It had only been a few months since February 2021 when I commissioned Herrera to create the poster for Siempre Verde #9,  yet it feels like we’ve been friends forever. I’m sure there are a lot of people who feel the same. Herrera’s warmth and generosity make even the most skeptical, world-wary worrywarts like myself feel at ease. He’s easy to befriend. 

Part of the Siempre Verde commission asks artists to participate in my journalism experiment called Tell Me Más! wherein I write about the poster commission process, interview each artist, and publish the results here on bonniecisneros.com.

From the start, Herrera was down to be interviewed, but he wasn’t so crazy about typing or even handwriting his answers to my questions. Couldn’t he just speak his responses, he asked, to which I dreaded the prospect of transcribing the meandering, yet fascinating, rivers of words he spouts when he really wants to delve deep into a topic. 

My El Placazo days, though still inspiring and relevant, are done and I was not willing to spend hours listening to recorded audio, typing, pausing, rewinding, typing, listening, etc…not even for Herrera whose Siempre Verde illustration is amongst my prized possessions. The drawing is beyond next-level, his vision pushed me up into a new plane of seeing myself and my place in the world. What a gift. 

If this is a journalism experiment, then this installment will play with form and be bold and brave and, I hope, refreshing. Long-winded, maybe, but unapologetically. 

Have you seen Siempre Verde #9? I mean, really seen it? Herrera entitled the piece Sunluna, which I find cool because I wanted to name my daughters Solana or Solymar, but didn’t. It has taken me hours of staring deeply into the drawing, which I picked up from his wife right after the historic snowstorm of February 2021 that shattered what we thought we knew about the reliability of our power grid and the precarious nature of tap water, to absorb and react to the world he built. 

Clothing and style are so integral to my identity. In Herrera's world, my hair blurs into painted desert mountains, my earrings are the phases of the moon, and a rainbow is my only outfit. Like a poem whose "I" is referred to as "the speaker, this isn't Bonnie, this is DJ Despeinada.

2.  The universe conspired, Alchemist-like, to open up both my schedule and my heart, so that I, post-second-vaccine and freshly reeling from three succinct rejection letters from three distinct San Antonio institutions who read over my three distinct grant proposals and said…nah, Bonnie, not you. It was gacho. I needed a three-hour vacation in the heart of my own downtown.  

No grants, but I still had Siempre Verde: Music for Feeling & Healing at Evergreen Garden, which continued to be a balm for me, and grants, more like gifts, me the privilege of collaborating with some of the San Anto’s brightest visual artists. From the independent and working class, to the underground, to the bright-eyed and hungry, to the established and legendary, to the rare birds and the cult-followy, to the unflinching activist and legendary cultural icons---I’ve worked with a myriad of local artists with the commission of posters, collages, digital portraits, and paintings during quarantine.

It has been a tidal wave of creativity and joy. Passing around funds, back and forth, keeping each other afloat financially, but more importantly, spiritually during the first global pandemic of our lifetimes is a way we take care of each other and create visual proof of our existence in a world that sometimes omits or ignores Chicano/Native/Latinx creativity and joy. 

To combat this, I made a decision that when I was offered an opportunity to DJ or teach or lecture at the academy, I would immediately start thinking of an artist I could pay to commemorate, not so much advertise, but more like visualize a remembrance of who we are and what we are doing during these times.

After six months of creating and collaborating an average of two to three commissions per month, the unexpected happened and one of the collaborations fell apart energetically, it dissolved and deteriorated based on…vibes. That’s all I can say about it. 

In hindsight I can see that the detour directly led me to Rudy Herrera, an artist I only knew as @cholotears on Instagram, whose artwork I admired but whose startling, refreshing, radically warm captions underneath his posts sang to me as soothingly as a singing bowl. 

The way Herrera expresses himself through words inspired me to ask him to fill in the job , and though it was a very quick turnaround, miracle of miracles, he said yes. 

My email serves as a nice artifact of how the project got off the ground:

Bonnie Cisneros 

Tue, Feb 2, 11:35 AM

to rudymherrera

Thanks for being part of this, Rudy.

I hope you are feeling optimistic despite...everything. We are getting through this pandemic portal. It's sublime sometimes. You are busy being creative, I can tell, and what a blessing that is! Keep up the momentum, or as my ma says, ride the wave. 

Beach metaphors por vida ‘cause the ocean (specifically the Gulf) is in our blood. San Anto feels landlocked sometimes. 

My DJ residency at Evergreen has been a way for me to stay hopeful. I curate music sets that I hope are cathartic and healing for listeners.

Last month I was out there and no one was around…except hundreds of potted plants of all kinds. I was listening to the music and looked up and had this glorious realization that I wasn’t alone….that the plantitas were…listening to the music, that they could feel the vibes as I went from one song to the next to the next on the turntables. I’m telling you stuff like this so it will maybe help you draft.... maybe. 

Honestly, this idea to commission poster art from local artists has been the best part of quarantine. I'm so grateful to Edward and the Evergreen team for this experience. I feel altered. 

Oh, yeah, I’m really into altares. It has been pointed out to me that my DJ setup serves as an altar---early on, I brought plants and pretty manteles and cositas to display on my tables. First, to mark off my space. To decorate. To supplement the fact that, yes, I am a woman DJ, and, yes, these are allllll my records (fuck that question), and that, yes, I can load in and out and deal with tech issues, and, yes, I dress up and emphasize my onda with clothes, jewelry, makeup---con estilo. It’s a show, after all. 

So far there has been a nice balance in terms of “am I represented in the poster literally or just metaphorically”---and I like that. My vanity and urge to document myself, coupled with my sincere appreciation of your renderings of real people tells me to be up front---to tell you that I (a human woman, Tejana, aged 43, glam, surreal and fantastic and mythological and over-the-top) desire to be depicted in the poster. 

I love San Anto and South Texas like my own mother. The nopal-like toughness and tuna-de-nopal type beauty. 

Gentrification is my archenemy. I miss the city. I’m scared of the constant construction of Monopoly hotels called “lofts” popping up like ugly mushrooms in and around downtown.

I automatically love that you’ll work in watercolor. I also love that you have a variety of styles, but I hope this one will be overfilled, surreal and fantastic and mythological and over-the-top.

I lurked your IG and I gotta also tell you how much I appreciate your captions. I love art, but words are really where it’s at for me, and your captions are art unto themselves. It’s such a treat to be able to hear the backstories to images in a person’s real voice. So I can’t wait to read what you have to say about this project when all is said and done.

Rudy’s response, same day, 5:19 PM

I think I got a feel for you or at least what you’re looking for. What are you reading right now?

Bonnie’s reply, same day, 5:51 PM

Well, I thought it was a pretty good email for a Tuesday morning. 

I’m reading:

Inventing Latinos by Laura Gómez

Sana Sana by Ariana Brown

Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui

3.  Saudade (Portuguese, Brazilian)—untranslatable state of deep emotional nostalgia or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone, further defined by Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo as: "a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy."

There is nothing like a great success backed up with great heartbreak to cement a young friendship real quick. Add a natural disaster to the mix, and forget it. 

After Siempre Verde #9, Herrera hired me to ghost write a grant for him. Spoiler: we didn’t get chosen to move to the second phase of a very spiritually and historically significant mural project. 

He says he’s still salty, and I say salt brings out the flavor or preserves the memory so it’s accessible at a later date. 

In lieu of the traditional five-question format, I  present to you a different type of interview culled from messages and conversations we’ve had over the last couple of months. I think it gives a peek into the nature of our creative, collaborative friendship. 

Herrera, pointing out a line of Anaya: Ultima said to take life’s experiences and build strength from them, not weakness.

Cisneros: Don’t forget the synchronicity of the San Antonio River giant crawfish pic I found in that Riverwalk book, and immediately posted to Close Friends, and then later that same day on the site visit we saw the exact same photo on the info panel at Adriana’s San Pedro Creek mural. 

Herrera: The mantis shrimp is supposed to have like 16 color spectrums… we can see three.

Cisneros: Why a tri-colored rainbow covering my nipples in the poster?

Herrera: Dried-blood brown-red, blue water, white moon. 

Cisneros: What’s your favorite natural land/water formation?

Herrera: I used to go to parks when I was young. I always like the sun. I enjoy being hot. Ascarate Park was cool also. When my mom met Francis Brogdon, the white guy I call Dad, he lived across Pasadena Park and I spent a lot of time there. 

I guess my youth was so transient in El Paso, I would try to be outside in an attempt to not deal, and out there the sun is the constant, and it became a marker for when I was away from the life shit.

Cisneros: I had a foggy vision of what your five-panel mural will feel like. To be walking along and suddenly see our story in all its glory and truth. A fresh take. A modern declaration of ancient prophesy. All the ancestors propelling their energy through you and us.

Another synchroncity: when I found the West of the Creek book at the pulga and it made me wonder where’s our red light district mural? And what about the Council House Fight? How about remembering that in public art?

Herrera: Yes. 

Cisneros: Throw our some key words about the poster and I’ll pick records for the garden gig.

Herrera: Magic. Dog tears. Salt. Full stomach. The avocado is a woman. The cactus standing out the pot is a guy. So there is a lot of feminine and masculine exchange. Slow strength. It’s kinda like they’re two forces that move together. Like two different notes hitting at the same time.

Cisneros: Duets?

Herrera: There you go, you’re better at it that me.

Cisneros: Nah. I just synthesized. How about the objects in the poster?

Herrera: The pan dulce is the good things we like to do to ourselves, and the cig is the bad things we like to do to ourselves. 

Cisneros: How do you feel about what we’ve created?

Herrera: You know I always felt genuinely out of the loop. As a child and most of my life, I did want to fit in, and at some point I kinda figured that because of a lot of things, I wasn’t going to. 

So when I think about my art or check spaces I know there’s a good chance my stuff will be a little different. Sometimes that’s good or bad. So I looked at the Siempre Verde poster roster I saw some stuff I didn’t like or wasn’t my taste. And that’s fine. I know people feel the same way about me. But I always say it’s like country music. It’s not my shit but I know a lot of people love Garth Brooks and I can see why.

Then I saw Mary Agnes Rodriguez did one and I admire her a lot, so I decided I was gonna make time to do it. I never really feel intimidated or worry about how I’m perceived. I just hope the person who asked me to do it likes it. I run it by the wife because sometimes I’m tone deaf because I don’t know something, and I show the boy.

Cisneros (during the snowstorm): I dreamed I grew fur all over.

Herrera: Lucky. The only good thing about this weather is that it reminds me of my mother’s love. 

Cisneros: Tell me more, I mean más, about Sunluna.

Herrera: The bigger squares are ancestral speakers. The coyote has the sun in the molcajete and the lady takes place as the moon. Your hair turns into mountains and leaks clouds. You bury a cow’s head and put milk in it and hot coals on it for a day. It’s yummy. It’s celebration food. Not sure if that’s old Mexican shit or old Indio things, you know how those lines blur. The plantman is getting the sun ready and you the DJ is over him with an altar DJ set thing.

Cisneros: I was nervous about being depicted without clothes and my comadre Ash, who has been my moral compass for 25 years told me: if he doesn’t draw you topless now, who will? And when?

Herrera: Ash is a wise one. I like her. 

4.  We weathered the pandemic so far, and the catastrophic snowstorm, and the heartbreak of not being chosen to present a project at a place that is more than a place, and we emerged creative collaborators.

As I licked my wounds, and refocused my mission, Herrera undertook what would become the crown on our downtown in the form of an immense mural on the wall of the historic six-story Samuel H. Kress building, a five-and-dime built in the Art Deco style with details echoing the Spanish missions, in 1938, and holds historical significance as one of the seven downtown San Antonio lunch counters simultaneously integrated on March 16, 1960.

Incidentally, at the peak of the Kress empire there were over 200 retail stores scattered across the US, one of which was located in Brownsville, Texas on E. Elizabeth Street. 

It was in front of this building where my 16-year-old mother, halfway through her pregnancy with me, fainted and the next thing she knew she was surrounded by ladies at the lunch counter, who offered  her water as she regained consciousness. 

She told them her suegra worked down the street at Sears, so they called for her, and my tall, stylish grandmother gently convinced my young mother that it was time to face her fears and finally go see a doctor, which she did. 

This story always echoes in my mind when I hear the words Kress Building, though now that The Last Parade exists, I have much more to add to that file in my heart. 

What does The Last Parade say, what does it make me feel? 

I keep thinking of the word brave, as in courageous, and indeed when I took my daughters, ages 8 and 5, to visit the mural in progress, they showed so much bravery by asking Herrera bold questions about the imagery, the color choices or patterns they noticed, the tools and methods and process he was undertaking on such a grand scale, and he’d answer their questions, simply, yet never talking down to them, and I would just stand there dumbfounded that these little girls had the courage to pick the brain of an artist they’d only recently met.

As we drove home and passed the wine bar Herrera slathered with images, I pointed it out to them to add to their repository of public art, and the little one asked me to ask Herrera why he paints “so crazy.”

And the next week when we visited, he answered her: because I’m not afraid.

And that’s the kid of bravery I’m referring to. Unadulterated confidence. The freedom to say and paint and create what your heart wants. That’s what I want my daughters to learn. Now. It took my mom fainting at the Brownsville Kress for her to face her fears, it took me 42 years to finally feel at ease in my own body, but my hope is that our girls skip all that fear because we felt it all for them. The time for being scared is over. 

Brave: (adjective) ready to face and endure danger or pain; showing courage, (noun) a North American Native warrior, and (verb) to endure or face (unpleasant conditions or behavior) without showing fear. 

Right now, the week after Herrera sealed the mural, the rain is pouring down over San Anto, but The Last Parade is signed, sealed, delivered. It’s ours.

Our downtown is now crowned with an epic poem in paint. That it was completed on what would have been the weekend of the Battle of Flowers (Day) and Fiesta Flambeau (Night) parades only served to crystalize the fact that magical realism is only…realism because the longer we live in San Anto, and the more we look for the signals and synchronicities, the more we see that magic is real. 

The pandemic rocked our sense of normal, put us up close to mass sickness and death, and thwarted so many traditions, including Fiesta San Antonio, a weeklong party with roots in what has been called imperialist nostalgia, a party to celebrate the battles and bloodshed when Mexico lost a landmass and Texas became Anglo property. 

But even before that, there was theft. Native culture is alive though. The images, the stories, the poetry and songs are a testament to that fact. 

The Last Parade re-remembers the myths and posits a future where an ancestor is reborn in the form of a brown-skinned girl in shimmery doorknocker hoops, her third eye maybe lined in Sharpie, leading a parade with a ragtag teddy bear who comes to life at night with a robot m’ijo in his marsupial pouch. 

She rides a great venado azul who has maybe mutated with a moose, and her path is illuminated with her own Native Chicana heart all aglow in a lantern. 

You notice that the mural begins six feet or so above street level? You see how precariously the parade teeters near the edge of a cliff? What’s at the bottom, my littlest girl asks Rudy, who holds the gridded key to the mural to their upturned faces: Well, we don’t know what’s down there, he doesn’t skip a beat, they’re about to figure that part out.

The next week, Herrera invited me to join him in the lift so we could work on this story. Like me, he’s a parent, his boy is Rocco and my girls are Lila and Luna. Like me, he has a badass partner who shares all the countless tasks, jobs, surprises, andresponsibilities that raising a family, keeping a home, and being a spouse entail. The wife is Courtney, the husband is Carlos.

This story would not be possible without them.

Because time is tight when you’re a working artist with children, we are masters of the multitask. Why not go up in the lift while Herrera painted, take my red notebook and black pencil, and the red shawl my mom crocheted because it was unseasonably cold that night? Even colder so far off the ground, he warned me. 

Maybe I should wait until morning, I debated. Nighttime was a long lost love I was nervous to reconnect with. Yet again, my comadre Ash stepped in again on the phone that night and said: go tonight. The city won’t be the same in the morning.

As usual, I’m thankful I heeded her advice. It had been over a year of not leaving my house past sunset. Never. Making a point of leaving the park before darkness fell, not even spending too mu ch time in the backyard garden at night really. Pandemic susto had rattled my sense of the city, and my place in it. 

So that night in April, driving south down San Pedro Ave towards downtown on a Friday felt both strangely familiar and anxiously foreign, but I let my senses autopilot the path to the Kress Building where I found parking alongside Travis Park and walked a block passed the St. Anthony Hotel and was surprised to see that downtown was indeed buzzing as if 500,000 Americans didn’t die of COVID-19, as if mass shootings and police murders did not daily spew the news with horrors, as if 11,000 years of history had not led to this very moment.

What my comadre Ash is to me, Santiago “Slim” Lopez IV is to Herrera. His right-hand man, who was there to help strap me into the harness, which had to be adjusted to fit me, but I didn’t blink. If Herrera trusted Slim, then I trusted Slim, who managed with some humorous struggling, to get me snuggly into the contraption. I’m glad I wore a boiler suit. Always with the dressing thematically, but this time style made sense. 

Gracias for being gracious, @slimithyleary. 

When asked about the project, Lopez wanted me to include the following fact: despite the rumors on the street, Rudy and I are equally as swole.

Old friends with inside jokes are one of my favorite earthly pleasures, so I’ll allow it. 

Once in the cage, I sat on a folding chair, Herrera at the helm, and up, up, up we went. That night he worked on: the rose the bear is holding, the outline of the cherry blossom or cotton candy tree, the baby in the tree, and some smoke squiggling way up at top on the bear side. At one point, a drone was sent up by Herrera’s left-hand man, Larry @canonkrook87, which startled me, but I went with it and set up my notebook as it hovered nearby. 

We talked a lot, but my notes only contain key words scrawled in my rushed cursive: Native Future, Mexican-Indio Past, San Anto serenade, border soul, desert dog, outlandish over-the-top, new archetypes, ancient fantasy, color-gasm. 

At the end of the session, Rudy smiled behind his mask: wanna go all the way to the top?

What was I gonna say? Yes, of course. 

Now, at the time I knew he didn’t like heights, and had to muster all his guts to go up that high each time, but Rudy took the Genie up as far as it could extend, to the tippy top of the building where the wind felt mischievous and the city looked small. 

I didn’t feel even one flutter of fear, but later he told me he was so scared he bit the inside of his cheek bloody, and that his hands ached from gripping the rail. 

What kind of friend does that for you? Knowing you’re all tender and burned from the three succinct rejection letters, knowing you’d never have a chance to see the city like that again, knowing you’d put your hand on the rough brick “laid by tíos” at the top of the Kress that had been rarely, if ever, been touched by human woman Tejana hands? 

What kind of friend? The Rudy kind. 

We stood up there at the top of the world, in silence. I looked out over San Anto, and into the vast light polluted galaxy, wrapped my mom’s red shawl around me and just…wept. And he let me. 

We came back down to earth even better friends than before. We swore to get our families together at Brackenridge Park someday, and always always always do our best work for the community. Always. 

5.  Sometime in the early stages of The Last Parade, Rudy changed his Instagram handle from @cholotears to @rmhworks, a move I found gutsy and poignant when so much of his (at least social media) cred was tied up with that moniker. R for Rudy, M for Marco, H for Herrera. Works because that why he’s here in this life at the time in this place. 

The term cholo can be tied up in so many connotations. In his work, Herrera takes those associations and adds tears. 

You think cholo, you maybe think something like this from J. Cuellar’s The Rise and Spread of Cholismo as a Border Youth Subculture, an unpublished manuscript from 1982:

Racial and cultural status, along with social class are reflected in the term cholo itself, which was adopted in California in the 1960s by youth following the pachuco tradition, as a label for that identity. In 1571, Fray Alonso de Molina, in his Nahuatl vocabulary, defined the word xolo as slave, servant, or waiter. 

The Porrúa Dictionary defines cholo, as used in the Americas, as a civilized Native American or a half-breed or mestizo of a European father and Native American mother. 

The word has historically been used along the borderland as a derogatory term to mean lower class Mexican migrants, and in the rest of Latin America to mean an acculturating Indian or peasant. Despite, or because of, its long history of denigrating semantics, the term Cholo was turned on its head and used as a symbol of pride in the context of the ethnic power movements of the 1960s.

Maybe when you think of a cholo’s tears, you imagine the solitary prison tattoo on a tío’s face, faded ballpoint blue ink on brown skin, a teardrop rolling down the face to symbolize a life they took, but never stop crying about. Marked forever. 

Or maybe you think literally, like me: the tears of a cholo. I think of the long list of young men I knew coming up in the 90s, shot or stabbed to death in apartment parking lots, on the street corner, or inside a house party. Young men bleeding to the death on the motorcycle trying to get to the hospital, young men with hearts stopped by drugs underneath the covers of their bed at their mom’s house. 

You think Alex, Chino, Chuck, Joey, Salvito and _________ Add your names for me here. I know you have some.

So many boys who never became men, who traded their lessons for blood. 

I think of cholotears as ambulance lights flashed, or in emergency rooms, dank prison cells, crowded rosaries, or in private with empty beer cans or needles or a pipe nearby. 

But now I can add that cholotears can also be in the form of “Home Depot paint on 100-year-old brick.” Want proof? Read Herrera’s Instagram post of him holding his sketchbook where The Last Parade was first conceived, up against the almost-finished mural:

When I sketched this your boy was a new father working 2 jobs. I kept a sketchbook on me at that time for the first time. I really just draw on scraps with whatever's around. But I knew I was caught up in this big life wave and I had to feed the creative part of myself because it was slipping. at this point the doodling had been something I'd been doing for so long it was now a part of my identity. and I had to come to terms with it and see how it was ganna fit into my new life. I think us creative folk all come to that fork at some point. you can suppress the need or hide from it but at some point your ganna have to acknowledge and deal with it. if you want some sort of good quality of life. if it's in you and a part of you please don't give up on it. Work with that relationship. Because people like me need to see. It helped me believe it was possible for me. My city, one of the loves of my life. 210, I believe in you and am rooting for every one of you. Please for me do the same for yourself. 

#cholotears #mural #browndadnetwork#wooodlawngang #bigtings #arte

At one point my daughters wanted to know about the girl herself. Who was she? Why did he give her the most attention? Says Herrera: Women have helped me out a lot, so I needed a girl up there. She's Native Chicana and American, and she represents the current generation. The spike things in purple represent her magic, the seven generations before, and the seven generations after. The crown loosely echoes the Statue of Liberty crown and her hoops are her Chicana culture.

6.  At this point, sitting at my desk the day before The Last Parade will be blessed, officially unveiled, and celebrated, I have to wander back to Sunluna. Herrera hired me to DJ the daytime festivities, another form of that creative mutal aid cycle I was talking about. Passing me another job so that I can pay that energy onwards. 

The drawing stares down at me from behind glass and I still get lost in the world Herrera built for me. He can talk about it better than I can, though. Here’s his IG caption describing what the work means to him:

Sunluna. 12’x18” watercolor and ink. (flyer) Everyday in San Antonio the spirit of the city mixes the sun with salt before he tosses it in the air. That’s his responsibility as a parent to all the green kids. He has his 100% Yanaguana water, he just ate pibil. All the while the moon nurtures the kids and talks to them with sound {I have to add one word here: music}.Ever wonder why they beat the drum? Think about a wave crashing on shore, that’s the moon using water and earth as a drum. That’s how the green ones feel all the way through. And that’s the way she loves her kids. This is a family portrait of the magick that happens everyday in my city, my home. Our city got hurt last week. I was lucky enuff to see my parents, the sun and moon, everyday tho. Some weren’t. It made me hopeful to see us look out for each other. The stories I read and saw play out between you guys gave me strength for my fam. Like water. Like pibil. San Antonio I’m proud of you and I know the parents we share are proud of you too. 

I never wrote an intricate caption for Sunluna like I did for the other posters in the series. We had just emerged from under four (five?) full days of snow that snapped our power and threatened our water, the very resource and luxury I’d often think about and ruminate on while turning on the kitchen tap, or running a warm shower, or brushing my teeth, or washing laundry, or rinsing the dishes. 

I spent so long being temporarily afraid of losing clean flowing water that here I was. almost predictably, with a sad trickle that SAWS warned us needed to be boiled before consumed. We boiled water for three days, stored the cloudy resource in pots and jugs around the kitchen.

I slept huddled under my suddenly-helpful pile of hoarded colchas with the husband and the children, one of whom woke up with her first pulled nerve neck ache of her young life from sleeping like kittens in the crowded queen-sized bed. 

When the lights would turn back on, I’d run to the thermostat and blast the heat, and scurry to the kitchen to cook something in a frenzied flash before the power was off again. The longest we went without a single spurt of electricity was around 24 hours. The lux wool sweaters I’d be thrifting for the fam suddenly saved our lives.

But even after that, we were okay. Later, I realized how it was such lovely disaster as far as natural disasters go…that fabled blanket of pure white frozen raspa ice that covered everything, the nopales, the roof of the chicken coop, and fell in slo mo in cinematic snowglobe sparkles of frosty sugar sprinkles. 

My snow metaphors are frilly, I agree, but consider this was merely the second true snowstorm of my four decades of life, the first being the last winter I lived in Portland, right before Manny died, and I clomped around the neighborhood in awe, and learned how not to slip on icy patches, but Oregon is prepared and Texas was not. That was the difference. 

I’ll always associate Siempre Verde #9, Herrera’s Sunluna watercolor wonderland of ancient fantasy and modern mythology, with that storm. And I’ll always remember how the experience defrosted my heart. 

7.  Rudy Herrera doesn’t do shit alone. His family is like the bear’s peg feet holding him up. There are Easter eggs to the wife and the boy blazing in plain sight in The Last Parade, which is probably the best part. 

Three local loca painters composed his crew of badass artists who went up in the lift and helped him plan, process, and paint the brick: Ana Laura Hernandez @ana.hernanx, Crystal Tamez @crywickedrain2, and Ashleigh Valentine @malaensanquilmas33. 

The crew was, at its core, composed of documentary photographers, @slimithyleary and @canonkrook87, who intentionally and meticulously kept the community connected to the mural progress and process with daily short films, photos, and drone footage that often made my stomach butterfly when the actual scale of the mural, its placement on the historic Kress building, and its imagery pops out all Technicolor tones and tells a story like only Herrera & Co. can tell. 

Herrera is swarmed with good people following each other to who knows where, their hearts lighting the way. 

The Last Parade is only the beginning. 

BIO:

Rudy Marco Herrera is a Native art worker based in his adopted hometown of San Antonio, Texas. His homeland is the desert of El Paso/Juarez, where he grew up in and out of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo. Like so many others before him, he came to Yanaguana/San Antonio to build a better life for his family and plans to die in San Anto, but before he does, he will leave his mark upon the city. To date, he has completed eight commissioned murals that have allowed him to flex his skills and hone his vision. Herrera lives near Woodlawn Lake with the wife, the boy, and the dogs.

BONUS TRACKS:

Love Notes to Rudy from The Last Parade Crew.

Santiago “Slim" Lopez IV:

The Last Parade  means a brighter future for the children and dreamers here in San Antonio, and any travelers that pass by. 

The mural shows that great things are obtainable despite what society tells us. 

We hold our futures in our hands, and the opportunity to do what we love for a living isn't just an inspirational quote on Instagram, it’s actually tangible. This mural and the visual art documentation of it all was a privilege I was given and hold sacred because its proof that some lil brown kids made it happen and didn't let others dictate whether or not it could happen. With my faith in Jesus and faith in each other, nothing is impossible.  

Larry @canonkrook87:

When I got on this project I didn’t think it was gonna be this massive, so I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

But the more and more we got to work it I realize that this was what I’m supposed to be doing.

Rudy and Slim have helped me a lot. This mural really opened my eyes to the bigger picture and twenty years from now I can go back with my son and have those great feelings of these days not only through my memories, but because of all the documentation we captured. 

The Last Parade means a lot to me. I would protect it to the day I die because I see Rudy, Slim, and myself up there on the brick. 

Ana Hernandez:

 
I love Rudy. I would totally donate my kidney to him if he needed it.

We met while volunteering at San Anto Cultural Arts, and he is one of my favorite people to work with. He’s a ride or die kind of artist, a force to be reckoned with. Aside from being talented and innovative in his designs, he has a great sense of humor and a heart of gold. 

I would paint any wall with Rudy, and I look forward to our future collaborations.

(Other crew members' thank you notes coming soon.)

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