SAN ANTO ART JOURNAL

It has been fifteen years after Manny Castillo was buried at San Fernando #3 in a casket hand painted to resemble a mural by the likes of Adriana Garcia, Rubio, Adan Hernandez, and a crew of mourners like me. 

These years later, I can declare that, like Manny, San Antonio is the foundation of my own practice: a beautiful, flawed muse whose culture and history is inspiration for a vast array of interdisciplinary artists, myself included. 

Like me, most of my colleagues and camaradas (Manny’s word) are also all of the above and there is no separation between their creative, spiritual, and scholarly work. Many of us are of Mexican descent, with deep roots in South Texas, and we shapeshift when asked to check off boxes to identify ourselves. HISPANIC does not cut it. LATINO tampoco. CHICANO is fine. XICANA, getting there. TEJANA, yes, for me, for now.

My early years on the art scene at Blue Star, adjacent art hubs, dive bars and icehouses introduced me to that cliché, yet getting rarer, San Anto stereotype: the first question after being introduced to a San Antonian used to be where did you go to high school  but demographics have shifted over time and the question is now more obtrusive and obnoxious: where do you work?

I have found community many times over in this city, usually in spaces that center Mexican-American music, Chicano art, Xicana scholarly activism, and Tejana spirituality and style. 

Hispanic Heritage month, while it gives some of us institutional gigs, feels more like a bank holiday than a sincere expression of cultural pride. 

Now I find myself on self-imposed "assignments,"  finding it my duty and honor to keep abreast of local art openings and performances, and when my family’s schedule allows it, I take myself on solita dates to see work that startles my soul and makes me stand taller in my thrifted fits. 

I paint my eyes lizard green, bluebonnet azul, nightclub black. I pack my bag with a notebook and poke a sharpened pencil in my peinado, ready to write if the feeling hits. 

When I heard that local art institutions deemed August 2024 XICANX MONTH, I wondered about the remaining 11 months of the year. August has been a smorgasbord of Mexican-America creativity in San Antonio. While the label XICANX and its oft-maligned primo, LATINX, seek to unite Spanish speaking people of the Americas and de-center gender, it’s also bait that riles people up in a tizzy of distraction, or else, I have seen, it’s an umbrella term to hide behind when work needs something to prop itself upon. 

While mainstream local arts institutions and cultural orgs promoted XICANX month by featuring Chicano artists or highlighting their track record as proponents of Mexican-American art, I went about my Tejana business and decided to write about August 2024, Bonnie’s version, to document what I saw in August, what I loved, and why I love this city. 

Time is precious and the world is in shambles, but my August was spent in the midst of an onda of creative cultural renaissance in San Anto—our Chicano antepasados paved the driveways and cleaned the kitchens and planted the crops and picked them and waited tables and made música and passed down stories and spoke in a new, hybrid, melodical language that to many of us just sounds like LOVE. 

It was, it is, it will be. 

When a group deems August XICANX month I wonder what that means to the Chicanos down the street, the Hispanics up the block, the Latinos in the migrant processing center one short mile from where I live, the Mexican Nationals at the mall, the Mexican/Americans like Emma Tenayuca, Ram Ayala, Esteban Jordan, my welita la maestra, and La Virgen de San Juan on my walls. 

If there is a 2nd annual observation of Xicanx month I hope they change the name. And then change it again. Because words are not flags. You can’t wave them and pledge allegiance. Labels are temporary. Our culture, if we get our shit together and work harder, is forever. 

Marisela Barrera’s Lechuza Guide to the Lone Star State is her latest one-woman production, this time featuring two músicos, Joe Reyes and Odie of Buttercup, who accompany her on five original songs. The third incarnation of this WIP one-act kicked off August at Jump Start Theater, located on Fredericksburg and Ashby, pero we remember when it occupied what is now Brick at Blue Star.

I try to never miss a Barrera production. She incarnates mythical figures of local lore in a blend of teatro-cabaret-dramedy-darkside-folk-urban-leyenda testimonios. Her stage presence is always magnetic, and with or without masks/prosthetics, she embodies local mythical figures like San Anto’s Donkey Lady, who hosted her own talk show after Barrera experimented with a phone line during the pandemic.

Funded in part by an Individual Artist Grant from the City of San Antonio Department of Arts and Culture, Barrera steps into a long line of multi-faceted theatrical chanteuses like Sally Bowles, Hedwig, and Polly Jean Harvey, with a dash of Astrid Hadad. Barrera has a knack for embodying misunderstood, otherworldly femme characters who snarl, whisper, and speak of what is “in-between earth and sky, entre secretos.” On her last night in human form, Lechuza tells us what lies betwixt loves and truth and lies. 

Barrera is best when her otherworldly alter-ego is a little bit her—how adeptly she utilizes her physicality, how she can bust out a cute little cartwheel or deftly toss a baton into the rafters and catch it, with ease, so I loved seeing Lechuza twirl a broom with mesmerizing tosses and catches. Barrera was a twirler back in the day, and it’s refreshing to see her practice her skills and embed her talents within performances-- so often our childhood dreams get buried like secrets of who we used to be. 

Barrera is, like Lechuza, a shapeshifter. She struts upon the stage barefoot in her trademark black jumpsuit and slowly molts layers of exquisite feathered capes by costumier Fabian Alejandro Diaz which she sheds in layers to eventually reveal a breastplate handcut by Lechuza set-designer Linda Monsivais Hernández. The metal-feathers, cut from Olde English “800” and Four Loko cans, make me wonder how Lechuza might appear in her next act, if Barrera decides to write it, maybe she transforms technologically and is made of metal scraps.

Either way, the choice of cans add to Lechuza aesthetics. Linda tells us later that when the two particular canned beverages are combined it’s known as a Sidewalk Slammer, a term she learned from train hoppers that describes how badly that combo can fuck one up. 

Monsivais Hernández, also a shapeshifter of mediums and form, made the necklace, designed the poster art, and built the set for Lechuza, cut out from cardboard she sourced from Botello corner store painted with acrylic over the course of several nights to map a scene of iconic establishments like Lerma’s, El Camaroncito, and of course, Saluté International Bar. 

The rasquache feel of the sets juxtaposed with the projected AI images interspersed through the show onto Linda’s handpainted wall map of the TX-MX border. While I can see how AI art often seems “off” which lends to the spooky onda of la lechuza lore, I found myself distracted by having to THINK about AI while examining the images. I’d rather fixate on Barrera herself or zone out to the smooth Western musical backbone of this Lechuza world—Odie and Reyes, fixtures of the local music scene, held it down so Barrera could belt out, croon, and croak out several original songs. Homegirl can sing, so that was another cool discovery of the night. 

The one-act was illuminated eerily, veladoras glowed from various points onstage, which added a familiar, almost cloying fragrance to the room. That Lechuza would light her ALL her velas on her last night on earth makes sense though. 

During the final scene a smoke machine smogged out the small theater with fog denser than the dive bars before the City banned cigs in public spaces. 

I had a couple moments of magic that night. Once, during audience Q&A they asked Lechuza how to manifest their dreams and she said to take a “real pen and paper” and write it down, and I, in fact, had a pen in my hand and paper on my lap, so I laughed. 

Lechuza laments that she would miss “almost dying every night” after shedding her human form, which I know a lot of us who frequented places like Lerma’s, Saluté, icehouses, and secret spots can relate—Lechuza knows the dark side of the night when last call comes much too early or way too late. 

She quotes Julian of Norwich, another instance of synchronicity for me, whose prayer has long been a mantra for my mom and me to help us navigate troubling times, and bookend, as Barrera expresses, the “stillness between two waves.” 

We witness Lechuza as she bids adieu to her human form, and I leave feeling that all shall be well because these legendary-folk-historia-urban-myths-of-our-magical reality really do protect us from necios. 

Barrera’s  “Lechuza Doña” song is an instant classic, Joe and Odie providing the owl-diva with background hoots that sound like they’re crooning whooooo and when the play was over, cast and crew took their bow to an audience ¾ standing, I knew the answer to their who, who, who:

It's me. It’s you. 

BAJO LA SAL is a tour de force collaboration between friends who both feel an urgency, like many artists of Mexican-de-San-Antonio decent, to tell our stories and express our creativity in a city dubiously developing and changing into a homogeneous mono-culture, but not if we keep focused and creative. 

That spark of defiance is reflected in the scale of the project: featuring a total of 30 local artists, activists, educators, and underground heroes, the dual portraits captured two side of each subject, Rodriguez’s “real” photographs and De La Tierra’s “surreal” paintings. 

Walk around the gallery is like walking around downtown SA in that way that the faces you encounter often feel…familiar. The subjects of Bajo la Sal are facets of the city that oftentimes remain unseen by the mainstream culture, so Rodriguez and De La Tierra, in this relatively early stage in their work are making a point of documenting voices whose value isn’t necessarily determined by societal (financial) goal posts. 

Rodriguez’s photographs capture the light in the subjects’ eyes, and with Chihuly’s Fiesta Tower crowning the jewelbox gallery from above, Bajo la Sal places these people and their stories in the grand scheme of things. 

San Antonio has always had its legends whose lives and work shape the city, even from the margins, and Bajo la Sal preserves these particular stories for a future where the underground gets to shine in color and light, while acknowledging the mistakes and the shadows. 

The exhibition is only the beginning, and De La Tierra and Rodriguez are publishing a book version of Bajo la Sal containing the portraits and corresponding interviews that further archive (preserve) the stories of San Antonio folk from all walks of life and all sides of town. The book will live on once the portraits come down, and the archives are richer for these preservations.

 c/s

Closing reception is September 14, from 12 PM – 4 PM with an artist talk and book release!

Westside San Anto muralist and painter Jose Cosme presented Un Poquito de Todo at Dock Space Gallery (AUG 10 – AUGUST 28), which is his first solo show in a handful of years. The title translates to “a little bit of everything” and is an array of medium and form. An alum of San Anto Cultural Arts, Centro Cultural Aztlan, Gallista Gallery, and the 1906 S. Flores art district, Jose Cosme’s roots span the streets of the Westside, all the way to his abuela’s ranchito in Puerto Rico, and back again. 

Cosme credits art, spirituality, and the guidance of his grandfather for saving his soul, and is eternally blessed for the guidance and mentorships of an all-star cast of artists whose work reflects facets of collaborations with mentors:  raulrsalinas, Joe Lopez, Raul Valdez, Mary Agnes Rodriguez, Manny Castillo, Andy Benavides--among many others. 

In his quest to document Westside landmarks and community, which he translates into paintings, we are given a double lens of one man’s particular visions of what he sees as beautiful, what is worth documenting, and once documented, re-processed as paint on canvas. 

Cosme’s work preserves parts of a San Antonio on the verge of fading, blurring, and this layering of histories on top of histories translates into paintings, collage, found art, sculpture, glass mosaic, and assemblage.

While the Westside is the clearly the heart of Cosme’s map of influence, the man is his own muse. The outline of his shaved skull appears as a motif and places the artist himself in the context of time (now) and place (San Antonio) in a way that claims no disconnect between life and art. 

Two works hold down the exhibition at the entrance of the gallery, IYKYK, a painting greets us with a taunt whose letters stand for “if you know you know,” in case you didn’t know, and is a study of a Mexican Talavera tile, greens and blues and yellow symmetrical like a mandala reminding us of times and crafts long lost. 

To know that particular tile design, you have to know how young Cosme frequented Las Palmas shopping center back in the day, and found community at Centro Cultural Aztlan there, where he stood in line alongside familias at Luby’s before they closed it, where the layers of time were evident to young Cosme who noticed the old tilework and admired the fading adornments of old San Quilmas. 

The Talavera tradition, over the centuries, is all but non-existent in modern San Anto, and Cosme’s work is a meditation on the layers of time that keep stacking up to create culture in San Anto. The tile painting is pretty, light, and strikes a chord of familiarity in me, but I didn’t come up at Las Palmas in the 90s in that precarious pre-internet era where Cosme and others were excavating artifacts and digging through scraps to FIND OURSELVES in the city. 

I only know what the tile references because Cosme told me. As a culture bearer, his art remembers and amplifies, yes, but it is bound to keep its secrets too. There is no artist statement to spell it out for us, and when I think about it, it’s okay that everything is not for everyone.

In the historic Westside of San Anto, the history and culture run deep, the land itself is scarred, and the street art shows communicates. Murals teach and remember. Tags declare and claim. Placazos identify and exclaim. 

Adapt, a mixed media sculpture set upon a pedestal, accompanies IYKYK. A Cosme-shaped figure is cut from yellow reflective street sign scored long ago from Gallista legend Joe Ramos (QEPD, iykyk). The artist’s head and shoulders become an urban sign post, his face etched on in marker, and where his heart would be is a car stereo complete with cassette tape adaptor poking out. This is another instance of “you had to be there,” an archaic piece of music technology whereby we could play CDs in a vehicle with a tape deck. 

The stereo wires lead down to nowhere, I discovered, but three grand feathers spring from the man’s shoulders, which serve to connect a figure composed of street and music to, I think, heaven above. 

I like how IYKYK and Adapt work together, like Cosme’s work in genral, to shine light on the various battles and blessings of being from the Westside. 

There is a lot of work in Un Poquito de Todo: a 2Pac portrait that is reminiscent of religious art, the hallowed rapper’s skin painted in a Renaissance-glowy reverence style. A towering glass mosaic Virgen de Guadalupe that would feel perfectly at home at the historic Guadalupe Church-- I imagine the artist arranging pedacitos de vidrio, forming Lupe’s mantilla with shimmering verde, and I appreciate how her face shows sorrow in broken glass, shattered, but put together again by a devout man’s hands. 

The heart of exhibition, for me, are the twin serpent cutouts, salvaged artifacts from Cosme-collaborator y camarada, Mary Agnes Rodriguez’s mural at Herbolaria La India, 2427 W. Commerce St., completed in 2004. Water damage over the years led to a restoration by San Anto Cultural Arts in 2017, and Cosme purchased the serpents from the org when they were replaced. 

True to the nature of SACA projects, the serpientes are unfinished for a reason, and Cosme set up glass cutting tools, glue, and pre-cut glass shapes that I assume, incorrectly, is all for show, a creative mise en scene. Even better, it was for us to participate in the process, which people seemed to love, and it was cool to see kids work on the mosaic opening night. 

My art show partner and fellow connoisseur of iykyk details, slang, found objects, hidden stories, Eagle Pass-to-San Anto artist Linda Monsivais Hernandez, asked about the box propping up Adapt, and we were delighted when Cosme opened it to reveal a baby pair of black Chuck Taylors. We admire the teeny relics of fatherhood knowing that if we had not asked about the box, we would have never known what was inside. 

If you don’t know, ask, could be a new tagline, and after tonight, I feel like I know un poquito más about one artist's Westside story. 

Hands down, the highlight of my AWP occurred at the edge of the San Antonio River on the last day of the conference, 

A Read In/Mitote had been organized by Dignidad Literaria, a group formed in the aftermath of the American Dirt fiasco, where I planned to read from Bodies of Agua, my unwieldy essay collection that centers on my wild trailblazer trendsetter mad genius manic depressed ageless extraterrestrial beautful abuela who had died exactly one year before on April Fool's Day, the same day I arrived back in SA from PDX after attending peripheral events of AWP 2019. 

This year the conference was happening in my homeland, in my home town of San Antonio, but a deadly virus put a kink in the plans. 

I had a couple of readings canceled due to the encroaching pandemic, but little twists of fate led Helena Maria Viramontes, keynote speaker and patron saint of Chicana lit, to inhabit the same circle I occupied  (we chose the spot closest to the river, or course) and fate made sure that when my turn to read came, it was right after Viramontes herself, no pressure. 

Viramontes listened as I read with her full attention, and said “no,no, keep reading,” when I had finished the carefully timed two pages, and I looked at her like, really? And she looked at me like, yes! 

So I did, and when I was done, she (Viramontes!) offered me (Cisneros!) instant feedback, gave me her beatific blessing that I must keep at it. 

She said that my grandma’s stories were now my stories. And now it was my job to tell them. 

Right there, by our once-wild Yanaguana waters, tamed and re-branded The River Walk so long ago in hopes that visitors and conferences such as AWP would choose San Antonio, Viramontes gave me permission to accept my inheritance and encouraged me to spend it how I see fit. 

She even bought a copy of Grunge Tejana, my zine based on "The Ana Files," my only mainstream publication and to be honest, the only essay I've sent out finished into the world. 

She even asked me to sign it, so I did: "Querida Helena…"

…the night before after her electrifying keynote, she had signed my copy of The Moths “con mucho cariño.” The well-worn book, y'all know the one, the early edition with the iconic “La Butterfly” painting by John Valadez on the cover. That iconic cover art that no longer features, I was quick to notice, on the new editions they were selling that night. But why?

I remember being in my first Chican@ Lit class ever, 19 years old, at University of the Incarnate Word in the 90s. I bought that book with a beautiful chola on the cover and thought: wowwww, finally, a book for us.

So when Viramontes moved on to the next reading (small groups read simultaneously and rotated at cues given by DJ De La O), I had to take a moment to compose myself. There was no where to go after that, honestly. It was only me and the river for a moment. 

On the edges of the event, a group of city maintenance workers were standing by, awaiting their cue to get to work and clean up after the reading. 

One man broke from the group and began to approach me. His hair was gray, his eyes were twinkly, and the name Jimmy was embroidered on his shirt pocket. 

He asked me what I selling, so I showed him my zine. 

“I want one. How much?” he didn't hesitate.

“Ten, but I’ll just give it to you,” I replied.

“Nah, nah, nah, I’m gonna buy it, mi’ja,” he said in that unmistakable, irreplaceable, highly loveable San Anto style that can only be described as home. 

He produced a ten from his wallet, and we both exchanged a flicker of happiness, and he didn’t miss a beat: “Now sign it.”

So I did: “Dear Jimmy...”

Helena Maria Viramontes and Jimmy bought my zine within minutes of each other, right there by the river with the wind acting all rowdy, teasing me that it just might flail my skirt up like a sail, right there with the bright barges floating tourists through the downtown river route, right there with all those writers reading to each other on colchas and the sun setting and the conference over…right at the precipice of a global pandemic. 

I’ll probably never see either of them again, but this memory is magic--the kind of gift that I can only define as San Antonian in nature