Artist, workforce equity activist. Latino bilingüe. Founder, Resilient Coders. History nerd.
Training people of color for high growth careers as software engineers, and connecting them with jobs. We believe in social justice through economic empowerment.
A boy who loves drawing superheroes doesn't come out of Mexico City unchanged. Looming over the city of my family are the murals of Siqueiros, Orozco, and Rivera -- to my eyes, basically elaborate illustrations of the heroes from the stories my parents would tell me: Juan Escutia, wrapping himself in the flag and leaping to his death over the side of the castle of Chapultepec, rather than surrendering it to the invading Americans. Zapata and Villa, always together, rifles ready. Cuauhtémoc, with his feet held over fire. Porfirio Díaz and his cientificos. And the greatest hero of every mural, el pueblo.
I grew up with an understanding that art and history are two aspects of the same discipline; that artists are keepers of our collective memory, who have a gift for telling old stories with contemporary language. In the work that most resonates with me, history is a lens through which we reflect on the present. Work that is truly future-facing is historically conscious.
Just as important as the subject matter is the medium. It matters how art is consumed, and who consumes it.
This is an ongoing project to present historical heroes in a visual vocabulary inspired largely by comic book culture, which matters because myth-making is how we envision and enforce our social order.
It’s an expression of how we see ourselves, idealized. And “ideal” is a loaded term here: values interspersed with racial, gender, and economic dimensions. You can’t put pen to paper and draw a comic book hero hero without drawing boundaries around a social ideal. This is what Paulo Freire would call a matter of cultural invasion or cultural synthesis. Who is in the cape? Whose culture does this hero represent? And who is outside that demarcation, looking in?
My parents presented me with plenty of history's Latinx heroes, tropes, and concerns, when I was a kid. And I reacted by daydreaming and drawing. I like to think of myself as continuing that tradition.
The names of the following pieces are as follows: El Martirio de Rodolfo Walsh. In town they speak with Righteous Fire. Ricardo Flores Magon.