Biography
The first seven years of my life were spent in a remote, rural region known as Tierra Caliente in Michoacán, Mexico. I recall no running water and no electricity. Our immediate and extended family lived in Apatzingán, the nearest bona fide town. From there, my family and I emigrated to Los Angeles in 1975. In many ways, it felt like traveling from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, given the rudimentary conditions to which we were accustomed. That early displacement, leaving one land for another and having to constantly redefine what it means to be a human being, a man, and a part of a community, remains central to my work. I am drawn to narratives and vignettes about the seemingly discarded moments that shape our culture. I believe these discounted moments harbor consequence, and in isolating them, I endeavor to stimulate reflection.
During my formative years, our family lived in Wilmington, California, in an old Spanish-styled apartment building we nicknamed “The Standing Dead.” I consider Wilmington my hometown. Our small community comprised several cultures. Some were welcoming, others indifferent or openly hostile to our presence. A nearby Boys Club of America became a sanctuary where I could doodle, read, and play billiards. It was there that my creative path began. In time, my attraction to drawing became transformative.
My practice is grounded in highly technical figurative image-making across drawing, painting, and printmaking. Creating a new piece is labor- and time-intensive and can require hundreds of hours. In a culture saturated with convincing images, I treat draftsmanship as provenance. The surface is a record of time, choice, and accountability. To my mind, an artist’s mark carries more significance than a fingerprint or a signature. It is one of the building blocks of artistic DNA. It must be etched with purpose and commitment. It matters not if the mark is smudged, dragged, pushed, erased, or redrawn. If that is the imprint, so be it. Think of the act as a tattoo that impregnates the surface. Attempt to remove it and it will resist.
As with other artists, my work contains autobiographical elements. I frequently explore masculinity as an inherited code, a performance shaped by pride, silence, expectation, and conduct. I return to the public and private spheres of manhood through the lives of men I have known. The rooster appears often as metaphor and symbol for valor, machismo, and patriarchy. It is a beautiful, regal, and common creature whose posture is meant to convince an opponent of its wisdom. Yet it is also fierce, driven by a primal instinct to fight until its enemy is dispatched. I have found no definitive answers. I seek to record and interpret a lifetime of observation.
Alongside this inquiry, I build Xicanoland, an alternative history that functions as a counter-archive. Where official narratives omit, flatten, or erase, I invent to restore complexity. Works such as The Chicano Moon Landing of 1968 and The Age of Heroes use speculative history to propose a cultural record that is both imagined and necessary. My aim is not escape, but presence. Narrative becomes resistance, and the work becomes a document of what we carry forward.