Ofrenda by Isaac Pelayo, mixed media, 2019 A TRIBUTE IN HONOR OF THE 10TH ANNUAL EL VELORIO DAY OF THE DEAD FIESTA By L.N. Amoratto It’s all about the ofrenda , you know, the trunk-load of plywood cut into uniform shapes. Pelayo has it down. You give an army of artists what passes for a universal canvas that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and obligates everyone to work with the same piece of wood shaped into a cross or lucha libre mask or something else he’ll dream up soon and which will allow him to include pretty damn near 100 artists in an exhibition which will grace the walls of the Plaza de la Raza Boathouse Gallery at Lincoln Park. And all 100 of them, well, most of them, will be asked to try and sell ten tickets. Few will succeed.  They will, instead, give the tickets away and pay for them out of pocket. A substantial portion of the money goes to keeping the lights on at Plaza de la Raza, and the look of worry off of director María Jimenez’ face, because you wouldn’...

A Sacred Journey , Fernando Barragán 2008, exterior wall, Sacred Heart Elementary       By Abel M. Salas Ernesto Quintero entered the world a year-and-a-half behind his brother Juan. Of the six children born to Micaela and Roberto Quintero, they were the nearest in age. “Growing up, we did everything together,” says Quintero, an independent filmmaker from Lincoln Heights, the cornerstone East Side community his family has called home since 1966. “We played on the same [Little League] baseball team… Pop Warner football… basketball…  we  were inseparable.” There, nestled below Flat Top, Montecito Heights and Elephant Hill—hilltop vantage points the pair of brothers explored as a duo—the Quintero family grew and prospered in the wake of the Chicano Movement and the fervent tide of cultural arts expression it spawned. As a result, the brothers would come of age in an era and an environment that validated their heritage and their identity even as their ...

Freeway Man and His Sack s, Mixed Media, 6' x 6,' collection of Cheech Marin. by Abel M. Salas David Flury is a Chicano artist. He will say so himself. He won’t say much about the early years he spent attached to a life on the streets of South Central. He will only acknowledge that it was based on loyalty to others. And it was what he did to survive during a time when he and his contemporaries felt compelled to prove they were beyond hope, beyond fear and capable of conducting themselves with no remorse. It is not something he cares to uphold as virtuous or worthwhile. He could have, like many of those he grew up with, been a less than memorable casualty or a permanent resident in one of the state’s penal institutions. His father, he says, was from the deep South and white. “But my mother was from Guatemala,” he shares in a comfortable office at the Goodwill Industries complex in Lincoln Heights where he has worked part-time for some 14 years. The trajectory of his ...