Art is just another way to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month.
For artists like SQRC resident Gabino Madera, creativity comes as a form of connecting the dots with his roots by sketching out a collage of Mexican culture and Chicano art that blends the past with the present of what he considers his culture.
This artist created a drawing dedicated to his father, Gabino Madera. The piece showed the late iconic Mexican singer and movie star Vicente Fernandez, “El Charro de Gran Titan,” from Jalisco, Mexico, the home of the artist’s father. In the center, a big “M” highlighted his family name’s initial. The work showed a revolutionary woman smoking a cigarette. During the era of the Mexican Revolution, these women were affectionately known as “Anitas.”
According to Madera, people fail to realize that not only men fought in the revolution, but that women willingly risked their lives for freedom.
“Anitas make me think of my own mother because she is a strong, hard worker, [an] independent woman,” said Madera. “My mother has been the matriarch of our family and has always made sure that we have food on the table.”
For the proud first-generation Mexican-American, art has not only been a tool to function inside of prison walls, but it has also helped him embrace his roots and the cultural ways he continued to discover.
Madera has been drawing since he was a child. He acknowledged that he put his gang lifestyle first instead of putting his art first. “I could of had got a scholarship to pursue a degree in arts.”
Madera said he never named his pieces because he wanted viewers to come up with their own ideas of meanings.
Going deep into the Mexican Revolution, the infamous and revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata held his revolver in one hand while he subjugated a rival solider from the Mexican civil war. A charra — a cowgirl — awaited the return of her loved one.
The artist said the piece meant to convey that “we are basically Zapata, we’re fighting our own struggles against incarceration.
Instead of bullets, our bullets is education, knowledge, and trying to survive so that we can get back to our loved ones back home.”
Madera said as an artist, he felt a responsibility to educate recent generations about a cultural era that seemed to have faded away in the lives of modern Mexican-American society. “Education is power,” he said.
Madera also has a portrait of a young man surrounded by a ferocious jaguar in front of a temple in which sacrifices took place. It showed an Aztec female warrior, displaying her feathers and a spear, ready for the battle of life and death, and a symbol representing the internal struggles of life with which the Aztecs identified.
One cannot ignore the style of this artist who continued to expand his creativity with a bit of humor. We have a Minion dressed up as a young man wearing a brown bandana “Raza Unida,” a bundle shirt, jeans, and Chuck Taylors [shoes]. The picture shows the subject overshadowed by the infamous San Quentin watchtower, projecting a future of incarceration.
According to the artist, incarceration happens if one could not take life seriously, if one would not think about the consequences of actions and the way they affect the future.
