Bio:
I started my career as an artist upon moving to San Francisco in 1992. Having discovered Mission Grafica at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, I started experimenting with silkscreen printing. In 1993 a group of mostly exiled artists and political refugees invited me to participate in a collaborative project celebrating 500 Years of Resistance with my piece La lluvia, (The Rain).

My work is often political, frequently dealing with cultural identity, the immigrant experience, language and war. My best-known work is The California Lottery. It was the first part of a body of work inspired by the Mexican Lottery and was in response to the anti immigrant Proposition 187 introduced in 1994. This silkscreen print was conceived as a temporary public art for Art in Market Street Project. It was my opportunity to contest the rising xenophobia in California and this piece also deals with language using “Spanglish” texts.

Over the past five years I have been working with images of war. It began with inspiration from a poem by Margot Pepper, entitled Sending the Troops, which I illustrated. This poem is an impassioned letter from a young Latino soldier who questions his involvement in a war waged against people just like him. I choose images of G.I. Joe toys rather than real soldiers as a comment on the sad fact that, so often, it’s our young boys who are trained to fight in armies before coming of age -The Game of War. Later, I did my Invisible War piece consisting of the toy soldier printed with white ink on white paper.

Currently, I am working with my own experiences and memories of war. The images I am developing deal specifically with the highly controversial La Toma del Palacio de Justicia (The Take of the Palace of Justice) in Bogotá, Colombia in 1986 where my brother was one of the many Desaparecidos (The Disappeared) and was tragically killed.