I had been told that Minnesotans were mostly of Norwegian, Irish, German, and Polish descent—to which I remember wondering, but does not the name Minnesota come from a Native American word? I had been told that there were generations of Mexican Americans living in the state since the 1920s, a unique Cuban dining spot called Victor’s 1959 Café, and a famous annual parade to celebrate Cinco de Mayo in the West Side neighborhood of Saint Paul. That was all I knew about Latin culture in my new home.

My first visceral memories of any art in the Twin Cities were the imposing Riverside Plaza buildings on Cedar Avenue (West Bank or Riverside area) and the colossal sculpture Spoonbridge and Cherry at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. But it was across the river, in the West Side neighborhood of Saint Paul, that I first experienced Latin art and culture. There I encountered the District Del Sol business corridor, as it was branded in the late nineties, with its gateway with the Sun, or Where the Sun Meets the River, mounted over the Concord/South Robert Street viaduct.

It was in the late nineties too that I discovered the vibrant images produced by Mexican painter and commercial artist Luis Fitch for the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) while reading La Prensa de Minnesota (2), the oldest Latino newspaper in the state. Here too, I saw listings of galerías de arte (art galleries). I remember visiting ArTrujillo Studio Gallery, Intermedia Arts, and Franklin Art Works.

While visiting these art galleries in the early 2000s, I came across the portraiture work of Mexican photographer Xavier Tavera. One of his notable projects from that period was La Calle, a compilation of portraits of three Latino groups: Cholos, transgender, and Punks, images taken part on the street and part in the studio. I also recall an art project on Lake Street led by Maria Cristina “Tina” Tavera in collaboration with other artists. It consisted of art placed on the windows of businesses, an ambitious street art project, and forerunner of subsequent urban installations.

The monumental Mosaic of the Americas by artist Gustavo Lira García along with Mexican masters and local collaborators located on Minnehaha Avenue and Lake Street in Minneapolis, was impressive to see after its completion in 2001. So was the mural Birth of a Nation by another Mexican artist, Rigel Sauri, on the wall facing Cesar Chavez Street of Boca Chica, a restaurant in the West Side neighborhood of Saint Paul.

I had heard of an artist of Norwegian and Mexican background called Dougie Padilla all through those years, but I would not meet him until much later. I remember seeing one of his paintings and thinking how much it reminded me of the raw and expressive style of French painter Jean Dubuffet. Dougie Padilla, Luis Fitch, Xavier Tavera, and Maria Cristina Tavera were all members of the legendary Minnesota collective Latino Artists Group, aka LAG, founded in 1997. Writer and translator Rico Paul Vallejos and musician and author Roma Calatayud-Stocks (both collaborators in this book) were members as well and served on LAG’s ad-hoc board. Vallejos even took part in the committee meetings that resulted in the “dissolution” of LAG in 2001. The group agreed to continue collaborating informally from that point on. This moment saw the growth of ArTrujillo Studio Gallery. Prior to LAG, many of these artists had met at CreArte, the Chicano Latino arts center and museum founded by painter and educator Armando Gutiérrez G.. For the few years that lasted, the number of local artists associated with LAG grew to nearly one hundred.

One stormy night in the winter of 2004, my first wife invited me to see a friend’s show at Normandale Community College in Bloomington. The exhibit, Forms + Nature, featured the work of Chilean-born American artist Alonso Sierralta. I had never been more intrigued by the work of a sculptor up to that point (maybe only by the sculptures of British artist Andy Goldsworthy). Sierralta’s sculptures, however, had a spatial and material quality of remarkable wit. Sierralta’s work has intrigued me and obsessed me ever since, and in 2011, I made my first video documentation of Sierralta’s biodegradable piece Charcoal Maker’s Hut (Casa del Carbonero) installed at Silverwood Park in the Twin Cities. A year later, I curated a comprehensive exhibit of Sierralta’s work at the Gordon Parks Gallery of Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul.

An image captured by Mexican photographer Selma Fernández Richter titled Horse, Saint Paul, MN (3) had a profound effect on me. Originally taken within the home of a Karen refugee family in Saint Paul in 2012, the image conveyed a universal sense of nostalgia and yearning for home. I rushed to ask the artist to participate in the group show Latino, Art Migration which I curated at the Concordia Gallery of Concordia University Saint Paul in the winter of 2017. I made a case for Horse, Saint Paul, MN to greet the guests upon arrival at the gallery by installing it around the most immediate visible corner. I have been holding tightly onto the memory of this image since then.

It was a great pleasure to find a Venezuelan-born St. Croix Valley-based potter with a studio in Shafer, Minnesota. I was introduced to Guillermo Cuellar by artist and friend Erica Spitzer Rasmussen in 2012. Cuellar’s career spans decades going back to his seminal and prolific time in Venezuela, where he also became an assistant of American craft potter Warren MacKenzie. MacKenzie taught workshops in Venezuela in the early eighties.

In 2017, he and his daughter, artist Alana Cuellar, exhibited a fleet of carefully assembled small pots for another of my curatorial projects, the group exhibit Caravan at Concordia Gallery—a response to the Central American humanitarian migrant crisis. Two years later, Guillermo Cuellar submitted a little mug made on glazed stoneware titled Mug from kiln in Turgua, Estado Miranda, Venezuela, November 18, 1999, for a mobile art exhibit (4) titled Mending that I curated during the COVID-19 pandemic. I learned that the small mug was made and unloaded from his kiln on the day his father died in a car accident.

Chilean-born artist and filmmaker Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo resides and teaches in Northfield. We connected in 2016 as I was looking for a video artist to participate in Latino, Art Migration at Concordia Gallery. I remember having a rich conversation with her on the phone about video art, the projected image, and cinema in general. I was immediately captivated by a Super 8mm, MiniDV short bilingual film called Encuentro that she had made early in her career. The film intermingled romance and politics while building a portrait of desire from a feminine perspective. I became eager to introduce Cornejo Sotelo to other artists in the Twin Cities. On many occasions after that, I would run into her and her husband at Cine Latino annual meetings of the MSP Film Society in Minneapolis.

In April 2019, I attended an exhibit of women and non-binary artists held at the old Swedish Bank building on Payne Avenue in Saint Paul’s East Side. The exhibit was part of the programming of Second Shift Studio Space, the nonprofit residency program founded by activists and artists Kriss Zulkoski and Chris Larson. I was struck by la mexicanidad (Mexicanity) and the cinematic quality of a series of black and white photographs installed in close proximity on the wall. I remember eagerly asking co-curator Maria Cristina Tavera to introduce me to the artist. Martha Gabriela Driessen is a Mexican photographer established in Minneapolis since 1991. Driessen’s images that day confronted me with a uniqueness of the Mexican essence and the everyday life of Mexican people I had not experienced before. All her images were taken in Mexico. A particular aspect of her candid photography was the occasional eye contact by some of the people in the shots. I was mesmerized.

It was through Martha Driessen that I became aware of the work of Cuban American artist Carmen Gutiérrez-Bolger. A self-defined Spanglish artist, she and her mother had fled Castro's regime and settled in southern Florida in 1962. The year before, her father left Cuba after being sent to prison by Fidel for three months. He was exiled in Spain. Gutiérrez-Bolger has been living in Minnesota permanently since 1978. Her personal story and iconography go hand in hand. Her images are astonishing revelations of her two identities. A recent painting titled Perspectives incorporates grommets and hemp thread to a vista of the sea and a sandy piece of land. There is something representable but also unrepresentable that haunts me about this and her other pieces. It is a special honor to have her work and testimonial included in this book.

Alondra Marisol Garza was born in Miguel Alemán, Tamaulipas, Mexico, which borders Roma, Texas, and came to Minnesota for her MFA degree at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2018. Her last year of graduate school coincided with the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic and social unrest in the Twin Cities. During that time, I witnessed the artist submerge herself in an exciting and prolific experimentation of art forms and mediums. Besides paintings, Garza experimented widely and remarkably with photography and installation. Inspired by her active practice, I asked Garza to submit a piece for the mobile exhibit Mending, a traveling art show featuring works dealing with anxiety derived from the pandemic and death of George Floyd. For the occasion, Garza submitted an oil-on-oiled paper work titled Anxious, an image embedding a sense of anxiety and fear as felt by many in 2020.

1. Ethnonyms used back then.
2. All editions of La Prensa de Minnesota are available as microfilms at the Gale Family Library of the Minnesota Historical Society.
3. Now in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
4. The Mobile Art Gallery belongs to the nonprofit community organization ArtReach St. Croix.

“Introduction,” Latin Art in Minnesota: Conversations and What’s Next, Afton Press, 2023.