RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 03.06.26 CRUZ ORTIZ A LATINO ENTREPENEUR

Cruz Ortiz is a prominent San Antonio-based contemporary artist known for his Chicano-Pop style and his social activism through art. He blends personal South Texas experiences with pop culture, consumer imagery, and political themes. Ortiz’s work features bold screen prints, abstract portraits, dream-like landscapes, murals, videos, sculptures, and public installations using murals and puppet shows to elevate Tejano culture in art history.

Ortiz’s approach to life was shaped as a young boy by his family’s religious commitment to serving the poor in the borderland communities of El Paso and Juarez. To undertake their Jesuit missionary work, Ortiz’s family gave up their home and life in Houston, traveling with their three children in a pickup truck to the border city of El Paso.

The younger Ortiz recalls many visits to Juarez, Mexico, where his family joined the Jesuit missionaries in delivering food and attending to the social needs of those living next to the large urban trash dumps of Juarez, among the poorest families in Mexico. These experiences gave Ortiz a greater understanding and appreciation of people living day by day on the edge of starvation and social deprivation.

Missionary work on the Border was consuming, and ultimately, the Ortiz family moved to Schertz, Texas where they continued working with the Jesuits. The move also enabled young Cruz to start high school in a community just north of San Antonio. Only a handful of Latino kids attended his high school, and Ortiz found it perplexing that the counselors pressed him to enroll in trade-related classes.

Ortiz enrolled in vocational classes, specializing in welding, which he mastered over his four years of high school. When he was not taking those classes, Ortiz expanded his artistic skills by learning printmaking and silkscreening. Numerous high school friends played in Punk-Rock bands, and they asked Ortiz to design and print posters advertising their music gigs. He also silk-screened T-shirts with band images and slogans.

In the early 1990s, Ortiz met Manny Castillo, a drummer at TacoLand, and artist Juan Miguel Ramos. He credits both for supporting his early efforts to become an artist. Ortiz’s teen years had been limited to the small projects of designing and printing posters and T-shirts. Manny Castillo was a musician who loved art, and Juan Miguel Ramos was an emerging artist who played in a band and loved to paint. The three bonded, founding in 1993 the San Anto Cultural Arts, a vulnerable Westside non-profit cultural organization. San Anto’s goals were straightforward–to beautify the Westside with murals. Ortiz painted his first mural, “Educacion,” on the street corner of Chupaderas and Guadalupe.

Ortiz completed his college education at UTSA in 2000 and took a job teaching high school. While at UTSA, his approach to art took on new meaning and purpose following the discovery of Chicano history and Chicano art books in the campus library.

My most recent conversation with artist Cruz Ortiz at his art compound in South San Antonio began with a question about his philosophy of art. He answered, “There are no rules at all with art.” In his art, he sees parallels among struggles in Ireland, Palestine, and South Texas, focusing on public art as an act of education, resistance, and survival. He is a big admirer of the Latin American print movements for their power to disseminate revolutionary imagery, valuing printmaking as both an aesthetic and a political medium.

Ortiz links artistic freedom to the ability to shift fluidly between painting, clay, printmaking, welding, woodcarving, tile, performance, video, and film, insisting his job as an artist is simply “to make,” while history later decides how to read the work. He also acknowledged consistently resisting being boxed solely into Chicano or identity-based categories, even as that history is an important part of his work.

Ortiz’s art transitioned into socio-political art following George Floyd’s murder in 2020. When the Mellon Foundation launched the Monuments Project, a major initiative in direct response to the racial justice uprisings in the U.S., Ortiz found his niche. The goals of the project were to rethink monuments, memorials, and public storytelling spaces in the U.S. In its initial stages, Mellon artist grantees questioned how history was taught in public schools, who was commemorated, who was missing, and how monuments reinforce or challenge white supremacy. In San Antonio, a statue of William Travis, a slaveholder who died at the Alamo, was removed from a downtown park. Cruz painted a portrait of Juan N. Cortina, a South Texas Mexicano rancher who resisted Anglo occupation of South Texas.

Ortiz and other Latino artists celebrated the Mellon Foundation’s support of projects that “reimagine and rebuild commemorative spaces” to tell a richer, more inclusive story of U.S. history. Latino artists know that this is especially difficult in Texas, where legislators have passed laws banning books about race, racism, and civil rights , as well as titles that discuss systemic racism, U.S. racial history, or antiracist ideas, including memoirs and youth and young adult novels centering people of color.

These books often feature teen protagonists or themes of adolescence (identity, friendships, family, sexuality, school, and coming-of-age). In the 2023–24 school year, about half of all banned books in Texas featured characters who represented people of color, and nearly 40% had LGBTQ+ characters. Local librarians say that book bans on stories of migration, race, and ethnic identity directly affect San Antonio’s majority‑Latino student population.

As a serious student of art history, Ortiz took an interest in Paul Klee, the Swiss-German artist whose work in the pre-WWI era is known for its childlike lines, symbolic shapes, and vibrant color harmonies. Studying Klee and other artists working under fascism, Ortiz noticed the grotesque puppets Klee made for his children and a broader pattern of artists like Alexander Calder, Frida Kahlo, and Joaquín Torres, who also made puppets during periods of political oppression. These artists chose to focus on joy and play as a form of resolve rather than protest imagery likely to be censored.

Inspired by Klee and his resistance to fascism, Ortiz’s newest major body of work includes puppets and a marionette theater, which he initially approached with humor but came to see as a serious, historically grounded project. Ortiz reflected on his earlier work painting protest murals and posters—staking a claim to land and community—as important but ultimately not “enough” for him. The puppet and circus-based performances are quieter yet “almost political action,” aligning with traditions such as Luis Valdez’s farmworker theater and Mexican circuses. These performances brought joy and education simultaneously to audiences. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Cesar Chavez’s union organizing drives teamed with the Luis Valdez Teatro Campesino. The Teatro performers created joy followed by a political message–Don’t buy grapes!

Ortiz’s first puppet performance developed almost casually; he built puppets from studio scraps, his chef brother from Austin proposed pairing a dinner with a puppet show, and a small family audience ended up in tears, revealing the emotional power of the format. Drawing inspiration from Calder’s nonverbal circus, Ortiz structured the show as a series of silent circus acts set to corridos, with simple staging, costumes, and repurposed materials, and later adapted the marionette theater for a family day performance at the San Antonio McNay Museum of Art and other institutional settings.

Ortiz discussed a difficult but productive relationship with clay. His early ceramic attempts literally exploded because of impurities in the local clays he collected. Rather than abandon the material, he began harvesting clays from different South Texas rivers—Rio Bravo/Rio Grande near Laredo, the Nueces near Cotulla, and San Antonio-area riverbeds. He uses the clay for ceramic works, but also creates painted works where the distinct clay colors correspond to specific waterways, turning regional geology into a material art map.

Ortiz stresses reading about art history and seeing “real” artworks in person—Van Gogh, Diego Rivera, Klee, Munch, and others—as essential, arguing that artists across time leave “messages” for future artists that can only be unlocked through long study. For Ortiz, this study informs his current choices: using puppetry, corridos, circus, clay, and print to echo historical creative responses to crisis (songs, quilts with coded stitches, pottery, weaving) while addressing contemporary social and political conditions in the United States after treaties and battles that reshaped the Southwest.

In his website biography, Ortiz notes that he “is interested in the exhausting narratives searching for love and the sense of belonging.” He adds, “Most of my works are created with a sense of exigency, only so I can keep up with the ever-evolving ideas and visual manifestos eager to be revealed.” Ortiz has demonstrated that there are no rules–and no boundaries with art–and we marvel at his performance.

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Copyright 2026 by Ricardo Romo. All photo credits as indicated above.