Marta Sancez, “Men working on the railroad”. Courtesy of the artist.
Marta Sánchez’s train artwork is presently included in an exhibition organized by the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. The exhibit documents how Mexican and Mexican American railroad workers helped build Chicago’s rail system and is titled Rieles y Raíces, which translates to Rails and Roots. The show features multiple artists and traces more than a century of railroad labor across Chicago and the Midwest, from the 1800s through the present day. Her print, “Men working on the Track,” at the Chicago show, follows the social and cultural traditions of Mexican and Chicano/an Art illuminating the contribution of ordinary workers.
Marta Sanchez, Train yard series. Courtesy of the artist.
A professional artist for the past four decades, Sánchez has created artwork inspired by traditional Mexican folk art expressions. Her art is also deeply influenced by her Catholic Latino upbringing and Mexican folk art in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas. Sánchez uses spiritual and cultural images to honor everyday people, such as railroad workers. Her vibrant works often address themes of identity, migration, family memory, and social justice. Two of her new works, “Thanksgiving on Seguin Street” and “Abuelita Señora Blanca,” have been recently acquired by The Cheech Museum in Riverside, California.
Sánchez’s art journey began at an early age when she taught herself to draw. Her appreciation and understanding of art grew as she ventured downtown by herself on the city bus to browse through the art bookshelves of the San Antonio Public Library. As a teenager, she attended Fox Tech High School, where she excelled in Commercial Art classes. She took an interest in photo-realism and also learned drawing.
Following high school graduation, Sánchez enrolled in the art program at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, where she received partial scholarship assistance. After two years, she transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, and she majored in Fine Arts. During her years in Austin, she worked part-time as a waitress at the famed Cisco’s Bakery on 6th Street on the Eastside of the city, which reinforced her Chicana cultural roots.
Marta Sanchez. San Antonio, Texas. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
To find her voice as an artist, Sánchez gained inspiration from Austin’s many cultural events, exhibitions, plays, and jazz sessions. The Texas capital city also supported the emergence of local Chicano artists Raul Valdez, Luis Guerra, and Jose Trevino during the early 1980s. Sánchez wrote: “My work slowly turned from being purely artistic to becoming art that served a purpose as I evolved from being a student to an artist, to a Chicana artist.”
Marta Sanchez, “Retablo for the Women of Juarez”. Courtesy of the artist.
During her years at UT Austin, she collaborated with several art lovers and patrons. Sylvia Orozco of MexiArte and Cynthia and Libby Perez of La Pena Art helped her introduce Chicano art to a larger audience. The Perez sisters moved to Austin from San Antonio to attend the University of Texas. In 1981, they opened a restaurant, Las Manitas on Congress Avenue, where they excelled in serving Mexican food and exhibiting Chicano art. Sánchez had several of her artworks shown at Las Manitas. Three years later, Sylvia Orozco and Sam Coronado of the UT Austin Fine Arts Department teamed up to open the Mexican American art center Mexic-Arte near Las Manitas.
Sánchez developed as an artist while at UT Austin, but decided by her senior year in college to pursue a graduate degree that would also prepare her as an art educator. In 1982, she earned a BFA in Painting from the University of Texas at Austin. The following year, she enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at Temple University in Philadelphia. At Temple University, Sánchez took the opportunity to participate in the university’s education abroad program in Italy. In Italy, she visited the ancient site of Pompei. There she studied the Roman Retablos–art on flat tin plates, an ancient process similar to the later era of retablos found in Catholic churches throughout Mexico.
Marta Sánchez, “Braceros.” Courtesy of the artist.
As a result of growing up in San Antonio, Sánchez has been fascinated with retablos and railroads. Her family lived a few blocks from the large train yards of San Antonio’s Eastside, and she often watched trains come and go from her family’s porch. As a child, she also admired the train track patterns and the hundreds of trains gathered at the railyards daily. “There I would draw the landscape full of trains and wonder about their departures and arrivals.”
Marta Sanchez, Train series. Courtesy of the artist.
The railroads came to San Antonio 120 years before any artist took an interest in them. Sanchez considered the railroad key to San Antonio’s early economic development. Trains brought immigrants and manufactured goods to the city and made the shipment of economic resources such as cattle and agricultural products possible. Moreover, Mexican workers helped build the railroad lines and depended on the trains for moving to and from San Antonio to harvest crops in the Midwestern states and California, Oregon, and Washington.
Marta Sanchez, “Cry Uvalde”. Courtesy of the artist.
Sánchez approaches her art about trains with the idea of sharing art and history. She has been painting and teaching art in Pennsylvania for the past 30 years, but Sánchez remains deeply committed to her Texas roots. She wrote: “Regardless of where I am living, I will always be the Chicana from San Antonio, Texas.”
El Jardín, en memoria de mi abuelita la Señora Blanca Estela. oil and enamel on aluminum. Gift to the Cheech Museum by Harriett and Ricardo Romo.
Although she remains a very accomplished artist, Sánchez also earns a living as a museum teacher at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and as an art instructor at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She has taught extensively—over seventeen years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and currently at St. Joseph’s University, Springside-Chestnut Hill Academy, and the Woodmere Art Museum. She also serves on the board of The Print Center in Philadelphia and works with the Brandywine Workshop and Archive, a major Philadelphia print-making institution.
Marta Sanchez, Virgin Guadalupe. Courtesy of the National Museum of Mexican Art.
Sánchez has many current projects, including creating an egg cookbook based on cascarones, colorful painted eggshells filled with confetti that are popular at Easter and Fiesta celebrations in San Antonio and cities with large Latino populations. A longtime community arts advocate, she co-founded Cascarones por La Vida, a project that combines artmaking with social action. Since 1992, she has organized artists and youth to create and sell confetti-filled cascarones each spring, donating proceeds to families and children affected by HIV/AIDS. The project reflects her belief that art should serve and unite communities.
Sánchez’s recent bodies of work continue to document San Antonio’s rail yards and explore the history of Carpas [traveling Mexican circuses]—linking personal memory, cultural storytelling, and historical recovery. She collaborated with poet Norma E. Cantú of Trinity University in San Antonio on Transcendental Train Yards (Wings Press), pairing her Carpas-inspired serigraphs with Cantú’s poetry. Sánchez also continues her retablo paintings and is currently working on an historical painting portraying Mexican Bracero workers in the United States.
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Copyright 2026 by Ricardo Romo.