RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 11.07.25 MARMOLEJO AND RAQUEL AT CENTRO DE ARTES

Aztec Myths, Mexican Legends, and Chicano Folktales Thrive in Borderland Urban Communities

The exhibition “Madre_Land: South Texas Memory & the Art of Making Home”  at the Centro de Artes in San Antonio’s Market Square features art, artifacts, and altar installations by 27 South Texas emerging and established borderland artists and scholars. The first floor of the exhibition is a mosaic of art mediums that mirror a layout of a South Texas house with room-like spaces that pay homage to family kitchens, family-owned businesses, a neighborhood cafe or panaderia, all filled with family archives and collections.

The rooms capture intergenerational Texas-Mexico border culture. The second floor features works of emerging Latina artists Hailey Marmolejo and Angelica Raquel, who illustrate Mexican life, legends, and folktales that thrive in Mexican American urban communities.

Hailey Marmolejo is a San Antonio native who is best known for paintings and murals that explore and celebrate Tejana identity and the resilience of South Texas landscapes. Her formal training in the arts began at St. Edward’s University in Austin, where she majored in Fine Arts with a minor in Spanish. In Austin, she met Sylvia Orozco of MexicArte and the Perez sisters, Cynthia and Lydia of La Peña Gallery, and worked as an intern with both of these arts organizations.

Marmolejo later lived in New York City, producing art, engaging in street art, and working at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In 2020, Marmolejo returned to Texas and began painting murals around San Antonio. Notable accolades include her participation in the award-winning collaborative mural “All Are Welcome Love Conquers Hate,” recognized as Best New Mural by San Antonio Magazine in 2022. Her work has appeared in publications such as Texas Monthly and has been exhibited in galleries and museums across Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and New York.​

Marmolejo’s pieces address the richness and contradictions of life on the borderlands, and she weaves her cultural heritage into each creation. Marmolejo’s work stands out for its powerful depiction of feminine resilience, cultural duality, and the lived experience of South Texas. Her paintings of La Llorona and La Malinche captured my interest.

I first heard about La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) when I was about five years old, living on Guadalupe Street in San Antonio, Texas. It was a story told to every young child in a Mexican household. As a legendary spirit, La Llorona mourns her drowned children and serves as a cautionary tale to keep children away from dangerous creeks and rivers. Her chilling cries are deeply woven into Latino and borderland culture.​

La Llorona’s story predates the Spanish conquest. In Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España (the Florentine Codex), Indigenous Nahua informants recounted visions of a weeping woman who walked the streets of Tenochtitlan before its fall, crying, “My children, where shall I take you?”—a lament scholars connect to the enduring legend of La Llorona.

Rooted in Aztec mythology, the legend of La Llorona recalls deities such as Cihuacoatl (snake woman), Coatlicue (mother goddess), and Chalchiuhtlicue (goddess of water)—all maternal figures who wept for their children and foretold catastrophe. Their laments, recorded in omen narratives, anticipated conquest and collapse. Folklorists suggest that La Llorona’s weeping echoes this divine mourning, transformed through colonial and postcolonial retellings into a story of loss, punishment, and redemption.

In contemporary art, the myth serves as testimony rather than terror. Hailey Marmolejo interprets La Llorona through a feminist lens, writing:  “Here, the legendary weeping woman stands as a witness rather than a warning. Her river becomes a current of generational tears that both submerges and reveals. Standing for women silenced by patriarchy, La Llorona turns sorrow into testimony—reflecting the ongoing struggle for voice, agency, and release.”

Legends of La Llorona and La Malinche have numerous parallels.  La Malinche, originally known as Marina, was a Nahua woman whose life symbolized both the conquest and the genesis of culture. Born around 1500 on the Gulf Coast, La Malinche was enslaved and given to Hernán Cortés in 1519. Recognized for her intelligence and linguistic fluency in Nahuatl, Maya, and later Spanish, she became indispensable to Cortés as a translator and political intermediary. With Geronimo Aguilar, a shipwrecked Spaniard fluent in the Mayan language, La Malinche negotiated alliances that proved decisive to the Spanish conquest, notably averting disaster at Cholula.

Doña Marina converted to Christianity, bore Cortés a son—Martín—and appeared beside him in numerous codices, portrayed as both interpreter and partner in the new Spanish colony. Over centuries, her image evolved from mediator and mother of mestizos to emblem of betrayal. The word “malinchista” still conveys preference for the foreign, yet modern readings reclaim her as a survivor navigating entrapment and power.

In Marmolejo’s reimagining statement, La Malinche is not a traitor but a tragic figure: “Traded like treasure, her gleaming gold skin reads as prize and burden, while the knife in her back marks where the true treachery lies. In Tejana guise, she confronts the violence of conquest and the silencing of women.” Marmolejo’s redefinition of La Malinche’s story—like the redefinition of La Llorona’s—reveals the endurance of Indigenous women’s voices as witnesses across centuries of transformation.

The art by Angelica Raquel, a multidisciplinary artist and educator working in San Antonio, Texas, also centers on the narrative power of folklore, family storytelling, and personal myth. Raised in the border city of Laredo, Angelica Raquel draws deep inspiration from her upbringing and cultural roots along the U.S.–Mexico border. Her paintings reflect stories handed down by her late grandfather during family gatherings and campouts.

Angelica Raquel’s works explore themes of memory, morality, belonging, and the intricate bonds between humans, nature, and the unknown. By intertwining mythic motifs with contemporary reflections, she preserves and expands her family’s storytelling traditions, forging a bridge between generations. Angelica Raquel earned her MFA from The University of Texas at San Antonio in 2020 and a BFA from Texas State University in 2016. Her exhibitions span venues such as Centro de Artes, Gerald Peters Gallery, Lawndale Art Center, and Presa House.

Angelica Raquel’s “Ghosts of San Antonio’s Train Tracks” is based on a local folktale from the pre-WWII years. In the 1930s or 1940s, a school bus stalled on the rail tracks; a train struck; a nun survived, but the children did not.  The incident took place near Mission San Juan in the Southside of San Antonio. Guilt drove the nun back to the crossing, where invisible hands had seemed to push her car to safety. Today, according to residents of the neighborhood,  the legend draws visitors who test the tale. Angelica Raquel wrote that the “image weighs grief, ritual, and the human need to make meaning where tragedy split the road.”

Angelica Raquel’s bold image,  “The Devil at the Disco,”  sometimes referred to as “San Antonio’s Dancing Devil,” is based on another popular Mexican American folktale.  Ken Gerhard of the San Antonio Current wrote in 2011 that one of his favorite San Antonio sagas involved a dubious character known as the Dancing Devil. According to many long-time residents,  as well as newspaper articles from the time, a dashing and handsome young man (el guapo) dressed in all white entered El Camaroncito Night Club on Old Highway 90 one 1975 night during Halloween.

Gerhard tells the story that the man was a fabulous dancer and wooed many of the señoritas in attendance. As the evening went on, however, things took a horrific turn when one of the man’s dancing partners happened to glance down at his feet. The woman suddenly screamed out in terror, broke free of the man’s grip, and began pointing downward. It was then, amidst a flurry of gasps and shrieks, that the patrons noticed the man’s shoes had transformed into long, clawed chicken’s feet.

These legends and others have roots tracing back to European and Aztec folklore but have been strongly adapted into Mexican American cultural contexts, blending local supernatural beliefs with moral lessons.​ Visitors can learn more about myths and legends, as well as ancestral heirlooms, from  “Madre_Land: South Texas Memory & the Art of Making Home” at the Centro de Artes in San Antonio, on view October 2, 2025–February 22, 2026.

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Copyright 2025 by Ricardo Romo. All photo credits as indicated.