RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 6.27.26 THE CHEECH FEATURES SIXTY-ONE CHICANO ARTISTS

The Cheech Museum exhibit “We the People: Chicano Art in the U.S.A.” opened on May 30, 2026. With 126 works by 61 artists, it is one of the largest Chicano shows of this century. Organized by artist and curator Benito Huerta, the exhibition explores themes of identity, migration, community, and cultural memory through painting, sculpture, printmaking, and mixed media. This month also marks the fourth anniversary of The Cheech, the first museum of its kind dedicated to Chicana/o/x art.

Benito Huerta has given much time and thought to this exquisite exhibit, which is drawn from Cheech Marin’s renowned collection, the museum’s permanent collections, recent acquisitions, gifts, and artist loans. To those visiting the exhibit, Huerta offers that Chicanos “are integral to the fabric of our country: the culture, the politics, the social strata, the economics, and, of course, American art.” In several interviews with Huerta, I came to understand why he was chosen to undertake such a significant artistic commitment.

Huerta is a Texas artist who, in the later years of his illustrious career, has moved into the curatorial space. He explained that La Raza, the people represented in this monumental exhibit, have “been here since Aztlán, since Mexico, through shifting borders and histories, and now within these United States.” He adds with pride that “our home is here and our life is here.”

I have known Huerta for many years, and we have shared mutual friendships with many Chicano artists. Huerta told me that he hoped that the art would demonstrate “not only a reflection of who we are, but also our dreams, our fears, our work, and, most importantly, our aspirations.” There is evidence of these artistic parameters in the works by three artists whom I have followed for over 25 years: César Martínez, Vincent Valdez, and John Valadez.

César Martínez is a major Latino artist and one of the founders of the Chicano Art Movement. He is best known for portraits, and the series is recognized as his Bato/Pachuco imagery, along with paintings of faith healers, bullfighters, and the Virgen de Guadalupe. Martinez is one of the few Latino-American artists whose work has been collected by major American museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York City, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

César Martínez was born and raised in Laredo and studied art at Texas A&I University in Kingsville. At the Kingsville campus, he formed friendships with several Latino artists who also expressed South Texas experiences in their paintings and drawings. Together, these South Texas artists constituted the early creative forces of the Texas Chicano art movement. After his college graduation, Martinez served in the U.S. Army in Korea and moved to San Antonio in 1971.

San Antonio artists played an important role in the initial years of the Texas Chicano Art Movement.  César Martínez was included in the Dale Gas exhibit in Houston, Texas, in 1977. The following year, Martinez began his bato and pachuco series. Martinez works with paper, canvas, wood, and metal, and, although he mostly paints with acrylics, he also excels with pastels and watercolors.

In his paintings of batos, Martinez captures the essence of iconic figures from the barrio in Laredo at a time when “Pachuquismo,” a distinct type of dress and hairstyle represented in Chicano urban street culture, was in vogue in many of the borderland barrios. The pachucos and pachucas represented a 1940-1950 equivalent of “cool” or “hip” dudes and ladies.

 

Martinez participated in numerous national exhibitions after winning the top award in the 1984 Chicano Art exhibit, Mira! The Canadian Club Hispanic Art Tour. Martinez’s solo exhibition at the McNay Museum of San Antonio in 1999 was the first ever by a Latino. He was included in CARA: Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation 1965-1985, organized by the Smithsonian Institute, and Hispanic Art in the United States, organized by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 1999, Artpace awarded Martinez an International Artists’ Residency, and the Artpace organization included Martinez in several exhibits. He has also shown at the Mexican Fine Arts Museum, Chicago; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.

A prominent participant in the “We the People” exhibit representing the younger generation of Chicano artists, Vincent Valdez was born in San Antonio’s Southside in 1977 and attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where he earned his BFA in 2000. His work is often described as monumental and hyper-realistic, with a strong social and political edge. Valdez frequently uses portraiture and history-painting themes to examine injustice, public memory, and marginalized stories. His images of American identity profoundly confront injustice and inequity while, according to Catharine Clark Gallery, “imbuing his subjects with empathy and humanity.”

Early in his career, Valdez rose to fame with portraits of Latino boxers, soldiers, embattled Mexican American families being evicted from their homes, and his powerful rendering of the Zoot-Suit Riots of 1943. The Zoot-Suit painting portrays the infamous World War II-era attacks in Los Angeles by U.S. sailors on Mexican-Americans dressed in the era’s flashy, counter-cultural Zoot Suits.

When the Houston Art League honored Valdez a few years ago, they noted that he “blends large, representational paintings—the scale of which recalls Western traditions of history painting as well as mural painting and cinema—with contemporary subject matter.” Valdez explained that his art aimed “to incite public remembrance and to counter the distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that fogs our collective American memory.”

At a recent Houston Contemporary Museum retrospective exhibit of Vincent Valdez’s works, curators explained that the artist “celebrates everyday people as empowered, formidable, and resilient, while challenging traditional and historic symbols of power within contemporary society.”

Valdez was the youngest Chicano/Latino artist to have a solo exhibition at the McNay. His exhibition venues have included The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Snite Museum of Art, The Frye Museum, The Mexican Museum of National Art, Chicago, The Parsons Museum in Paris, The El Paso Museum of Art, OSDE Buenos Aires, The Laguna Art Museum, and others. He has been awarded several art residencies, including prestigious stays at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2005), the Vermont Studio Center (2011), the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (2014), and the Arion Press King Residency.

An early Chicano mural painter and a native of East Los Angeles featured in the Cheech Museum show, John M. Valadez began his art career in the early 1970s as a muralist and expanded into a multidisciplinary practice that merges painting, pastels, muralism, and photography. While painting murals in the barrios of East L.A., Valadez attended East Los Angeles College and California State University, Long Beach. His formative artistic circles included the Centro de Arte Público and his association with “Los Four” and Master printer Richard Duardo in Los Angeles. Today, Valadez is considered one of the most important visual chroniclers of the Chicano experience in late twentieth-century urban America, particularly in Los Angeles.

From the early Chicano Arts Movement of the 1970s, Valadez’s commitment to figuration was deliberate. He embraced narrative realism as a means to depict the lived realities, tensions, humor, and spectacle of Chicano life in the city. Drawing heavily from street photography, he translated everyday urban scenes—often overlooked or marginalized—into complex, large-scale compositions populated by a diverse cast of figures. The leaders of Eastern Project noted that Valadez’s “work has come to define the iconography of Chicano identity of the period, situating it within the changing dynamics of the city rather than nostalgically attempting to reconstruct a mythical and distant past.”

Over a career spanning more than four decades, Valadez has remained a persistent and influential voice, shaping the way Chicano identity is visualized and understood. His murals and public commissions across California, Texas, and internationally (including France) foreground themes of cultural hybridity, invisible borders, and layered histories linking Mexican, Chicano, and American experiences.

Valadez commented in an interview with Los Angeles writer Jesus Trevino of the Latino cultural blog, Latinopia, “They call [my work] photorealism, but I appreciate people who could recognize that I wasn’t trying to redo a photo.” For Valadez, his work was more complex than that. He added, “I was trying to draw people I saw on the street that I related to.” He hoped his paintings would show who we are as Chicanos. He aspired to “do something that has multiple meanings because the worst thing for me is to be boring.”

The “We The People” exhibit opened at the Cheech on May 30, 2026, and closes in May of 2027. I look forward to writing future articles about additional artists featured in the show.

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