RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 8.07.26 GASPAR ENRIQUEZ AND SCHERESZADE GARCIA AT MITOTE IN AUSTIN

Friends of Gilberto Cardenas and Dolores Carillo Garcia gathered on July 11, 2026, at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin, Texas, for a special viewing of the exhibit, Mitote. The exhibit features selections from the Cardenas-Garcia extensive and iconic Chicano art collection.

The Mitote exhibit paid tribute to Dr. Cárdenas. His wife, Dolores Garcia, curated the show. Sadly, Cárdenas passed away at home in Austin, Texas, on July 26, 2026, at the age of 79. Two artists, Gaspar Enriquez from El Paso and Scherezade Garcia from Austin and New York City, are featured in this week’s story about the Mitote exhibit.

El Paso native Gaspar Enriquez is one of the nation’s premier Latino artists. The photorealistic art he created in his hometown has been included in major Latino art exhibits. His paintings have been purchased by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Tucson Museum of Art, El Paso Museum of Art, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, and the Albuquerque Museum of Art.

Enriquez grew up in El Paso’s Segundo Barrio [Second Ward], one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States. His home was blocks away from the Rio Grande and a short distance from his grandparents’ home in Juarez, Mexico. When he walked to Juarez to visit his family, he would take a notebook or scraps of paper for his drawings. The artist Mel Casas lived near Enriquez’s home and would often give him a ride to school. They talked about art, and the encounters proved valuable to Enriquez, who was interested in art but had no direction or plan for how to pursue art as a career.

Following high school graduation in 1961, Enriquez moved to Los Angeles where he found work as a machinist. Although working full-time, Enriquez found time to enroll in evening classes at East Los Angeles College. After several years in Southern California, he returned to El Paso, where he enrolled at the University of Texas at El Paso [UTEP]. With his bachelor’s degree in art from UTEP in 1970, he found a job teaching at Bowie High School in his old neighborhood. In 1985, he earned an MA degree in metalwork from New Mexico State University, a short distance from El Paso.

Enriquez’s evolution as an artist led him to switch from oil painting to working primarily with acrylic paint using an airbrush, creating photorealist portraits on paper, canvas, or board. His work is deeply rooted in Chicano identity, barrio life, and borderland experience. Enriquez’s portraits of prominent Latino artists, traditional charros, and Mexican American dancers are among his best-known works. He is well-known for painting barrio figures, including cholos and community members.

As a great admirer of Latino artist Luis Jimenez, who was also a native of El Paso, Enriquez often invited Jimenez to guest lecture at his high school.

Art historian and critic Lucy Lippard noted that Enriquez’s mission has been “to represent his community with compassion and honesty. His challenge has been to avoid stereotypes, rhetoric, and sentimentalism.” She added that his art embodies a broader Latino culture. Lippard points to Enriquez’s portraits with “the confrontational gazes, the stances, the fashions, the headgear, the shades, the tattoos, the crossed arms or legs,” and concludes that they are all “components of the ‘attitudes’ he celebrates.”

Latina artist Scherezade Garcia is featured in the Mitote exhibit and is best known for her visual and powerful interpretations of Diaspora communities in the Caribbean, particularly in the Dominican Republic, her native land. In her artist statement, Garcia explains that her work explores allegories of history, migration, collective and ancestral memory, and cultural colonization and politics.

Garcia’s artistic interests include painting, printing, and installations. In her writing and lectures, she expands on her research interests in Spanish colonial history and Afro-Atlantic legacies, acknowledging that her art is informed by aspects of her Black and European heritage.

Garcia teaches in UT Austin’s Art Department. Her contribution to Latino art is significant not only because of her alluring paintings and installations, but also because she is a pedagogue and art influencer of Caribe [Caribbean] art and history. She told writers of the art magazine Arte Realizzata that she has “an ancestral urgency to rewrite history, to give voices to the silenced, and to create and honor new icons.”

Colonial History has always fascinated Garcia. In the late 1490s, Garcia’s island was among the first to experience genocide of the natives, Los Taínos. The Spaniards enslaved the Taínos to mine for gold and then exploited their labor on the new sugar plantations. The plantations required large numbers of laborers, and as the Taínos died off from forced labor and disease, the Spaniards turned to enslaving people from Africa.

Garcia admits to having a fascination with the social human experience of her homeland. “This fascination,” she wrote, “has led me to such themes as the causes and consequences of migration, the mestizo and barroquism as consequences of colonization, the inversion of traditional beliefs of salvation, and the questioning of religious and social uses of the notion of paradise.”

Garcia migrated to the U.S. in the mid-1980s to study at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. She had earned a degree from Altos de Chavón School of Design in the Dominican Republic. In 2011, she completed a Master’s in Fine Arts in Sculpture at The City College of New York (CUNY). A co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA, she taught as a faculty member at Parsons from 2010-2021. In 2021, she joined the Art Department at UT Austin.

In 2015, García received a prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant followed by the Colene Brown Art Prize in 2020. An edited monograph on her work, Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic, was published in 2020 by the Art Museum of the Americas.

At the Emma Barrientos Center, exhibit curators featured Scherezade García’s Las Americas 2 painting of a young mestiza girl in a bright dress. The girl has both a crown of flowers and a band of thorns around her chest. As Harriett and I viewed the painting, we wondered about the symbolism. The title Las Americas 2 suggests that the young maiden may represent a young nation. Her eyes reveal sadness, and an image of a heart is painted floating nearby, linked to her body. Perhaps the painting is a rendering of the many struggles of youth or of a young nation. The caption did not explain, but the image stayed with us long after we left the exhibit.

Dr. Cardenas was an internationally recognized sociologist, educator, collector, and institution builder. He was one of the foundational figures in the development of Latino Studies in the United States.

For more than five decades, Cárdenas devoted his life to expanding educational opportunity, advancing scholarship, and supporting artists and their work. He dedicated himself to ensuring that future generations of artists, scholars, and community leaders would recognize the richness and importance of Latino history and culture, as well as the institutions that support the Latino art community. He deeply understood that Latino art, scholarship, and community activism were inseparable—each strengthening the other, and together giving voice to the aspirations and hopes of the Latino community.

__________________________________________________