Manola and Maria Ramirez, “Dreamer.”Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlán. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Latina artists Manola and Maria Ramirez’s exhibition, Había Una Vez, at Centro Cultural Aztlán in San Antonio, brings their interest in participation and visual storytelling into an immersive gallery setting.
Manola and Maria Ramirez, “Looking Ahead.”Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlán. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
On view through August 27, 2026, the installation at the Centro Cultural Aztlán explores and commemorates the culture, memories, bicultural identities, and often fractured experiences of immigrant families. Its title—“Once Upon a Time”—signals an invitation to visitors who are “asked not simply to view the work, but to enter its story and locate their own relationship to migration, family, and belonging within San Antonio’s cultural landscape.” This invitation to study one’s “migration and belonging” led me to think about my own family’s initial arrival in San Antonio.
Everyone in Texas has a migration story. The Texas story is important because the state includes families of the earliest European settlers of North America. Spaniards who founded St. Augustine in Florida in 1565 were the first Euro-Americans, followed by the Spanish settlements in New Mexico in 1598. Texas was next with early Spanish colonization in the 1680s.
Manola and Maria Ramirez, “Infinity.”Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlán. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
The topic is also important because so much attention lately has been placed on immigration. Sadly, today we see in the news too many stories about the deportation of undocumented immigrants. Texas, with its large Mexican population, has especially been hit hard.
Manola and Maria Ramirez, “Grandpa’s Jardin.”Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlán. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Questions of migration posed by the Ramirez sisters’ art themes reminded me of grandparents who came to Texas during the Mexican Revolution 1910-1920 era. My grandparents were the first of our family to emigrate from Mexico. My genealogy and historical research over the past decade have led me to discover deeper ancestral roots.
Manola and María Ramírez, “Incansable.”Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlán. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
My migration story begins with my sixth-generation grandfather, Captain Nicolas Flores de Valdes, a frontier Spanish soldier who arrived in Texas in the late 1680s and eventually settled in San Antonio in 1722, four years after the town’s founding. Flores de Valdes first came with a team of explorers in the 1600s and eventually settled in San Antonio with his wife. The Spanish Census classified the Flores de Valdes family as mestizos, a mixture of Spanish and Mexican heritage. Over the previous two centuries, 1500-1700, settlers like the Valdeses often intermarried with spouses from northern Mexican Indigenous tribes. My ancestors came to Texas largely from the northern Mexican states.
Manola and Maria Ramirez, “Mexican American.”Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlán. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
In the early 1990s, I bought Frederick C. Chabot’s classic book, With the Makers of San Antonio. Published in 1937, Chabot’s research is an essential resource for anyone interested in ancestors who might have been among the early settlers of San Antonio. I found the reference very useful when I was teaching History of the Southwest at UT Austin. At that time, it never occurred to me that my Mexican ancestors were among the earliest settlers of Texas. By 1820, 4,000 Mexicanos resided in Texas, making Texas one of Spain’s largest colonies in North America. In the first hundred years of San Antonio’s founding, 1718-1818, more than 1,500 Mexican [Tejano] colonists settled in San Antonio.
Manola and Maria Ramirez, “Dreamers.”Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlán. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
A decade ago I learned that several members of my family had received land grants from Spain in 1750 to establish communities along the Rio Grande. I was curious about their possible settlement in other parts of Texas, so I turned to Frederic Chabot’s book to inquire about the early San Antonio settlers. Chabot had documented the first forty-five families to settle in San Antonio. Some families received more coverage than others. I was lucky! Chabot had dedicated two full pages to my 6th-generation grandfather, Captain Nicolas Flores de Valdes.
Manola and María Ramírez, “Rayo de Luz.”Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlán. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
According to Chabot, Flores de Valdes was appointed Captain of the Presidio at San Antonio de Bexar in 1722. As I discovered this fact, I realized that my ancestors had been in North America for over 300 years. Flores de Valdes truly was one of the first Tejanos. Thanks to research completed in the 1930s by Dr. Carlos Castaneda, UT Austin’s first Latino historian whose work was a major source of Chabot’s account, we know quite a bit about San Antonio’s settlement.
Construction of the Alamo began under Flores de Valdes’s watch. He was also in charge of protecting workers at San Jose Mission, where construction began in 1720.
Historians researching ancestral roots work with civic and religious documents such as birth, marriage, and death certificates, and these documents are of enormous value in ancestry research. I was fortunate that the Handbook of Texas had also documented some of my ancestors’ history. The Handbook of Texas notes that Flores de Valdes first came to Texas in a supply expedition in 1693 with Governor Gregorio de Salinas Varona at age thirteen. It was not uncommon for the Spanish armies to enlist teens.
In my research, I used traditional academic sources, but also employed more modern research tools such as Family Search, Geni, and Wikipedia. I learned from the more modern Family Search database created by the Mormon Church that my early ancestor Flores de Valdes was born in Saltillo, Coahuila, in 1680 and that he married Nicolasa Ximenes de Valdes on December 31, 1700. He died in San Antonio in 1731 and fathered fourteen children.
Manola and María Ramírez, “Cactus Garden.”Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlán. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
The new tools are not always accurate. The same database, Family Search, also has my ancestor Flores de Valdes marrying Maria Lucia Rodriguez Longoria on the same date as Nicolasa Ximenes, December 31, 1700. Maria Lucia was cited as a native of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. From other sources, I learned that Flores de Valdes married at least twice. Frontier life was difficult, and many women died young, often from childbirth or lack of medical treatment.
Eventually, the Flores de Valdes clan of early San Antonio married into the Saenz family, a direct link to my maternal grandparents who migrated to Texas in the 1880s. I can now assume that my earliest ancestors migrated to Texas in the early 1700s and later returned to Mexico. Back-and-forth movement across the Rio Grande was not uncommon.
The Ramirez sisters have pressed us to learn about our families, explore family migration patterns, and expand our own sense of belonging. Such inquiries require long conversations with grandparents. Do not wait too long to ask them about their migration experiences.
Artist Terry Ybanez and muralist Shek. Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Manola and María Ramírez are San Antonio–based artist sisters whose individual and collaborative practices move effortlessly among painting, printmaking, illustration, installation, murals, and public art. Raised on the city’s West Side and separated by two years in age, they form an unusually close creative partnership. As artists and muralists, they are drawn to visual interpretations of the cultural life of San Antonio.
Maria, the younger sister, began her arts education at the San Antonio nonprofit youth arts program Say Sí, and saw early on that art might become a vocation. Manola initially imagined a different future: studying literature, writing, and perhaps working in film. Both sisters attended Brackenridge High School and studied with artist Terry Ybanez, who encouraged their artistic projects.
Maria and Manola Ramirez, “Aborlito.”Courtesy of Centro Cultural Aztlan. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
After graduation, their trajectories shifted when Maria persuaded Manola to join her in a life-drawing class at San Antonio College. Manola’s instructors recognized her artistic aptitude and encouraged her to pursue art seriously. After two years at SAC, both sisters transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where they studied studio art, developed an enthusiasm for printmaking, and earned BFA degrees in 2018.
Returning to San Antonio, the Ramirez sisters built a shared practice and a community-oriented creative base. Since 2019, they have worked as a duo while maintaining distinct artistic voices. They also help operate Lavaca Studios in Southtown, an all-women collaborative space for making art, teaching, and sharing resources with other artists. The San Antonio Magazine noted that the Ramirez sisters’ screen-printing work has made original art more accessible, enabling artists to create hand-pulled editions for local audiences and markets.
Maria’s independent work is often abstract, centering color, texture, line, and pattern. Rather than prescribing a single meaning, both sisters invite viewers to participate through interpretation—an approach shaped by their interest in public, outsider, and street art. Together, the Ramirez sisters often shift toward a bold figurative and illustrative art vocabulary. The paintings at the Centro Cultural Aztlan, with their vivid color and graphic forms, captivated viewers’ attention.
Centro Director Malena Gonzalez-Cid noted that the visual energy of the Ramirez sisters readily engages public audiences. The opening reception of the Habia Una Vez exhibit buzzed with excitement as local artists and art enthusiasts viewed the large dual-sided billboard mural dominating one gallery space at the Centro and the numerous beautiful paintings in the main gallery. Most of the works featured red dots indicating the pieces were sold early in the evening.
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Copyright by Ricardo Romo. All images and art credits as indicated.