RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 8.28.26 EL OTRO CAMINO: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF CÉSAR MARTÍNEZ

A new exhibition, “El Otro Camino: An Intimate Portrait of César A. Martínez,” opened in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, August 22, 2026. It is the first large-scale comprehensive exhibition by the acclaimed San Antonio Chicano artist in the El Paso Southwest region.

Guest-curated by Diana Molina and organized by the El Paso Mexican American Cultural Center, the exhibit selections are predominantly drawn from the artist’s personal collection created between 1975 and 2026. Thus, the exhibit offers an intimate glimpse into Martínez’s work as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, photographer, and collage artist.

César Martínez is a major Latino artist and one of the founders of the Chicano Art Movement. He is one of the few Latino-American artists whose work has been collected by prominent American museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; The Cheech Center, Riverside, California; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; the San Antonio Museum of Art; and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago.

Martinez, a native of the borderlands, is the first American-born child of his immediate family. In the 1930s, Martínez told Jesus Trevino of Latinopia, “my grandmother, Cruz Garza, took that big step and emigrated to Laredo, Texas, to escape an existence of hardship at the family ranch, Los Garzas, in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, only about 60 miles from the border.”

During the first half of the 20th century, the Rio Grande did not present a barrier to the residents of the twin cities of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and Laredo, Texas. In his youth, Martinez crossed the international U.S.-Mexico border bridge nearly every weekend to visit family ranches and to shop at the Mercado Malclovio Herrera, an open-air market dating back to the 19th century. As often as possible, he also attended bullfights at the Plaza de Toros.

Martinez enrolled at Texas A&M University at Kingsville in the mid-1960s and graduated with an art degree in 1968. At the Kingsville campus, he formed friendships with several Latino artists who, like himself, expressed South Texas experiences in their paintings and drawings. In his Artist Statement, Marinez wrote: “I am not a natural-born technically gifted artist and was never a child prodigy who did wondrous artwork.” He expanded on his approach to art, noting, “The strength in my art has always been the ideas behind it; everything else is hard work, and to this day I struggle.”

In the late 1960s a cohort of South Texas artists constituted the early creative forces of the Texas Chicano art movement. In 1968, as Martinez prepared for his first solo show, the U.S. Army drafted him. Following an Honorable Discharge in 1971, he moved to San Antonio, Texas.

San Antonio artists played an important role in the initial years of the Texas Chicano Art Movement. San Antonio College art professor and artist Mel Casas recruited young artists like Martinez to join the famed Con Safo art group. Martinez joined Con Safo in 1974. In recalling his early introduction to the Chicano Movement, Martinez told the UT Rio Grande Valley Center for Latino Arts interviewer, “It was all about defining ourselves for ourselves, self-determination in every sense, culturally, politically and whatever else.”

At Latino artists’ meetings in San Antonio, Martinez met Santos Martinez, Jr., who later included Cesar Martinez in the Dale Gas exhibit in Houston, Texas, in 1977. The Dale Gas exhibit is considered one of the first Chicano art shows in the United States. The following year [1978], César Martinez began his bato-and-pachuco series. Santos G. Martinez, Jr. noted that Martinez’s paintings “represent a cultural portrait of a working-class community often marginalized, and one which generally goes unnoticed.”

In his paintings of batos, Martínez captures the essence of iconic figures from his 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.

Art critic Benito Huerta commented that Martínez is “widely recognized for his figurative works, including his Bato/Pachuco/Ruca series, a group of imaginary portraits grounded in real life.” His “cropped, solitary sitters,” added Huerta, “set against vibrant color fields, gaze at us from each of these portraits.”

Although the Bato series represents Martínez’s signature paintings, his artistic versatility is evident in the many creative works he produced over his career, such as his serape and Mestizo series. In the serape pieces, Martinez returns to the Mexican mercados of the borderlands where vendors in Nuevo Laredo offered colorful long rectangular wool blankets or shawls for men to wrap around their shoulders. The serape, one of Mexico’s most famous traditional symbols, was introduced to the art world by Diego Rivera’s “Zapatista Landscape” painting of 1915, a Cubist abstract that captured symbols of the Mexican Revolution and Mexican Nationalism.

Over the years, Martínez returned to his interest in Indigenous identity [mestizos] and culture [toros or bulls]. In earlier works, he painted a jaguar from pre-Columbian Indigenous culture confronting a bull representing Spanish newcomers to Mexico. In a self-portrait, Martínez’s facial features are divided: one-half features a jaguar and the opposite half is that of a bull. Diana Molina, who has followed César Martínez’s career for nearly three decades, has excellent images of his work in her beautiful 2020 book, Icons & Symbols of the Borderlands.

 

Early in his career, Martínez participated in numerous national exhibitions after winning the top award in the 1984 Chicano Art exhibit Mira! The Canadian Club Hispanic Art Tour. In 1997, Artpace in San Antonio awarded Martinez an International Artists’ Residency, and the Artpace organization included Martinez in several exhibits.

Ellen Bernstein of the Corpus Christi Caller newspaper noted that in the mid-1980s, Martinez began producing works that were a “visual antithesis of his vividly colored Chicano portraits”. She wrote, “Employing a more subdued palette and working with a less representational imagery that is more subtle and elusive in both message and mood, the mixed-media works and paintings included in his South Texas and mestizo series are consummately more biographical and personal.”

Over the last 40 years, César Martinez has also painted many portraits of women. Some like “Sra. Rivas” are conceived from images found in dusty old South Texas high school yearbooks of the 1940s and 50s. He found other ideas for his paintings in the obituary pages of South Texas newspapers.

Martinez works with paper, canvas, wood, and metal, and, although he mostly paints with acrylics, he also excels with pastels and watercolors. Several of his wood construction pieces have been included in museum exhibitions in Texas. As early collectors of his art, Harriett and I have witnessed the evolution of César Martinez as an artist. We bought two pastel portraits of women and a painting of a bull confronting a jaguar from Martinez in 1982. We recently acquired one of his serape pieces completed in 1980. I had the good fortune to arrange for the printing of a beautiful lithographic portrait, Bato Azul, at UT Austin which we donated to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in D.C. several years ago.

Twenty-seven years ago, the McNay Art Museum presented a solo exhibition, César A. Martínez: A Retrospective. Fourteen years later, he was featured as one of the artists in the Estampas: Romo Collection McNay exhibit. That exhibition has traveled to ten American cities.

El Otro Camino marks milestones in Martínez’s brilliant and prolific career by showcasing iconic selections from his “Batos Rucas,” “Serape,” “Mestizo,“ and “South Texas” series of works. The exhibition, which closes on January 24, 2027, highlights the significant role César Martínez has played in the emergence of Chicano art as an enduring representation of Latino and Mexican American life and culture.

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