1	Into the Wind Alejandro Fernández, El Potrillo, rides back into the limelight with his new album and tour. read more...
2	The Wild Bunch Inspired by their heritage and emboldened by their spirits, these four poets, musicians and artists are taking tradition in a whole new direction. read more...
3	Ones to Watch Though George Lopez has left prime time, there are many new faces to watch for as TV’s fall season heats up. read more...
4	The Raconteur José Rivera made a name for himself on the Great White Way, but when Hollywood called, he answered with The Motorcycle Diaries and now with his gritty drama, Trade. read more...
5	Human Trafficking Thousands of young women are smuggled into the U.S. every year and sold into an underworld of prostitution and slavery. read more...
6	The Matchmaker NBC wiz kid Ben Silverman is bringing some of Spanish TV’s best to an English-language tube near you. read more...

Hispanic Heritage

hispanic heritage month

the wild bunch

Ask people what represents Hispanic heritage and you’ll probably find as many answers as respondents. Mariachis to quinceañeras, ropa vieja, coquis, salsa, dominos and a good cup of coffee would probably all make the list. These important cultural staples represent aspects of tradition and custom that hold us to our roots. Yet as Hispanics, we find our communities in constant flux and our culture shaped by a variety of influences. These four fearless artists, poets and musicians embody that spirit. From a painter who uses tortillas as his canvas to a rockera who bases her jams in ranchera music, they’re all innovators—or better yet, cultural evolutionists who have taken their heritage and applied something different, contemporary and fresh.

James De La Vega, artist
Don’t ask James De La Vega to describe his work.
He won’t.
And it’s probably because in truth, his work defies description. An artist-come-poet-philosopher who peppers the streets of New York with pensive phrases and accompanying paintings, De La Vega is a New York icon, especially in his native Spanish Harlem or in the East Village in Lower Manhattan, where he’s established his business.
Read phrases like “Fate is moving toward your destiny” or “The pressure of survival in the big city will make you lose sight of your dream” painted on a façade and you know its De La Vega. Messages such as these are part social critique and part inspirational statement.
“The ideas come from conversations that I have with people around me,” he says. “Sometimes these things are a response to things that are happening. I think we live in a dark time, and I use my work to be inspiring.”
The 35-year-old father and former school teacher has a few great motivators; the first is his great desire to see youth empowered in the knowledge that they can be entrepreneurs, artists or otherwise follow their vision and employ themselves and help bolster a weakening Latino community. “Become your Dream” has become the mantra for his store on St. Mark’s Place that sells his variety of work.
“I use different mediums because there are so many ways of communicating: stickers, T-shirts or a public installation of some sort. It’s a way of interrupting people’s lives,” De La Vega says. “Through day-to-day routines, [people] become immune, and my stuff is a breath of fresh air. It can make them smile and make them angry.”
There are no sacred cows for De La Vega, and many have become angry with the span of his work and the themes on which he touches, much of which features his mother as the focal point. He has painted his mother as Fidel Castro, Salvador Dali, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Zorro and more.
“She is just the general in the battle that I wage,” he says. “It’s a mental one, it’s about being out here doing what I am doing.” Without fear and without apology.

Sandra Lilia Velásquez, lead singer of Pistolera
Growing up, Sandra Velásquez was just as likely to hear cumbia and Mexican pop from her parents’ collection as she was to blast Zeppelin, Jimmy Hendrix and Pink Floyd out of her bedroom. The 31-year-old mom-to-be grew up in San Diego but felt drawn to New York City for its fast pace and diverse art scene. She now resides in Brooklyn.
“It was inevitable that it would mix in my head,” Velásquez says. “It wasn’t until I moved to New York that I missed the sounds of my mom’s living room stereo, and I wanted to recreate that.”
Velásquez, her drummer cousin Ani Cordero, accordion player Maria Elena and bassist Inca B. Satz form the band Pistolera, and together perform their signature alt-folklorico sound. Think ranchera mixed with punk, indie pop, cumbia, with some samba and rock influences thrown in for good measure.
“Alt-folklorico is the shorthand way of describing our music,” she says. “We do it with a drum set, a rock attitude and at the same time, there is clearly a cumbia influence. We are putting a spin on the music.”
The sound, born from a disconnection she felt with her heritage and roots, probably would never have evolved had she stayed in her native San Diego. She had never lived in a place where taquerias weren’t on every corner nor where Mexican slang was out of earshot. And while the sound is a hybrid of genres, the lyrics, sung all in Spanish, recount things that have touched Velásquez personally, whether they detail a breakup, the xenophobic Minutemen or even being sexually harassed on the street, relived in the song Acercate. Her songs are narrative and personal and are drawn from her days growing up in the border town with an immigration lawyer mother, as well as from her new life in New York. In one such tune she describes commuting on the subway and sitting next to a Hassidic Jew, a Bangladeshi woman and a white guy. It’s this mix of cultures and interaction of immigrants with natives that move her.
The independent band will launch a European and U.S. tour in 2008 and is also working on a follow-up album to 2006’s Siempre Hay Salida.

Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria, spoken word poet
The first poem Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria ever wrote was about the absence of noise. Growing up in Lima, Peru, Sanchez was used to hearing cars, busses and the bustle of the city. In the quiet of Minnesota, where his family moved in 1988 when his mother pursued a graduate degree, he took pen to paper and began what would be his future calling.
“When I moved here I didn’t know English. I started writing a diary,” he says. “I started writing about myself and daily happenings, being in a new country and new environment. I wrote about what I saw ... I would get together and put it in an essay.”
Essays later became poems with touches of oral history and observations of his new home. “When my dad took me to Cuzco, they would tell us the history of the town. I thought these stories needed to be shared.”
In college he was inspired by Pablo Neruda, Pedro Pietri of the Nuyorican Poets Café and Peruvian poets, as well as his contemporaries in his university Chicano studies program. Sanchez tried his hand at an open mic night where he could add performance poetry.
“[The first time I performed] my hand was shaking and it was hard for me to read the words,” he says. After a while the nerves became more manageable, but he has never allowed himself to get too comfortable. “We are all accustomed to being in a comfortable setting, but that space that we create doesn’t let us learn about other spaces ... If I feel uncomfortable it will help me understand my environment.”
Today, Sanchez is part of the performance art and poet society the Palabristas, a community leader, media watchdog and activist, a husband and father of two. He’s also come out with a CD of his poetry called Desconocidos.
“My job as a poet, as a product of where I live, is to give back the best way I can do it, by telling stories of what I have seen.”

Joe Bravo, tortilla artist
It was in Southern California’s tumultuous 1960s and 1970s when Joe Bravo began his art career. His Mexican heritage and the Chicano movement influenced his work, as did the Los Angeles suburb of Wilmington, where he attended junior and senior high. Neighborhoods were close and gangs were prevalent.
Bravo joined the mural movement, where Chicano artists colored Los Angeles with cultural, religious and political iconography. In 1976, he designed and painted the Wilhall anti-gang violence mural with a handful of other artists. In the decades since, it has become both a symbol of the movement and of the neighborhood. Young men have tattooed the mural on their bodies out of respect and as a way to commemorate their barrios.
Just as the need for creative outlets and cultural pride drove the mural movement of the 1970s, necessity drove Bravo’s innovative spirit and would, unbeknownst to him, create a new path for his art.
“I was in college and had an assignment due for an art class,” he says. He didn’t have money for a canvas, so working with four regular corn tortillas, he created a mobile. “That was back in ’72. Then, I forgot about it and went into advertising and marketing. I started getting back into painting about seven years ago when an old college friend asked me if I remembered the tortilla artist from college. That was me.” His interest in tortillas was reignited.
At the time, Bravo was unaware of his work’s social or political implications. For him, it was a folk art, work on an organic canvass. To critics and fans (among them Tyra Banks and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers; both have commissioned work), Bravo’s paintings are an artistic documentation of Latino iconography, painted on an icon itself. “I think I am following folk tradition and working with my environment, and what I choose to put out there is a social and political statement,” Bravo says. “Using a tortilla is a statement in itself, and the themes can make it political. Being involved in the Chicano movement, I put the culture first; it’s not just limited to politics.”
Nor is his work limited to Hispanic images. His Chinese dragons on tortillas have made him a Chicano ambassador. In addition to showing at East L.A.’s famed Olvera Street, on national television and in print, Bravo has been invited to show in Hong Kong.