Digital
Ma Rabby & the Pony Underground
I created this for the cover of a graphic book about animal rights.
2013
Rosie & Pepe of rabbitwest, my dream mercantile,
delivery by bunnie express
Los Mariachis
While at the University in Tucson, it was an frequent pass time to go down to Nogales, Mexico to drink beer and listen to the mariaches play. They often played and sang the beautiful old ranchera songs, those that have lasted through the years because they capture the flavor and beauty and life of Mexico.
Two white boys who lived in Nogales, USA, but spent all their time hanging out in the taverns in Nogales, Mex listening to the music, learned and recorded those songs so Americans could hear their beauty. It was their first record when folk music was just coming on. Way ta go, Bud and Travis.
Two examples of T-shirt images
La Viuda Negra (Black Widow)
Desert Chacha, for Nazario
Boy With Kitten, for Buddy
My brother Lawrence, whom we called Buddy, had a habit of roaming the barrio when he was a young boy. He would take off without a word and return a day later or days later. One of my earliest memories is of my Gramma and I walking the barrio alleyways at night, looking for him.
One night he came home with a tiny starved kitten inside his coat. We begged to keep her, and named her Tiger. I began learning about loving an animal from her, and grew up to became an animal activist, taking part in protests for animal rights and against experimentation on live animals.
In a greater context, animal rights is about our evolution as a species, and our spiritual growth in protecting other life on the planet that produced all of us.
It is about living all together in peace and love without exploitation of anyone or anything.
I have Buddy to thank for all of this.
Miguel & his Mama, Camela
This image was made for the book,
Los Muertitos de San Cristobal. Miguel was a musician and soldier who died in Vietnam.
Mechica
IMechica--the people who inhabited the plateau of Mexico before the conquest, the source of the word for that country; the true name of those we call Aztecs.
We still dont know where they migrated from, called Atzlan, but they were following the vision of their shaman: an eagle atop a cactus, holding a snake in its beak, devouring it. When they saw that, they would settle there. They saw this in the middle of a lake.
They built Tenochitlan in the middle of Lake Texcoco by an elaborate system of causeways so people could walk among the islands in that swampland and then to shore.
Straight north of the center of Tenochitlan is Tepeyac, a hill belonging to Tonantzin, where she had her temple. She was the Mother Goddess of the Mechica.
In 1531, ten years after the conquest, Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared on that site to Juan Diego, a slave peasant who was actually a member of Mechica nobility, working on one of the Spanish haciendas.
For me, this digital image pictures the Heart of the Mechica people, of Tonantzin/Guadalupe and the mixing of peoples that followed, creating the Mexican race and the country of Mexico, my Father's country.
