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[ Music ]
>> I try to
depict images of my childhood, of my memory
because I wanted to have my artwork speak
to the Mexican-American community,
and I wanted the artwork to be images
that they were very familiar
with so they could see themselves in the artwork
and feel proud of all the things that we have, that are part
of the American culture, that we have contributed
to the American culture.
This painting is "Cumpleanos de Lala y Turri."
I'm Lala, and my brother's name Arturo and we call him Turri.
Everybody's gathered around in a circle waiting
for their turn to hit the pinata.
So this is me, and I'm hitting the fish pinata,
which is my younger brother's pinata
because my mother made our pinatas for us,
and she asked us what we wanted, and I wanted a rose,
and he wanted a fish because he likes to, to go fishing.
The magical thing that happens is that when people are looking
at it, especially Latino families,
they can immediately recognize what's going on,
and they'll start telling me their stories.
And they'll say this is my story.
This is my family.
And it's been really gratifying to hear that,
to get that kind of feedback.
[ Music ]
>> So a lot of the compositions of my artwork
and my paintings are in my head.
I will spend a lot of time just thinking and visualizing.
I feel like I have this little canvas inside of my forehead,
and that's where it's all being composed, all the images.
[ Music ]
[ Background Noise ]
>> This is my parents' house, the front porch,
and it's a recollection of one day when I was a kid,
my mother was walking around with this bucket of water,
and I kept asking her what are going to do with that water,
and she took a sheet of newspaper,
rolled it up into a cone shape,
and put it on my father's outer ear,
and then very briefly ignited it with a match.
Sometimes when he would go swimming,
water would get trapped in his outer ear,
and this was a treatment for that,
and then she threw the burning paper into the bucket of water.
That's what the bucket of water was for.
It was for safety reasons.
[ Pause ]
[ Music ]
>> So you see there, the dancers.
It started out with a full figure,
and then now it's a half figure as you're,
as you're scanning the, the cutout from left to right,
and the figures keep getting bigger and bigger,
and then finally on the extreme right,
it's just the ruffles of the skirt.
So it's like you're standing on the side of the stage looking
at all these Ballet Folklorico dancers.
Even though the paper cutouts may look different
than the paintings, it's still within that whole goal
of depicting images that my community can relate to.
I didn't really anticipate that my artwork would be
in a bilingual children's book.
The, the editor/publisher of Children's Book Press,
she invited me to illustrate somebody else's story.
I told her, "Well, why don't we just do a book with my artwork,
with my stories about each painting,"
because that's exactly what I do.
When I show my artwork, I tell stories
about what's happening in the painting.
It came out in 1990.
The first one is called "Family Pictures"/"Cuadros de Familia."
The book is helping kids to talk about the artwork,
articulate what they are seeing, and it's just a short step
from talking about it to writing about it.
And so the literacy happens with the use of the artwork.
The greatest honor has to be the approval
by the Los Angeles Unified School District Board
of naming one of their new primary schools the Carmen Lomas
Garza Primary Center.
It's a great feeling having the artwork and the books
and come all the way around to be used in a public school
for the purpose of, of helping the kids become literate,
learn how to read and write, tell stories.
It's a great honor, and my family was very honored to,
to have our family name on the school.
[ Music ]