Chicano

In 2022, the iconic L.A. comedian Cheech Marin opened an art museum with the hope of inspiring a Chicano art renaissance.

“I looked around and said, ‘This could be the next big art town’ — because the foundations were already there,” Marin told De Los. “There was this kind of nebulous underground here, but [they’ll] reach officialdom when they have their museum.”

Now, as the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture enters its fourth year, Marin said he believes his goal is slowly coming true.

Known colloquially as the Cheech, the museum is widely considered the only space in the nation that exclusively showcases Chicano art. It’s located in Riverside, a majority-Latino city which is also within one of the largest Latino-populated counties in the country.

Since its grand opening on June 17, 2022, the center has housed hundreds of artworks from Marin’s vast private collection, including from prominent artists such as Wayne Alaniz Healy, Judithe Hernández and Frank Romero.

In its first two years, the space attracted over 200,000 visitors, according to an independent study commissioned by the city, with around 90% of attendees coming from outside the Inland Empire. The study also found that the Cheech brought around $29 million into the city’s local economy in that time frame.

“We were recognized as one of the top 50 shows in the world,” Marin said. “The fame of the museum is spreading far and wide, and people are coming from all over the United States.”

While the Cheech grew in nationwide prominence, its artistic director, María Esther Fernández, explained that the museum’s team also worked to fulfill Marin’s goal by taking advantage of its rapid success.

In the last three years, the center has become a hub and vital resource for many of the region’s Chicano artists. It has done this by creating opportunities to network with high-profile individuals, hosting recurring professional development workshops and regularly contracting emerging creatives for different design projects.

Drew Oberjuerge, the center’s former executive director, added that the museum has invested in the region’s economy by hiring locals to help prepare artwork for installation while also paying musicians and other contractors to work throughout their events.

Cheech Marin photographed in the Riverside Art Museum for the unveiling of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture (a.k.a. “The Cheech”) in 2022.

(Gustavo Soriano / For The Times)

Most important for these artists, however, is the space that the Cheech has designated to put their art front and center.

“What we’ve been really lucky to leverage is the visibility of the Cheech,” Fernández said. “We’ve been really dedicated, since we opened, to featuring artists that are emerging or some that are even mid-career in the community gallery.”

Some of the creatives, who have collaborated with the Cheech within the community gallery since it first opened, say the center’s efforts have legitimized their career paths and created new opportunities to help pursue their dreams.

The gallery is located next to the museum’s entrance and is only a fraction of the space given to the other exhibits within the 61,420-square-foot museum — and it feels like being in a waiting room in comparison to the rest of the center too. Yet, on only four small walls, the artists featured in the area have put on powerful exhibitions that tell the region’s story while also making art on par with Marin’s collection.

This includes shows like “Desde los Cielos,” which was co-curated by Perry Picasshoe and Emmanuel Camacho Larios, and looked into the concept of alienness — as well as Cosme Córdova’s “Reflections of Our Stories,” which emphasized a cultural connection between Inland Empire artists, despite the use of vastly different mediums.

Perry Picasshoe stands outside the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture as part of a performance piece in Riverside on July 3, 2025.

(Daniel Hernandez)

In total, the Cheech has held at least seven different exhibitions that showcased artists from across the Inland Empire — at times, catching Marin’s connoisseur eyes.

“I bought a couple of pieces from different artists because they are of that quality,” Marin said. “It’s great to be encouraging local talent as well as recognizing a larger picture that they are a part of, or going to become a part of [the Cheech].”

According to the Cheech’s spokesperson, Marin has purchased three works from Inland Empire-based artist Denise Silva after they curated an exhibition named “Indigenous Futurism” within the gallery. Another piece, created by artist Rosy Cortez, who has been featured in several exhibitions, was purchased by an anonymous donor and added to the center’s permanent collection.

“We’ve also begun to implement an artist fee for artists who are participating in the exhibitions,” Fernández said, adding that her team has assisted in the transportation of larger works of art as well. “Participating in exhibitions can be cost-prohibitive for artists, and so it’s something we’re trying to mitigate in our practices.”

Their most recent exhibition within the community gallery, called “Hecho en Park Avenue,” has been one of their most successful showings, with over 1,300 community members attending its opening earlier this year.

The exhibition’s co-curator, Juan Navarro, explained that the show culminated years of work within Riverside’s Eastside neighborhood. He, along with other Chicano artists, has been creating art within the Latino-dominant community since 2021.

Then, when the Cheech asked them to curate a show, Navarro felt it was the perfect chance to tell the stories of the Eastside’s locals. The response to the final product was more than Navarro could have ever imagined.

“The community showed out: from intellectuals from UC Riverside, from local government, to state government showed up, to the gang members,” Navarro said. He also noted the emotional weight of being recognized for his art, while surrounded by the work of Chicano artists who waited decades for their own to be recognized.

“Seeing this big, broad community and seeing that our show met the need for a diverse audience… It was meaningful to a lot of people, that’s what I cared about.”

The show’s other co-curator, Michelle Espino, also expressed gratitude for the chance to tell the Eastside’s story at the Cheech. Besides being one of its featured artists, Espino worked on many of the behind-the-scenes aspects of the “Hecho en Park Avenue” exhibition.

It was also a full-circle moment for her; years prior, Espino had written about Fernández’s work for a Chicano art history class. This year, she met with Fernández to ask for advice and to finalize plans for the exhibit.

“It [validated] that I do want to continue with this,” Espino said. “She is literally the person I look up to.”

On top of Espino’s one-on-one meetings with the artistic director, she has also enrolled in a few professional development workshops hosted by the center, most recently taking a class that taught both the art of portraiture and poetry. The Cheech regularly partners with a nonprofit organization named the Riverside Arts Council to host professional development classes.

“If we had these resources when I was younger, my trajectory could have probably been a little bit different,” Espino said.

Marin, in his lifelong quest to collect works for his private collection, has seen how Chicano artists have grown their communities in their respective cities. It starts with painters sharing their works with each other through smaller shows, he said, which builds excitement and increases participation. He likened it to a biological process, where each generation builds upon the growth of the previous iteration.

That process is starting in the Inland Empire now, he added.

“We are a part of this big American picture,” Marin said. “And there’s nothing more official that you can do besides having your own museum.”

Hernandez is a freelance writer based in Riverside. This article is part of a De Los initiative to expand coverage of the Inland Empire with funding from the Cultivating Inland Empire Latino Opportunity (CIELO) Fund at the Inland Empire Community Foundation.

Some SoCal residents spent their summer at the beach, or at their local rooftop pool; others spent it indoors, hiding from ICE agents.

It’s why Riverside artist Perry Picasshoe spent his summer documenting the melting of 36 ice blocks on sidewalks across the Inland Empire.

He traveled to nine locations, a mix of parks, storefronts and gas stations, where immigration enforcement raids have taken place in the past few weeks. In each spot, he placed four 25-pound ice blocks on the ground and took photos of them as they melted. He would periodically check on the progress, he explained, and found that some were smashed into pieces or completely disappeared.

“I took it as a metaphor of what’s happening,” Picasshoe said, referencing the recent ICE raids taking place across Southern California. “I was also thinking a lot about having these blocks of ice as almost a stand-in for people.”

This latest art piece is just one of the many other Chicano-focused projects that Picasshoe has created in his hometown in the past three years. His goal, among all of the artworks, is to push its residents to reflect on the complexity of the Inland Empire’s Latino identity.

Perry Picasshoe and his father place an ice block near the epicenter of the city’s monthly arts walk in downtown Riverside on July 3, 2025.

(Daniel Hernandez)

Juan Carlos Hernandez Marquez is an emerging Mexican American multidisciplinary artist from Riverside who goes by the stage name Perry Picasshoe. The moniker, which he created as a teenager, is a play on Pablo Picasso’s name mixed with an early 2010s social media term “art hoe.” Under this pseudonym, Picasshoe first gained recognition for creating art that explored the complexities of his dueling identities of being an LGBTQ+ artist while surrounded by traditional Latino ideals.

While studying visual arts at UCLA, he reimagined Sandro Botticelli’s painting “The Birth of Venus” with LGBTQ+ imagery, created a 9-foot-tall Christmas cactus in honor of the time he spent with his father during the holidays and hosted a solo exhibition called “Mystic Garden,” which showcased pieces inspired by flowers given to him by an ex-partner. It’s also where he developed his signature red-dominant style in both his fashion and art.

“Red is my comfort color,” Picasshoe said.

He suffered from occasional panic attacks while studying at UCLA, he explained, which discouraged him from going to school. It continued for months — until he found himself wearing a bright red outfit, which brought him a sense of peace.

“It just kind of grew from there,” he added. “It just followed me everywhere that I went.”

Picasshoe also posted videos showcasing his pieces on social media. Like his artwork, his posts were intricately filmed and edited with bright red accents. They were also accompanied by narration detailing the work’s inspiration, creation process and meaning. His efforts amassed him almost 200,000 followers between TikTok and Instagram.

This rapid growth, both on social media and within his network, brought new opportunities to grow professionally in Los Angeles. Yet after graduating in 2022, he decided to continue his career in his hometown instead.

“It was just a different pace that I was not ready for,” he said. “The art scene out here is much more [based in] community, as opposed to [money] or clout. It’s more of making work that people here will get to enjoy.”

It’s a decision that’s worked in his favor.

This year, he’s been honored by the city at the Mayor’s Ball for the Arts with the Emerging Artist award and recognized as one of UCLA’s top 100 alumni entrepreneurs for 2025. Picasshoe’s decision to be a professional artist within the Inland Empire also came at a time when opportunities for Latino artists in the region have grown in recent years.

Cosme Cordova, long-time Riverside Chicano artist and Division 9 Gallery founder, explained that for decades, Latino artists considered Riverside a “boot camp” instead of a city where they could make a living. They would earn some money in their hometown, then travel to other prominent locations, like Los Angeles or Palm Springs, where artists felt their work was more respected. As the years went on, he said, the local community began to understand the value in supporting its artists.

“Then when the Cheech came, it’s got international attention, so it’s just gotten even better,” Cordova said. “I’m starting to see a lot of artists now more genuinely focused on just trying to showcase their work here in Riverside.”

The most prominent addition within the region has been the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture — known colloquially as “the Cheech.” The museum is widely considered the only space in the country that exclusively showcases Latino-made exhibitions, including some of Picasshoe’s work.

Since returning to the Inland Empire, Picasshoe’s artistic vision caught the attention of both community leaders and larger institutions. While hosting one of his first solo exhibitions, called “Red Thoughts,” at the Eastside Arthouse in Riverside, the directors of the Cheech took notice of his unique style.

“They approach their work with abandon, with any medium,” said María Esther Fernández, the center’s artistic director. “They had an installation and it was very interactive and immersive. I think pushing the boundaries of that is really fun and innovative.”

It would lead Picasshoe to work on a wide range of projects in collaboration with the Chicano art center for the next three years.

Perry Picasshoe stands in front of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, Calif., on July 3, 2025.

(Daniel Hernandez)

Last year, Picasshoe teamed up with Inland Empire-based artist Emmanuel Camacho Larios to curate an exhibition for the Cheech’s community gallery called “Desde los Cielos.”

“It was a group show that explored what the term ‘alien’ meant in the context of Chicanxs, and alien in the political, the social and the queerness of it all,” Picasshoe said. “I also made a huge painting for that one, the largest that I’ve ever done so far.”

The seven-foot-tall painting, called “Simulacra of Guillermo Hernandez, Beethoven, y los Guachimontones,” depicts his late grandfather sitting on the bed of a pickup truck alongside a small chihuahua. In the background, looming over his abuelo, is a giant circular pyramid built by the Teuchitlán people. A golden pyramid, made from Abuelita Mexican Chocolate bricks, was placed in front of the painting; the bricks were free for the taking during the exhibition’s debut.

After the time for his co-curated exhibition ended, another installation named “Queer Wishes” was featured in the Cheech for an exhibition co-curated by the Eastside Arthouse’s founder and resident artist.

The piece is a three-dimensional black box with a white dress made from bath towels and bedazzled gems displayed on a dress form mannequin inside. Next to the mannequin is a small black vanity desk and mirror with makeup and porcelain wishbones filling the table’s surface.

“The first time I was really able to express myself was when I would get out of the bathroom, put my bath towel on and pretend it was a dress,” Picasshoe said. “I know I’m not the only one with that experience of being in the bathroom and having that be the only time you have to yourself.”

Since debuting the installation at the Cheech, Picasshoe had hoped to take a step back from creating larger community-focused pieces and spend time finalizing some personal projects. However, as immigration enforcement raids ramped up in Southern California, Picasshoe felt the need to create artwork to express his frustration.

Picasshoe and his father drove the family truck to Fontana on July 3 to pick up three translucent ice slabs, each about 40 inches tall and weighing around 300 pounds, and brought them back to downtown Riverside.

They arrived 45 minutes before the start of the city’s monthly arts walk, an event where dozens of local vendors set up booths to sell their artwork to hundreds of residents.

Picasshoe and his father slowly unloaded the slabs from the truck’s bed onto a dolly and wheeled the installations out into the three chosen locations: the front of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture, the epicenter of the city’s monthly arts walk event and the front of the Riverside County Superior Court.

A wooden platform was placed under each slab, with the words “life,” “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness,” written upside down and divided between the three art pieces, along with a QR code explaining its meaning.

He chose this day, he said, because of its high foot traffic. It was the best opportunity to help some passersby feel represented while confronting others with a hard truth.

“Art should be lived in,” Picasshoe said. “It’s prevalent in a lot of my work, and especially this one, since it’s meant to be commenting on something regarding the public.”

Punk rock is not the first thing one might associate with a children’s puppet show. But on Sunday morning at the Ford Theater, L.A. punk pioneers Juanita y Juan and puppeteers from the Bob Baker Marionette Theater put local kids to the test.

After a morning spent crafting their own paper marionettes in the foyer, children marched towards the stage to revel in the weirdness of Juanita y Juan’s electro-cumbia guitar jams — a musical fusion they call “loud lounge.”

The duo was accompanied by vintage marionettes and their handlers, who played backup dancers in the shapes of jellyfish, cats and aliens. Families bounced and gently moshed along to the drum machine beats as “Juan,” also known as Kid Congo Powers, regaled them with a story about his hair catching on fire while playing a candlelit punk show with the Cramps.

And when a couple of rowdy kids started to climb onstage, bouncers swiftly intervened. “Oh, that’s very punk!” said “Juanita,” better known as Alice Bag.

(Evelina Gabrielle Perez / For De Los)

It was a familiar scenario for Bag and Powers. When the two first crossed paths in the 1970s — one being the front woman of the Bags, the other a guitarist in such bands as the Gun Club, the Cramps and later Pink Monkey Birds — they could hardly surmise how influential their scrappy community would become in its nascent years.

“We were all trying to create some kind of new subculture or protest against the bland music of the day,” said Kid in a Zoom call before the show. “We bonded under the flag of punk rock,” added Bag.

In the storied history of the Los Angeles punk scene, Chicanos were, and remain, permanent fixtures. But after predominantly white bands like Germs, X and the Go-Go’s were commemorated in countless books and documentaries as architects of the genre, Bag and Powers decided to start sharing their own perspectives as Mexican Americans who broke the mold.

First, they committed the stories of their lives to the page. In 2011, Alice Bag published a memoir titled “Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story,” and in 2022, Kid Congo Powers followed with “Some New Kind of Kick.”

But it was after collaborating on a song for the 2022 Peacock mystery series “The Resort” that their duo, Juanita y Juan, was born. They spoke to De Los about their salad days, their new album, “Jungle Cruise” and how young Latinos can navigate this time of upheaval in the U.S.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

(Evelina Gabrielle Perez / For De Los)

Tell me about your supergroup, Juanita y Juan. What sparked this idea for you?

Kid Congo Powers: Juanita and Juan are the alter egos of Alice and I. Our reference was Marty & Elayne, who were a cabaret covers act at the Dresden Room [in Los Feliz]. They got a huge following; they were in the movie “Swingers.” And the songs are fun.

We first reconnected as friends after Alice [released] her book, “Violence Girl.” Then we got asked to write a song for a [2022] TV show on Peacock called “The Resort.” Me and Alice are on the same label, In the Red Records, out of L.A. They asked for a song by “a beach lounge act,” and they wanted it to be in Spanish. We are both Mexican Americans, Chicanos, but I thought, “Alice is much more fluent in Spanish.” She was like, “Why don’t we try to do it as a duet?” And they liked that idea.

Alice Bag: With “The Resort,” we had a springboard of this “loud lounge” idea. But it morphed into several different things that were very much our personality, and very much not something we would normally do — exploring different rhythms, like Latin rhythms and tropical rhythms. I spent a month in Tucson, and we actually wrote and recorded songs [that became the album] “Jungle Cruise.”

So how did this puppet show come into play?

K.C.G.: The [Bob Baker] Marionette Theater heard our music and thought it would be appropriate for a kids’ punk thing.

A.B.: I have actually worked with Bob Baker’s Marionette Theater before. We did a video together for a song on my “Sister Dynamite” album, which was released in 2020. Also, I’m a former teacher. I used to take my classes to the old theater, so I have a very warm association with childhood and how enchanted kids are when they see a puppet show.

(Evelina Gabrielle Perez/For De Los)

You both are really inspiring to me as Latinos who helped shape punk in its very early days. Learning about you and other Latin punks like Jeffrey Lee Pierce (The Gun Club) was affirming to me as a young Latina and punk. How did you two connect over your Mexican American experience?

A.B.: There were a lot of Latinos in the early punk scene. Not just Kid and I, but like, Trudie Arguelles, who was the face of L.A. punk.

K.C.P.: Yeah, she was the it girl.

A.B.: And Margot Olavarria, who was the original bassist for the Go-Go’s, was a big shot in the scene. Tito Larriva, who formed the Plugs. Robert Lopez, Hector Penalosa, all the Zeros! There were a lot of Latinos around. But I think one of the things that happened is — I’m Alice Bag, although Bag is not my last name. Our last names got lost, and people just thought of the band names as our family names, like the Ramones! We banded under the flag of punk rock.

Our ethnicity was present, but it wasn’t always the first thing that you noticed about us because of how we dressed. People did not know what punk was. They would make comments like, “Is the circus in town? Are these people in a gang? Are they they gonna beat us up?” So we bonded, and we had to hang out together as self-defense. We were the weirdos.

Alice, in your memoir (“Violence Girl”) you spoke about the tension between the Mexican cultural mores that you grew up with and what you were creating anew with punk.

A.B.: I think people got the wrong idea about me very early on because they knew I was from East L.A. I grew up around gang culture and learned to stick up for myself, so people thought I was scary. Even Kid Congo Powers said I was scary.

Did you think she was scary?

K.C.P.: I thought she was intense. Anything could happen when Alice Bag got on stage. And that was what drew me to her and the band. There was a menace to them, something volatile. This could be a riot, or it could be an orgy.

And Kid knows chaos very well. You held your own in bands like the Cramps. Could you think of a Latin entertainer who helped influence your own performance?

K.C.P.: Iris Chacón.

Wow, I didn’t know you got down like that!

K.C.P.: My mom watched her on TV. That was exciting.

A.B.: That’s where he got his maraca work from.

K.C.P.: And my outfits. But there was Ritchie Valens, of course. I like old rock ‘n’ roll. And then when I met Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club in 1978 or ‘79, we bonded on being Chicano. We both grew up in San Gabriel Valley — me in La Puente, Jeffrey in El Monte. We’d reference riffs coming out of a garage in La Puente, some Chicano garage band playing Santana or War. We shared the outsider-ness of being born in America, but we were in Chicano world. And throw in the fact that I knew I was queer from a young age … I didn’t know if I was in or out.

A.B.: My influences were from Spanish-language music. Raphael was a Spanish singer who’s very intense and very dramatic. And I also am a big fan of José Alfredo Jiménez, who wrote all these ranchera songs that were very emotional. I think there’s a connection between ranchera music and punk — it’s for everybody. It’s better when everybody joins in and sings along. Punk and ranchera are the people’s music.

That calls to mind the resurgence of corridos among young people. Some of the songs generate controversy, but it’s interesting to see a similarly rebellious spirit as punk. What do you think?

K.C.P.: People are always saying to me, “Don’t you feel sorry for young people today? They don’t have what you had, this and that.” But I would never in my life underestimate younger people. There’s something going on, and I don’t know about it. You don’t know about it, because it’s not for us to know about.

You both have shown many Latinos how to live authentically to your identity, to your values. What’s a quick bite of encouragement or advice for young, weird Latino kids? Especially now, when it’s hard not to feel demoralized about what’s happening across the country?

K.C.P.: Well, to live authentically is a path that can be lonely. But it’s also very empowering. And I get to be in my 60s and say I’ve done music exactly as I’ve pleased. That is possible. I had no idea how to play guitar until Jeffrey Lee Pierce said, “Here’s a guitar. I think you can do this. And you’re gonna do it.” I thought, “If this one person believes in me, then I’m gonna try it.” You just have to say yes to yourself.

A.B.: I would also say you’re not alone. Every day, there’s a bombardment of things in the world and in the U.S. that you want to resist. It’s very easy to become despondent and overwhelmed. But you don’t have to feel like you’re lifting this whole weight by yourself. It’s important to know that you do have a community that stands with you. We’re all working in different ways. We’re all a band. We’re going to make it through this together.