Somos de la Tierra

Somos de la tierra ( We are of the Earth) is a series of portraits and figurative paintings accented with ceramic frames that personify the internal dialogue of race, culture, and sexuality. The relationship in pairing large-scale paintings with ceramic components amplifies the narrative suggested through titles and expressed through the combination of the materials. Magic Realism manifests in the melancholic paintings of people and fantastical characters in desert scenes to understand and represent these aspects of cultural, sexual, and racial identity as a Mexican-American. I paint people I know as part of the subject matter to extend portraits of myself in applying cultural values and expanding on sexual and racial identity. I play with memory and personal experience to address customs, beliefs, and languages growing up between the United States and Mexico—the visual lexicon of Aztec indexical signs of duality and transformation explore the Mexican-Americans’ dualism.

Title: Desenterando plumas y huesos. (Unearthing Feathers and Bones.) 

Dimensions:   49 ¾” x 65 ¼”

Materials: Oil on panel with Ceramic Red Earthenware Frame.

Date: 2024

Artwork Description and Significance:

Desenterrando plumas y huesos is a mythopoetic meditation on origin, duality, and ancestral guidance, rendered through a Chicano lens of Magical Realism. Drawing from Mesoamerican mythology and personal narrative, Avena creates a swirling dreamscape where the sacred symbols of Aztlán—eagle, cactus, and serpent—are reborn through a contemporary vision of identity and place.

At the painting’s center, two mirrored figures emerge from the mouth of a serpent, evoking the dual reflections of the artist and his brother. They are surrounded by swirling leaves and flanked by xoloitzcuintli dogs—guides of the underworld—who reclaim the foreground with presence and purpose. Above them, a monumental eagle pierces the sky, echoing the founding myth of Tenochtitlán while also symbolizing the layered surveillance and dominance associated with empire.

The piece embraces Magical Realism not only through its precise yet otherworldly composition, but also through its deep embedding of myth into the present. The fantastic becomes plausible, and the historical becomes psychic. Here, Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, and Xólotl are not simply gods—they are living, breathing presences, guiding the Chicano soul through the terrain of memory, homeland, and self-reflection.

Surrounded by terracotta glyphs and visual codes carved into a ceremonial frame, the artwork becomes an altar to the borderlands—a visual essay aligned with the philosophies found in Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. It interrogates how Indigenous, Mexican, and American identities coexist within the body, the land, and the imagination, illuminating a mestizo cosmovision that continues to transform and unearth its origins.

Title: Tu puedes ser un coyote, mi hijo. (You Can Be a Coyote, My Son.) 

Dimensions: 31 ¼” x 55” 

Materials: Oil on panel with Ceramic Red Earthenware Frame

Date: 2023

Artwork Description and Significance:

Tú Puedes Ser un Coyote, Mi Hijo is a deeply personal reflection on mestizo identity, cultural memory, and the psychological tension of living between worlds. Set in a vividly painted desert landscape, the composition is split between a younger self nestled in the shadow of a Santuario dedicated to San Judas Tadeo, and an adult self-kneeling beside a fallen wren, face-to-face with a coyote emerging from a prickly pear cactus shaped like the Mexican territory. This central cactus becomes a metaphorical border—both physical and spiritual—marking the threshold between Mexico and the U.S., faith and survival, innocence and transformation.

The work draws heavily on Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of Nepantla—a space of in-betweenness and shifting identity—and explores the artist’s experience of cultural hybridity as a queer, Mexican-American man. The figure of the coyote operates on multiple levels: as an animal of myth, a symbol of cunning and survival, and as a reference to the human "coyote" who smuggles migrants across the border. Rather than villainize, Avena reclaims the figure as a symbol of adaptive transformation, agency, and ancestral memory.

Blending Chicano mythos, Catholic iconography, and borderland poetics, the painting becomes a meditation on voice, value, and visibility—especially for those living at the intersections of race, sexuality, and nationality. It invites viewers into the emotional terrain of the "new mestizaje," where identity is not fixed, but constantly negotiated across language, land, and legacy.

Title: De otros colores, seya la media naranja. (Of Other Colors, Be the Better Half.)

Dimensions:  29” x 19 ⅛” 

Materials: Oil on panel with Ceramic Red Earthenware Frame

Date: 2023

Artwork Description and Significance:

De otros colores, seya la media naranja is a serene and intimate meditation on queer love, duality, and ancestral grounding within the vast and often desolate terrain of the American Southwest. In this composition, the artist and his partner recline into one another, held not by the arid landscape around them but by an eruption of tropical vegetation—lush and out of place, yet deeply rooted in the heart’s emotional climate. Above them, two swallows soar, offering a symbolic and playful expression of queer affection, kinship, and migration.

Framed by terracotta borders referencing the Aztec earth deity Tlaltecuhtli, particularly her torn lower half, the piece draws directly from Mesoamerican cosmovision. In Aztec myth, Tlaltecuhtli’s dismembered body becomes the Earth itself, and her hair gives rise to vegetation—here, mirrored in the plants that lift the lovers above the cracked ground. The visual language of transformation and fragmentation speaks to the Chicano/a/x experience of borderlands identity: a life built from pieces of Indigenous, Mexican, and colonial pasts.

The result is a visual offering of rest, resilience, and recognition—elevating queer embodiment as divine, grounded, and essential to the ongoing reimagining of home.

Title: Maricon. (Faggot.) 

Dimensions: 51” x 62”

Materials: Oil on canvas with Ceramic Red Earthenware Frame and kitchen curtains. 

Date: 2023

Artwork Description and Significance:

Maricón (Faggot.) confronts the complex intersections of queerness, masculinity, and cultural identity within the Mexican-American experience. Framed with embroidered curtains and terracotta molding referencing Xólotl’s mythical transformations, the composition stages a psychologically charged scene: a bare-chested luchador and a sharply dressed man (the artist’s partner) engage in a quiet hand game, surrounded by masked, faceless figures and the desert landscape of the borderlands.

This work channels Mesoamerican cosmovision through the Nahua concept of tonalli—the animating force of warmth and soul—and the mythic journey of Xólotl, God of shadows and twins, who transformed into an agave, corn, and axolotl to escape death. These transformations echo the adaptive strategies of queer identity: survival, concealment, and emergence.

Through the contrast between public bravado and private vulnerability, Maricón critiques machismo and the internalized homophobia still embedded in both Mexican and American cultures. The masked luchadores serve as metaphors for closeted lives shaped by fear, shame, and performative masculinity. The duality of openness and repression, visibility and disguise, runs throughout the work—positioning it within a larger Chicano visual language that blends mythology, personal narrative, and political urgency.

Rooted in Magical Realism and ceremonial aesthetics, this painting becomes both altar and battleground, inviting viewers to reflect on how queer bodies navigate and resist.

Title: Somos de la tierra. (We are of the Earth.) 

Dimensions: 176 sq ft.

Materials: Ceramic cylinders and desert soil. 

Date: 2024


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2023–2024 IAIA BFA Exhibition: Indigenous Presence, Indigenous Futures

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