SculPtor Ruben Trejo is an American-born artist of Mexican heritage whose substantial and varied body of work includes sculpture in steel, wood, aluminum, and mixed media, as well as an inventive body of paintings, drawings and collages. While his work is rooted in modernist sculptural traditions, Trejo has expanded and invigorated these conventions with form and content that correspond to his lived experiences as an artist deeply steeped in the cultural and aesthetic traditions of both Mexico and Euro-America.

  Ruben Trejo was born in a boxcar belonging to the cB&Q railroad on a rail siding in St. Paul, Minnesota, on January 7, 1937. His father, Eugenio José Trejo, had come from San Pedro, Michoacán, as part of the massive immigration from Mexico to the United States at the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Th e elder Trejo, who found work laying railroad tracks, married Esperanza Jiménez from Ixtlan, Michoacán. Th e couple made a home in the boxcar dwelling, where Ruben was born. With limited resources and four other young boys to care for, the family decided to send Ruben to live with his godparents Jesus and Josefina Lopez in Chicago, Illinois.

  His godparents were seasonal laborers in the agricultural fi elds of the Midwest and Ruben joined them in the fi elds, sitting on rolls of gunny sacks while Jesus and Josefina worked picking various crops. Th is early exposure to the vastness of nature with broad, open vistas of earth and sky and the mystery of many creatures living in the trees and furrows of the fields left indelible images in Ruben's imagination. The artist recalls:
 

  When I was about two or three years old, I had my first experience of feeling the earth and sensing its mystery. It was September and I was looking up at a gray sky and I was cold. And so my godparents came over and put gunny sacks over me and eventually what they did was to put me into this Model A Ford car so I could get warm. . . . But I stood there looking up at the gray sky in Minnesota. It was so beautiful because the smell of the onions mixed with the smell of the earth. And that's one of my first recollections of life, of being in the onion fields, looking at the sky.①
 

  Years later, this precise experience inspired The Onion Fields (1988), a mixed-media sculpture ten feet by more than four feet, with painted steel wires sprouting from a plain, brushed-aluminum surface (plate 27). Simultaneously abstract and narrative, The Onion Fields is a lyrical evocation of the wind flowing across a luminous landscape and the mystery of germination and growth in nature.
 

  In 1942, when Ruben was six years old, his godparents decided to return to Mexico and he was reunited with his family in St. Paul. While his father continued working on the railroad, Ruben joined his mother and other siblings as itinerant workers who traveled throughout the region to pick seasonal crops. Ruben remarks: "We would pick cherries in Souja Bay, Wisconsin; we actually picked tomatoes in Kokomo, Indiana, and corn in Brissen, Minnesota, as well as sugar beets in North Dakota."②
 

  The drudgery, tedium, and backbreaking work of picking crops was somewhat alleviated by the human interaction in the labor camps that were the temporary homes of the itinerant workers. At dusk, after a grueling workday, the camps came alive with murmured conversations and the sounds of someone strumming a guitar and singing. Occasionally a storyteller would gather the children and mesmerize them with Mexican folktales and myths. Such simple cultural actions fortified the collective identity of the group and forged communal solidarity. Trejo remembered how astonished and frightened he was when he first heard an oral version of La Llorona (The Weeping Woman), the horrifying tale of a mother who kills her own children by drowning them in a river; later, at night, she returns, calling out for her lost ones. La Llorona is a core archetype that haunts the Mexican imagination across time and space. Wherever Mexicans settle, La Llorona follows them and soon reappears, for she is cursed to lament eternally for her lost children.
 

  The tale of La Llorona is often used by parents like the bogeyman in other cultures. The Weeping Woman will come and get you, if you don't behave properly. Even in adulthood, Trejo remained haunted by the somber story, whose profound meaning may also relate to La Llorona as Mother Earth, who will finally reunite all her children in their graves.
 

  A romantic Mexican song of profane love, also titled "La Llorona," is equally evocative and served to spur Trejo's imagination. In the song, the male protagonist addresses the object of his affection, a beautiful yet unobtainable woman. He declares his love and gives reasons why she should return his ardor. A famous refrain implores:
 

  Yo soy como el chile verde, Llorona
  Picante pero sabroso.

  I am like the green chile, Llorona
  Very hot, but very flavorful.

  The lyrics play on the double meaning of the word chile, with the literal meaning of the pepper and the figurative reference to the phallus. 
 

  Amalgamating deep sentiments with mental images derived from two profoundly Mexican cultural sources, Trejo created his La Llorona sculpture (plate 12). The biomorphic form of the figure unites masculine elements (the chile pepper) with feminine elements (the painted face). An undulating spiral encasing the figure leads the eye to focus on La Llorona's hermetic, masklike features. With vividly painted green lips and glaring, taxidermist's eyes, the image represents the chilling moments after La Llorona has murdered her own children. Both The Onion Fields and La Llorona are directly linked to Trejo's foundational experiences as a migrant agricultural worker. Narrative content in many later sculptures will integrate motifs, objects, symbols, and emotional attitudes derived from Trejo's formative years, when he labored directly in nature and harvested its bounty.
 

  After their intermittent journeys as they followed the crops, the Trejo family would return to their boxcar home in the Burlington railroad yard at Dayton's Bluff in South St. Paul. In retrospect, Trejo remembers his hometown as a multiethnic, multilingual, immigrant city. He says: "St. Paul was strangely enough a very diverse ethnic community. It had Italians and French people, Germans, Syrians, and a variety of others." ③Some parishes in the different neighborhoods conducted church services in the non-English primary languages of their parishioners. Every two years the city celebrated Pan Ameri can Day in the downtown auditorium. The diverse ethnic groups were welcomed to showcase their customs and traditions in educational programs seeking to promote cross-cultural understanding and cooperation among all groups.
 

  The Colonia Mexicana was concentrated on the West side of St. Paul and was somewhat insular and self-contained, maintaining a parallel culture alongside the Euro-American society. In the Mexican barrio (neighborhood), you could read a Spanishlanguage newspaper, go to periodic showings of Mexican movies, eat Mexican food, and feel a sense of a collective Mexican identity. 
 

  Immigrant parents, along with their children, selectively incorporated themselves into American society: they adapted, innovated, and affirmed a cultural identity that negotiated between lo Mexicano (Spanish language and Mexican culture) and lo Americano (English language and American ways of life).
 

  While patterns of social exclusion, intolerance, and inequality in education, employment, and civic participation remained, St. Paul provided a social environment where the adolescent Ruben Trejo could begin to experiment with cultural fusion. At Mechanic Arts High School he was musically inclined and learned to play the tenor saxophone while also enjoying jazz and playing for an orchestra named Las Siete Notas (The Seven Notes). If jazz offered an immersion in a quintessential American Black idiom, Las Siete Notas was a group that performed a wide range of Mexican popular music for community dances. Their repertoire included boleros, mambos, polkas, and corridos. Diverse musical components, such as improvisation, patterns of call and response, and forms of theme and variation will surface later as constituent elements of Trejo's working procedures.
 

  In addition to music, movies also amplified Trejo's cultural horizons. Each month the State Theatre in downtown St. Paul would screen Mexican movies. Through the celluloid moving images, Trejo was absorbing the rhetoric of cultural nationalism in the creation of the modern Mexican state. The ideals of the Mexican Revolution, the glorification of indigenous cultures, especially the pre-Columbian past, the folklore of agrarian cultures, and the avant-garde forms of modernity were all themes in the movies of the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema of the 1940s. Through many memorable films, incandescent movie stars like María Felix, Pedro Infante, Dolores del Río, Cantinflás, and many others collectively articulated the moral and artistic regimes of contemporary Mexican culture.
 

  High school immersed Trejo in American history and canonical forms of American culture. At the same time that he was absorbing the ethos and worldview of his Mexican American working-class culture in St. Paul, he was also taking in the images and imaginaries of Mexican culture as depicted in film and the mass media.
 

  In 1962 Trejo enrolled in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, declaring a Studio Art major with a minor in Spanish literature. As the first in his family to attend a university, he says, "I felt like una mosca en leche" (a fly in the buttermilk), alluding to the fact that he was conspicuously the only person of color among all the Euro-American students at the university.
 

  Trejo counteracted a persistent sense of alienation and dislocation by immersing himself in the canons of Western art history. He engaged in a personal quest to learn about Latin American and Mexican artists and art movements, which were conspicuously absent from his art history curriculum. The murals of the so-called Tres Grandes of Mexican art, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, along with the work of Rufino Tamayo, made a lasting impact, prompting him to further research the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica.
 

  With his adventurous spirit and insatiable curiosity, Trejo began to understand correspondences and analogous relationships between Western and non-Western art. These included Henry Moore's dependence on pre-Columbian Mexican sculptures as well as the strategies of the Surrealists, which he felt were allied with the phantasmagoric array of Mexican ritual masks. This impulse to absorb form and content from heterogeneous sources is a hallmark of Trejo's subsequent artistic productions.
 

  Studying with sculptors Richard Randall and Katherine Nash, Trejo discovered that he possessed an innate ability to make sculpture. He worked with a wide variety of materials and methods, from clay to wood and welding to bronze casting. Major American art movements that dominated the graduate school curriculum of the period included abstraction, Pop, Process, and Conceptual art.
 

  After almost ten years of intermittent enrollment—he had to take time off to work in order to defray university fees—Trejo completed the coursework for an MFA in sculpture from the University of Minnesota in 1968. For the next three years, Trejo was a full-time associate professor of Art at the College of St. Teresa, an all-women's school in Winona, Minnesota.
 

  The late 1960s were a transformative moment in American society. For those in power, everything solid seemed to melt into air. Rebellion against the established order and rejection of all forms of authority were dominant attitudes.④Race, class, gender, and sexual differences became categories of analysis in cultural interventions, evolving from ethnic civil rights movements, women's and gay liberation struggles, and massive opposition to the Vietnam War.
 

  In the arts, a pluralist era came into being. The elite, white male–centered aesthetic canon was decentered and made more inclusive. New paradigms for art production, representation, and reception focused on public art outside the museum, collaborative interdisciplinary actions, and on the excavation, interpretation, and integration of multicultural sources and artistic traditions as integral components of contemporary art.
 

  Observing the eclectic artistic currents of the period— Pop, Minimal, Color Field, and Conceptual art, among others—Trejo was keenly aware of the prevailing pluralist impulse, and began the arduous task of defining the constituent elements of his own evolving sculptural practice. He recognized that his ethnic and cultural differences could serve as a bridge between Western and the more widely hemispheric American traditions of art making. The artist says:
 

  Sometime in the late '60s and early '70s, the idea of being a Chicano finally hit me like a Red River Valley Potato. I began looking at Orozco, Rivera, and Tamayo, along with Mexican folk art, in juxtaposition to European and American art traditions, in order to try and find an answer. Such insanity is like trying to formulate a style somewhat between Caravaggio and Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts.⑤
 

  Embedded in such heterogeneous sources, Trejo found a way to create sculptures whose thematic and formal concerns are eclectic, hybrid, and in constant dialogue with modernist forms and procedures linked to narrative resources derived from his multicultural heritage.