Topico de Nopal

The painful re-birth of Chicanos began with the death of Ruben Salazar at the hands of the LA County Sheriff in 1970 during the low point of the American intervention in Vietnam, inspiring a self definition of Mexican-Americans as “Chicanos”, who had been unheard of since the death of the cultural symbolic revolutionary “Pachuco” in the mid 1940’s.

During this period Herrón was baking Pan Dulce (Mexican Sweetbread) in the family’s small East LA bakery by day and co-founding the avant-garde performance art group “ASCO” (Spanish for nausea) by night, concocting guerilla performances reflecting religion, street gang, and intensive helicopter police sweeps, along with other urban images that burned in his head.

After nearly a decade of high profiled and controversial public ASCO performances, Herrón turned his attention away from a movement that was losing its energy and began to question the true relevance of a theatrical style that was becoming “just another form of Radical Chic”.

His new found, and urgent focus, was now turned to the mission of re-defining the Chicano in the coming 1980’s through another medium: music he defined as “alternative to the alternative” and recruiting a band of civil rights activists, local street vagrants and aspiring mariachis to form what many leading historical texts and documentaries have called “the most important cultural Chicano catalysts of that era: Los Illegals”.
HerróthiCa incorporates decades of re-definition and re-birthing of Herrón’s “perspective as a Chicano artist” through the use of canvas, wood, metal, glass, and music.

In an era of fly by night and “upscale-pseudo-alternative-elitist (and high priced) art galleries”, Herrón had decided not to exhibit but rather to retreat to the alley and the bakery of his youth to produce a selected body of work not tied up by the outside popular definition of “Chicano art” … until now, in this time of another birth (El dolor con pan fino).