translated from Spanish: Mexicon artist ‘fights’ Trump’s politics with murals

In the municipality of Tonatico, State of Mexico, artist Luis Sotelo painted two murals in which the main speech is the rejection of the immigration policy of Donald Trump, president of the United States.
“The first mural was erased at night,” the artist says.
The second mural, however, is in force and is located in a road near the secondary where he studied. He painted it in seven days and worked 3 hours a day without any help, with his own paint and material. 
The two murals are the artist’s response to what he calls Donald Trump’s xenophobic speech against migrants.
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In an interview with Animal Político, Sotelo spoke of the pictorial composition of his two murals. The first under the title “We are migrants, not criminals”, which in turn is closely linked to its second installment which he called “For the freedom of Mexico”.
For Sotelo, art became a means of expression that allowed him to playfully represent the immigration situation that Mexico is going through in the face of submission imposed by the United States, by a tariff threat.
For this reason, it is that through art Sotelo launches this discourse in which, from his murals, he sums up the history of two nations but also projects it into the future with a hopeful message.
“Art is the medium I don’t have to worry about languages,” says the artist.
Tonatico and its relationship to migration
According to the Sociodemographic Diagnosis of the State of Mexico, the municipality of Tonatico, State of Mexico, has a total of 13 thousand 793 inhabitants until 2018. According to Luis Sotelo’s account, both Tonatico and the migratory situation in Mexico are intimately linked. 
In the 1950s he started a bracero program in the Tonatico community in which his father participated. He had to hire people from Tonatico to go to work as braceros in the southern United States.
According to the artist, the income of tonatian families is most beneficiaried by the remittances that migrants send to their families, this allows the village to depend on the dollars sent each month by people who had to migrate to that country.
Read: Faced with a road full of dangers: Why do migrants keep arriving at the US border?
Estimates by Sotelo himself, who has visited the U.S. cities where his countrymen live there, point out that around 8,000 Tonatiquens and their families live there. It is a new generation that every holiday season returns to Tonatico. 
“We have people in Los Angeles, San Diego, the rest of the American Union and Hawaii; are in everything. There are many young people in the Air Force, in the Army.”
According to Sotelo, young people who come from the United States to Tonatico speak English but do not know the history of Mexico, so one of the reasons for making a mural that criticizes Trump is having contact with visitors.
“Remember that before you got there you had grandparents who emigrated,” he said.
Who is Luis Sotelo
Luis Sotelo is a self-taught artist. The 45-year-old has painted more than 400 portraits and 80 murals in the southern region of the State of Mexico and others are in the United States; in addition to having a large cloth mural that has led to different parts of the world.
He began painting at the age of eight and is currently a teacher. He comes from a family of artists: his maternal grandfather Francisco Morales Rueda left works and testimonies, also as self-taught also in the southern region of the State of Mexico.
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At the age of 12 his father enrolled him in the school of Fine Arts despite coming from a family of 10 brothers. When he turned 13 he became a self-taught artist and at 15 he had his first collective exhibition with a medium format painting with the image of the Virgin of the Temple.
Muralism came to his life when he began to travel to Mexico City with his own savings to visit museums in the absence of the internet at the time.
“I started buying books, researching, and I went forward.”
Sotelo is currently awaiting the results of Donald Trump’s impending re-election. If his triumph is confirmed he will paint a large mural in Mexico City, where according to the artist, the idea is to convey a message of faith and hope, reflecting that the people are greater than any politician.
 
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Original source in Spanish