Friends in groups of twos and threes walk down 35th Street in Bridgeport, a historically blue collar neighborhood in Chicago. They grip the edges of their jackets attempting to shield themselves from the frosty wind of the November morning. Down the street, a mechanic appears from under the hood of a red car, his dark, oil-filled hands pet the spotted fur of his dog, who walks around him without a leash.

Inside a cafe, students look frustrated at their computer screens. They raise the volume of their headphones in an unsuccessful attempt to drown out the humming chatter of their neighbors. Towards the back, a group of grandmothers sip their cappuccinos and take turns practicing Spanish phrases from their thick textbooks: “Ehstoy per deeda, don dee ehsta il bano?”

Among the noise, Marcos Raya sits at a small table by the corner. He sips his coffee slowly and watches as people come and go. Despite being inside, he keeps his signature circular-framed sunglasses on, that, along with the gray fedora he wears, give him a mystical aura only a certain few can pull off. He is close to seventy years old, but acts as fresh and boastful as a man in his twenties.

“You found me,” he says when he sees me, a slight accent trailing each of his words.

Earlier, he’d sent a text. A selfie. He was smiling and wore the same sunglasses and fedora he wore today. At his side, a blond woman pursed her bright red lips in a strained half smile.

“In case you don’t know what I look like,” it said, capped off with one of those silly smiling emojis.

I had met him once before, though it’s clear he doesn’t remember.

“I did,” I say, and take a seat in front of him.

“No, no, we’re not staying here,” he says as I move to take off my jacket. “I thought we could drive over to my studio, it’s only a couple of blocks away.” He draws a quick map in the back of his business card and explains where I need to turn and park once I get to the warehouse of studios. I nod, not completely sure where I’m going.

-- 

Raya is an old-timer, an artist who’s been part of Chicago’s art scene since the 1970s. He’s best known as a pioneer of the Chicago Chicano mural movement of that time, a movement that took inspiration from Mexico’s three great muralists—Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros.

From 1968 to the late 1970s, Mexican and Mexican-American artists created murals that helped establish an identity for the waves of Mexican immigrants that were settling in the Southwest-side neighborhood of Pilsen. These murals “were giving validity to the Latino identity,” according to Raya, helping further establish Pilsen as a mecca for Mexican immigrants, a place where individuals could find a home away from home.

His work can still be seen around Pilsen, where the neighborhood currently fights a losing battle against gentrification.

Raya points to a painting of a spotted dog sitting on his hind legs. We’re in his second-floor gallery in Bridgeport, a mile away from the cafe, in a labyrinth of hallways and empty studio spaces. The dog’s wearing a pair of black dress shoes and red sunglasses. An empty bottle of booze lies to one side of him, and on the other, a battled photograph of Chicago’s Sears Tower. Tired and defeated, the dog sits below a large yellow street sign; the sign’s large block letters indicate this is 18th Street.

“It’s a self-portrait,” Raya says.

It’s a painting meant to reflect his dog years, the decade of the seventies when he was fighting to survive in Pilsen, a neighborhood that seemed as broken and lost as himself. “When I arrived in Pilsen, we had no identity; we had no barrio.”

Raya was twenty-three when he moved into the neighborhood. He had three dollars in his pocket and nowhere to live. He moved into an abandoned church called St. Joseph’s on 17th Street and Halsted. “The whole church was just for me, nobody knew I lived there.”

Pilsen was a dark and forgotten place back then. “The set of Orson Welles's, Touch of Evil,” is how Raya likes to describe it—rundown, crime-ridden and grim. “We had the most racist alderman who had his block spotless but he wouldn’t clean the rest of the neighborhood. He would call us cucarachas.”

The neighborhood was in a state of transition during that time. Mexican immigrant families, pushed out of Taylor Street to make way for the expansion of the city’s university campus, were moving in and settling next door to the Czech and Polish families who lived there. Crime, drugs and gangs plagued the neighborhood, and social services were all but nonexistent. 

“There was a lot of violence and small gangs that would protect the neighborhood. I saw a lot of killings during the seventies.”

Like his neighborhood, Raya was going through dark times. Born in Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico he had moved to Chicago when he was sixteen. At seventeen, he left his mother’s house to study art and painting in Massachusetts and in 1968, in order to avoid the draft, he moved to Mexico City. Now he was back in Chicago—broke, homeless and politicized.

“I was in a lot of pain,” he says. “I began to drink.”

Raya has memorialized this time in many of his paintings. One in particular, named “The Alley,” shows a group of friends partying, taking drugs and drinking while six-eyed demons, monsters and skeletons surround them. It’s a depressing piece. Many of the participants depicted, who are based on real people, are shirtless, shooting up drugs and crawling in desperation along a dark alleyway. “Most of them are dead now but this is what I saw, what I experienced—a whirlwind of alcohol, drugs and violence.”

Despite his troubles with alcohol, Raya began to forge relationships with other artists, activists and workers in the neighborhood. He moved into Casa Aztlan, a community center in Pilsen that served as a gathering place for the Chicano movement. For the next ten years, he was its artist-in-residence and it was there where he became one of the well-known artists of the mural movement. 

“Casa Aztlan was the center of agitation, of organizing,” Raya remembers. “We started from the bottom and we created Pilsen. We organized the people, the murals created consciousness among the students, the workers. We turned it around. If it wasn’t for the activists and for the artists, we would have fallen into a hole.”

The movement helped unite the Chicano and Mexican people living in Pilsen, creating an identity they both could connect with, says Raya. “There was this hate between Mexicans and Chicanos. Mexicans would call Chicanos pochos, and Chicanos would call Mexicans wetbacks. But the movement helped them understand that we are all from Aztlan. That identity was created in the seventies.”

Raya still lives in Pilsen and is now experiencing a new kind of transition. New cafes, shops and restaurants have opened along 18th Street, Casa Aztlan has closed, street art has replaced many of the old murals and higher rents have driven many Mexican families out. Pilsen, once thought to be a hub of crime, is now one of Chicago’s hippest neighborhoods.

--

On one of Raya’s gallery walls, in a corner back room, I notice a small picture frame. Inside the frame, a photograph of a masked luchador is pasted against a handwritten prayer:

Santo Niño,

Patron saint of Mexican criminals and lumpen artists,

Marcos Raya wants to thank Santo Niño for getting me two shows in London,

I am asking you now, Santo Niño, to help me sell my paintings for $100,000.

Raya senses my confusion. He’s not a religious man.

“You know I’ve been asking Santo Niño for many years now,” he explains. “When I asked him to sell my paintings for $10,000, I thought it was a lot of money. And to help me find my dream studio. And to help me find the most beautiful women in the world. But it all took place...now I want more.”

Looking around, it does seem like Raya has gotten everything he ever wanted. His gallery is expansive and filled with a grand collection of surrealistic paintings, kitsch art objects, and dystopian installations of half-naked mannequins. His love of women is also well represented—one artwork in particular, a large frame with more than a dozen portraits, is pretty boastful of the women in Raya’s life. 

“It’s called ‘The Most Beautiful Women in the World,’” Raya says, holding it up to take a closer look. The frame is filled with rows of photographs. Portraits of women, young and old; brunette and blond.  

“This is my girlfriend here,” he says, as he points to a photograph in the bottom row. It shows a dark-haired woman in her mid-30s with full eyebrows and light brown eyes. “And here’s my mommy and my sister. And I just met this one...Mexicana, she’s pretty.”

Among Raya’s odes to women, his gallery is filled with personal treasures—decades of work that showcase his progression as an artist and continued effort to push himself outside the boundaries of Mexican art. 

“My work is not like the other guy,” he says. “It’s not in your face Mexican. I’m not interested in that. I don’t live in Mexico, I live in the United States.”

Though he was part of Pilsen’s mural movement, he has never considered himself a muralist. He is more attracted to studio work, where he can experiment with his ideas more freely. “I studied the work of the Mexican muralists and I came to the conclusion that they took mural painting to the extreme. That after what they did, there was almost nothing left to do.”

When he was a student in Massachusetts he took frequent trips to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. On one of those trips, he saw the International Surrealism Exhibit, a show that opened his eyes to other forms of art and influenced his future work. “I went in there and when I came out, I was never the same,” he says.

His paintings are often self-portraits set behind obsessively detailed, surreal backgrounds. They’re dark, eerie and often political. Many of them deal with warfare, criticizing the government here and across the border. Walking across his gallery, one gets a sense of his story, his suffering and his accomplishments. Pasted next to some of his paintings are news and magazine clips—proud mementos of exhibitions Raya has participated in.

“I was part of the MCA’s exhibit of surrealist work, and the [Chicago] Tribune wrote about it and used my painting to promote it,” he says, while pointing to the clip on the wall.

Raya thinks of himself as an underground artist, so every story written about him or his work, is a sign of recognition, a sign he’s at the level with many of the successful artists across the country. It’s why he chooses to promote himself the way he does, he wants to be known for what he is—a contemporary artist who happens to be Mexican.

It’s something he’s found lacking, he says, with the Mexican and Mexican-American artists in Chicago, especially in Pilsen’s art scene and its Mexican fine art museum, the National Museum of Mexican Art.

“That word contemporary or modern doesn’t exist in that museum which is a very big, big mistake for many reasons,” he says. “It’s allowing the Mexican artists who were born here or who come here, not to grow and compete with the rest of the people because they get stuck on that Mexican theme. It’s easy for them to do what they do because they don’t have to think, they just borrow imagery—Mexican imagery, Chicano imagery—that’s why the art all looks the same. That’s the whole point of being an artist, to have ideas and produce something new.” 

Raya misses the old days when, he says, there was a healthy art scene in Chicago, full of galleries, critics, collectors and a hierarchy of artistic talent. Now he says, everyone is mixed in together and it’s hard to distinguish who truly is talented. “Most of the artwork is cheap and that makes it to be that anybody, even the local paletero, can be an artist.” 

---

As we walk up the stairs to Raya’s studio, he tells me about a collector who came to visit him just a couple of months ago. 

“He was this guy from Colorado. He looked like [former Illinois governor Bruce] Rauner. The Mexican museum gave him my name and he said he was buying art by Mexicans, artists who he thought would be the next big thing.”

He stops suddenly at the top of the landing. 

“I think we passed it,” he says laughing. “My studio is downstairs. We went up a flight of stairs too many.”

We turn around and start walking down the stairs.

“He told me he knew Mexican art was pretty cheap,” he continues. “He didn’t know why mine was so expensive. I showed him the piece about me in the Wall Street Journal and told him I had my work in major museums. As he’s looking around the studio, he goes for the most Mexican piece in my collection—a calavera,” Raya pauses and rolls his eyes. “He picks out two other pieces and starts to put his own price on them. ‘I’ll give you $2,500 for these three,’ he says. ‘What are you talking about?’, I say. ‘You’re making your own prices?’ I told him he could have the little one for $2,500. He looked surprised but took it.”

He’s shaking his head as we enter his studio—it’s a long narrow space full of works in progress, naked mannequins and tables piled with paints, books and tools. 

“I never pursued grants or federal money. Everything I did was by myself,” he says. “I enjoy doing this because of the freedom to do as I please. I paint for no one. I am just an artist with ideas.”

I ask Raya for a photo before I leave.

As he talks about his works, he moves his chair below one of his paintings—a colorful abstract canvas that reflects his new style of work. He makes sure the chair is in the middle of the painting and then sits, fixing the edges of his dark blazer. His shirt buttons are unbuttoned a bit too low, a sterling silver star-shaped necklace sparkles in the middle of his bare chest.

He crosses his arms.  “Ready.”

I snap a couple of photos before he asks to see them.

He pouts and nods approvingly.

“Huh. I look good.”