A BRUSH WITH DEPTH A Latinx artist-alum opens a cultural center and paints the way BY JULIE DAVIDOW | ART BY JAKE PRENDEZ
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HOUGH SOPHIA VAZQUEZ does not see many students who look like her when she walks around UW, she hears the familiar sounds of home. Her earbuds, filled with the Spanish-language music her mom played in the car and while cleaning the house on weekends, evoke her Mexican roots even as she feels like an outsider. “The music is what really holds me together right now,” says 19-year-old Vazquez, who started at the UW in the fall. A range of songs, from Selena to Shakira and cumbia, populates her playlist. Vazquez always knew she was college bound, but she was never sure where—or if—her Mexican identity fit in that plan. Although her high school in Federal Way was more than 50 percent Latinx, the honors classes where she spent most of her time lacked diversity. She worried about standing out if she called attention to her heritage. “I didn’t like being different,” she says. Then, on a whim, she joined the first session of an arts residency program for Latinx teenagers led by Chicano artist Jake Prendez. “Suddenly I was in a group of kids who were all like me,” says Vazquez, whose parents met in California. Both sides of her family came from the Mexican state of Jalisco. The Próxima Generación: Youth Residency Project introduced Vazquez to artists and activists who encouraged the teens to consider their own role in sustaining cultural traditions. “I became more comfortable being able to connect with my roots,” Vazquez says. Prendez, ’00, knows what it’s like to be on the outside. As a Mexican teenager in Bothell in the 1990s, he faced constant reminders that he didn’t belong. Once, police stopped his group of black and brown friends and held guns to their heads because they said the 14-year-olds matched the description of a robbery suspect. A math teacher at his high school handed out word problems based on racist stereotypes of African Americans and Latinos. Art teachers told him his work was too ethnic. “I quit art after my first year in college,” says Prendez, who attended Bellevue Community College before transferring to UW. “I thought, finally an art teacher will get me. They will see me. But they just perpetuated the same thing I heard from everyone else.” After struggling with school as a child and teen, he found a major—American Ethnic Studies—that helped him make sense of the racism he experienced.
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V I E W P O I N T : : U Wa l u m . c o m / v i e w p o i n t
“Genetic Memory,” a 2018 oil on canvas, captures Prendez's approach for youth empowerment, his penchant for positive imagery and his connection to his Indigenous roots.
