The white SUV that I happened to be driving into downtown Laredo on a cold, Sunday night hummed with its heater on with a low, whooshing sound. The highway had some traffic with most lanes clear.
As I pulled into downtown, no one seemed to be there. Buildings hid their age in the darkness. Pockets of dull scattered light emanated from the gas station and the Tornado bus depot with a few people milling about.
Three commercial banks provided large, empty parking lots and bright lights. Further into downtown, Jarvis Plaza, and the Greyhound bus station, some wandering eyes might see figures in the shadows or an older man sitting on a park bench by himself in the forty-degree weather with a crisp, cutting breeze.
As an old city, by American standards, why should we care about artists and art in our community? Can public art turn the lights on for Laredo’s downtown? Can it breathe life back into a forgotten place that we hold dear deep in our hearts? Can art give a sense of place, of community, of comfort and home – hope and joy and inspiration for those who need it when they walk alone on the streets of Laredo?
“Music washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life,” wrote Berthold Auerbach. Maybe, we can interpret Berthold’s quote that art can serve as a spiritual therapy. And maybe we can further interpret and analogize that art can be a representation of a person, of a community, of the soul of the city: our hopes, our dreams, and our unique realities. And through this could reveal in some ways who we are as a place and celebrate why we call this place our home — with all the love, complications, and the dust of everyday life that we may feel.
This September and October the Laredo Center for the Arts welcomed over a thousand students from LISD, UISD, St. Augustine, United Day School, and Laredo College to participate in the Don Quixote exhibit. Students toured the exhibit of enlarged engravings, saw paintings and sculptures by local artists who were inspired by Don Quixote, watched a video about the life of Miguel Cervantes, checked out period costumes, saw a massive and incredible mural of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza gazing towards the windmills with an actual windmill constructed by hand in the foreground, and participated in the modern printing process to learn about how these images were sketched, engraved, and imprinted.
The takeaway was not just about art. Their amazing teachers, administrators, and everyone involved with the Laredo Center of the Arts cared about them and wanted to create a special experience. In addition, one artist, who submitted a sculpture, shared that his Don Quixote sculpture was made 50 years ago and thought one day there might be an exhibit of Don Quixote in Laredo – incredible!
We have artists across every part of our City and County from Canta Ranas, Hillside, Río Bravo, El Cenizo, Mines Road area, North Laredo, Los Presidentes — everywhere. As Frida Khalo stated, “Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”
You can feel the heartbeat of art in our city gently beating and at times pounding with exuberance through the exhibits, programming and productions of Daphne Art Foundation, Laredo Center for the Arts, Laredo Little Theater, the Laredo Theater Guild International, Casa Ortiz, the Laredo Film Society, the music being produced out of our educational institutions, and with print making by Eric Avery and the greater art community.
I recently participated in an art exhibit and one of the best parties and best kept secrets in town at Casa Daphne, which had incredible musicians and DJs playing.
One of the most fun events held monthly is CaminArte Laredo, an art walk into different buildings downtown to see various art exhibits while musicians jam out with their music reverberating across downtown. It’s a glorious experience. One person I spoke with posited, “What if this was every day in downtown? What would that feel like?”
When you walk through Aldo Tatangelo Walkway downtown and see the mural by Abel “El Picasso” Gonzalez, it feels absolutely magical. You are transported into something different, more alive. We need more of this in downtown and across our city.
All of this is to say that I believe in the transformative power of art for good. We live in a harsh, brutal world with so much cruelty, when we think about some of the things happening on our little blue planet all alone somewhere in the universe. Then, thinking about what humans to do to other humans can be paralyzing, and yet there is so much good and kindness and love in our world. Art strives to paint in all its iterations and variations the full human experience.
Quoting Frida Khalo again, “I paint flowers so they will not die.” This reminds me of the fragility and bitterness of life as well as the word agape, a Greek word translated by William Tyndale in the New Testament as the idea of sacrificial, unconditional love. Maybe art and public art can be a representation of agape, of love, of the soul of our city — of a kinder world that brings people together.
My hope, if I can be so daring, is that you can join me in advocating for public art, especially downtown, and support the arts in Laredo.
To read the January edition and all stories: https://tragaluzjournal.org/2026/01/15/tragaluz-vol-ii-no-4-3/
