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Enrique Chagoya was born in Mexico City in 1953. He was encouraged to be an artist from an early age by his father, who worked at the national bank of Mexico by day and was himself an artist by night. While studying political economy at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Chagoya created political cartoons for local student-run newspapers and was an active participant in student and worker protests in Mexico City during the early 1970s. After emigrating to the United States in 1977, he went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, receiving a BFA in 1984, and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. He currently lives and works in San Francisco, and has been a professor of art and art history at Stanford University since 1995.

Chagoya’s art practice is an extension of his political activism. He uses his experiences on both sides of the United States-Mexico border to inform his work, as he tackles themes such as immigration, politics, stereotypes and cultural conflicts “to construct a narrative, with humor and a more contemporary feel, that is different from the dominant history.” His approach is multivalent and he utilizes a range of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, and prints. An early series of large-scale editorial drawings from the mid ‘80s rendered mainly in black and red, lampooned current events by conflating cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse with political figures such as Ronald Reagan. As his work became more pointedly critical of dominant Western cultures, he continued to draw from popular culture, political figures and canonical artworks as fodder for his art, albeit as seen through a nonwestern lens, both poking fun and demanding societal accountability for the pressing issues of the day. Chagoya’s method of revisionism, particularly of Western narratives, is through satire, by appropriating historical and pop-cultural figures and depicting them fro