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City of Austin
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASERelease Date:
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The Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center recognizes achievements in the cultural arts.
The Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center (ESB MACC) is honored to announce their Awards of Excellence winners for 2024. These awards, which were established by the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center Advisory Board in 2009, recognize those individuals in Austin that have demonstrated significant leadership and have made meaningful contributions in the Latino/a/e cultural arts.
The Awards of Excellence ceremony will be held for the awardees and their families on Saturday, June 29 at the Long Center. The general public will be able to watch the video recording of the ceremony on ESB MACC social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The video of the 2023 ceremony, also held at the Long Center, is available to watch here.
The community sent in nominations via an open nomination form, and the ESB MACC received over 40 individual nominations. The nominees were scored by the Awards of Excellence selection committee who awarded the top candidates with the highest scores based on their service in each of the award categories to the ESB-MACC and the Mexican American/ Latino/a/x/e Community.
For biographies of each Awards of Excellence 2024 winner, as well as a complete list of winners from 2009–2023, please visit AustinTexas.gov/MACCAWARDS.
2024 Awardees:
Arts Education Award Winner: Adolph Ortiz
Adolph Ortiz graduated from Travis High School in Austin and was a product of Zeke Castro's Mariachi Ensemble. Mr. Ortiz has played a pivotal role in establishing Austin's Mariachi Relampago in 1991 which was honored with the award of "Mejor Mariachi" from Univision's Premios a la Musica Latina. With all their hard work and dedication for the city of Austin, they were the first group from here to be nominated and win the award. They are also winners of Austin's first mariachi competition, "Fiesta del Mariachi" held at the Long Center.
Emerging Artist Award Winner: Ana Barajas
Ana is a singer/songwriter from Colombia who explores a whole palette of sounds and textures through her music, creating a personal and intriguing sound fusing elements of latin folk, tribal sounds, and electronic. Ana learned to sing traditional music from the Colombian Altiplano and at age 5 took her first music lessons in a classical music school. Later on, she got involved in the Colombian metal scene as the lead singer of various metal bands. In 2011, she moved to Austin, where she got into the local Latin folk scene and started working on her solo project, releasing her debut album in 2018 “La Botánica de los Sueños.” Today, Ana’s career includes an extensive list of collaborations for recording and live performances with artists from around the world, from jazz to electronica, metal and folk.
Arts Award Winner: Mauricio Callejas
Mauricio Callejas is a singer-songwriter from El Salvador who has lived in Austin for twenty years. Mauricio has released six albums as a soloist: “Cosas de la Calle” in 2002, “Mágico” in 2008, “Ice Cream Pop” in 2012, later came the EP “Preambulo” in 2016, his fifth album “Crisis” released in 2020 and his most recent album “Twenty” from 2022 which is a tribute to the two decades living in Texas. He founded and produced Centroamericanto Fest, a Central American music festival that for 15 years has brought together artists from Central America the US to present live music performances for the Austin community.
Lifetime Achievement Award Winner: Dolores Carrillo Garcia
Dolores has been a great supporter of the arts in Austin, from working with La Peña, with the UT Center for Mexican American Studies, Sam Coronado, Coronado Studios and the Blanton Museum at UT-Austin. A native of Lubbock and a University of Texas at Austin alumna, she retired from UT Austin in 2008, after thirty years of service working in Latino-focused programs. García has worked to advance Latino visual-arts programming, curating numerous exhibitions at venues such as the UT Center for Mexican American Studies and the Dougherty Arts Center. Together with her husband Gil Cárdenas, for the last sixteen years García has been instrumental in growing one of the largest private collections of Chicano and other Latino art. And, in the last few years, she and Cárdenas have been generously donating many of these works to museums and collections around the country.
Lifetime Achievement Award Winner: Gilberto Cardenas
Gilberto Cárdenas is internationally recognized as a scholar of Mexican immigration, and authored and edited numerous books, articles, monographs, and reports on topics covering several fields of specialization, including international migration, economy and society, and race and ethnic relations. At UT Austin, he was the director of the Center for Mexican American Studies from 1992–1996. At Notre Dame, from 1999–2012, he was Assistant Provost, held the Julián Samora Chair in Latino Studies, and was the founding director of the Institute for Latino Studies. In Austin, he established Galería Sin Fronteras (1986), and became a prodigious collector of Chicano and other Latino art. In 1993, he was the founding executive director of Latino USA, a half-hour weekly radio program produced at the University of Texas at Austin and distributed nationally by National Public Radio. He worked to create the Smithsonian Institution’s Latino Center. Recently, in 2023, the Blanton Museum of Art announced that it had acquired more than 5,000 works from the Gilberto Cárdenas and Dolores Garcia Collection, which constitutes the largest single donation of Latino art to a museum.
Service Award Winner: Velia Sanchez Ruiz
Velia Sanchez-Ruiz is a graduate of Texas Women's University who worked for Austin Independent School District (AISD) at the elementary school level for over 30 years. From the time she began as an educator, Ms. Sanchez-Ruiz included dance in her Physical Education classes and Mexican music and dance were part of her program. She provided leadership for school programming for Cinco de Mayo and 16 de Septiembre events. She worked hand-in-hand with Emma S. Barrientos to establish and support the Roy Lozano Ballet Folklorico. She was part of the effort to pass the bond election to establish the ESB-MACC, assisting with getting out voters in support of the bond program. After retirement from AISD, she served on the ESB-MACC Advisory Board. She has spent her life as a strong and active advocate for the cultural arts, especially Mexican and Tejano cultural arts.
Posthumous Award Winner: Marcelo Tafoya Sr.
A Pillar of Tejano Culture and Community Leadership Marcelo H. Tafoya, a native of Austin, Texas, where he resided for over 55 years, was a foundational figure in Tejano broadcasting and a staunch advocate for Chicano civil rights. His formative years, marked by a deep connection to his community and a passion for music, laid the groundwork for his later contributions. During the 1960s and 1970s, Marcelo became one of the pioneering voices of La Onda Tejana, a movement that revolutionized the Tejano music genre. His broadcasting career, which spanned over four decades, included impactful tenures at stations like KGTN, KUT, and KAZZ. He received the first "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the Tejano Music Awards, a testament to his early and lasting contributions to the music industry. Marcelo launched Central Texas's first Hispanic television show, "Austin Presenta," on KTBC channel 7. Beyond his roles in broadcasting and community service, Marcelo was a passionate collector of Tejano Music memorabilia and founder of the Tejano Artist Music Museum.
Posthumous Award Winner: Maria Emilia Martin
Martin was a Latina journalist who focused primarily on Latin American and Latino affairs. She was the founding executive producer of Latino USA, a half-hour weekly radio program produced at the University of Texas at Austin and distributed nationally by National Public Radio. She reported on the politics, violence, and resilience of indigenous communities in Central America. Martin was born in Mexico City and grew up in California. She got her start at KBBF in Santa Rosa, Calif., the first Latino-owned community radio station in the U.S. Later, she was an editor on NPR’s national show Latin File, before becoming the network’s first and only Latin American affairs editor on the national desk. She left NPR in 1993 to create the English-language radio program Latino USA. In her memoir Crossing Borders, Building Bridges: A Journalist’s Heart in Latin America, she wrote about overcoming racism and sexism in her work devoted to training other Latina journalists. She won many awards, including for her documentary series Después de las Guerras: Central America After the Wars, was a Fulbright fellow, and was inducted into the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Hall of Fame.