Austin’s Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center (ESB MACC) has announced the recipients of its 2024 Awards of Excellence in the areas of art, arts education, and service.
Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center Awards of Excellence
ESB MACC’s awards program was established by the organization’s Advisory Board in 2009 to honor Austin-area individuals who have been leaders in and made important contributions to the local Latinx cultural arts scene. This year, the organization received over 40 nominations through an open nominations form. Nominees were scored by a selection committee, which awarded honors to the top-ranked candidates in each category.
Award categories include: The Arts, awarded to a professional artist working in any creative discipline; Emerging Artist, intended to recognize beginning to mid-career artists of any age; Service, for arts administrators or others volunteering or working in the cultural arts; Arts Educator, honoring people working in arts education in the community; Lifetime Achievement, granted to people who have engaged in a lifetime of dedication to the arts; and Posthumous Award, recognizing a person who made important contributions to the arts in their lifetime.
This year’s awardees are Adolph Ortiz, Ana Barajas, Mauricio Callejas, Dolores Carrillo Garcia, Gilberto Cárdenas, Velia Sanchez Ruiz, Marcelo Tafoya, Sr., and Maria Emilia Martin. Learn more about the recipients below via biographies provided by ESB MACC.
The winners will be recognized during the Awards of Excellence ceremony on Saturday, June 29 at the Long Center. The public can watch a video recording of the ceremony on ESB MACC’s social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
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 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 to 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 Barajas 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. Ms. Barajas 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, Ms. Barajas’ 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 20 years. Mr. Callejas has released six albums as a soloist: Cosas de la Calle in 2002, Mágico in 2008, Ice Cream Pop in 2012, 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 and the U.S. to present live music performances for the Austin community.
Lifetime Achievement Award Winner: Dolores Carrillo Garcia
Dolores Carrillo Garcia has been a great supporter of the arts in Austin, from working with La Peña, 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 30 years of service working in Latino-focused programs. Ms. 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. For the last 16 years, Ms. García and her husband Gil Cárdenas, have been instrumental in growing one of the largest private collections of Chicano and other Latino art. In the last few years, she and Mr. 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
Maria Emilia 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. Ms. 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.
