“Mi Matamoros Querido”

My lady and I decided to take a month long vaction to Mexico this summer. It’s always a great feeling coming down to the mother land. We are officially on day 15 of 31 and we have had a blast so far. Eating tacos, tortas, and esquites and other Mexican delicacies is all we have been doing these 2 weeks,  aside from all the walking a site seeing.

I managed to score a wall in Izucar after looking and asking owners, and I was able to get permission from a barber to let me paint his gate. Once we got the OK me and the wife started looking for some paint. The town has a couple of paint sotores, but their spray paint  is not nearly as good as the brands that I am use to and they are way more watery than the paint that I like. I mean I would much rather some rustos or krylon over comex anyday!. I managed to get a connect by contacting a cousin of mine that has some friends in Ilegal Squad. Ilegal Squad is  a crew that has a graff magazine and even makes their own brand of paint, they are based out of the Distrito Federal in Mexico. We have been staying in Izucar De Matamoros, Puebla, which is about 4 hours away from the capitol! So the Closes place that they had a distributor was in the city of Puebla.

Well that was it, we managed to take a bus to Atlixco, and  another to the city of Puebla. Once we got there we walked about 40 mins before we reached our destination. I would say it was not all that bad given that we ran into the train car museum and alot of graff, so we had alot of site seeing during our walk. Finally we reached our store “La Raza” which a little shopping strip with a bunch of little shops. It wasn’t to long before we were able to find the little shop, paint was cheap and the selection of color’s was large so it wasn’t hard to decide. Now we were on our way back to Izucar after a few hours of travel.

So Saturday evening I contacted the Barber to see if the walls good to go. Unfortunately the barber backed out so I was back to square one. But this time I had paint, so now for sure I had to get something. Sunday morning while having breakfast with Patys Uncle we came up with the idea of creating a flyer to share on family members social media that resided in the town we were in, to see who was up for a nice piece.

Also I didn’t want to sit and wait for something to come up. I new that I had to get up off my feet and do something so I did. Me and my lady put on our running shoes and jogged the little town while looking around for some possibilites. We figured  someone was bound to let me paint. One after the other they kept turning me down. Finally we ran into a little ice cream shop that had some old graff that was faded and pealing. It was a rather huge wall, and kind of doubted myself. But I said what the heck its worth a shot. So we stopped and asked. The gentlemen was very humble and had his daughter there with him. As soon as I began to show previous pictures of my older work from back home he seemed up for it. We were so excited we left without paying the for the coffee flavored ice cream we bought! So we ran back to pay the man. He mentioned not to worry about because he would see us first thing in the morning.

Next morning I had to borrow my cousins truck in order to transport buff and a latter to be able to complete the mural. My lady and I arrived around 11am and began right away with the scraping and buffing of the wall. The heat at that time of day was no Joke!!!- I continued painting for about 3 and a half hours until we decided to take a little lunch break. By that time I was exhausted by the heat and hungry!. I finished lunch and headed back to the wall, by that time we had brought back some company (family) to hang out and watch. I painted for about 4 more hours until the mural was finally completed. Through out my project many people stopped by to talk to me. I had alot of positive feedback from the communtiy, i even had a little old lady stop by and “congratulate me” she went on to say thank you and that it brought a lot of joy to her because of the bright colors. Someone even said it was very “elegant”, which was an odd word to describe graffiti, but I appreciated it!