How have people tended to react to your fairly objective representations of the mundane aspects of everyday life in the Mexican capital?

At the beginning people thought that what I was doing was horrible but there's a greater acceptance of it now. When I began I doubted that I would ever be appreciated. People considered what I was doing to be vulgar-I was looked on almost as a traitor to the way I'd been brought up. However, when I had an exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1988 I was sure that there would be a very negative reaction but I was surprised that so many people identified with what I painted. People of my own group generally liked it-much to my amazement. They looked at my work and said, "Yes, things really are like that." They discovered beauty in things that they had been trained to dismiss as ugly or vulgar. I was also gratified to see the great number of visitors to my show from different social classes. Very rich people as well as people like the guards or the maintenance staff of the museum came and looked with real sympathy at what I'd done.

Do you consider yourself as part of a specific "generation" or group of Mexican painters?

I don't know. I've always been a loner. I am self-trained and it never seemed to me that I did things the normal way. Yes, I do feel, in general, a part of a "generation" of artists insofar as I'm confronting the same problems as everyone else, not only in Mexico but in the world. I feel that everyone is looking for some urgent reason to preserve a certain amount of optimism about life in a moment when there's a real pessimism around. Insofar as contemporary Mexican artists are concerned, I've been able to see a lot more of their work since I've been living in New York and I realize that there are tendencies and preoccupations in their art that we have in common. I am surprised to see that there are so many parallels with my own work so there must be things "in the air" that we're all concerned with. For example, there's a definite trend to return to realism and a specific way of treating objects and color that's similar in many of us. There's a rejection among us of the canons of the preceding generation. We reject Europeanism in art. We were told in school that we should imitate European art but we don't want to. Abstraction is also something we reject, although there are marvelous abstract artists. I feel something of a tension between us and the previous generation. We're often attacked by the older artists as "folkloric" painters. For example, if any of us paints a Virgin of Guadalupe, that's it.. .we re immediately marked by these older artists as simple folklorists. My principal idea has been to search out things in Mexican life-traditions and customs that aren't moribund but are very much alive-things that are regenerating themselves. I want to show that there really is a Mexican reality today, one that's not coming to an end but rather is very much alive and constantly regenerating itself. I go to Mexico twice each year and I'm always seeing a continuation of what I'd observed before. This really has nothing to do with nationalism because I believe that what I'm painting has universal value.