Multi-Hyphenates: A Conversation with Veronique Medrano and Paloma Martínez-Cruz
- Frederick Aldama
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
There's a phrase that kept ringing through our fireside chat at this year's BIPOC PoP 2026 Expo & Symposium, and it came from Veronique Medrano, the Deep South Texas singer-songwriter, comic book writer, journalist, and archivist who has spent her career refusing the boxes that the entertainment industry loves to build around Brown women. "I am more than the limits of society that they put on me," she said, with the directness and warmth that define her. The line landed like the opening chord of one of her great songs.
Sitting across from Veronique and just to left of me was Paloma Martínez-Cruz, Ohio State scholar-activist, poet, performance artist, and director of the Taco Reparations Brigade, who brought that same refusal of limits. She expressed hers through her elegant concept of the "fractal”: each form of creative work contains the whole of who you are. Poetry, performance, scholarship, community organizing, these aren't competing demands on your time. They are, as Martínez-Cruz puts it, "the ongoing project of becoming."
Together, these two creative powerhouse Latinas mapped a vision of Latinx creative practice that is expansive, rigorous, and utterly alive. What follows is drawn from our BIPOC PoP 2026 Fireside Chat.
The Multi-Hyphenate Life
Medrano came up being told she was scattered: too many ideas, too many industries, unable to focus. She heard it from the time she was eighteen. For a decade, she internalized it. "I was searching for where I belonged in the space," she told us. "Every industry tells you, you have to focus on our industry one hundred percent or else you will never get anywhere."
It took community, her parents, her close artistic circle, to help her see the through-line. She was always writing: songs, treatments, journalism, now comics. The work was always connected. She just hadn't been given permission to say so.
"A no is a soft maybe until they outright say, 'Please stop.' You can tell me no once, but maybe if I tell you a different way, it might be, 'That sounds interesting.'" — Veronique Medrano
That stubbornness, graceful and fierce in equal measure, led to her writing her debut comic, Dragonthrall. The protagonist, Lupe, is a DACA student who makes the simple, devastating mistake of crossing back into Mexico with her family (unaware of the consequences) and watches everything unravel. Drawn by artist Stephanie C. brings a visual electricity to the South Texas terrain she knows firsthand. "To pair her beautiful artwork with that piece," Medrano said, "and it be something created on both sides of the border about a character who lives on both sides of the border. I could not ask for a better collab."
The book takes risks. Medrano was nervous, she admits, about whether an emerging publisher would allow the story she wanted to tell. They did. "Those senses of risk, and being open to them saying no. But a no is a soft maybe until they outright say please stop."
Theory in the Street, the Lucha Libre Ringside, the Kitchen
Martínez-Cruz approaches the question of form differently, through what she describes as embodied theory. After publishing in 2019 her Food Fight! Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace that identified food as a site of cultural struggle, she was unsatisfied. The book had the arguments, but it was locked in academic circulation. So she took it outside.
"Activism as sitting down to a table where everyone is fed and no one is harmed. We try to have a politics of radical tenderness and radical hospitality." — Paloma Martínez-Cruz
The result was the Taco Reparations Brigade: a lucha libre performance intervention staged in front of a racist taco shop in Columbus, Ohio, on Indigenous People's Day. Martínez-Cruz performed as her persona Misty Taco Bell's, the ruda (the heel, the villain), alongside her colleague El Rod Rodriguez as the technica (the face). They fought, distributed a manifesto that was the poetry version of Food Fight!, and pointed audiences toward the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Columbus Sanctuary Collective. The bite was real. So was the hospitality. "We don't want to other the people who witness our performance," she said. "We consider everybody who walks by to be somebody like a guest at a table."
Martínez-Cruz calls this a “politics of radical tenderness.” It’s the throughline of everything she does, from her poetry collection Other Bombs to Trust the Circle, her critical biography of grassroots organizer Rubén Castilla Herrera. That book, built from oral histories and community voices, takes its structural cue from Herrera's own philosophy: horizontal, multi-vocal, circle-based. "The next messiah is actually you," she told us, channeling the book's core spirit. Leadership isn't a stage. It's a room where everyone is in the circle.
Archive as Resistance, TikTok as Archive
Both women do deep preservation work, and both understand it as a form of creative resistance. Medrano serves as the official archivist of the Freddy Fender Estate, a role that has given her direct, floor-to-ceiling access to five bedroom's worth of concert footage, photographs, correspondence, and artifacts. She's organizing what she calls a re-education: the true history of Mexican American excellence in country music, through a Tejano lens, not someone else's.
"We have a fight to make our history accessible. We're not dumbing down the language. We're taking it out of the spaces that require a degree to access it and bringing it back to where we're from." — Veronique Medrano
She's also deeply attuned to a new generation of archivists who are doing this work on TikTok and Instagram; short-form videos that surface forgotten massacres, music histories, and cultural contexts, delivered directly to people who never had access before. "That is active digital archiving," Medrano said. "They are taking it to the people. And that is the fight we have: to make our history accessible." She described watching viewers get angry, at the gaps in their knowledge, at systems that withheld it, and seeing that anger flip into hunger for more. "You learned something, and now you're mad for all the right reasons."
Martínez-Cruz is tracking similar currents in her own scholarly work, particularly the way traditional Indigenous plant medicines are being decriminalized, rebranded, and absorbed into wellness culture without credit or reparation to their origins. "It used to be satanic," she said, with her signature deadpan. "Now it's a white hipster spa." It's the same dispossession in a new package. And Paloma’s building the critical apparatus to name it.
The Bite and the Joy
Near the end of our conversation, I asked both Paloma and Veronique about the balance between critique and hope. How one keeps the bite without letting it hollow you out. Medrano's answer was a story. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, she was furious. She wanted to "bite till somebody bled," as she put it. Instead, she was washing dishes. "Wishing I didn't have to wash dishes." And the first line of a protest song came out. She finished the song, handed the dishes to someone else. The song, written in Spanish for a Tex-Mex country record, ended up reviewed on mainstream country music websites by writers who admitted they didn't know what was happening in the lyrics but loved the song anyway. That's the power of art that stands in its truth.
"It is the battle of the two wolves. You will constantly have to figure out every single day which one you're gonna feed." — Veronique Medrano
Martínez-Cruz put it this way: she considers herself a hopeless optimist. "You can't be an educator if you are not a hopeless optimist. You can't." Every intervention the Taco Reparations Brigade stages ends with a way to donate, a way to act, a way to take something home beyond the spectacle. Consciousness-raising, dialogue, self-care, invitation, that's how she frames it. Not protest as confrontation, but protest as ceremony.
These two women are making something that didn't fully exist before; not just new work, but new templates for how Latinx creators can move through the world without apology, without narrowing themselves to fit someone else's market logic. "When you stand in who you are as a person," Medrano said, "the moment will find you. Because they won't give it to somebody else. They will go directly to you."
All those that filled out the Glickman Conference Center that afternoon understood exactly what she meant.
