Word-Drawn Worlds: Garza, Picacio, & Aldama at the 2026 San Antonio Book Festival
- Frederick Aldama
- 12 hours ago
- 7 min read
San Antonio has always felt like a city that holds memory in its bones. The riverwalk and historic el marcado hums with it. The food carries it. And every spring, the San Antonio Book Festival draws together the storytellers who know how to excavate that memory and put it on the page, the panel, the panel, the illustrated spread. This past April 11th, in a room buzzing with writers, artists, librarians, readers of all ages, and the kind of devoted fans who show up early and stay late, Hugo Award-winning illustrator-author John Picacio and I sat down with moderator Xavier Garza for a conversation that ranged from childhood spice tolerance to the frontlines of cultural survival.
"San Antonio has always felt like a city that holds memory in its bones".
The session was titled "Drawing Latin American Stories” and gravitated around: My co-edited From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides (Mad Creek Books 2025) with its word-drawn stories of food, sports, and the diverse cultural architectures they build in our Latinx communities; and, Picacio’s debut, night-of-Día-de-Muertos set, The Invisible Parade, co-created with bestselling novelist Leigh Bardugo. Xavier Garza, himself a master of Latinx storytelling for young readers, held the room with warmth, wit, and exactly the kind of questions that make people lean forward in their chairs.
The Long Road to the First Book
John Picacio did not arrive at picture books the way most people imagine a picture book artist might. He came up through comics, through self-published work that found its way into the hands of science fiction and fantasy editors in the mid-nineties, and then spent three decades as one of the most sought-after cover illustrators in the business. "People like to say it's natural talent," he told the room. "You work at it. But it's also just projecting out all those things you're truly passionate about and putting it out there."
He was a sprinter, he said, world class at it. A cover illustration is a sprint. You have the deadline, the composition, the moment of impact. The Invisible Parade required something he had never done professionally before: marathon running. Two years of drawing. Fourteen-and-a-half by twenty-seven-inch originals that shrink down to ten by ten in print. He held one of those originals up for the audience to see and feel the scale of it, the graphite and the labor embedded in every line.
The book's origins go back to 2016. Picacio had been sketching out ideas for a visual story grounded in Mexican American culture, and he made a deliberate, counterintuitive choice about his co-author. "I thought, the world might go in a very bad direction," he said, referencing the political climate he saw forming. "I could just do another story that was just Mexican Americans talking about our culture. And the publishing industry often silences those stories and markets it like we're just talking to ourselves." He went to Bardugo, whose own emotional entry point into the story was profound: she had lost a grandfather who was central to her becoming a writer. Her grief became the story's emotional spine. Pala, the young protagonist who visits a graveyard on Día de Muertos and encounters four mysterious riders, is mourning that same irreplaceable figure.
"Her peanut butter, my chocolate," Picacio said. It was the right pairing for the right moment.
Chile Time and Cultural Truth
I shared how I came to From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides through a different kind of reckoning. My Latinographix series with Mad Creek Books had already opened up necessary space for Latinx comics voices, but with this anthology, co-edited with Angela M. Sánchez, we asked the contributors (and ourselves) to dive deep into the embodied memories that live in either food or sports (or both); spaces where identity is formed, tested, and passed down. I shared how we tasked all of the creatives with “digging deep into how those memories, very proximate and very distant at the same time, resonate with them as both a form of connection and a cultural resistance to erasure."
For my own story in the collection "The Great Chile Stand-Off" (illustrated by Angela), I took the audience back to growing up in the dust belt of Northern California, where me and my pals, the Dungeons-and-Dragons kids and the last ones picked for sports. One school recess this changed. We went from being the the school’s “Nobodies” to its Somebodies, at least for that afternoon. Behind the gym, an informal chile contest materialized. Raised on my mama and abuelita’s spicy cooking, I thought this might be our chance to grab some of the limelight. I won. "Something small like spice tolerance can be epic and a form of cultural embrace,” I shared with the SABF audience.
The story in the anthology captures what I’ve argued in my theoretical work: comics' visual-verbal fusion can hold emotional truths that pure prose cannot. For instance, the birth certificate in the opening panel, with "Frederick Engels" crossed out and rewritten and crossed out again, transforms an official document into a battlefield. The "HACK CHUG CHUG" of the chile contest creates what a kind of "chile time," a suspended, heightened temporal state where spice tolerance becomes cultural authenticity. The final "YAHHH!" collapses all that suspension into a moment of triumph.
I shared with the audience how food isn't just sustenance, “it's how we claim space, preserve memory, and resist erasure.” How when dominant culture dismisses our flavors, “every homemade tortilla becomes an act of defiance."
"Every homemade tortilla becomes an act of defiance".
The Illustrator Is a Co-Creator
One of the most charged moments in the conversation came when Garza asked Picacio about the credit illustrators do and don't receive. Picacio did not let the question land softly. "If you don't have those pictures that go with that graphic narrative, that writer's script is basically a car manual." He invoked what he called the Stan Lee Effect: the industry's tendency to center the writer and relegate the visual artist to the shadowed sidelines. When he and Bardugo took The Invisible Parade out into the world, she consistently corrected the record in public. "She always pushed the book saying, he is a co-creator. Don't get it twisted."
I made a similar point, from the editorial side. How over forty contributors brought different styles, different regional experiences, different generational relationships to the page in the curating of From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides. Some work took the shape of a Mesoamerican codex aesthetic; others the look of a lean full punk zine that burns with a distinctive rawness. Co-curating the Latinographix anthology was a deliberate act of shouting from the rooftops: We are rooted in sports and food, but in interesting, subtle, and complexly nuanced ways.
Imposter Syndrome as Weapon
Gabriel Tijerina, illustrator and children's book author (Abuela's Fideo) asked us a question that stopped the room: do you feel pressure, as a Latino creator, to always tell Latino stories? And what do you tell someone who feels like they're not Latino enough to tell those stories?
Picacio answered the second part with the directness of someone who has been fighting for thirty years. He doesn't speak Spanish fluently. He never let that become a reason to doubt himself. "There's just no time to be worrying about whether you belong and how you do. Period." When he won his first Hugo Award in 2012, after losing seven years in a row, he understood immediately what that trophy actually was: a crowbar. A small window when the world looks at you a little shiny, and you use that shine to crack open a door that wasn't available before. He went toward the culture work because it felt like coming home. And he's doing it now, he said, not just in reaction to the current moment but in anticipation of the one coming, because he doesn't see enough younger Latinx creators getting the opportunities he has. "It's up to me to crack it open for them."
My response cut to the root: "Imposter syndrome is a weapon used to divide. The best thing you can do is embrace your experience as truth and give it shape and put it into the world." I named Kat Fajardo’s Miss Quince as a model of exactly that, and extended it outward: "It's no holds barred. This is my truth. I'm recreating it for others and inviting them into this space." Imposter syndrome "is exactly what strangles your subjectivity, and as a result prevents the stories and the glorious gorgeous multiplicities of our lives from being in the world."
"Imposter syndrome...prevents the stories of our lives from being in the world".
Joy as the Other Side of the Coin
The conversation could have ended on the political urgency, and that urgency is real. I spoke directly about culturecide; the systematic erasure happening across humanities and arts communities, inside and outside universities. I discussed how today we’re seeing minute by minute the infrastructure of cultural memory being chipped away. "We are the frontline to what is literally a resistance to an absolute obliteration."
But I chose to end on joy, because joy is not the opposite of resistance. It is resistance's oldest fuel. From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides has hard truths in it, food insecurity among them, and it has celebrations loud enough to feel like parties. "The culture has a toolkit for how we deal, how we process. And part of that toolkit is joy and celebration and community and coming together to remember at a certain time. We have that baked in. Not all communities and cultures have that."
Picacio put it more personally. He lost his brother-in-law on St. Patrick's Day while he was still working on The Invisible Parade. The grief shaped how the book would end. "We do take these losses and find some sort of joy, find some sort of life when we cross." He looked around the audience who had been with us for over an hour, and said he feels it at moments like this one. That something is happening. That the story is doing what it was built to do.
As Xavier Garza wrapped the session, he circled back to the art itself, to the books on the table and John’s originals. He offered something simple and true: authors might not always be there to tell the stories, but those books will be in our libraries. A kid, twenty years from now, will pull one down and be inspired to tell their own.
That's the whole bet. That's what all of this is.
From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides and The Invisible Parade are available wherever books are sold.
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