GALERÍA TEPÍN
SOMETHING SMALL BUT SPICY!
 !Bienvenidos a Galería Tepín! This historic building was once the residence of Don Antonio Lucero and his family. It was opened on the side and served as a shelter for the coaches. It was later covered and used as a shed to dry skunk pelts.
In the past, the building has served as a coin shop, the Groves Art Gallery and now houses Galería Tepín. The Cultural Center de Mesilla, home of the Border Book Festival Inc., welcomes you to our little gallery, two small rooms that house an enormous and expansive world of creative dimension and spirit.
Our mission is to bring to you a gallery that features the work of multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary and multi-genre artists who are exploring the known and unknown worlds through their art. Many of our artists are also writers and this vision about vision is what we are all about.
Three words come to mind when we think of Galería Tepín: IMAGE, WORDS & SPIRIT.
GALERÍA TEPÍN
2220 CALLE DE PARIAN
MESILLA, NEW MEXICO
575-523-3988 / bbf@borderbookfestival.com
ENTRE MUNDOS/BETWEEN WORLDS
Galería Tepín will feature work by Santa Barraza, Daniel Zolinsky, Jean Buchanan and César Ívan in an exhibition called Entre Mundos/Between Worlds opening Sunday, January 31 from 3-5 p.m. at 2220 Calle de Parian in Mesilla. A reception will follow across the street at the Cultural Center, 2231 Calle de Parian.
The gallery, which opened in December, is part of the Cultural Center de Mesilla, which is the home base of the Border Book Festival. The gallery is located a block from the Plaza behind El Mariachi Store across from the Cultural Center. A bright turquoise sign with Tepín peppers announces this small but spicy gallery. The tepín is a cousin of the pequín pepper and also means “little one” in Nahuatl, the Aztecan language. The small building was once a coach house as well as a place to dry skunk pelts and was once home to a Mesilla newspaper.
Entre Mundos/Between Worlds featured artwork that explores the worlds that exist inside/alongside and within our own, the realities of the everyday and the more than everyday that cohabit and give meaning to our lives.
Artwork by Santa Barraza features various retablos including Desnudo/Nude and Emma Tenayuca. San Antonio native Emma Tenayuca was a pioneering activist involved with issues that resemble those of modern times: disparity of rich and poor, and substandard wages and working conditions of laborers and migrant workers. She was called “La Pasionaria,” speaking out at a time when neither Mexicans nor women were expected to speak at all and because of her brave and passionate leadership in defense of Mexican workers in depression-era Texas.
Acrylics include La Cosecha/The Harvest, Cihuateteo con Coyolxauhqui y La Guadalupe, The Corn Goddess, The Trinity, La Mano Poderosa de Coyolxauhqui, Selena and La Llorona en Renacimiento, a Xerox transferred drawing with acrylics and jade, among others. Gliclée prints are also available. A gliclée print connotes an elevation in printmaking technology. Images are generated from high resolution digital scans and printed with archival quality inks onto various substrates including canvas, fine art, and photo-base paper. The giclée printing process provides better color accuracy than other means of reproduction.
Much of Barraza’s imagery is symbolic. In Aztec mythology, the Cihuateteo were the spirits of human women who died in childbirth. Childbirth was considered a form of battle, and its victims were honored as fallen warriors. Coyolxauhqui is the Aztec Moon goddess. The combat between Coyolxauhqui the Moon and Huitzilopochtli the Sun represent the alternation of day and night.
Daniel Zolinsky’s work includes photos of La Muralla, the wall between Tijuana and San Diego, among other border images, real and imagined. A passionate traveler, Zolinsky continues to work in different parts of the world. Currently he has been working on a book on the Italian Islands.
Jean Buchanan’s watercolors are a profound statement of the interconnection of the ethereal and the real. New images include Our Lady of Guadalupe Church at Tortugas. Born in Pasadena, Texas, Buchanan, has a M.A. in painting and sculpture from Texas Women’s University and is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Educational Center in Houston. She has taught at San Jacinto College, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Rice University Museum School and regionally in El Paso and Las Cruces. With a deep connection to people and landscape, Buchanan is known for her delicate yet powerful touchstone to the divine.
Born in the lower valley of East El Paso, César Ívan works in various mediums in order to express the world around him, the world as he sees it. He states that “Living on the El Paso border with México gives me the best of both worlds.” An electric bass guitarist, he has worked with bands including Fronteras No Más and now Sangre Gitana. Living downtown in a Trost designed building, Ívan mines the richness of urban El Paso life, dreams of the circus and its roiling human menageries as well as a dark still luminescent interaction of people reminiscent of Diego Rivera’s painting, Dream of A Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park. Galeriá Tepín will feature his painting, Día de Los Muertos and a number of his Dancing Calacas Marionettes, handmade moveable dancing skeleton marionettes made out of carved wood, nails, with two separate controls. They are in assorted colors and are 2’ high and 7 1/2” wide.
For more information on the exhibition, Entre Mundos, contact The Cultural Center de Mesilla. 575-523-3988. bbf@borderbookfestival.com or www.borderbookfestival.org
 Tepín peppers (Capsicum annuum var. glabrisculum), also called chiltepe or chile tepín , is a wild chile pepper that grows primarily in Central America, México, and the southwestern United States. It is sometimes called the "mother of all peppers" because it is thought to be the oldest of the Capsicum annuum species.
Tepín peppers or “bird’s eye” peppers are supposedly one of the hottest peppers in the world. Some chile enthusiasts argue that the Tepín is hotter than the habanero or Red Savina. These tiny peppers are about 3/8″ round to slightly oval, and are found in the deserts of Arizona, New México, Texas, and Northern México. Tepins are extremely hot, measuring between 50,000 and 100,000 Scoville Units.
In México, the heat of the Chiltepin is called arrebatado ("rapid" or "violent"), because, while the heat is intense, it is not very enduring. This stands in contrast to the Chili Piquín, which is somewhat similar in size and shape to the Chiltepín, but delivers a decidedly different experience. Piquíns are not as hot as Chiltepíns (only about 30,000-50,000 Scoville Units but they have a much slower and longer-lasting effect.
The word “Tepín” comes from the Nahuatl Mexican word meaning “little one” and “flea.”
The first year, plants require 120 days for green fruit and 200 days from the setting out of plants to mature red ripe fruit, so they are best grown in containers year-round and brought indoors over winter in areas that have frost. The second year, when plants are put outdoors the next spring, they start flowering quickly, and start producing fruit from July to October.
Plants can live for 35-50 years that way. In Florida, Hawaii, southern Texas, southern NM and southern Arizona, and coastal California, the plants will grow as perennial bushes outside year-round, if protected with a cardboard box over them, if nights ever dip into the 30s.
All the peppers in the world are perennials and can live for years to decades, when protected from cold, and only die when hit by frost.
The Wild Chile Botanical Area in the Coronado National Forest near Tucson, Arizona, has the largest population of chiltepín chile peppers in the United States. In 1997, Texans named the Tepín "the official native pepper of Texas,” two years after making the Jalapeño Texas' official pepper.
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