In 2016, artist César Aréchiga talked one of Mexico’s most dangerous maximum security prisons into letting him run art classes for its inmates, many of them violent gang members. Could he really change their lives?
After two decades working in some of Mexico’s toughest prisons, warden Ángeles Zavala thought she had seen it all. Then one morning in 2016, she arrived for work at Puente Grande prison to find a local artist waiting for her. The man had recently completed a few workshops with inmates in another part of the prison, and had a proposal. Speaking in rapid-fire bursts, the artist told Ángeles he wanted to move into the maximum-security prison and live there for six weeks, in order to teach some of the country’s most dangerous inmates how to paint. Through art therapy, he would help them change their lives. And he wanted to start with the veteran narcos of Mexico’s violent drug war.
“I was thinking: ‘What is wrong with him?’” Ángeles said later. “‘Everyone is trying to get out and César wants to live here?’”
