Escobar’s paintings, which capture the borderland experience past and present, are rich in narrative and color. An artist, educator, and community activist, Escobar draws and paints in his words, “What I have lived and experienced in my life.”
The path to U.S. residency for Cris Escobar’s parents, Ramon and Maria Ascencion, began in the late 1930s. As a teenage vaquero in Coahuila, Mexico, Ramon Escobar looked north to the United States for better opportunities. He left Mexico at age 14 to work as a cowboy in South Dakota. The large ranches and farms in the upper West and Midwest recruited their best ranch and bracero [seasonal contract] farm workers from Central Mexico. Many seasonal workers returned to Mexico after the work was done although others stayed in the United States. Escobar was determined to find steady work so that he and his family could remain permanently in the U.S.
Ramon Escobar later worked on another large ranch in Montana. A trusted worker, he was tasked to recruit additional vaqueros from his home state. He also brought his wife to the U.S. Ranch work was seasonal and the Escobar family worked in different midwestern states picking crops in the spring and summer. As a result of constant movement to migrant labor camps, Cris Escobar was born in Utah in 1958.
The Escobar family settled in Del Rio when Cris’s father found work in the building of the Amistad Dam. Construction work existed year-round, and Cris attended school in Del Rio where his teachers, as early as second grade, took notice of his artistic talents and gave him art assignments.
After graduating from Del Rio High School, Cris Escobar attended St. Edward’s University in Austin on a Migrant Education scholarship. He completed an art degree at the University of Texas, El Paso but returned to Del Rio in 1983 after completing his studies at UTEP.
While attending St. Edward’s University, Escobar met Raul Valdez and Fidencio Duran, two muralists who influenced Escobar’s artistic development. Valdez moved
to Del Rio to complete a series of murals in 1977-1978, and Escobar connected with him and began learning about muralism. In 1985, The Texas Commission of the Arts selected Duran and Escobar to paint several murals in Brownsville, Texas. For his commission, Escobar painted murals over ten months for the Brownsville School District.
In the late 1980s, Escobar began a teaching career in Del Rio, a vocation that extended to 2022. He moved to Pleasanton, Texas in 2023 to be close to his daughter and lives part of the year in Pleasanton and part in Del Rio. At the end of the school year on May 24, 2024, Escobar retired from teaching and now looks forward to painting full-time.
Escobar completed a giant 20×120 foot mural on a building on South Main Street in downtown Del Rio that honors different fields of professional sports figures– including the famed Mexican-American golf team from the San Felipe barrio that won a state championship in the 1950s. A movie based on this sports story, “The Long Game,” recently premiered nationally and was well-received.
