By Charlotte Perry Aguilar – HoustonPress.com – Photo: Agapito Sanchez.
Photo: Macario Ramirez at his Heights folk art gallery in front of his annual tribute during Dias de los Muertos to his parents (left) and to lives lost in the community.
Macario Ramirez’s own personal history was captivating — brutally hot summers in his childhood spent as a migrant farmworker with his immigrant parents and six siblings, a friend of Cesar Chavez as a young Chicano activist, a language adviser with the U.S. Department of Defense who braved the hotspots of South Vietnam, Honduras and Guatemala in the ’60s, a specialist with the Labor Department on the plight of Latino workers.
