This week, the DePaul Latinx Cultural Center and Tepeyac hosted the second annual Latinx Art Festival: SOMOS at the Latinx Cultural Center in O’Connell room 360. The weeklong festival celebrates Latinx arts with a free and open art exhibit featuring works from Latinx artists, photographers, poets and graphic designers with special guests, a poetry slam and arts and crafts.

Monica Haydee Ramos, the Latinx Cultural Center coordinator, was pleased with the amount of students coming to each day of the festival and looks forward to next year.

“This is such a great festival and it is such a pleasure seeing people coming out and supporting local Latinx artists and having a space for Latinx students to talk to one another and hang out,” Ramos said. “We had some performers cancel on us, but instead of getting discouraged, the students started to do karaoke with the microphones and speakers we had and had a great time.”

On the last day of SOMOS, Ricardo “Naco” Gonzalez and Enrique Reyes came as special guests and talked about their careers as Latinx comic book artists and gave advice for Latinx students thinking about entering into the comic book industry. Gonzalez and Reyes both work together on their comic book, “La Chamba,” and work with a lot of different organizations across the country to empower Latinx artists and communities with workshops and mural projects, to name a few.

“I was a kid wanting to go into the comic book industry, but I didn’t see a lot of [Latinx] representation in comics which was definitely discouraging,” Gonzalez said. “I then decided to make my own representation by making my own comic book that many Latinx people can relate to.”

Even though SOMOS is over, Tepeyac and the Latinx Cultural Center will still have events for students to participate in. The Latinx Cultural Center is also open for students to come in and study and has information on events, scholarships, internships and a place for students to connect with Latinx students.