Viet-Cajun. Ukrainian-Canadian. Chinese-Puerto Rican. Mex everything. Houston’s food scene is characterized by rich cultural hybridization, but the melding and merging of ideas and aesthetics and geographies extends well beyond the plate. MECA, the nonprofit bringing Latin American art and culture to underserved communities, and the Japan-America Society of Houston share a creative relationship that has resulted in quite Houstony outcomes.

“Multiculturalism is important, and bringing that back to our work, for me, is key. I think that’s how we will be able to continue and thrive,” says Armando Silva, executive director of MECA. “The beauty of all of this collaboration is exactly that: celebrating the multiculturalism that is in our city.”

Michael Martin, a former MECA intern who now serves as a teaching artist with the nonprofit, is credited as first bringing the two organizations together. While working on his humanities degree with minors in visual art and philosophy at University of Houston Downtown, Martin became fascinated with kendama, a Japanese ball-and-cup game with a global following and numerous organizations and competitions testing players’ mettle.

“I’d never really thought kendama was going to become such a serious, big part of my artistic expression, but over the years it just kind of organically happened,” Martin says.

Kendama, and subsequently Japanese visual art, first came to MECA when Martin worked at the organization’s summer camps. When he was entertaining campers during dismissal, while they waited for their parents or guardians to pick them up, the kids noticed him wearing his kendama like a necklace.

“I would let one or two kids try, and I realized there was a line of kids at the end of the day waiting to play with this one kendama. And so I decided to bring a couple more,” Martin says. “And it kind of just turned into this special thing that kids would do at the end of the day.”

Martin has since achieved certified kendama sensei honors via the Japan Kendama Association, and he regularly attends the annual Japan Festival to demonstrate the game to interested onlookers and encourage them to give it a shot. Alongside this personal growth came an opportunity to interpret the Japanese game through a Latin American lens.

The Mexican stick-and-ball game balero and kendama aren’t exact parallels: Kendama has a two-headed hammer shape offering two different options for where the ball might land. Balero has only one, which resembles a barrel with an indentation on the top for catching the ball. As Martin began introducing the kendama to MECA campers and Japan Festival attendees, he noticed that many children from MECA would play the Japanese game using Mexican rules and techniques. Some of the kids who struggled with the kendama improved their performance when they started playing using balero rules. Among the children enrolled in this playful summer camp, a creative melding of art and culture emerged organically. The kids would go home to their parents and share with them the new ways of seeing and playing with the baleros they kept at home.

Martin first met printmaker Julio Luna via MECA. They both worked at the summer camp in 2023, which involved a partnership with JASH and was themed around introducing kids to Japanese culture. By then, Martin was also working as an art instructor at the camp, and Silva credits him with bringing the two organizations together for the summer camp collaboration. He and Luna bonded over their shared love of ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai (whose iconic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa is recognizable to people even with little interest in art). They taught the campers how to make woodblock prints the way Hokusai would have. Martin made a mosaic—a common medium in Latin America—of The Great Wave. 

Even outside of a camp context, Martin and Luna began exploring their own visual arts voices with the support of MECA and JASH. They found some commonalities in the Mexican and Japanese artistic traditions, such as a rich history of printmaking, and found inspiration in building bridges between the differences.

“In Japan, a lot of times, they minimize their colors. That’s something that I’ve done with my palette a lot in a lot of my drawings and paintings. I’ll go monochromatic, or I’ll just use the primary colors and secondary colors,” Martin says. “And I’ve definitely explored a lot of ink stuff. The look of the black ink on the white paper is akin to the printmaking style, you know, where everything is kind of negative and positive space.”

Some of Luna’s works also show this interplay between Mexican and Japanese art styles. One of his prints depicts maneki-neko, the familiar waving cat that smiles at you from restaurant counters, as a daruma doll, round Zen Buddhist figures depicting a monk with no pupils, one to be filled in while making a wish and the other once the wish has been granted. It’s black-and-white, evoking the monochromatic aesthetic Martin cites. But in its geometry, the complex, curvilinear shapes evoke ancient Mayan and Aztec artistry.

Martin continues to work with taking Japanese subjects—like the mythical tengu, a prideful humanoid spirit often depicted with bright red skin, a comically long nose, and wings—and immortalizing them in mosaics inspired by José Fuster, whose work he studied while traveling through Cuba. And the flipside as well: Skulls don’t appear often in Japanese art, especially when compared to Latin American, but Martin will create works with them using a more Japanese-style minimalist approach to detail.

It’s new stuff, and so very Houston, but it’s also…well…not. Though the result of independent inquiry and experimentation, Luna, Martin, and the campers gravitating toward finding their own multicultural voices have parallels in long-term geopolitical relationships.

“Japan and Mexico have a long history of collaboration and support. I believe the partnership between the two countries goes back over 400 years,” says Patsy Brown, executive director of JASH. “I believe just last year, Mexico and Japan marked their 400th anniversary of being essentially strategic global partners.”

There have been some challenges along the way for the local groups. Silva notes that the daruma dolls caused some confusion among campers’ parents. They expressed a worry that the ritual may run counter to the religions practiced in their own homes. But with more explanation and exposure, they came to embrace the Japanese tradition.

“The daruma doll, it did open up those areas of thought for some…understanding that our community really wants to learn and engage in other cultures,” Silva says. “This opportunity opened up other avenues. They saw different things; they experienced different people.”

To encourage more interactions between Japanese and Latin American cultures, JASH always sponsors a booth at MECA’s annual Día de Muertos celebration. Luna and Martin also set up at the Japan Festival, using both events as opportunities to teach visitors about printmaking, kendama, and the other creative fusions they’ve explored along the way. The two have also visited NASA, the Daikin air conditioner factory, and the local Tanabata Star Festivals as ambassadors of this melting pot.

“We hope to continue to find ways to work with MECA, to go out into the community,” Brown says. “Hopefully, we’ll find other ways to really showcase the Japan and Mexico ties on a more formal level moving forward.”

MECA is also working on creating new connections with Houston-area cultural organizations that may potentially nurture more artistic fusions. They’re planning a collaboration with Silambam Houston, a classical Indian dance troupe and school, as well as the Indo-American Association, which promotes Indian performing arts, mainly music. Riyaaz Qawwali, an ensemble performing Sufi devotional music originating from across South Asia, is also slated to take part in the summer camp.

“I think that’s the perfect example of what Houston is, in our diversity, right?” Brown says. “The goal of really trying to broaden horizons through various connections in various communities.”