Before he knew he wanted to be an artist, Roberto Gil de Montes watched a documentary about the sculptor Henry Moore; it was three o'clock in the afternoon in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and there was nothing else to do. His parents had emigrated to the United States and he lived with his grandmother, who did not want to take him to painting classes because they were too far away. He could not know it yet, but Moore's work was influenced by the Mesoamerican cultures that he would vindicate much later from the Chicano movement; although the sixties were still a long way off, for Los Angeles and for the political and cultural movement that brought together artists -and not only Mexicans- in the United States. The film they were showing on television that afternoon "clicked" for him: "I said to myself 'that's what I want, that's what I am.