José Cisneros - Margo

José Cisneros, Immigrant Artist.  Edited by Adair Margo and Leanne Hedrick.  El Paso: Texas Western Press / UTEP, 2006.  Dark brown cloth on boards, sandy endpapers, silver stamping on front and spine, 8 ½ x 11, many photos and graphics, endnotes, index, 108 pages. $45.  http://www.utep.edu/twp/josecisneros.htm José Cisneros has long been an admired actor and fixture in Texas illustrative letters.  The editors have gathered his autobiographical essays, arranged from his 1910 origin in Durango on the cusp of the Revolution to recent reflections.  A timeline precedes "José's Beginnings," the first of 23 chapterlettes.  In the 1920's he was inspired by Gustave Doré's illustrations of Don Quixote.  Cisneros' first publication came in the El Hogar magazine in Mexico City.  In the 1930's he and Tom Lea begin their friendship.  By 1938 he shared with Carl Hertzog the project of Everett DeGolyer's Across Aboriginal America, and subsequently begins long-term Texas residency in El Paso.  His range of books widen with the admiration of the ever talkative J. Frank Dobie.  The artist's honors and awards range from a Paisano Fellowship to an exhibit in the Texas State Capitol building and being Knighted Caballero de Mérito Civil by King Juan Carlos and granted the Humanities Award from President G.W. Bush. For a fellow who was inspired to artistry via books borrowed from a friend and taught himself to draw by using a stick in the dirt, Cisneros drew a bold line in international art, and likely still sees those lines even though he's 99 and color-blind.