This story aired in the March 24, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
Rachel Palacios teaches art to youth all over the Bay Area in schools, libraries, and at the Oakland Museum. And her favorite art to teach her students, her passion, is called repujados: Mexican tin art. For Rachel, this technique is a tangible way to instill creative ownership. To ask students to connect with their culture… and each other.
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REPORTER: The art room at Fred T. Korematsu Discovery Academy in East Oakland is full of energy today.
The teacher, Rachel Palacios, hands out foam sheets, tape, and pencils to excited fifth graders.
RACHEL PALACIOS: Pick the design you want. I’ll get you guys your foam. Necesita cinta también.
REPORTER: Rachel teaches art to TK through fifth grade students in English and Spanish. Even though her art room doubles as storage for PE, the classroom is bursting with materials and bright displays. Students share tables of four and talk. Today the table tops are covered in paper stencils, markers, and tin sheets.
Many of Rachel’s students are immigrants and most are Latino. A lot of students have seen repujados before but this is the first time they are making them.
RACHEL: So, repujados, or hojalatas, is basically Mexican tin art.
REPORTER: Repujados are pieces of colorful metal art with intricate shapes and lines. Rachel says that for the student project they do a simpler version. Students choose a basic paper design that gets taped onto a piece of tin. With a foam sheet underneath, they trace the design with a pencil. Then they lift the paper and add dashes or circles or lines or dots directly onto the tin. Next, the really fun part: coloring it.
Since the tin is thick and needs extra sharp scissors, Rachel will cut the students’ final designs out for them.
RACHEL: So we're in the magical universe of listening to the tin be cut and all the little tin shards falling on the ground.
REPORTER: In her own art studio, Rachel makes her designs by...
RACHEL: Embossing it or tracing it onto the tin and then pounding out or carving out the designs and then coloring it. With my students, we use sharpies because they dry fast and the color is really cool. But when I do my own, I use either alcohol inks or enamel inks and then hanging it or framing it.
REPORTER: Repujados can be large wall hangings or tiny pocket sized ornaments. They can be frames for mirrors or photos too. Most people have seen repujados on Día de los Muertos altars.
RACHEL: I love to make milagros. So, hands, hearts, skeletons for Día de los Muertos, hummingbirds. Things that you like meditate on or pray to, to make things better.
REPORTER: Indigenous people in Mexico have been mining and melting metals for hundreds and hundreds of years. Early Mexican illustrations show people using fire and blowpipes to liquify metal. Mayan and Aztec people made metal objects for ceremony. When the Spanish came in the 1500s, they integrated Indigenous smelting techniques and combined metals – including tin – to make weapons, money, and cookware.
…So tin scraps became a cheap and easy material to find.
RACHEL: What I do is folk art, so it's very Indigenous, it's very raw. I didn't go to art school because I didn't want any other professors to tell me that what I was doing wasn't correct because that's not what I'm trying to create. I'm trying to get some feelings out.
REPORTER: It strikes me that Rachel is not only teaching the specific art of repujados but also the art of making things by hand. An analog art in a digital world. For many of us…
RACHEL: We're swiping and pushing buttons. We're not really like braiding or cutting or doing things that use our dexterity.
REPORTER: But with repujados, it’s different.
RACHEL: You know, a lot of the kids ask what machines we're gonna use for our artwork and I'm like, "Close and open your hands." Our hands are the machine.
And so having them have a piece of metal and ask them, what does it feel like? What does it remind you of? It looks hard. And then how easy it is to just manipulate the tin with a pencil.
REPORTER: Art helped Rachel as a youth to connect with her culture and navigate being mixed while growing up in Oakland.
RACHEL: If I didn't have art as a kid, I don't know where I would be or what I would be doing.
REPORTER: As a kid, Rachel struggled with feeling different.
RACHEL: You know, I wasn't Mexican enough. I wasn't Black enough.
REPORTER: But art helped Rachel connect to her Mexican culture and was a way to cope with traumatic events in her youth. She wants all her students, no matter where they are from, to be able to connect and express themselves through art.
RACHEL: I don't want these students to forget where they came from whether it's Guatemala or Honduras or Sierra Leone and Yemen.
REPORTER: Rachel says: many cultures have a tin art tradition. The styles and designs are different but the creative process is the same.
RACHEL: I want this learning to be a lot about play, a lot about understanding other people. We all can be creative.
Art is something that we're supposed to mess up on. And you can try it over and over again and just recreate and evolve. The final product doesn't have to be the final product. And the first one that you make is always the prototype.
REPORTER: She wants to teach them that creativity and play is something they can always find. They can make art with anything they have. That trying something that looks hard and then practicing can be rewarding.
RACHEL: These students, they get picked up and they go home and who knows what's going on. Or if there's anybody there to actually help them and engage with them. So if I can give them the tools to be able to do something on their own, then they'll have that sense of self-empowerment and independence.
REPORTER: But for some students, they may not have the chance to make art at home so Rachel also gives kids extra materials.
RACHEL: What I've noticed is, "Well, you can take this home if you want extra." "Oh, I don't have scissors." Some of the ways that they could be creatively expressing themselves is limited once they leave these doors. So how can I help them find space in their home where they might need to escape?
REPORTER: She helps them figure out how to fold instead of cut or use simpler materials. The repujados tradition has always been about making something beautiful with what is available.
RACHEL: So who still needs to color their Repujado? I’m going to give everybody markers. Okay, who else here needs markers? I’m going to get you all the stuff that you need.
REPORTER: Back in the classroom, Rachel’s students are finishing up their repujados. When they’re ready, they head to Rachel for a trim with the scissors. Next a hole punch in one corner and a ribbon to make their creation into an ornament.
Rachel has taught hundreds of kids to make repujados over the years.
RACHEL: It's like a legacy, like I'm keeping traditions alive and because I'm from here I know the streets that they live on. I've experienced a lot of what they have. Not like crossing borders. I know what it's like to not have heat. I know the struggle but I've come out of it through my art and these kids can do the same thing.
REPORTER: Rachel hopes her students find joy and power in making art that reflects them.
