Around the time Mel Depaz agreed to design Angel City’s Celebración de Culturas merch for 2023, she got an unexpected visit.
“A hummingbird came to my window three days in a row in June,” she says. Depaz, a Compton native, knew she had to feature the tiny bird in her work with the club. “The hummingbird is important in our culture—you see it represented a lot in art from all of Latin America.”
In her two designs—a scarf and a t-shirt/hoodie design—Depaz, a child of Salvadoran immigrants, celebrates not just her own heritage but the huge range of Latin cultures from throughout the Americas. She pulled inspiration from various motifs that are common to multiple artistic traditions.
“I had just gone to Mexico when Angel City contacted me, and I was looking at art in galleries and pop-up shops and all of that,” she remembers. “And I had just gone to El Salvador in December. So I was looking at the similarities between the art and the culture [of the two countries].”
The other elements of the scarf design—the brightly colored flowers and strings of papeles picados—were inspired by those trips.
“I took inspiration from the pattern making and textile work I saw while traveling,” she says. “I just wanted to connect all the things that were going on in my life heading into this.”
For the t-shirt and hoodie design, Depaz leaned more on her own upbringing in her Latino community in Compton. She used the same color palette as the scarf to depict a backyard party like the ones she grew up going to.
“The backyard party on the t-shirt and hoodie, that was inspired by growing up and going to parties like that,” she says. “The decor is very specific in our culture.”
The print depicts a backyard ready to host a party, with a charcoal grill, table and chairs, and a piñata and other decorations. The whole scene is pure LA.
If you’ve seen Depaz’s work before, there’s a good chance it was on a wall in the LA area. The 25-year-old started painting murals a few years ago and has now worked on dozens of them for various businesses and municipalities.
In fact, Depaz got her earliest formal education as an artist from a friend of her dad’s, a prominent muralist from El Salvador named Julay Hernandez. “The summer before I started middle school,” she says, “I remember my dad said he was tired of me doing nothing all day. His friend had just come from El Salvador and he was like, ‘I’m going to teach you how to paint.’”
Depaz spent the rest of the summer working on landscapes with Hernandez, mostly of the small, colorful houses from back home. “I didn’t know what it was,” she remembers. “I was just painting these colorful houses.” Nonetheless, something stuck, and she signed up for an art class when school started.
Depaz continued studying art into college, when she told herself she’d get a “real” career that offered a guaranteed, steady income. After a few semesters, realizing that art classes were the only thing that got her excited about school, she decided she had to give a career as an artist a shot.
She started at a small scale, designing t-shirts inspired by her upbringing, featuring Compton landmarks and Old English text. As people in the community started to take notice, her work caught the eye of the team behind Patria Coffee, who asked if she could paint an exterior wall that was getting hit by graffiti regularly.
“This guy had seen me on Instagram,” she says. “They were like, ‘We want to commission you for a mural, but we know that you don't have any experience.’” Depaz got in touch with a more experienced local muralist. The two worked on both the concept—which reads “Compton” in big block letters and features the LA skyline, a Metro train, and a Compton cowboy—and the actual painting together. At 3,000 square feet, “it’s actually the biggest mural in Compton, which is crazy,” she says.
Depaz is excited to be participating in a bigger cultural moment in her city. “Right now in Compton, I feel like there’s an art movement,” she says. “There’s a nonprofit called Color Compton that just opened up the Compton Art and History Museum, which is unheard of. They also have a program where they teach high schoolers art… when I was growing up in Compton, we didn't have any of that, so it's cool to be part of it.”
With everything she creates, Depaz aims to go beyond the superficial. Talking about the Latin American art that inspired her Angel City designs, she says, “Most of the paintings you see, they tell a story. It's usually a culture-based story, or it could be about the history of a place. I like all that.”
With the Celebración de Culturas collection, that story is about a city defined by its Latinx roots, where millions of people come together to build a culture that isn’t just Mexican, Salvadoran, Peruvian, Guatemalan, or Honduran, but all of those, and more—and above all, uniquely LA.