Discos Resaca Collective is a movement from the San Jose music scene that’s not quite like any other. Their family of artists, including vocalists, percussionists, and guitarists, is fascinating.
While some might find it amusing that resaca translates into “hungover” in Spanish, the collective takes inspiration from another meaning of the word, “undertow.” Reflected in their vision, the band makes music that draws people in like a wave in the ocean, just like an undertow.
The collective combines an intriguing mix of traditional cumbia music with hip-hop beats, rock influences, and romantic music, bringing a distinct Bay Area vibe that gets you on your feet dancing. And if you’re paying attention while dancing to their music, you might see up to four lead singers performing alongside the rest of the band. “It’s almost like you’re seeing four bands in one night, but it’s really just one band and four different vocalists that are kind of taking the leap,” said Ivan Flores, bandleader and founder of the collective. He explained that it is akin to the Motown days, where there would be one band and a rotating crew of singers performing their songs.
In traditional bands, there is one lead singer, one drummer, one bassist, one guitarist, and so on. Session players would usually step in when a band member was not available. It’s that sense of camaraderie, family, and community that sparked Flores to build the collective. “We’re a product of the Bay Area music scene, where everybody knows everybody and we’re all willing to help each other out,” said the San Jose native. “I basically put together a band—which is what I call our collective—and we support each other [through] the music,” he continued.
To the collective, music is the soundtrack of life. It is in the background of every family gathering and in every joyful celebration or sad moment. This has shaped the way the collective makes music—utilizing freedom and flexibility to inform their creative process. “Our goal was to [be] that band that could be the whole playlist for a family gathering. We have some romantic songs, [and] we have some songs that are more upbeat, like for dancing. We [also] have songs that are more like, you know, maybe deal with some kind of sadness or songs that deal with joy in other ways,” explains Flores.
Officially, the collective came together in 2015, but most of the members have been working together for much longer. A big part of their creative process involves storytelling. Whether it’s stories of happiness, sadness, grief, or tragedy, the collective takes it in stride and processes the experiences through music.
Unfortunately, a theme that has come up a lot and continues to influence the collective is loss. Flores recalled an experience he had writing a song for the collective’s first full-length album, Y Te Cuento, released in 2020. He had just attended the funeral of someone who was like a mentor to him, and the song manifested over the course of the following day. The song seemed to materialize out of nowhere, par for the course when it comes to creating music. This was certainly not the first or last time something like this occurred for Flores.
Simultaneously, the three sisters from Mariposas del Alma, who would later become the main vocalists for the collective, were also dealing with the loss of a loved one. Soon after this loss, they were introduced to Flores through mutual friends and decided to work together, starting with the song that Flores had written about grief. It seemed like a sort of poignant fate had started to bring the group together. “And it was just like, from there, we just never stopped working together. We’ve been in the band together ever since,” said Flores.
Fast forward to their most recent album released in 2022, East Side San Jose. This timepiece was dedicated to the San Jose Flores grew up in. To him, his album was deeply entwined with the experiences that he shared with his older brother, who regularly introduced him to new things. It was natural to bring him into the project as well and put him on the cover art for the album. Unfortunately, Flores’s brother passed away shortly after the album was completed.
Despite the difficulty of their individual losses, the bond that unites the collective has been helping Flores cope and slowly heal. “I think that’s another part of the strength of this group. We have all experienced [losses] together in different ways, but we know how to support each other,” said Flores.
While things have been incredibly difficult, the collective has managed to channel their grief into a movement that’s larger than life, putting out tracks that speak to people.
When Akeem Raheem paints, you can sense the hum of the city. The hiss of aerosol through a nozzle, the thumping bass from a passing car, and the shockwaves of a culture that shaped generations pulse through his work. His canvases feel alive with rhythm because he always remembers that art and culture are inseparable.
For Akeem, hip-hop has always been more than music—it’s a culture. “I want my paintings to remind people that hip-hop wasn’t just something you listened to; it was something you saw,” he said. Adding, “A lot of your favorite music had visual things that came with it. We had album covers and they’d be iconic. We’ve lost physical albums.”
Through portraits of artists like Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie), MF DOOM, and Humpty Hump, Akeem connects his memories to the heartbeat of hip-hop that still drives culture today. “I want my work to be graffiti at heart but also to have that pop feel, something people could take home. People want something posi-tive to hold onto,” said Akeem.
That conviction runs through his paintings, including one of his best-known works, Keep Your Head Up, which frames Tupac Shakur in a powerful and af-firming stained-glass motif. “That’s my favorite version of Tupac, before Death Row Records. Before his spiral downwards,” said Akeem. Another piece, titled Today Was a Good Day and featuring Ice Cube, captures the essence of the mid-1990s when hip-hop was at its peak.
Akeem grew up between Detroit and California. Detroit gave him grit, and California gave him sunshine. His upbringing shaped a unique style, where the metallic edges of the city glow with sun-drenched warmth. During those forma-tive years, he discovered hip-hop’s visual world through film. “Two noteworthy movies for me were Beat Street and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. Those movies were based around break dancers, but everything about those movies visually was like graffiti art, on the walls everywhere and vibrant colors. The type of visual expression stuck with me,” he said. Akeem realized that hip-hop’s soul wasn’t confined to music. It lived in murals, movement, and in the people who made it thrive.
Studying sociology and history at San José State University deepened his understanding of how culture forms. Akeem shared, “I’m a big history buff, and it’s interesting to me to see groups of people form culture. History and sociol-ogy fit together in a way. It kind of explains mankind to me and how and why people operate.”
His art career began almost by accident at a friend’s day party in Oakland, where his art table turned into the party’s unofficial photo booth. People took pictures and tagged him on social media, and before long his name was circulating through Oakland’s art scene. Soon he was showing at First Fridays on Telegraph Avenue and selling work through a vintage shop in downtown Oakland.
Momentum built quickly as small shows evolved into full installations, and in 2019 Akeem landed a temporary storefront in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. “It felt like I had my own gallery,” he said. “Half the people who came through weren’t even from the US. That’s when I realized how far it could reach.”
Even as his audience grew, Akeem stayed grounded. “Being an artist and creating art in a society where we’re largely a consumer culture, where people don’t make things anymore, it makes me feel truly lucky to have something I can call mine,” he said. “The art is mine; I make it, and it’s something that belongs to me, and it comes out of me. It allows me to feel like my work will transcend me.”
Today his canvases fill popular Bay Area cafés, pop-ups, and galleries, but they still carry the raw energy of a freeway underpass. Akeem’s paintings bridge the gap between street and pop art, between nostalgia and renewal, and between what hip-hop was and where it might go next. The vivid colors of his iconic portraits carry the past forward for new generations who keep the culture alive.
A recent meeting with artist Emory Douglas, the creative force behind the Black Panther Party’s iconic posters and flyers, reshaped the purpose of Akeem’s art. He shared, “It influenced me. It made me feel that art can be a part of a bigger movement. The pharaohs didn’t make all of the inscriptions, art, and artifacts that we find in Egypt. An artist made those things. It clicked with me that every idea needs a visual component to go with it.”
What matters most to Akeem now is using his art to spread positivity. “I’ve had people tell me that we’re living through some tough times,” Akeem reflected, adding, “I want my art to be a ray of sunshine. I’d like my work to be that bright spot in a person’s life, or their home, or their consciousness.”
Historian Lewis Mumford famously stated, “The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.” History is a testament to the people, families, towns, cities, and society that are constantly changing and evolving. Art of a specific time period can bring into focus the spirit of the era, capturing a time of transformation, and revealing a guiding principle of the past.
For illustrator and graffiti artist RC, art can illuminate the zeitgeist of an era by utilizing the seemingly ordinary objects that populate people’s everyday lives. More importantly, creating art connects RC to his family, who have played an integral part in San Francisco Bay Area history.
To understand RC as an artist, we have to begin with a significant piece of Bay Area history. The late 1800s in California was a confusing time; ranchos of the Old West were slowly divided up, sold, or taken, and the days of vaqueros, dons, and wealthy land ownership were coming to an end. The transition from Mexican government land grants to American settler claims under statehood was messy. Before this transition, however, was the Robles family, who arrived in Monterey in 1797. In 1847, brothers Teodoro and Secundino Robles purchased Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito, 8,800 acres of beautiful grazing land located in what is now south Palo Alto. The family home stood at Alma Street and San Antonio Road, where Don Secundino and his wife, Dona Maria Antonia, became known for their hospitality—a stage stop between San Francisco and San Jose. They would offer refreshments, hold bear and bullfights, host fandangos, and allow hunters to ride Secundino’s beautiful horses across the property. Secundino and the Robles name became a cornerstone of late nineteenth-century peninsula life, known as the land of wealth and abundance of goodwill towards all.
“I don’t think there are any prerequisites for how a really great artist can come to be, except one—I think they need to possess a rebel or outsider spirit in some way, and it should be very natural.”
Secundino and Maria Antonia Robles are RC’s great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. Their story and its role in the history of the Bay Area, when the Old West began to meet the modern age, holds significant value for RC when the Old West began to meet the modern age. During this time, innovation and the natural environment lived hand-in-hand. “That time period was interesting because it was soon enough ago that we relate to the objects seen from that time, but they were created with simple materials (wood, glass, metal). There was a boom of modern-day conveniences being invented constantly, but everything still had a natural beauty to it. Most of the objects in your house back then would have been one-of-a-kind, but you could have still felt you were at the edge of innovation.”
The spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship of the Old West influences RC’s approach to art and helps frame the visual aesthetic of his work. RC explains, “I don’t think there are any prerequisites for how a really great artist can come to be, except one—I think they need to possess a rebel or outsider spirit in some way, and it should be very natural. The overarching spirit of the West is that of creative outsiders.” RC carries this spirit as his art and life occupies a space between conformity and rebellion.
RC is a software engineer—a job that pays the bills and provides health insurance—but his real passion is his graffiti work. The challenge of working within the confines of letter-shape rules and limitations, while simultaneously creating art where one feels they shouldn’t, is a welcomed one. “Graffiti is a mental and physical challenge, which gives a higher sense of achievement in return after overcoming those challenges.” The discipline of working within a certain form while applying it through a medium historically seen as vandalism mirrors the rebel spirit of the Old West.
Graffiti took hold of RC in high school when all he wanted to do was draw and tag. As his skills grew, people started hiring him for flyers, logos, or website design. Full-time graphic design wasn’t paying the bills, so he transitioned and started doing hybrid design and software engineering work. It wasn’t until the recent California wildfires and the pandemic that RC found the streets less crowded than usual. “Everyone was staying inside. I remember thinking it’d be a great time to get back on the street again in those smokey years. Then, when the pandemic hit, it was like a very not-subtle ask from the universe to paint all the Bandos in my neighborhood.”
The letter forms in his graffiti work have a heaviness to them; solid and firmly planted as if they were cornerstones to a building. Yet the letters turn and stretch into each other, bringing a lightness and life-like quality to his work. RC’s fine art illustrations follow in his graffiti’s footsteps as his subjects seem to hold a particular shape, like that of a letter form, with lines that flow and bend in the same direction, giving the subjects a sense of confinement. In one black and white illustration entitled “The Long Hat Horse Rider,” a vaquero sits upon a horse. RC illustrates a half-wooden and half-fabric horse whose legs fold upon themselves into wheels. A bird cage sits upon the haunches of the horse as the birds stick their heads out between the bars. The transformational time of the last decades of the Old West produced in ornate detail, grace RC’s illustrations. Their overall stamp-like quality further suggests the antiquity of the subjects.
As beautiful as the visual remnants of a bygone time are, those times were hard. Eventually, Secundino’s famous hospitality was slowly taken advantage of by those who desired his land, and in 1876 his estate was down to a mere 300 acres. Though the Robles family had to conform to the new norms Americans brought with them, a quiet rebellion took place as Secundino and Maria Antonia never wavered from opening up their home, offering a drink, and allowing visitors to enjoy their land. The Robles hospitality continued into the early 1890s and refreshments were handed out by Maria Antonia to passing bicyclists until she died in 1897.
RC continues to carry his family, their journey, and history with him through his art. Growing up, drawing with his older sister and grandparents planted the seed for RC to embrace the philosophy of staying true to himself. He has carried them through tough times as his art has pulled him out of a “dysfunctional state” after losing a family member to suicide. He carries them now as his graffiti work adorns the concrete landscape of Silicon Valley, the same valley where his ancestors rode across endless pastures and became known for their famous hospitality.
If art can represent the “transformation of endless becoming into being,” then it’s RC’s family and their endless becoming that his art strives to bring into being. “The story of the West, in particular, is one of having no backup plan and being on your own should something go wrong, and without any established settlements to help you, given it was the new land. My great-grandparents had 29 children. Only eight of them lived to adulthood, and I can only imagine what they went through. The strength they had to have back then is inspiring to me, and I think about it a lot when I’m drawing.”
René Lorraine Schilling-Sears, a graduate of San Jose State with a BFA in Pictorial Arts, has moved from oils to watercolor and pen, giving a voice to what she sees.
Was there a time when you had that “aha moment,” when you released your voice?
Yeah, absolutely. I had an instructor when I was at San Jose State who really got through to me. It was one of those things where you’re working on a painting and you finally see something that you hadn’t felt for decades. It finally just happened on the canvas.
Do you remember what that painting was?
Yes, I still have it too. I was working on my BFA show. My whole series was about body art, tattoos, piercings, things like that. That’s what I had been working on for the last two years at that point. It was a single fingernail. I was working on painting a hand. It was a single fingernail, and it was like, “Oh, this is what I want to do forever.”
When you look back at that piece, what’s your feeling about it?
I am in love with that piece so much that I feel like I’ll never be able to top it for myself. I’ve been offered a lot of money for it. There’s no way. It feels like my firstborn child, because I had such a connecting moment to it. It’s going to stay with me forever.
What was that about? Was it the type of technique that you used?
That’s hard. That’s a hard thing to put into words. At that moment, I felt I finally believed in myself with the title of “artist.” I was satisfied with the work that I’d done to the point where I felt like I could finally own the title artist, because that is always a struggle.
When you grow up in the Bay Area with a lot of amazing artists, you see so many paintings and artworks and people really making it happen. You think, “How am I ever going to compete with them?”
You have three different styles in your portfolio: oil, pencil, and watercolor. Which is your favorite?
I prefer watercolor and ink, which is crazy, because when I started painting, I never thought that I would do watercolor or watercolor portraits. It was the furthest thing that I thought I would ever be interested in. I was always just an oil lover and a canvas lover, but I think there’s something very intimate about sitting down with watercolor and ink, something that seems more personal. I like that. Oil is fun, too, but at this point to me…I’m just not personally as connected to it anymore.
Your watercolor ink portraits have a very unique aspect, with the subjects’ faces missing. I hear it is because of a degenerative eye disorder, is that right?
I have neurological issues. I have a cyst in my brain that causes balance issues and visual disturbances. The left side of my temporal lobe fires at half the rate that the right side does. There’s some disconnect there. Also, I have holes in my vision.
Some days, it’s like I’m looking through a wheel of Swiss cheese. It started in 2011. The doctors still are not really sure what it is. The holes in my vision, they’re not really sure where it stems from. They think it’s related to the other things that are happening. It’s really difficult to explain to people and hard to convey what I am going through, so I really wanted to put that on paper.
Why are you choosing this particular medium—pen and watercolor—for these portraits?
One of the reasons I do pen and watercolor in the same piece is because I feel a lot of times when I can’t see very well, it’s hard to feel grounded. I use the watercolor to show and convey that whole feeling that things are happening. When you work with watercolor, things will just happen that you can’t pick up off that paper. You can’t wipe it off. That’s how I feel with these spots in my eyes. They’re not going away. I can’t wipe them away. The hard lines that I use, that are more pencil or Micron pen, are my way of conveying those moments that are calm, that say “Everything is in place.” That’s how I’m trying to meld both of those together.
How does it feel then, when people are attracted to your work and find out your story? Is there a little bit of insecurity or concern? Are you wanting to share it?
Personally, I feel that things are less scary when you talk about them. On the one hand, I wouldn’t put the story out there, but on the other, when I did the show here, I titled it with the condition that I have. It gave me the chance to talk to 30 people—strangers—about it.
Putting it out there is easier because when I talk about things, I feel like they’re less scary. They don’t seem as crazy. At the same time, I don’t want my work to be all about my condition. I don’t want people to only pay attention to it because the story has a really personal health issue involved.
I imagine you don’t want your health issue to be the reason people notice your work, but it is part of your story. I was very attracted to your work, knowing that you had neurological issues.
It’s hard. It’s a hard balance. I think, for the most part, people…like you just said, you liked it before you knew the story. I hope that continues, but at the same time, it’s also really cool. I’ve met some cool people who have similar conditions. They can see that within the art. They can relate to it.
You’ve had this current series. What are you working on now? What’s next for you?
I’m still expanding this series, but I want to bring more medical devices and machinery into it. I have a show coming up in the fall in San Francisco, so I’ve got about eight months or so to finish this body of work, or at least a couple new pieces. That’s what I really want to do. I want to bring the medical equipment side to it, just to evoke more of those feelings, and get more people to be able to connect with the pieces. A lot of times a portrait is a portrait, and you need something else in there to show or help along the thought process. I think the juxtaposition might be just right.
What’s the greatest lesson you’ve learned in life through your painting?
What I always come back to is a moment in college, where a professor told me to eliminate something from a painting, and I did it without even thinking. I hated that painting from that moment on. I could never get that piece back to what I wanted it to look like.
I always go back to that moment, in all sorts of experiences, and remember to always stop and think and not take somebody else’s opinion without really figuring out if it’s right for you. It’s interesting that I learned that through painting.
