Name: Salon del RGV: Apr. 9: Featuring Jessica Monroe Valentín | Daniel García Ordaz
Start: 2026-04-09T19:00:00-05:00
Location: CommonSpace

$Salon del RGV: Apr. 9: Featuring Jessica Monroe Valent\u00edn | Daniel Garc\u00eda Ordaz$

The public is invited to join our artsy and intellectual casual Salon del RGV conversations on the 2nd Thursday of each month from 7 to 9 p.m. at CommonSpace coffee shop in McAllen.
Our April 9th Featured Speakers are Jessica Monroe Valentín and Daniel García Ordaz, who will present Como Caminamos, a collaborative (work-in-progress) project exploring place, memory, language, ecology, and lived experience in the Rio Grande Valley. Through conversation, images, and reflection, Jessica and Daniel use collaborative autoethnography to think through how personal experience connects to larger histories, communities, and landscapes.
Jessica Monroe Valentín is a South Texas artist whose work is rooted in landscape, perception, ecology, and embodied attention. Through painting, drawing, and research-based projects, she explores how lived experience, environment, and systems of relation shape the way we understand ourselves and the world.
Daniel García Ordaz, called "the voice of the Rio Grande Valley" (The Monitor newspaper), is a McAllen Poet Laureate emeritus whose work engages language, memory, identity, culture, and place. His writing often moves between the intimate and the political, drawing on personal experience while opening onto larger questions of history and community.
The Featured Artist will be Jessica Monroe.
Our featured nonprofit TBD.
Salon del RGV is brought to you by the Seven To Eight Poetry Project, a program of the McAllen Poet Laureate, Daniel García Ordaz.
“Salon” sa•lon noun 1. an artful conversation held monthly where artists, writers, and arts professionals, and arts and philosophy-minded individuals come together to bond, network and get out of their heads for a little while. It is a conversation; a support group; sometimes a counseling session; always a networking extravaganza; an experimental lab for new ideas; a place to learn and grow by leaps and bounds as an artist and a professional.