Art, Features April 5, 2010 By John Dickie

bobadilla page3 La Locha: Bobadilla
Sometimes I sit down to draw a cartoon and I get stuck, blocked. So I have to let some time pass before I draw about something. I use symbols which are part of life in Sinaloa, like el encobijado (“a body wrapped in a blanket”). There’s a mystique surrounding this. Wrapping a body up in a blanket, using brown tape, leaving a message. These are old customs here. Encobijados have been around a long time and it’s something you see in Ñacas y Tacuachi. The car with the big trunk, people tied up, the classic chequered blanket. These are all things we have seen and experienced, so I put them in comic strips.

There’s a lot of cartoonists in Sinaloa at the moment. How did that come about?

In Sinaloa, there are very few newspapers, and the only windows for cartoons were in El Debate and El Noroeste newspapers. So those of us who like doing cartoons and criticising society and politics, we got together and founded the magazine La Locha. It became a kind of watershed for the new cartoonist movement in Sinaloa. Then the newspaper Riodoce came out, which was something completely new. It’s called Riodoce (“Twelfth River”) because there are eleven rivers in Sinaloa, so Riodoce was like the new current in journalism. And they called me up to publish Ñacas y Tlacuachi, which was already in La Locha.

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