Alex Perez first came here as immigrant from Nicaragua after the country was undergoing a civil war.
“It was extremely hard for me to fit into the American culture at the beginning I barely knew how to speak English,” he remembers.
But his passion for art was always there as even without supplies at first he painted on old pieces of wood and anything he could find.
Perez graduated from high school in Texas only a year after moving to the U.S. He knew he had to move to pursue a career in becoming an artist, his dream.
So he packed up his belongings and moved to Los Angeles.
“Most people are scared to move to somewhere like Los Angeles but I had nothing to lose so I applied and sent in my art work everywhere,” he said.
He eventually landed a job as a political cartoonist at the newspaper called “La Opinion” a Hispanic newspaper.
Photos from the past tell his story as a cartoonist.
Perez left “La Opinion” after two years but with an established portfolio he started to apply to bigger newspapers. And to his surprise his career took a new turn.
Instead of being a political cartoonist he was now drawing entertainment celebrities. His work was published in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter and the Washington Post.
He was living the dream. Perez went from bagging groceries at a local grocery store to supplement his income to attending movie premieres, and starting to become recognized for his art by famous actors including Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman.
“I was finally getting recognized for what I loved to do it was a surreal moment in my life,” he remembers of the mid 1980s and 1990s.
Over the years, Perez became syndicated and recognized by the Academy of Motion Pictures. Unfortunately, newspapers were slowly starting to fade in the 2000s and his career started to slow down.
Perez had worked on a few projects here and there but ultimately he decided to move to Reno, Nevada to start his family and work for a gaming company called IGT.
“Although I was still drawing, I was crushed inside because it wasn’t what I truly wanted to do and I finally had a taste of what my dreams were like because they had came true,” he said.
Back at it. “Almost 20 years passed I knew I couldn’t let my dreams die down so I picked up the pieces and started to create something new,” Perez said of starting drawing again during retirement.
Perez is now retired which has allowed him to start drawing again and resume work as an artist. He soon hopes to host an exhibition with all of his art in Los Angeles.
“To never give up on your dreams but most importantly to never give up on yourself in all my years of my career I had doubts but I picked myself back up and knew that I could make it,” he said.