Bastion technologies denver10/2/2023 In the end, McLeod published three large volumes, and garnered wide support from online fans, many of whom found him through his Twitter account and his participation in online forums. “I protected myself by laying down boundaries, basically telling all the men that I would not sleep with them to make my way to the top.” “I had to work twice as hard for half as much,” she said. When asked in a 2020 interview, about what it was like starting out as a woman in a male-dominated field, she described it as “DIFFICULT” - all caps. “Not an angry animal.”)Īfter his exit, Cardenas founded Sol Tribe, and set out to have a different kind of space, one that truly felt safe. “‘I was a professional martial artist,” he wrote. “But that warrior mentality, that aggressiveness that he had as an alpha male for so long, he might’ve accidentally killed me in the process.” (When reached for comment, the former business partner, who declined to be interviewed for this story, disputed her characterization that he would have hurt anyone. “He would’ve killed for me - literally would’ve killed for me,” Cardenas says in a 2018 interview. She questioned whether she ever felt “safe” with that kind of male energy in her space. For 13 years, she ran it with a male business partner, and the two had a working relationship that she later described as volatile, combative, and passionate. When she was 20, Alicia opened her first successful shop, Twisted Sol. “She was a bigger-than-life presence, even as a child,” recalls her brother, Al, three years her senior. “Indigenous, Spanish, French - we’re a woven people.”īorn in 1977, Cardenas always had a passion for performing. “We’re from southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, descendants of Spanish conquistadors that were married into people from Montezuma’s descendants,” Dr. The practice involves participants dressing in traditional Aztec outfits, like headdresses with long feathers, and moving rhythmically along with the beat of a single drum as either a performance or ritual ceremony. Renee Fajardo, a program director in the Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Department of Chicana/o Studies and a friend who danced with Alicia. But during the fifties it was brought here during the Chicano rights movement,” explains Dr. “Aztec dancing has always gone on in Mexico, but it wasn’t really a tradition here. It’s a nod to the family’s ancestral Manito culture, which Alicia reconnected to in her early twenties, and it remained an important part of her life until its end. On his way out of the neighborhood, McLeod set Costilow’s van on fire.Īlfredo Cardenas, Sr., had an image of his daughter as his Facebook profile photo, showing Alicia wearing a black and red headdress, earlobes stretched nearly to her shoulders, her lips painted black and red stripes across her cheeks. Then he drove one mile to VI Collective, a private home with an adjoining appointment-only tattoo studio, where he posed as a deliveryman and shot through an interior door at artist Jeremy Costilow and his family, but missed. At Sol Tribe, his first stop, he shot and killed Cardenas, along with jewelry manager Alyssa Gunn Maldonado, and shot Maldonado’s husband and Alicia’s childhood friend, Jimmy, in the chest. On a dark winter evening during the typically sleepy week between Christmas and New Years, Lyndon McLeod, 47, drove to five locations in and around Denver, murdering five people along the way. 27, 2021, it was transformed into a crime scene. “She was just calling people out on their shit.”įor more than a decade, Cardenas had owned Sol Tribe, a successful tattoo and piercing shop that clients and employees describe as a sanctuary. “It’s not like she went out there to make people pissed,” says Desiree Ortega-Stange, a close friend. She had no qualms telling fellow members of Denver’s piercing and tattoo scene - a community she had helped turn from a male-centric bastion of bikers and bros to a place of greater acceptance and inclusivity - that she would not tolerate anyone working with toxic men she would publicly criticize exploitative apprenticeship practices. With her thick gray and black hair, piercings, and tattoos on nearly every inch of her body, Cardenas was both a physical force and an iron-willed artist who friends say wielded her words with purpose. Alicia Cardenas’s friends knew she had enemies, but they never thought she was in imminent danger.
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