Born in a border town in Mexico, Rigoberto A. Gonzalez moved with his family to San Juan, Texas, when he was young. After earning an MFA in New York City in 2004, he returned to Texas, where he began to make work that emerged from his knowledge of seventeenth-century Italian painters like Caravaggio but focused on the stories of drug cartels and immigration that he saw everywhere around him. La Guia is a confrontational narrative, depicting the story of a teenaged girl who smuggled immigrants from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas. The three main figures inhabit a nocturnal landscape that resembles a stage set, with theatrical lighting and a dramatic triangular composition.