He loved the work of the Mexican muralists, particularly Jose Clemente Orozco, but they were, he found, national-minded and tended not to mix with foreigners.
There are also hints of contact with all sorts of other art, from the Mexican muralists of the 1920s and '30s to the Chicago imagists of the '60s and '70s.
As to possible regional forebears, he has neither the epic vision of the Mexican muralists (whom he admires) nor the modernist commitments of earlier 20th-century Latin Americans such as Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Wilfredo Lam or Roberto Matta.