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Born at Wilcox, Arizona, on May 19, 1914, artist Pedro Lopez Cervantez took his father's last name–instead of his mother's, as usually dictated by Hispanic tradition–because he had been told of an earlier Cervantes who had been a great man. His mother was a Mexican Indian whose parents ran a pottery at Durango, Mexico, before the Mexican Revolution. Cervantez's father, of Spanish descent, worked for the Santa Fe Railroad at Texico, New Mexico. Pedro Cervantez lived most of his life in Texico and Clovis, New Mexico, and across the Texas border at Farwell. Most of his painting focused on life in the Plains of eastern New Mexico, combining a Regionalist style with a hybrid surrealism.
Cervantez began painting in oils about 1930. He assisted artist Russell Vernon Hunter (1900–1955) on Hunter's mural
Later, Cervantez made easel paintings for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, exhibiting most of his New Deal productions at the Museum of Fine Arts at Santa Fe. In 1938 Cervantez's work was included in the exhibition "Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was one of the first Hispanic artists in the United States to receive national attention.
Cervantez enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1940
and was stationed in Italy and Germany during
World War II. Following the war he
worked as a sign painter for the Coca Cola
Bottling Company at Clovis for a number of
years. He never regained his prewar recognition
and never truly returned to easel painting,
about which he felt some bitterness. He
died at Clovis on July 3, 1987, after many years
as a public school custodian. Ironically, some
of his New Deal easel paintings hang at Melrose
(New Mexico) High School. His paintings
were featured in a recent exhibition, "Sin
Nombre: Hispana and Hispano Artists of the
New Deal Era," at the Museum of International
Folk Art in Santa Fe.