Al Rendón’s ‘Nuestra Cultura · 75 Años’ Press Pass at the Witte — A Master Chef Coffee Sign in the Backdrop

A vertical “Nuestra Cultura · 75 Años” lanyard pass from Mi Tierra Cafe & Bakery’s September 2016 75th-anniversary celebration, photographed on display by its black lanyard and silver alligator-style metal clip on a pale exhibit wall at the Witte Museum in San Antonio on 23 January 2024. The corner of an adjacent striped exhibit element — most likely another print or pass on the same wall run — is just visible at the right edge of the frame.

What makes this artifact more interesting than a generic guest commemorative is where it’s hanging. The card is on display in the Witte’s exhibit:

“Mi Cultura — Bringing Shadows Into the Light: The Photography of Al Rendón” Russell Hill Rogers Texas Art Gallery, First Floor of the Robert J. and Helen C. Kleberg South Texas Heritage Center, Witte Museum, San Antonio 2 September 2023 – 27 May 2024 (subsequently extended) Curated by Bruce Shackelford and Katherine Nelson Hall Part of the 2023 FOTOSEPTIEMBRE photography festival

That exhibit is a 50-year retrospective of San Antonio Tejano cultural photographer Al Rendón’s career — best known for his portraits of Selena, his rock-and-roll concert work, his charreada photographs, and decades of documenting San Antonio’s Tejano communities — and the Witte’s own description of the show explicitly calls out that it includes Rendón’s “personal collection of cameras and press passes used throughout his career,” alongside the recreation of his darkroom and the backstage passes from Led Zeppelin and Elton John concerts. So almost certainly this card isn’t a generic guest souvenir from the Mi Tierra anniversary — it’s Al Rendón’s own working press pass from the September 2016 celebration, accessioned years later into his career retrospective at the Witte. He wore it, did the job, kept it, and the Witte put it on the wall.

That reframes everything else about the artifact.

What’s on the card

Foreground. Sepia-and-burgundy stylized head-and-shoulders portraits of the cafe’s founders Pedro and Cruz Cortez — Cruz on the left in a hat with two pink-and-yellow flower decorations, dark coat, and brooch; Pedro on the right in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. The treatment is the same painted-portrait look featured on the Edible San Antonio Aug/Sep 2016 spread and at the September 2016 La Familia Cortez 75th-anniversary celebration, confirming that the card is part of the same anniversary-identity artwork program rather than a one-off later piece.

Backdrop. A montage assembled from the cafe’s own historical signage, all rendered in the same monochromatic sepia-and-burgundy palette so it sits behind the foreground portraits without competing:

• Upper left: a block sign reading “MI TIERRA / CAFE / TACOS / MENUDO”.
• Left of center: a sign panel reading “Tierra CAFE / and BAKERY / WE SPECIALIZE IN / MEXICAN FOOD”.
• Center: a small inset portrait of an older woman in a hat or kerchief — most likely Doña Cruz Cortez at work in the cafe.
• Center right: a small “Mi Tierra / [EM]PANADAS” bakery reference, partly hidden by Pedro’s shoulder.
• Upper right: a vertical painted wall sign on a tile-and-stucco wall reading, in three stacked lines:

MASTER CHEF COFFEE

That last sign is the H and H connection. Master Chef Coffee is Hoffmann-Hayman’s hotel-and-restaurant trade brand — the line of coffee sold in bulk to cafes, hotels, and clubs from the late 1920s, and from 1952 onward in one-pound retail keywind tins as well. Mi Tierra carrying a Master Chef sign on its storefront is consistent with both companies’ histories: Pedro Cortez bought the Toyo Café in 1941 and renamed it Mi Tierra, and by the 1950s the cafe carried a large Master Chef Coffee sign on its exterior, first documented in the project from a 1950s photograph published in the San Antonio Express-News in May 2015.

Bottom. The card’s title text — “Nuestra Cultura” in cream script across the lower third, with “75 Años” in a cream banner below it. Mi Tierra opened in 1941; “75 Años” places the card at 2016.

The card’s “Nuestra Cultura” wording is also a deliberate echo, in retrospect: when Bruce Shackelford and Katherine Nelson Hall came to title Rendón’s 2023 Witte retrospective seven years later, they led with the same two words — “Mi Cultura” — and the exhibit lists “Mi Cultura” as one of its named thematic series. The card the photographer wore at the 2016 anniversary now sits inside a 2023–24 exhibit whose title and themes echo it.

Where it sits in the existing Mi Tierra / Master Chef thread

The project already had three earlier posts on Mi Tierra and Master Chef Coffee:

1. The first sighting in 2015 — the San Antonio Express-News “Mi Tierra: A San Antonio love story” gallery published a 1950s photograph of Mi Tierra’s exterior with a large H and H Master Chef sign on the building.
2. The 2016 Edible San Antonio sighting — the Aug/Sep 2016 issue ran a “75 Years of Food and Family” spread on La Familia Cortez featuring a stylized painted portrait of Pedro and Cruz Cortez in front of the Mi Tierra storefront, with a Master Chef Coffee chef-mascot sign visible on the wall — the spread that introduced the painted treatment now reused on this lanyard card. That post first flagged the green color of the rendered Master Chef sign in the painted version, since the original 1950s photograph is black-and-white.
3. The December 2016 in-person investigation — a holiday visit to Mi Tierra to look for the Master Chef sign on the actual building, which found that the original H and H Master Chef sign was no longer on display, that a replica entrance with the green Master Chef sign had been built for the 75th-anniversary special occasions, that the framed San Antonio Express-News article was hanging by the north entrance to La Panadería, that the framed 1950s entrance photo was hanging above the south entrance, that the back of the menu featured the same 1950s photograph, that the price sign above the La Panadería counter was still a Master Chef sign, and that a “giant Master Chef peeking out from the mural on the wall directly behind the bakery counter” had been hidden in plain sight all along. The post closed with the observation that “There must be more to the story of Mi Tierra and Master Chef coffee.”

This card is the next piece of “more to the story.” It puts the 2016-anniversary painted-portrait artwork — first seen in Edible San Antonio and on the green replica entrance — onto a physical card-stock object that a working press photographer wore at the anniversary, and it puts that object on display in a curated 50-year photographic retrospective at the Witte in 2024. Eight years after the anniversary, the press pass crossed from a working photographer’s career-ephemera box into a museum exhibit. The Master Chef sign rode along on the artwork the whole way.

Provenance tiers — revised

Knowing the exhibit context tightens the chain of reproduction substantially:

1. 1941–1950s: Mi Tierra Cafe, Market Square, San Antonio — Pedro Cortez’s renamed Toyo Café — carries a real Master Chef Coffee sign on its building.
2. 1950s: A black-and-white photograph of the cafe’s exterior, including the Master Chef sign, is taken by an unidentified photographer; this is the photograph since reproduced in the San Antonio Express-News in 2015 and elsewhere.
3. 2016 (mid-year): That 1950s photograph is reworked into a stylized painted portrait of Pedro and Cruz Cortez with the cafe’s signage as a backdrop, runs in Edible San Antonio Aug/Sep 2016, and becomes the visual identity of Mi Tierra’s September 2016 La Familia Cortez 75th-anniversary celebration (replica green-sign entrance, Mayor Ivy Taylor’s address, Rivard Report photo gallery).
4. September 2016: That same painted artwork is printed onto lanyard press passes for the 75th-anniversary celebration, with “Nuestra Cultura · 75 Años” branding — including the pass worn by Al Rendón while photographing the event.
5. 2023–2024: Al Rendón’s working press pass from the 2016 anniversary is accessioned into the Witte Museum’s 50-year retrospective of his career, “Mi Cultura — Bringing Shadows Into the Light: The Photography of Al Rendón,” alongside his Led Zeppelin / Elton John backstage passes and a recreation of his darkroom.
6. 2024-01-23: This photograph documents the pass on display in that exhibit.

So this is third-generation reference material on the Master Chef sign itself — a Witte exhibit display of a 2016 lanyard card whose artwork is built from a 1950s storefront photograph — but it’s first-generation as a Rendón-archive artifact. It documents that a major San Antonio Tejano cultural photographer was credentialed at the Cortez family’s 75th anniversary, that he kept the credential, and that the credential’s design carried Master Chef Coffee imagery far enough that the H and H connection traveled with him into a curated museum retrospective seven years later. That’s not nothing for an H and H reference page.

Why it’s worth filing for H and H specifically

The Mi Tierra / Master Chef relationship had been read on the project, prior to this card, as a 1950s-storefront story with a long mural-and-menu afterlife inside the cafe. The Witte exhibit context adds a different angle: the relationship is also durable enough to show up in the personal archive of one of San Antonio’s defining Tejano cultural photographers, in language (“Nuestra Cultura”) that the Witte itself then echoes back as the title of a 50-year retrospective. The H and H Master Chef sign rides along on all of that — quietly, in the upper right corner of the backdrop, but undeniably there.

Open questions

• The painted-portrait artwork’s authorship. Is the 2016 Cortez-family painted-portrait montage Al Rendón’s own work (a stylization of one of his own photographs of the Cortezes), or is it by another San Antonio artist who licensed Rendón’s photographs or worked from the 1950s archival photograph directly? Rendón has photographed Mi Tierra and the Cortezes for decades; either reading is plausible, and the Witte’s published catalog or the Mi Cultura — Bringing Shadows Into the Light book may pin it down.
• The pass type. The “Nuestra Cultura · 75 Años” pass format — lanyard with alligator clip, vertical card stock — is consistent with both a press credential and an event/family pass. Given the Witte exhibit’s framing of these as “press passes used throughout his career,” the press-credential reading is strongly supported, but a label/wall-text confirmation would lock it down.
• Original Master Chef sign on Mi Tierra’s building today. The 2016 visit found that the original H and H Master Chef sign was no longer mounted on the cafe’s exterior, but that a green-painted replica entrance for special occasions had been built. Whether the replica is still in service in 2024–2026, and whether the original 1950s sign survives anywhere in the cafe’s storage, remains the obvious next in-person follow-up. If anyone in the Cortez family or at La Panadería wants to talk, the contact page is the right place.