Chelo’s family held traditional expectations for their irrepressible child. Autobiographical statements suggest that she lived largely in her imagination. Completing only six years of formal education, González Amézcua was self-schooled in areas that interested her: history, art, architecture, and religion. She was a natural performance artist, dancing, singing, and playing the guitar, piano, castanets, and tambourine from an early age. Eventually, she also wrote and recited original poetry, carved stone, and drew the delicate "Texas filigree art" for which she is acclaimed today. One early photograph shows Chelo as a lovely young woman tightly swathed in an embroidered shawl that pools at her feet like a mermaid, a flower in her hair, and feathered fan in her hand. She was enchanting.

In 1932, González Amézcua was granted a scholarship to a renowned art school in Mexico. Sadly, the death of her father prevented her from accepting, and she soon started to work at the candy counter of the local Kress variety store. In 1964, she began to seriously draw, using ballpoint pen on cardboard or paper. The consistent line and ever-flowing ink permitted a fluidity in her mental recordatorio, or mental drawings, that evoke the intricacy of Mexican silver filigree work. Despite the fact that they are dense and tightly controlled images, the scrolling, curving lines also exhibit a free and joyous abandon in the feminine abundance of flowers, birds, graceful women, mythical figures, and fantasy architecture. Her spiritual nature sought expression in biblical subjects, such as this depiction of Milcah, one of the five beautiful daughters of Zelophehad, who lived during the time of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. As recounted in Numbers 27, Milcah and her sisters petitioned that they might inherit their father’s name and property. The Lord granted permission, provided they did not marry outside their ancestral tribe, a culturally insular narrative González Amézcua may have internalized as the daughter of two cultures. Crossing one border to another is not an erasure of where and what one has been; it is a melding of two existences. As a survivor of the mass deportations of Mexicans and Mexican American citizens during the 1930s and 40s, González Amézcua asks, "Mystery of life/Whose blood [in] her veins flow?"

Stacy C. Hollander, "Melcha Daughter of Salphahad, 1964–1975" exhibition copy for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020.