 Romero's vocation as a santera was the result of personal crisis.Following her mother's death on 28 December 1998 at age of eighty-two, the artist began to make devotional retablos, eventually learning how to paint with natural pigments on pine panels with recipes for paints, gesso, and piñon varnish that master santero Charlie Carrillo wrote out for her on small pieces of paper, which Romero still has.Romero's studies of the Crucified Christ are examples of contemporary expressions of a traditional genre of New Mexican folk art.