Return to Chicano Park

 

Chicano Park is one of those places that looms in the imagination of our community. It is located in Barrio Logan in San Diego, next to the Interstate 5 freeway, and it represents a site of struggle and an act of self-affirmation for the Chicano community.

Barrio Logan has historically been home to a large community of Mexican origin. It is a poor community, crisscrossed by overhead freeways. Not having grown up in this area, and only having visited this place three times in the past twenty years, I have no qualms about stating that I feel a sense of proprietorship. Symbols belong to those who can assign meaning to them, and this place seems very familiar to me, even if it is unlike any other park I have seen. It bears a faint resemblance to a temple, one with many columns that hold up the overpasses above the site and cast it in a faint gloom shot through with beams of sunlight. It similarly occupies a reverential place in our community imagination.

 

The neighborhood is not unlike many similar neighborhoods I have known while growing up. It is an urban neighborhood, one with corner strip malls that sell “Fish Tacos for $1”, with bus stops and bounded by residential housing that seems geared towards lower-income households. It did seem to have little traffic during the Saturday in which I visited, and apart from the enclosed basketball court or the modest swings, lacked the features of other parks like the community pool. The most startling aspect of this place is, of course, the presence of so many dynamic and colorful murals.

The saga behind Chicano Park is one that is not unusual for our community. Back in the 60s and early 70s there was a process of community awakening, one that was inspired by the civil rights struggles of this period as well as by the movements, both national as well as international, for self-affirmation. It was a heady time, one that I wish I had seen first hand, and it was evident in a cultural ferment that would shortly see the publication of many of the seminal works of Chicano literature. It was also a period of repression, and this site was originally slated to be the site of a police station that would keep watch over the surrounding community.

The plan to build this police station seemed like an affront to many community leaders in this area, and it gave rise to an act of defiance. On April 22, 1970, the site was occupied for several days by activists, and the community rallied to support them and prevent the construction of this station. It was an inspiring fight, one that was chronicled in songs and testimonies and in the institutional legacy of a struggle that served as an inspiration for the community.  This action eventually accomplished its aims, and the site was converted into a public park, with groups of artists undertaking to fill it with murals and elaborate it as a place for self-affirmation.

 

I remember hearing about this park as a young man in the late 80s. I could remember no similar event in my town, no student walkouts such as those that took place in 1968 in Los Angeles, no commemoration of the death of a journalist such as Rubén Salazar, no establishment of a pioneering civil rights organization such as the Crusade for Justice by Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzales in 1965, among others. My formative years took place in the 70s and 80s. But despite this, I was aware of these events and these figures. They were invested with the light of an earlier era, associated as they were with the work of pioneers, even if, by the time of my early upbringing, we were transitioning into a more institutionalized phase in which dramatic calls for action seemed to be lacking. It was no longer the 60s, after all.

Muralism holds a special place in Chicano identity. It embodies the ethos of public art that is meant to be accessible and available, one that is furthermore meant to elaborate a language of symbolic liberation. This visual language, as well as spatial distribution and the intent to enshrine these movements of emancipation and thereby educate the public, was heavily influenced by the work of “Los Tres”, the Mexican triumvirate of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquieros and José Clemente Orozco. It was a language of resistance, and by placing these icons and these narratives in historical formation on public walls, a public act of affirmation.

I am struck by the pantheon of figures that occupy these murals. One finds portraits of humble mestizo faces, farm landscapes, Mexican national symbols such as the eagle and the snake as well as the Virgen de Guadalupe, representations of pre-Hispanic iconography (temples, indigenous sculptures) as well as figures, and symbolic and abstract figures that allude to narratives of struggle, of dismemberment (the border and the loss of the northern Mexican lands is seen in this way) and of cohesion and fertility, among others. Many figures recur over and over, such as the portraits of César Chávez who seems to be elevated to a state of sainthood, never really gesticulating wildly but instead portrayed as a humble figure, the Chicano Gandhi. We also have representations of struggle, recapitulating painful historical episodes that continue to pulse with a sharp and bitter pain that hasn’t receded after all these centuries.

 

Without undertaking to analyze all the murals that are found at this location, which are all too many, I thought I would concentrate on a panoramic mural that is one of the earliest to be painted. Chicano Park is still accreting murals, with new ones being added, and I saw them even on walls of establishments and houses that are not within the park per se. There is even a cutout figure of César Chávez, flanked by two children, a block away that seems to be oddly out of place because it is located not in the center but, precisely, on the margin, next to an off ramp.

There is a bust of Benito Juarez at on the outskirts of the park as well. The statue that occupies the center is one of Emiliano Zapata, who is considered perhaps the purest icon of revolutionary struggle associated with the Mexican Revolution.

The panoramic mural that I saw was painted in 1972, and it is entitled “Viva la Raza: La Logan C/5”. It was restored recently in 2012, and it illustrates much of the ideology of Chicano muralism.

For one thing, it depicts a narrative of oppression and resistance. The oppression takes familiar forms, from that represented by the conquerors and the accompanying priests who did much to destroy the fabric of indigenous life, as much as by denunciations of exploitative conditions in agricultural fields of the Southwest and the struggles of urban youth in the face of police repression. This historical narrative is very common, and represents a more general outlook, one that establishes ties between communities throughout the region. It makes me wonder how effective it would be to the establishment of a regional sense of identity if these murals concentrated on local instances of repression. These might prove to be just as energizing, as has been confirmed by the way in which the figures of Joseph Arpaio, he controversial sheriff of Maricopa county in Arizona, and the governor of that state, Jan Brewer, have already been incorporated in murals, the anti-heroes.

 

There is also a depiction of a pantheon of distinguished revolutionary figures. These range from revered Mexican icons such as Benito Juárez, the great liberal president of the mid nineteenth century, to Fidel Castro. I found it noteworthy that a figure such as Father Hidalgo, who issued the first call for independence in Mexico, recedes into the background, as does Francisco Madero, who challenged Porfirio Díaz and captured the national imagination, having been the focus of all the messianic hope of the marginalized classes of Mexico about one hundred years ago. There is no scarcity of martyrs in Mexican history, but for Chicanos, at least for those artists who painted this work, Benito Juárez continues to hold a special place, and it is striking to me the likeness he shares, not necessarily in terms of physical resemblance, but in terms of the dignified pose of humility and quiet power. I wonder if the artists ever really stopped to reflect on the true repercussions of Juárez’s political program, and the idea that nineteenth century Liberalism, with its support for individualism , meant for the destruction of a communal form of Indian identity, and for the accompanying aggregation of public lands into private estates. I suppose that what resonates with them is the symbolism of a full-blooded Indian as President, something that resonates with its suggestion of revindication. The Indian occupies such a place in this symbolic language.

 

Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa also figure in the pantheon of revolutionary figures. Of the two, the former is perhaps the more ideologically pure. He is the one who formulated a plan, after all, that incorporated the hopes of his community and the association between their claim for representation and their need to find the means to sustain themselves. “Tierra y Libertad!”, he proclaimed, in contrast with the view of a Pancho Villa, the bandit from Durango turned revolutionary who won popular acclaim for his audacity and his fight against Huerta, but who didn’t embody any similar ideological purity. He did invade the United States, however, briefly occupying Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916, killing several soldiers and residents then escaping afterward.

We find many community figures that are arraying in an arc above the historical scenes that are depicted. They are all labeled, and they range from the afore-mentioned “Corky” Gonzales to Bert Corona and Reyes Tijerina. These are figures that emerged from the Chicano community, but we find them arrayed next to Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. The juxtaposition couldn’t be clearer. They are all revolutionaries, and they are part of a historical process. While not as common as they used to be in the past, we still find sacred figure of Che in the Chicano imaginary, soon to be joined, I suspect, by Hugo Chávez, the late president of Venezuela.

 

I am struck by this juxtaposition with relation to a conception found in a book published recently by the Mexican historian Enrique Krauze. The title is “Redentores: Ideas y Poder en America Latina”, and it provides short sketches of important Latin American intellectuals as well as political figures. What strikes me is the conception of the role of “redeemers” for these figures, one that at the same time can be applied to the figures portrayed in this Chicano mural. Latin America can be viewed, in this conception, as part of a community that is receptive to the “redeemer”, a role that is claimed by intellectuals who enjoy a special status as interpreters and critics of society. In this book, many of the essays have to do with literary figures, from Martí to Vargas Llosa to García Márquez. Is this necessarily the case in the Chicano community?

I don’t see a corresponding role for intellectuals in this mural. This could be due to the fact that Chicano intellectuals were still too reliant on Mexican and Latin American figures, and I remember very vividly the revered role assigned to figures such as José Vasconcelos (the originator of the concept of the “Cosmic Race”) and José Martí (especially his famous essay, “Nuestra América”). As a community, we were still awaiting the publication of important works such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, even if by the late 60s we had seen the arrival of Luiz Váldez. The consecrated artistic figures in this mural all come from the visual arts, figures such as the three muralists or Frida Kahlo, however. We find Che, yes, but not Gabo. Fidel, yes, but not Martí.

As noted above, this particular mural, as many others do in the Chicano mural movement, also references the episode of the conquest of the Americas. Over five hundred years later, it continues to engage the Chicano imagination as much as it does the Mexican one. One need hardly add that this is due to the fact that it is easy to draw the comparison to similar processes of domination in evidence in the modern world. Globalization is perhaps the latest manifestation of a conquest that has never really ended, and I wonder how the Occupy Wall Street movement is being depicted in contemporary works, as well as the phenomenon of foreclosure, the health care crisis and other issues that affect Chicanos, perhaps more so than exploitation in the fields.

This mural is the product of a particular period. It is noteworthy that the experience of urban Chicanos is depicted, most notably in the reference to the clashes with the San Diego police department, but the farmworker continues to figure prominently. This mural, as well as so many of the murals located on the columns and walls of this park, and perhaps the medium of muralism itself, still resonates for people of the older generation (and I guess I would reluctantly have to include myself in that generation, if not in the first generation), but I question how these works are received by the young nowadays.

This is not to suggest that the young have transcended the struggles that defined the first generations, or that they have become apolitical. They haven’t on both counts.  We must recognize, however, that the community is continuing to evolve. As subsequent generations move out to the suburbs (this is happening in San Diego and throughout the nation), and as these generations lose their connection with the language and with their agricultural or working-class background that characterized their immigrant parents, and as they continue to intermarry and are influenced by the mediums most popular nowadays, such as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, we will continue to witness the splintering of identity into infinite and ever more personalized communities, something that is part of the modern era in which collective narratives are seemingly become transformed. Yes, there exists the possibility for new communities evolving, for a new transnational awareness, but the cohesiveness of Chicano identity as it pertained to the past, with the nostalgic idealization of the pageant of immigration and the notion of an exalted return to an originary space (Aztlán), will become more of a historical notion. Perhaps that is one of the operative principles behind Chicano Park. It is nostalgia that is preserved in these murals of the past.

Communities evolve and change, of course. Maybe these murals, painted as they are on columns that support the highways that loom overhead, are also in essence support structures, meant to stabilize and prop up what is nonetheless changing around it. The highways head east and west, north and south, and are always congested with people who cocoon themselves, wishing as they do always to arrive at a new destination. Chicano identity is also in movement, and it would be fascinating to see how the next generations, especially in an age when it is anticipated that future immigration from Mexico will decline as that country transforms itself and undergoes a dramatic reduction in birth rates, will change when the traditional sectors who have contributed so much to the Mexican-American community, the rural Mexican poor, no longer figure as prominently as they did in the past.

Each generation needs to evolve a relevant language for expression, do they not? Are communities to be defined in terms of generations now, and not in terms of ethnic identity? I know class has not been transcended, but will it continue to be muted in the modern era, seemingly given credence to Republican affirmations that it just doesn't have a role to play in the United States? And is Cyber-Identity, which holds such a powerful place in our imagination, in the age of the Internet, ultimately a minefield, endlessly mutable or ephemeral? Quién sabe.

 

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)

The Magic of "Bless Me, Última"

I lay back and watched the silent beams of light radiate in the colorful dust motes I had stirred up. I loved to watch the sun beams of each new morning enter the room. They made me feel fresh and clean and new. Each morning I seemed to awaken with new experiences and dreams strangely mixed into me. (p. 28)

I was still a young man when I first read Rudolfo Anaya’s classic novel, Bless Me, Última. It struck me as a lyrical novel about a young man’s coming of age, reflecting as it did a world view that was familiar to me. Not so much because I had grown up in the llanos, or even in an open space, because I didn’t. It was familiar because it described the point of view not only of a child who felt besieged by pressures to conform and to live up to the roles that were being imposed upon him. This is perhaps a universal constant, but it also featured a cultural setting that appealed to me with the vistas of time and contrast and struggle. The llano had its own identity, and it seduced the reader.

This is one of the reasons why it is possible to state that this landscape constitutes a character in this novel. It doesn’t have to do only with repeated references to the river having a “presence” that is felt by the most sensitive characters, Antonio and Última, but also in the voice of the winds that roar from time to time, or the dust devils that make a beeline for people and objects if they are not warded off with a sign of the cross, or even the beautiful evocation of an ecosystem that is somehow alive, that responds to the sensitive viewer. It is a romantic landscape in the sense that it is personified, and it plays a role in the narrative, if not always one that can be readily ascertained. It is angry, it is peaceful, it is forgiving, it is merciless, but somehow, it responds and as such plays an almost comforting role when other deities seem all too distant.

What struck me as well were the parallels with Harper Lee’s classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. In that work, we similarly have the evocation of an idyllic upbringing, as told through the viewpoint of a small child, the girl named Scout. She also lives in a society that is unfortunately beset by conflict, in which certain groups are marginalized, and what we have is a novel in which described the wish to encompass and in some manner incorporate those groups into a greater whole, a family that is tied together by a shared faith. By this, I don’t mean to suggest that we have a novel about justice, even though we do have a character who is a lawyer and who serves as the abiding symbol of comfort and strength for the young children. No, it is about patriarchy, which isn’t the same as justice.

The unusual element that we have seem to have in Anaya’s novel is the assertion of an alternative world view that is also encompassing, that serves as the basis for the creation of a sense of community, but that resides in the values of matriarchy. I am referring, of course, to the figure of La Grande, known as Última, an old curandera who joins the household and who is deferred to by all, but also acknowledge as a powerful, almost independent agent. She is the one who is supposedly invested with magical powers, who has received extensive training by others in a secret lore, and who is able to assert almost magical restorative powers. She is also the midwife, and when need be, the exorcist who succeeds where priests fail.

Última is an old figure who, while she seems not to have borne any children of her own, is nonetheless treated as a type of material figure by most in this community, but not by all. She is also an arbiter in the disputes, one who hears pleas and who intercedes but only when she is able to impress upon all who besiege her for help that there are consequences. She would almost be tantamount to a Virgen de Guadalupe figure (virginal because she is not known to have had a husband or children, and she is present at the birth of others, and because she heals and intercedes), were it not for the fact that she also appears to judge. Such has been the case with the family of Tenorio Tremendina, the malevolent bar owner of a neighboring town who has his own brood of “witches”.

The upbringing of the young child, at least during this period in which he lives under the tutiledge of Ultima, is idyllic. We have the sense of a special relationship, a rapport that is facilitated by the fact that she asserts the possibility of a third path for Antonio. While his mother beseeches him to become a priest and to uphold the values of the sedentary farmers who form the bulk of her clan, the Lunas (who are people of the earth), his father impresses upon him the paternal heritage of the Márez clan, those llaneros who were born to wander, who live under the open sky, herding sheep and cattle and living according to their own code of independence that is predicated on space and dreams. His vision is forever fixed on the next horizon, in this case, California.

The dichotomy between the Lunas and the Márez  form the basis for the struggle, but what is also apparent is the fact that there is also, in a much less sentimental and formulaic way, a deep desire to understand the elements that determine how power and authority is wielded. This is a society that also manifests the presence of disturbing acts of violence, and we can see this on a personal, emotional level, but also on a grander sociological scale as well as on a more abstract, ideological dimension.

The outside world, for one thing, is a place of danger. Is this perspective common to the world view of all children? It is the place of wars such as the one which profoundly disturbed Lupito, a young man who had fought in the army and who was to be overcome by a feeling of paranoia and fear which leads him to commit a murder. We also have the arrival of the outsiders, the Tejanos (large scale cattle ranchers) who fenced the plains and who reduced the scope of the llanero imagination, leading them to live in a state of perpetual lament over what has been lost. (Such is the lament of Antonio’s father). There is also the reference to past community clashes, to that, for example, between the first settlers and the original Indian inhabitants, the Comanches, several of whom were murdered in the past and who ghosts have not been fully exorcised. (What are ghost except for the manifestation of unresolved conflicts?). And, of course, we have the struggle between those who believe and those who don’t, between the upholders of institutional power (the Church, for example, with their representative, Father Byrnes), and the earnest young orphan Florence, who can’t believe in a god or God because he can’t fathom how such a system can abrogate to itself a sense of intellectual cohesion (justice) when it leads to so much injustice.

This struggle obsesses Antonio, who is deeply steeped not only a folk Catholicism practiced by Mexicans and their descendants (witness the allusion to folk cures, to the faith put in scapulars as objects of power, or in the sign of a cross to ward off the collision with a dust devil), but also with institutionalized Catholic dogma that is predicated on the idea of sacrifice, of the spilling of innocent blood, as if this were necessary to garner the attention of an impersonal and distant God. He sees plenty of innocent blood spilled, from that of Lupito, the veteran who is shot by the river after having murdered the town sheriff (who can be guilty when they know not what they do, as was the case with this victim?) to Narciso, the friend of the family who is ambushed by Tenorio and shot at close range, dying next to the boy, to the demise of Florence, the ultimate innocent, a boy who couldn’t manage to find a filiation with any of these patriarchal codes and who dies just before he was to be introduced to the cult of the Golden Carp. He dies in a state of innocence, rendered all the more tragic for Antonio because it takes the form of a drowning. Would that he had had a chance to go to the river and commune with this other god.

This cult of the Golden Carp is a beautiful invention. It may or may not be based on an original mythology or system of belief that is native to the llanos, but it is one that seems somehow familiar. In this case it can’t but recall all the associations we might have with the idea of a hidden deity, or a leader who fishes for men, and who shows them the way (the Fisher King).  This deity is also a savior, but one who is not distant, one who has not turned his or her back on his or her people. When the original inhabitants of this valley are punished for their transgressions, and are threatened with extinction (which strikes me as a common predicament in all such religious beliefs that posit order as a form of patriarchy, where the patriarch reserves the right to repress the reprimand willfully and in severe draconian fashion), the deity intercedes, and these humans are converted into fish, with the deity joining them as their protector. What more beautiful notion of union than that in which the deity joins and lives with and among you? It certainly strikes Antonio as a more appealing notion of union than that of Catholic dogma, in which God is ingested in a wafer, but even so, these reflections awaken deep fears in him, precisely because they go against the grain of the beliefs that have been instilled in him.

The cult is also beautiful because it is a select and more harmonious society. The other society, conformed as it is of boisterous individuals and mercilessly tease and taunt each other (with names such as Bones and Horse and the Vitamin Kid) is one that is, of course, familiar to us, because they represent the childhood companions that we had. But the friends in the cult are much more pensive, and it strikes me, they are like the philosophers of old, but without the urge to meddle, impugn, castigate or in any way subvert. They are like hermits, having withdrawn not to a dusty cave deep in the desert, but instead to the bands of a shady rivers, awaiting the eternal return of the Carp during certain periods of the year. Of course, I can’t imagine children sustaining such sophisticated dialogues as the ones that are in evidence in this novel, but that is why I see this novel as more of a fable, and definitely not an exercise in realism.

Ultima is the figure who guides Antonio as well during this journey of self-discovery. She is the one who offers him comfort during his nightmares, which are recurring episodes and seem to revolve around the sense of foreboding, abandonment and destruction. These dreams assume the contours of apocalyptic unveilings (which is precisely the meaning of the apocalyptic vision), and perhaps they reflect the view not only of those groups and individuals who inhabit the margins, the outsiders who have little power and are thus exposed to abuse, but also the recognition that he needs to impose some kind of order, to find a system that will allow him to navigate this terrain. The old woman is, in this sense, still a midwife, but not to Antonio’s mother, but to Antonio who becomes his own person, who is living, perhaps, through the anxieties of separation from his parents, from his all-enveloping mother and his wistful and nostalgic father. She is helping him to navigate this transition.

The elements that seem most jarring to me are both structural as well as stylistic. For the structural, we have, one again, the pitting of one family against the other. I am not referring only to the dynamic between the Lunas and the Márez, nor the opposition between the cult of the Golden Carp and the God of Catholic dogma, or between the prodigal sons (his older brothers) and his father, but in that evident between the extended family of the Márez clan and their analogue, the Tremendinas. In a certain way this division is much too clear cut, and doesn’t capture the full scope of subtlety that might be afforded by clans that, after all, share much in common. After all, if magic and brujería is associated with Última, it is also associated as well with Tenorio and his daughters, and we don’t have a more nuanced scope of exploration for what magic might mean in this context. With regards to stylistics, I would have to signal out not only the sometimes plodding nature of the narrative, one which is meant to heighten tension and build a sense of anticipation that is too prolonged to be adequately sustained (why is it taking so long for that final confrontation with Tenorio?), but also with the language that seems all too lugubrious and artificial, with dialogue that can be characterized by the tone of false solemnity. Dialogue is never spontaneous, never broken, at least when it involves an adult character. It has all the gravity and sententiousness of a salon conversation, in which worldly reflections are attributed to a boy who is, after all, only supposed to be six or seven years old.

The “evilness” of the Tremendina clan is exaggerated in a way which seems almost incongruous. I can visualize the evil old man wearing black, with a sneering visage and an at times whining, at other times menacing tone, cackling as he rides his stallion and tries to trample Antonio. I can visualize him, that is, as a cartoon character, not as a nuanced individual. I can similarly envisage his band of friends, bullies who are sullied by alcoholism and a deep streak of meanness mixed with cowardice, the mob that makes the trek to the Márez household in an attempt to extract Última and lynch her for supposedly cursing and killing the eldest daughter of Tenorio. And in what was a brief and chilling aside, an observation by Antonio, we actually have cause to give credence to his assertion, because Última is no stranger to fights, and we are told that she had a group of three figurines in her room that seem to, maybe, represent the three daughters, all subjected to a form of torture. She molds them out of clay right before his eyes, after all, and in what we may term an example of sympathetic or homeopathic magic (which James Frazer in his work The Golden Bough defines as the type of magic that assumes a connection between two objects based on similarity):

Then she sat by the candlelight and sang as she worked the wet clay. She broke it in three pieces, and  she worked each one carefully. For a long time she sat and molded the clay. When she was through I saw that she had molded three dolls. They were lifelike, but I did not recognize the likeness of the clay dolls as anyone I knew. They she took the warm melted wax from the candle and covered the clay dolls with it so that they took on the color of flesh. When they had cooled she dress the three dolls with scraps of cloth which she took from her black bag. (p. 101)

We have the folk element again, evident in the way in which folk customs fill the cracks of institutional belief, perhaps supplanting it because they lend themselves to a more compelling narrative, that of justice that is otherwise denied, or needs that are unfulfilled through traditional mechanisms.

What is magic, after all? Why are Ultima and Tenorio so powerful, even if they inhabit two opposing sides of the same coin? I have to admit, the idea of magic and its many manifestations, in dolls that are struck by pins, in prolonged illnesses that resist diagnosis and are somehow cast through use of a man’s freshly cut hair (invoking as this does the law of contiguity, in Fraser’s terminology), in raining stones that fall on roofs but not on other areas of a house, and boiling water that scalds cooks unexpectedly because it jumps out of the pot, as well as owls and coyotes that in assume symbolic value in this struggle between human agents but also world views, is certainly fascinating. As one approximation, perhaps we can say that it represents an appeal to hidden narrative urge, one that functions like a salve or sealant, a covering or lubricant, and it strikes us with the force of a beautiful metaphor. (What is a metaphor but another approximation between two different things, one made possible by an underlying similarity or quality?)

That is precisely where I find so much of the power of the novel, in the way that magic exerts such a hold on Antonio’s imagination, a magic that works by means of songs and chants and prayers, even if the precise meaning of the individual words escapes capture. It is the image of Narciso, the gentle giant who was widowed early in his marriage and who since then has transferred this need to fertilize to the ground, to the plants, working a magic by the light of the moon, as described by Cico: “It is then that he gathers the seeds and plants. He dances as he plants, and he sings. He scatters the seeds by moonlight, and they fall and grow—The garden is like Narciso, it is drunk” (p. 109). It is a way to reap more than you sow, to gather together pleasure and pain and to transform them in ways that aren’t entirely controlled, for rivers can also overflow their embankments. It is the force of the psyche, is it not, a way to express or release those hidden energies, the imputation perhaps of a narrative essence to our actions to create a convincing and necessary story?

The child becomes a man in an impossibly short period of time. But this is a parable, and as such, subject to compressed time. During this formative period of one or two years a young boy was nurtured by powerful and sympathetic people, by those who had, as explained by Antonio’s father, the “magic” of understanding, something which “means having a sympathy for people” (p. 248), by an gentle giant by the name of a flower (Narciso), by a wise young hermit by the name of Cico, by an earnest Christlike child who didn’t believe in Christ and whose name was Florence, by those silent uncles who tilled the soil in Las Pasturas, and by that old curandera, the midwife who perhaps personified the power of a landscape and a time and tradition that helped this young boy understand where he came from. She resonates still with him, as an adult looking back on these years.

“Ultima and I continued to search for plant and roots in the hills. I felt more attached to Ultima than to my own mother. Ultima told me the stories and legends of my ancestors. From her I learned the glory and the tragedy of the history of my people, and I came to understand how that history stirred in my blood.” (p. 123)

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)

Chicano Emancipation and the Passing of Sal Castro

 

 

Earlier this week teacher and activist Sal Castro passed away. He was a seminal figure in the Chicano movement, having contributed greatly to the mobilization of the community in the city of Los Angeles. As a teacher he helped lead protests by students who walked out of their classes to protest a curriculum that didn’t address their needs. When I think about this period and the conditions that must have prevailed back then, with teachers who seemed distant and unwilling to recognize or in any way validate their concerns, I can’t help but shudder.  There may be many problems nowadays with our schools and with dropout rates as well as indexes of low academic achievement, but it couldn’t have been as bad as it was back then.

The passing of Sal Castro was met with many expressions of grief, not only by those of his students who were fortunate to know him as a teacher and mentor in eastside schools, but also by members of the Chicano community in general. It was a period, of course, of cultural and political awakening, and it was influenced by a climate that prevailed in the 60s, a period still nourished by the civil rights movements of earlier years and a youth and folk culture that wholeheartedly welcomed oppositional movements by groups that were looking for new ways to define their needs. The times, they were a changin’, of course, and the mobilization had already started earlier with the labor movement led by César Chávez, the UFW (the United Farm Workers).

During this period of agitation and dissent and the need to find new alternatives for cultural expression, there was also of course a notable cultural upswing. Agitation begets the need for new forms of expression, after all, for it looks to find its own language, to devise one that sets it apart and that captures its aims. Such was the case for Chicano arts. This period of cultural ferment was to set the stage for the appropriation of the medium of muralism, one that had been amply developed by the Mexican masters decades earlier to express the ideological basis of the Mexican Revolution, but also in literature and the expansion of an artform that had always been present among Chicanos but that became institutionalized, by which I am referring to lowrider clubs. In the field of literature, we saw the publication of seminal works such as Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless me Ultima, a fable of reconciliation with a past and with a heritage that had been divided, written as a coming-of-age novel. This arrival, so to speak, of these Chicano voices had been predated by other works from the 40s and 50s, and also, by a string of Chicano rock hits that signaled the way this community was ready to tap into popular culture, evident most paradigmatically in Richie Valens’ hit “La Bamba” from 1958.

I both belong and don’t belong to the decade of the 60s. I am too young to remember them, but at the same time I live with the legacy of this period. The few memories I have of those years revolve around commercials with rocket ships and the Apollo space program, and with memories of my father returning from a factory job in Norwalk, too exhausted to do little else other than take a quick meal and lie down.  In the 70s, I do remember hearing about Vietnam, and about Richard Nixon, and always, always, the watchful cry of “La migra!”, one that shouldn’t have resonated so deeply with me since we all were lawful residents, but that nonetheless sent a chill down our spines, one that was paradoxically a source of delight because in a child’s imagination the men in the green vans where the “Bad Guys” so necessary for a child’s sense of moral drama. Perhaps we were a community under siege.

We were a minority in our town, one that was located east of the metropolis of Los Angeles, in the outer reaches of a desert, one that seemed to afford little opportunity for excitement. We knew enough, of course, to know that we Chicanos were the underclass in a town that only had two classes, and we had little other ethnic diversity. There was no African-American community, no Asian-American community, so when we saw reports of black politicians or social leaders, of singers or athletes, they seemed incredibly glamorous. We knew enough to know that we were being sidetracked in school, that Chicanos didn’t really participate in school life and instead scoffed on the sides, and many of us didn’t even want to use the term “Chicanos”. It seems difficult to imagine that we had had such a notable burst of activism in the 60s, based on what we experienced in the subsequent two decades where we seemed to have reverted to apathy and a barely-concealed sense of frustration. My escape took the form of science fiction, not Chicanismo, and while I remember the murals and the language and the fashion of so many other members of the community, I somehow set myself apart.

The decade of the 60s, back then as now, seems to partake in a persistent glow in my imagination. Even forty years later, it is infused with an epic of struggle and becoming, combining as much a quixotic appeal (the doomed cause that is nonetheless worth fighting for) as much as with a sense of hopefulness and boundless energy, a renaissance that was cut off too soon by the rise of the new conservatism of the late 70s and early 80s. Our teachers used to talk to us about hippies, and we would scoff, of course, because by that time they had been domesticated, and there was no threat implied in their lifestyle or their social ethos. We were still being told about the Beatles, and most of the time, when I thought of this seminal group, I thought of their happier songs from the early 60s, not being able to appreciate the concise way in which they captured desire and the sense of becoming, one that was wedded to a creative impulse that reflected the inner tension that would end up splitting the group. We were talking about a cultural phenomenon which continues to hold a unique sway on the modern imagination not only of baby-boomers but of subsequent generation.

Those were heady times in the decade of the 60s, and struggle seemed to define them as much as hedonism and the need to search for self-expression. It was the age of indulgence, of experimentation, of taking chances and not being obsessed by careers or high SAT scores or finding the perfect day school for your children who would begin their school days having had a steady diet of Baby Einstein and other enriching educational supplements. I know, I know, indulgence hasn’t disappeared, it has only found new channels in our modern era, new forms of consumption to signal new forms of identity, but I nonetheless hesitate to imagine what it must have been like for those young people who had to face the prospect of being drafted to fight in that hopeless war in Vietnam, or who were living under the perpetual cloud of the cold war that could ignite in an ignominious flash of destruction. The cultural models that had prevailed up to that point and that stressed conventional values were being questioned, and we saw what this meant in the many movements of liberation that played out. It wasn’t all about questioning the Vietnam war, it was an exercise in pure romanticism.

Those Chicano students in those marginal eastside schools in the 1960s who walked out also needed to find themselves. Their action became known as a “Blowout”, and it was empowering because it was an expression of pure dissent, a thumb up the rectum of traditional America. Was it that these young people had not been sufficiently indoctrinated in the values of assimilation and in the work ethic and western values that were taught in our schools? Were they being misled by radicals and other agitators? Was it a sign of impending social disintegration, the equivalent of that which was to be denounced over and over by those critics who would inveigh against the perils of “multiculturalism”, as they continue to do in our modern age?

For many of those students, it must have been both a liberating action that was also chilling. It was an act of defiance, one undertaken in the company of many other individuals, and as such constituted a moment of solidarity but also of danger. Would the police be sent to round them up, possibly to beat them or do worse? Who could doubt the power of the repressive apparatus of the state?

When I read accounts of some of the reactions, I am taken by this sense of an adventure that was being live, a journey that was beginning for most of them. The students gathered at a park to hear speeches and to see the performances of different cultural groups. They saw folklorico dances and they heard folk music, and they found it exciting to rediscover something that had been denied to them. I feel at times as if I am recapitulating what they experienced, although I never walked out of schools and didn’t participate in any protests until the coming of the Chicano student strikes at UCLA in the early 90s, or the manifestations for immigration reform in the early 2000s.

I think I know that those students back in the 60s felt. It was the thrill of being able to enjoy those cultural expressions that defined their private spaces and had only been relegated to such closed spaces, being able to share in that folk culture that was part of the background of so many immigrant Mexican households. It was the culture in which you could use words such as “rasquatche”, where you could share the food you ate and feel pride in those cultural markers that distinguished us as members of the working class. Now, we didn’t tease each other by calling out “La migra!” if we saw one another running, consumed as we were with distancing ourselves from our ethnic background. Now, if we saw figures of authority, we could relish in the opportunity we saw to unite against the outsider, without having to police ourselves.

Despite the fact that so much seemed to have remained unchanged, and that we were still in need of making these discoveries and of finding new ways of expressing our dissent in the decades subsequent to the 60s, there still lived a memory of that first generation of Chicano emancipators. I term them as such, of course, because those figures loom as heroic, figures such as Carlos Santana, the aforementioned César Chávez and Sal Castro, Rudolfo Anaya, Tomás Rivera and others.  We also remember hearing about Woodstock and that moment of impossible idealism (impossible because it was wasted, dissipating as it did like an ephemeral cloud of smoke), but we remembered and we could still note the power inherent in those symbols of that movement, the Aztec warrior, the eagle, the Pachuco, the lowrider, the fields as a sort of purgatory that purified us. We Chicanos always did seem to have an affinity for soul music, for rhythm and blues, and of course, for pop music, but we didn’t lose our own soul as a consequence.  It was unfortunate, however, that for so many young people of my generation we wouldn’t be caught dead listening to our parents’ mariachi or norteña music, at least, not until we were ready to use it to challenge the outside world and to complete that inner journey that most of us were making, and had been making since the earliest generation of Chicanos in the United States.

I was thinking about music and about the wistfulness and nostalgia I feel for a period that I didn’t really experience personally, which is the decade of the 60s, but only experienced as a legacy. It is a feeling of affinity for a period of cultural awakening that took place in the past, a period that signaled my own transition, but own willingness to step out of the stuffy confines of a classroom and undertake my own metaphoric march to a public space, unafraid to proclaim my need to find new models, to express myself as well as an artist, for if an artists is involved in creation, can we not say the same about protest?

It must have been profoundly novel during that period, and it might have awakened profound suspicion from other communities. Nowadays, the current generation may not engage in the same mystical idealization of the Aztecs, although they still represent a power symbol for us, along with the associated ideology of indigenismo that exalts the spiritual values of the ancient Indians and their will to survival. But now, our generation (or at least my generation) seems to also be much more accepting of those icons of Mexican popular culture, people such as Lucha Reyes or Pedro Infante or José Alfredo Jiménez, at the same time as we are receptive to multicultural currents and ideologies of resistence, to the anti-globalization movements, to Bob Marley and Hip Hop and Afro Pop (I’m thinking of the delicious mélange of cultures prepared by Chicano groups such as Quetzal and Quita Penas) and to alternative ecological movements as well as Zapatismo and other expressions of opposition and creation. It captures a sense of discovery, a sense that must have been so powerful for those Chicano students who were led by Sal Castro during the Blowout marches of the late 1960s, a movement that signaled creation.

I photographed the murals that followed about 8 years ago in Echo Park, a neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying. It has traditionally been a mixed neighborhood, located close to the heart of the city of Los Angeles, and it is still notable for its ethnic diversity although it is now undergoing a transformation.  It is next to the “hipster” Silverlake district, and it is still characterized by a vigorous street life. I wrote about Echo Park in a prior entry, and it still continues to figure in my mind as an inviting place, one with an active community life.

These murals evoke a more hopeful time, and they portray much of this allusion to folk culture, to exuberant mariachi singers, dancers in a passionate embrace, children at fairs, mastering horses that far from being placid and tamed creatures, seem to be captured in rebellion, perhaps in the heat of the race as they circle round and round on the carrousel. These murals are all the more poignant for having been defaced.

 

 

 

 

These murals, located on what seems to be a medical clinic, present images of brown and primal earth mothers, women with a healing touch, with somber and dignified visages.

 

 

These murals, defaced though some of them may be, with others having disappeared, still capture much of the vigor of an earlier period. I lament the passing of Sal Castro and of other pioneers, but recognize that they left cultural markers that still resonate with our community, and capture some of their hopes if, at times, also continuing to reveal our fears, our struggles and our inner turmoil.

 

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)

Visit with John V

 

Last Friday

 

(c) OGRomero, 2013

Review of "I Used to be a Superwoman"

                                                                                                Gente del sol
                                                                                                la tierra llora
                                                                                                por tus caricias

                                                                                                (Gente del sol)

 

The genre of autobiography has constituted a particularly rich vein in Chicano literature. Because so many of these works embody themes of transformation as well as loss and absence, this genre captures much of the experience of many educated Chicanos who come from poor and working class backgrounds. It is natural, thus, to appeal to a genre that lends itself to an exploration of these changes, rendered all the more powerful because they also reflect issue having to do with cultural accommodation. Given the importance as well of community consciousness, touched as it is by the fact that many of these writers come from tight-knit immigrant communities that live in precarious circumstances, we are dealing with narratives that details more than just individual transformations. They are not necessarily celebratory narratives, and indeed, this is the essence of much of autobiography which is rooted frequently in a type of nostalgia. For Chicano narratives, these struggles are as much personal as they are political, and they capture a paradoxical sense of loss, for the initial circumstances are invariably difficult ones.

 

 

 

In the case of Gloria Velásquez’s collection of poems “I Used to be a Superwoman”, we see a work that captures much of the journey of a Chicana intellectual and artist. One of the most prevalent themes in these poems is that of separation, a theme that takes the form of nostalgia as well as displaced desire. It is a particularly rich theme, invested as it is with a consciousness of many of the struggles as well the guilt that many of us had to endure as we undertake these frequently solitary journeys. As such, I can identify with the alienation that she expresses in many of these poems, alienation that takes the form of despair at times, cursing as she does the fact that she finds herself

It conveys the sense of an existence that seems like a half-life, one that lacks the purpose of the struggle, which in so many of our works, lies precisely in the idea of the journey, and an at times contradictory sense of wishing to recapture the sense of coherence that was evident in the past. Our journeys of discovery are thus, frequently, not necessarily serene ones of fulfillment or culmination. We can’t overcome the memory of those we left behind, investing these journeys with psychic elements of guilt and abandonment.

These poems that make up this collection are presented in side-by-side versions, both in English and in Spanish. I believe that those written in the latter represent the originals, conveying as they do more of a sense of natural flow, and of sentiments that somehow sound more authentic. Perhaps because Spanish is perceived by so many of us as the language of the home, it frequently is accompanied by less of an association with artifice or inauthenticity. The Spanish-language poems sound more vigorous to me, even if they convey the sentiments of a Chicana who has necessarily been immersed in English. They are more direct, in a style that seems intimate, at times confessional, at other times searing in their directness and their refusal to shirk from confronting the more painful episodes of her life.

When considering issues such as loss or suffering or the poverty experienced when young, in the small towns in Colorado and Texas, the verses tend to be shorter and more terse. They compare, for example, poverty to hunger, revealing a leanness that is free of embellishment. They are punctuated at times by Spanglish, that which is utilized not only by Chicanos but by our immigrant parents, who use words such as “files” (pronounced fee-les), to approximate the sound of “fields”, or “lonche” to convey the Spanish approximation to “lunch”. This is the vocabulary that they use, and that is mirrored as well by their offspring, who  use words such as “fensas” to refer to “fences”, but in Spanish. These are unbalanced creations which nonetheless have their vigor and vitality, prefixes and suffixes grafted on to root words, bearing fruit of unexpected combinations.

The psychic dimension and the perception of the tension between a private and a public realm is much in evidence here. These poems are intimate but they can also reveal a more political stance, assertive and confrontational and meant to assert a public presence. This is not to say that private reflections can’t assume this role, but in the political stance assumed they reveal the intent to appropriate a public role, to address a response to the question, “Who are you?”. In the poem “¿Quién soy?”, it reaches a  crescendo in the final stanza:

                                            ¡Soy la Chicana revolucionaria

                                            mi voz grita por el Movimiento,

                                            por los derechos humanos,
                                            por mejores salarios y
                                            por la igualdad social! 

The need to assert a public role subverts at times the quiet tone of the personal reflections, and because it embodies slogans, seems a little dated. But it is in the private meditations on leaving Johnstown, Colorado, and of reflecting on the life of an artist who despairs at times to find an authentic voice. I feel much of this myself as I reflect on this need to capture and convey in my own fashion the pain and struggles of a difficult childhood, the frustration of not finding a place of one’s own, of trying to create and not finding an audience, one that is hopefully able to understand what it means to capture the novelty of a metaphor taking wing, of inspiration taking the form of geometrical patterns or formulas that somehow coalesce into meanings, a memory like a hidden temblor.

As alluded to before, despite the poverty and discrimination and the difficult home circumstances that saw her raised by an alcoholic father numb with despair, Gloria Velasquez  can express a form of nostalgia for early experiences in rural Colorado. It takes the form of sensory delight at times, in smells and touch and colors, as in her evocation of her farewell to Johnstown:

                                                        Esa mañana
                                                        de calles dormidas,
                                                        no olí el perfume
                                                        de la fábrica de azúcar
                                                        ni el dulzor
                                                       del trigo amarillo
                                                       donde descalza jugaba
                                                       con los niños de la colonia,
                                                       ni sentí las caricias
                                                       de camino de tierra
                                                      (Despedida de Johnstown)

But in other poems this evocation takes on an ironic note, where the landscape of personal interactions is filtered by the supposed hypocrisy of civic ideals that are not fulfilled. There is a tension between the two, where community history is erased to highlight instead official mythologies of the founding fathers, where the ideal of sportsmanship is expressed in terms of segregation, because the idyllic Anglo establishment dismissed the others, “ignoraban a los morenos / que eran tontos y muy slow.” (Bella Juventud).  The sensory appears associated with an emotional as well as community experience, and sunlight means different things to those who can afford pools and air conditioning as opposed to those who are forced to work outside, overpowered by a punishing burden of necessity.

The language of these poems is direct, constituted as these verses are at times by progressions of linked words like slow-moving trains climbing up steep hills, twisting and winding their way as they link as well as bypass the landmarks of a life lived in uncertainty and suffering. Aren’t all our lives like that as well? There are also prose letters, those that capture much of the sensibility of a writer and individual who is still struggling to overcome these past traumas, one of which involves the journey to Stanford. In this poem these words convey the sensation of being squeezed, an anguish of suffocation and of space closing in, where the poet doesn’t hold back in expressing how alienated she feels:

                                                           Ahora

                                                           me han
                                                           roto
                                                           el alma
                                                           en este
                                                           mundo
                                                           lleno de
                                                           teorías
                                                           inútiles
                                                           palabras
                                                           burguesas

                                                         (Metamorfosis en Stanford)

None of these useless theories or “palabras burguesas” are reflected in this poem. This world is just as alienating and burdensome, and one can sense the pain of a journey that seems pointless, just as spiritually unfulfilling as the poverty that drained her spirit back in that rural town in Colorado. It is almost as if she were forced to confront with chagrin the warnings given to her by her mother, that women “Deben estar felices y / en su familia nomás pensar” (Consejos).

Desire also plays a role, and it is in this facet that we can reflect on the female sensibility that becomes evident. For example, it appears in the memory of the heartrending cries of her mother, the cries that greeted the news of her brother who had been killed in that useless war in Vietnam, an evocation of a kindred motherhood even if she was only a child, but one nonetheless powerful, majestic, sordid and plaintive.  We see it as well in the invocation to her “lovers”, to those figures who will provide her with inspiration, as well as in the ideal of sisterhood, when she invokes the figure of Frida Kahlo.  

It is no accident, of course, that she should invoke this figure, an icon of feminism and of the socially-engaged artist.  The Frida that visits her, the one with “thick braids and / her solitary stare”, is strikingly similar to the figure of the Navajo warrior Crazy Horse, who also pays her a visit at night, “su pelo largo y grueso / su perfil decidido” (Tashunka Witico). These figures evoke cultural heroes as well as emblems autonomy and freedom, although the sense of waiting also can’t help but paradoxically put the poem in a passive position, at least in my interpretation, pointing once again at the contradictions evident in this search for models, in the same way that her “lover” poems express a similar sentiment. (She is waiting for an idealized lover in both cases, one who will visit her also at night.) Perhaps this feeling of waiting is also emblematic of the journey?

The absences that are evoked in her poems, the transformations and the search for fulfillment, represent ongoing searches. There are experiences that are never really reconciled, as is evident in the need in a work such as the “Letter to a Patroncito”, it is understood that there are conflicts that continue to haunt her the way they haunt all of us. The honest and unsparing way in which she confronts these fears, however, gives these poems a nurturing feeling while also validating her own journey. I would hope to be able to also illustrate my own psychic journey to completion in a similar fashion although I am fully appreciative that completion may be, indeed, an artifice characteristic of the autobiographic genre.
 

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)