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.
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