There is a wall that figured prominently in my imagination when I was a boy. It wasn’t particularly distinguished as walls go, at least in terms of architectural features. It wasn’t ornate, with buttresses and stylized features or elements including regularly space towers, nor impossibly imposing, a vertical barrier made of steel panels. It wasn’t grim and menacing like the Berlin Wall, nor forbidding like the walls in Mexico that protect the middle and upper classes unfortunate enough not to be able to live in gated communities, walls that invariably have barbed wire and shards of glass affixed to the top. It was a purely functional wall made of bricks, and as such, it was a fairly mundane example of a structure designed to keep people out.
We had just moved
into a new neighborhood way back in the 70s, a new settlement of tract houses
that in their lack of singularity seemed offered the possibility of fitting in.
These ranch houses encapsulated all the dreams my parents had for achieving
social mobility in this new country. There was a blank canvass that we could
fill with our presence, space to plant trees, to build patios and to raise a
family with a level of privacy that had been lacking in the neighborhood of
squat and small houses that we had just left behind.
The Mexican immigrant
families that settling in this neighborhood (they were all Mexican) were, by
and large, growing families, and we quickly crowded those streets and claimed
those spaces. I remember that during the first week we had water balloon
fights, and mad groups of children would dash from one yard to the next, unabashedly
mixing in before we settled into our own tribes. It appeared as if we had
claimed a stake in suburbia, but it was still nonetheless apparent that we were
all of working-class background. Our parents, after all, worked in factories,
in restaurants, in nearby dairies and as maids and cleaners. But we didn’t
bother so much with distinctions. These were newly-constructed houses, and we
couldn’t help but see them as ushering in a break with the past, even if
alcoholism, depression and generational as well as marital strife were still
present.
We weren't
necessarily exposed to art when we were young. Perhaps other families had art
hanging on their walls, paintings of flowers or landscapes or cultural symbols
that we saw from time to time in our glimpses into middle-class homes. Others
had sculptures, or beautiful gardens, or had children who took piano or violin
lessons, the kids that settled into routines other than those of watching
cartoons during the afternoon or playing hide-and-seek in an adjoining lot that
was still awaiting development. It may have been that those families even visited
museums from time to time, making the sixty mile trek out to Los Angeles, something
that I never recall doing with my parents. I'm not sure what their conception
of art involved, but all I remember were the family portraits hanging crookedly
on our walls, with few books other than the lurid weeklies from Mexico with titles
such as Alarma! that featured bodies
skewered, mangled and torn apart at industrial sites, or as a result of traffic
or train accidents, or in sordid crime scenes (a sadder version of WeeGee’s
crime photography). Our parents certainly had little proclivity for decorative gardens,
preferring instead what was practical, trees bearing fruit (lemons, oranges,
avocados, pomegranates, etc.) and vegetable gardens which, one must admit, are
beautiful in their own right, but something I didn’t associate with an kind of
artistic aesthetic back then. Our neighbor played the guitar from time to time,
singing religious songs while strumming a few basic chords.
Art with a capital
“A” certainly seemed a luxury for us, something out of keeping with our working
class background. We aspired to the middle class, but we had little knowledge
of the necessary accoutrements, certainly of high art. I was exposed to folk
arts, however, having been taught by a neighbor, the kindly señora Pérez, to
make piñatas, and being introduced to Catholic rituals. I would have loved to
make dinosaur piñatas or invent fanciful creatures such as the Mexican alebrijes that take such different
forms, but instead we settled on the obvious, on the stars with cones and maybe
a burro or two that hardly merited the thrill of destruction, given their
reputation for placidity. I didn’t make very many piñatas, and my ambition to
fashion gorgons, centaurs and minotaurs wasn’t shared by my family who preferred
what was merely functional as well as frugal.
But it was the wall
that encircled the storage facility located a block away from our neighborhood that
provided me with my first contact with what I could recognizably characterize as
art. It was a very low and flat wall that couldn’t have been more than six feet
tall, and it wouldn’t have merited a second glance other than the fact that it
also represented a canvas that would prove irresistible to those wishing to
leave a mark, so to speak. Such blank spaces were all typically covered in
macabre and menacing graphitti back in our old neighborhood, and had the wall
been blank, I have no doubt whatsoever that the teenagers would quickly have
moved in to cover it with similar drawings and challenges. But it had already
been painted over with panels that together formed a long mural that
incorporated different themes and tropes of Chicano culture.
There were, for
example, those that featured Aztec figures in heroic and dramatic poses, those
that hardly needed to be interpreted because the poses themselves were
sufficient and highly stylized, like those found on Mexican lotería cards (el
catrín, “the dandy”, for example, waltzing along). There were eagles and snakes
and pyramids, as well as the sun and moon and inert Aztec princesses waiting to
be rescued. There were dogs and wolves and snakes, and peasants with ammunition
clips who were members of Emiliano Zapata’s army, dark men with big moustaches
posing awkwardly with rifles rather than shovels. And there was a grinning
Pancho Villa, who was as familiar to us as our tío Pancho, we children of
Mexican immigrant parents who had never studied Mexican history but had heard
about the “Centaur of the North” from our families, he who had shattered
Federalist armies and dared defy the United States. He was, after all, still
celebrated in myth and in the many corridos
that our parents listened to, on the AM radio stations as well as in family
gatherings when old men would occasionally break out into song and confuse us
kids who couldn’t recognize men who we had only heard mumble before.
The figure that
most obsessed me, however, was Emiliano Zapata, the heroic proponent of land
redistribution during the Mexican Revolution. He was shown in his classic pose,
not grinning the way Pancho Villa usually did in his pith helmet but instead a
more tragic figure, looking directly at the viewer with an expression of
intense earnestness. He was invariably wearing a big sombrero, dark and striped
pants and an artillery belt strapped across his chest. With one foot forward as
if he were taking a step towards us, he looked elegant, and he was holding, of
course, a long rifle. That particular mural was captioned with the quote that
is invariably attributed to him, "It is better to die on your feet than to
continue living on your knees".
I wasn't there when
these murals were painted, and had no idea what organization might have
sponsored them, although I suspected it was an initiative supported by the city
and by community activists. The colors and the lettering were, of course,
vibrant and perhaps a little garish to sensibilities other than those of
Latinos or Chicanos. And the few women who were painted seemed to be confined
to limited and secondary roles, those of sexual figures to be courted, to Aztec
princess defended by their warriors, or joining the crowd of small children who
worshipfully looked up to heroes.
Mexican culture being one characterized by strong matriolachy , mothers
and virgins are haloed figures, and there were mothers who were painted with a
nimbus of suffering, sorrowful, eternally grieving. They couldn’t properly be
termed counterparts to the male figures because their function was different.
These figures
served as my introduction to popular Chicano and Mexican iconography when I was
a child, lacking as I did any formal exposure to muralismo or to what could be termed examples of "high"
art. Muralism, it must be said, continues to form a vibrant part of Chicano
culture, and can be found in any immigrant neighborhood, from Pilsen in Chicago
to Corpus Christi, from Oakland to Oxnard. This iconography as well as the
medium in general are familiar to our communities, and they represent an art
form that continues to speak of cultural aspiration, at least for the poor
communities who haven’t moved out to the wealthier suburbs and who can’t aspire
to a different palette of architectural styles, with their associated symbolic
vocabulary.
The panels that I
saw back then, in the 70s and 80s (they remained untouched for a little over a decade
before being painted over in the early 90s) indicated a social purpose that was
perhaps more in tune with that earlier period. There was an earnestness that
veered away from the abstract and relied instead on a more accessible
symbolism. Clenched fists raised in the air, eagles soaring above, mothers
cradling wounded sons, these panels were meant to portray intense political
struggles, an explicit criticism of unjust institutional structures and
policies. They came from the ideology of Chicanismo, from an era that still
remembered the early struggles of the 60s and the mobilization of these
communities. This was all the more surprising to me because, for the most part,
the community may still have lived by and large in conditions of poverty, but
the times had very much changed during the epoch of the Reagan years, an era
that seemed much less politically accommodating.
It was always
surprising to me that the murals lasted as long as they did. Other walls in
other parts of town had been invariably tagged, and were always being
repainted. The murals at the public library never seemed to last and were
constantly defaced, until it was decided to paint them over completely, or to
hide them behind growing vines. That particular series of panels on that wall
survived even as I moved away to Los Angeles and discovered East LA, and the
paintings that I had known from my childhood grew more and more weathered.
It was during this
time that I became more and more aware of what we could consider the political
import of much of early Chicano art, and especially, the art that referenced
revolutionary Mexican traditions. In the eighties we members of the current
generation were already growing more and more separate from the traditional
formative experiences of much of Chicano life in the Southwest. Many of us had
not lived the experiences chronicled in Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me
Última, a pastoral novel that incorporated elements of magic and an
alternative spiritual outlook that stressed a cohesiveness that we, the kids
who grew up in towns or in large cities, had never really known, in that
jarring assemblage of these modern spaces where tradition is always in
question. Neither had we had those experiences narrated in Tomás Rivera’s Y
no se lo tragó la tierra, the story of wandering tribes always moving
forward to the next harvest, never able to settle down, always brutally
exploited amidst fields of plenty.
We were no
strangers to poverty, but it must be stated over and over that ours was a more
settled and urban existence, far from the fields and the more extreme forms of
exploitation. We didn’t milk cows, many of us had never even ridden on a horse,
we didn’t share in the rhythms of agricultural life, as our parents never
failed to remind us. My grandfather had been a bracero, and my father had also
worked in the fields as a young man in the decade of the sixties, never having
attended public school in the United States despite being under age. But for so
many of us children in our community it seemed to be an existence that
characterized a distant past, that which had been left behind on the other side
of the wall, in those ranchitos we
saw from time to time during hurried visits south. Young people, of course,
have a short memory.
Although there is a
market that has been evolving during the past few decades, it must be said
that, in general, expressions of popular or folk art aren't met with the esteem
traditionally reserved for "high" art. Collectors may assemble
galleries full of folk art, carvings or paintings in the style of Nellie Mae Rowe, but these
collections aren’t typically studied in the same way in those place of
reverential contemplation such as the Getty Museum or LACMA (the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art). We wouldn’t have known what to do if we were standing in
front of the Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, or Picasso’s Guernica. We weren’t that
cosmopolitan, and we knew that the art exhibited in museum, for those of us who
were living a working-class existence, didn't reflect accessible or familiar
traditions.
Which begs the
question, what were our cultural references? Were they folk art, the clothing
and style of Mexican regional artists, the ones who wore flowered dresses or
tight pants, singing in a very rustic style Spanish songs of defiance and love?
Were they the symbols found on those consumer items, the stylized Mexican
ranchero on the bottle of Tapatio hot sauce, the snakes and scorpions and the
vivid color palette of Latino products that we consumed? Or were they
political, the Aztec dancers who performed at our Virgen de Guadalupe festivals
every December (they were most assuredly conveying a political message, for
they always inserted a message of resistance to the Conquest that still so very
much obsesses Mexicans), or the intimately parsed fashion sense of individual
political figures, whether they were Mexican politicians or the famous labor
leader César Chávez. Back then we were still searching for our own style, our
own vocabulary of expression, one that of course made reference to Mexico but
that also, as in the tattoos and low-rider culture of the Southwest,
represented something distinct.
The wall with the
murals was, of course, suggestive of an epoch of perceived exclusion and
exploitation, one that gave rise to an aesthetic of political resistance. Even
then we knew murals such as those of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquieros and
José Orozco, but also those that found in our barrios, was conveying a
political message, one that challenged authority and hierarchy. There were
other elements, of course, incorporating as well an idealization of the rural
past that our parents had fled, or examples of indigenous scientific prowess
(the Aztec Calendar, the elegant Mayan pyramids, the domestication of maize,
etc.), or even, the stories of personal struggle and survival, including
national cultural icons, the Adelitas (the spouses of male soldiers who
accompanied them as they fought in various battles during the Mexican
Revolution) or the Niños Héroes, the patriotic child soldiers who committed
suicide rather than surrender to the invading soldiers of the United States.
These references, of course, would have needed to be explained to us, because
they weren’t taught in our school, of course. We could, nonetheless, understand
the language of rebellion, even if, for us at that age, rebelling against our
parents made much more sense that rebelling against history.
As the eighties
progressed I came to realize that there was a subsequent generation of Chicano
artists who continued to draw on the popular iconographies pioneered by
previous generations, but others were elaborating new vocabularies. After all,
hadn’t we seen the pioneering efforts of Los Four during the 70s and 80s? (This
was a collective comprised of Frank Romero, Carlos Almaraz, Roberto de la Rocha
and Gilbert Luján, and in conjunction with other famous collectives such as
ASCO, comprised of Willie Herron, Henry Gamboa, Gronk and Patssi Valdes,
produced a very influential corpus of work during this period.) Hadn’t they
stormed the bastion of high art, prestigious museums such as LACMA, streaming
across an ideological border the way so many of our immigrant parents had? Was
this not ushering in a new era, such as when Time Magazine breathlessly
proclaimed the 80s as the decade of the Hispanic? (I bought and savored that
cover for a long time, not fully believing it but hoping that I would be part
of the generation that would fulfill this promise.)
Chicano life was
steadily evolving, and could hardly be said to conform to a single pattern. As
stated before, although we were still overwhelmingly concentrated in the
Southwest, occupational as well as other socioeconomic indicators were
changing. The experience of urban life was being brought increasingly to the
fore, as was the experience of movement to the suburbs, and marriage across
ethnic boundaries. The despair felt in the barrio, which was expressed at times
in angry imagery, gave rise to nostalgia once it was left behind, and a search
for a new identity that resolved the experiences of Chicanos at the Crossroads,
to quote the anthology from the 1990s edited by Maciel and Ortiz. The community
may well be changing, but not the need for a sense of community, with the
associated impulse for Chicanos to create and preserve an alternative
iconography and mythology of origin and authenticity. (We return back to the
question of origins, circling back.)
I guess this would
be a way of saying that in the images on that wall I was seeing already a
historical record of the struggles of an earlier epoch. The seventies and
eighties still featured in many of these themes, but they had to be
reformulated for a different era. The ideological framework had somehow become
too constricting, after all, because it hadn’t moved in some time, even as we
were moving and changing. Is art like a wall that carves out boundaries as an
act of will, both excluding as well as including, or it is more like a river
that follows natural contours, moving according to an internal impetus? (Of
course it can’t be entirely internal, I fully realize that, but the image of a
river navigating boundaries and winding around obstacles does suggest the idea
of a natural process.)
For all our modern
day conceit about breaking down walls and damming rivers to channel and utilize
their productive potential, did we not have to appreciate before all else the
way in which metaphors respond to contours and needs we feel as communities,
and the way in which hierarchical expressions at times fail to find audiences
while popular expressions (which were always present in our households), while
seeming to be less artistically ambitious, seem at times more compelling
because they are more immediate and more familiar. Our communities are and
continue to be in a state of evolution, but we also look for elements of continuity.
The murals on that
wall were long ago painted over, and I have preserved no record of them other
than that provided by memory. I hate to admit it, but I never ended up taking
photos, having come to view them as relics of an earlier period, one that didn’t
quite speak to my own needs even if they had stimulated me as a child. When I
visit my parents, who still live in that house they purchased over thirty years
ago, I pass by that wall and see it as a vacuum that is crying to be filled
once again. But the aesthetic has changed, and murals as well as public art that
reflects Chicano themes seems to be less visible than it was in the past. I
feel that the art from those panels has been temporarily submerged, washed
over, but was this due to indifference or to the conception that I had shared
earlier, that it had run its course, that the river had meandered into a
terrain that couldn’t support it any longer?
Art is, of course,
an act of constant refashioning. A long-standing conceit seems to maintain that
if it isn't active and dynamic, bewildering and upsetting but also enchanting
and seductive and defiant, then it isn't art, for it would otherwise lack
vitality. But who can say how we are changing, and how it is that we chose to
contest those traditions that frame our language and ways of thinking, those
walls and rivers that exclude but also establish contours and structural features
and at times reveal underlying fault lines that continue to loom large in our
imagination? When we least expect it we feel the tremors in our social and
cultural landscape and we scramble for cover, shivering with fear but at the
same time excited because something has happened and, for a fleeting second, we
have confirmed that we are still ALIVE.
Every generation
needs to tear down its walls and cross its own rivers. I am interested in
discovering and understanding what it is that currently appears on the walls
and imagination of this generation, and whether we can still talk about a
coherent and unified Chicano sensibility and identity, with all that this
implies with regards to a community ethos and a specific social (and class and
gender and racial and other) sensibility. Should walls and rivers be viewed as
expansive or delimiting? I suspect this will always be a source of creative
tension.
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