2011 San Bernardino County Museum Photography Exhibition Focuses on the 1970s Chicano Experience

[Click photo to enlarge. Photo copyright 2011 Jesus Manuel Mena Garza. All rights reserved.]

UPDATE: Chicano Photographer, an exhibition by Riverside, California documentary photographer Jesús Manuel Mena Garza opens at the San Bernardino County Museum (SBCM) Schuilling Gallery, March 26, 2011. The exhibition continues to November 6.

A reception open to the public takes place on Friday, March 25, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Space is limited (400+). Please call (909) 307-2669 x227 or email kplimley@sbcm.sbcounty.gov to make your reservation. The event is free to museum members or $10 at the door.

Get more information by clicking here...

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Chica Chic: The New Wave of Chicana Art

ChicaChic: The New Wave of Chicana Art // Interview with Curator Raquel De Anda from New America Media on Vimeo.

ChicaChic, an art exhibit showcasing the work of five prominent Chicana visual artists is open through March 18, 2011 at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).

"ChicaChic includes images that honor the concepts, themes, and iconography of the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s but reflect a world that is drastically changed,” says Deirdre Visser, arts curator at CIIS. “These women were raised in a different era, and ask different questions” added Visser.

The works in the show include a large canvas by Ana Teresa Fernandez depicting a woman “washing” the beach at the U.S.-Mexican border with her hair; a striking image that demands both that we engage with the current debates over immigration, and the politics of women and labor.

In addition to Fernandez, ChicaChic features the work of Angelica Muro, Mitsy Ávila Ovalles, Favianna Rodriguez, and Shizu Saldamando. The work of these five artists varies greatly, but they all are responding visually to the shifting needs of their communities in novel ways. The exhibit is guest-curated by Raquel de Anda, formerly of Galería de la Raza in San Francisco.

“ChicaChic is about stepping beyond the boundaries of identity, challenging stereotypes about what it means to be Chicana,” says de Anda. “It’s about the fluidity of identity and the need for new kinds of images in a fast-paced, media-saturated society.”

The exhibit is the culmination of years of planning. As Dorotea Reyna, CIIS Director of Development describes it, “ChicaChic is also a way to represent who we are at CIIS. With a ethnically diverse student body, CIIS feels that ChicaChic is an ideal exhibition to highlight our diversity, expand our arts programming, and further project our voice into Bay Area Latino communities.”

An intergenerational panel will discuss the art exhibit on Saturday, March 12, at 6:00PM at the CIIS Minna Street Center. For more information about the event or CIIS programs, visitwww.ciis.edu.

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Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement

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October 16, 2011- February 26, 2012

Beginning with the establishment of the first Chicano art gallery in 1969 in East Los Angeles, Chicano artists began a collective re-imagining of the urban landscape through photography, graphic arts, murals, and large-scale architectural plans, as well as through painting, sculpture, installation, and drawing. While their approach was collective in spirit, and undertaken in the context of the Chicano civil rights movement, these artists engaged in varied and debated positions on aesthetics, media, ideology, and the social or community function for their art. Their work was at once local, identity-based, and global in orientation, exploring the uncharted spaces between Mexican tradition, Chicano vernacular, and American modernism. This exhibition maps the diverse social networks among Chicano artist groups and art spaces in Los Angeles during the 1970s. These include Asco, Centro de Arte Público (CAP), East Los Streetscapers, Goez Art Studio and Gallery, Los Four, Mechicano Art Center, Plaza de la Raza, Self Help Graphics and Art, and Social Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). In showing how these artists mapped another L.A. – as part of a social protest and community empowerment movement – the exhibit presents little-seen work and documentation that reveal a complex history of the artists as they both navigated and imagined the social spaces of Los Angeles.

Mapping Another L.A is part of L.A. XICANO, four inter-related exhibitions organized by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980, an unprecedented collaboration of more than fifty cultural institutions across Southern California, which are coming together to tell the story of the birth of the LA art scene. Initiated through grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time will take place for six months beginning October 2011.

This exhibition is curated by Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas.

A Native Chicano Son Reflects on El Movimiento

BY GREGG BARRIOS

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In Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981, author and educator David Montejano posits that San Antonio local history provides a microscopic look at the Chicano civil-rights movement and the social change it forged.

In the book’s preface he declares: “As a San Antonio native, my narrative explanation has a certain autobiographical quality to it.” Montejano grew up in “a West Side subdivision built in the 1950s, in the Edgewood District, one of the poorest in the state and later made famous by its successful challenge of the state’s educational financing schema. My neighborhood was a poor working class surrounded by poorer neighbors on three sides.”

Still, Montejano’s parents made the decision to send him to Catholic school since it provided a better education. He attended Central Catholic High in the mid-1960s along with George and Willie Velásquez and Ernie Cortés, all of whom later played important roles in the movimiento. While future San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros also attended the Catholic high school, Montejano considers Cisneros a beneficiary but not part of the Chicano movement.

The seeds of Montejano’s activism were planted early on: “The Brothers [of Mary] taught a humanistic philosophy of brotherhood that later became liberation theology.” He was drawn to those teachings with their attention to poverty and social inequality.

His freshman year at then South Texas State University in San Marcos proved important to the young man’s education: He witnessed a clash between a Mexican service-station attendant who had refused to put gas in a car of drunken cowboys and how it was effectively defused. Later, when a caravan of striking farmworkers came through the small college town, Montejano joined them.

He transferred to the UT Austin campus where he became involved in the counterculture, anti-war, and black civil-rights movements and helped collect petitions to get La Raza Unida Party on the state ballot. His activism led to his arrest during a student protest in Austin against service-station owner Don Weedon.

Montejano is now a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the author of the award-winning Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1936-1986, and the editor of Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century.

Unlike many academic books steeped in jargon, Quixote’s Soldiers is a fascinating look into the making and undoing of el movimento chicano and more specifically traces “some parts and tactics to its history of the Chicano movement in San Antonio.”

The Current spoke to Montejano during a brief visit upon the publication of Quixote’s Soldiers.

In the first part of Quixote, you point out how San Antonio’s gang problem in the 1960s wasn’t helped by how it was viewed by the authorities.

There was a real gang problem, but it was exacerbated by the perception by authorities that all the working- and lower-class youth in the barrios were gang members. This included the social scientists that would come from the outside to study the youth. They would come in with this assumption that was an oversimplification and false. But there were gangs and conflicts that were passed on from generation to generation. But when I talk about self-identified gangs, I’m speaking of a very small number, perhaps 10 percent.

Your account of how Mexican-American student activists [many from St. Mary’s University] along with politicized gang social workers mobilized disenfranchised barrio youth is fascinating. And yet organizations like [the Mexican American Youth Organization] and [the Mexican American Unity Council] quickly faced opposition from the Anglo and Mexican-American political elite.

The MAYO leadership and the batos locos of the barrio hanging out truly influenced one another. But once Henry B. shuts down places like [the alternative] La Universidad del Barrios, these young college kids get involved in politics. Symbolic politics. The batos were geared to addressing local issues: police brutality, drug trafficking. If they had remained together who knows how this could have developed.

Where do the Brown Berets fit in the movimiento? I remember there were some Wild West types in the Berets and a few informants as well.

Wild West Side types. The first part of the book deals with barrio youth and gang warfare and how they become involved in the movement and eventually form the Brown Berets. The [academic] literature places little emphasis on the barrio or the batos locos that formed the Berets. The first confederation of the Berets in San Antonio is based on the old gang boundaries and identities.

Did Saul Alinsky’s community-organizing strategy have a bigger influence on MAYO and MAUC than the Mexican Revolution?

The Mexican revolution provided the symbols and the songs [laughs] and the color, but without question, Saul Alinsky. And, of course, the Black Power movement.

Why did the rhetoric turn to the confrontational “Kill the Gringo!”?

Jose Angel Gutiérrez, Nacho Perez, Mario Compean, [and] Norman Guerrero all believed that the only way you could wake up our people was through this confrontational, provocative language. There was an image that we were a passive people, the sleeping giant. Estos batos were going to wake up the sleeping giant through their rhetoric. This scared the hell out of the political establishment — the Anglo and Mexican-American elite.

You devote several chapters to Henry B. Gonzalez, who viewed the Raza movement as racist. Still he was also considered a hero for his liberal stance on issues. Why this division? Was this old crab trying to keep the others down? Political posturing?

That’s a good question. I wrestled with that. Henry B. would say it was out of principle. He opposed any politics based on ethnicity. He thought it was equivalent to corruption. His adversaries believed it was based on his alliance with the [Good Government League], that Henry B. had turned his back on the people who had helped elect him. And so that’s the basis for a lot of animosity between Henry, Albert Peña, Joe Bernal, and others. So was it just principle or was it just money? Was it patrón politics we’re talking about? I’ll let the reader figure that out.

Did the strong showing of Mario Compean [the Committee for Barrio Betterment candidate for mayor in 1969] against GGL incumbent Walter McAllister spark the notion that we could elect our own candidates and create a political party like Raza Unida?

I definitely believe that. It is not just my belief but that of others that I have interviewed — the fact that CBB was able to place second without any money and just campaigning in the barrios, using mimeograph machines, going to the quinceañeras, clearly a low-budget affair. And they clearly won against the GGL in the West Side. And not by tiny margins; there were some substantial margins. This results in Mario Compean declaring himself Mayor of the West Side.

I was a teacher at Lanier High School at the time. I saw the sense of pride and identity in my students, not only in having Latino teachers, but in the rise of a Chicano renaissance in the arts. While your book centers on the political aspects of the movimiento, I believe both go hand in hand; all art in a sense is political.

It’s true, I do in passing mention the teatros, the art, the flourishing of literature. And the identity formation. Now we are Chicanos, Chicanas. That’s a new vocabulary. A new identity. And all of that is buttressed by this cultural renaissance. There is no question about that.

Was José Angel Gutiérrez’s strategy of building the Raza Unida Party county by county instead of running candidates in state elections ultimately the road that should have been taken?

In hindsight it would have been the better alternative. At the time we wanted everything and we wanted it now.

But were we prepared to accept the responsibilities that come with those victories?

We were young. We were 20-something. We were naive. We didn’t know a lot of these things, we just wanted someone elected. And in many cases we didn’t know what to do afterward. We had no plan other than that it might lead to some sort of liberation.

What is the lasting legacy of the Chicano movement?

Certainly the opening up of universities in the creation of Chicano Studies, because that is where we get our history, our art and literature. And in San Antonio, the establishment of UTSA might be considered a logro for us. The changing from at-large electoral politics to single-member districts was a very important change. The building of our political and community capacity by grassroots organizations — COPS and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.

Bless Willie and Ernie!

They increased the political capacity of these barrios and the result of all that in tangible, concrete results are parks, housing, flood control, drainage. Those are some of the accomplishments. And I think besides the election of Henry Cisneros in 1981 that symbolizes the changes.

The other major change is the emergence of Chicanas in leadership positions. I mean visible leadership, no longer being in the supportive background but now being upfront, leading the organizations, holding the press conferences, running for office. That to me is an important change.

Gregg Barrios is a San Antonio poet and playwright. His new book of poetry, La Causa, appears in September and his play I-DJ premieres in October.

A FEW WRONG TURNS

In one of Quixote’s Soldiers’ most interesting and bound to be controversial chapters, Montejano focuses on three individuals as examples of failed leadership. Fred Gómez Carrasco, Ramsey Muñiz, and Henry B. Gonzalez dominated media coverage in Texas in the 1970s — representing a “Mexican” voice or presence to the larger public.

Montejano writes that some may question his selection of these three men as arbitrary and unreasonable: “The first was a convicted killed and drug dealer, the second a fallen political star, and the last a respected liberal congressman. [F]or better or worse, they represented different paths leading up and away from barrio poverty and isolation.”

“Fred Gómez Carrasco, the chivalrous drug ‘don,’ had been a major heroin supplier for the barrios and ghettos of San Antonio and other points in Texas. Despite the romanticization of his life as a narco-traficante, Carrasco must be remembered as the genius organizer behind a drug operation that tranquilized and criminalized countless barrio and ghetto youths. In short, Carrasco played a critical part in undermining the Chicano movement in the poor, working-class barrios. Yet his last-minute political testaments, given before his staged death, suggests there could have been a different path.”

“Ramsey Muñiz, athletic star, charismatic leader, and two-time gubernatorial candidate for the Raza Unida Party, stumbled and then self-destructed, taking along with him the fortunes of the party. What happened? [Muñiz was charged with conspiracy to smuggle drugs from Mexico to Alabama.] Yes, it was a setup by the authorities, but how could Muñiz have walked into it? Was the temptation so great? Was it hubris? Ten years after serving time for his first two convictions, Muñiz was arrested and convicted on a third drug charge. As a result, Muñiz has been permanently incarcerated. The loss is irrevocable. What remains is a memory of those inspiring years when Muñiz moved 200,000 voters to believe in a ‘united people.’”

“Henry B. Gonzalez, an American of Spanish surnamed descent who held an idealistic ‘color-blind’ view of the world was so upset with the Chicano ethnic demands that he actively opposed the Chicano movement. He was successful in defunding MAYO, forcing MALDEF to move from San Antonio, and restricting MAUC activities. Was it principle that moved his opposition, personal pique at movement rhetoric, or simply interest in maintaining political control? Gonzalez has been charged with undermining the Chicano movement, yet that responsibility must be partitioned among many.”

Montejano concludes: “Perhaps this does lead to a judgmental question after all. Can we judge which path was the most flawed? [W]hich is worse, a flawed journey, a flawed decision or a flawed vision?”

Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981

By David Montejano

University of Texas Press

$24.95, 360 pages (paperback)

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UCSB professor Garcia helps write new book describing the Chicano urban movement in the 1960s

By NICK C. TONKIN

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In March of 1968, students in East Los Angeles brought the high schools to a halt. Ignited by the cancellation of a school play and driven by decades of antipathy by administrators and board members, nearly 20,000 students walked out of their classrooms. These walkouts came to be known as blowouts and, according to UCSB Chicana and Chicano Studies Professor Mario T. García, sparked the urban Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The man who brought the student organizers together was a Lincoln High School teacher named Sal Castro. Forty-two years later, Castro teamed with García to write, “Blowout! Sal Castro and the Struggle for Educational Justice,” a new book that tells the story of the walkouts.

As a high school teacher, Castro grew alarmed at the high dropout rate among Chicano and Latino students, poor reading scores, and a school system that ignored language and cultural backgrounds and steered them towards vocational jobs instead of higher education.

Castro brought together current and former Lincoln High students as well as UCLA and Cal State LA students to organize the students and make school officials address their grievances.

“I have no doubt that the walkouts wouldn’t have happened without Sal Castro,” García said. “He inspired the students. When they saw that their teacher was willing to put his career on the line, that gave them a lot of courage.”

Wednesday, February 23rd, UCSB is hosting a presentation from García and Castro at 3:30 p.m. in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building. Free and open to the public, the authors will discuss the book and the protests that launched the biggest civil rights protests by Mexican Americans in U.S. History.

“Sal’s story is a history of a dedicated and committed teacher,” said García. “Through the walkouts, the students—and the entire Chicano community—learned that they could bring about change.”

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Photography show looks through Latina eyes

Sexy, but not erotic. Magical, mythic and mysterious. The photos in "Her Gaze" capture how identity shapes our vision.

By Kyle MacMillan
Denver Post Fine Arts Critic

When most people snap pictures with their cellphones or digital cameras, their intent is simple: Record whatever immediate reality is in front of them at the moment.

But for the five widely recognized Mexican and Mexican-American artists featured in a new exhibition at Museo de las Americas, photography provides a means to see beyond the tangible to something spiritual, metaphorical and mysterious.

The show's evocative title, "Her Gaze/Su Mirada," points to this preternatural ability, as well as broader implications of the word.

"We always talk about the gaze — the gaze of the photographer, the gaze of the public, the gaze of a man on a woman and vice versa," said Kathy Vargas, a participating photographer from San Antonio.

Kathy Vargas uses an in-camera, multiple-exposure technique to create multilayered images such as her cross-shaped array of six photographs, "Broken Column: Mother," 80 by 48 inches. (Courtesy of Joe Diaz )

"What is the female gaze? I guess that's what the show is about. What are women looking at? How are they looking at it? Is it different from the way a man would look at it?"

By focusing only on Latina photographers, curator Maruca Salazar, Museo's executive director, has expressly narrowed her focus to an artistic point of view that is not just female but also Latina.

The question is: Do these two pivotal identity markers come together to produce a distinctive vision? The more than 50 black-and-white and color images on display provide compelling evidence that the answer is yes.

It is a rich, perceptive world view that finds deep roots in the Latino embrace of the cycle of life and death and encompasses metaphorical and transcendent dimensions beyond the merely physical.

At the same time, it is a vantage point of the outsider. Although a Latina sits on the Supreme Court, Latinos in the United States still struggle to be fully enfranchised with equal pay and all that mainstream society has to offer.

"We are, I don't really want to use the word 'marginalized,' but I guess I could use that word," said Albuquerque photographer Delilah Montoya. "Even the word 'Latina' was

Exploring the relationship between humankind and nature, Mexican photographer Yesika Felix intersperses surprisingly similar topographic close-ups of human skin and bark, such as this silver gelatin print from her "Sequoia" series. (Courtesy of the artist )

devised by the dominant culture to explain who we are. That's a word to make us more simple, more uniform."

There is no doubt that each of these photographers — the youngest born in 1976, the oldest in 1942 — has a distinctive visual style and subject matter.

In 1979-88, for example, Graciela Iturbide, the most famous of the five, took her camera to the isthmus city of Juchitán in Oaxaca, Mexico, creating enigmatic images of its ancient, matriarchal society.

In a series of photos along the American-Mexican border, Montoya, who takes an overtly sociopolitical stance in her photographs, explores the clash between the area's rugged beauty and the frequent deaths of immigrants there.

Vargas confronted the death of her mother and her ensuing grief in a shrine-like installation that combines hanging and wall-mounted photographs with a sculpture that extends their multilayered symbolism.

Common themes

Divergent, yes, but certain commonalities run through these and the images by the two other featured photographers — Yesika Felix and Flor Garduño, both from Mexico.

Among those commonalities is a drive to define themselves, something that Montoya has sought to do in the Chicano communities where she has lived in Denver and Albuquerque, and in connection with other artists, musicians and writers.

"We were more or less forming our identity," she said, "forming a way of speaking about who we are and what our issues are. And, of course, the issues change throughout time."

Though what differentiates how men and women perceive things is nearly impossible to pin down and has been debated for centuries, it seems clear a dichotomy does exist.

"I tried to truly analyze why women are different when they take a picture," Salazar said. "What happens when they take a picture? How do they see things? Definitely, there is something there that tells me that we totally look at things differently."

Not surprisingly, the show contains many views of women, none more provocative then Montoya's series of feminist-infused images of female boxers.

"You think of them as very bad girls, (niñas)malcriadas," she said. "I wanted to find out who they are and why are they pounding each other. And what does violence look like with women? Does violence look the same as it does on a man?"

Defiant gazes

Greeting viewers at the entrance of the exhibition is the portrait, "Jackie Chavez" (2006). Posed in her uniform with boxing gloves boldly emblazoned with the abbreviation "TKO," the sitter stares directly at the viewer — adding a defiant dimension to the show's title, "Her Gaze."

"The strong woman in the photograph is saying to the viewer, 'Here I am, and I'm looking out too. I'm not just here to be looked at. I'm going to be looking at you, too,' " Vargas said.

Similarly, Iturbide presents her now-iconic take on the unbowed, independent woman in "Our Lady of the Iguanas" (1979), a portrait depicting a marketplace vendor in Juchitán wearing a group of iguanas on her head like a headdress.

In an alternative vein are a group of female nudes by Garduño that are certainly sexual but not in an erotic way, as they might have been through the lens of a man. Instead, she seems to be emphasizing the women's natural beauty and fecundity, tying them to the ancient notion of Mother Earth.

This connection links her directly with a Latino sensibility that emphasizes the relationship between humankind and nature, embraces the inevitable life cycle and does not shy from death and what might lie beyond.

"A lot of our work is very much about metaphor, that it's not just what you see on the surface," said Vargas. "It is about the spiritual and what unites the spirit with the physical."

Magic realism

This kind of supernatural realm is sometimes described as magic realism, an aesthetic that first emerged in Europe in the early 20th century but found particular resonance in Latin America, especially in the literature of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and many others.

This approach, which expands the notion of reality to take in elements of magic, myth and religion, extends as well to Latin-American visual art, such as the paintings of Frida Kahlo and the photography of Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

It has been a strong influence on Iturbide, a student of Bravo, suffusing her 13 images on view, such as "Cementerio (Cemetery)" (1988), a haunting scene in which dozens of what are apparently sparrows take to the sky at once.

There has been much debate in recent decades around exhibitions of this kind that critics would argue segregate, even ghettoize, certain societal groups like women.

But Vargas believes the day of such debates is over. Like the rest of the Latina photographers in the exhibition, her works are now regularly shown in mainstream venues of all kinds.

"It doesn't bother me because we've done all things now and because we all are everywhere," she said of "Her Gaze." "This is just another excuse for a show, as far as I'm concerned. It's kind of nice that it's women because we can sit and gossip and go shopping together."

Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 orkmacmillan@denverpost.com

"Her Gaze/Su Mirada."

Photography. Museo de las Americas, 861 Santa Fe Drive. This exhibition showcases the works of five widely recognized Latina photographers of varying generations: Yesika Felix, Flor Garduño, Graciela Iturbide, Delila Montoya and Kathy Vargas. Through May 29. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. $4, $3 students and seniors and free for children younger than 13 and members. 303-571-4401 ormuseo.org

Read more:Photography show looks through Latina eyes - The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/entertainment/ci_17286464#ixzz1DJCG1bDL

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Chicano Photographer Exhibition

Please note that the reception has been moved to March 25, 2011. The exhibition opens to the general public the next day. It will be a packed house. See you there.

Call Jesus at (909) 557-7151 or send him email if you have any questions.

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