Photographs from North Tejas

Three Photographs From the Series

Wichita Falls, Texas: Isolation, Abandonment and Loss

Near Oklahoma, exists the city of Wichita Falls, Texas. The glory days of Wichita Falls are but a distant memory. Downtown buildings blue and gold have long been empty. Desolate suburban streets lead to unrealized subdivisions. The poor live on the margins while the rich can leave town. Every community has its positives and negatives. Residents here enjoy a simpler life. Housing is dirt cheap and parking is never a problem.

No majestic mountains, crystal clear rivers or historic infrastructure to photograph here. Jesús Garza is forced to focus his lens on the more mundane. Issues of isolation, abandonment and loss are examined in his new work. Garza photographs decaying infrastructure and the endless landscape. They are embedded with symbols of the ordinary. 

Locals brag about the Texoma landscape. It lays flat at the Southern edge of the great American prairie. Garza often traveled to the edge to see what has been built or fallen. On the margins of Wichita Falls are extensive fields of cotton, grass, oil and gas. The red soil obscures the essential fuels that drive the local economy. While taking these photographs, Garza found solace in interpreting the landscape, simply. Typical of many photographers he enjoyed revisiting and reexamining past adventures. Possibly seeing more the next time around.   

Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston have grown exponentially over the past decades while Wichita Falls seems the worse for wear. There is no rush to live here, now. The area has become a refuge for those with few options. This new book project is dedicated to those hardy souls who make this wind-swept corner of Tornado Alley their home. This project offers eloquent visual testimony of their tenacity. Their future embedded in this dusty patch of Texas.. 

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Can Obama's Organizing Army Take Texas?

The American Prospect
By Abby Rapoport
 
Progressive Texans just might lead a Democratic revival in the ultimate red state. Here's how.

Shortly before the Battleground Texas tour stopped in Austin’s old AFL-CIO building in early April, the sky opened up. Thunder and lightning raged, parts of the city flooded, and traffic came to a standstill. But Democrats kept arriving, some dripping wet, others clutching umbrellas rarely used in the city, and the meeting room soon filled with about 100 folks, some no doubt drawn by curiosity. Launched in February by two of Team Obama’s hotshot organizers, Battleground Texas was promising to inject into the nation’s biggest Republican stronghold the grassroots field tactics—the volunteer-organizing, the phone-banking and door-knocking, the digital savvy—that won the 2012 presidential election. After years of national Democrats seeing Texas as hopelessly red, what made this fledgling group think it could turn the state blue?

Jenn Brown, Battleground Texas’s executive director, was pleasantly surprised by the turnout. But the 31-year-old California native, who projects the energy and enthusiasm of a camp counselor, knew she had some convincing to do. As one attendee put it, “We’re suffering from battered-spouse syndrome. We believe it is impossible to win.” The situation for Texas Democrats has been as gloomy as the day’s weather. The party hasn’t won a single statewide race since 1996—a 100-campaign losing streak. Republicans dominate the state legislature. Mitt Romney carried the state by more than 1.2 million votes. For nearly two decades, the Texas Democratic Party has been the political equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters’ perennial patsies, the Washington Generals.

But the people leading Battleground Texas are proven winners. Brown headed up Barack Obama’s field operation in Ohio, which turned out 100,000 more African American voters in 2012 than in 2008. Battleground Texas founder and senior advisor Jeremy Bird, a 34-year-old Missouri native, is the wonky wunderkind who, as Obama’s national field director, oversaw the campaign’s state-of-the-art turnout operation. They’ve been joined by young, native Texan organizers such as Christina Gomez, formerly with the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, and Cliff Walker, who ran the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee. Bird and Brown got interested in Texas, they say, during the 2012 campaign. Bird was wowed by the enthusiasm of Texas volunteers, who made 400,000 calls to Florida voters in the last three days before the election. Brown says that wherever she went during the campaign, Obama staffers from Texas would talk excitedly about the potential for organizing the state, given its rapidly changing demographics.

Since their effort launched in February, they’ve seen more encouraging signs. Attendance was strong on Battleground Texas’s 14-city getting-to-know-you tour, which stopped in both Democrat-friendly places like Austin and San Antonio and Republican strongholds like Waco and Lubbock. By mid-April, Battleground Texas already had more Facebook friends—23,000—than the Texas GOP. Its organizers refuse to comment on the group’s funding sources, but the state’s biggest Democratic donor, Steve Mostyn, has agreed to help the group raise its estimated $10 million annual budget. As of April, there were ten paid staffers, more than the state Democratic Party employs, with additional hires on the way.

While Governor Rick Perry laughed off the effort to turn Texas blue as “the biggest pipe dream I have ever heard,” other Republican leaders are giving Battleground Texas free publicity by decrying it as a coven of dangerous outside agitators—“masters of the slimy dark arts of campaigning,” state Republican Party Chair Steve Munisteri wrote in a fundraising letter. Speaking at a lunch in Waco, Attorney General Greg Abbott called the arrival of Team Obama members “a new 
assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons. The threat that we’re getting is the threat from the Obama administration and his political machine.”

For a fledgling effort, Battleground Texas has already become a national media darling, prominently featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Bloomberg News. In February, Bird even had a guest turn on The Colbert Report, where the host described him as “the man behind Obama’s minority outreach-around.” It’s easy to see why there’s so much interest. If Texas were to become a competitive state, the impact on national politics would be enormous. Without the state’s 38 electoral votes, Republicans would find it virtually impossible to win presidential elections with the current national map. Even the threat of losing Texas would influence a presidential contest. If the GOP has to start fighting for votes in such an enormous state—with 20 media markets—it will drain resources the party could devote to other battlegrounds.

No state has greater potential for Democrats. Texas is already “majority-minority,” with Latinos making up 38 percent of the population and African Americans 12 percent. According to the state demographer, the number of Latinos will surpass the number of whites in the next decade; by 2040, 52 percent of the state will be Latino, and 27 percent will be white. Between just 2012 and 2016, about a million additional Latinos in Texas will become eligible to vote. But that’s been the trouble for Democrats: Latinos aren’t voting. Forty-seven percent of eligible Latinos have not even registered. In 2010, when Perry won re-election, the Latino turnout rate was an anemic 16 percent, about half the typical Latino turnout in New Mexico. An analysis by the Houston Chronicle shows that if Latinos voted at the same rate as whites, the state would already be a toss-up.

So while Battleground Texas aims to make inroads with other groups—including white women, who are overwhelmingly Republican in Texas, counter to national trends—driving up the Latino vote is the key to a Democratic turnaround. On paper, it looks straightforward, which is one reason Democrats outside of Texas tend to be more sanguine about a partisan flip than Democrats in the state. They don’t know what the folks in Austin know all too well: that Republicans have continued to gain congressional and legislative seats over the past decade, even as Texas’s Latino population has swelled.

One challenge is scale. Bird and Brown cite Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada as models for turning out Latinos. But none of those states has more than 516,000 Latino citizens total—which is fewer than the number of Latino citizens in Houston’s Harris County alone. “In those little states, you can just throw money and get all kinds of stuff done,” says Antonio Gonzalez, head of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. Not in Texas, where size is only one of the complicating factors.

Another wrinkle: Battleground Texas will have to tangle with a state Republican Party that has been far smarter about connecting with Latinos than the national Republican Party. The tone was set by Karl Rove and George W. Bush, who actively courted Latinos in the 1990s as they set about building the Texas GOP into a dominant force. Battleground Texas will also have to overcome deeply entrenched political disengagement among Latinos and other nonwhites, born in part from years of Democratic neglect.

Even given the rosiest of scenarios, Texas Democrats aren’t likely to elect a governor in 2014 or help to elevate a Democrat into the White House in 2016. But Battleground Texas’s leaders swear they’re committed for the long haul. As Brown said in Austin, “If 2020 is the year we turn this state around, that is OK with me.”

Republican supremacy in Texas is a relatively recent phenomenon. From Reconstruction until the 1960s, Democrats—mostly conservative, exclusively white—ran the state. The party always had a vocal progressive wing, and in the wake of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Latino leaders began to emerge. Most came from San Antonio, which had both a large Latino population and a strong activist tradition. Community organizer Willie C. Velasquez founded the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, which registered thousands of Latinos and filed more than 80 lawsuits to ensure their access to the ballot. In 1974, Ernie Cortés started San Antonio’s Communities Organized for Public Service, which helped Latino neighborhoods push their policy agendas. In 1981, Henry Cisneros was elected mayor, making him only the second Latino mayor in U.S. history.

While other Southern states were trending Republican, Democrats still looked like the party of the future in Texas. Houston, fast becoming one of the nation’s largest and most diverse cities, had elected Democrat Barbara Jordan, the state’s first African American legislator and, later, first African American member of Congress. In 1990, Dan Morales, a state legislator, became the first Latino elected statewide, as attorney general. A year later, Governor Ann Richards appointed Lena Guerrero to the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas industries, making her the first woman and person of color on the commission.

But white conservatives still made up most of the state’s electorate, and they backed Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984—the first time a Republican had carried the state since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. In 1978, Republicans elected their first Texas governor since Reconstruction, Bill Clements, after a bitterly contested Democratic primary divided the party. Suddenly, the GOP didn’t look completely hopeless in Texas, and conservative Anglos began to get accustomed to voting Republican after generations as yellow-dog Democrats. Karl Rove laid out a strategy for taking control of the state, systematically targeting vulnerable Democrats he could either unseat or convince to switch sides. “When there was a straggler in the pack, he would take them in the bushes and cut their throat,” says Cal Jillson, a political scientist and author of Texas Politics: Governing the Lone Star State.

The tipping point came in 1994, when Richards lost her re-election bid to Rove’s candidate, George W. Bush. Democrats still carried most statewide offices that year and maintained a sizable edge in the legislature. But the Republican tide was rising fast. In 1998, against weak opposition, Bush won re-election with 69 percent of the vote—including nearly 40 percent of the Latino vote—and Republicans swept statewide offices. Meanwhile, Democrats lost their most promising Latino candidate for higher office when Cisneros, who’d gone to Washington as President Bill Clinton’s housing secretary, was felled by a scandal involving hush money given to a former mistress. By then, Velasquez and Cortés had left the state as well.

In 2002, Democrats ran what they thought was a “dream team”—wealthy businessman Tony Sanchez for governor and Ron Kirk, an African American who’d been elected mayor in Dallas, for U.S. senator. “We had a really well-funded and sophisticated outreach to Hispanic voters,” says longtime Democratic consultant Glenn Smith, who ran the Sanchez campaign. “The problem was we were doing it all of a sudden in one campaign cycle. That’s just not enough time.” The dream team lost badly, and Republicans took control of the state legislature.

Texas Democrats went into a death spiral. Their bench of potential statewide candidates was empty. National leaders saw no upside to investing in the state and began using it as a cash machine for campaigns outside the state. As the Latino population continued to swell, Democrats failed to launch the type of sustained outreach needed to bring new voters into the system. Latinos still voted for Democrats, usually by about a 2-to-1 margin. But far too few were voting.

Texas Republican leaders wisely avoided the mistakes of their counterparts in California and Arizona, where anti-immigration laws turned Latinos into avid Democrats. As governor and president, Bush spoke Spanish at campaign events, appointed Latinos to key positions, and broke with most Republicans by championing comprehensive immigration reform. His successor as governor, Rick Perry, signed a state version of the DREAM Act into law and spoke out against measures like Arizona’s “papers, please” law. When Republican lawmakers tried to float such bills, Perry and other party leaders quashed their efforts before they became an embarrassment.

“Democrats think that if they just wait and the state becomes more Hispanic, they win,” says the current GOP chair, Munisteri. “That ignores the fact that we are doing Hispanic outreach.” Even as the Tea Party wave of 2010 drove the state legislature further to the right, Texas Republicans launched new efforts to attract nonwhite voters. The party used data analytics and cross-checks to identify conservative Latinos and get them involved; as a result, last year’s state GOP convention had 600 new Latino delegates. At that same convention, delegates changed the party platform to eliminate calls for mass deportation of undocumented Texans. (However, it still advocates rescinding citizenship for those born in the country to noncitizens.) A full-time Republican outreach coordinator now goes on Telemundo and Univision, the two major Spanish-language networks, as a regular commentator. On June 4, Munisteri said the national GOP would even start kicking in to help the state party hire nearly two dozen full-time field organizers and open five new outreach offices around the state.

The party’s efforts have been bolstered by Hispanic Republicans of Texas, a political action committee co-founded by George P. Bush (son of Jeb) and two Republican consultants with strong national connections. Hispanic Republicans recruits, trains, and backs candidates for local, state, and federal offices. The group built a lot of buzz in 2010, when seven Hispanic Republicans were elected to the state legislature and Congress. But in 2012, the results were decidedly mixed. Though Ted Cruz was elected to the U.S. Senate and two new Latinos won state House seats, only two of the winners from 2012 were re-elected, and a coveted congressional race was lost. Bush, who’s 37 and whose mother is Mexican-born, has announced that he will be running statewide in 2014 for Texas land commissioner—a launching pad to bigger things.

The party’s strategy is based on the belief that Latinos in Texas are more conservative than their counterparts in other states—and thus “persuadable” for Republicans without a wholesale change in policies. There’s a large bloc who are swing voters, says George Antuna Jr., who co-founded Hispanic Republicans of Texas with Bush. “Those voters are up for grabs.”

“They’re dreaming,” Jillson counters. With rare exceptions, Latinos have been voting 2 to 1 Democratic in Texas since the days of LBJ. In 2012, an election-eve poll by Latino Decisions found 53 percent of Texas Latinos identifying as Democrats; only 15 percent said they were Republicans. Polling data show why. Particularly on economic issues, Latino voters in Texas line up overwhelmingly with Democratic positions. Young Latinos, who will dominate Texas politics in the near future, are more liberal than their elders. Latino voters’ top priorities, aside from immigration reform, are improving education and health care—two issues that are not exactly strengths for Texas Republicans. In 2011, GOP lawmakers, cheered on by Perry, made the largest cuts in modern Texas history to public schools. Republicans are also responsible for policies that have left one-quarter of Texans—and a far larger slice of Latinos—without health insurance.

For a couple more election cycles, Republicans can continue to win Texas with overwhelming white support—it often reaches 70 percent in statewide races—combined with one-third of the Latino vote. But if enough Latinos start voting, the GOP will have to recalibrate its message while holding on to a right-wing base that has shown little taste for moderation. If anything, the party has moved rightward in recent years. Its most visible Latino champion, Senator Cruz, is a Tea Party stalwart. If Republicans were expecting Cruz, whose ancestry is Cuban American, to boost their Latino vote, it didn’t happen in 2012; he received about 35 percent, one point less than Senator John Cornyn received in 2008. “Republicans like Ted Cruz talk about how Republicans are different in Texas because they have a few Hispanic candidates,” Bird says. “But the first speech Cruz gave in the Senate was about his opposition to Obamacare, which an overwhelming majority of Hispanics support.”

Still, Republicans profess confidence that they’ll keep Texas red—and conservative—for decades to come. If Battleground Texas begins to pose a threat, Munisteri says, national Republicans will pour limitless money and resources into the state to keep from losing the party’s crown jewel. Battleground Texas, he claims, “may end up doing me a favor. We’ll have more resources than they would if they left it alone.” Since the group announced itself, Munisteri says he’s already raised $300,000 by sounding the alarm about a potential takeover by Team Obama. “When Texas begins to look competitive, there’s going to be an avalanche of Republican money coming home to protect the state,” Jillson says. But that would come with a cost: fewer resources for Republicans everywhere else.

How will Battleground Texas mount a challenge to Republican hegemony in the ultimate red state? Slowly but surely, as Jenn Brown told the Austin Democrats. “We know this is a long-term effort,” she said. “We know it will take time.” The initial focus will be to create a massive network of Democratic organizers and volunteers across the state. Imagine, Brown said, what could happen with 250 paid field organizers in Texas, each with five teams of volunteers; they could reach 500,000 potential voters if everyone just knocked on 50 doors.

At this point, the details are hypothetical: A full-scale plan for “getting that started” won’t be rolled out until this summer. But Jeremy Bird offers a few more details. In the next couple of election cycles, Battleground Texas will target “battleground zones”—races that organizers believe could either be winnable or could help Democrats build infrastructure by training new candidates and registering voters. A battleground zone could be a city council race with a promising young Latino candidate in Waco or a state House race in a heavily minority district in Houston. The idea is to seize every viable opportunity to build new Democratic networks around the state, creating new voters along the way.

For the time being, that’ll be done without backing candidates for statewide offices. Texas has a few rising Democratic stars—most notably San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro and his twin, Congressman Joaquin Castro—but running them for major offices too soon and losing risks diminishing their appeal. Democratic strategist James Aldrete says the Battleground Texas approach—build the base rather than expecting miracle results right away—is refreshing. For too long, Aldrete says, Texas Democrats tried the opposite approach: “waiting for the amazing candidate that’s gonna inspire everyone and solve all our problems.” Finally, Texas Democrats are attempting to replicate what has worked elsewhere. “The way I look at it,” Bird says, “Texas is our candidate.”

But Obama-style grassroots politics is brand-new for most Texas Democrats. While the national party was putting an increasing emphasis on door-knocking and turnout over the past decade, the party in Texas was falling behind. Battleground Texas will have to change fundamentally the way Texas Democrats think about politics, reorienting them from a campaign-to-campaign mentality to one of year-round organizing.

The leaders of Battleground Texas say there’s reason for optimism—partly because there is some recent history of grassroots politics working in Texas. During the 2010 midterm elections, Austin Democratic Party Chair Andy Brown selected 21 largely black and Latino precincts where turnout had traditionally been low and pledged to run the type of hardcore turnout campaigns usually reserved for the wealthier, whiter parts of town. With a paid field staff organizing volunteers, the Travis County Democrats knocked on every registered voter’s door in those precincts two or three times and called each one at least twice. The effort paid off: Although 2010 was the worst year in history for Texas Democrats, 18 percent more ballots were cast in Travis County and the number of straight-ticket Democratic voters went up 54 percent. “There was nothing fancy about it,” Brown says. “It was a really well-run field program.”

A similar strategy has also worked wonders in Dallas. In 2006, Democrats in Texas’s oldest Republican stronghold bucked convention by spending as much on phone-banking and door-to-door campaigning as on media ads and mailers. The results were stunning: Democrats swept all 47 local offices, including 40 judgeships that had previously belonged to Republicans.

But elsewhere, Texas Democrats have been slow to learn from Dallas’s example. The party’s most glaring failure has been in Harris County, home to Houston and the nation’s fourth-largest population. Harris County already looks like the Texas of the future; only 33 percent of its residents are white, while 41 percent are Latino, 19 percent are black, and 6 percent are Asian. Houston voters elected the first lesbian mayor of a major city, Democrat Annise Parker, in 2009. But in 2012, President Obama carried the county by a measly 971 votes, and Republicans remain competitive in local races. How is that possible? Because there’s a staggering number of voters who are eligible but unregistered—estimates run between 600,000 and 800,000.

Democrats can’t simply start knocking on doors in neighborhoods that have long been shunned, asking for votes and expecting results. The Latino Decisions election-eve poll showed the depths of Texas Democrats’ dysfunction: Only 25 percent of Texas Latinos had been contacted by a campaign, a political party, or a community organization of any kind—compared with 59 percent in Colorado, 51 percent in Nevada, and 48 percent in New Mexico.

Harris County Democrats and Battleground Texas volunteers will have to start making calls and venturing into minority neighborhoods for the first time in decades. The effort has, at least, belatedly begun. Houston elected a new Democratic chair in 2011, Lane Lewis, who is focusing the party for the first time on Dallas-style field organizing. Lewis estimates that if the party registers 120,000 new nonwhite voters, it will result in 80,000 more people going to the polls. “We’re already block-walking,” Lewis says. “We’ve already had phone banks this year.” But his field team is not just trying to woo new voters; Democratic staffers and volunteers are participating year-round in projects like building a community garden in the tough Independence Heights neighborhood, an effort to show that the party cares about more than winning votes.

If Democrats can galvanize Houston’s nonvoters, they will be well on their way to turning Texas blue. But all those years of ignoring minorities will make it a formidable task. “You’ve got to commit at least ten years,” Antonio Gonzalez says. “It takes at least ten years to undo twenty years of neglect.”

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'Miradas' reveals how Mexican artists confronted modernity after Revolution

By Steve Bennett
sbennett@express-news.net

San Antonio's Witte Museum marked the centennial of the Mexican Revolution last year with its multifaceted exhibition “1910: A Revolution Across Borders.” Now the venerable institution examines the artistic legacy of that earth-shattering rip in society's fabric with a seismic summer show that traces the development of Mexican art over the past 80 years in some 100 works.

“Miradas: Mexican Art From the Bank of America Collection” features paintings, prints and photography by 32 artists, including Diego Rivera, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide and Rufino Tamayo, as well as contemporary artists such as Alejandro Colunga, Judithe Hernandez and Luis Jiménez.

“The ‘Revolution' show was very gritty,” says Marise McDermott, Witte president. “It really captured the violence of those times. This one explores the explosion of art across the U.S.-Mexico border.”

According to Cesáreo Moreno, chief curator and visual director at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, a furor of post-Revolution nationalism fueled the engines of creativity as Mexican artists rediscovered their country's past and peered ahead into its future.

“At the close of the war, an era of peace was ushered in gradually, with a different political order, a strong sense of nationalism — known as Mexicanidad (Mexican-ness) — and newfound social goals,” says Moreno, organizer of “Miradas,” a touring show culled from one of the country's strongest corporate collections. “Artists sought to develop an artistic language that could convey their sense of modernity in an increasingly industrialized world.”

Among the outlets of expression was a cultural movement known as Indigenismo (Indigenism or Indianism), Moreno says, pointing to “Miradas” paintings by Jean Charlot, a Zapotec mestizo born in Paris in 1898, and Guatemala native Carlos Mérida's series of lithographs reimagining the creation myths of the Popol Vuh.

“Artists and writers who participated in this movement explored their national heritage and proudly included in their work aspects of ancient Mesoamerican culture,” he says.

The Mexican mural movement emerged from the Revolution as well, and Los Tres Grandes (The Three Giants) — Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros — became Mexico's artistic ambassadors, global beacons who championed indigenous culture and the rights of the common man, even as they adopted and adapted international avant garde theories and methods.

Although a meditative suite of later (1968) Siqueiros lithographs dealing with family (“Mother and Child”) and community (“Village Dance”) is included here, visitors will find only one work by Rivera, who, as Witte curator of collections Amy Fulkerson points out, has a long history with the museum.

“The Witte was the first venue in San Antonio to exhibit Rivera, in 1927, so it's a nice connection to our history,” Fulkerson says.

Rivera's 1932 lithograph “The Teacher — The Fruits of School,” which looks like a pencil drawing at first glance, is a sensual work that “employs the classicizing style of Italian Renaissance fresco alongside the smooth elongated forms favored by the Cubists,” Moreno writes in exhibition materials. “His symbolic image valorizes popular education and implies it is planting the seeds of the nation's future.”

Photography occupies a longstanding and important niche in the history of Mexican art, and no exhibition chronicling the 20th century would be complete without Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the influential photographer whose work is such an important window on the world, as well as being a bridge from the past to the present.

The images here, which span the years from 1927 to 1972, capture a sense of Mexican daily life that only Alvarez Bravo could, with his unique vision. His '30s portrait of Frida Kahlo is absolutely majestic.

The most striking photographs in “Miradas,” however, are by Graciela Iturbide, born in 1942, who apprenticed with Alvarez Bravo — and perhaps has surpassed the master. Iturbide's lens found one of Mexico's most iconic images, which she titled “Mujer angel (Angel Woman),” depicting a young woman navigating the Sonora Desert, presumably heading north, with a boom box in her hand. It compresses so much political information into a single image.

The Chicano movement is epitomized in the work of Judithe Hernandez. The pioneering artist is represented here by a strong 2008 pastel on paper work from her Manos de sangre series.

“Red Hand, Bloody Hand, Hand of Oppression” encompasses nine small facial portraits of women in a grid format, as if they are caged or jailed. Bloody handprints are splashed on eyes, mouths, cheeks or necks, reflecting the artist's concern about the abuse of women. It's difficult not to think of the hundreds mysteriously murdered along the border when contemplating Hernandez's disturbing piece.

Many other works are worth discussing in “Miradas”: “There truly is something for everyone in ‘Miradas,'” Fulkerson says.

Can't miss works include a suite of prints by Luis Jiménez (check out “Bronco I”; nobody captured equine fury like Jiménez); the surreal folk narrative paintings of Alejandro Colunga, leader of the Nueva Mexicanidad movement; the “Rodeo Drive” series of Cibachrome prints dealing with rampant consumerism and the inequity of wealth by Los Angeles artist Anthony Hernandez; the symbolic paintings of self-taught artist Raymundo Andrade, who holds degrees in medicine and history, a fact that obviously influences his allegorical work; and Ricardo Rendon's large multimedia installation “Trabajo Diario (Daily Work),” which takes up two walls and features 31 consecutive front pages of the tabloid periodical La Jornada from August 2007.

“Miradas” visitors can't fail to linger over Javier Chavira's “El guerrero (Warrior),” which dominates the entry foyer to the exhibition, and in many ways embodies the dominant themes of the show: Chavira is a young Mexican American artist educated in the Midwest who draws on traditional Mexican sources of imagery, including indigenous sculpture, the Catholic Church and native folk art.

“In addition to producing drawings and paintings,” Moreno says, “Chavira has executed murals on schools and other buildings. ‘The Warrior,' with its architectonically rendered, monumentally proportioned head of an indigenous male, is reminiscent of Chavira's murals.”

In Spanish, the word mirada usually refers to a quick glimpse, but in the case of “Miradas,” it also can evoke a longer look, a deep, captivating gaze.

“Miradas” runs through Aug. 21 at the Witte Museum, 3801 Broadway in San Antonio, Tejas.

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A Native Chicano Son Reflects on El Movimiento

BY GREGG BARRIOS

[Click header to go to original article source]

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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Dedicated to ‘Xicano' culture

[Click photo to enlarge. Article courtesy of My San Antonio.]

By Meredith Canales

Anisa Onofre and Juan Tejeda have been working on their small business — Aztlan Libre Press — for the last year.

Aztlan Libre Press opened in January. The couple said their daughter Maya Quetzalli, is the inspiration for one of the independent publishing company's newest projects, a new coloring book titled, “Aztec Calendar Coloring Book.”

“We decided to do a coloring book based on the Nahuatl language,” said Tejeda.

He added, “We wanted our daughter to know part of her culture, and the symbols looked so simple we thought we could use them for a coloring book.”

Aztlan Libre's first endeavor, a book and tour for celebrated Chicano poet Alurista, went well, said Onofre. They are hoping Aztlan's second project will get off the ground in a similar way.

“Juan saw the Sun Stone in Mexico at the Museo Nacional de Antropología and has always admired those depictions on the stone,” she said. “He wanted a way of introducing the Aztec language, Nahuatl, to children, combining it with Spanish and English to make it easier to understand.”

Tejeda said when he began studying the images, he realized they might easy to teach to his 3 year-old daughter.

“They were so simple and fantastic,” he said.

Nahuatl is not a language Tejeda speaks fluently, and he's aware not many other people in the United States speak it either. He said many people in Mexico still speak Nahuatl.

“I took a class at The University of Texas a while back, and I know a lot of words. This is kind of a process of recovery for one of the many indigenous languages of Mexico,” he said.

Another Aztlan project titled, “Nauhaliiandoing Dos,” is an anthology of poetry in Nahuatl, English and Spanish.

A fourth project, also in the works, is a collection of poems from Reyes Cardenas, whom Onofre said she has greatly admired for years.

“He's been writing for 30 or 40 years, and Juan has known him for quite a while,” she said. “I just got to met him when Alurista was in town. He came to our home for the tour, and we took it from there. We don't think he's received as much attention as he's deserved.”

The couple's passion for art came from their own creativity, said Tejeda.

“Anisa and I are both writers, and she's the director of writers and communities at Gemini Ink,” he said. “It was always a dream of ours to start an independent publishing Chicano publishing company.”

Tejeda added, “We have received so many (written works) that it just proves there's a great need for more Chicano publishing houses to publish our stories, novels, drama and poetry.”

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Baldo co-creator big hit at Lyceum Series (Victoria, Tejas)

[Photo by Maya Cantu. Click to enlarge.]

He may be a great writer and cartoonist but judging by the reactions Thursday at the Victoria College Lyceum Series, Hector Cantu may have missed his calling as a stand-up comedian. The co-creator of the nationally syndicated comic "Baldo" had the audience in stitches as he shared his stories of growing up, how Baldo came to be and how he deals with hate mail.

One of the biggest influences in Cantu's life happened after his family moved to Crystal City, at the height of the Chicano Power Movement when he was 10, he said. Being surrounded by all these characters and powerful people, Cantu's childhood heroes included Cesar Chavez and Spiderman, the latter of whom had "a more colorful costume."

"It was also at this time that I was reading comics like crazy and Mad Magazine, which I never put down. I remember my dad would tell me 'Come on, we're going to the Chicano Power Rally,' and I'd say 'Again, dad?' So I'd bring the magazine with me and read it while I was there," Cantu said as he mimed reading while half-heartedly pumping his fist and chanting. "And then there was the time Cesar Chavez was in Crystal City and didn't have a place to sleep. My dad offered him my bed and the part I remember is being pissed some man kicked me out of my bed. Sure, it was Cesar Chavez but I didn't care. I still had to sleep on the couch."

Cantu added that one of the things his childhood heroes, which also included Spy vs. Spy creator Antonio Prohias, taught him was to set your own destiny and that you have to decide what you want to do and not let anyone else decide.

Eventually Cantu followed his own heart and become a journalist.

"Although I was writing non-fiction, I always kept my eye on the comics. The guys on the comics page always seemed to have a lot more fun," he said.

It was after moving to California in the late 90s and meeting Carlos Castellanos that the two came up with Baldo, the first nationally syndicated comic strip featuring a Latino-American family. Cantu added that some of the things that make Baldo different from other comic strips is that he gleans storylines from current news stories, e-mails from readers, and his own life experiences, as well as making use of playful language.

"I play with language a lot. For example, in one comic I used the word 'impalated,' which is a trancelike state induced by the sight of a '64 Chevy Impala," he said.

Of course, Cantu isn't afraid to take on more serious topics. When high schools across the country were having walkouts to protest immigration laws, Cantu did a comic in which the same thing happened at Baldo's high school.

"I got tons of e-mail on that one, most of it telling me to go back to Mexico," he added.

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The State of Latin American Art

Dr Mari Carmen Ramirez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art and Director, International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, discusses Latin American Art at the Aspen Ideas Festival

What follows are my notes based on a talk given by Dr. Mari Carmen Ramirez at the Aspen Ideas Festival, July 10, 2010:

The ICAA:
The International Center for Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston is a unique resource center for the study of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art. Established in 2001, its mission is to transform perceptions of Latin American and Latino Art and open new avenues of intercultural dialogue and exchange. The ICAA's signature initiative is the Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project whose web-based digital archive - which is scheduled to launch in the Fall of 2011 - will provide free universal access to key writings by artists, artistic movements, critics, and curators from Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the United States.

The Problem:
Much of Latin American and Latino Art of the 20th century is poorly documented. The market, particularly the international market, for much of the work was not developed until relatively recently. For example, Sotheby's only created a category for Latin American Art in 1979 and there is no category or mainstream market for Latino art. An accessible resource that taps into the intellectual foundations of this art is needed.

The ICAA at Houston is now ten years old.

Our principal goals are to:
Recover and digitally publish primary and critical documents relevant to Latin American and Latino art of the 20th Century.

Provide open access to these documents for all those interested in 20th century Latin American and Latino Art.

Publish selections of these documents in the form of thematic anthologies that will complement the digital archive.

Establish a dynamic digital archive and research program devoted to providing a sound basis of scholarship for this work.

Recovery:
As part of our efforts we have initiated a systematic effort to recover original documents relevant to Latin American and Latino Art of the 20th century. This effort is encompassed by the ICAA's Documents Project. These include key documents from the artist's own papers and collections as well as contemporaneous press and art criticism. Our work is made difficult by a precarious infrastructure in many of the countries, poor distribution and lack of policies aimed at preserving books, archival material, and key documents.

Curate:
To address these and other issues we have created a "think tank" comprised of scholars and experts on the art produced along this cultural axis who generously contribute their expertise and are helping the ICAA further our goal to preserve and make accessible documents that will change perceptions of Latin American and Latino art. To date, the Center has published 11 books and catalogs and held 4 major international symposia.

Access:
We have established regional centers for the study of Latin American Art in 10 cities that include: Buenos Aires (Argentina), Santiago/Valparaiso (Chile), São Paulo (Brazil), Lima (Peru), Caracas (Venezuela), Bogotá (Colombia), Mexico City, Los Angeles, South Bend (Indiana), and Houston. The project also has research affiliates in San Juan (Puerto Rico), Miami, and New York. In each location we recover documents, scan and digitize them, catalogue and annotate them. Beginning in Fall 2011, we will make them all publicly available, free of charge, in the project's specially designed Website. Through this monumental undertaking, we are creating a "multinational super information highway."

This data is intended to provide a sound intellectual foundation for the long-term growth and development of the field of Latin American and Latino art. Our hope is that this archive will help fill gaps in the worldwide knowledge and appreciation of this art as well provide the necessary research tools for scholars, students, collectors, museum and arts professional, and anyone else interested in this art.

Scholarship:
At present we have over 100 researchers distributed amongst the ten project sites. Our headquarters are in Houston. The project's team members include senior and junior art historians, researchers, librarians, IT specialists, editors, translators, and administrators. We are governed by a 17-member Editorial Board and a 10-member steering committee. By the time we launch the project's website in Fall 2011 we will have a collection of over 10,000 critical document and more than 55,000 related images. We are committed to continue to expand this archive which, in theory at least, is limitless.

By art world standards, in which the perceived glamor resides in promoting artists and organizing exhibitions, the often tedious work of archiving and documenting is hardly enticing. The ICAA's work, in particular, is mostly behind the scenes and has an assembly line character. However, it fulfills the indispensable role of adding the crucial information and context to exhibitions and publications that enable a deeper appreciation of the art presented.

Several illustrations of the type of documents collected were shown in photos. These include photos artists at work, artists' notes, contemporary newspaper reviews, and gallery handouts.

Examples:
The profusely illustrated documents by Caracas' radical collective El Techo de la Ballena
-Luis Felipe Noé's art criticism of the 1950s (Argentina)
- Brazil's "Ruptura Manifesto"
-Documentation of a series of debates between Antonio Berni and David Alfaro Siqueiros in Argentina during 1933
- The precursory responses to a survey published in Havana's Revista de avance from 1927 to 1929 that debated the existence and definition of the concept of Latin American art
-The critical work of the Guatemala-born, Mexico City-based artist, Carlos Mérida that illuminates the work of other artists at a time when there was little established art criticism of their work.
-The recipes for colors and tonalities developed by Hélio Oiticica, the Brazilian avant-garde artist, for his Grand Nucleus installation (1960-68)

In 2011 we will launch the ICAA digital archive. The archive will be a free online resource for all. Simultaneous to the launching of the site, the ICAA will publish the first volume in the parallel Critical Documents of Latin American and Latino Art book series, 13 thematic anthologies that will provide English translations for documents from the online resource. Our hope is that the web-based archive and the book series will provide a visible space of Latin American Art in the United States and elsewhere and will transmit a rich legacy of knowledge to future generations.

Questions from the audience.

Q: Have we transcended the need for Latin American Specialists?
MCR: Absolutely not. Latin American Art is now mainstream yet there are still huge gaps in our understanding of the thousands of artists and movements at work in the more than twenty countries that make up the region throughout the 20th century. There is a lot of information out there about the contemporary manifestations of this art but very little serious historical scholarship. The field has grown horizontally yet lacks depth. This is what the ICAA's Documents Project is trying to address. We need a high degree of scholarship to support the understanding and appreciation of Latin American and Latino art in both its historical and contemporary manifestations.

Promoters of the global view argue that Latin American art is now global, yet we need to bear in mind that all art is both local and global. We cannot side-step the local and what it implies in terms of the contextual factors affecting the emergence and development of a particular form of art. Latin American art is no exception.

What is really at stake behind the "global" position is a market-driven, economic process that has transformed the status of Latin American art in contemporary artistic circuits. Globalization has turned Latin American art into a strategic economic resource. Over the last 10-15 year this art has become a favorite commodity in the current market, providing additional justification for careful scholarship and documentation. Curiously, all this attention has created a movement to re-regionalize, a tendency which calls for expert knowledge such as the one that the ICAA is trying to provide.

A persistent issue in the field is that Latin American art has traditionally been considered to be derivative. Those of us working in this field over the last three decades have set out to prove that this is not the case. Since the early 20th century, Latin American artists have engaged in original research. They have made important theoretical contributions to art and aesthetics and have produced forms of art that in many cases have anticipated important developments in Europe and the United States. To understand these developments we need to get roots of this art and understand its development in depth. This can only be done through key writings and other documentation that shed light on the intellectual process that nurtured the art. This is the ultimate goal of the ICAA Documents project.

Q: What is Latin American Art and what is Latino Art? How do they differ?
MCR: Latin American Art is an operational term used to describe art actually made in the more than twenty countries that make up Latin America and that encompass Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Latino art refers to the work of artists of Latin American origin (usually by birth, family ties, or education) who work primarily in the United States.

Q: Doesn't the term Latino Art unfairly segregate artists? After all do we call Pollock a Polish-American Artist or de Kooning a Dutch-American artist? What do we call artists of Latin American origin who were born in the US?
MCR: I do not believe that the term Latin American or Latino Art is segregating as we use it. As I have said, this is another pressing reason why we need to document this work and also, I believe, to study this art in the social milieu in which it arose, either in Latin America or the United States. We do want to understand the social context of the work. We do want to examine patterns of inversion or assimilation of received artistic tenets.
We call artists of Latin American origin living in the United States "Latinos." This is a political term that signals the largest ethnic majority in the United States at present. The use of this term does not segregate these artists, instead it brings attention upon their roots and cultural heritage. As an ascendant minority, these artists need legitimization. We do have Museums of African American Art in the United States and there is a National Museum of Women's Art. However, I believe Latinos are best served by displaying their art next to the art of other groups, particularly North American, European, and even Asian artists.

Q: Does your center also include architecture as art? Are you collecting original drawings by Latin American architects as does MOMA for example?
MCR: No. At the moment our collection does not include architecture.

Q: Will you extend your collection and research to Colonial Art of Latin America?
MCR: We may extend our collection to include colonial art, but have no plans at present to expand our research and documentation work in this area. Other institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Denver Art Museum have established programs dedicated to Colonial Art. We gain by dividing the effort.

Q: And Chicano Art?
MCR: Both our research and our collection include "Chicano Art" (the art of Mexican-Americans, mostly living in California, Texas and the Southwest). To that effect, we have partnered with other research centers devoted to Chicano Art, such as UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center and the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies.

Q: And Puerto Rican Art?
MCR: It is interesting that both Chicano and Puerto Rican art in the United States form an important part of the Civil Rights legacy and dialog. The Documents Project has actively collected documentation on both island-based Puerto Rican art as well as Nuyorican art in the United States through partnerships and researchers ceded at the University of Puerto Rico's museum in San Juan and Hunter College's Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York City, respectively.

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