A Horse of a Different Color Divides Denver

[Photo of Luis Jimenez's Horse Sculpture at the Denver Airport - Click on photo to view larger. Click on headline to go to the WSJ and see more photos and original article]

Blue Mustang Sculpture Shocks Visitors, Perturbs Poets; 'Because of This Thing, People Think They Are in Hell'

By STEPHANIE SIMON

Wall Street Journal

The mustang rears on splayed hind legs -- his nostrils flaring, his eyes glowing red, his taut body a slick, sweaty sheen of blue. Anatomically correct -- eye-poppingly so -- the 32-foot-tall fiberglass sculpture makes quite a statement at the gateway to Denver International Airport.

But that begs the question: What kind of statement, exactly?

"It looks like it's possessed," says Denver resident Samantha Horoschak. "I have a huge fear of flying anyway, and to be greeted at the airport by a demon horse -- it's not a soothing experience."

Many people here agree, calling the muscular steed a terrifying welcome to the Mile High City.

Now a local developer, Rachel Hultin, has launched a campaign to get the wild horse moved so it isn't the first thing visitors to Denver see. In the past month, Ms. Hultin has signed up about 7,600 supporters on her Facebook page, Bye Bye Blue Mustang. This week she dropped off 200 protest haiku at the mayor's office. (Sample verse: Because of this thing / People think they are in hell / Instead of Denver.)

But uprooting public art turns out to be quite tricky. Especially a piece as emotionally freighted -- and as critically acclaimed -- as Mustang.

The Denver airport commissioned the sculpture in 1992 from Luis Jimenez, a widely honored artist known for melding Chicano themes and Western history in exuberant sculpture. The airport is full of public art, most of it much tamer -- silver pinwheels in a tram tunnel, a fleet of sky-colored paper airplanes. The mustang was to be a symbol of Denver and the West.

Mr. Jimenez was killed working on the sculpture. In 2006, while he was hoisting pieces of the mustang for final assembly in his New Mexico studio, the horse's massive torso swung out of control and crushed the 65-year-old artist. Mr. Jimenez's widow and children helped finish the sculpture, and it was installed last February at the airport, at a cost to the city of $650,000.

'Built With Love'

"You look at the piece and you just know it was built with love," says the artist's widow, Susan Jimenez.

The jabs flung at the mustang by amateur critics -- who have described it as "mean," "scary," and "like the Ringwraith horse from 'Lord of the Rings' " -- perplex Ms. Jimenez. She says she's disappointed that people don't seem to grasp her husband's intent.

The eyes are light-emitting diodes, which burn red like taillights. They are an homage to Mr. Jimenez's father, who ran a neon-sign studio in El Paso, Texas, she says. The well-articulated body, laced with bulging black veins, pays tribute to a mighty breed that Mr. Jimenez saw as a symbol of freedom, strength and the American West.

When she looks at the mustang, framed against the wide prairie sky, Ms. Jimenez thinks of her husband petting his beloved appaloosa, Blackjack. "I know he didn't mean anything demonic by it," she said. "I'm sorry if people are afraid of ribs on a horse."

Mr. Jimenez's sculptures grace museums and public squares all over the country: rugged Mexican cowboys, or vaqueros; dancing señoritas in ruffled skirts; a huge purple ox; weary migrants. His "Southwest Pieta" -- which depicts a Native American bent over the body of a woman with flowing hair -- was designated a national treasure during the Clinton administration.

Awash in carnival colors, the sculptures may look like they've popped out of a comic book, but they're imbued with deep emotion and stamped with the history of a people and a culture, says Betsy Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.

"His is not a quiet, meditative, reflective art," Ms. Broun says. "It's an art that says, 'This is important!' and reaches out to grab your attention."

Firm Support

Most cities have had controversies over public art, but Ms. Broun says she's shocked to hear that anyone opposes the Denver Mustang. "It's fabulous," she says firmly.

Many Denver citizens beg to differ.

"When they unwrapped it, I was just horrified," says Dena McClung, who watched from the airport tower, where she worked as an air-traffic controller until her recent retirement. "It makes me feel like I'm looking at something out of a science-fiction movie."

A list of nicknames suggested last year by readers of the Rocky Mountain News ran from Beelzebub's Blue Bay to Satan's Stallion. The protest haiku drew on similar themes, as in this one:

Ugly devil horse
horrifies the traveler
shames our fair city

"It's disturbing," says Nancy Harris, a Denver painter. "As an artist myself, I totally respect the artist's vision. But I don't think it's representative of the Denver community."

Mr. Jimenez's stallions have sparked uproars before. A much smaller (and more muted) version of the blue mustang "caused quite a stir" when installed at the University of Oklahoma's art museum in 1997, says Susan Baley, a curator. "It just didn't fit peoples' definition of public sculpture," she says.

Mr. Jimenez appeared on the campus to respond to the complaints in person, drawing an audience of 700, a record crowd for the art museum. The sculptor's charisma, passion and humor won over many of his detractors, Ms. Baley says. (It didn't hurt, either, that the museum moved the sculpture to a less-prominent location.)

"It's become a local landmark," Ms. Baley says. "People have adjusted."

Denver officials are hoping for a similar response. City rules require any public-art installation to remain in place for at least five years, to honor the artist's intent and give the work a chance to grow on the public.

Resigned to looking at it for at least the next few years, Ms. Hultin, the leader of the anti-Mustang campaign, now plans to launch a public-education effort to demystify the sculpture.

Art Workshops

She envisions brochures in the Denver airport, articles in in-flight magazines, and plaques describing the artist's style and intent mounted along concourse walls. She'd even like to hold workshops for taxi and shuttle-bus drivers so they can respond to startled comments from visitors coming across the mustang for the first time.

Her goal: Instead of being scared, "when people see it, they'll be like, 'Oh, that's interesting,' " she says.

Erin Trapp, director of the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, hopes for more enthusiasm than that. She says the city has logged plenty of nasty calls about the statue, but also many glowing comments from fans who find it clever and powerful. The passion on both sides thrills her, and she hopes it doesn't fade.

"The point of art is not just to make beautiful public spaces but also to engage people," Ms. Trapp says. "That's when we know we've had a success -- when people care."

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Write to Stephanie Simon at stephanie.simon@wsj.com

Photographer's work informed by culture, childhood

By DANIEL FOSTER
Special to The Press-Enterprise

Few photographers in the Inland Empire have as prolific a body of work in fine and documentary photography as Jesus Garza, a resident of Riverside. Garza has pursued his love of critically observing and documenting the world around him since he was eight years old -- almost a half century.

As a photographer, artist and organizer, Garza's photography has been informed by his upbringing in the migrant labor camps of the Santa Clara Valley in the 1950s and '60s.

Reflecting on his cultural roots and the inherent power of a photograph to communicate and educate the public, Garza said, "From the beginning, my images have as their source my migrant farm worker heritage and my immersion in the dynamic political and artistic culture of El Movimiento, the political movement that emerged during the mid-60s seeking social justice. ... Through photography, I explored the dynamic Chicano culture of the (19)70s."

Over a long photographic career, Garza has turned the camera's eye toward many subjects -- always with a confident and insightful view about the "truth" within the subject. Garza's documentary photos are included in national exhibitions in addition to books, publications and collections.

Garza came to the Inland Empire when his wife, Dr. Ann Marie Leimer, accepted a professorship at the University of Redlands with expertise in Latin American/Hispanic/Chicano art in 2005. Previously, Garza lived in San Francisco and Austin, Texas.

Since arriving in the region, Garza has mounted two photographic exhibitions at San Bernardino Valley College and University of Redlands in the past two years. For more information about Jesus Garza, visit his Web site at www.jmmgarza.com

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For more information about the Artist Spotlight, please contact Daniel Foster, The Community Foundation at 951-684-4194 or DFoster@thecommunityfoundation.net.

Chicanas: Loud and Proud

Photo: Self Portrait Speaking Fire and Flowers by Maya Gonzalez

Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas at 516 Arts, Albuquerque, NM

By Erin Adair-Hodges

Self Portrait Speaking Fire and Flowers by Maya Gonzalez part of her desire to “demonstrate the history of Chicana artists.” A photographer, Montoya co-curated the show at 516 Arts with Laura E. Perez, a professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. They noted a legacy of several generations of artists that was largely unknown. “What I wanted to do,” Montoya says, “was bring in those women of the first generation and then the subsequent generations.” The result is a show that sees contemporary Chicana art as the latest permutation of a conversation that began with the civil rights and feminist movements.

Las Hociconas translates as “large” or “loudmouthed.” It's fair to say that much of the featured art is exactly that, swelling with how much it has to share. Part of what Montoya calls the “extension of the vocabulary” of how we talk about sex and race is the examination of a group's central icons. For Chicanas, that icon is la Virgen de Guadalupe. Guadalupe is often seen as not only a religious figure, but the ultimate role model for Hispanic women.

The difference between the generations becomes apparent in their interpretation of the Virgin. Montoya describes it as such: For the first generation, she is largely untouched, kept in altar spaces, intact. It was Yolanda Lopez' portrayal of Mary in running shoes, sprinting from her altar, that signaled the arrival of a second generation. Guadalupe was a significant force in the shaping of the identities of this next generation, and they tended to recast Mary from an icon of impossible purity to one of modern strength and attitude. The third generation still holds the Virgin as an important cultural touchstone but seems more concerned with the introduction of new faces. That's why, as part of the Chicana Badgirls show, you'll see depictions of Ugly Betty, Selena and Sandra Cisneros alongside la Virgen of Guadalupe.

Along with wall art and installations, Chicana Badgirls brings in fabric work. “Fabric is a large part of Chicana domesticity,” Montoya says. “[Sewing] was very much a part of how Latinas learned to be women.” As part of this focus, the opening reception will feature the work of fabric artist and clothing designer Elisa Jimenez (Season 4 of “Project Runway”). Models styled by Inspire Salon will catwalk through the gallery wearing Jimenez' creations, each of which will then be hung and sold, with a portion of the proceeds going to support 516 Arts.

When I ask Montoya how she sees Chicana art 15 years from now, she laughs and says, “Cyberspace.” Younger artists, such Tina Hernandez and Rosa Zamora, are using technology and the Internet as a lens through which to view the world and shape their expectations, resulting in work that asks different questions than that of two generations before. Montoya holds that “an artist takes in where they're at—time, place ... influences.” And so, the range of work in Chicana Badgirls is stunning.

“This is a show that had to happen,” Montoya says, and she thanks Suzanne Sbarge, executive director of 516 Arts, for hosting the exhibit. “Not everyone has a voice, and that's what this show wants to do. We can look at ourselves now.”

For more info, call 242-1445 or go to 516arts.org.

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Chicana, Chicano studies has grown with UCLA

Now a full-fledged department, the field has developed through many years of student support

By Neha Jaganathan

When Carlos Manuel Haro stepped into the Rieber dining hall in 1965 and noticed that he was the only minority student, he was motivated to join a newly born cultural and academic movement which now puts UCLA in the position to be the third university in the country to offer master’s and doctorate programs in Chicana and Chicano studies.

“Once you have an undergraduate major and graduate program, you can say the department has now fully arrived,” said Alicia Gaspar de Alba, current chair of the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies.

Gaspar de Alba said that two weeks ago, the proposal for the graduate program cleared the first of many steps in the academic review process after being unanimously approved by the Faculty Executive Committee.

Haro, a postdoctoral scholar at the Chicano Studies Research Center, has been at UCLA since 1965 and said the academic field has come a long way since that time.

“Given that my initial introduction to UCLA was a sense of being a bit lonely ... where I could identify one or two (other Chicano students) as I walked around campus, that’s a dramatic change to today.”

But the birth of the César E. Chávez Department, as well as the creation of the Chicano Studies Research Center, was not without several challenges and obstacles, all of which were overcome by student activism.

In 1966, Haro attended the first ever meeting of Chicano students, which was organized after another undergraduate student manually sorted through information cards in Kerckhoff Hall to find individuals with Spanish last names.

Haro said the meeting, though only attended by 11 students, gave rise to the larger full-fledged organization United Mexican-American Students, which started in 1967.

“The organization, although initially one of social interaction, became much more important as we started to take on issues that were of concern,” Haro said.

The organization began to focus on issues such as under-representaton of minority groups on campus, mentoring support and increasing financial aid, Haro said.

Reynaldo Macias, currently the acting dean of the Department of Social Sciences, was also a student at UCLA in the late 1960s, and as a member of UMAS, was involved in the Chicana/o movement on campus.

Mecias said the summer of ’68 saw several meetings of planning- and agenda-setting committees, one of which resulted in what was then called the Mexican-American Research Center.

In particular, the research center was the result of an intra-university effort called the Plan de Santa Barbara, when students from several campuses met at UC Santa Barbara to lay the foundations for a research center, Haro said.

The research center, which was created in 1969, eventually led to the formation of an interdepartmental Chicana and Chicano studies program in 1973, according to the research center.

But the interdepartmental program had several deficiencies, Gaspar de Alba said.

In an interdepartmental program, faculty members have other primary commitments to the departments in which they were actually hired.

The interdepartmental program underwent significant change in 1993, when student protesting followed a refusal by Chancellor Young to grant full department status to Chicana and Chicano studies.

The protest involved a hunger strike and sit-in in May of 1993, during which time more than 90 students were arrested, according to the research center.

As a result of the hunger strike, Chancellor Young created the César Chávez Center in June of 1993, Gaspar de Alba said.

The Center acted as a quasi-department, able to perform most of the functions of a department without the legitimacy of the label, Gaspar de Alba said.

“It was an experiment by the administration to see whether (Chicana and Chicano) studies would hold up as an autonomous unit,” she said.

She furthered that this quasi-department faced a lot of initial challenges, including poor leadership and resistance from student organizations which wanted a different set of faculty members.

“It’s a phoenix department because it rose from the ashes of its previous incarnation.”

In June of 2005, Chicana and Chicano Studies officially became a department, Haro said.

“That was historical, not only because the administration was finally meeting the primary hunger strike agreement, but because we were fleshing out the vision of students in 1969,” Gaspar de Alba said.

But she said the department was originally named the Undergraduate Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies and only since 2007 has been known by its current name, the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies.

While most scholars agree that the field of Chicana and Chicano studies has come a long way in the last 50 years, they also feel that it still has many goals to accomplish.

“At the college level, programs have to expand. They are limited in terms of the number of students they can accept,” Hora said.

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Sephardic Ancestry Common Among Spaniards, Study Says

[Click graphic to enlarge]

By Nicholas Wade, The NY Times 

Spain and Portugal have a history of fervent Catholicism, but almost a third of the population now turns out to have a non-Christian genetic heritage. Some 20 percent of the present population of the Iberian peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and 11 percent bear Moorish DNA signatures, a team of geneticists reports.

The genetic signatures reflect the forced conversions to Christianity in the 14th and 15th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control.

The new finding bears on two very different views of Spanish history: one holds that Spanish civilization is Catholic and all other influences are foreign, the other that Spain has been enriched by drawing from all three of its historical cultures, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim.

The genetic study, based on an analysis of Y chromosomes, was conducted by a team of biologists led by Mark A. Jobling of the University of Leicester in England and Francesc Calafell of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

The biologists developed a Y chromosome signature for Sephardic men by studying Sephardic Jewish communities in places where Jews migrated after being expelled from Spain in 1492-1496. They also characterized the Y chromosomes of the Arab and Berber army that invaded Spain in 711 AD from data on people now living in Morocco and Western Sahara.

After a period of forbearance under the Arab Umayyad dynasty, Spain entered a long period of religious intolerance, with its Muslim Berber dynasties forcing both Christians and Jews to convert to Islam, and the victorious Christians then expelling Jews and Muslims or forcing both to convert. The new genetic study , reported online Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics, indicates there was a high level of conversion among Jews.
Jonathan S. Ray, a professor of Jewish studies at Georgetown University

, said that a high proportion of people with Sephardic ancestry was to be expected. “Jews formed a very large part of the urban population up until the great conversions,” he said.

The genetic analysis is “very compelling,” said Jane S. Gerber, an expert on Sephardic history at the City University of New York , and weighs against scholars who have argued there were very few Jewish conversions to Christianity.

Dr. Ray raised the question of what the DNA evidence might mean on a personal level. “If four generations on I have no knowledge of my genetic past, how does that affect my understanding of my own religious association?”

The issue is one that has confronted Dr. Calafell, an author of the study. His own Y chromosome is probably of Sephardic ancestry — the test is not definitive for individuals — and his surname is from a town in Catalonia; Jews undergoing conversion often took surnames from place names.

Jews first settled in Spain during the early years of the Roman empire. Sephardic Jews are so-called after the Hebrew word for Spain, Sepharad.

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Ben's Story

Photo: Ben on bass, his son Benjy on maraca eggs and Adrian Vargas on guitar.

By Ben Cadena

I wrote this about a couple of young Chicanas working at local retail grocery stores. I am an old brown trout who played with Flor del Pueblo that warm summer day, August 29,1970 at the Chicano Moratorium. I played the guittarron as we played Pancho Villa and the Police started a riot with the tear gas and clubs. What a welcome, pero asi va. Now I'm back at SJSU after dropping out 43 years ago to join Teatro Campesino.

The Young Women

They take care of other peoples’ kids to make ends meet. They work in retail at creameries and as cashiers in grocery stores that pay minimum wages. They are thankful to have the work, many are turned away and some are let go for being too slow.

This is the fate of those who don’t have legal status in this country, but it is their own countrymen that hire them at minimum wage without checking too closely the legality of their documents. These young women complain that they pay taxes also but get no refund.

According to a couple of young retail workers in local supermarkets, they like the work. Joanie stated “I can pay my college tuition and help my mom with the bills.” She said the flexible hours allowed her to go to classes and she is in the cashier position, which is highly sought after.

Juana the other worker likes the staff but said “I need more hours than the six hours they are giving me daily.” This is done to not pay benefits. She also stated that sometimes “I have to throw away my lunch because there is not enough time to eat.

This is the way of today’s female workers. Take what you can get and be grateful because there is always someone else to take your place. Some people say it doesn’t matter anyway, they are all illegal, but we all benefit from their labor, the working upper-class mothers who can afford child care, those men that don’t like to mow their lawns; we all benefit.

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Save Self Help Graphics

Come to hear what's going on with Self Help Graphics; what are future plans and upcoming events; and how you can help. Come to the community meeting on December 17, 2008 at 7 p.m.

Self Help Graphics
3802 Cesár Chávez Avenue
East Los Angeles, CA 90063

http://www.selfhelpgraphics.com

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An Historic Election

A Chance For Change

Larry Cox
Executive Director
Amnesty International USA

Waking up this morning was like waking up to a new era. That’s because many of us remember a time when activities were segregated by race, whether going to the movies or riding a bus.

And then yesterday, the biggest racial barrier in American politics was annihilated. By record margins, America elected Barack Obama the first African-American president of the United States.

Hope overcame fear. Ordinary citizens mobilized to change the future. This is the heart of Amnesty International. Since 1961, we’ve held out hope for those enduring injustice, when all hope was lost. And through the power of your collective actions, hundreds of thousands now enjoy greater freedom and a safer, more just world.

A record 131 million people cast their vote and exercised one of the most fundamental of human rights. But as Barack Obama said last night,

"This victory alone is not the change we seek--it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you."

We have a great opportunity. The world faces overwhelming human rights crises. But with your help, we can turn this country’s policies on human rights back in the direction of alleviating, and not contributing, to these crises.

President-elect Obama has promised to restore the rule of law, to repair America’s damaged perception in the world, to close Guantánamo, and to renounce torture.

These promises bring hope. In the coming days, we will need you to help make those promises a reality.

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UCSB Fulbright Scholars to Study in Spain and Germany

Two UC Santa Barbara faculty members have received Fulbright fellowships to study in Europe during the 2008-09 academic year. In addition, the Fulbright Scholar Program has awarded grants to nine university professors from around the world who will conduct research at UCSB during the same time period.

UCSB's recipients include Mario T. García, a professor of history and Chicana and Chicano studies; and Paul Russell Spickard, professor of history.

García will spend winter and spring quarters at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid where he will teach a graduate seminar on the Chicano/Latino historical experience. García's expertise includes mass immigration from Mexico, the development of immigrant communities, civil rights struggles, oral history, and, more recently, Chicano Catholic history.

A specialist in United States and world history, and race and immigration, Spickard will spend the entire year at the University of Muenster in Germany. He will lecture on race, immigration, and citizenship in United States history and in American popular culture. Also, he will conduct research on the ways that Germany and other European nations are coming to grips with the fact that their populations are beginning to include many different peoples.

Fulbright scholars from abroad who are studying at UCSB this year include Tine A.A.A. Breban of Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium; Inigo Novales Flamarique of Simon Fraser University in Canada; Robert Helan of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic; Phuong Thi Minh Huynh of the University of Dalat in Vietnam; Robert Mann of the University of Waterloo in Canada; Karolina Siskova of the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry at the Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic; Tolya Angelova Stoitsova of New Bulgarian University in Bulgaria; Dongfeng Wang of Sun- Yat-sen University in China; and Alejandra Silvia Vidal of the National University of Formosa in Argentina.

The Fulbright Scholar Program, sponsored by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, is America's flagship international educational exchange program. Since its inception in 1946, the Fulbright Program has sponsored approximately 273,500 American and foreign scholars. Recipients are selected based on academic or professional achievement as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields.

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Computer-aided Chicano Artist Ignacio Farías

If art isn’t free, then what is it, asks local artist Ignacio Farías.

By Shannon O'Connor
The Zonie Report

Farías, 61, is a self-taught Chicano artist who creates abstract works using digital composition with acrylics and paints. His sole intention for his work is only to be beautiful, and he makes no bones about being called a “wall decorator” or using a computer to help create his works.

Born and raised in Mexico City, Farías began drawing things as a child. He said he was always in trouble at school for drawing caricatures of teachers and doodling in class.

He moved to Arizona in 1983 with his first wife, a native Arizonan, and their children. His techniques and unique styles come from experimentation and his only standard is to rarely, if ever, use a paintbrush.

“(In the beginning), I felt reluctant to use brushes,” Farías says. “Everyone uses brushes so I had to find another way.”

Instead, he uses a variation of tools that ranges from kitchen and carving utensils to spatulas, ice picks, combs and syringes. The only consistent marking that can be found on his works that were made with a brush is his signature, which he said enabled him to sign his name in a unique, Asian-looking style.

But it was his other hobbies, such as photography and advertising, that led to the use of digital composition in his artwork.

These tools of the 21st Century are the reason that Farías refers to his work as the product of “extreme mix media.” He says he’s a PC guy who uses a Velocity and plenty of Adobe software to bring his artistic visions to life.

Although the use of a computer may help with artistic effects, it doesn’t necessarily make the process go faster, Farías says. Much of the process involves the subconscious mind.

“Inspiration is not related,” Farías says. “Art is like a blessed area where the most beautiful things can happen. Never mind what is outside.”

Farías’ works are often created as a series, such as “The Eyes of a Woman,” which has about 80 different versions.

“No two women have the same eyes,” Farías said. “(They are) like fingerprints.”

Each displays the different types of women in the world. However, a few of them have an animal name that identifies the type of woman it depicts according to the Mesoamerican culture of Mexico. For example, the painting called “Eagle Woman Eyes” is a depiction of the “executive woman.”

Some of his other works are depicted on multiple canvases, such as “A Fascinating City,” which was done as an ode to Paris. This work is a display of five separate canvases that are displayed inches apart from one another but are connected by the flow of the elongated picture that they depict.

Link to Ignacio Farías website: http://www.ignaciofarias.com/
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Queering the Movimiento

Gregg Barrios's Theater of the Repressed, Recovered, and Revolutionized
BY B.V. OLGUÍN

San Antonio Current

Photo by Justin Parr

When bleached-blond Danny De La Paz rollerbladed onto a minimalist stage at Our Lady of the Lake University on August 13, 2005, wearing a glass tiara, a muscle T-shirt, and tight, bulging shorts while Brian Adams’ campy anthem “Heaven” played in the background, you knew this wasn’t gonna be just another Chicano gangbanger story.

The actor who debuted as the ill-fated cholo Chuco in the classic gang saga Boulevard Nights, and later played a fratricidal Mexican Mafia assassin in American Me, is all grown up and out of the closet in Gregg Barrios’s play I-DJ Mofomixmaster.

De La Paz opened the one-night stand with an adaptation from Hamlet:

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.”

With a perfectly delivered comic pause and femme aside, he deadpans: “Weren’t you expecting Shakesqueer?”

This seemingly dissonant appropriation of the Bard’s classic work of existential angst to explore the 1970s Los Angeles dance-club scene enables a provocative queering of Chicano identity and even British literary history.

“After all, Hamlet is a play within a play,” De La Paz’s character reminds us. “How queer is that?!”

Barrios’s Shakespeare gloss provided an unexpectedly good staging device for a drama about an aging DJ who recalls how his search for validation as a Chicano on West Coast airways coincided with his coming out. The storyline is simple yet profound: A young gay Chicano wants to proclaim his existence by joining the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and ’70s — el Movimiento — but his fellow Chicano activists respond by paraphrasing Eldridge Cleaver’s outrageous party line, that the only position for a woman or a fag in our movement is the lateral position.

The play documents a burgeoning love between the DJ and his neophyte (played by South San Antonio high-school student Jimmy Villa), who resist the binary logic of the axiom that to be Queer means not to be Chicano. After the romance is broken up by a different type of gangbanging — a viscerally disturbing rape scene — the play’s action unravels into a dark yet illuminating exploration of Chicano ontology. I-DJ is nothing less than a Chicano re-staging of Plato’s Symposium: The mascara-wearing Chicano DJ played by De La Paz does a lip-sync of Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way” while offering metaphysical meditations on the intersections of love, art, Chicano identity, and the ecstatic nature of true knowledge.

This theatrical dialogue with the highly masculine culture of the barrios of the Southwest, and the multiple communities within and beyond — whites, queers of all races, Chicano nationalists — is Gregg Barrios’s signature style in an oeuvre that spans six decades, five genres, and thousands of literary publications and journalism bylines. Barrios has made an art out of creating unlikely fusions and uncovering unexpected influences, collaborations, and liaisons.

Yet the adage that a genius is always unappreciated in his own backyard seems to hold true for Barrios. While I-DJ was published in 2007 in the 15th-anniversary double issue of the venerable Ollantay theater magazine, an expanded re-staging of this play still has not found a home despite the playwright’s success at attracting a Hollywood actor to play the lead role.

Until recently, the same was true of Barrios’s other theatrical works, even as his poetry received early recognition with the 1982 publication of his first collection, Puro Rollo. Prior to his recent hit play, Rancho Pancho (reviewed in the Current’s September 10-16, 2008 issue), Barrios had resigned himself to interstitial anonymity.

“I guess it must be my message,” he said in a recent interview. “Because it doesn’t fit neatly into any pre-established categories, few people want to stage my work. It’s too Chicano for the white venues, not Chicano enough for the Chicano venues, too queer for straight ones, not queer enough for the queer spaces, and just too much of this and not enough of that for everyone else.”

He may be right. Barrios’s work lies at the intersection of so many traditions, political perspectives, and identities it is hard to position it squarely within any single one. Yet Barrios isn’t exactly correct when he complains about a “brownout” and “closeting of Chicano theater” in San Antonio; he has produced two other plays locally, one of which was developed in a short-lived collaboration with the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center Gateway Grant. But one thing is certain: You either love Barrios’s work for its eclectic cultural fusions and unexpected storylines, or you hate it precisely because of these features.

It's all a matter of perspective

Gregg Barrios was born in Victoria, Texas, on Halloween 1945, and his first contact with the arts was at home. His father, Gregorio Barrios Sr., was a photographer and film projectionist in Victoria in the 1950s and ’60s. His photography recently was published in a father-and-son pairing in Dagobert Gilb’s bilingual multimedia text, Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature.

Barrios recalls how his father taught him about the most important element in all literary and visual arts: perspective.

“My father’s studio was next to the downtown bus station, which naturally attracted sojourners from the lower strata of society because it is the most economical way to travel,” he said. “There were bums, prostitutes, hustlers, quick-change artists, pachucos and street toughs, unemployed workers, and just ordinary working-class folks of all races trying to get from one place to another in their daily grind of survival.”

Barrios recalls how “[I] peeked into my father’s dark room once and found photos he had developed of naked men and women ... My father had become something of a fixer, as people would come to him for help with all sorts of problems and activities, legal and not-so-legal. I saw it all from my own little perch in the corner. This was my introduction to the world, from the margins and the bottom up.”

This early exposure to society’s outcasts lead to a lifelong quest for communion with the masses, but Barrios claims his poetry, theater, and journalism have always avoided a condescending or exoticist view. Rather, he seeks to understand and accurately represent his subjects as their ally, as one “who shares similar pains as well as broader joie de vivre.”

It’s also telling that Barrios’s first book review, written when he was a 16-year-old high-school student, was of The Gay Place, Billy Lee Brammer’s thinly veiled roman à clef of Lyndon Johnson’s reign in Pink Dome. His selection is revealing for his innocent belief that as a Chicano in early ’60s South Texas he could pontificate on any topic or author of his choosing. Apparently, no one ever got around to telling Barrios that he could not claim a place in the center and the margins simultaneously, so he just did it.

Having witnessed the fate of the masses excluded from educational opportunities by the cruelly efficient calculations of a capitalist economy, Barrios took a gamble on the Air Force so he could use the G.I. Bill to fund his education. Even though the word “Vietnam” was becoming commonplace, he enlisted in 1962 and for three years served as a combat medic in the 859th Medical Group. Luckily for Barrios, he was stationed at Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin — with occasional temporary-duty assignments to pick up severely wounded soldiers from hospitals in Germany. This allowed him to attend class at the University of Texas at Austin as a part-time student.

During his time in Austin, Barrios was involved in the underground newspaper The Rag, infamous for its irreverent political commentary and cultural critiques. He also co-founded the Cinema 40 Film Club, for which he is recognized in Esquire magazine film critic Dwight Macdonald’s 1969 memoir, On Movies:

“While I was in Texas I caught up on my movies, avant-garde and rear-guard ... I was able to see for the first time some films by Warhol and Anger, both programs being put on by Cinema 40, a film club operated with great enterprise by a senior named Gregory Barrios.”

Like most film buffs of the era, Barrios eventually made a pilgrimage to Andy Warhol’s notorious Manhattan Factory. Under Warhol’s tutelage, in 1967 Barrios made his own experimental film, titled BONY (Boys of New York). Shot in both black-and-white and color with a 16-millimeter Roloflex Camera, Barrios’s film captures a day in the life of the Warhol “superstars” — the poet Gerard Melanga and Rene Ricard (the poet and art critic who “discovered” Jean Michel Basquiat) — during which they meet Leonard Cohen and Vogue model Ivy Nicholson.

BONY is archived at UCLA and is included on Chon Noriega’s list of 100 Best Chicano Films. Barrios has since shown his films in San Antonio and elsewhere, paired with an excerpt of Warhol’s epic 25-hour, four-channel projection **** (Four Stars), which Warhol gave Barrios with the express challenge to put it to new use by showing it in different settings. Gemini Ink hosted one of these collaborative screenings in 2003.

Barrios eventually earned a degree in English and accepted his first teaching job in Crystal City in 1970, where his art found new purpose: el Movimiento!

¡Dale gas, carnal!

Like its contemporary, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Chicano Movement art took a combative tone predicated on opposition to racist white capitalist American society. Barrios took his characteristic interstitial approach, positioning himself within the Movimiento and the effort to complicate models of culture and identity that would later come to fruition in works by Chicana Renaissance writers in the 1980s such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga.

He even anticipated the post-Movimiento hybrid poetics that filmmakers, writers, and critics as diverse as Jimmy Mendiola, Marisela Norte, and Alfred Arteaga have shown to be a hallmark of the New Latino Aesthetic. Georges Bizet’s classic 19th-century opera Carmen was transformed in Barrios’s 1975 rendition, which he conspicuously titled, Carmen: A Chicano Rock Opera. It was co-directed by Ruth Zarate and performed by his Crystal City High School student cast.

Barrios even anticipated John Sayles’ 1984 The Brother From Another Planet with his own 1976 sci-fi play, Stranger in a Strange Land. His 1977 reprise of Andrew Webber’s Evita, which includes a post-mortem cameo by Che Guevara, an icon of the Chicano Movement, was also recast as a Chicano rock opera. The production was covered by the San Antonio Express in a May 24, 1977, feature by Ben King Jr., who quotes the young Barrios:

“We are trying to show there’s more in Crystal City than the politics. We’re trying to reinforce our culture ... Our goal is to show the Chicano has the ability to express himself in several ways, besides politics.”

Barrios was responding to national and international attention to the grueling grassroots battle by the Raza Unida Party against the oppressive local government. He was attempting to restore some sense of normalcy for his students in the aftermath of the famous student “blowouts” (as student boycotts of classes were known), while at the same time using culture as the site for consciousness-raising.

But in Cristal, as the city came to be known, politics infused everything, as was dramatically illustrated in another struggle: the infamous “gas crisis” of 1977. The “gas crisis” was directly related to the oil embargo of the 1970s, but specifically refers to the conflict between the Lo-Vaca Gathering Company (a private utility vendor) and the new, all-Chicano Crystal City Council. The Council, attempting to respond to its new mandate to represent its poor constituency, rejected the new higher price the company demanded for gas. The city insisted on a lower rate enshrined in its previous contract. With the support of a Texas Supreme Court ruling, the company eventually cut off all natural gas supplies to Crystal City for more than a decade.

Prior to the gas cut-off, Barrios and other educators and artists traveled the country to publicize the struggle and drum up support. Barrios spoke to the Coalition for Economic Survival in Los Angeles as a guest of liberal politico Tom Hayden, whose wife at the time — Jane Fonda — donated a shipment of solar panels to Crystal City to help the citizens survive the brutally cold winter of 1977. Barrios was invited as a non-member guest to address the Communist Party National Convention in Santa Monica, where he received a standing ovation after his speech about the popular revolt against monopoly capitalism. Angela Davis, then a prominent member of the CP, subsequently wrote a short preface to the 1977 published version of Barrios’s play about the struggle, Dale Gas Cristal!

In the spirit of the era, Barrios also staged a play about another outlaw — the infamous San Antonio gangster Fred Gomez Carrasco. To call the play “controversial” is an understatement. Drawing from Teatro Campesino’s agitprop theater form known as the Acto, the actors in ¡Carrasco! — the same Crystal City High School Students of his other plays — provocatively kidnap Governor Dolph Briscoe and Lady Bird Johnson in response to the allegation that the Texas Rangers executed Carrasco during his violent 1974 prison-break attempt.

Barrios continued his work as an educator, literary provocateur, and journalist after accepting a new teaching position in Los Angeles, where he lived from 1982 to 1999. He retired from teaching in 1999 and relocated to San Antonio, where he began a new teaching career, while continuing his journalism first with the San Antonio Express-News as the book editor, then as editorial-page editor for the Spanish-language Rumbo. He retired anew to focus on his own creative writing, but continues to be involved in journalism as a watchdog and regular contributor to the Current and other publications.

“Gregg is both a creative force in his own right — witness his body of dramatic work — and an observant journalist and critic interested in the work of others and the personalities and driving forces behind their work,” wrote Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News and Barrios’s former boss, via email. “He also lets us know when we fall short in our own coverage. We don’t always agree with him, but oftentimes he is right and we are better for it.”

With Barrios, you either love him or hate him. But you can’t deny his presence and provocations.

Coloring the canon

True to his simultaneous insider-outsider status, Barrios doesn’t respect zero-sum cultural propositions, but this doesn’t mean he won’t air dirty laundry. And Barrios is fond of chisme and a good off-color joke, especially if he can make a play out of it.

His provocatively titled Dark Horse/Pale Rider, which premiered at the San Pedro Playhouse Cellar Theater, immediately alludes to the theme of miscegenation. It focuses on Texas writer Katherine Anne Porter’s interest in, um, Mexican rural themes, as critics have called it. Barrios dug deeper in archives to find evidence of Porter’s predilection for mounting dark brown studs, then using them in her celebrated stories.

The play received mixed reviews, with some vocal Chicano educators asking why Barrios “wasted an opportunity” by writing about a white writer. “Don’t we already have enough of that shit?” quipped one educator who requested anonymity.

These critics miss the point, however: Barrios’s work uncovers the Chicano presence in the Eurocentric canon. He was much more successful at rendering this issue in Rancho Pancho. An unusual amount of copy has been devoted to this play in newspapers from San Antonio to New Orleans to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the play has run to overwhelming acclaim.

The premise again is both simple and profound: Barrios posits that Tennessee Williams pimped his Mexican-American lover’s life to create characters and storylines. The bombshell is Barrios’s claim, backed up by reams of archival documents, photos, and interviews, that Williams’ archetypal character Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire is modeled on Pancho Gonzalez, with whom Tennessee had a similarly turbulent relationship.

Sandra Cisneros, perhaps San Antonio’s most famous writer and a personal friend of Barrios, suggested the title he eventually used for the play. She was ecstatic at the opening night of Rancho Pancho last month.

“His play is such a pleasure for those of us educated — and indoctrinated — in English Departments to revere the canon as just a white male thing,” said Cisneros. “He gives us new reasons to love the canon because we now know we have always been part of it.”

Despite this celebratory reception among Latina/o writers who know the sting of academic exclusion first hand, an important question remains: What are the ideological implications of a Chicano writer claiming inclusion in an American literary canon built in part on the U.S. imperialist takeover of Mexican territory?

In his groundbreaking 1971 manifesto, Calibán, renowned Cuban cultural critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar aptly notes that literary canons are extensions of political power. He uses the villain of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest as a third-world hero and archetype to rhetorically propose that students in the Americas could do without the European and White American canons if this continues to require the effacement of Mesoamerican, Black, Mestizo and populist canons of the rest of the Americas.

Again, Barrios, a student of Martí as much as Melville, rejects the binary:

“My perspective is that it is a both/and situation.”

He proves his point in his next two plays, Hard Candy, and a restructured and expanded ¡Carrasco!, which he currently is polishing for initial readings in San Antonio next year.

Hard Candy memorializes burlesque performer Candy Barr, who was born Juanita Dale Slusher in 1935 in Edna, Texas. She worked for Jack Ruby in his club in Texas, and later was mobster Mickey Cohen’s lover. (She expands JFK conspiracy theories by claiming to have seen Ruby with Lee Harvey Oswald at her home two weeks before Ruby shot Oswald.)

In an extension of the “prostitute with a heart of gold” storyline, Barrios’s focus is on Slusher’s life outside her status as a “kept woman” of the mob — as the author of a poetry collection, A Gentle Mind ... Confused (Dulce Press, 1972) and a humanist. Slusher transcended boundaries and taboos. She maintained life-long friendships with Barrios as well as Mexican American outlaws such as prison poet Ricardo Sánchez.

“She was the first really public sexual outlaw, a star of a porn film and an iconoclast and bohemian. Were she alive today,” Barrios maintains, “she’d be celebrated very much like the early Madonna was revered and reviled.”

Barrios’s reprise of Carrasco’s violent rise and fall is less about the man and more about the struggle to give meaning to a community that was in such dire straights it lionized him as a social bandit fighting evil racist whites with his pistol in his hand, similar to 19th-century heroes like Jacinto Treviño, who are still celebrated in the popular ballads known as corridos.

Barrios’s play also is informed by his access to the Carrasco diary, which he translated. He has yet to find a publisher. One renowned Texas publisher politely rejected the piece with a note stating, “Gregg, we are awaiting a great work from you. However, Carrasco does little to make our people look good.”

The enigmatic book-selling sage of San Antonio

While some theater critics are predicting Rancho Pancho will eventually find its way into the off-Broadway circuit where real theater still is being produced on occasion, Barrios is less concerned with fame than with the wonderful world of books and film.

Rosemary Catacalos, executive director of literary organization Gemini Ink, where Barrios has taught classes on writing book reviews and plays, testifies to Barrios’s role as a bibliophile.

“Gregg’s ability to speak to so many diverse aspects of writing makes him a journeyman, in the old sense of being a well-rounded craftsman,” says Catacalos.

Barrios’s work also has made its way into the academy. His early articles on Chicano film are credited with recovering San Antonio film pioneer Efrain Gutierrez as the very first Chicano filmmaker. He has devoted a considerable amount of time, effort, and money to collecting vintage film posters and the films they advertise, signed first-edition books from authors all over the world, and of course, Chicano texts.

After restarting and retiring anew from his teaching and journalism careers, Barrios has finally found what he calls “my dream job”: he works as a part-time bookseller at a local chain bookstore, where he can be found in the literature section.

On a recent weekday afternoon, standing between the stacks, he was asked what is the role of the artist in society. As usual, he resisted an easy answer. Instead, he recommended a book by Vaclav Havel, another by Gabriel García Márquez, another by Carlos Fuentes, and then another by his all-time-favorite Chicano sexual-outlaw author, John Rechy (City of Night). And so on.

He does this four or five days a week, recommending title after title until his shift is over, and it is time for him to drive home. A recent heart attack gave him a new sense of urgency to bring closure to his lingering projects, but he continues to sneak in a new idea every now and then. “I’ll probably die dreaming of the outlines of another play,” he says with a wry smile. •

B.V. Olguín is a published poet, San Antonio educator, and frequent contributor to the San Antonio Current.