BORN IN EAST L.A. : Mexican-American Artists Are Finding Fame All Over the World--Even, Finally, in Their Own City

THE FOUR YOUNG Chicanos would meet daily in the International House of Pancakes on Atlantic Boulevard, looking a little conspicuous for East Los Angeles in 1971. The men’s collective grooming included fishnet stockings, jeans appliqued with paw prints, freshly shaved eyebrows, and jackets resembling outsized, customized tuxedos; the black-cloaked woman gleamed of crimson cosmetology. Thoroughly broke, they ordered cups of hot water, adding ketchup to make tomato soup, although sometimes waitresses would swap meals for the drawings the guy wearing fishnets would ink onto paper napkins.

It was a better deal than they knew. Those napkins, the ones that are still around, are now being collected by the Smithsonian Institution.

Their creator, known only as Gronk (the name plucked by his mother from a National Geographic she read during labor), is currently featured along with six other Los Angeles residents--Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert Lujan, John Valadez, Roberto Gil de Montes, Frank Romero and Robert Graham--in the most lavish exhibition ever of works by Latino artists living in North America. Curated by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, it opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston last May to reviews that found it brilliant, albeit controversial. Titled “Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters & Sculptors,” it will come to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in February, 1989. The show’s detractors fault it for avoiding work that reflects the plight of Chicano barrios, for largely neglecting women artists and for using the generic term Hispanic --rejected by many as a bureaucratic homogenization that lumps persons of Mexican heritage born or raised in the United States with Puerto Ricans, Cubans and other Latin Americans.

Yet supporters and detractors alike agree on one thing: The Corcoran show is filled with gorgeous art. Along with a recent cluster of Hollywood triumphs by Cheech Marin, Luis Valdez and Edward James Olmos--to the accompaniment of such musicians as East L.A.’s Los Lobos--it suggests that non-Latino Americans, including those residing west of the Los Angeles River, are discovering that home-grown Latin culture transcends nachos and fajitas . But while Los Lobos complete another world tour, and while L.A. Chicano artists are exhibited in Tokyo and Cannes and at MIT, many Latinos still wonder whether recognition from outside means that their people will someday be appreciated and prosperous in this city.

“Shows like the Corcoran throw a bone to a few people,” says Isabel Castro, acting director of Plaza de La Raza, a Lincoln Heights arts center partly supported by public funds she says are inadequate to serve the millions of Latinos in Los Angeles. “Sometimes there’s a little meat on the bone. If a proportionate amount of the taxes paid by the Latino community ever came back here, we’d be in good shape.”

Says Candace Lee of West Hollywood’s Saxon-Lee Gallery, which represents Gronk: “If a Chicano artist catches on, it’s as an individual. Very few people who sell or buy art give a damn about East L.A. It’s an upper-class, radical-chic fantasy to think that we do.”

Yet, there is a growing perception in the marketplace that the sheer numbers of Latinos in the United States are creating opportunities that never before existed--a perception supported by the $54-million box office reaped by “La Bamba.” “Now,” says the film’s writer-director, Luis Valdez, “I can write leading roles for Chicano actors who before usually played pimps and pushers. Today it’s possible for Linda Ronstadt to reveal to the world that she’s half-Mexican and put out an album (“Canciones de Mi Padre”) that’s not only a critical but a commercial success.”

But the increasing visibility of Chicano artists has raised an unexpected issue: Does making it in L.A. mean isolating themselves from the origins that initially inspired them?

The Painful Birth Of Asco

IN 1971, handsome Willie Herron had shaved his eyebrows as a sacrifice, praying that God would save his brother John, whom he’d found behind their home on City Terrace Drive, perforated with 100 ice-pick wounds. That same night, with John’s survival hanging on intravenous tubes, Herron returned to the alley and pounded on the back door of his aunt’s bakery.

“ Si, mi hijo (Yes, my son),” she agreed, weeping, after he had explained what he wanted. He then climbed a ladder, hauling up cans of house paint and oil-based enamel he’d thinned to a wash, as two cholos from his brother’s gang guided him with flashlights.

Back then, the City Mural Program was promoting colorful, upbeat alternatives to inflammatory graffiti. But the image that Herron completed 12 hours later behind the bakery incorporated not only spray-painted cholo insignias but the wall itself, which now appeared to have an enormous crack down its length. Bursting through it were the faces and bloody fists of brothers locked in conflict, a grandmother keening over rosary beads, a pre-Columbian life-and-death’s head and, above, an eagle struggling to free itself from a cancerous red morass.

It was Herron’s first mural--and is now considered one of Los Angeles’ greatest. Two weeks later, he noticed someone staring at it. It was Gronk, then 16, who dragged him off to see his friend Harry Gamboa. All three had attended Garfield High, a school with a drop-out rate then exceeding 60% and where, in the late ‘60s, Gamboa had helped organize mass walkouts of students protesting the state of education in East Los Angeles.

Now, at 21, Gamboa was attending Cal State Los Angeles. Eventually, he, Gronk, Herron and Patssi Valdez found themselves editing and designing a magazine called Regeneracion in a booth at the pancake house. As they’d work, Gamboa and his friends compared their experiences in a system run by authority figures like Valdez’s homemaking teacher at Garfield, who prefaced gravy recipes with: “I know you little Mexicans have never eaten this kind of food before, but you’d better listen, because someday you’ll be a cook or maid in someone’s house.” Such was the inspiration for their metamorphosis into a performing ensemble, dedicated to wringing art from a life defined by contempt.

Their resulting outbursts were nihilistic and mocking--Gronk dressing as Pontius Pilate, blessing pedestrians with holy popcorn in front of a Whittier Boulevard Marine recruiting station; Gronk creating instant murals by taping Patssi Valdez to walls; Willie Herron encased in a slab of painted Masonite, forming a mural that got fed up with wall art and walked away. Harry Gamboa groans to think that their theatrics are lately providing fodder for doctoral theses. At the time, they mostly disgusted unwitting spectators. They’d accordingly named themselves “Asco”--Spanish for loathing .

“We were pretty disgusted ourselves,” recalls Gamboa, who is now working on intermedia pieces through a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. “We were sick of high schools with full auto shops but tiny libraries, of educational systems designed to make children feel pointless. Instead of creating social realism protest art, social surrealism seemed more to the point.”

One day in 1972, he made an appointment at the County Museum of Art to see if it had any Chicano works. “Chicanos,” a curator deigned to explain, “don’t make real art.”

Asco’s response was to spray-paint its signatures across the museum’s entrances late that night, converting it into instant conceptual sculpture. The fact that no one arrested the artists seemed to confirm their brooding suspicions that the Westside was oblivious to East L.A.

But within two years, growing acknowledgment of the Chicano presence in Los Angeles had led to a County Museum show featuring another L.A. collective: Beto de la Rocha, Gilbert Lujan, Frank Romero and Carlos Almaraz--known as Los Four. Unlike Asco’s members, each was university- or art-school-educated. Their works derived from Mexican folk icons and the Chicano political movement, and for years scholars and activists argued over whether lifting these images from the barrios and putting them in a museum show meant recognition or a corruption of principles.

An Explosion in the ‘70’s

LOUIE PEREZ HAD gone to Garfield with Willie Herron; in the mid-’70s he and another high school friend, Elsa Flores, got teaching jobs at Plaza de La Raza, newly inaugurated through some city matching funds. Flores’ future husband, Carlos Almaraz, was also on the staff. It was exciting to think that they could actually make a living being artists.

But Plaza directors seemed mostly intent on charming wealthy Westside benefactors with glossy openings for art exhibits imported from Mexico, while works of their own resident talent were rarely displayed. Still, the idea of teaching Chicano children that creativity could be a way of life was worth it. “I have this cousin,” Perez recalls, “who’s a gifted woodcarver. The only related work he ever found was as a body-and-fender man.” He and Flores taught painting and printmaking, and it also fell to them and fellow instructor David Hidalgo to introduce kids to their musical heritage, from the conch-blowing of pre-Aztec Indians through modern arrangements of that old veracruzana classic, “La Bamba.”

Perez, a drummer and lyricist, and vocalist Hidalgo had become transfixed by the musicianship on old Mexican records they had once begged their mothers not to play when their friends were around. Dumping their high school Top 40 bands, they helped form a new group, Los Lobos del Este, that began working electric sounds around the acoustic 12-strings and accordions. Sometimes Flores sang with them, but except for bands playing weddings, no Chicano--not even Carlos Almaraz, who had had museum shows--seemed to be making much money at creativity.

But by the late ‘70s, as though exploding from its larval stage, the Chicano expression born of the ‘60s found momentum. Los Lobos, who had appalled their families by rejecting $1,000-a-weekend wedding jobs for the privilege of crashing Hollywood basement clubs for $40, opened a set at the Whiskey and suddenly were signing a major recording contract. Sister Karen Boccalero, an artist-nun raised on the Eastside, returned from Rome and in 1972 started Self-Help Graphics, a commodious workshop with silkscreen capabilities, to promote Chicano artists.

They appeared, more than 100 of them: Gilbert Lujan and Frank Romero, and talented new names such as Roberto Gil de Montes, Leo Limon, Margaret Garcia, Eloy Torrez, Linda Vallejo, Dolores Guerrero-Cruz and Tito Delgado. The quality of their serigraphs soon had non-Chicanos traveling up Brooklyn Avenue to work with them.

In various East L.A. cooperative studios, and during late-night sessions in Frank Romero’s kitchen, Chicano painters and sculptors were debating how to balance allegiance to their culture with their developing personal visions. “Our ancient character dates from today back 10,000 years,” Gilbert Lujan insisted. Colonialism and lousy schools may have conspired to keep them illiterate, but, he believed, every mexicano had a visual history, stretching from the bright primary colors of parrots and quetzal birds to the blur of cars whizzing along freeways that had turned Eastside neighborhoods into a succession of median strips. Hearts, crucifixes, skulls, cactuses and automobiles filled Lujan’s and Romero’s three-dimensional tableaux. “Not to use these symbols would be like Anglos giving up English.”

Political struggle had inspired Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino and murals created by such artists as Carlos Almaraz. But, as he neared 40, Almaraz was feeling hyperextended, painting Chicano social realism for the United Farm Workers while obsessively filling canvases with dreamlike cities for himself. After collaborating on a mural with John Valadez and Barbara Carrasco for Valdez’s play, “Zoot Suit,” he realized he needed a break from propaganda art.

The decision released a torrent of pent-up color and texture, and Almaraz suddenly became L.A.’s most successful Chicano painter. Gallery doors were cracking open, but some colleagues claimed that he had abandoned the message he’d portrayed on so many East L.A. walls. “If artists aren’t allowed to explore,” he retorted, “we end up with Stalinism. How can we be original if someone dictates content?”

The art he’d seen on trips to China and Cuba had disturbed him: “It was all so controlled.” Yet part of the business of art today means sometimes accepting commissions from institutions such as Home Savings, Loyola Law School and the City of Los Angeles, that subject his work to review.

“There’s nothing new or shocking about that: Michelangelo had to learn to work with the Pope. With the ‘Zoot Suit’ mural, I also had tremendous restrictions. As you get older and more professional, you have to live with contradictions. You try to resolve them with your art.”

A NEW GENERATION

THE POLITICAL AND FOLKLORIC stereotypes of what constitutes Chicano art make even less sense to young artists emerging in the 1980s. In the windowless studio she shares with sculptor Daniel Martinez on the eastern edge of downtown, Diane Gamboa contemplates another anguished face she has painted. She and Martinez, both 30, are often called the brightest of a new generation of Chicanos who were too young to experience the protest years but who inherited their aesthetic legacy.

Diane Gamboa’s startling paper fashions, which she creates in lighter moods, appear in L.A. coffee table magazines, but her smoldering portraits aren’t easy images for collectors, she’s been told. Yet she keeps painting them until her emotions, teetering at the balance between pleasure and pain, dictate otherwise.

The phone rings, but she lets the machine answer, guessing it’s for Martinez, who is currently in a show at MIT. She doesn’t begrudge him that; she believes in him and his work. Martinez lets nothing stop him: To realize his ferociously urban visions he has even discovered a new medium--pigmented concrete--and collaborated with an inventor of the laser for his Olympics exhibit of life-size, moving holographs. Diane Gamboa was passed over for the Corcoran show, but the catalogue lists her and Elsa Flores among the United States’ most promising Latina artists.

Because Diane is Harry Gamboa’s younger sister, people sometimes assume she was inspired by Asco, that Patssi Valdez was her model. Actually, she was too young for Asco to have much influence on her. She’d been drawing since she could first grasp a crayon, so the sight of people making art in the kitchen past midnight was something she supposed existed in all households.

What affected her most was getting raped. She was 15 at the time, so ashamed that she didn’t return home for two days. When she did, her assailant was at the kitchen table with her parents, discussing getting married and incidentally asking her father to co-sign on a car loan. Afraid that Gamboa might be pregnant, her mother was agreeing to the marriage. No one asked the girl’s opinion. The marriage lasted less than a year, ending with Gamboa alone in a hospital awaiting an abortion, her incensed husband telephoning her father to let him know “what I was doing to them.”

Diane Gamboa sometimes hears that she ought to honor her heritage by including Mexican folk symbols in her paintings. She figures that being on the receiving end of machismo’s brutality is also part of that heritage, older even than the Virgin of Guadalupe. But once a year she relents and does a calavera , a skull, for the Day of the Dead. Last time it was a sculpture of a tiered wedding cake, pierced with a knife, a lonely bride-skeleton perched atop it with a picture of La Virgen in her fleshless crotch.

It sits in her closet, surrounded by images of exorcised devils, renderings of memories from when she’d confuse God with Satan because it seemed like He was always punishing people. Now she understands better--but paints to keep the devil at bay.

MOMENTUM FOR MODERNS

TWO FLOORS ABOVE Gamboa’s studio, John Valadez and Richard Duardo split a beer in Duardo’s silk-screen studio, Future Perfect. Duardo, 35, has been called the best serigrapher in Los Angeles, although he considers his younger brother Oscar, chief printer at Self-Help Graphics, to have surpassed him. But Duardo, whose pop artwork appears in bigger and bigger galleries, is also known for his encouragement of other artists.

He has become something of an art entrepreneur, recording rock musicians and promoting silk-screen reproductions. He has just returned from his third trip to Tokyo and is going again. This last time, he took prints of East L.A.’s Chaz Bojorquez, whose graffiti designs Japanese buyers approvingly compared to their ancient calligraphy. Lately, everyone’s traveling: Self-Help Graphics’ Tito Delgado, back from a Fulbright fellowship, is now off to create a mural in Nicaragua; Barbara Carrasco did the same in the Soviet Union.

“In our generation,” Duardo tells Valadez, “we’re becoming multifaceted, global Chicanos, but with our raza sensibilities intact.” Valadez agrees, still reverberating from the six weeks’ painting residency he’s just completed in southern France. Before, he’d almost never left Los Angeles, and there he was, realizing more than ever how complicated it is to explain what it means to be mexicain-americain .

A reviewer declared his triptych “Beto’s Vacation,” which is owned by actor Dennis Hopper, the most magnificent piece in the Corcoran show. His practically breathing images of street people deal directly with racism and poverty--yet they sell. As such, Valadez is a bridge between those who believe that Chicano art ought to reflect political concerns and those who hope for mainstream acceptance. “He’s so good, it’s impossible to keep him out of galleries or shows like the Corcoran,” says Harry Gamboa. “Of course, they have to downplay him.”

But Valadez doesn’t seem to notice. He grew up in the Estrada Courts projects in Boyle Heights, son of a determined single mother whose other sons made it to Berkeley and Stanford. He continues to live as if money were something other people make, crashing on studio floors, teaching art in prisons. “Those prisons help me turn the anger I learned from my mother, a teen-ager saddled with raising us, into compassion. In the barrio all you can give a kid is your hate--or a way to get out.”

It is a paradox Chicano artists face: As they master techniques to accurately portray their community, they gain a means to escape it. Nearly everyone who can afford to lives elsewhere--though, as Gilbert Lujan observes in Santa Monica, it’s not really like leaving. “I see Mexicans all over here.” Adds Gronk, in Silver Lake: “Borders don’t apply now. East L.A. is everywhere.”

THE AMBASSADOR OF CULTURE

THE EAST L.A. that most Westsiders picture with alarm is the one that makes the news, illuminated by helicopter searchlights. But for poet Marisela Norte, one of the happiest places she can be is on a bus going down Whittier Boulevard. Norte’s readings, plays and periodic radio appearances are so popular that friends call her East L.A.’s Ambassador of Culture. But little of her work sees print, except for fragments that appear in magazine articles--

... these men

fixing the ribbons in our tangled hair

our brothers being lifted up in their arms

and placed like trophies on the shiny hoods of their cars

lined up on our front lawn

they rode our tricycles and drank by the porch light

and I was there

in a race from father to favorite uncle

to see which one would place my bare feet

on wing-tips first

so we could fly . . . .

--but she doesn’t like this too much, because it lifts images out of the luxurious context of her story-poems. Still, who else is publishing Chicano writers, especially those outside academic cliques? (And even academics share her lament. When L.A. film makers Jesus Salvador Trevino and Luis Torres chose to feature UC Irvine professor Alejandro Morales in a PBS documentary they are making about Chicano authors, they discovered that he had had to go to Mexico to publish his first novel.)

So Norte waits on tables to afford rent and the bus rides where she eavesdrops and writes, until passengers realize what she is doing and speak to her directly, entrusting her with the eloquence of their lives. When the bus reaches Record Avenue, she gets off, attracted by an herbalist’s sign reading “ Capsulas de Vibora “--snake pills for sale. How could she not go in?

Norte can’t resist blowing her tip income on items found nowhere else in Los Angeles, like Success Oil, Crushed Bridal Veil Powder or Come to Me Talcum. She knows that people across the river think that East Los Angeles is dangerous. But what would her writing be without streets such as this one, lined with friendly places like bakeries named Hope, Flower of Michoacan and Wheat-Stalk of Gold? Or the You & I Bar, or a record shop called Destiny?

“The words give life/to a life without life,” she writes, but it sounds flat in English, so she switches to Spanish, and now it works: “ Las palabras dan vida/a vida sin vida.” She rarely mixes languages but writes entire pieces in whichever tongue best expresses the particular truth she’s addressing. To Norte, to be bilingual is not a political stance but a precious gift insisted on by her father. In a city where world cultures, and economies, are inexorably destined to mingle, how could people desire any less for their children?

SKIRTING THE MAINSTREAM

SOME PORTENTS OF mingling appear: Con Safos, the flashy band led by East L.A.’s resident musicologist, Ruben Guevara, gets “West Meets East” gigs across the river; former cholo Daniel Villareal acts in an Asco play written by Marisela Norte and gets tapped for a Hollywood film; Los Lobos receive four Grammy nominations.

But, in general, L.A.’s mainstream doesn’t easily broaden to absorb polycultural currents. Except for Santa Monica’s B-1 Gallery, which seeks out Chicanos because owner Robert Berman considers them a significant part of the L.A. scene he wants to represent, few commercial galleries show them.

“Part of the problem,” says Alice Ovsey of the Ovsey Gallery on La Brea, “is perhaps a lack of knowledge about the skills needed to approach a gallery.” Like most dealers, she requires artists to submit slides of their work. But fine-arts photographers are expensive, which, she speculates, may be why she rarely sees Chicanos’ portfolios. She wonders, too, if the pristine, hushed whiteness of Westside galleries might be especially intimidating to someone untutored in the business of art.

Susan Landau, of Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art on Beverly Boulevard, agrees that Chicanos might not know how to get into galleries. But she believes that great artists find their way in. “If you’re really a serious artist, you find a way to be with other artists. You don’t hang together with other Chicanos. As a culture becomes more integrated, they tend to allow themselves more esoteric expressions. It’s like, if you’ve just arrived as an immigrant you become a W-word: welder, waitress. To become an A-word--artist--you have to ascend Maslow’s hierarchy of needs until you feel you can express yourself in aesthetic ways.”

But since Los Angeles was once part of Mexico, this theory regarding Chicanos’ absence from galleries seems somehow inadequate. Yet this absence is critical, because galleries lead to other exalted spaces.

“The museum’s role,” says Earl Powell, director of the County Museum of Art, “is to assess and evaluate, not to create instant history. The gallery scene is the appropriate place for that to happen.”

Chicano art is represented in that museum’s permanent collection by four Carlos Almaraz pastels. (There are also two statues by Robert Graham, who is in the Corcoran show, but art critics generally consider his aesthetic roots to be more European than Mexican-American.) In 1983, Powell stated that his institution hadn’t done enough to exhibit Chicanos. Since then, he says, there have been signs of improvement. For example, the museum included Gilbert Lujan in an exhibition of 112 avant-garde artists, and it acquired a pre-Columbian collection.

Powell hopes that the forthcoming Corcoran show and a major exhibition of Mexican art from New York’s Metropolitan Museum, scheduled here for 1990, will inspire some donations of Chicano art to the museum--”but with the new tax laws,” he cautions, “building collections has become increasingly difficult.”

Mary Jane Jacob, head curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, unhappily acknowledges that museums and galleries mainly exhibit the works of white males. In 1985, MOCA showed installations by Willie Herron and Gronk, “but that’s not enough. We have to defy the commercially defined mainstream.”

Since arriving last year from Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacob has been surprised that, while other artists deluge MOCA with slides, almost no Chicanos have requested studio visits.

“Maybe they’ve been scared by rejection; maybe they just don’t want to be part of the system,” she says. “I respect that: I don’t want to screw up by saying, ‘Because we’re MOCA we’re great and obviously important, so what can you do for us?’ Harry Gamboa once let me know what he thinks about that kind of attitude; his reaction is sobering and valid. So we must make an aggressive effort and not wait anymore for Chicano talent to come to us. But we’ll need a sustained amount of time; that’s not easily allocated.”

“It’s always hard for emerging artists,” says Elsa Flores, who has sent slides of her work to MOCA, “but some Chicanos get tired of repeated rejection from the mainstream, or they’re just not willing to play the mainstream’s game.”

In 1990, UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery will inaugurate a major traveling exhibition; unlike the Corcoran show, it will be curated by Chicanos. Yet, even as such shows help redress old neglects, they risk ghettoizing the people they wish to embrace: Some Chicanos worry that they will be forever pigeonholed as ethnic artists. “This is American art, reflecting part of America’s heritage,” stresses Barbara Carrasco. Her argument was lost on the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency when, in 1983, it rejected a Carrasco mural it had commissioned of scenes from L.A.’s history. The CRA contended that some sequences might offend groups depicted, such as Japanese in internment camps--despite letters supporting Carrasco from the Japanese community.

It seemed that nothing had changed since 1932, when city officials whitewashed an Olvera Street mural by the Mexican master David Siqueiros, which showed the American eagle preying on a crucified Mexican peasant. Carrasco’s piece was never displayed here but hung recently in a show at MIT. “I’m censored in my hometown,” she says, “but get invited to direct public art projects by Soviet and American children in Russia. Why is that?”

IN THE Tujunga Wash flood-control channel in the San Fernando Valley, Judy Baca, former director of the City Mural Program, continues work on the Great Wall of Los Angeles, sponsored by the Social Public Arts Resource Center. While some Chicanos strive for gallery shows, gold records or Hollywood credits, Baca’s only goal is to dissolve cultural boundaries.

Stretching over half a mile, her Great Wall is the longest painting in the world, a massive time-line created over the last 12 years by teams of youths from every Los Angeles ethnic group: Chicanos, blacks, Koreans, Jews, Russians--a gathering of the separate nations of Los Angeles. Her own people exemplify what is happening: Even as continual immigration replenishes old traditions, succeeding Chicano generations draw their inspiration not from Mexico but from the swirl of Los Angeles.

Chicano experience is now too complex for any one artist’s vision to encompass it; the contradictions and debates are signs of artistic maturity. But by the next century, Baca predicts, present concerns over assimilating too much with the mainstream will seem trivial.

“Future L.A. generations will grapple with even newer combinations: Chinese-Mexican, Chicano-Korean. The rich new American art will depend not on Western European forms but on pluralistic, multicultural visions.”

Putting down her brush, she gazes at a 30-foot prototype for a Great Wall panel that imagines a socially and technologically balanced Los Angeles. “L.A. is a kaleidoscope. The art produced here will redefine the American experience.”