Centro Says Goodby to 2 of 3 Leaders

For years, Veronica Enrique kept a plastic three-headed monster on her desk at work. The long necks stretching out of a common body reminded her that she was part of a team, one of a triumvirate of voices that has guided the Centro Cultural de la Raza through its second decade.

After this summer, the significance of the little green creature will be mostly nostalgic. Enrique resigned as executive director of the Centro Cultural on June 30, and her husband, David Avalos, artist-in-residence and curator of exhibitions, will leave this month.

The Centro’s robust body will sport only one head for a while, as Victor Ochoa, one of its founders and a longtime artist-in-residence, takes over as acting director.

Enrique’s name has become synonymous with the Centro’s energetic spirit and strong community presence. Yet, she is quick to correct the supposition that leaving the organization after 10 years is like leaving a child she has nurtured and raised.

“The Centro’s not my baby, I’m the Centro’s baby,” she said. “I grew up here, and now it’s like I’m leaving home, saying goodby to the folks.”

Enrique, 30, really did come of age within the Centro’s curving walls. She arrived at the former water tower in Balboa Park’s Pepper Grove as a teen-ager. As part of the Ballet Folklorico de Aztlan, a family-run dance troupe, she practiced and performed at the Centro for years. Through her affiliation with the group and its performances at rallies, benefits and demonstrations during some of the most fertile years of Chicano social activism, she developed a strong sense of personal and cultural identity.

The Centro nourished that sense of identity, and became a home away from home for an entire community.

“I know how important it is to have a place like this to come to when you’re growing up,” Enrique said. “It can make a tremendous difference in your life. I’m living proof.”

In 1979, Enrique was hired as administrative assistant to the director of the Centro, and was named executive director in 1981. The next year, she married Avalos, then coordinator of the Centro’s performing arts programming. Their three children, ages 1, 3 and 5, have been part of the Centro since birth, accompanying their parents to meetings, art openings and the Centro’s other cultural and educational events.

Their presence there epitomizes Enrique’s efforts to maintain the Centro’s strength as a vital, enriching community center.

“If we’re going to integrate any of the principles or ideals that we’re talking about through our artwork, we have to find ways to bring them into our everyday lives,” she said.

In this, as in many other respects, the Centro Cultural has served as a model environment--one where children are welcome and nurtured, where family and community life overlap and where minority segments of the population can join together in self-determination.

The extended family that gathers at the Centro is not homogeneous, however. Enrique, Avalos and Ochoa all stress the importance of respecting the distinctions between the ethnic groups uniformly labeled as Hispanic.

“Using the term Hispanic liquidates part of our heritage,” Avalos said. “It concentrates only on our Spanish influences. We want to identify with our Indian heritage, too.”

Although the term has become increasingly common, the Centro’s three voices unite in opposing its use. It was manufactured, they said, and imposed on its various constituents from the outside, as a matter of convenience.

“Acceptance of the term grew in the belief that unity of diverse minorities into one nameable body would strengthen the group,” Avalos said. “But, from a cultural point of view, it makes us weaker. We lose our particularity by jumping into this melting pot. We need to know that there are differences between Puerto Ricans and Cubans, for instance. There are cultural and political differences.”

Searching out those distinct voices and encouraging their expression have been constants at the Centro Cultural. Enrique names self-determination as one of the organization’s founding principles, along with self-respect and self-sacrifice. Self-respect, she explained, evolves out of a need to know about oneself and one’s culture, and serves as a base for dealing with others on a level of equality.

As for self-sacrifice, that’s a concept that artists today know all too well. Artists are essential to the Centro’s existence, but “we are not an art-for-art’s-sake organization,” Enrique said. “The sacrifice of the artist is for the greater goal of the community.”

Avalos, whose own art has taken on a strong public dimension, has embodied that principle in his programming of events at the Centro.

“Our perception of art was as something that can contribute to society,” he said. “Art needs to be shared to really be experienced. The more it’s shared, the greater its value. It’s not just for the elite.”

Art should be as natural as breathing, Enrique said, and as fundamental to contemporary life. Rather than memorializing the rich cultural traditions of its Chicano, Mexican and Indian constituents, the Centro has attempted to show how these traditions speak to present realities and needs.

“Traditions are seen as hermetically sealed,” Avalos said. “One of the things that I hope the Centro has conveyed is that traditions are something that have to be explored. They convey an attitude about making the future. How do you go about creating the future--with an attitude of confidence or a lack of energy?”

Despite the departure of two of its dynamic leaders, the Centro faces a promising and secure future. Since its founding in 1970, it has grown steadily and consistently, Enrique said. Now it is “moving to a new level of growth that will require a level of energy that I’m not prepared to give anymore.”

In addition to spending more time with her family, she plans to work as a consultant to other multidisciplinary organizations that need help in developing a structure and staff.

Avalos said that he, too, will take the lessons he learned at the Centro with him this fall when he enters the master of fine arts program at UC San Diego. “The insights I’ve gained here into the political and social context in which I work will stay with me for years to come. This is where I’ve received my education as an artist. Going to UCSD is to get another language, another way of looking at what I’ve done.”

As acting director, Ochoa will cut back on his own work as a muralist. His priority, he said, is to strengthen the Centro’s relationship with the community.

The Centro is at a high point in its development, he said. As its reputation for supporting both innovative and traditional forms of art grows, so does its funding, which comes from a variety of sources, including the city’s transient occupancy tax, the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and private contributions.

“What I’d like to work on is the performing arts,” Ochoa said, “to raise it to a higher level, and to work on this multidisciplinary heritage we have.”

Improving the Centro’s facility is also high on the agenda. For almost 20 years, the organization has survived without a bathroom on the premises. Its lighting, heating, roofing and doors need upgrading, and a storage area is planned to hold the Centro’s small collection of prints and photographs. The interior and exterior murals, of important cultural value, also need restoration.

The Centro’s newly expanded board of directors is now conducting a nationwide search for a new executive director to usher in these changes.

Although the three-headed monster is no longer an accurate symbol of the Centro’s shared leadership, Ochoa still likes being compared to a dinosaur. He’s proud of being “hard-headed enough to carry the torch from the ‘60s,” he said, and of helping to keep cultural consciousness alive in the ‘80s.