Latino Activist Is a One-Man Culture Club : Oxnard: Aztec philosophy guides teacher Javier Gomez, who in his spare time is the driving force behind a theater group, dance ensemble and coffeehouse.

Javier Gomez is a man on the run.

One minute, he’s stomping his feet to an Aztec beat at an Oxnard school. Later, he’s working over some dialogue on a play he’s writing about gangs. At the end of the day, he’s presiding over a coffeehouse discussion of the merits of Chicanismo .

Gomez lives to promote Latino culture in Ventura County, and he approaches the job as a race that has just begun.

Honored in January as the county’s most outstanding Latino cultural leader in 1991, Gomez is the force behind a Chicano theater group, an Aztec dance ensemble, a cultural coffeehouse and a Saturday cultural school for Latino youths and their families.

He’s a full-time teacher at Oxnard’s Richard Barrett Haydock Intermediate School. On his own time, he writes, directs and produces an endless volume of plays and dance routines.

When he received the recent Cultural Arts Leadership Award from El Concilio del Condado de Ventura, the county’s most important Latino advocacy organization, it was just the latest of several honors from community groups that plaster the walls of a tiny studio at his house in Oxnard.

“He is a catalyst of important efforts to increase cultural awareness in the Latino community, and to increase the self-esteem of our youth through the cultural arts,” said Marcos Vargas, El Concilio’s executive director.

The forces that drive him, Gomez said, are the spirit of his late mother and a Mayan philosophy called Inlakech.

And not only do they drive Gomez, but they have a major impact on his entire family.

His wife and three teen-age children--Xochitl, Anahuac and Tonantzin--have no choice but to follow him around in his cultural enterprises.

They are his lighting technicians, dance instructors and star performers. Even his 1-year-old granddaughter, Xelina, dons a dance skirt and jumps on stage during his rehearsals.

“What I do, my family has to do,” he said recently, still fresh at the end of a 19-hour day. “It’s like eating or breathing. You don’t have a choice.”

Anahuac, 16, looked bored during rehearsal while he worked the tape recorder for his father’s play about a disturbed Chicano Vietnam veteran. But he didn’t complain.

“I still have Saturday and Sunday to see my friends,” he said, trying hard to sound enthusiastic. But he admitted a certain jealousy about sharing his father with so many people.

“It would be nice to see him home sometime when he’s not sitting in front of his computer,” the young man sighed.

Everyone else around Gomez seemed to be having a ball.

Elizabeth Ramos, 8, leaped into the air, smiling from ear to ear, during a 7 p.m. dance rehearsal. Sitting on a picnic table in front of the stage, her parents, Epifanio and Clementina, laughed and applauded.

“When Elizabeth was in kindergarten, her teacher said she was a special girl,” bragged the mother, who works at a strawberry-packing company. “She had so much energy, she needed a distraction, so they recommended us Senor Gomez.

“Senor Gomez is a very beautiful person,” she replied, eyes glowing with admiration. “He is so active, I wonder what he drinks, because I’d like some of the same tonic.”

Another parent, Enedali Santillan, brought her newborn baby to watch her 12-year-old daughter, Edna, dance.

“It keeps Edna off the streets, and she is learning her culture,” the mother said, nodding approvingly toward the dancers.

“So what’s the baby’s name?” Gomez asked after practice, while his students struggled to catch their breath.

“You haven’t picked one yet? Ooooh, I have some great names. How about Citlali? It means ‘little star.’ How does Xilonen sound? It means ‘queen of corn.’ Then there’s Quetzali, or ‘divine feather. . . .’ ”

He jotted them down on a piece of paper.

“They do sound nice, don’t they?” Santillan asked the other mothers, sounding less than convinced. “My friends were telling me to name her Chantal or Jacqueline, but I can’t make up my mind.”

In his spare time, Gomez has put together a booklet with Aztec names for Latino mothers.

“I made sure my kids’ names couldn’t be translated into English,” he said. “It’s important for them to retain their heritage.”

When his children were young, Gomez liked to tell them a tale of how the moon was created that goes something like this:

Back in the days of the Mayan empire, the old sun was running out of steam, and the gods decided that it was time to replace it. They gathered the worshipers and asked for a volunteer, someone who would be willing to leap into the flames of eternity so that his soul would fuel the new ball of fire.

Tecuzitecatl--young, brash and rich--stepped forward. But when he got close to the fire, he had no courage. Four times he tried to leap into the blaze, and four times the flames pushed him back.

Nanoantzin--a poor, humble old man who had spent his life growing corn and beans--took it upon himself to save the tribe’s honor. As he walked toward the flames, young Tecuzitecatl made fun of the old man. But Nanoantzin didn’t listen and jumped straight into the heart of the fire.

Embarrassed, the young warrior jumped into the flames too, creating a second sun. But the gods decided that the rich boy did not deserve to be their guiding light. They picked up a rabbit and threw it at him. When it hit, the flames were extinguished, and Tecuzitecatl’s soul became the moon.

“That’s why, on a clear day, you can see the rabbit’s footprints on the moon,” Gomez said with a smile. “My daughters still look at the moon and see the rabbit’s footprints.”

There’s a moral to this tale, of course, but Gomez had trouble defining it.

“It goes back to my philosophy of Inlakech ,” he finally said. He then wrote in Spanish on a piece of paper with strong, decisive pen strokes:

“Inlakech: You are my other self.

“If I love you, and I respect you, I love and respect myself.

“If I hurt you, I hurt myself.

“You are my other self.”

So there you have it. Even a murderer can be one’s other self, Gomez said. He learned that after touring countless prisons with his Chicano theater companies, he added.

“They laughed at us, but deep down, I think they respected us because we respected them,” he said.

Throughout his life, Gomez has had plenty of opportunities to practice his philosophy of forgiving those who do him wrong.

The firstborn of 15 children, he was raised in East Los Angeles by an alcoholic father and an abusive stepmother, who threw Javier out of the house whenever his father went to work.

“Friday night was fight night, with screaming, knife-wielding, the whole bit. Dad would spend all week saving up money to get drunk, and saving up enough energy to put up a good fight.”

It didn’t get much better when young Javier went to school at Brooklyn Avenue Elementary. “For six years, they put me in a class for emotionally retarded children. I didn’t speak English and didn’t score well on a placement test.”

Few of his brothers and sisters were able to overcome adversity, Gomez said.

“I belong to a dysfunctional family. My kid brothers got into selling drugs and heavy drinking--a sad situation really.”

But Javier Gomez managed to rise above it.

“I always wonder about that,” he said.

It is difficult to imagine Gomez wondering. He rarely ponders a question or tries to change the subject. He fires answers almost on reflex and is never at a loss for words.

“I was the only one who got to know my mother. I was 7 when she died, and her death opened a door,” he said. “I had to provide for myself and my brothers. There was nobody to protect me.”

At Cal State Northridge in the 1960s, he was “swept away by the Chicano movement,” Gomez said.

He fasted like Cesar Chavez to rid the campus of lettuce picked by non-union workers, he marched against the Vietnam war, and he found in Chicano theater the medium to express his social concerns. His mentor was playwright and linguistics professor Luis Valdez, who turned him on to Inlakech .

After graduating with a degree in Chicano studies, Gomez came to Oxnard, took a teaching job and got on with the business of spreading his culture.

He founded the Ventura County Multicultural Arts Council and sponsored Aztec mask-making workshops in Oxnard schools, God of Corn celebrations in Ventura Beach, and Day of the Dead parties in Thousand Oaks.

He brought the comic group Latins Anonymous to tour the county and even managed to lure the prestigious Ballet Nacional de Mexico in 1985 to play at the Oxnard Civic Auditorium.

He started a theater company, now called Teatro Inlakech, that performs at convalescent homes, street fairs and social clubs. He is now preparing a performance at the Point Mugu naval base and thinks his Chicano Vietnam vet piece, complete with music by the Doors, will be a hit.

He learned to play Mexican songs on guitar and picked up a love of dance. He now has his own ballet company, Ballet Folklorico Regional, with understudies at the intermediate and beginner levels.

Once a month, Gomez gathers with friends at Cafe Inlakech, a Latino cultural gathering spot that reminds him of his Cal State Northridge days. For next month’s session, he’s bringing in a poet from Mexico and another from Los Angeles.

Out of all of Gomez’s projects, none is more important these days than his Saturday cultural school in downtown Oxnard, called the Inlakech School, which he started last year.

At the school, 50 students and their parents learn language, history and culture, and they eat typical Mexican food.

“It’s really a powerful program, a way of giving back to the community,” Gomez said. “Hopefully, someday, it will become a multicultural center where blacks, Japanese and whites can learn about themselves and each other.”

Picking at a pecan pie at Denny’s Restaurant and speaking of the “cultural genocide” committed by Christopher Columbus, Gomez said he is a happy man.

He can’t think of anything he ever did wrong in his entire life, he said. And just as only women can be true feminists, only Chicanos can really understand Chicanos, he added.

He has no regrets about the energy he throws into his work, Gomez said. As far as he is concerned, there is no clear point where his work stops and his play begins.

“I relax by being in the middle of everything,” he said, finishing his early morning meal and preparing to put a few last touches on his unfinished play.

“I have to go back to work,” he said.