A new page for Mexican book fair

Officially, it’s called the Sixth Annual Mexico City Book Fair, but some participants in the upcoming bibliophiles blowout are toying with a more tongue-in-cheek sobriquet: “Chicanos vs. Chilangos.” And don’t forget the Cubanos.

On Friday, this kinetic metropolis will inaugurate its yearly celebration of the written word, from poetry to graffiti. About 120 publishing houses will take part, with hundreds of book titles available for browsing and buying, along with readings, panel discussions, art shows and performances. The fair, which runs through Oct. 15, is one of the Mexican capital’s most conspicuous forms of cultural largesse, as all events are free and open to the public.

But two other Spanish-accented cities, Los Angeles and Havana, also will command the spotlight. Each year, the fair pays tribute to the literary culture of a pair of urban areas, and this fall some 50 writers and artists from the Cuban capital are converging here, along with an equal number from the City of Angels.

Though separated by 1,500 miles and some serious attitudinal differences, Los Angeles and Mexico City have begun to take more notice of each other recently. That mutual interest seems especially keen between Chicanos (as some, primarily second- and third-generation, Mexican Americans call themselves) and Chilangos, as Mexico City residents are known.

Fittingly, many in the L.A. delegation arriving here this week are identified with the Chicano art scene, that flowering of Mexican American political and cultural life that sprouted from the civil rights and farmworker movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Many younger L.A. artists have been nurtured by that movement while pursuing their own paths.

“This is like saying to the Mexican American community in Los Angeles that Mexico City is their space as well, not politically but culturally,” says Marta Recasens, liaison for the secretary of culture for Mexico City, one of the fair’s sponsors. “It’s like saying, ‘You are part of us, and we’re trying to be part of you.’ ”

One participant, artist Ruben Ortiz-Torres, who was born and raised in Mexico City but now keeps his studio in Echo Park, thinks the event should be a valuable encounter for all three cultures, including two -- Chicano and Chilango -- that haven’t always known what to make of each other. “Mexico City tends to see Los Angeles as a place where the gardeners go,” he says, laughing. “And in Los Angeles, they think of Mexico City as a place where the gardeners come from.”

While Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in border areas such as southern Texas and the L.A.-San Diego-Tijuana nexus have frequent contact, the cultural intelligentsia of the distant Mexican capital has tended to look more toward New York, South America and European cities than to Southern California. Chicano artists and writers, Ortiz-Torres says, are sometimes baffled and intimidated by Mexico City’s labyrinthine cultural protocols.

The list of L.A. invitees reads like a partial Who’s Who of Chicano cultural evolution: artist and writer Harry Gamboa Jr.; Lalo Alcaraz, cartoonist and co-host of the popular “Pocho Hour of Power” radio show on KPFK-FM (90.7); Judith F. Baca, artist and founder of the Venice-based SPARC community art center; writer-director Luis Valdez (“Zoot Suit”); and author Luis J. Rodriguez, the co-founder of Tia Chucha’s Cafe Cultural in Sylmar.

Los Angeles also will be represented by the venerable Latino arts center Self-Help Graphics & Art, which will host a retrospective on its 50-year history; El Nopal Press; and the punk/hip-hop/indigenous band Aztlan Underground. Books by L.A. authors will be sold, and short films, documentaries and feature films by L.A. moviemakers will be screened. Mexico City and L.A. DJs will mix sounds side by side, and graffiti artists from the two cities will collaborate on a project.

Most fair-related activities will take place in the city’s historic center in and around the Zocalo. (More information on programming can be found at: www.cultura.df.gob.mx/culturama/cartelera/FeriaLibro2006/img1.html.)

The concentration of L.A. Latino artists arose through some unusual circumstances. Cultural officials here say they first attempted to contact L.A. city officials in February to formally advise them that Los Angeles was being invited to participate in the fair and seek their cooperation. But the Mexican officials “never got a direct answer” from their L.A. counterparts, Recasens says.

Finally, in June, Raquel Sosa, secretary of culture for Mexico City, flew to Los Angeles to meet with Margie Reese, then general manager of L.A.’s Department of Cultural Affairs. But as it happened, Reese resigned that very day. L.A. officials subsequently determined that there wasn’t enough time to organize an official fair delegation.

“The request came in too late, that’s the bottom line,” says Will Caperton y Montoya, the department’s director of marketing and development. “It’s a great event, we would have loved to participate.”

However, Sosa already had begun contacting other L.A. cultural figures, including arts presenter and curator Pilar Perez and Mexico-born artist Mariana Botey. The two women were tapped to organize an L.A. delegation, and have been scrambling to make arrangements. “It’s been crazy, very crazy,” Perez says. “But it’s working.”

Partly because of the three-month deadline, the women decided to focus on artists and writers whom they already knew or had worked with before, many of them Chicano, and others connected with what Botey calls Southern California’s “progressive community,” such as Tom Hayden, who will take part in a conversation with Mexican intellectual Carlos Monsivais.

There also will be a few non-Angelenos with strong L.A. ties. Guillermo Gomez-Pena, the well-known Mexico City-born, Bay Area-based avant-garde performance artist, will unveil a new work with his longtime artistic partner, Ruben Martinez. Gomez-Pena says the fair comes at a critical juncture in U.S.-Mexican relations, which have been strained by the bitter immigration debate, the U.S. preoccupation with Iraq and Mexico’s absorption in its own political crisis after its disputed July presidential election.

At the same time, he says, the Chicano and Chilango cultures are drawing closer in many ways, particularly among young people connecting through the Internet. “Artists are always crossing the border,” he says. “It’s like underground railroads.”

Botey traces some of the two cultures’ historic estrangement to “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” the highly influential book-length essay on Mexican identity written by Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican diplomat and man of letters. In his 1950 work, Paz wrote with a mix of sympathy and disdain about the zoot-suited “pachucos” of Los Angeles, Mexican immigrants whom he said had rejected their “whole inheritance: language, religion, customs, beliefs” in favor of a “grotesque dandyism.”

“He [Paz] has this kind of extremely conservative and elitist reading of what will be the culture of displacement and translation, which remains one of the key makers of the culture of globalization in the 21st century,” Botey says.

Chicanismo has drifted in and out of fashion among Chilangos, sometimes embraced for its Pop Art, urban-modernist aesthetic, sometimes rejected as a vulgar offshoot of “gringo-imperialist” commercial culture.

But those sentiments are slowly changing. Meanwhile, formal and informal cultural links between the two cities have proliferated in recent years. The Mexico-based Jumex Collection, one of the world’s largest and most important collections of Latin American art, has promoted the work of many L.A. artists. (Part of a recent Jumex exhibition on Mexico City and L.A. artists will be remounted as part of the book fair.)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently announced that it will loan 70 works from its core American paintings collection for an exhibition at Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL) opening Oct. 19. MUNAL will loan works from its permanent Mexican paintings collection for an upcoming LACMA show.

While Botey believes the encounter will be timely given the “issues on both sides of the border,” she stresses that this will be only one representation of Los Angeles culture, not a definitive survey. “We hope this is just the beginning of a dialogue.”

reed.johnson@latimes.com