Return to Aztlán: Resources

Transcription

1 Smithsonian American Art Museum Return to Aztlán: Resources Cocina Jaiteca, from the National Chicano Screenprint Taller, Larry Yáñez Printer: Self-Help Graphics serigraph on paper sheet: 40 1/4 x 25 3/4 in. (102.2 x 65.4 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles Available at

2 Farm Workers' Altar 1967 Emanuel Martínez acrylic on mahogany and plywood 38 1/8 x 54 1/2 x 36 in. (96.9 x x 91.4 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the International Bank of Commerce in honor of Antonio R. Sanchez, Sr Available at

3 Drawing for Southwest Pieta 1983 Luis Jiménez oil stick and oil paint on paper a: 60 1/8 x 119 in. (152.7 x cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Frank K. Ribelin A-B Available at

4 Return to Aztlán: Chicano Perspectives Readings Excerpts from Oral History Interviews with Chicano Artists collected by the Archives of American Art. Copy the links into your web browser to read the interviews in their entireties. RUPERT GARCIA Having arrived and being there for a while in Mexico City, seeing things, I felt, "D, I have a limited historical knowledge about Mexico. All I know and what I learned from experience back home with my family and the.... It was a limitation that was imposed because of economics. Some finished high school. Virtually nobody went on to college. So their interest was a mode in survival, and so there was no one to talk about all these vast, divine, Teotihuacan, and all that stuff, you know. or the writings of [Octavio Ed.] Paz and all that. That was not a part of my experience. Not at all. But going to Mexico and seeing all this stuff, I realized, "Wow!" "Wow," the weight of what is there to investigate about Mexico is so deep it s bottomless. Okay, on the one hand nauseous, on the other hand so elated. And I didn t blame anybody in my family for not giving me that because they didn t have it. They have what they have. But I was so elated that I really... I taught myself the complete history of Mexico from the Olmecas to the present INTERVIEWER: Okay, my question is and I think this is an important question, it s not a flippant one what difference did it make? What does that have to do with you, that civilization, Teotihuacan? What does that really have to do with you? You have, of course, your own experience. Your immediate experience was being born in California, growing up within that circumstance One could argue that that is your true experience, modest as it may be compared to the great accomplishments of Pre-Columbian Mexico. Well, it made me realize that the dynamics of anybody who was born anyplace and goes to somewhere else and who is not conscious or aware of a full spectrum of who they are, existentially and historically, who does not know that, is to a certain degree and in certain contexts, limited in their true potential of grasping.... See, I m interested in knowing the whole thing. I want to know everything about the world. Everything. So this is part of that. Not only was it a journey. But it matters in the same way in which it matters for anybody who learns, "Damn, you know what? My family... they re from Ireland. I just really found that out, that they re from Ireland. They never talked about it, or maybe there were things around, and then I did some work on it and I went to Ireland, and, wow, it s just amazing. I can now see these things I saw when Grandma and Grandpa and whatever... I can see the connections and I can see.... It s just amazing. It s amazing." And what it does, it amplifies your sensibility of who you are. You are more than whom you thought you were. You re more than that. And so for me that s what happened. It just opened up this.... And it resonated with a psychological elation as well as with, more important for me, an intellectual resonance and heightening. That awe: There s just so much out there to know about and to learn about. And go to Teotihuacan.

5 You know, I studied before I went. I studied the philosophy of Mexico from ancient times to the twentieth century as well as I did art history. I learned all that information. So I went and looking at what I studied, and then I m going, "Jeez, this is absolutely astounding to look at the production of this culture." And also understanding that while all of it is wonderful and profound, there was also certain aspects in Teotihuacan and the Aztecs that I found to be problematic. Which is the case for all cultures high or low, so-called high or low. But the opening... see, the experience... it matters because it told me, it demonstrated to me, "Rupert, you are who you thought you were and more. If you look at, in an orderly fashion, if you look at how you got here, how you got to French Camp, how you got to Manteca, Modesto, and Stockton, how you got to San Antonio, Texas, for basic training, how you got to Indochina all those kinds of connections, relationships, I wanted to know. And then experiencing the thing in Mexico gave me the opportunity to feel that and to sense it and to realize. Because for some people it doesn t matter. For me it mattered. Wow, I was like stimulated, like I said earlier, intellectually and emotionally, to get into this thing and just get as close as I can. Because what it did, it made me understand the significance of the cuisine on which I was raised. It made me understand why we had cactus plants in our backyard, nopales. It made me understand that a Nopal is more than simply a Nopal. It s more than that. It resonates, that s why. It amplifies, it rearticulates, it opens these doors of experience that made me feel that I am who I am yes, I am. But I m also part of something much larger than who I am. And I feel the same way when I meet people from anywhere that I am who I am, but I m also a part of you. And perhaps knowing you I know in some way is going to enhance me. And anybody who says I know you just raised a question, what does it matter? anyone that raised that question in a way to demean or to diminish the significance of same is one who is questioning their own selves and at the same time wished to deny the humanity of another. You re denying the intelligence of another who wishes to use that intelligence and imagination to enlarge their world view, their point of view. I m not saying that s you. One of the first times I went to Mexico, I think it was the early seventies, I m at the National Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park, and there are these young kids, Mexicano kids, looking at this layout of ancient Mexico Tenochtitlán [Mexico City RG]. And they re pointing at it and they re talking, "That s us." Okay, so kids are talking that way in the seventies in Mexico, one could say they were practicing ethnic studies. Because the myth is that all Mexicans know their past That s not true at all. Most of them don t know the past I mean, not the way in which Octavio Paz knows the past, or Carlos Fuentes or any intellectuals who know the past. So when I saw those kids, I saw me. I saw me. And I said, "D it, this exists in both places. In both places.

6 LUIS JIMENEZ I really felt like it was important for me to make that pilgrimage down to Mexico. In fact, I thought I was going to stay there and live. When I got down to Mexico, I realized that I was an American. My whole way of thinking, my framework, etc., is American. I am an American of Mexican descent. I mean, it s an important thing to realize at one point, I think. The man on fire comes from the Cuauhtemoc image of, you know, from Cuauhtemoc Cortez came into Mexico, came into the valley of Mexico, presented him as a god, was welcomed into the city by Montezuma, who was a very weak ruler, at the time. And eventually Cortez and his men took over the entire ruling class, made a captive of Montezuma and made slaves of the Aztecs. It was Cuauhtemoc, who was an 18-year- old he s perfect hero material who gathered the Aztecs together and said, Hey, this guy I don t think is a god, because, you know, they re going around stealing all the gold.... [laughs] And, you know, We ve got to get them out of here. He organizes the Aztecs and throws Cortez out of the city. When Cortez comes into the city, he then does what they did with what they did because it was during the Inquisition in Spain he then does what you did with anybody who was a heathen, who wasn t a Christian, which is you burn them at the stake. So he burns Cuauhtemoc at the stake, which is, you know, this wonderful image now, because, Cuauhtemoc stood there, and of course he was an Indian, he was stoic, I mean, you know, he showed no pain. He just was this guy, you know, with the flames. And so when the Mexican muralists began looking for a positive image for the Indian in Mexico, I mean, they found this perfect image in Cuauhtemoc. Now, why is that important? Well, my grandmother came out of the Mexican revolution. You know, she had lived a long time, I mean, she went through the revolution, she saw this change, she herself was very dark-skinned, but with green eyes, of Indian stock from San Luis Potosi. Again, educated and knew what was going on. She knew about all these images, so as a kid, you know, I was told about Cuauhtemoc, and I was told, for instance I ve said it before, but I m saying it again for this tape, because we re putting everything together that when I was a kid, you know, if I scraped my knee, for instance, and I d come in crying to my grandmother, she say, you know, How can you cry about a little thing like that, because after all they burned Cuauhtemoc at the stake. They burned his legs off and he never cried. You know. So it became this kind of hero guy for me, and when I go into the dentist s office, I mean, you know, How can I can I be afraid of a little dentist s drill when after all, you know, Cuauhtemoc....it s not like I did this very methodical, Oh, gee, I m going to pick on a hero. I mean, this is going to be a good guy. It s that I grew up knowing about this guy, thinking of him in a mythic kind of way. I mean, you know, this guy is like some kind of Superman.

7 GILBERT MAGU LUJAN And it s important to note that because, as an artist, I was already working on trying to establish something that later blew up called the Movimiento. I was alone. I was trying to talk to people about these things, had very few ears that would pay attention to it, and I didn t know enough. So it was this examination and exploration that began to lead me into.... Well, since then I ve learned how to articulate it this way that is, that art is a noun and Chicano art makes Chicano an adjective. I said, "Okay, I ve got an adjective describing what kind of art it is, so what is Chicano? Chicano is not a political entity. Chicano is not a religion. Chicano s not an ethnic group unless you want to say we re mestizos, which I would accept. So what is Chicano? Well, what do I need? I need visuals. Well, Chicano really is a cultural term therefore, let s say that the term is cultural. Now let s look at the culture for the visual motifs that I need to describe what Chicano art is." That was the first round. The second round in my thinking had to do with refining these ideas from beyond the tortilla and the tacos and the low-riders and the pan de huevo. So now what? Now we have a vocabulary. And what I think and what people have told me this is not coming from me, I say but they said that people who have known what I ve done for the last thirty years said that I was probably the most helpful in establishing a vocabulary for Chicano art. I d tell whoever was listening. I did it on TV, I did it in a lecture series, and then I did it in my work. And anybody that would listen in meetings would say, "Ah, Magu s at it again you know, talking about cholos and low-riders and stuff, and tortillas." I call this the Tortilla Clan. Again, looking for symbols and looking for things that made sense. I looked at the wheel by the.... The Native Americans have the shield, the wheel. We got all these things that are emblematic of the culture, okay? And so. And the Mayas, the Aztecas, the Toltecas, they all influenced this thing. This is the one that kills me. We sit down and we start having our mental menudo session and people say, "Well, what is Chicano art?" And we always throw bread at those people, because we ve.... And it s not an unfair question. It really isn t. Because there is a lot of confusion in people s minds about these things. And it was my endeavoring to clarify this by establishing a definition that was all-encompassing. I needed to take care of academic concerns and issues. And this idea that, "Well, just because you re a Chicano, you re doing Chicano art," is not an argument. It s not a stance. It s just a stupid opinion], in my opinion. [laughs] It doesn t hold water. It just doesn t work. Because there s no evidence of that. I know a lot of Chicanos that don t do Chicano art and don t want to. So definitions had to hold up on their own; they have to stand on their own. These ideas that I was trying to put together, this vocabulary, these motifs that I was trying to single out to begin to say, "Okay, if you re going to do Chicano art, you ve got to use these little Mexican pots, you ve got to use a reference to the culture. It s all I ask. You ve got to make it evident." Because when we went into abstract art, they said, "Well, how does abstract art work?" I said, "Now you re trying to get another concept called abstract art, a cousin of Chicano art, and you re trying to make that Chicano art. It s a different notion."

8 ENRIQUE CHAGOYA As Carlos Fuentes put it once, we are children of two fundamentalist cultures, the Catholic and the pre-columbian. They were totally religious, both of them. So we got a double whammy, in that sense. I think anybody who leaves their own country of origin creates a mental distance, from it. I created a distance of myself with my own history and in a way, not too different than what some scientists have to do to distance themselves from what they see. Hopefully, I m not trying to idealize certain things of my own culture. On the other hand, I also feel a distance to this country, so you become a citizen of both countries, or of no country. Sort of like a citizen of a borderless country, in which you find fellow citizens of borderless countries, everywhere. Somehow, where you grow up leaves a mark on you, no matter where you re coming from, and that made that kind of an effect on me. I cannot escape my sense of humor, that s for sure. I think I move away, or I m moving away from issues of identity. And in that sense, I have a difference with Chicano art. Chicano art is very much based on the need to affirm an identity that has been very much oppressed by the dominant culture. In my case, I grew up familiar with it, taking it, maybe even, for granted, when I grew up in Mexico. I ve never been insecure about my own identity, in that sense, or not insecure, but I ve never been denied of it. I ve never been punished for speaking Spanish, like some of my Chicano friends, or I didn t have to look for Zapata or the Virgin of Guadalupe, because I grew up with them, to the point that I didn t want to see any more images of them. So it s just the opposite. So the issues of identity, I will say, are secondary in my work, even though I have a lot of very culturally significant symbolism in the work. It is not about identity, but rather, that s the specific experience from which I depart to think about more global issues. I think that s the only way I could think of being sincere, through my own personal, specific experience. In other words, I don t believe there is a universal culture or a universal, or way of looking at the world. You could see it through a specific experience. That applies to any culture in history. I think the Greeks are a very specific culture, through which you could find universal values. The same thing happens with the Egyptian culture, it s very specific. But then you could find very universal values, the same thing with the pre-columbian cultures, the Nahua cultures, the Mayan, or the Incas, or et cetera. You could find a way in which there is universal understanding, but from a very specific experience. I think the same thing happens with my artwork.