Respite from the Sun

From the jam-packed Very Be Careful show on Friday at Grandstar's Firecracker in Chinatown to the Amsterdam Cafe in the North Hollywood arts district on Sunday for an afternoon of poetry, there was no avoiding the extreme heat that laid low the greater LA-area. At the moment, the much cooler sound of an El Sereno rooster accompanies the hint of fog under partially overcast skies. He must think it's the breaking of a longer-than-average dawn. This contrasts with the smoking VBC fusilade of Colombian cumbia and happy-fingered accordion riffs which was brief but beautiful. Unexpectedly caught sight, from across the room, of a healthy contingent from Proyecto Jardin, a squad of white-clad artisans and community comadres who support, nurture and cultivate--literally--the independent Boyle Heights green space and gather once a month for the Mercado Caracol to break bread while trading/selling books, jewelry, crafts and herbal products. Bumped into Azul and his camera yet again for an equally pleasant surprise. Of course, the foursome I was part of raced madly thereafter to Eastside Luv for last call with Guillermo "Pata de Perro" Uribe, whose entirely too hip and too cool night spot was the subject of an LA Times feature the following day. Felicidades to Guillermo and Arlene. You have to love an in-house DJ that plays Morrisey and Ramón Ayala back to back. And what's with all these husband and wife teams showing the rest of us how that sort of thing is possible? Unfortunately, I missed the Mentiritas show there the next night, but that's another story. Do yourself a favor and catch Lysa Flores there this Friday if you can't make the history of LA DJ culture event on Thursday.

Running on Firecracker fumes and residual Eastside Luv glow from the night before, I still managed to catch the last part of the First Annual Latino Student Film Festival at Lincoln High School in Lincoln Heights, the neighborhood directly south of here on Saturday morning. Organized by Harry Liflan and the Latin-American Cinemateca of LA, the one-day fest was chock-full of future directors, producers and writers. Alternately touching and hilarious, the short films were marked by uncanny understanding of teen angst and its place in the world as a harbinger of passion and the creative spirit. And the vegetarian tamales I brought home are off the hizinges.

Qwik-ee Round Up: I'll save the personal take on Linda Arreola's "Vaguely Chicana" exhibit, which closed on Saturday afternoon at Trópico de Nopal Gallery and the Vexing show which opened at the Claremont Museum of Art on Saturday night for another post. Suffice it simply to say here that Arreola is an El Sereno neighbor whose work is con[text]ually divine in its geometric and mathematical precision. At the other end of the spectrum, the Claremont exhibition is intended to highlight the contributions of women to the underground LA Chicano punk scene during the late 70s and early 80s as well as the bastard, hybrid art spawned by that era. Much of the work, which ruptured outward into the mainstream consciouness with an LA Weekly article on ASCO and again with the opening of "Phantom Sightings" at LACMA, is reprised, but not a rehash. Despite the fact that at least two of the show's curators were children being reared in places other than LA when the scene unfolded, the exhibition is extremely well put together. The research was spot on. The raucous opening night performances by queen of Chicano rock Lysa Flores and Alice Bags were fever pitch odes to the Sex Pistols and Clash-inspired turbulence I flirted with in high school while at the same time, I was ordering by mail a compilation album titled Los Angelinos: The Eastside Renaissance, a 1983 issue that included tunes by both The Brat and The Plugz. And who will ever match Alice Bags neé Alicia Armendáriz shouting "Chinga tu madre" in a song at the top of her lungs repeatedly then joking about the need to end her set because the vehicle from the senior citizen's home was waiting for her outside?

In the sin verguenza, mire lo que hice department, I read a few poems at the Amsterdam Cafe in the North Hollywood (NOHO... How pretensious is that?) Arts District on Sunday alongside Gloria Alvarez who has been like a sister, a literary co-conspirator and all-around comandante brillante through a tumultuous year, and Gabriela Jauregui, a heavy-duty wordslinger packed into a tiny, five-foot frame all decked out in a gauzy white dress, red undergarments and cat-eye glasses. Her book, Controlled Decay, is available on Chris Abani's Black Goat poetry series. Born and raised in Mexico City, she out-Conrads Conrad with an urgent, dangerously sublime command of el idioma de los gringos. Her poems are visceral yet captivatingly femenine. Obviously, being educated at some of the best schools in two countries as part of the elite, privileged class is no hindrance. But hers is a language that trancends, that couples freedom and liberation and dreams of a society without class distinctions or exploitation. Muscular and at times venturing compellingly into the realm of the pyrotechnic, her work is necessary frontburner reading and at the leading edge of Latina letters in the U.S. Props to Rafael Alvarado for coordinating the monthly Amsterdam event.

Dualities and Line Drawing

Have to begin this post with a resounding plug for Alberto Ibarra and Christi Burgos, who celebrate 13 years of matrimony and art. Beto is a founding member of Teatro Chusma in East LA, and they both make stunning visual work they've grouped together for a show called "Giving Birth to Duality." The husband and wife collaborative exhibition is currently on display at Antigua Cultural Coffee House here in El Sereno and features serigraphy and painting as well as the vivid 3-D paper mache pieces Burgos creates as the force behind Mayan Inspirations. I wasn't able to make the opening, but the work will remain on exhibit for the next few weeks. Be sure to check the wedding photo that pictures the happy couple in front of a classic bomb lowrider straight from the 1940s. Kind of makes you proud to be in LA.

"Herban Mother-Lode," a photo exhibition at First Street Studios in the heart of Boyle Heights featuring work by several photographers I admire, opened last Saturday with a daylight outdoor performance by East LA's favored musical sons Ollin and beats by Spaceways Radio DJ Carlos Nino. The exhibition offer eye-catching and thoughtful work by Sandra de la Loza, Dalila Mendez, Heriberto Oriol and his son Esteban Oriol. Definitely worth checking out. I plan to stop by for a second look myself. It was definitely cool to finally catch up with Azul, the artist behind the "Peace in Iraq" photo project.

Of course, the weekend would not have been complete without a predictable stop at Ave. 50 after the Boyle Heights run for a showing of new work from The Los De Abajo Printmaking Collective, an informal group working out of Self-Help Graphics. "Drawing the Line," as the exhibition is titled, is a tantalizing show of experimental prints that use line as a point of departure for exploration and examination of social demarcations, internal and external emotional states as well as the intersections of art with political and personal ideologies or transfigurations. Among the artists exhibiting are José Lozano, Emelda Gutierrez, Judith Durán, Kay Brown, Poli Marichal (who will also be part of the "Maestras" show opening in several weeks at Self-Help), Mariana Sadowsky, Antonio Escalante, Victor Rojas and fellow Echospace Poetry Collective member Don Newton.

Emelda Gutierrez and Kay Brown deserve mention here because I had not yet realized how singularly powerful and evocative their respective print work has become. Beyond that, I'm wearing a nugget-sized quartz crystal in a brass wire setting that hangs from a leather chord around my neck these days. It is a gift from the hyper-energetic Gutierrez, and it has become the amulet that fuses both poetic and earthly energy for me as the waves of melancholy nostalgia and fear-laced sadness are gradually replaced with peace and light and joy.

Mother's Day Tribute & Post-Chicano Blues

In El Sereno and environs, life will not be the same but it goes on, because go on it must. After turning the final pages of The Shadow of the Wind, an extraordinary novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, I linger on the moderate attempts made over the last few days to once again inhabit the land of the living and to once again be inspired by the landscapes of love and art. The annual summer youth play at Plaza de la Raza, an adaption of Teatro Campesino's El Soldado Razo by Culture Clash's Herbet Siguenza, reminds us of the need to examine the costs of war, both literally and metaphorically, in our community. Doff o' the old bowler hat to me friend Herb for a putting together a play in Lincoln Heights with more than a score of neighborhood and community youth, righteous kids who helped write the script then put on quite a show and even danced salsa with Vicky Grise and the ever fabulous Karla Legaspy at Friday's opening night after-party. Compound that particular joy with a Saturday night splash at Ave. 50 by the Inspiration House Poetry Choir. Joining the usual crew was the "Chola con Cello" herself, María Elena Gaitán, who lit up the already intoxicating fusion of improvised music behind live poetry delivered at volcanic intensities with her relentless bow. Y finalmente, I was able to sit in on the discussion between Sandra de la Loza and Harry Gamboa at Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the "Phantom Sightings" exhibition. Not a whole lot of new ground covered, but at least it wasn't a rehash of the same old tropes. Ms. de la Loza, if a bit nervous before such a large crowd and for the fact that the show has been the subject of far ranging polemics, discussion and criticism, reminded us that we can and must reappropriate media and public symbols in order to restore forgotten or intentionally whitewashed history. It is this re-write of truth and distortion of historical fact to create myths and collective amnesia, she seems to suggest, that makes possible a world where urban youth are criminalized and dissent, critical thought or free-speech, at every level, is quelled before it truly ever even begins with the complicity of corporate thought control as issued by mass media in support of a hegemonic state and both its internal and external policies. So here we are, folks, well into the hyperglorified Cinco de Mayo celebration, a holiday rarely celebrated in Mexico, if you must know. Stay tuned for this Friday's "Homenaje Dia de las Madres: Honoring our Mothers and the Earth." It's a fundraiser and tribute at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock. The reading begins 8 p.m. and will include sets from spinmasters Fermina D and DJ Hugo Molina.

Para la quien ya no volveré a buscar

Adios mamá, aneh huitzilincuatzintahtli

The hummingbird whir of her hands, nimble fingers that stitched quinceañera dresses, built delicate sand castle-sized cakes from roses and flowers made with sugar frosting can be heard faintly. Her small, strong and stoic hands, hands that once picked cotton and tomatoes and okra, are pressing against my breastbone gently in the dark. Her spirit has returned to remind me of those moments as a child when only a warm glass of milk and her thumbs in circular motion along my temples could get me to sleep. She is gone you see. Se nos ha ido la bella picarrosa. She ascended on Saturday night in a room far away. I would have spoken of weeklong dread, a foreboding that was countered by a good meeting on Friday with old friend, author and community advocate Luís Rodríguez at Tia Chucha's Café Cultural and a visit to both Ave. 50 Studios and Trópico de Nopal as a tag along with friends who knew I was anxious to be near my mother's side. I searched frantically for a one-way flight because I could not change a previously purchased reservation in order to arrive sooner, but it was not soon enough. Juliana Zepeda Vela, the woman from whom everything beautiful, my appreciation for all things creative, aesthetic, sensitive or artistic comes, is no longer here. I know hurt greater than any heartbreak now. My artist friend Daniel Gonzalez, a printmaker from Boyle Heights says "Que tragos amargos nos da la vida!" Media artist Maritza Alvarez sends me into the aftermath of my beautiful mother's ascencion with "fuerza y paz." But the loss is no less painful. At 69, she succumbed to liver cancer, almost as if the posting of the previous poem was a prophetic foreshadowing. We knew it would happen. We just didn't think it would happen so quickly. The poem was posted shortly after a run along Huntington Drive to Alhambra--a stab at cardiovascular health--where I discovered a hummingbird on the pavement midway between the El Sereno Community Garden and Fremont Street. Irridescent, the nestling was barely alive, its tiny heartbeat racing uncontrollably. I moved the injured baby bird to a cooler, less visibe place. And I did not realize it was a message for me until I opened the box of adornments my mother had often worn and wished me to have as a gift when she was gone. Last night inside my mother's home, my sister Alma handed me what seemed to be a watch or bracelet case. Inside, I found a silver a hummingbird broach. It lay alongside a pendant, an antique woman's watch and a bracelet, keepsakes meant for me by a mother who embodied style and grace as the visible evidence and an extension of her natural talent as an artesana. Remarkably, the pendant--a silver Thai circle with an aqua-colored stone set in its center--suits the dress she selected for her burial, perfectly. Since she had never worn the dress, we removed it from her closest with the price tag still attached. I've decided she will take the pendant with her. I have my family's permission to place the pendant around her slender neck during a memorial service tomorrow. The brocade huitzilin I will keep as a reminder of the mission she has symbolically entrusted to me. Y como me mandó mi querida madre, voy empezar pidiendole publicamente las disculpas a la hija de ehecatl. Ojalá que un día me pueda perdonar. Pero no la culparía si nunca quisiera jamás. I will honor her memory as well, while I seek transformation and peace. As instructed by my mother, I will leave the past where it belongs and hover fearlessly in the face of the future.

fantasmas personales: poesía COMO movimiento

It is the iron and blood offered on blue black

flower stems or rusting hulks of palm tree decay,

the children who rage and perish in green cellblock

isolation, medicated under guard and lock and key,

a street-bred godson lost in the slow suspicion that his

chameleon gifts are unwelcome and misunderstood,

the propaganda that paralyzes thought and dissent with

threat and fear amplified on screens and speakers

bought and paid for with clueless taxpayer complicity.

It is the bitter sound of homelessness on worn sneaker

soles under the anonymous face of addiction and exile,

the Iraq war veteran with a gun to his head as he recalls

atrocity in a desert he should never have known,

his grandfather who cries silently at dawn for lost loves

and the borders like walls and turrets that drove them away,

the bent and fractured poet who twists with insomnia

and recalls every unfinished dream like the color of dread,

his mother with a blooming flower of death in her liver,

as if to say innocence can only be rewarded with fire.

It is the unforgotten beloved he could not regain,

the stainless steel memory of refrigerated nausea

against the gray-smoke haze of anguish or remorse

or the sound of a blackboard under his fingernails

until the blistering exhaustion encircles his neck

and rakes all of his pores along barbed-wire truth

like the time he woke up on the curb, his face tired

and the spring a season of despair longing for hope.

El Sereno
November, 2007

LA Phantom Sightings

The last weekend of the monthlong Somos Medicina celebration organized by Mujeres de Maiz coincided with the opening of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement." I am proud to say I made it to the video screenings at Self-Help, a soul stirring presentation of conscious hip-hop, rap, spoken word, jaraneras and the closing ceremonia at Proyecto Jardín as part of the former. Can't say enough about how true and powerful and uplifting the art exhibit and the films and the energy were. If I'm mum for a moment about the hotly anticipated LACMA show, it's because I agree with Oscar Magallanes and feel like the sisters got it going on with the kind of work that people need to know about. I can rattle off names, hurl shout outs to film and visual and word comadres Dalila Paola Mendez, Felicia Montes, Claudia Mercado, Marisol Torres, Maritza Alvarez, and Cihuatl Ce, all chingonas who don't need to be validated at the institution or by dry academics who barely ever even make their way to the Eastside unless it's to check out a collection of Chicano art owned by luminary collectors such as Gilbert Cardenas. It means more to me that Gloria Alvarez and Yreina Cervantes are invited and included by their legitimate heirs. It's the conversation that flies in the face of this tacit generational erasure, as if to say that Chicano art and movimiento politics are evolving into a more hybrid mainstream, one that brings a few emerging art stars to an invitation-only party at LACMA. Of course there are hold-outs, my own contemporaries who do stand up with serious critiques... Sandra de la Loza, la Space Chola and Arturo Romo are head on here. Ms. de la Loza was in both shows. And she is an El Sereno native. Call her a bridge and artist that can help redeem the inexcusable elitism of an exhibit that only tries to patronize and annoint... the kind of exercise that only further encourages some cool, hip youngsters. They are the kids who can tell you about ASCO and Rage Against the Machine. They'll know all the groovy nightspots around town but are losing the legacies of Emma Tenayuca or Reyes Tijerina or Raul Salinas in the process. Meanwhile, lofts and development get approved and poor people have to leave. Excuse me if I'm a little jaded and cynical, but I'd still much rather talk and write about what's happening in the 'hood. How come we haven't allowed the conversation to include the influence and beauty of Centro America on our politics and struggle? Why has Chicanismo not been there to prevent the exportation of a deeply embedded gang culture, furthering the criminalization of our youth in a global context and an interminable line of kids going to jail for making "terrorists threats" or just hanging out together on the street in the same neighborhoods being gentrified to may way for the next wave of starving artists? Why have we not spoken about the next generation of resistance to hegemony and colonialism coming from the artists that have as many roots in Mexico City and Guatemala as they do in the City of Angels?

Enough tirade. Go to First Street Studios and check out the new show curated by Lilia Ramirez and Juan Ochoa. Go there before you make the trek out west to LACMA. These are companion and complimentary exhibitions, in my own personal and highly opinionated point of view. I do want to see the "Phantom" show, and support the artists who have contributed work but I also want to be like Adelina Anthony, a Tex-Mex-patriot, playwright and luchadora. I want to cross my arms, click my teeth and palette and say for all time that I'm Xican@ with an "X" and an "at" sign at the end.

Y mis mas sinceros perdones/disculpas al anónimo quien dijo que debo aprender no mirar, porque me podrían picar los ojos. I apologize profusely and confess that I have no idea where I'm looking at most times. I've been so severely inhabiting my own head and heart for two years now and especially since a return from the tomato fields in Florida, that I'm not exactly sure how I could be faulted for looking too long or untoward at anyone. If there was a mistaken perception that I was staring or engaging in some form of lurking disrespect, I would like to know and would be happy to have my eyes poked out by an honest, truthful person willing to tell me neta, to my face that they were feeling something I did was unkind or came from some machista objectification. This is exactly what I'm rebelling against. And it's what we all need some good healing from.