PAN DULCE!
(MEXICAN PASTRY)
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Throughout the United States many people awaken each morning with one thing in mind: Pan Dulce!  The wide variety of pastries known collectively as Pan Dulce (literally “sweet bread.”) can be found, freshly baked, on sale in panaderias (bakeries ) from Los Angeles, California to Brooklyn, New York,  from San Antonio, Texas  to Chicago, Illinois and from Yakima, Washington to Tucson, Arizona. In some panaderias, the customer uses metal tongs to select his or her particular preference in pan dulce, while at other bakeries, the behind-the-counter servers will take the order and place the selections in a bag for the customer. Pan dulce can also be bought pre-packaged in cellophane at supermarkets and corner stores. Mexican pan dulce dates back to the Spanish conquest, when Spaniards introduced their pastry traditions to the New World. Later Mexican bakers incorporated indigenous ingredients and created new recipes.  In the 1860s, the French intervention into Mexico brought with it the influence of French pastry-making. Today, pan dulce is a creative amalgam of all of these baking styles. The result is literally hundreds of variations on a theme. LATINOPIA wondered what do you call this and that sweet bread? Here are names for some of the most common varieties of Mexican pan dulce. So next time you buy pan dulce, instead of saying, “give me one of those,” you’ll be able to say,  “give me a conchita blanca, a polvoron or ojos de buey.”

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Conchita Blanca (White Conch Shell)

Conchita Chilindrina (Trifle Conch Shell)

Conchita Tomate (Tomato Conch Shell)

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Cuernitos (Little Horns)

Nino Embuelto (Wrapped Up Child)

Empanada de Pina (Pinapple turnover)

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Chamucos

Rieles de Pina y Fresa (Pinapple & Strawberry Rails)

Elotes (Corn Cobs)

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Conos (Cones)

Mantecadas (Muffins)

Danish Ochos (Danish Eights)

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Galleta Grajea (Sprinkles Cookie)

Galleta de Tres Colores (Three-colored Cookie)

Galleta Sandia (Watermelon Cookie)

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Cochitos (Little Pigs)

Ojos de Buey (Ox Eyes)

Muffin de Zanahoria (Carrot Muffin)

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Payasos (Clowns)

Galleta Happy Face (Happy Face Cookie)

Novias (Brides)

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Polvoron (Dusters)

Polvoron Rojo (Red Duster)

Polvoron Amarillo (Yellow Duster)

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COMING SOON: MORE PAN DULCE SELECTIONS!

Artist Judy Baca

JUDY BACA
IN HER OWN WORDS:

When I first became aware of the Chicano Movement was watching the walk-outs in East Los Angeles. I watched on television and began to wonder and question what I was doing as an artist. I came to muralism by virtue of writing in the street.

I remember specifically one piece of writing that was very influential and someone had scrawled in giant words, “I would rather live one year as a lion than a hundred years as a lamb.” And when I saw that I thought look at that, this is the most powerful thing, its public, its not on a canvas, nobody owns it, and yet it is speaking to the community. And I thought that is what we should be doing, making images that speak to the community.

Sy Griven was a man who believed in urban wildernesses. He came from the Kennedy administration and became director of Parks and Recreation in Los Angeles. And he saw me doing this [mural] work and I thought he was going to tell me to stop because I was

Wall Grafitti "One Day as a Lion"

ruining his park walls. So I was prepared to be scolded. Instead he said, “What are you doing and how can we do more of this? How can we bottle this?”I said I could use some more paint and scaffolding. He ended giving me a job as the director of the Eastside murals.

By 1974, we had a full blown mural project. We were able to give artists things that they needed to produce their works throughout the city.

The reason I made the images I made when I made the Great Wall was that I was pissed off. I was pissed off that I could not find the kinds of historical records that would say what we had contributed to society. So, the great wall is a great giant testament to interracial harmony.

Judy Baca and Muralist Team

It’s a history that includes the story of the people, people that have been left out of the history books for the most part. It examines what was not told in that history and it looks very specifically in the face of things like Chavez Ravine, or the story of the Zoot Suit riots or for that matter the black coveted laws of Los Angeles. It tells the story of race but it also tells the great history of amazing people who came through great struggle to contribute to our society.

Artist Yolanda López

YOLANDA LÓPEZ – CALIFORNIA ARTIST

I did not become aware of our own history until 1968 when there was a call for a strike at San Francisco State, a strike for ethnic studies. I heard the men and women that led that Third World Strike speak and I understood at that point what my position was

"Free Los Siete" art by Yolanda López

being part of this long legacy of being part of the oppressed people, just like Black people. In 1969, there was an incident in the Mission District where seven young men were accused of killing an undercover policeman. And I had joined a Chicano group after the San Francisco State strike and we became Los Siete De La Raza (The Seven of the People) after that incident. I was interested in learning how to draw, so when to Los Siete (The Seven) to be a part of them, all of a sudden there was a need for the tools that I had, my ability to draw.

"Virgen Running" by Yolanda López

I originally did the Virgin de Guadalupe series when I was looking at media. I wanted to look at the images that we have of the Virgin–she was essentially the most ubiquitous female Latina. What was its meaning? So, I did the first one of myself running.

Then I did the image of my mother [as the Virgen] who was working at the

"Virgen Seamstress" by Yolanda López

Navel Training Center at a sewing machine, so I wanted to show her as a working woman. This is one of the problems with the Virgen de Guadalupe being so ubiquitous, there is no real imagery of Latinas at the work that we do.

"Virgen Grandmother" by Yolanda López

The other one was that of my grandmother. The Virgen de Guadalupe is always this beautiful, young thing. Yet there is no depiction of her as an older woman. I was conscious about this and so that‘s why I did my grandmother as an older woman. I see the Virgen de Guadalupe as being the great Aztec goddess and I think that’s one of the reasons why she has such a strong, indefinable hold on Mexicans and women in general. Its more primordial. I think the great Aztec goddess, Cuatlique, depicts the primal forces in nature: life, death and rebirth.

TOP TEN LATINO ALBUMS OF ALL TIME
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As with other Latinopia lists, the criteria used was: is the work of art still valid, vibrant and
remembered a decade after its release? In the case of music, are people still listening to this album ten years (and, in some cases, forty years) later? Of course, there are many albums that
fit this criteria. Latinopia also looked to the influence that the album and musician would later leave on the evolution of Latino music. We offer the following list of top Latino Albums for your perusal, approval and/or debate.
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1)     Abraxas (1970)
Santana
At a time when Latino rock was relegated to
barrio venues, Santana’s second break through
album not only firmly embedded Santana into the
national American register but also did much
to prepare American listeners for appreciating
subsequent Latino rock groups like Malo and
Los Lobos. The album includes the hits Black
Magic Woman, Oye Como Va and Singing
Wind/Crying Beasts. Arguably the most
significant single Latino album ever produced.

2)     Just Another Band from East L.A. (1977)
Los Lobos
Produced on a budget of less than $3,000,
this first album by the legendary Los Lobos
is an all acoustic and virtually all Spanish
language album that showed the promise of this
internationally renowned and multi-talented
group of East Los Angeles musicians before
they went electric and rock. The cuts on this
album reveal their roots and the promise of the
unique musicianship that would later result in
hits like La Bamba, Will The Wolf Survive,
Kiko and the Lavender and La Pistola y El
Corazon. The album includes such classics as
Sabor A Mi, Cielito Lindo, La Iguana,
Feria de las Flores and María Chuchena.

3)     Big Hits By Prado (1960)
Perez Prado
During the fifties Cuban born orchestra leader and
composer Perez Prado scored American number one
hits with Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,
Patricia and Mambo No. 5. When stereo came onto the
scene, RCA decided to record these and other hits in stereo.
The result was Big Hits by Prado which further consolidated
Prado as the King of the Mambo. These same songs can now
be heard on a variety of compilations including the 1995
Rhino collection, Mondo Mambo. When you listen to
Cherry Pink or Patricia, one wonders: How
could modern American Latino music have evolved
without these ground breaking sounds?

4)     Dreaming of You (1995)
Selena
Released shortly after her premature death in
1995, this album shows the promise of what could
have been. English language songs like Dreaming
of You, I Could Fall in Love and Captive Heart are
complemented by Spanish language hits like Amor
Prohibido and Tu Solo Tu. In her short lifetime,
Selena amassed a worldwide audience making
her worth of inclusion on this list.

5)    La Incomparable Celia (1958)
Celia Cruz
This was the first album to consolidate
the many performances of Celia Cruz with
the legendary Cuban band, La Sonora Mantancera.
The vibrant and electric voice of a young woman
alive with music and culture reverberates throughout
this album and suggests the legacy that she would
later leave after a lifetime of singing. The album
includes Chango Ta Viene, Madre Rumba,
Poco a Poco, Baho Kende and Que Voy Hacer.
Rhino records includes many of these in its
compilation release of the Celia Cruz/Sonora Matancera
collaborations from 1951 thru 1965 titled
100% Azucar! The Best of Celia Cruz con la
Sonora Mantancera.

6)     Para La Gente (1972)
Little Joe & La Familia
This breakthrough album put Little Joe
and La Familia on the national register
and introduced his big band Tex-Mex
sound  to a national audience. The album
includes his signature song, Las Nubes,
as well as El Disco, Que Culpa Tengo
Viajera, and La Tracionera. Perhaps
the quintessential Tex-Mex album.

7)    Dance Mania (1958)
Tito Puente
This 1958 break through album not only
established Tito Puente as the King of the
Salseros, but also did much to popularize
the cha cha, son and mambo to American
audiences (Latinos were already on to all
of this!) The album , touted as “the album that
taught America to dance,” includes El Cayuco,
Complicación, 3-D Mambo, Estoy Siempre
Junto as Tí and Saca Tu Mujer. Listening to
Tito Puente in his youth affirms the vision
and artistry that would later make him a
legend.

8)    Canciones de Mi Padre (1987)
Linda Ronstadt
Linda Ronstadt’s first Spanish language album,
Songs of My Father, was a smash hit on its
release in 1987 and soon became the largest
selling non-English language album in American
music history. Based on songs she heard her
father sing at their home in Tucson, Arizona,
the album includes such Mexican standards as
Los Laureles, Tú Solo Tú, Y Andale, Dos
Arbolitos and La Barca de Guaymas.

9 ) Thee Midniters Greatest Hits (1965)
Thee Midniters
This landmark first album by the
legendary Eastside rock group crystalized
the Eastside sound that had been pioneered
by the Premiers, Cannibal and the Headhunters
and El Chicano and that would evolve with
groups like Azteca and Tierra. The album, now
reissued by Thump records includes classics
such as Whittier Blvd, Land of A Thousand
Dances, That’s All, Sad Girl and Giving Up
on Love. The next best thing to having the vinyl.

10)     Buena Vista Social Club (1997)
Ry Cooder and the Buena Vista Social Club
This collaboration between American musician
Ry Cooder with old school Cuban musicians
of the “son de Cuba” like Ibrahim Ferrer, Orlando
“Cachaíto” López, Eliades Ochoa and Compay
Segundo rocked the American music scene on
its release in 1997. Since then it has done much
to revitalize cross-cultural understanding between
Cuba and the United States and has introduced
American listeners to a classic Cuban sound seldom
heard before. The album includes outstanding songs
like Chan Chan,De Camino a La Vereda, Dos
Gardenias, Candela and La Bayamesa.

GILBERT “MAGU” LUJAN – CALIFORNIA ARTIST

Artist Gilbert "Magu" Lujan

IN HIS OWN WORDS:

I came out of the Air Force in 1962 and I went to East L.A. College. I took art classes. And as I was learning about the vocabulary in fine arts, definitions and so forth. I looked to the barrio and found parallels. I began to understand that a sculpture, by definition, was a low-rider and by definition, calligraphy could be graffiti. And altars were installation pieces. I began to realize this about 1964 and 1965. I began to curate shows and trying to find a definition for Chicano Art in a very rudimentary way. It was a cultural effort.

Frank [Romero] introduced me to Carlos [Almaraz]. Frank was the only one who had a house, we would go to his house to have coffee. Frank was never interested in political events, it was Carlos and I that had the most tumultuous conversations. He told me he didn’t want to hear

Los Four Artist

about Chicano Art, “Don’t tell me about that Chicano Art shit.” He had just come back from New York, he was doing Rauschenberg and those kinds of images. I was looking into our Mesoamerican heritage as a root as a basis for what I was doing.

This is how the Los Four show was assembled. I began to look for people that I wanted to have in the show. Beto De La Rocha was a given, we had gone to East Los Angeles college together, so I knew him for ten or twelve years already. Then Carlos was another choice of mine. And Frank was somebody that Carlos wanted to be in the group. LACMA had already done a show previously with Black artists. They had done nothing for the Chicano community. A group Chicano show made sense. What happened as a result of the Los Four exhibit was, not only was it a first, but it was important because thousands of people came to the museum that had never gone there to the museum. The other is that here we had a group of artists that were talking about being Chicanos– without apologies, talking about self-determination.

Dog People sculptures

I wanted to find an icon that made sense to me, that would represent what I was trying to do. So the Mexican pyramid was that icon. One day I inverted two pyramids and saw a dog howling. So I wound up with a pyramid dog. That was the original idea for my dogs. Then I made the first anthropomorphic stick dogs and then that led to the pachuco dogs. I began to do these dog characters.

I think the lowrider was just part of what I was exploring to help define Chicano Art for myself. The reason that I have anthropomorphized cars and everything else that I do, is

Car Woman

because I am a humanitarian, I am a humanist. Making these things human is my counter to the alienation that I see in society. I see a lot of abuses which take place. Immigrant people coming over here and doing the dirty work and then being criticized and being treated hostilely. It is this human quality that is lacking in our society that I am trying to address.

Borderless Express

For me making them these cartoon characters is a subterfuge for something else. This way I can deal with racism in a different way, to counter these anti-Mexican feelings by hiding behind whimsy, color, innocence, folksy.

“Bless Me, Ultima” by Rudolfo Anaya

First published 1972

Reviewed by Luís Torres

March 8, 2012

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Jesús Treviño, the man behind the curtain at Latinopia, had a solid idea. Why not take another look at some of the books that have become classics in Chicano literature? (I regularly write contemporary book reviews for a number of newspapers.) I thought Treviño’s idea was an excellent one and I agreed to be part of a team to take on the challenge. We thought it would be a good idea to begin with arguably the most storied Chicano novel of all time. We are talking, of course, about Rudolfo Anaya’s landmark novel “Bless Me, Ultima.”

First published by a small publishing house back in 1972 it has since sold nearly a half-a-million copies. It has satisfied readers, both Latino and non-Latino, with its impeccable storytelling and its universal analysis of the threshold between innocence and understanding, between wonder and awareness, between the power of the spirit and the presumed rationality of the intellect. It is about the power of myth and legacy. Now published and distributed by a mainstream publishing house, it is still enthralling readers. It has won the praise of critics and captured the hearts of readers in the United States and beyond. And deservedly so.

It is still captivating readers and winning critical praise. This year Anaya will be awarded the Robert Kirsch Prize for literature by the Los Angeles Times, an award recognizing lifetime achievement.

Reading the novel again recently was like encountering an old friend. Can it be that I first read it more than forty years ago? Has time raced that quickly? “Bless Me, Ultima” has become an iconic tapestry of Chicano literature, and it has inspired an entire generation of Latino fiction writers. Upon reading it again, it becomes clear why that is so.

The novel “holds up.” And then some. When we read a book that’s beautiful or somehow moves us, we are

Original Art by Dennis Martinez

participating in a process. We bring something to the book, based on our experiences and our perspectives. You are not the same person who read the book forty years ago, and so you imbue the experience with your own memories, recollections and, one hopes, insights into the world around us. And the book, if superbly written, isn’t exactly the same book either. It is certainly moored in the craftsmanship and thoughtfulness that made it compelling in the first place. Fundamentally, the book hasn’t changed, but we have. But, in a sense, the book has “evolved” as you, the reader, have evolved. Reading it again recently was an extremely satisfying experience. (In fact, I read “Bless Me, Ultima” a second time about twenty years ago when I was nearing the age of forty and it stood out not only as a wonderful work of art but as a reflection of my own life and frame of reference.) The third time was quite a charm.

For readers who were born during the Bill Clinton administration, maybe a note or two about the social-cultural cauldron that existed in Aztlán in the early 1970s when the book was first embraced by readers is in order. It was published at a time when college students were eagerly reading books such as Carlos Castañeda’s “Teachings of Don Juan.” A complex but marvelous experiment in writing and thinking. Was it anthropology? Was it pure fiction? Did it really matter? It stirred questions in us about the nature of reality. What really is? What isn’t? How the hell can we genuinely distinguish between them?

It was part of a cultural and spiritual quest that captivated many of us young Chicanos, most of whom were the first in their family to go to college and have the comparative luxury to indulge in such questioning. So, “Bless Me, Ultima” tugged at some of those same questions, but in a format and context wholly different from Castañeda’s “Teachings of Don Juan” and his subsequent books exploring those issues.

Original Art by Dennis Martinez

“Bless Me, Ultima” tells an engaging story of a Chicanito’s coming of age. It tells it in a context that is familiar and yet a bit mysterious to us all. Young Antonio wonders if understanding must come only at the loss of innocence. In his own way he ponders the sources of good and evil. He wonders about his place in the immediate world around him and in the larger universe. And it’s all told magically.

There’s a cast of characters including  a benign and powerful curandera, town locas perceived to be brujas, drunkards, priests and prostitutes. And there’s no end of page-turning violence and action. A good story is a good story. And “Bless Me, Ultima” is certainly that, but it is much more. It’s an exploration into tradition versus contemporary reality. An exploration of the lessons of history and the unforeseen potential of the future. It’s an exploration of love and trust and meaning. It takes place in rural New Mexico, a place where the life of the wild, beguiling llano contrasts with the stolid life of the domestic farm. That is its specific geographic and temporal context. But its tale is transcendent; it is universal.

When the novel opens we meet six-year-old Antonio who is on the cusp of a process, despite his young age, of seeking to understand the world around him. As we’ll soon discover, he is torn between several seeming extremes. His father is a descendant of vaqueros of the llano who are crafted from a culture of independence and wanderlust. His mother is from generations of people of the earth, farmers who are linked to the seasons and the bounty that comes their way from being custodians of the nourished and fertile land. Antonio is also somewhat torn between two separate spiritual ways of being: there is the European Catholic church that gives sustenance to his mother and there is the broad and mysterious spiritual perspective that is shown to him by his paternal grandmother, Ultima.

Which side is he on? Which paths should he follow?

Ultima, a curandera who heals people because of her connection to an indigenous way of being and understanding, comes to live with Antonio’s family when the novel begins. Gradually she teaches Antonio about “good and evil” from a perspective quite different from that of his mother’s Christian god. But to Ultima, all things can work in harmony, if one’s heart is open. Antonio’s mother wants him to grow up to be a Catholic priest. Ultima suggests that he will be “a man of learning.”

We follow Antonio as he begins to make his way, trying to understand the world.

Antonio sees darkness and violence all around him. Among other things he sees a man being killed. He tries to reconcile all of this, wondering how a beneficent god can allow such things. Ultima becomes his teacher and his protector. But Ultima herself eventually faces a very serious danger and Antonio tries to protect her.

It is a riveting, sensitively told tale. And, as I say, it still holds up – on many levels. As it happens, I recently also reread Harper Lee’s phenomenal “To Kill A Mockingbird” after first reading it thirty years ago or so. Like “Ultima,” it decidedly “holds up.” And, now that I’m a bit of an anciano, there was more to it than there was before. The book hadn’t changed; I had. I believe – at least I hope – that my own growth and my own experiences made the book resonate differently and more meaningfully than it had before. It’s because of the solid work that it is, a work that allows our experiences to reflect the characters, thoughts and experiences in the book. That’s what outstanding writing is about. And that’s definitely the case with “Bless Me, Ultima.” It’s a delight to read for the first time and a new, fulfilling challenge with every time you revisit it.

On the fortieth anniversary of its initial publication it remains a stellar literary achievement. But it’s also a sign of our political times that the misguided book burners masquerading as legislators and school officials of Arizona have taken it upon themselves to ban “Bless Me, Ultima” as somehow subversive and politically dangerous. Yeah, a lot has happened in our culture since I first read this marvelous book so many years ago.

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from

Pasadena, California, is at work on a

book that examines the 1968 East  Los

Angeles high school student walkouts.

Artist and Poet José Montoya

JOSÉ MONTOYA – CALIFORNIA ARTIST

IN HIS OWN WORDS:

By the late 1960s, we have the Chicano Movement begin to consolidate. And the whole concept of what is Chicano Art is being discussed throughout the Southwest. I was concerned that our people did not know their history, did not know who we were. Who are we? Where do we come from? What are the images of the barrio?

I wanted a historical update on the Pachuco. So that we could show people that there was a lot of class

1940s Zootsuiters

in being what you guys are calling gangsters or hoodlums. I remember them very fervently wanting to show the man that they weren’t lazy, dirty Mexicans.

"Pachuco" by José Montoya

That they could dress as sharp as Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind. The could work hard to have their drapes tailor made by good tailors. For them it was a matter of showing they had class, and still they got their ass kicked with the Zootsuit riots and all of that.

"New Symbols for La Nueva Raza" flyer

Once the Chicano Movement got going, they were looking for people with abilities. It was the power of the movement. The notion that we could better the plight of our people, finally. That we had the tools, that we had the people to do it and this was more important than showing at the Crocker Gallery or showing in New York. That was not what we were going to use our talents and abilities for. We were going to use them to further and correct the wrongs that had been done to our people and to use them, more than anything else, as an organizing tool.

Esteban [Villa} was teaching silk screening in the barrio, Eduardo Carrillo was doing murals, I had the barrio program for kids. We needed a term to sign our posters. We were going to be known as the Rebel Chicano Art Front.

Royal Chicano Air Force artists

And only the initials would go in the posters or murals. People began to see RCAF and they were curious about what our connection was with the Royal Canadian Air Force. We would try to explain, “No, we’re the Rebel Chicano Art Front.” Finally, someone just said, “No man, we’re the Royal Chicano Air Force!”

And from then on it took a whole different meaning. They gave us flying helmets, and a local grower gave us a jeep. So we would do our locuras (craziness) dressed as pilots with goggles and leather flight jackets with fur and go to Safeway to boycott grapes in a jeep.

RCAF Pilot José Montoya

Then there was a crop duster that crashed and in the inquiry the pilot said that the RCAF has been the fault for him crashing–andaba pedo el vato (the guy was drunk). But he tried to claim that Cesar Chavez had his own private air force, and that they were called the Royal Chicano Air Force and that they should be investigated. So we go investigated by the Aeronautics Commission. And they asked us, “who’s in charge?” “Well, we can’t tell you.

José Montoya reads poetry

Its top secret!” We just went along with the locura (craziness)and its still going on!

AUGUST 29, 1970 CHICANO MORATORIUM MARCH

Historically, Mexican Americans have defended their country and have distinguished themselves in the wars of the United States. Mexican Americans fought in U.S. wars as far back as the American Civil War and Spanish Surnamed soldiers received more Congressional Medals of Honor in World War Two than any other ethnic group. But by the late1960s it became apparent that the percentage of Mexican American casualties in the Vietnam war far outnumbered their percentage in the general population.

In an eye-opening study, political science professor Dr. Ralph Guzman found that from 1961 to 1967, Mexican Americans made up 19.4 percent of U.S. casualties in Vietnam from Southwestern states even though they represented only 10% of the overall population in these states. Something was clearly wrong. By 1970, Chicano anti-war activists were speaking out publicly that Chicanos were being used as cannon fodder.

In 1969, Rosalío Muñoz, the first Chicano student body president of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), burned his draft card in protest over Chicano casualties in Vietnam. In 1970, following his attendance at the Second Denver Youth Conference, he joined with Roberto Elías and the two began a systematic tour of the Southwest, recruiting Chicano activists for a major anti-war march to be held in Los Angeles in August of 1970.

Often screening the film I Am Joaquin, based on the epic poem by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez and produced by Luis and Daniel Valdez of the Teatro Campesino, the anti-war activists traveled from city to city calling attention to the injustice of Chicano Vietnam deaths.

Their efforts paid off. On August 29, 1970, approximately thirty thousand people, hailing from throughout the Southwest, assembled for a march along Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles to a peaceful rally in Laguna Park. But a disturbance at a local liquor store provoked the presence of scores of Los Angeles police officers and Los Angeles County Sheriffs who descended on the peaceful rally and began to beat and arrest people.

Within moments the largest confrontation in East Los Angeles history had begun. Before the day was over, hundreds of fires had been set in East Angeles as angry Chicanos vented their anger over the unjust police attack on women, children and grandparents who were attending the peaceful rally.  Hundreds of people were arrested and three people were killed, Angel Díaz, Lyn Ward and respected Los Angeles Times journalist, Ruben Salazar.

In the aftermath of the riot, it became clear that the death of Ruben Salazar was far from the “accident” claimed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department. In the 16-day televised coroner’s inquest that followed the riot, two versions emerged as to what had transpired at the Silver Dollar Bar when Salazar was killed. According to the Sheriffs, they had gotten a call of someone with a gun in the bar, they had called out for people to come out, and when no one responded, they fired a tear-gas projectile into the bar.

It was the nine-inch tear gas projectile that hit Salazar in the head and killed him. According to the Sheriffs they were unaware that anyone had been hurt until several hours later, when the head public relations officer for the department entered the bar and found the body of Salazar. But according to many civilian witnesses, including people at Salazar’s side inside the bar, the call to vacate the bar had never been given. To the contrary, witnesses testified that when individuals in the bar tried to come out they were pushed back in by the officers and that when an ambulance, called by Salazar’s news crew, came to the front of the bar, it was sent away by the Sheriff officers. At the time Salazar was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and news director of Spanish-language television station KMEX.

Raul Ruiz, a photographer on the scene, captured the moment when Sheriff officer Thomas Wilson shot the deadly tear gas projectile into the bar. During the inquest, when officer Wilson was asked about the photo which depicted him shooting into the bar with the tear gas projectile that killed Salazar, he replied that he couldn’t recall the event taking place. The Inquest Jury returned a verdict 4 to 3 that Salazar had, indeed, been killed “at the hands of another,” but the District Attorney of Los Angeles, Evelle Younger, opted not to charge Officer Wilson with manslaughter or murder.

The doubtful circumstances surrounded Salazar’s death, coupled with the fact that Salazar was writing an exposé of police malfeasance at the time of his death, and that the Los Angeles Chief of Police had tried to get Salazar fired from his job at the Los Angeles Times only days before, left more than a trace of suspicion that Salazar’s death was not accidental. In 2008, Salazar was honored with United States postal stamp in his honor.

EMMA TENAYUCA, LABOR ORGANIZER

Labor Leader Emma Tenayuca

Born on December 21, 1916, Emma Tenayuca was the eldest of eleven children who was raised by her maternal grandparents in San Antonio, Texas. Perhaps best known for her activities leading to the 1938 San Antonio Pecan Shellers strike, “La Pasionaria” (The Passionate One) as she was known, started her labor organizing at age 18 when she joined the Finch Cigar Company strike, made up largely of Mexican American women of San Antonio. Because of her activities as a chief organizer of the Finck Strike she was arrested. As her political awareness grew, Emma saw the injustices committed against Mexican Americans and Mexicans living in Texas. In particular, the repatriation of thousands of Mexicans and even some American citizens of Mexican descent to Mexico, caused her to join the Communist Party in 1936 where she was soon an advocate for Mexican American justice, protesting the deportations and police brutality.

By 1937 she had risen to be an important functionary of the Workers Alliance of America, a national labor movement. It was in her role as executive secretary of Texas chapters of the Workers Alliance that she became involved in the 1938 Pecan Sheller’s Strike of San Antonio. At the time, San Antonio was a leading center of pecan production and Mexican women made up the bulk of the labor force, shelling pecans by hand in poorly ventilated warehouses and being paid only five cents a day. When San Antonio companies opted to cut back on the price paid to workers to three cents a day, more than twelve thousand workers organized under the International Pecans Shellers Union local 172 (affiliated with the United Cannery and Agricultural Workers Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) went on strike. La Pasionaria soon became leader of the strike in which hundreds of strikers were arrested and beaten by police, among them Emma Tenayuca. The strike lasted for three months until Emma’s Communist Party affiliations compromised her effectiveness. Eventually she was replaced as head of the UCAPAWA chapter and a strike settlement was eventually negotiated.

In 1938 Emma married Homer Brooks, then head of the Texas Communist Party. She replaced Homer as Texas Chair of the Communist Party and made headlines once again in 1939, when she was scheduled to speak at San Antonio’s Municipal Auditorium. A crowd of thousands gathered outside the municipal auditorium to protest the Communist Party gathering and a riot soon erupted. Emma and her followers escaped with their lives but the municipal auditorium was vandalized. The death threats against Emma following the Municipal Auditorium riot and her inability to retain work, ended Emma’s labor organizing. She and Homer Brooks were divorced in 1941.

By 1946 she had left the Communist Party and labor organizing and resettled to San Francisco, California. In 1952 she received a BA degree from San Francisco State University and began a teaching career. In 1968 she returned to San Antonio where she earned a MA degree from Our Lady Of the Lake University and resumed a teaching career which she pursued until her retirement in 1982. In 1985 she was featured in the PBS documentary Yo Soy (I AM) and in the later years of her life became the subject of much attention from Chicana activists who were inspired by her previous activism. She died in San Antonio on July 23, 1999.

Artist Santa Barraza

SANTA BARRAZA – TEXAS ARTIST

IN HER OWN WORDS:

I think that my encounter with the civil rights movement and the struggles of Mexican Americans, I first became aware of it when I was at the University. At the time José Rivera was there, Carmen Lomas Garza, Amado Peña, José Angel Gutiérrez as a graduate student, Carlos Guerra who had just put together MAYO and César Martinez would occasionally come back–he had already graduated.

At the time I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to make a difference. When I was at the University of Texas I did not see myself reflected in any of the books, in any of the textbooks, any of the paintings, and so I felt I needed to do something about that. The female image, the iconography, the Chicana imagery–I was particularly very interested in that because I was trying to figure out what direction of painting, what direction of artwork, I should take.

I started doing research on the Virgin de Guadalupe. According to the ancient legend, the way that she is interpreted originally was no the way we see her today. Originally she was 16 years old maiden. She spoke in her indigenous language, she was Nahuatl. She was dark-skinned.

The Mexican colonial painters actually redid her image, made her look more European so that the dominant culture would accept her. I felt we needed to look beyond that and see the hidden meaning in that image. So I started doing research on that and I started to use those in my works. I started playing with the image to take back the ancient interpretation of the image of the earth.

So, for example, when you see the Virgin de Guadalupe instead of having stars, I have indigenous fertility symbols on it. I think it is important because traditionally we are a matriarchal society, but now we are not. Our original culture was matriarchal, so I felt it was important to empower the younger generations of women to realize that this. So I started to make this correction through my art. I am actually appropriating our ancient past, reinterpreting it in a very contemporary way. Now it becomes American art, a contemporary American art expression.

BEST MEXICAN RESTAURANTS: AUSTIN, TEXAS

Sazón Restaurant

SAZÓN RESTAURANT
1816 South Lamar Blvd.
Austin, Texas 78704
(512) 326-4395
Website: www.sazonaustin.com

Owner Margarito Aranda calls his food “gastronomia Mexicana” from a “Mexico deconocido” and indeed the menu includes regional items from throughout Mexico you don’t usually find in Mexican restaurants. Culling from Puebla, Oaxaca, Yucatan, Veracruz, and Mexico City, Sazón offers such dishes as

Mitote Performing at Sazón Restaurant

empanadas de huitlacoche, caldo Xochitl, Pollo en Mole Oaxaqueño and carnitas Michoacanas. There is a full bar along with a spacious interior–or you can sit on the outdoor patio where you can listen to local bands on weekends. LATINOPIA RECOMMENDS: the empanadas de Huitlacoche for starters followed by the Pollo en Mole Oaxaqueño.

Guero's Restaurant

GUERO’S TACO BAR
1412 South Congress Avenue
Austin, TX 78704
Website: www.guerostacobar.com

Guero’s has been at its present location on South Congress since 1995, a building that used to house the  Central Feed and Seed building. The patio has a bar and live music. While the varied menu includes many familiar standard dishes–enchiladas, tamales, flautas and chalupas, and even Codorniz (quail) asada–you really go to Guero’s for the self-serve salsa bar. And that means tacos and fajitas! The plentiful taco fillings include picadillo, carne guisada, pork, al pastor, chicken al carbon steak, fish and shrimp. Don’t forget to compliment your tacos with a bowl of Frijoles Charros. In addition to hand-shaken margaritas, domestic and foreign beers, the full bar offers a dangerous array of premium tequilas. LATINOPIA RECOMMENDS:  the fajita plate with its complement of guacamole, sour cream, rice and beans.

MR. NATURAL
1901 East Cesar Chavez Street
Austin, Texas 78702
(512) 477-5228

Austin has many good Mexican food restaurants but none is more unique than Mr. Natural, a small restaurant which shares the space with a natural food store and, yes, the menu features health-minded renderings of traditional Mexican dishes. How about albondiga soup the way your abuelita used to make it, except with tofu albondigas! Yep, this is  natural food approach to Mexican cuisine. You’ll find Green Chile and Cheese Tamales, Vegetarian Enchiladas, Veggie Tacos, Tofu Chorizo and Egg soft taco burritos and Corn Tortilla humus flautas.  LATINOPIA recommends the albondiga soup and the veggie tacos–scrumptious!

LA MORELIANA MEAT MARKET
3600 South Congress Avenue
Austin, TX 78704
(512) 442-8398

La Moreliana Meat Market

This is one of three Moreliana markets in Austin that feature a modest counter-style restaurant ensconced amid the rows of supermarket displays and the fresh meat counter. But don’t be fooled. The tacos here are exquisite, arguably the best in town. This is ideal for a quick no frills luncheon. Latinopia recommends the melt in

La Moreliana Food counter

your mouth asada or carnitas tacos, the spicing is excellent and the meat cooked to a juicy tenderness. The other locations are at 5403 Cameron Road (512) 371-7599 and at 1909 East William Cannon Drive (512) 693-9008.

Juan in a Million on a busy morning

JUAN IN A MILLION
2300 East Cesar Chavez Street,
Austin, TX 78702
(512) 472-3872.

Located on Cesar Chavez Street, along with so many good Mexican restaurants in Austin, this is a family restaurant, founded in 1980 by Juan Mesa. It attracts all comers–students, families with kids and workaday stiffs. Latinopia visited at breakfast and themenu is traditional Tejano with breakfast tacos as well as a variety of breakfast treats including the “con queso” breakfast of any style eggs, carne quisada, refried beans, potatoes and flour tortillas.

Juan in A Million Outdoor Patio

The selection of breakfast fillings is diverse including eggs and nopales, barbacoa,chorizo, and machaca. Latinopia recommends the “migas” breakfast plate made up of tortilla chips, onions, and tomatoes with shredded cheese as well as any of the scrumptious soft flour breakfast tacos. For dessert the tres leches cake!

Placing your order!

Lunches and dinners at Juan in a Million include fajitas, enchiladas, chalupas, carne guisada and rib steak dinners. Beverages include soft drinks, beer, margaritas as well as traditional horchata. The son of owner Juan Mesa told Latinopia, “We love Latinopia and we hope people will continue to come to our restaurant. If we continue supporting one another we will really get somewhere!”

IZZOZ TACOS
1207 South 1St Street
Austin, TX 78704
(512) 326-4996

Fried avocado tacos?

Yep, that’s what you’ll find, along with more traditional taco fare, at Izzoz tacos, one of the trailer-on-cement block trucks that have sprung up in Austin in recent years. This is a no frills outdoor patio venue located next to a funky used car lot just 1 mile south of downtown Austin on South First Street. But don’ t be misled, the food here is excellent!

The fried avocado taco contains tempura battered avocado, tortilla, tomato, fresh young

Izzoz Tacos Patio

arugula greens and a sprinkling of cojita cheese all flavored with a luscious Sherry
vinaigrette sauce. There is a wide variety of tacos including the Slowrider (braised
machaca beef with caramelized onion, cilantro and cojita cheese), the Padre ( braised carnitas, avocado, pinapple and tomato salsa), the Bowman (roasted chicken, spinach, pico de gallo and cilantro) and for vegetarians there is the Shroom (sauteed Portabello mushroom with caramelized onion, spinach, tomato, and chipotle aioli). The Old School taco is traditional crisp corn taco with chile flavored ground meat, tomato, lettuce and shredded cheddar cheese. Tortas include beef, pulled pork, blackened Talapia andtempura shrimp. Complementing the food is a selection of bottled Mexican and American sodas, coffee and tea. Latinopia recommends the signature fried avocado tacos and the blackened talapia torta. Whether its tacos or tortas, You’re sure to find some of the tastiest food you’ve ever eaten at Izzoz tacos!

The Menu

Artist John Valadez

JOHN VALADEZ – CALIFORNIA ARTIST

When I was getting out of high school and into college, a friend of mine and I went to Olvera Street because we had heard about the Siquieros mural in Olvera Street. We went to see it. We were so inspired that I wanted to repaint it. The Siquieros mural was history that was being ignored in this city. It was something that really showed me that the path we were taking politically, our social concerns about schooling and health care–all of that became part of our identity. I was a Mexican American kid embracing and trying to become a Chicano, trying to consciously make Chicano Art.

"Car Show" by John Valadez

I switched from drawing to photographic because I proved to myself when I was in school that I could draw. I could do it from just looking at something and drawing it. But it took too damn long. I had a lot of things I wanted to say

"Out of the car-detail" by John Valadez

and by the time I finished doing a drawing the old-fashioned way, I would get bored to death. I wanted to move on. I was driven by what I had to do and, for me, the camera was a tool. It was just another tool, like a pencil or a paint brush.

They call it photorealism, but I appreciate people who could recognize that I wasn’t trying to redo a photo. I was trying to get beyond that. I was trying to draw people that I saw on the street that I

"Broadway Mural - Detail" by John Valadez

related to. It wasn’t about feeling sorry for people. It’s showing our strength who we are. You want to do something that has multiple meanings because the worst thing for me is to be boring.

"Out of the car" by John Valdez

I have always been interested in social dynamics. That’s why the Broadway Mural. When you are a figurative artist, you are trying to portray us at this time. I’m doing portraits of marginalized people. I try to use symbolism in my realistic portrayals. Its allegory, its expressive symbolism.

RODOLFO “CORKY” GONZALES, POLITICAL ACTIVIST

One of the most vocal and charismatic leaders of the Chicano Movement, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales began his career as a prizefighter in Denver, Colorado. By 1960, however, he had become interested in politics and was appointed to co-chair the Viva Kennedy campaign in Denver. When Congress passed legislation for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty in 1964, Corky was appointed director of Denver’s War on Poverty office. Corky soon became disillusioned with the politics of the war on poverty and quit his job to found the Crusade for Justice in 1966. The Crusade had as it chief goal the creation of self-determination and community control of all aspects of Chicano life. Within a short time the Crusade had its own school, art gallery, newspaper (El Gallo),and credit bureau. On the political front, the Crusade and its members lobbied for improved educational and housing opportunities for Chicanos in Denver. In 1967, Corky gained national prominence because of the widely circulated epic poem he authored, I Am Joaquin which crystalized the sensibility of the Chicano movement of the time.

Also in 1967 Corky attended the Poor People’s March held in Washington D.C. and convened by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Corky made headlines when he confronted then U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and called for a redress of the discrimination suffered by Chicanos in education, housing employment opportunities. In 1968, Gonzales and some of its members were involved in a riot that broke out at West High School in Denver when students walked out to protest inferior education at the school.

1969 Denver Youth Conference

In 1969, Corky convened the First National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference from March 27-31. It was during the debates of the conference that the Plan de Aztlán emerged as the blueprint by which the emergent Chicano movement would proceed; the plan called for a nationalist movement of self-determination using the term “Chicano” as it banner.

In 1970, Corky attended Chicano Moratorium March and Rally in Los Angeles. Los Angeles County Sheriffs and Los Angeles city police officers attacked the assembled crowd and in the riot that erupted Corky, along with other members of the Crusade For Justice were arrested. A meeting scheduled to take place after the day of marching, in which Chicano leaders would discuss the formation of a national political party made up of Latinos, was cancelled. Corky continued as a leader of Colorado activists and in 1972 created the Colorado chapter of the all Latino, La Raza Unida political party.

In 1972, Corky attended the National Convention of the La Raza Unida party held in El Paso Texas and lost

1971 La Raza Unida Convention

the national chair of the party to Jose Angel Gutiérrez. The success of the Crusade for Justice came to an end on the evening of March 17, 1973. Hearing reports that some Crusade members were armed, more than 200 Denver police officers raided the Crusade offices and gunfire ensued. A 23 year old member of the Crusade, Luis Martinez, was killed. During the course of the evening, an explosion destroyed one of the dormitory buildings of the Crusade. The violence surrounding the police attack on the Crusade dissuaded many members who soon left the organization. After 1973, the Crusade was never the effective community agency it had once been. In 1987 Corky suffered a heart arrhythmia while driving his car and was hospitalized and partially paralyzed as a result of the accident that resulted. Corky Gonzalez passed away on in Denver, Colorado on April 12, 2005.

200 YEARS OF CHICANO/LATINO HISTORY

TIMELINE: 1940- 1959

Attack on Pearl Harbor

December 7, 1941 The Japanese air force attacks United States forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. War is declared against Japan and the United States enters World War Two.

1941 Beto Villa, known as the father of Mexican American big band music begins a career that will make him famous throughout the Southwest.

1942 Throughout the United States, Mexican Americans enlist to serve in the defense of their country. In Silvis, Illinois, the sons of twenty-two Mexican Americans families on Second Street sign up for the war. In the course of the next five years,

Hero Street Monument, Silvis, Illinois

more men will serve in the armed forces from Second Street, a total of 45 men, than from any other street its size in the United States. A total of six men from the 22 families will die in action (Joseph Sandoval, Frank Sandoval, Pete Masias, Willie Sandoval, Tony Pompa, and Claro Solíz). Two other sons of Second Street will die in the Korean conflict (Joseph Gomez and Johnny MuZoz). In spite of the sacrifices made by the Second Street families, requests to have Second Street paved are turned down by the Silvis city council. The street will not be paved until 1975 when a Mexican American is finally elected Mayor of the city.

Bataan Death March

April 12-24, 1942 Japanese General Masahuru Homma, commanding general in the Phillipines, orders 70,000 American prisoners of war on the infamous Bataan Death March. The soldiers, already riddled with malaria and dysentery, are forced to march 60 miles from Bataan to a railroad station at San Fernando without food and water. Along the way some 400 Filipino civilians who defy Japanese orders and offer the Americans food and water are summarily bayoneted or beheaded. In all, 14,000 of the 70,000 soldiers who begin the march die along the way. A large number of those who died were Mexican Americans from New Mexico.

1942 In response to a shortage of farm laborers the United States (due to World War Two), the United States and Mexico enter into a joint Emergency Labor Program under which thousands of Mexican “braceros,” farm laborers, will be permitted to work legally in the United

The Bracero Program

States. The program, initially set up as temporary program, will continue unabated until 1964. American agriculture growers benefit from this program of low-cost laborers.

Sleepy Lagoon Article

August 2, 1942 The body of José Díaz is found near a swimming hole known as the Sleepy Lagoon in what is today Montebello, California. The police conduct a major dragnet, arresting hundreds of young Mexican Americans and eventually charging 22 young men with the murder of Díaz. Twelve of the young men are found guilty of first and second degree murder and are sentenced to prison for varying terms. The “Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee” is formed by actors Anthony Quinn, Orson Wells and Rita Hayworth. Two year later, the young men win a reversal of their sentence on appeal but only after they have already served two years in prison.

1943 The Mexican film Maria Candalaria, starring Maria Felix and directed by Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez wins the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

June 7, 1943 Following an altercation between Mexican American youth and Anglo sailors stationed at Long Beach, attacks on Mexican Americans by “taxi brigades” of U.S. Sailors take place in the streets of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times proclaims, “Zoot Suiters Learn Lesson in Fights With Servicemen,” as Mexican American youth, whose older brothers and fathers are away at war, are hunted down in the streets of downtown Los Angeles, beaten by sailors, then arrested by Los Angeles police. The so-called “Zoot Suit riots” continue for a week

1945 Gabriela Mistrál (Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga), a Chilean poet of such works as Sonetas de la Muerte (1914), Tenura (1924 and Tala (1938) wins the Novel Prize in Literature. She is the first Latin American woman to be so honored.

1945 Josephina Niggli’s collection of short stories, Mexican Village, depicts the experience of growing up part Anglo and part Mexican.

May 7, 1945 Germany unconditionally surrenders to Allied forces bringing an end to the war in Europe.

August 6, 9, 1945 The United States drops atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

September 2, 1945 Japan surrenders to U.S. Forces, ending World War Two.

1946 Gonzalo and Felicitas Méndez, with the help of the League of United Latin American Citizens, file a class action lawsuit, Méndez v. Westminister, against the school district in Westminister, California for its segregation of Mexican American students. The Federal District Court finds in favor of Méndez and this favorable ruling sets a precedent for the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education which overturns the “separate but equal” tradition.

1946 Ideal Records begins recording the Tejano music of South Texas with singers like Carmen and Laura, The Conjunto Bernal and Narciso Martinez. This will set the stage for the evolution of the Tex-Mex sound in later years.

1947 The Community Service Organization is created in East Los Angeles. Made up of activists from the labor movement and volunteers from Edward Roybal’s unsuccessful 1947 race for a Los Angeles city council seat and trained by organizer Fred Ross, Sr., the CSO seeks to organize Mexican Americans to demand improved social services and register to vote. This activism will help Roybal win his 1949 race for city council.

Ricardo Montalban

1947 Ricardo Montalban stars opposite Esther Williams in his first Hollywood motion picture, Fiesta, directed by Richard Thorpe.

1948 Luís MuZoz Marín, running under the Popular Democratic Party, is elected as the first popularly elected Governor of Puerto Rico.

March 26, 1948 After serving in World War Two, returning Mexican American veterans find disappointment as they try to reintegrate into American society. They find that they cannot obtain the benefits legally due to them through the 1944 G.I. Bill of Rights. Dr. Hector P. García calls together 700 veterans to meet in Corpus Christi, Texas and they form the American G.I. Forum, a organization devoted to securing equal rights of Mexican American and other Latino veterans.

1948 Mario Suárez, a native of Tucson, writes short stories which are published in the Arizona Quarterly. In stories such as “El Hoyo,” he uses the word Chicano, one of the first fiction writers to do so.

1948 The body of Felix Longória, a private killed during the last days of World War Two, is denied burial at the cemetery in his home town of Three Rivers, Texas, because he is Mexican. Dr. Hector P. García, founder of the American G.I. Forum, organized a campaign to have Longoria properly buried and, with the help of then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, is successful in having Longória buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The highly publicized scandal provokes Mexican Americans to continue in their struggle for civil rights.

1948 The League of United Latin American Citizens files a lawsuit, Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District which finally brings an end to the segregation of Mexican children in Texas schools.

1949 Edward Roybal wins a city council seat in Los Angeles, California after an extensive campaign that relies on registering Mexican Americans to vote. He becomes the first Latino since 1881 to be on the Los Angeles city council.

1949 The Asociación Nacional Mexico-Americana is established in a two-day conference in Phoenix, Arizona. Its focus is improved housing, workers rights and political representation for Mexican Americans. Later the group will be the focus of an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee for its activities.

1951 The United States enacts Public Law 78 which renews the bracero program initiated in 1942. The program will continue until 1964.

1952 Cesar Chavez is recruited by organizer Fred Ross to organize Mexicans to vote in San Jose, California.

1952 Anthony Quinn portrays the brother of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, opposite Marlon Brando in the lead role, in the motion picture Zapata written by John Steinbeck and directed by Elia Kazan.

1952 After serving in the Korean conflict as a second lieutenant, and earning a law degree from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Eligio “Kika” de la Garza is elected to the Texas House of Representatives where he will serve for six terms of office.

July 27, 1953 The Armistice of Panmunjon is signed bringing hostilities of the Korean conflict to an end. Thousands of Mexican Americans and other Latinos will distinguish themselves in the war in which 54,246 Americans are killed. While the final negotiations are underway at Panmunjon, Hollywood producer Hal Wallis commissions director Owen Crump to film a realistic film about a real platoon of American soldiers on the eve of the peace accord, Cease Fire. The rushes convince Hal Walsh that a young Mexican American private from Texas, Ricardo Carrasco, has the making of a Hollywood superstar. He instantly offers Carrasco a movie contract and arranges to have Carrasco released from the last moments of fighting. But Carrasco refuses the contract and instead goes back with his platoon to fight out the final days of battle. He is killed in action a week before the armistice is signed. Hal Walsh later eulogies Carrasco in a Reader’s Digest article titled “The Movie You Never Saw.”

1953 The independently produced motion picture Salt of the Earth is released. The film, written by Michael Wilson, directed by Herbert Biberman, and produced by Paul Jarrico, all of whom were black listed from Hollywood because of their political views, depicts the true struggle of 1400 members of Local 890, International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (90% of whom are Mexican American) against Empire Zinc in the town of Silver City, New Mexico. The 15 month strike is the longest in New Mexico history. After the film is released, one of the stars, Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, is deported by U.S. authorities.

1953 Operation Wetback is enacted by the U.S. Immigration Service deporting more than 3 million persons of Mexican descent. As with the deportations of the 1930s, many of those deported are U.S. born citizens.

Fidel Castro

July 23, 1953 In Cuba, a student revolutionary named Fidel Castro, is among many people arrested after attacking the Moncado, a military garrison of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Castro will later declare in court that “history will absolve me.”

January, 1954 Attorney Gus García successfully appeals the conviction of Pete Hernandez for murder before the U.S. Supreme Court. In Hernandez v. State of Texas, a case supported by the American G.I. Forum and League of Latin American Citizens, García is able to show that Mexican Americans cannot receive a fair trial in Texas because they are excluded from serving on juries and therefore Mexicans can not received a fair trial by a jury of their peers.

March 1, 1954 Four Puerto Rican nationalists, calling for Puerto Rican independence from the United States, open fire in the United States House of Representatives wounding five Congressmen.

1954 The U.S. Supreme Court finds in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that public schools may no longer segregate children according to race, finding that such racial segregation was “inherently unequal.” Argumentation on the Brown decision is founded, in part, on the successful 1946 case of Méndez v. Westminister School District and reverses the “separate but equal” Supreme Court ruling in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.

1956 The House Un-American Activities Committee continues its investigation of suspected Communists by accusing the Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA) and its president, Alfredo Montoya, of communist affiliations. Montoya is found not guilty of being a member of the Communist party.

Henry B. Gonzalez

1956 Henry B. Gonzalez becomes the first Mexican American in 110 years elected to the Texas State Senate. An outspoken advocate of minority rights, and responsible for much legislation benefitting Latinos, Henry B. Gonzalez will go on to serve in the U.S. Congress for 37 years before his retirement in 1998.

1957 Raymond L. Telles, Jr. is elected Mayor of El Paso, Texas. Running on the “People’s Ticket,” he becomes the first Mexican American to be mayor of the city. During his two terms of office he will open up employment opportunities for Latinos in the city before being appointed to Ambassador to Costa Rica by President John F. Kennedy.

1957 The Civil Rights Act of 1957 is passed. The legislation creates a civil rights commission to investigate allegations of the denial of equal protection under the law which, in addition to investigating abuses against African Americans, will investigate abuses against Mexican Americans and other Latinos in the years to come.

1959 The Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) is formed in Los Angeles. The organization has as its goal to register Mexican Americans to vote and promote the election of Mexican Americans to political office.

March, 1959 Ritchie Valens, whose real name is Ricardo Valenzuela and whose hits “La Bamba” and “Donna” made him the first nationally recognized Mexican American rock and roll star, dies in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa along with singers Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper (J.P. Richardson).

Artist Amalia Mesa-Bains

AMALIA MESA-BAINS – CALIFORNIA ARTIST

IN HER OWN WORDS

An ofrenda is a temporary offering to the dead and is ephemeral and is time related. An altar is a permanent on-going record of a family’s culture and spiritual history within the home. What attracted me to the altar, because my grandmother kept one and my mother in a different way, was that women were in charge of them. The husbands might build them but the women tended to them.

The ofrenda appeals to me because I like the temporariness of it. That’s the greatness of it and the glory of it, is that you will throw everything into it. It is the deepest sign of your love for that person because you give it everything and you only have it for a few days.

Chicano Altar

So I took on myself to do [an ofrenda] to Dolores Del Rio because she was this bicultural phenomenon. Someone else would do Diego Rivera, or people who do Posada or later when Cesar Chavez died, all of this country people made ofrendas. I think the Day of the

Dolores Del Rio Altar

dead is our generation’s way to constitute a history in a spiritual and sacred way. Each person that you pick for an homage had some attributes and characteristics that inspired you and that affirmed you.

Day of the Dead Celebration

I see the Day of the dead or the Days of the dead as a chance to maintain our traditions, our poetry, the forms of our offerings and the ofrendas but also to cope with the stresses, the losses, the death, the suffering that we go through as a community. I always talk about memory as the bridge between the living and the dead, between the past and the present. It is memory that through the ofrenda, allows us to never lose someone.

RUPERT GARCÍA – CALIFORNIA ARTIST

Artist Rupert Garcia

IN HIS OWN WORDS:

I was in Indochina from 1965 to 1966, at a secret base near Laos. Why were so many of us [Chicanos] there? The answer is simple and that is that working class kids joined the army, air force, etc. to get a job!

When I came home I was very frightened because I knew that many in the US were protesting against the war in Vietnam. So I came home not wearing my uniform for fear that I would be accosted. So in this context, I’m a young guy trying to figure things

César Chávez

out. I’m studying painting and taking classes at San Francisco State. And when the Chicanismo came forth and I embraced, I began to question myself as an artist. Who is an artist? What is an artist supposed to do and for whom?

The strike at school [San Francisco State] and then the Chicano thrust of cultural nationalism, brought to my mind another way of looking at art. And that had to do with struggle, and by that I mean, what can we do as Chicanos in particular, what can we do to underscore how we see the world, how we feel about it, how we think about it in visual terms.

Silkscreen printmaking

A faculty person had just come back from Paris in ‘68 following an uprising of student and he talked about what the students were doing to support the strike and he mentioned posters, and that you could make many of them.

I had never made a silk screen in my life so I had to learn how to make them under duress. Because cops were looking around at us to make sure that we weren’t using chemicals to make bombs and that kind of stuff. So I learned how to make silkscreens on the sly at the art building. And that raised to me the idea of art for

Fuera

the people. And that was important for me because I was reconsidering the myths I had learned about the fine artist. That you’re an elite and you’re beyond what most people understand about reality Well, the Chicano Movement was the opposite of this. It made you look at society, get involved with society and make images that were understandable by us the artists ourselves and also the folks in the neighborhood.

I am often asked what is the trajectory of your work? Well, the answer is that I am trying to get at the truth. I am trying to experience the truth of being alive and experiencing

Cesen Deportaciones

my moment and the moment of human beings and situation in the world. I want to embrace it and to experience it as if its absolute truth. And that’s the end. Every painting I make or every picture I make I am after my truth. I am not saying its an objective truth. I am after my truth. I want to experience that truth and so each work that I do I pursuing that truth.

Rudolfo “Rudy” Añaya is one of the most celebrated of Chicano authors. His coming of age novel, Bless Me Ultima is perhaps the most widely read novels by a United States born Spanish surnamed author. The National Education Association recommended the novel as the book to read in 2008. LATINOPIA asked Rudolfo Añaya about the oral tradition in New Mexico and how an appreciation of this led him to write his landmark novel.

Author Rudolfo Añaya

IN HIS OWN WORDS:

Well, when you speak of the Chicano experience in this country, you have to remember that our literature is in the form of the oral tradition. That we had a really rich material of cuentos and songs, corridos, refranes, dichos, adivinanzas, so we did have the literature, it’s called an oral tradition. We’re not in the library reading about our people, about our community. We’re hearing it at home, everybody that comes to visit tells stories.

Storytelling is part of our inheritance. And I think that’s where I get my sense of being a storyteller, it wasn’t at school. We didn’t depend on the school system, we depended on our culture and what was at home.

All of my work has to do with the  people of New Mexico and the place. It’s the people and the place that have inspired me. So when I say I was born in Pastura, a little village on the llano of eastern New Mexico, that’s going to be part of what I write about. When we moved to Santa Rosa and I grow up, that’s my hometown, a town that has a lot of water around it. It’s got Pecos River, artesian wells that come up, it has beautiful little streams, it has lakes, all of that will influence me because as a boy.

I’d run around the river, to the lakes, go fishing, and then began to get a sense very early of what I call the spirit of the place. That both people and place are imbued with a spirit and that as a child I felt it and I heard it. It became part of me. It was at times La Llorona, at times El Cucuy, and at times it was something else. What I call in Bless Me Última, the essence of the river is the soul of the river. Place has soul.

Well when I started writing, a great deal of my search was personal. I think, most of art, music or poetry or stories are a reflection of our human nature, what we’re going through. What we have experienced and what we what we see in life around us and so for me it was starting to write Bless Me Última and looking at my childhood, looking back, and asking what formed me, what made me who I am.

If the world is animated, how does that spirit work? What does it mean to me? And trying to write Bless Me Última, it was great deal reflecting my childhood but I think very quickly what I learned to do, to go deeper and begin to try to make sense of the symbols and the images that  seem to be coming in as I wrote the story. Seem to be part of me that I couldn’t explain.

You know, I had read a lot of literature, as a student, but somehow it didn’t speak to the real essence of who I was at that time and so writing became an exploration, a journey. Trying to put together all those strands that seemed to be affecting me and it wasn’t just that I came from a Hispanic family in New Mexico. My family spoke Spanish, they were Catholic, the extended family, all the tíos and the tías uh spoke Spanish. So I knew that history. But then some of the symbols were speaking of another part of my history.

And I think those have been the Native American inheritance, so the golden carp comes out of a mythology, it comes out of world mythology , it comes out of personal mythology, in other words, I have seen the beauty in nature and it’s embodied in this beautiful fish that swam in those rivers that I hunted as a child. And so I began to pull everything in the novel– all the indo-hispano, the history, the tragedies of the people, the poverty that was there. And, along with that a kind of beauty I think that can only come when one indulges in that imagination, in that creative imagination.

The individual search parallels the communal search. Individual identity is tied into the community identity. They work back and forth. My community formed me, gave me life, nurtured me. Gave me a language, gave me a creative imagination when I heard the cuentos of my grandfather of my parents of the vecinos who came to visit. They were feeding me and so I had to respond and create out of what they gave me. So it’s a two way street.

The community is me, I am the community. And the community is bigger than just raza. It’s bigger than just the Chicanos, it’s a world community because of the mythology, because of legend. Once you have the mythology that we, as Chicanos look for in the 60′s, the Aztec legends. Aztlán, Quetzalcoatl, Huitchilopochtli , the whole idea of migration. Once we tie into that, we’re tying into world mythology, and it’s been there all along.

In the Chicano community in the United States, we hadn’t quite developed the contemporary literature and that’s what we did during the Chicano movement. And we were giving our identity back to the community and telling them, it came from you. And once you have that metaphor, that meaning,  I think that’s why the community, the Chicanos, responded to Bless Me Última. They were saying , Ah! This guy is one of us, you know!
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BOOKS BY RODOLFO ANAYA:

THE MAN WHO COULD FLY     UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS, 2006

CURSE OF THE CHUPACABRA    UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS, 2006

JEMEZ SPRING            UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS, 2005

THE SANTERO’S MIRACLE    UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS,. 2004

SERAFINA’ STORIES        UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS, 2004
ELEGY ON THE DEATH
OF CÉSAR CHÁVEZ        CINCOS PUNTOS PRESS, 2000

ROAD RUNNER’S DANCE    HYPERION PRESS, 2000

SHAMAN WINTER            WARNER BOOKS, 1999

FAROLITOS FOR
ABUELA                HYPERION PRESS, 1998

JALAMANTA: A MESSAGE
FROM THE DESERT        WARNER BOOKS, 1996

RIO GRANDE FALL        WARNER BOOKS , 1996

ZIA SUMMER            WARNER BOOKS, 1995

THE ANAYA READER        WARNER BOOKS, 1995

THE FAROLITOS OF
CHRISTMAS                HYPERION PRESS, 1995

ALBURQUERQUE            UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS, 1992

LORD OF THE DAWN        UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS, 1987

A CHICANO IN CHINA        UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS, 1986

LEGEND OF LA
LLORONA                QUINTO SOL PUBLICATIONS, 1984

THE SILENCE OF
THE LLANO                QUINTO SOL PUBLICATIONS, 1982

TORTUGA                  JUSTA  PUBLICATIONS, 1979

HEART OF AZTLÁN        JUSTA PUBLICATIONS, 1976

BLESS MY ULTIMA        QUINTO SOL PRESS, 1972

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You can purchase many of these books from Arte Publico Press ( www.artepublicopress.com ) and Bilingual Review Press (www.asu.edu/brp).

March 17, 1966 EL PLAN DE DELANO

CONTEXT: On September 16, 1965, the 6,000 members of the United Farm Workers Association voted to strike California grape growers for higher salaries and safe working conditions. By the beginning of 1966, Cesar Chavez, President of the Farm Workers Union, decided the strike needed a more visible presence and prepared for a peregrinación (pilgrimage) of farm workers from their headquarters in Delano, California to the California state capital of Sacramento. Along the way, the strikers would stop in towns of the San Joaquin Valley and make their case concluding with a presentation at the state capital. Chavez recruited Luis Valdez, head of the Farm Workers Theater, to draft El Plan De Delano which would articulate the reasons for the strike and the goals of the farm workers union. Working with Chavez’s ideas, Valdez based El Plan De Delano on the historic Plan De Ayala which Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata had declared on November 25, 1911 in which he laid out his revolutionary plan for agrarian reform in Mexico. On March 17, 1966, at the start of the march to Sacramento, the Plan de Delano was read to the assembled marchers and repeated at each stop along the way.

THE PLAN OF DELANO

PLAN for the liberation of the Farm Workers associated with the Delano Grape Strike in the

State of California, seeking social justice in farm labor with those reforms that they believe

necessary for their well-being as workers in the United States.

We, the undersigned, gathered in Pilgrimage to the capital of the State in Sacramento in

penance for all the failings of Farm Workers as free and sovereign men, do solemnly declare

before the civilized world which judges our actions, and before the nation to which we

belong, the propositions we have formulated to end the injustice that oppresses us.

We are conscious of the historical significance of our Pilgrimage. It is clearly evident that our

path travels through a valley well known to all Mexican farm workers. We know all of these

towns of Delano, Madera, Fresno, Modesto, Stockton, and Sacramento, because along this

very same road, in this very same valley, the Mexican race has sacrificed itself for the last

hundred years. Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich. The

pilgrimage is a witness to the suffering we have seen for generations.

The penance we accept symbolizes the suffering we shall have in order to bring justice

to these same towns, to this same valley. The pilgrimage we make symbolizes the long

historical road we have traveled in this valley alone, and the long road we have yet to travel,

with much penance, in order to bring about the revolution we need, and for which we present

the propositions in the following PLAN:

1. This is the beginning of a social movement in fact and not in pronouncements. We seek our basic, God-given rights as human beings. Because we have suffered–and are not afraid to suffer—in order to survive, we are ready to give up everything, even our lives, in our flight for social justice. We shall do it without violence because that is our destiny. To the ranchers, and to all those who opposes, we say, in the words of Benito Juarez, “EL RESPETO AL DE-RECHO AJENO ES LA PAZ.”

2. We seek the support of all political groups and protection of the government, which is also our government, in our struggle. For too many years we have been treated like the lowest of the low. Our wages and working conditions have been determined from above, because irresponsible legislators who could have helped us, have supported the rancher’s argument that the plight of the Farm Worker was a “special case.” They saw the obvious effects of an unjust system, starvation wages, contractors, day hauls, forced migration, sickness, illiteracy, camps and sub-human living conditions, and acted as if they were irremediable causes. The farm worker has been abandoned to his own fate—without representation, without power—subject to mercy and caprice of the rancher. We are tired of words, of betrayals, of indifference. To the politicians we say that the years are gone when the farm worker said nothing and did nothing to help himself. from this movement shall spring leaders who shall understand us, lead us, be faithful to us, and we shall elect them to represent us. WE SHALL BE HEARD.

3. We seek, and have, the support of the Church in what we do. At the head of the pilgrimage we carry LA VIRGEN DE LA GUADALUPE because she is ours, all ours, Patroness of the Mexican people. We also carry the Sacred Cross and the Star of David because we are not sectarians, and because we ask the help and prayers of all religions. All men are brothers, sons of the same God; that is why we say to all of good will, in the words of Pope Leo XIII, “Everyone’s first duty is protect the workers from the greed of speculators who use human beings as instruments to provide themselves with money. It is neither just nor human to oppress men with excessive work to the point where their minds become enfeebled and their bodies worn out.” GOD SHALL NOT ABANDON US.

4. We are suffering. We have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause. We have suffered unnumbered ills and crimes in the name of the Law of the Land. Our men, women, and children have suffered not only the basic brutality of stoop labor, and the most obvious injustices of the system; they have also suffered the desperation of knowing that the system caters to the greed of callous men and not to our needs. Now we will suffer for the purpose of ending the poverty, the misery, and the injustice, with the hope that our children will not be exploited as we have been. They have imposed hunger on us, and now we hunger for justice. We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. WE SHALL ENDURE.

5. We shall unite. We have learned the meaning of UNITY. We know why these are just that– united. The strength of the poor is also in union. We know that the poverty of the Mexican or Filipino worker in California is the same as that of all farm workers across the country, the Negroes and poor whites, the Puerto Ricans, Japanese, and Arabians; in short, all of the races that comprise the oppressed minorities of the United States. The majority of the people on our Pilgrimage are of Mexican decent, but the triumph of our race depends on a national association of all farm workers. The ranchers want to keep us divided in order to keep us weak. Many of us have signed individual “work contracts” with the ranchers or contractors, contracts in which they had all power. These contracts were farces, one more cynical joke at our impotence. That is why we must get together and bargain collectively. We must use the only strength that we have, the force of our numbers. The ranchers are few; we are many. UNITED WE SHALL STAND.

6. We shall Strike. We shall pursue the REVOLUTION we have proposed. We are sons of the Mexican Revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking, bread and justice. Our revolution will not be armed, but we want the existing social order to dissolve, we want a new social order. We are poor, we are humble, and our only choices is to Strike in those ranchers where we are not treated with the respect we deserve as working men, where our rights as free and sovereign men are not recognized. We do not want the paternalism of the rancher; we do not want the contractor; we do not want charity at the price of our dignity. We want to be equal with all the working men in the nation; we want just wage, better working conditions, a decent future for our children. To those who oppose us, be they ranchers, police, politicians, or speculators, we say that we are going to continue fighting until we die, or we win. WE SHALL OVERCOME.

Across the San Joaquin Valley, across California, across the entire Southwest of the United

States, wherever there are Mexican people, wherever there are farm workers, our movement

is spreading like flames across ad dry plain. Our PILGRIMAGE is the MATCH that will light

our cause for all farm workers to see what is happening here, so that they may do as we have

done. The time has come for the liberation of the poor farm worker.

History is on our side. MAY THE STRIKE GO ON! VIVA LA CAUSA!

Muralist Wayne Alaníz Healy

WAYNE ALANIZ HEALY – CALIFORNIA ARTIST

(EAST LOS STREETSCAPERS)

IN HIS OWN WORDS:

I started painting murals in 1972 with a group from Mechicano Art Center. For the next two years I worked with a lot of different artists such as Rich Raya and Carlos Almaraz. Finally, I did my own in 1974, all by myself. It is called Ghosts of the Barrio. It shows some

"Ghost of the Barrio" by Wayne Healy

vatos hanging out on a front porch. It’s sort of a trompe-l’oeil because people say, “How did you paint that on the steps?” It’s not the steps, it’s a blank wall of a housing unit so it has a kind of trompe-l’oeil, 3-D effect. So its cholo like cats hanging out and on the side are ghost images of Mestizos, a Revolutionary, an indigena. So, its sort of, “Where do we go from here?”

"Broadway & Daly Mural" by East Los Streetscapers

The first project I did with David Botello as East Los Streetscapers, and this was right after we had decided to do murals together, was a bank in Lincoln Heights. Daly Street and North Broadway. It is a major intersection and here is this great wall. The way we would approach a mural, and still do today, is to start out with a proposition of site specific. There are three different elements that up for “site specific.” One is architectural. Art wants to fit in the architecture, it doesn’t want to disappear in the architectural like wall paper and it doesn’t want to hand on the side of like a radio antenna. It wants to be integrated. Second, who is in that building and what are they doing? Is this a jail? A courtroom? A motel?

"Broadway & Daly mural-detail" by East los Streetscapers

That function and the people who use it is a major element. And finally, where is it? And what happened here in the past and what may happen in the future that is of historic consideration? After that we have the flow lines, and we start putting peopl ein there–our work is always populated with the human form.

Wayne Healy at work

My own, personal work, differs from David’s or our joint work, in that I really lean heavily on draftsmanship. Ultimately, what kind of artist was healey? He was a draftsman. He was pencil and paper. The imagery that you will see in my work is pretty autobiographical and s I get older it becomes more so. Washing the car in the fron yard, or my grandmother watering the driveway, dirt driveway, in East LA. Or animals in the backyard, pgs, our neighbors had horses, steers and this is on Third and Mednick!

"Bolero Familiar" by Wayne Healy

Music, there was always music. My uncles were all musical. Birthdays, bautismos, funerals–stuff that anybody in any part of the planet can look at and say, “yeah, I can relate to that.”

Louie Pérez is a founding member, drummer and song writer of the legendary rock group Los Lobos. The group is one of the longest lasting successful collaborations in music history. They are responsible for numerous hits including Will The Wolf Survive, Kiko By The Lavender Moon, La Pistola y El Corazon and the record breaking La Bamba. Latinopia wondered how the group came together and what brought about their first album. We sought out Louie Pérez to hear it in his own words.
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Louie Pérez, Drummer/Songwriter Los Lobos

LOUIE PÉREZ

IN HIS OWN WORDS

I grew up in East Los Angeles, California on January 29th, 1953. Boyle Heights and the Belvedere area. My father was carpenter and my mother was sewing machine operator. My father passed away when I was eight years old. So I didn’t get to know him. My mother loved music, she always sang and I grew up listening to rancheras.

My mom would drag us down to downtown Los Angeles to the Million Dollar theater to the variedades, the Mexican variety shows. M first experience with live music I was sitting in the Million Dollar theater, a mariachis comes on stage. It looked like there were fifty of them up there. Big fanfare, the main attraction comes on stage, it may have been Miguel Aceves Mejía, but he comes out on a white horse! Singing on horseback. My first experience with live music!

I was in high school in 1968 an d1969. The Beatles had already arrive and the East L.A. sound with the Midniters was already there. The East L.A. sound, especially the Midniters became our stand-ins for the Beatles. All of this had a great deal of influence on me. David Hidalgo and I shared an interest in music. We listened to music together. After high school all we did was listen to music and play music. We were able to create our own musical universe.

David and I, for at least a couple of years. I already knew Conrad Lozano from the neighborhood, because he lived  a couple of blocks away from me. He had his own band. David knew Cesar Rojas because they lived in the same neighborhood. We were separated by the Interstate 5 freeway. Cesar had his own band as well., a soul music, mid of tower of power band. And David and I had our band, we played together.

It wasn’t like a light went on over our heads, a foquito, and we said, wow let’s star a band. We were friends in high school before there was ever music. I knew Conrad from the neighborhood and Cesar knew David.  So out of high school we hung out as friends. Everybody had their own band but we hung out as friends.

We started Los Lobos kind of on a lark. I think it was my mom or Cesar’s mom had a birthday and we decided we were going to learn Las Mañanitas. Now these are rock and roll kids. We never paid much attention to Mexican music. Oh,  it played as the soundtrack of our lives, as an underscore. But we never paid attention to it. Because by the time we were tall enough to reach the knob on the radio we were listening to everything else. And we were part of the whole homogenization that happens to culture in the United States.

You become part of the larger scheme of things. We started listening to Jimmy Henricks, the Byrds and Bob Dylan, all the stuff that was going on and the last thing we wanted to listen to was Mexican music. But we thought this would be a novel idea, we’d learn a song for mom. We did the Mañanitas, She cried. We got this incredible sensation of moving someone with our music. Mexican music started to interest us. We started to dust off the old records at mom’s house. We started listening to Miguel Aceves Mejía again and suddenly we were like kids in a candy store.

But we approached it with this rock and roll attitude, what is in it for us? We discovered at that point that the music was actually very challenging to our musicianship. Once we realized that it wasn’t easy to play like this. When we heard the trio Los Panchos–we thought that Erik Clampton was the best guitar player in the world–and then we listen to the requinto player from the Trio Los Panchos and he is playing lightening fast licks! So this really got us interested. And it was challenging because it was not easy to play.

And then it just opened up this Pandora’s Box. We were looking for instruments. We went to pawn shops. We’d see these instruments hanging in the windows. We’d hold up a record cover with instruments and say, look there is one! And we’d match them up that way and we’d buy them for fifteen bucks. And then we had to figure out how to play them! And how to tune them!

Classical training in music. None of us ever had that.  We were all self-taught. We gravitated to music because we had an ear for it and because of that ear we were able to fold that into the instruments. I guess we were all destined for it and we had talent.

We started playing Mexican music and we finally decide that we wanted to do this full time. We went to rehearsals,. We all of us, one by one, left our groups and started playing Mexican music.  And during this time a lot of the bands were saying, What are you doing that for? We finally named the band Los Lobos after our first real gig.

We had to put our name on a contract. We played at East Los Angeles college student lounge and we started playing Mexican music and it was so strange. I looked out there and I could see the student s weren’t sure if they wanted to clap or not. This was not hip. This was not the cool thing to do. The kids were saying, they look just like us but they are playing the music of our parents, the music we are trying to get away from.

Concurrent to what was going on in 1973, was the Chicano movement and people were beginning to learn about their culture. Young people were going into the Chicano studies classes in the colleges and there was this whole renaissance of everything Chicano.

The first time we ever put down anything down as far as recording was for the United Farmworkers of America. A benefit album. We were the house band for the album.  After that we continued to keep playing over the week-ends. The way I tell the story is, fi you are Mexican American and you were married between 1973 and 1980, we probably played at your wedding, cause we never had a Saturday off.

By 1977 and 1978 we met other Chicanos who were involved in different parts of media. We met dancers and painters and we started to meet filmmakers, writers. In the same way that we found something that liberated us to play whatever we wanted to do, to play Mexican music, in the same way it happened to Chicano artists whether they were dancers or painters, filmmakers or writers. They all found what they loved and what they believed in and how they could say something through their particular talents.

So we met Jesús Treviño, we met Luis Torres, Adolfo “Rudy” Vargas, David Sandoval. They were all the upstart young writers and filmmakers and producers who were doing a lot of

Los Lobos, 1977

different things. We met up with them when they asked us to play some music for a film they were producing. And then they turned around and said, hey we should help these guys make a record. So in 1978, we went into the studio on their dime. The whole production cost maybe 1800 bucks. That was a lot of money in 1978. And we made out first record produced by Luis Torres. Just Another Band from East L.A.

*****

Victor Millan is a pioneer Latino actor, born and raised in East Los Angeles, whose early work includes a recurring role as Zahir in the 1950s television series Ramar of the Jungle and who later gave memorable performances in such classic American motion pictures as Giant (working opposite Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor) and Touch of Evil (playing opposite Charlton Heston and Orson Welles). Latinopia asked Millan, now in his nineties,  about his journey from East Los Angeles to working on major Hollywood motion pictures in the 1950s and 1960s,  a time when Latinos were virtually invisible in Hollywood.
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Victor Millan, Pioneer actor

VICTOR MILLAN

IN HIS OWN WORDS

I was born in and raised in East Los Angeles. Around Evergreen. My mother was from Durango. They came here during the Mexican revolution and she worked as a seamstress. In grammar school I had a teacher who would read to us short stories and had students present their works, their own stories. So she encouraged me to read.

From grammar school then I went to Belvedere Junior High and that is where I really got the bug for acting as a result of Mrs. Harries interest in me and her encouraging me. We did not have drama classes as such but I did a play, a one-act play. So when I went on to Roosevelt High School I took the drama class there. It was taught by a Mrs. Draper and I became very interested in pursuing acting.

I was going to school at UCLA to study drama . While there, the casting director for the Hopalong Cassidy cowboy series asked me if I could ride a horse. And, of course, you want the job, so I told him I could. I got he part but now I had to learn how to ride! So I went to the stables on Los Feliz and I rode for two days straight. But the thing was I got so sore riding the horse that the day we were to shoot the scene. I was supposed to say good-buy to my sweetheart and then get on the horse and ride off with Hoppy.

So when we are ready to shoot I tried to get on the horse but I couldn’t because I was so sore from having rehearsed that I couldn’t get my right leg over to get on the horse. I couldn’t get my foot over the horse. So they had said not to stop the camera and to keep going no matter what.  So because I couldn’t get my foot over the horse’s back–I was supposed to wave to my sweetheart. So I waved as I tried to get on the horse. It was an awkward and very funny position, It was so funny that it brought the house down, everybody laughed Hopalong Cassidy was very kind to me.

There was an open call for a movie called The Ring. I auditioned for it and got called back. When I finished the audition I overheard them talking about me. And a comment was made, that “he’s too clean cut to play a barrio kid.” But I was a barrio kid from East L.A.! The idea that I now had to have dirty pants and shirt. You know we Mexicans do take baths!

In the film there is a very important scene, sociologically speaking, because the storyline is that we come to Beverly Hills. We stop to get something to eat in a Beverly Hills restaurant and the waitress in the restaurant is treating us poorly, doesn’t give us a chance to order. And she calls the police and John Crawford was the actor playing the cop that comes to our table and asks us what are you guys doing here and tells us in essence to get out. And we do.  And he makes sure that we leave. And it was a powerful scene because it dealt with prejudice.

Ramar of the Jungle was wonderful. One of the producer’s wife saw me on a TV show and they were looking for someone to play Zahir and they recommended me to go an interview. So I went to the interview and got the part as a result of the television work I had previously done. It was a lucky break being at the right place at the right time. And we ended up doing 13 episodes of Ramar of the Jungle.

I wanted to play this East Indian and he has an East Indian accent. So you have to be careful doing dialect. It can be so phony if not done right.  I didn’t want to go overboard. So in preparing I learned how to play a dialect that wasn’t phony-baloney. It was exciting to work with John Hall and Ray Montgomery, who were big stars at the time, the were the leads. After that I started to get known by various casting offices and that made getting jobs easier.

Giant. First of all, it was a pleasure to work for George Stevens, a heavyweight in the motion picture industry. I remember getting a call from my agent to go to Warner Brothers for an interview for Giant. I went to the interview and George Stevens was shooting the wedding scene. And I waited for him to finish shooting the scenes–and waited and waited. Finally, he came by and said let’s see.  The casting director took me on the set to meet George Stevens. I came in he looked at me and didn’t say a word. So I said to myself, boy I really missed this one! So I started to leave. But the casting director stopped me before I left and he said,”go to wardrobe.” I said , you mean you’re telling me that I have the part? It can’t be because he didn’t even know if I spoke English. He didn’t talk to me. The casting agent told me, You got the part. Just like that!

Later on as I worked on the film, when I asked about George Stevens not even talking to me, they said , he had already seen your work. Later I visited his office and he had drawings of all the characters in the movie And there was drawing there of me! So he knew already in advance. All he wanted to do was look at me on that day.

The climate in Marfa, Texas where we filmed, was in the summer time, and it was hot and humid. But yet the actors, all of them were uncomfortable but they were pleasant. The climate was conducive to work because of George Stevens. In the scene where you first meet my character is waiting at the train station. I am bringing a bouquet of flowers and am driving the car to pick up Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor. And she is very gracious in the scene. And Rock picks up on that graciousness and he tells her in the scene. “You don’t treat these people this way.” And this is the first mention of the racial prejudice that you see in the film.

I filmed for six weeks in Marfa, Texas. They built the front facade of the house in Texas. They filmed the outdoor scenes in Marfa and then the indoor scenes when we got back to Los Angeles.

The Christmas party scene was filmed at the studio. In the scene I am proud with a touch of great dignity. I didn’t want to play him as the typical stereotype of what they considered a Mexican character to be. He enters the room, and Alex Scourby, played the grandfather, he played it with a gentleness and dignity and that is what I wanted to play as well. With dignity.

My beat in the funeral scene. I miss my son and love him. And I am thinking, dear God don’t let me cry and break down. Because to hold it back instead of letting it all hang out, is to me is much more powerful. It is a thread that is stretched that may or may not break at any time. So I played the scene as someone not wanting to break down. My beat, the goal of my scene as an actor.

After that I became well known and it was much easier to meet directly people. And also it was exciting.

Getting the part of Touch of Evil was very exciting, Universal in those days had wooden bungalows where producers and directors hug out in their offices. And I went to read for Orson Welles and I read for him. And he asked me to wait outside.

And I could hear the conversation because the wooden bungalows had no sound protection. And I could hear them arguing about casting me. And I hear my agent saying, I guess Welles quoted a price the agent says that his actor doesn’t work for that kind of money. And I am outside saying, God, I’ll do this for nothing. Working with Welles!  So they argued there and I walked off with the part.

We went into rehearsal period. And its along scene, along take. Orson Welles wanted it in one take without any cuts. He had a disagreement with the studio because they wanted it with cuts but he wanted it with one take. We rehearsed it in Orson Welles home in the Hollywood Hills. So he blocked the scene in his big living room. And we rehearsed without the slap. So after a couple of days of rehearsal we are now ready to shoot. So I got used to him, Orson Welles, not hitting me. Well in the scene, if you see the scene, Orson Welles comes into the room and comes up to me and addresses me and says the lines and then he slaps me. Well he really did slap, he really did hit me and my teeth were rattled! I was worried about my jaw swelling up. I didn’t want to do another take. I thought this had better be good. And it was good! We did it in one take!