RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 12.05.25 GRACIELA ITURBIDE BORDERLAND IMAGES

Graciela Iturbide: Borderland Images from East Los Angeles and Tijuana

In 1986, Iturbide was one of the 200 photographers invited from across the world for a project titled A Day in the Life of America. The project became one of the most ambitious collaborative photojournalism endeavors ever produced. Each photographer was assigned to document life in different regions of the USA, covering both everyday and extraordinary scenes. 245,000 images were collectively shot across all 50 states, from dawn to midnight, presenting an expansive, mosaic-like narrative of American life during the mid-1980s. The final selection featured about 275 photographs in a published book. Iturbide’s photo of several White Fence gang members caring for a small baby is included in a two-page spread of A Day in the Life of America.

When Iturbide reached out to her Los Angeles contacts to find a location to photograph for A Day in the Life of America, she consulted with the Los Angeles Photo Center and Sister Karen Boccalero of Self-Help Graphics. The Photo Center and Sister Karen both recommended Chicana artist Margaret Garcia, a longtime resident of East Los Angeles. The only instruction Iturbide provided was that the folks she would meet be of Mexican descent. Garcia had a niece, Lisa Gomez, who belonged to the White Fence gang, and Garcia offered to take Iturbide to meet them.  When Iturbide met Lisa Gomez, a young chola, she learned that her potential subjects were “unusual in another way: the two women, a boyfriend, and five-month-old Joe live together in the White Fence barrio of East Los Angeles, and, except for baby Joe, all were deaf-mutes.”

Alfonso Morales Carrillo, in his essay for the White Fence Revisited book, quoted a descriptive caption that provides an excellent introduction to Iturbide’s East Los Angeles project. He wrote, “Mexico City-based photographer Graciela Iturbide spent May 2nd with a group of East Los Angeles cholos–a loose term for the small fringe of tough, streetwise young Mexican Americans, mostly U.S.-born, who see themselves at odds with both Anglo society and Hispanic traditions.” In her 24-hour assignment in East Los Angeles, Iturbide left a photographer’s trail of over one thousand shots, mostly on black-and-white film.

The White Fence gang dates to the pre-WWII years, and some current members document its founding to 1939. The gang originated around La Purísima Catholic Church on Inez Street, near Lorena Street and Whittier Boulevard, close to the Los Angeles River and the Downtown rail tracks.​ The white fence that enclosed the church inspired their name.​ Through the historical narrative of California writer and attorney Carey McWilliams, who covered the Zoot-Suit Riots and the Sleepy Lagoon trial in his monumental book, North From Mexico, we learn of several East Los Angeles gangs in the early 1940s.

The White Fence photos were first exhibited at the Casa de la Fotografía in Mexico City in 1988 under the title Cerco Blanco. Iturbide wrote how she came to photograph the East Los Angeles cholos: “I was invited to work on the project: A Day in the Life of America in 1986. I decided to work with the Chicana community because I wanted a book on the life of the United States to include a marginalized community like theirs.”  She recalled, “They agreed to work with me on this project. I stayed at their home, following them around with my camera as they went about their day-to-day activities.”

Los Angeles cholos were also the subject of the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz, who wrote about the Californian gang members he knew as Pachucos. Paz viewed the California Pachucos as a complex cultural phenomenon embodying a sense of alienation and identity conflict. In his book The Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz described how the Pachucos [or cholos] were perceived negatively in both Mexico and the United States.  He offered that they were seen as “cultural degenerates” by some Mexican critics, including Mexican American elites.  Chicano scholars argued that the cholos embodied a form of resistance against cultural invisibility and societal rejection.

The Latino members of the White Fence Gang of East Los Angeles, like many Latino gangs in California, are social outliers. Marta Daho’s essay in the Graciela Iturbide book, published by Fundación MAPFRE, offers a deeper understanding of Iturbide’s White Fence photos. The Los Angeles gang, like all California gangs, Black or Latino, was part of a marginalized community.  Daho notes that Iturbide’s work on the Seri, a Mexican indigenous tribe from Sonora, “gives rise to a reflection that extends beyond the specific circumstances of that community, touching directly on the question of the survival of certain cultural systems existing within others that occupy a dominant position.”

Iturbide photographed White Fence gang members at home, in a local park, shopping, and in front of Chicano murals. In 1986, when Iturbide arrived for the 24-hour shoot, East Los Angeles had more than 500 murals—the most extensive public art display in the United States. The murals were part of the Chicano mural movement, which originated in East Los Angeles in the late 1960s, not far from the White Fence community.  The East Los Angeles community that Iturbide visited had its share of dangerous neighborhoods. California writer Luis J. Rodriguez published the memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., which provides an excellent description of cholo life in Los Angeles.  Rodriguez argued that an everyday awareness existed of the violence and dangers present in East Los Angeles gang culture. In the preface of his 1993 book’s first edition, Rodriguez pointed out: “By the time I turned 18 years old, 25 of my friends had been killed by rival gangs, police, drugs, car crashes, or suicides.”

The Los Angeles that Iturbide visited in 1986 for her photography assignment had evolved into one of the most important Spanish-speaking centers in the Americas.  At the time, more Mexicans lived in Los Angeles than in either Monterrey or Guadalajara, Mexico’s second and third largest cities. Even today, the Latino community of Southern California is larger than that of several Central American countries. In the 1980s, a significant evolution in Mexican television programming allowed U.S. Latinos to closely follow cultural events and political news south of the border.  However, interest in Mexico extended beyond politics.  Mexican workers in the United States sent an estimated $2 billion in remittances to Mexico during the mid-1980s.  Advances in communication networks allowed Mexican families on both sides of the border to stay up to date about matters related to the economic and social well-being of their loved ones.

In the Ruiz-Healy Art Gallery exhibit in New York City, we are witness to a splendid collection of photos from East Los Angeles and Tijuana, Mexico. Three years after the publication of A Day in the Life of America, Iturbide returned to Southern California and extended her visit, traveling to San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico. In Tijuana, she photographed migrants waiting to cross the international border. In those years, thousands of men, women, and children camped near the border fence in hopes of crossing at night. While the majority were of Mexican descent, those wishing to cross into the United States included Central and South Americans. Alfonso Morales Carillo, author of White Fence Revisited, wrote of Iturbide’s Tijuana U.S.-Mexico border encounter: “In the midst of unwelcoming landscapes, Iturbide came across young men whose bearing, dress, and haircuts put them on a par with the cholos of Los Angeles.”  Iturbide’s photos of cholos in Tijuana, Baja California, offer a rare glimpse into the lives of young people in the urban borderlands. With a metro area population of 700,000 in 1990 when Iturbide visited, Tijuana was a booming border city with thousands of industrial jobs in the maquiladoras [assembly plants]. The maquiladoras provided the backbone of the city’s thriving economy, and young workers were central to its successes.  Tijuana was also known for launching ambitious urban development projects, and was a critical borderland mecca for migrants, mainly from the interior of Mexico, but also from as far away as China.

I knew Tijuana from visits in the early 1960s. When my wife Harriett and I moved to San Diego in the mid-1970s, we made the short trip to Tijuana on many weekends to shop and have dinner.  Harriett had started her Ph.D. in Sociology at UC San Diego, focusing on Mexican immigrants, so Tijuana was of particular interest to her. I was a new Assistant Professor in the History Department and had established friendships with Mexican history faculty from Tijuana and El Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

The term vatos in place of cholos is frequently used in the California-Mexico borderlands. I found the four photos of cholos from Tijuana particularly interesting.  The images include a vato on a bike next to a lowrider, a cholo in a plain dark shirt posing with a hairnet, a vato with a large Virgen de Guadalupe tattoo on his back, and a cholo wearing a white shirt in front of an unfinished mural of the Virgen de Guadalupe.  I was familiar with similar images in the San Antonio Westside, where I grew up, and in East Los Angeles, where I taught high school while working on my Ph.D. in urban history at UCLA.

The exhibit at Ruiz-Healy Art Gallery also includes photos of the United Farm Workers [UFW] union leaders/founders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. These photos were also taken in 1989-1990 when Iturbide returned to California to follow up on her earlier work with the White Fence gang.  Chavez and Huerta led the union organizing of farmworkers over an intense, often violent period, from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. During the initial years of the labor struggle, the growers recruited Mexican Braceros as strikebreakers. By organizing young Chicanos in urban areas to support the grape boycott, the UFW contributed to the Chicano Movement. As a young teacher in East Los Angeles, I participated in the UFW protests and taught one of the first Mexican American history classes in the California high school system. My students in East Los Angeles joined the Los Angeles High School Walkouts in 1968, protesting the poor educational facilities, lack of Chicano teachers, and limited educational resources in their schools.

Alejandro Castellanos’ essay on Iturbide for the book Eyes to Fly With explains that her “work is characterized by a continuous dialogue between images, times, and symbols rather than by a linear process.” In her photos of White Fence, we admire how she captured the everyday lives and humanity of gang culture. She saw a human connection in East Los Angeles and Tijuana that had eluded other photographers and scholars. Castellanos added that photography to Iturbide was more a “transitory act dominated by insight and openness to the unknown than by reason and the security of experience.” Iturbide made no judgments about the lifestyles or cultures of those she photographed. She captured their dignity, uniqueness, and resilience.

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Copyright 2025 by Ricardo Romo. All photo credits as indicate above.