V O L U M E 39 • N U M B E R T W O • F A L L 2 0 1 4
Editor’s Commentary
NORIEGA / Exilic Reckoning
Essays
LIRA AND STERN / Mexican Americans and Eugenic Sterilization: Resisting
Reproductive Injustice in California, 1920–1950
GARZA / Decolonizing Intimacies: Women of Mexican Descent and
Colorism
HUERTA AND MORALES / Formation of a Latino Grassroots Movement:
The Association of Latin American Gardeners of Los Angeles
Challenges City Hall
PÉREZ / Toward a Mariposa Consciousness: Reimagining Queer Chicano
and Latino Identities
Dossier: Sal Castro—A Teacher
GARCÍA / Introduction
MORENO, LA SALLE, CRISOSTOMO, SALAS, BRUTTI, GARCÍA, AND LERCHENMULLER / In Memoriam: Remembering
a Teacher
HARO / Write Your Own History: Sal Castro’s Legacy
CALVO-QUIRÓS / Thank You Maestro: The Walkouts as Praxis of “Epistemic Resistance”
VERDUGO AND MONTOYA / I Am Walking!
Sal Castro: A Photo Essay
VALLEJO / Make ’Em All Mexican
Reviews
V39-2cover.indd 1
FAL L 2 0 1 4
JANSEN / John D. Márquez’s Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the New Gulf South
DEL CASTILLO / John Rechy’s City of Night: 50th Anniversary Edition
BARRERA / Raúl Coronado’s A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture
MARTINEZ AND CORTEZ / Dwayne Mack, Elwood D. Watson, and Michelle Madsen Camacho’s Mentoring Faculty of
Color: Essays on Professional Development and Advancement in Colleges and Universities
VASQUEZ / Josh Kun and Laura Pulido’s Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition
CENTINO / Pancho McFarland’s The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje
ESPINOZA / Elizabeth R. Escobedo’s From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World
War II Home Front
HEREDIA / David R. Diaz and Rodolfo D. Torres’s Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning, Policy, and Redevelopment
ROMERO AND RODAS / Yvette G. Flores’s Chicana and Chicano Mental Health: Alma, Mente y Corazón
DI BLASI / Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography
GONZÁLEZ / Clara Román-Odio’s Sacred Iconographies in Chicana Cultural Productions
BACA / Joseph P. Sánchez, Robert L. Spude, and Art Gómez’s New Mexico: A History
RODRÍGUEZ / Suzanne Bost’s Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature
VILLANUEVA-NIEVES / Carolyn Tuttle’s Mexican Women in American Factories: Free Trade and Exploitation on the Border
VOLUME 39 NUMBER TWO
Artist’s Communiqué
A JOURNAL OF CHICANO STUDIES
Editor’s Introduction
AZTLAN
In th i s i s s u e . . .
AZTLAN
A JOURNAL OF CHICANO STUDIES
V O L U M E
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N U M B E R
T W O
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F A L L
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CONTE NTS
VOLUME 39
• NUMBER TWO
• FA L L 2 0 1 4
Editor’s Introduction
Editor’s Commentary
Exilic Reckoning
CHON A. NORIEGA
viii
1
Essays
Mexican Americans and Eugenic Sterilization: Resisting Reproductive
Injustice in California, 1920–1950
NATALIE LIRA AND ALEXANDRA MINNA STERN
9
Decolonizing Intimacies: Women of Mexican Descent and Colorism
SANDRA D. GARZA
35
Formation of a Latino Grassroots Movement: The Association of
Latin American Gardeners of Los Angeles Challenges City Hall
ALVARO HUERTA AND ALFONSO MORALES
65
Toward a Mariposa Consciousness: Reimagining Queer Chicano
and Latino Identities
DANIEL ENRIQUE PÉREZ
95
Dossier: Sal Castro—A Teacher
V39-2_00front.indd 5
Introduction
MARIO T. GARCÍA
131
In Memoriam: Remembering a Teacher
CARLOS MORENO, ROBIN AVELAR LA SALLE, PAULA CRISOSTOMO,
HILDA SALAS, MYRNA GONZÁLEZ BRUTTI, MARIO T. GARCÍA, AND
CHARLOTTE LERCHENMULLER
137
Write Your Own History: Sal Castro’s Legacy
CARLOS MANUEL HARO
149
Thank You Maestro: The Walkouts as Praxis of
“Epistemic Resistance”
WILLIAM A. CALVO-QUIRÓS
155
I Am Walking!
BOBBY LEE VERDUGO AND JOSÉ MONTOYA
167
Sal Castro: A Photo Essay
171
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Artist’s Communiqué
Make ’Em All Mexican
LINDA VALLEJO
179
Reviews
John D. Márquez’s Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the
New Gulf South
ANNE MAI YEE JANSEN
189
John Rechy’s City of Night: 50th Anniversary Edition
ADELAIDA R. DEL CASTILLO
195
Raúl Coronado’s A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing
and Print Culture
MAGDALENA BARRERA
201
Dwayne Mack, Elwood D. Watson, and Michelle Madsen Camacho’s
Mentoring Faculty of Color: Essays on Professional Development and
Advancement in Colleges and Universities
MELISSA A. MARTINEZ AND LAURA J. CORTEZ
207
Josh Kun and Laura Pulido’s Black and Brown in Los Angeles:
Beyond Conflict and Coalition
IRENE VASQUEZ
213
Pancho McFarland’s The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a
New Millennial Mestizaje
NICHOLAS F. CENTINO
219
Elizabeth R. Escobedo’s From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives
of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home Front
DIONNE ESPINOZA
225
David R. Diaz and Rodolfo D. Torres’s Latino Urbanism:
The Politics of Planning, Policy, and Redevelopment
JUANITA HEREDIA
231
Yvette G. Flores’s Chicana and Chicano Mental Health: Alma,
Mente y Corazón
ANDREA J. ROMERO AND JOSÉ M. RODAS
237
Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography
MARCELA DI BLASI
241
Clara Román-Odio’s Sacred Iconographies in Chicana
Cultural Productions
AMBER ROSE GONZÁLEZ
247
V39-2_00front.indd 6
7/25/14 1:37 PM
Joseph P. Sánchez, Robert L. Spude, and Art Gómez’s New Mexico:
A History
JACOBO D. BACA
253
Suzanne Bost’s Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana
Feminist Literature
SONIA ALEJANDRA RODRÍGUEZ
257
Carolyn Tuttle’s Mexican Women in American Factories:
Free Trade and Exploitation on the Border
NATALIA VILLANUEVA-NIEVES
263
V39-2_00front.indd 7
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Artist’s Communiqué
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Make ’Em All Mexican
Linda Vallejo
My early years were spent traveling and studying in far-flung locations
throughout the United States and Europe. During my artistic grounding, I
became increasingly immersed in Chicano art and indigenous communities—experiences that have informed my cultural perspectives and, by
extension, my art practice. It has taken my entire artistic career to fuse
an image that defines my multicultural experience of the world and my
place in it.
I was born in Boyle Heights and lived in East Los Angeles, just a stone’s
throw away from Self Help Graphics & Art, until I was three years old. I was
very fortunate to have six great-grandparents and a large extended family in
those early years. My father, Adam Vallejo, was studying political science at
the University of California, Los Angeles, and my mother, Helen, worked
for a prominent doctor on First Street. My father’s family was blessed with
several musicians, including my paternal grandfather, Aniceto, as well as
talented singers and dancers. My great-grandparents hailed from Mexico
and Texas, having migrating to work in the fields of California in the first
decades of the twentieth century.
After my father graduated from college he entered the US Air Force as
a commissioned officer and we moved to Germany, just outside Munich. As
a young girl I didn’t understand the changes I would experience in moving
from one place to another. Over the next ten years I lived in Arizona,
Missouri, Texas, and Sacramento, California, where we stayed for seven
years. In the mid-1960s I found myself in Montgomery, Alabama, where
my high school was integrated for the first time in its history. The tension
was palpable, and violence seemed imminent. The knowledge of myself as
a person of color, standing outside the lines of fire, scorched me indelibly.
I have memories of “white” and “colored” bathroom stalls and fountains,
of the tragic marches from Selma, of burning crosses and lynchings, and
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© University of California Regents
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Vallejo
of the hopeful speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King. I began to realize that
the world did not see me as I saw myself, that color was a defining point
in how the world judges us and fixes our place in it. I believe that these
experiences during the fight for integration and equality are the bedrock
of my newest series, Make ’Em All Mexican.
In 1967 my family moved to Madrid, where I graduated from high
school. I traveled, studying art, architecture, and art history. As I traveled
I fell in love with European history and culture, and with the classics. I
wrote music, designed clothing, and painted, searching for a language that
could express universal equality and acceptance. I imagined an image that
could open a dialogue of understanding among all peoples.
The artwork I created during these years came from my experiences
in El Museo Nacional del Prado, where I studied El Greco’s elongated and
floating images of the pantheon of heaven, Goya’s gruesome portrayals
of humanity’s folly in pain and suffering, and an astounding collection of
Bosch, with his imagination-filled landscapes of the glories of heaven and
the humiliations of hell. I visited ancient Roman sites, falling in love with
the ethereal gods and their mythologies and with the history of the great
Western cultures. These experiences fed my desire to create an image that
could speak a language of compassion and respect.
In 1975 I returned to Los Angeles to begin my master of fine arts
studies in printmaking at California State University, Long Beach. I also
returned to be close to my family. Two of my grandparents were still alive,
and I had several cousins living in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas.
LINDA VALLEJO is a Los Angeles–based artist who investigates contemporary cultural and
political issues through her work. Solo exhibitions of works from the Make ’Em All Mexican
series have been presented at the Soto Clemente Velez Cultural Center in New York in 2014,
the George Lawson Gallery and the University Art Gallery of New Mexico State University
in 2013, and at Arte Americas in collaboration with the Fresno Art Museum and the Robert
and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art at California State University, San Bernardino in
2012. In 2014 Vallejo received the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs COLA Individual
Artist Fellowship. She has exhibited at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Los Angeles
Craft and Folk Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art New York, San Antonio Museum, and
Mexico City Modern Art Museum. She was included in two exhibitions associated with the
Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945–1980 initiative: Mapping Another
LA: The Chicano Art Movement, at the UCLA Fowler Museum; and Doin’ It in Public: Art and
Feminism at the Woman’s Building, at the Otis College of Art and Design Ben Maltz Gallery.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago,
the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, California, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the
California Multicultural and Ethnic Archives at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
and the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Vallejo
is represented by the George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco.
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Make ’Em All Mexican
It was then that I found my way into a job with Sister Karen Boccalero as a printmaking teacher for Self Help Graphics’s Barrio Mobile
Art Studio, immersing myself in “my own” classical culture, Mesoamerica.
I became involved in the burgeoning Chicano arts community as well
as in Chicano indígena and Native American ceremonial circles. Again,
I found myself surrounded by stories of cultural misconceptions based
on color, class, and creed. My experiences in indígena led me to create
fantastic realism landscapes focused on spiritual awakening. As the years
passed I continued to travel, study, and paint. A few years ago I made trips
to China, New York, and several other major US cities. It is my custom
to include museums and galleries on my itinerary to get a sense of what
is happening in the national and international art scene. On these trips
I noticed a growing trend from the mundane to the fantastic—sculpture
made of pre-produced objects, wildly untamed images created from found
objects put to fascinating new uses, photographic collages combining
digital work and hand-drawn forms, and images that juxtaposed seemingly
contrary cultural symbols and icons.
After seeing these works and hundreds more, my thoughts and creative processes began to shift. I found myself ruminating, “What would
repurposed art images look like if I created them from my own personal
Chicano-indígena lens?”
Now, after forty years of search and artistic production, I find that Make
’Em All Mexican accomplishes the task I set for myself so very long ago.
By coaxing the viewer into a comfortable space where there is humor and
laughter, the images allow stories to surface about the divisions caused by
our differences and the possibility of unity through our similarities. Personally, Make ’Em All Mexican helps me to “laugh to keep from crying.” In
this new series of works I repurpose iconic images of national and world
culture and “make them Mexican” by painting them brown. When viewers first see Make ’Em All Mexican they begin by chuckling over images
of a brown Marilyn Monroe (Marielena: La Fabulosa, reproduced on the
front cover), or a brown Marie Antoinette and Louis Auguste in all their
regal finery, and end in a meaty dialogue about their experiences with the
politics of color. What would happen if Hollywood were built and governed
by Mexicans? What if the world and all its grand historical kingdoms were
ruled by Mexican royalty? It’s at first a funny notion, but slowly becomes
disconcerting to many, even to Mexicans . . .
Make ’Em All Mexican leads you down an ironic path where you find
yourself confronted by some of the most difficult questions of our time: “Do
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Vallejo
race, color, and class define our status in the world?” “Do color and class
define our understanding and appreciation of culture?”
For some viewers, the images are hyperpolitical; for others, they are
emotional portals to a past remembered and sometimes forgotten; and for
still another group, they are just hilarious. Curators look forward to exhibiting this work because of the explosive conversations it evokes. During
gallery talks the faces in the audience show joy and elation, disbelief and
relief, fear and anger. In many cases younger viewers will make suggestions
about what other important and famous figures could be “made brown.”
People are alight with ideas about how funny it is to make them “all”
Mexican. “Hey, what about the Three Stooges or John Wayne?” “I want
to be Mexican too! Make me brown!”
At other times the conversation turns to stories of memory and loss.
One viewer commented on Dick and Jane, a handmade book made from
a repurposed third-grade primer showing little blond blue-eyed children
transformed into brown-faced Mexicans. He shared, “When I first glimpsed
Dick and Jane my immediate reaction was ‘not only do I get it’ but that ‘they
got me.’ Images came rushing back like ghosts from a childhood nightmare
that I didn’t know I held within.” Dick and Jane gave him a chance to
reflect on his past and to “realize that the future is never a lost cause.” I was
astonished at the personal memories and feelings that he shared.
A woman reflected in tears on a very personal story of how she had
been celebrated as the “little princess” of her family, born with light hair
and skin, but how over time as her skin and hair grew darker and darker
she could feel the love of her family “ebbing away.”
An African American family spoke in hushed tones about “high yella
and low black” and wondered if the struggle for class based on “shades of
color” would ever change. A Chicano family who had adopted a Chinese
daughter lamented that she no longer wanted to be Chinese; the girl was
angry that she could not be “like the girls in the magazines,” and the mother
and father were at a loss to help her understand her place in the world.
Another highly placed individual actually acknowledged that the “light”
members of his family do not speak to the “dark ones.”
Conversations have found their way into gay rights and the struggles
of feminism, where anyone who has ever felt like an outsider can
openly express the need to be considered a member of the whole and
to be heard and respected for his or her feelings, thoughts, knowledge,
and accomplishments.
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Make ’Em All Mexican
As funny as it is, the Make ’Em All Mexican series appears to open
doors to a shared reality in a modern world where color still governs access
and power. Make ’Em All Mexican is only the start of a lengthy process,
but change is possible if we just laugh and work through it together.
Dick and Jane (panel 1), 2010. From the
Make ’Em All Mexican series. Repurposed
book pages, pigment print of original painting,
gouache, and Wite-Out, 8 × 5 inches. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Dick and Jane (panel 2), 2010. From the
Make ’Em All Mexican series. Repurposed
book pages, pigment print of original painting,
gouache, and Wite-Out, 8 × 5 inches. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
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Vallejo
Dick and Jane (panel 3),
2010. From the Make ’Em
All Mexican series. Repurposed book pages, pigment
print of original painting,
gouache, and Wite-Out,
8 × 5 inches. Photograph
courtesy of the artist.
Nor All Freed from Want
(panel 1), 2012. From the
Make ’Em All Mexican
series. Repurposed posters,
original silk-screen print,
gouache, and Wite-Out,
10 × 8 inches. Photograph
courtesy of the artist.
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Make ’Em All Mexican
Nor All Freed from Want (panel 2), 2012. From the Make ’Em All Mexican series. Repurposed
posters, original silk-screen print, gouache, and Wite-Out, 10 × 10 inches. Photograph courtesy
of the artist.
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