2018 | I was back at the Redz Bar of my queer adolescence, a pang of grief gnawing in my gut. The establishment had closed its doors in 2015, after more than fifty years as one of the few spaces in East Los Angeles for Chicana lesbians to congregate in conviviality. Redz, which reopened in late 2016, continues to be important to me, and I wanted to recognize its historic role in providing that crucial space by organizing an evening featuring the filmic works of Oakland-based artist Xandra Ibarra. The event marked my return to the bar under its new ownership.
I pulled out two barstools from right in the middle of the counter and looked up to see the familiar sight of vinyl records glued to the ceiling. Red vinyl, yellow vinyl, blue vinyl, black. I had arrived early with my friend Thea, a curator at a small Seattle gallery and my best femme friend, who was eager to see Boyle Heights up close and personally. We had stopped for the world-famous bean and cheese burritos with green sauce from Al & Bea’s and parked ourselves in the middle of the late afternoon crowd of butch-femme regulars, who were decked out head to toe in Dodgers gear, digging into their buckets of icy cold Coronas. Thea and I stuck out a bit—me in a white and neon-flourished Hawaiian shirt and short green shorts, Thea in the monochromatic angularity of Eileen Fisher. The evening was my fourth and final program for the 2018 Dirty Looks: On Location, a film and performance series that was the brainchild of my friend, the film curator Bradford Nordeen.18 Bradford had knighted a handful of artists, programmers, impresarios, and deejays into event conveners. We organized a muscular monthlong series that gave neighborhood bars throughout Los Angeles their moment under the queer historical and vernacular sun. I chose Ibarra’s work because of the way it resonates with Redz history in addressing the queer and colonial histories that brought Mexicans from El Paso to East L.A. throughout the twentieth century. The event was my attempt to tether the two cities, an umbilical cord that queers a history of Mexican migration following the Mexican Revolution.
Ten years earlier I would have felt good, in an uncomplicated way, about the program’s intent and execution. Ten years earlier, I was scraping by with an administrative university job that had been cut down to seventeen hours after the 2008 crash. That job only existed because of an endowment, and when Wall Street’s down so is gender and women’s studies. Now, I couldn’t help but think I was setting myself up for a callout, given the current political wariness of artists in a Boyle Heights I hadn’t lived in since 2010. The neighborhood was burdened by a housing crisis reaching its boiling point, and intimidation tactics like doxxing were standard practice in Boyle Heights, which had become somehow alienated by Chicanx art—not the Chicanx art championed by the late Sister Karen Boccalero (often credited as the founder of the organization Self-Help Graphics & Art19) but not not championed either; this was an art that had become the nouveau signal of a Boyle Heights in transition. An art by Chicanx artists who took flight into and out of prestigious BFA and MFA programs and returned to a neighborhood that was once the epicenter for Japanese migrants who came to L.A. en masse after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, followed in the twenties and thirties by Jewish Eastern Europeans. Art changed these neighborhoods. Artists were telling stories many were starving to hear. Sometimes I feel like Tomás Ybarra-Frausto never should have given us the theory of rasquachismo because once you have language to describe the representational depth of beauty of the harsh places we come from, those in power want to take it away. Our historical imprints enhance the value of a neighborhood. Our histories sell, whereas our lives obstruct profits.
My anxiety was new and had emerged in response to an unusual Instagram message I received in the fall of 2017: my Latinx identity, or so I gleaned from this message, was being coopted by a Boyle Heights gallery to push out low-income renters from their Boyle Heights apartments. Who is this? I hissed to myself. I was struck by social media’s ability to make me feel like it was always already instantaneously omnipotent and omniscient and that I was in trouble. But I get that information has become the currency in the democratization of surveillance and that’s what our little smartphones enable—our surveillance of one another. It’s also really dramatic. But sometimes it inspires dialogue, and gossip and critique are a powerful combination. Gossip queers critique. And I will never begrudge a good callout.
I texted Pau, a young Chicanx who lived in nearby Highland Park but was raised in the California high desert community of Hesperia. Pau was my friend and the curator of the exhibition in question. They were one of the hardest-working artists I knew and explained that the main person behind the incendiary Instagram account was a white trans art bro whose wealth was publicly known, an organizer who had fallen out with members of his cohort who had recently opened a new gallery in Boyle Heights; the gallery was backed by New York investors, inspiring necessary scrutiny. I took a minute to let that information assimilate in my mind. It all felt so wildly imagined. But these details were part of an anecdotal register permeating a Los Angeles arts community struggling to make sense of the stain of art-washing (arts organizations helping scrub the stink of gentrification from developers seizing upon real estate opportunities). The accuracies are what we lose in the constant, unrelenting discourse anchored in perception and optics. Or what happens when no one interfaces in person anymore.
I had never heard of the anonymous Instagram account critical of many Latinx artists making art about East Los Angeles in East Los Angeles. Naming these identity markers of the caller is important. It’s how a politic of identity gets determined. The caller used these declarative callouts as a strategy, a provocation: as a mean-spirited critique of the artists’ “authentic Latinidad” as if the whole thing isn’t just made up to preserve proximities to whiteness and power. But it’s true some of the artists had one non-Latinx parent, others were probably trust-funded or were just “too white” to even be considered “real” Latinxs. No one in that exhibition was trust-funded to my knowledge, but that isn’t even the point.
That callout felt like we were being asked to show our papers.
It was effective in some ways. Some of the artists haven’t shown since that episode, which played out mostly on social media. Having their identities leveraged in a public and virulent way has startled them into an anxious silence. Several of my friends and acquaintances had liked the image, a doom-scrolled admission of their approval on a timeline no one stops to contemplate anymore, I thought.
How could Chicanx artists make work without somehow engaging a Chicanx epicenter?
I lurked on the account to see a post calling out my old friend Tanya Saracho, showrunner for Vida (which, according to its website, is a dramedy series “about two Mexican-American siblings from East Los Angeles”), for selling out Boyle Heights. She is referred to as a whitetina.
Was I a whitetina? Or a whitetinx, to remain congruent to my old-school bulldagger swagger with new-school queer theory presentation? Why wasn’t I called a leva (short for levantado, a name reserved for someone who is elevated or uppity)? Was my desire to move slowly above my station—a glacially paced social mobility—a problem? Was asking to get paid for a performance a problem? Was wanting what I was owed a problem?
Space in a community as a contributing member: I dreamed of a rightful place at the family dinner table. Permission, when necessary, to be a loving gadfly.
I was living in Tucson at the time of the callout and had to think about how a poem of mine could be capable of aiding and abetting community displacement when I myself had to leave a northeast Los Angeles neighborhood to improve my lot in what was heretofore a broke queer life. I knew displacement well, even as I was often contacted for work about queerness, brownness, and how the two intersect in an ever-changing L.A. landscape. I had been asked to include my poem in the small publication for Facing, a show focused on Latinx portraiture at the artist-run gallery BBQLA, a space whose controversy was new to me. Timo Fahler, son of an Oklahoma Chicana with El Paso roots, is one of two guys I know who runs BBQLA, and I liked and trusted him enough to agree to participate. We had hung out in Marfa the previous summer, both of us in collaborative efforts with our mutual friend, rafa esparza. About four artists had pulled their work before Facing opened, in response to the Instagram callout. Some may have done so in fear of retribution or in solidarity with local low-income residents at risk of being displaced. There were empty spaces on some of the BBQLA walls, a gesture making visible the choices of each artist. The opening, which I attended, served freshly smoked brisket and coleslaw and cornbread for free.
How to briefly illustrate a brown life in the arts? Many of us arrive to art from origins that register in most narratives as humble beginnings—that is, our parents emerged from an immigrant underclass that has beaten the odds. If you can buy a home a decade after being paid to take care of children twenty-four seven at fifty dollars a week during your first four years in a new country then you, my friend, have beaten the odds. Which is what makes our histories appealing—the raw underdoggedness of needing to survive is thrilling to consume from a safe distance. These stories are the discursive equivalents of a cockfight.
And so we, the children of those who have ascended successfully to the middle classes, move toward the arts as a promise of sustainability beyond survival. We make an art that calls on the ancestors who survived encroachment and expulsion, disaster and disease. We tell their stories through our own. We stitch a story about where we are from to make up for the history seized from us. Our stories navigate gatekeeping strategies from institutions as diverse as university art programs, local nonprofits, galleries, and museums. Our stories make it to the other side of those gates. But now we may have been intercepted by a new level of financialization. How to make art and a life that isn’t influenced by market forces, or that is able to operate outside of exploited labor and toxic consumption? How to leave our art behind when some of us are told that our artistic projects are putting poorer people in jeopardy? We are forming identities in need of empowerment through expression while trying to arrive at answers that could satisfy similarly circumstanced detractors (even those who owned homes in these neighborhoods). Most of us had been priced out of apartments once a lease agreement came to a close. No one owed us anything and yet we had a right to be there.
Who knew a Latinx immigrant middle class could exist, only to quickly be undercut by a government that values its corporations more than its citizenry?
My parents were part of that class, which meant a modest mortgage in southeast Los Angeles and sunrise drives to see the dentist in Tijuana. They met at El Mercadito on 3rd and Lorena in the early seventies, when my mom lived in a spartan one-bedroom in the Estrada Courts housing project. My dad a Mexicano from Pachuca, Hidalgo, working at a pressing plant in Vernon, and Mom, a Salvadoran woman barely making it by doing piecework as a seamstress downtown. I was born at the county hospital before it became USC Medical Center in Lincoln Heights—before USC offered its employees a housing purchase subsidy starting at $20,000 to buy homes in neighborhoods like Lincoln Heights and the South Central communities surrounding the main university campus. I was baptized at Our Lady Queen of Angels across the street from the old Plaza Olvera Street, and I grew up in Huntington Park and Bell Gardens. I saw Vaginal Creme Davis open for the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black when I was seventeen, playing in bands and palling around with the Yao sisters from Emily’s Sassy Lime, the other teenage girls of color in that Jabberjaw milieu that later contributed to various underground cultures. Over a span of fifteen years, I have lived in Silver Lake, Echo Park, Lincoln Heights, and Montecito Heights. I found my first community outside of my immediate family at Bienestar Human Services in East L.A. on Beverly Boulevard, in the form of support group meetings for Latina lesbians. I learned about collectives and made zines and organized showcases for Black and brown queer and woman-identified emerging artists hungry to connect with one another. We only had access to places like Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, an organization that was eager to bring our voices to its black box theater. The Westside welcomed us. In fact, I never had a gig in East Los Angeles during the entire time I performed with Butchlalis de Panochtitlan.
Here’s my proof. These are my papers. May my agitators approve my history.
These are just experiences I had as a younger person, and certainly not shields from the critique my current middle-aged actions inspired. But the struggle to ethically express oneself under the conditions of late capitalism was present. As someone who spent the first decade of the twentieth century finding my voice under the globalized violence of the idiocracy that was the Bush Jr. administration, it wouldn’t occur to me that things could get worse. I was an innocent who wanted to present my work in the communities that raised me—East Los Angeles, from the north to the southeast of the Los Angeles River. But presenting venues were few except for Josefina López’s Casa 0101, a tiny black box that did everything to support emerging theater artists. But I wasn’t a theater artist. I was into performance art and Brechtian approaches to narrative. It took a series of turnstile changes in these neighborhoods to make room for organizations with missions to present work by queer brown and Black artists, particularly those with roots in these communities. These callouts tend to reify the torment of Latinx queers (many of them children of Mexican and Central American immigrants), whose initial response as residents of these neighborhoods is to flee.
Flight had always been my instinct.
These were the conditions that underscored my attempts at eking out a creative life, working in arts nonprofit organizations and universities as a low-tiered administrator. I moved out of Los Angeles and into a San Francisco housing fray that saw me move three times in a year. I had landed a job as a community arts curator at one of San Francisco’s larger arts institutions that had received over half a million in funding to do community-based projects in South of Market (SoMa), the Mission District, and parts of Oakland. I have lived the contradictions before what we saw happen in Boyle Heights. I moved four times in five years and each time put me deeper into a debt I still contend with daily. That financial stress was a bonding rite with other artists and nonprofit workers who were living collectively just to be able to live.
Mine might not be the Molotov-cocktail instigations of a radical militant, but I can be counted on to model other ontological possibilities for younger artists-in-the-making who benefit from mentorship and continued dialogue in spaces that want us to be there. I’m not calling for civility, even as I struggle to understand how white artists who use social practice to support a sector of the community that is inarguably living in precarious conditions might then turn around and suggest that the emerging Latinx artists they have taught in their art school classes and have shared exhibition space with should be met with vitriol. A simple desire instilled in many Latinx children of immigrants is to improve the circumstances that condition a life under capitalism. That often requires some of us to endure the violent professionalization that comes with higher educational institutions, including learning from masters of relational aesthetics (and agreeing to their logics that what we do is called community art). We have to leave behind the parts of our respective rasquachismo matrices in order to learn about rasquachismo from the vantage point of the departmental chair. We have to learn about the workers from the bosses.
________
Perhaps the hardest part of reckoning with our Latinx artist identity is thinking about historical repetition—or how we come for one another as a way to fend off being come for ourselves. Living in Arizona forced me into the historical fact of the intra-ethnic violence Mexicans inflicted on the Apache and Yaqui in the name of state-building. This is a truth that runs parallel to Mexicans fleeing the Revolution of 1910—its violence created many Angelenxs with El Pasoan roots. Xandra Ibarra is from El Paso and her work charges the connections between her city and mine—their borderlands and their histories of colonization—through a queer, often provocative, lens. It’s important for Ibarra’s work to be shown in Redz Bar, a lesbian bar that opened in the late fifties and catered primarily to queer, working-class Chicanas. It’s important for those conceptual bridges to emerge between those who live in Boyle Heights and those in exile from the embattled neighborhood. However, sometimes bridging means that the good-intentioned white friends living and lurking in our networks are the ones who can afford to remain in these neighborhoods. When artists and organizers (like me) present the optics of these events to those white friends it situates those of us (like me) who lie in the political liminality as champions of the marginalized subject and brokers of the white gaze.
Is this what moving beyond survival looks like? Does it mean losing some semblance of a self constituted through surviving the racist policies that structure how we inhabit contested publics—whether it’s receiving a subpar primary and secondary education, a predatory loan, or speaking in Spanish at the chain restaurant in a better-resourced adjacent neighborhood? Some might say I choose this loss and that doing so requires a selling out. Do I sell out so you don’t have to? In 2013 I worked for an institution that played its own role in displacing a local community under duress; approximately four thousand people in the SoMa area were pushed out to make room for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and SFMOMA. Various lawsuits challenged dislocation, financing, and environmental concerns, including the successful 1970–1973 Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment (TOOR) suit, which emerged over the relocation process and halted development, though not permanently.20 It’s easy to critique these development endeavors when they’re elsewhere, not where one lives, relies on for rent money, or longs to return. When it’s your old neighborhood, you have to stop and wonder how your complicity persists even when brown bodies—our brown bodies together—are regarded with more suspicion when navigating the sociopathic capitalist regime than are those whose careers arrived on the backs of the same brown bodies they proclaim to engage.
Others will argue that these are exactly the opportunities our families risked their lives for when coming north for a better life. And that’s the problem. Queriamos norte.
18. https://dirtylooksla.org/
19. https://www.selfhelpgraphics.com/
20. This is chronicled in David Woo’s 2017 University of San Francisco dissertation titled People, Land, and Profit in the South of Market: A Critical Analysis of the Central SoMa Plan.