2018 | One April weekend, as I saw the first sign for East Los Angeles herald my homecoming, I decided to text the artist Shizu Saldamando. She lived near the Atlantic exit where I pulled off the 60 Freeway to pump gas at Southern California prices, a jolt from what I had been paying in Tucson. I was bound for a wedding in San Diego and needed a gift for the bride, an aging punk with a penchant for revolutionary histories, like any one of us who came of age going to Los Crudos shows at Macondo or seeing Jawbreaker at Jabberjaw in the nineties. Shizu’s studio was an ideal alternative to the tyranny of wedding registries. I arrived, parked my car in the densely packed residential street, and met Shizu in her driveway. We hugged hello and sauntered over to the brightly lit home studio in her and her husband Len’s backyard. I was ready to pick out one of Shizu’s paño prints, images rendered in ballpoint blue ink on handkerchiefs, a style inspired by jailhouse pinta art out of the Southwest. The paño I chose was a portrait of Alice Bag, which seemed appropriate to fulfill the “something blue” mandate for rebellious brides who know the words to “Babylonian Gorgon.”
As I handled the handkerchief delicately, I looked around the studio and saw a new series of works on paper and pine wood canvases in various beginning stages. While the work was new, the subjects in each individual portrait were familiar to me. There was the queer club promoter, the punk singer, the ranchera goth chanteuse—subjects off the canvas who I’ve known for the last two decades as we try to make centers out of margins, hashtags out of undergrounds. Or mostly arguing and finally relenting on Morrissey’s relevance. They were just a few of the reasons I was excited to be back in my familiar East Los, watching the downtown city skyline silhouette against a smog-streaked sunset in the rearview mirror of my 4Runner.
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My parents found each other one Valentine’s Day evening on the third floor of El Mercadito, the last standing identifiable grand central market located on East 1st Street and Lorena. My upbringing was one in which every kid I encountered—from kindergarten to junior high—had a parent that came to the United States from some other far-flung place in the world. We were the majority in southeast Los Angeles and no one felt like their outsiderness outdid anyone else’s. We were all translating utility bills to our parents, asking permission to join the Brownies or to try out for our little Catholic school’s talent show. We sold the world’s finest chocolates to get to Knott’s Berry Farm. Our heroes were James Worthy and Fernando Valenzuela. We were lucky to grow up in a time and place where our heroes looked like us.
Seeing ourselves on our terms was always important, and Shizu gets that. In my years as a chronicler of Los Angeles-based artists of color, and their practices, creative ethos, and cultural contributions, I’ve known homegrown talents like Rudy (Bleu) Garcia, Martín Sorrondeguy (Singer of Los Crudos and Limp Wrist), and Lizette Gutierrez (known as San Cha) as important members of a brown commons, a potentially radical space that, according to the late queer theorist José Muñoz, would be inhabited by both working-class Latinx queer immigrants and queer punks and artists of color in service to a collective good. Subjects whose queerness becomes saturated with colors and sparkle that heighten the complicated gradations of self. Shizu has always had the ability to home in on her subjects’ individual modes of resistance. These modes—a faraway look, a defiant smirk, a swirling sea of baby-blue tulle—push against the dominant white heterosexual culture that stratifies much of a Los Angeles to which these subjects find themselves adjacent and sometimes in opposition.
Shizu was gearing up for a new solo exhibition in June at the Charlie James Gallery in Chinatown. This was her first solo work since her survey exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM), located on the East Los Angeles College campus, in the fall of 2008. Back then Shizu was still single and living in West Los Angeles, off Sawtelle, in a cramped second-floor apartment above the one where her Japanese grandmother lived until her death a few years later. It was also her workspace and I remember having to wash my eyes out with cold water thanks to the chemicals she was working with in the small kitchen.
The ethos that lives east of the river has come out unabashedly in Shizu’s new work. And coming out is important.
At the heart of this new series, called To Return, are Shizu’s reflections on her own current sociability as an east-of-the-river denizen, which any self-respecting Angeleno knows is where the true Eastside begins and ends. Every first Friday of the month, Len takes care of their toddler while Shizu heads to Chico’s to catch a bevy of nascent performance artists cutting their teeth on the dance floor of Club Scum, the monthly dance party that centers queer brown members of an ever-growing identity spectrum, where new names for self emerge and tumble out like fractals from a disco ball. Shizu is now part of an East Los Angeles marked by histories of radical affinities between Chicanx activists decrying the casualty inequities in the Vietnam War. An East Los Angeles that was home to young queers navigating homophobia in their own homes as well as racism in West Hollywood, Los Angeles’s perceived center of LGBT acceptance. In between those two poles, the cultural shifting took place through a political agitation that Shizu has always been adjacent to. That proximity has compelled her to contemplate her own vexed gender role, especially as her world has become peopled by queer and trans people in East L.A.
“Five years ago I was still having an extended adolescence. I went out and partied and I still do,” Shizu tells me recently, a few days before her show opens at Charlie James. “But now that I’m married and in a positive, supportive partnership, I have a kid, all of that has allowed me to free a lot of internalized misogyny, this baggage that I didn’t know I carried as far as what it means to have a voice.”
The moment we’re in is new. This is a moment with a real chance at becoming a movement that might just benefit everyone who isn’t a Hollywood, A-list, white actress. A movement that goes beyond social media and into disrupting norms and mores that produce toxic gender performances. And right now, nothing crystalizes that possibility more than what the #MeToo movement has allowed us to witness. And question. Does having seen Harvey Weinstein do a perp walk allow all of us assigned female at birth to retreat into ourselves and take inventory of the varying degrees of trauma we carry? And how do our most beloved L.A. artists arrive at such reckonings?
“Before I wondered: how does a single woman communicate, have her own voice and still be attractive to whoever she wants?” Shizu says before her smartphone short circuits and the call is dropped. “I look back, realize there was all this formative gender performing that that we do. You wake up and realize you were raised a certain way and then you get to the point where you’re just like, ‘I don’t care.’”
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I had last seen Shizu back in early December 2017 at Chico’s in Montebello. We had been invited to celebrate our friend Martín Sorrondeguy’s fiftieth birthday bash, a cinquentañera he called it, with queer tongue firmly in cheek. I wasn’t surprised to see Shizu still snapping photographs on her banged-up, nearly obsolete digital camera, a relic hanging off her tattooed wrist, clinking between our vodka sodas. Some shots she snaps are gold. Others, like a photo of me with artist Joey Terrell, show up blurry the next day.
We had seen Martín wail and stomp for Limp Wrist numerous times at The Smell in downtown L.A., as well as hold our centers of gravity in mosh pits for Murder City Devils, and we’d even played it cool meeting TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe and his bubbly Nigerian mother at the Trader Joe’s in Silver Lake the day before Thanksgiving one year. Catching up at Chico’s after fifteen years of friendship meant being able to catch sight of Martín making a big birthday entrance in black leather suspenders and a buoyant, baby-blue tulle ballerina skirt, bobbing curtsies to every one of his nearing admirers.
A cornerstone of Shizu’s work is making visible the youth cultures she has been a part of for the last twenty years in such a way that expresses an ontology of the ordinary; a soft whisper that reveals enough without revealing the secrets of these complicated public identities and the scary abysses within very private selves. Why do we like the music we do? Or dress the way we do? Why do we still feel weird enough to hold up the walls at most parties or rock shows? How do those questions feed into a competing matrix of desire? Her photographs capture some essence of each person and become a blueprint in which she carefully isolates the contexts of her subjects—to remove the inaudibility that comes when the bass is bouncing or when a fight is breaking out on the dance floor.
However, Shizu is stretching beyond the isolating impulse and allowing for some play in her work. This shift can be most notably experienced in the piece from that party at Chico’s, now hanging at Charlie James, titled Martin’s Cinquentañera. Shizu’s portrayal of the blue tulle as swirling wave suggests a queer metaphysical take on the image of the goddess Yemaya, a Venus-like deity known as the mother of the ocean in a religion called Santería in parts of the Caribbean, Florida, and the Southwest; Candomblé in Brazil; and Yoruba in Nigeria. A reassuring figure who protects her children, Yemaya is ultimately a beacon of solace for her believers. The sight of Martín’s sexy defiance can offer a similarly important spiritual shelter for queer children of all ages seeking recognition and belonging in one of the most antagonistic times for, especially, queer and trans youth fighting to stay with families being torn apart by ICE. In a visual language made raw by queer punk rock parlance, it’s not hard to imbue Martín’s unapologetic selfhood, in his tough and flamboyant stance and direct gaze back out to the spectator, with an aura of knowing protectiveness, one animated by the fact that only twenty years ago not all gay man of color were guaranteed a chance to enter middle age on their own terms.
For Shizu, it is important to be in service by making those images possible, not just as an ally to and for the community by whom she feels most comprehended, but also as an accomplice. Activating an ally position means aiding and abetting a queerness that makes queer spaces like Chico’s, a bar that’s been in her neighborhood since the late nineties and is her preferred partying zone, part and parcel to Shizu’s cultural contributions. But how does that fly for members of a queer community whose spatial options, including housing, are diminishing with each new threat of gentrification? Is there a tendency to barricade against a hostile hetero world, including its hetero defectors? Is Shizu like those straight women in the third season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, episode nine, where White Josh brings his straight bro-friend to Home Base, the local gay bar, only to be inundated by revelers from a bachelorette party gone awry? Straight women go to gay bars for a reason, and the promise of safety to let it all hang out sometimes outweighs the gay misogyny—as evidenced in White Josh’s disapproving grimace—confirming that the women’s presence is not welcome. And sometimes gay misogyny is easier to absorb; it’s the energy of a verbal joust rather than the physically menacing misogyny connected to hetero masculinity. Both are toxic, but if the Handmaid’s Tale is any indication of how hetero femininity is feeling these days, then one devil might be better than the other.
It might be time to take up new mantles.
“I’ve always depicted a lot of queer people in my work just because that’s who’s always been in my weird, musical underground. There’s a certain level of comfort in seeing an acceptance of fluidity in these spaces, our spaces, that a lot of other communities don’t have,” Shizu tells me over a Skype chat.
“You mean, like, straight spaces,” I query, hearing my voice crack on the word straight.
“There’s a level of intelligence I value because it’s not just a level of safety but just a more intellectually gratifying [sociability],” Shizu answers. “I’m challenged more as someone who is queer adjacent to think about my own subjectivity as well.”
For longtime Club Scum promoter and producer Rudy Garcia, who goes by his nom de party Rudy Bleu, Shizu’s work is reflective of a culture and scene that he has inhabited his whole life. She has been an active participant in the scene for more than a decade. People appreciate the courtesy Shizu demonstrates in asking to take a photograph at a party—her transparency is important to Rudy, who says she is not producing exploitative portraiture but documenting a time and a space that is important to her community.
“Shizu captures the energy of this scene,” Rudy says to me in a voice message sent over Facebook. “Seeing myself and my friends in art on art walls is that same feeling I got seeing Joey Terrell’s work for the first time. I was seeing queer Chicanos in an art setting, which meant finally getting to see myself.”
Shizu’s artistic process becomes visible when she deejays Club Scum parties, providing a service to a community in need of conviviality, to hold another on a dance floor that allows for both love and grief to coexist each week. Taking in and putting out—a symbiosis of labor that allows for Shizu to contribute to both a queer everyday life in which her subjects’ images circulate, and an everynight life to boot. She understands the crowd there, revels in having the same musical tastes, and trusts that her own tastes provide some semblance of aural pleasure for the dancers.
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The depths of hanging out as an aging participant of the underground are contingent on that underground providing ample opportunities for a continuing education. A dance floor should be a site of ontological meditation, a four-four beat reminding you that there’s only now. Of Frida Kahlo’s inimitable portraiture, the essayist John Berger noted that the Mexican artist could signal that “there was no future, only an immensely modest present which claimed everything and to which the things painted momentarily return whilst we look, things which were already memories before they were painted, memories of the skin.” Or in other words, the moment—like the moment captured in the portrait Vicki and Audrey, Chicas Rockeras, with two punk rock millennials in the middle of mentoring pre-teen punks rock camp–style in Huntington Park, a barrio of Southeast Los Angeles—is not the past but a muscular presence redefined with each spectatorial visitation. How does Berger’s idea of modest presence interact with or even counteract José Muñoz’s theory of queer futurity, which posits that our queerness has not yet arrived? How might this presence feel its way through the dark in the world that Shizu has devoted her life to making? How does an allyship that verges on radical accomplice-hood serve to bridge the two where an artist can render queer memory on a skin made complicated through its occupation of desire and aspiration?
“Wait, are you going by ‘they’ now?” Shizu asks me recently over a Fourth of July lunch at a Cuban eatery in Downey, where my parents live and where I’m staying for much of the summer. Our server has more than a passing resemblance to Juan Gabriel, who Shizu refers to as goth, the Mexican pop icon who passed away suddenly two years ago.
“I actually like other peoples’ preferred gender pronouns for me. It’s more fun than choosing one myself,” I retort. “I get to see where people are at with their perceptions.” We share the fried plantains and clink our white wine glasses like the punk godparents we have become.
A few days later I receive a text from Shizu asking me to moderate a panel of emerging artists whose work is being exhibited in the gallery downstairs from her show at Charlie James. The original moderator, Guadalupe Rosales, the digital archivist behind Instagram sensation Veteranas & Rucas, has fallen ill from a bee sting. I arrive early on the second hottest day of the summer, clocking in at 103 degrees. Tucson has prepared me well for such heat, but then most places in Los Angeles aren’t equipped with central air. The lot of us inside the gallery space are miserable but hiding it well.
Shizu introduces the artists, and everyone in the room is adhering to some variation of gender nonconformity. I ask about the chronicling of underground publics, but we talk about process and Instagram. Floral print and goth tank tops are ubiquitous, as is La Croix. Many of Shizu’s recent subjects are in the room.
“[Shizu] captures authentic moments, the personalities of peoples whose pictures she takes and transforms into sketches without being invasive,” says Audrey Silvestre, a UCLA doctoral student, whose face along with her girlfriend’s hang on the walls of the gallery. “Her presence doesn’t change the vibe, whether at punk spaces or queer spaces. It’s weird to think of her as an outsider.”