Intersections

'History of Transportation' to be revived in Inglewood

The above images are from Helen Lundeberg's landmark 1939 WPA mural "The History of Transportation" in Inglewood, which will be rededicated this weekend after an expensive, four-year restoration effort. Lundeberg, who died in 1999, was an L.A. artist who worked for decades in the shadows of more celebrated local names while remaining true in her work to classic California colors and visual spaces. "The History of Transportation" might be called her masterpiece, although she worked primarily in painting. A show of some of Lundeberg's "architectural compositions" is up at Louis Stern on Melrose through late August. * See my LA Weekly piece for more. Also, City of Inglewood and the Centinela Adobe.

Pedro Guzman is back home in Lancaster *

Here is the link to my Tuesday night piece on the case of Pedro Guzman, wrongly deported from the L.A. county jails to Tijuana and found some 89 days later in Calexico, California. I saw Pedro's mother Maria Tuesday and his brother Michael after yesterday's press conference. They seemed more happy than shocked, but definitely a mix of the two:

The next day, Guzman was released from the Antelope Valley courthouse. A photograph distributed at the news conference showed a thin, bushy-haired Guzman hunched over with a shirt wrapped around his shoulders, but clearly back home under the hot Lancaster sun. Carbajal and Michael said Pedro told them only snippets of his ordeal in Tijuana, a place he had not visited since he was a teenager. He said he first tried to cross back home through San Ysidro, but was repeatedly turned away by U.S. border agents and told, "Stop playing games." He told his family he then walked 100 miles east to reach the border crossing at Mexicali. He said he ate out of garbage cans, bathed in canals, and avoided people and police. "Whatever we did get out of him, we couldn’t understand it," Michael said of his first conversation with Pedro. "That's not my brother, to a certain point."

More here. See previous post for more.

*** WEDNESDAY ADD: I should also mention, as some other outlets have noted, that the ACLU said an immigration hold was put on Pedro when he was initially found. Outrageous, it would seem, considering the family had been told an alert was put out to federal agents about the error. This is difficult to verify however because ICE is not talking about the case, citing the lawsuit, and besides, check out what they told me:

But the federal government did not relent on the position it has held since the story broke, that Guzman was deported lawfully. "We believe that, yes," said ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley, adding via e-mail: "ICE recognizes the important responsibility of enforcing our nation’s immigration laws and carries out its mission judiciously, fairly, and appropriately."

See this related release from the ACLU from July 31: "Judge Finds Widespread Abuses in Immigration Detention." Let's hope Guzman rests up, recovers, and that the media glare keeps away for a bit. The remaining questions should eventually be answered.

Pedro Guzman, deported citizen, found three months later *

* TUESDAY NIGHT NEWS: Just filed a fresh LA Weekly story from the press conference today and I will re-update this post once my piece goes online. * (See post above.)

Pedro Guzman, the U.S. citizen wrongfully deported from the L.A. county jail system three months ago, has been found. Sheriff's officials told the ACLU he crossed the border from Mexicali into Calexico on Sunday and was detained for an outstanding probation warrant. (As my story noted, Guzman's probation officer seemed to believe Pedro had to show up to a probation hearing in June even though he was a missing person in Mexico.)

Superior Court judge Carlos Chung today in Lancaster released Guzman to his family, the ACLU says. A press conference is scheduled for later today.

* More updates later at LAWeekly.com.

** Image above courtesy of ACLU, of Pedro Guzman leaving Lancaster jail earlier today with his brother Juan Carlos Chabes.

*** Previously, "Lost in Tijuana: A mother's search for her deported son."

LACMA's locura: Art from the Spanish world, not in Spanish

Fitting that I've been musing lately on how the many faces of what it means to be Mexican intersects with the art world, because a big show on 300 years of viceregal art in Latin America opened this week at LACMA, covering the years between the arrival of the Europeans in the late 1400s and the national independence movements in the early 1800s. It is an impressive show, with paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts like insanely detailed silver-embossed chocolate mugs and spice boxes.

Trouble is, the information on such pieces and how they were made is unavailable to about half of L.A. None of the exhibition information panels are presented bilingually, in Spanish, the language that essentially binds most of the show together as a historical and aesthetic document. This is a serious error on the part of the curators and the institutions involved, particularly LACMA, L.A.'s county museum.

I overheard several the reporters from the Spanish media grumbling over the lack of Spanish panels in the show during the press preview last week. In light of the city's sharply shifting demographics, presenting such an important exhibition bilingually would have been ideal for encouraging scores of low-income immigrants who are thirsty for intellectual succor beyond working all day to send money to the countries where this art came from to become a museum-going population -- -- nevermind the public museum's high admissions fees. (Shouldn't all public museums be free, all the time?) LACMA's Latin American art curator Ilona Katzew told La Opinion's Antonio Mejías-Rentas, in an unsatisfactory excuse, that not presenting the show in Spanish was "a question of space, fundamentally."

Hmm. Space never seems to be an issue at the museums at San Diego's Balboa Park and in La Jolla, where the major institutions seem to make it a point -- given their positioning in a binational urban zone with Tijuana -- to present all their shows in English and Spanish. And in Mexico, going to museums is practically a routine of daily life, up and down the classes. Why can't immigrants be encouraged to retain this tradition?

It's not just LACMA's responsibility to be more inclusive and open the doors of the art institutions to the city's working class. Fundación Televisa provided a large chunk of funding for this particular show: Where was the foresight? Are there public campaigns on the part of the consulates to encourage Latino immigrants to pull away from the television and junk food and feed their soul?

The show is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Antiguo Colegio de San Idelfonso, and LACMA. One highlight is the presentation, once more, of a series of caste paintings, beautifully illustrating the diverse levels of hierarchy in New Spain's increasingly confusing racial caste system, from criollo to mulatto and everything in between. The faces in those panels are also the faces of the new Los Angeles.

* Links: Christopher Knight review, La Opinion story 1, La Opinion story 2, LACMA release 1, LACMA release 2, NPR piece. * Image: "Christ Child Crucified," 18th century, Guatemala.

Mexicali Chinatown alive in Chinatown Los Angeles

Fresh off explorations of the true rainbow that is Mexican ethnic heritage, there's an interesting show up at Art for Humans on Chung King Road in Chinatown devoted to work from or related to Mexicali, a Chinese city on the U.S.-Mexico border. Over the weekend, Art for Humans hosted Mexicali art collective Bezando and artist Armando Rascon for what looked like an intense multimedia performance. Check out the Flickr shots.

Included is a documentary about Mexicali, the most Chinese city in Mexico and some say all of Latin America because it was founded as a Chinese settlement. The video has an interview with a young guy who basically looks as Chinese as can be but is speaking the most perfectly pitched Spanish in the Baja California dialect I grew up listening to on the border, describing the life around him. The effect is a really incredible and welcome dose of cognitive dissonance.

Mexicali is a couple hours east of Tijuana. When you cross the border from Calexico, you are greeted by a huge pagoda. The old city center, the "Chinesca," is filled corner to corner with Mexican Chinese restaurants. Just the same in Calexico, the much smaller village on the U.S. side next-door. Sadly, Art for Humans told me Monday the show remains up only till Wednesday.

Tijuana is pretty Chinese, too. My new brother-in-law's surname is Cerda Wong, and as I saw over the weekend back home, the Asian heritage of TJ lives on in the many faces of my cousins and nephews. (Same goes with the historic Russian influence in the region, in the faces, and names: Anya, Sasha, Vanessa, Katia, etc.) We really are becoming the manifestation of Rodriguez's concept of "Brown." Brings to mind the fallacy of the recent bigotry-tinged row over Zhenli Ye Gon. On that subject, La Opinion has this fresh piece on being Chinese Mexican, and this short look at the impact of the Ye Gon story on the D.F.'s Chinese, who say business has fallen dramatically in the their Chinatown since the scandal broke.

* Links: Art for Humans, A review of Chinese migration to Mexico, Virtual Tourist, Flickr, Art for Humans blog, Russians in Baja, La Opinion story 1, La Opinion story 2, Rodriguez on "Brown" on PBS.

** Art for Humans is that gallery on Chung King where there always seems to be kids playing, as seen in the picture above, originally published here.

*** BLOG NOTE: Apologies to my blog comrades for being late on the blog roll. Many more are on the way.

Jorge Hank Rohn loses election, his 19 kids, white tigers in agony

Jorge Hank Rohn, the highly eccentric former mayor of Tijuana with 19 offspring and a zoo of thousands of rare animals, appears to have lost his bid for governor of Baja California on Sunday as the PRI candidate. Hank, persisently linked to organized crime and corruption, was unable to dethrone his rival party the conservative PAN, which has enjoyed stronghold status in Baja for decades. The PAN candidate José Guadalupe Osuna Millán won, but who cares? The real news is Hank's loss.

Richard Marosi of the LA Times had this good profile of Hank running up to Sunday, describing the formation of his larger-than-life populist personality and the peculiarities of his lifestyle:

Almost every day, people line up outside his office at the racetrack, which doubles as a social services center of sorts. Staffers with medical, financial and legal expertise evaluate requests for help gathered on the campaign trail and from people who show up at the track. The philanthropist image takes flight on the campaign trail. In a comic book distributed to children at events, Hank is depicted as a caped superhero, Hombre H., a fearless crime fighter and protector of the poor.

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Some aren't convinced. Hank's proposed solutions to Baja California's crime and growth problems are simplistic, they say, and he talks down to people, as though they were children. Many women say they would never support a man once quoted as saying that women were his favorite animals. (Aren't we all animals? Hank said in explanation.)

In its preview of the race, the Union-Tribune noted that a "Hank victory in Baja California would give the PRI control over all six of Mexico's northern border states." Apparently didn't happen, but don't expect the PRI, traditional masters of the electoral boondoggle, to give up honorably. Frontera notes Monday that national PRI leader Beatriz Paredes (who lost her bid for mayor of Mexico D.F. last year) said her party wants "figures in hand" before conceding defeat.

Meanwhile, the law-and-order New York Times rushed to declare the voting peaceful and without problems, while noting some polling places opened late or just didn't open. La Opinion's Jorge Morales Almada reports that voters were approached with bribes to vote for Hank's PRI. Either way, after such an intense campaign, no one really wins, as a local man tied to the proudly leftist PRD party told the U-T: "This campaign has nothing to do with the democracy we are looking for in this country."

* Links: LAT round-up, LAT preview, Union-Tribune preview, Frontera on Osuna Millán, Beatriz statement, NYT round-up, La Opinion story. Previous posts in Intersections on the Baja election here and here. Photo by Annie Wells, LAT.

** ADD: Josh Kun's meditation on the arrival of Starbucks in Tijuana (an assault on the land of D'Volada) and the Union-Tribune's nice multimedia package on Tijuana's wonderful Mercado Hidalgo.

*** And in case you were wondering, my little sister's binational San Diego/TJ wedding was really marvelous. The beautiful bride arrived at the non denominational ceremony at Old Town's Temple Beth Israel Historic Site in style, riding in the back of my dad's gleaming 1940 Buick, with proud pa Sergio at the wheel. The families extravagantly decked out Salon Alhambra in Tijuana with a martini bar, chocolate fountains, mariachis, a video slideshow, and a goddamn pyrotechnics display. Everyone was faded. It was awesome. Erika and Juan dazzled.

Addenda: OC murals, Ronny Rios, más Africa

 
Gustavo Arellano writes to remind us that "No nomás hay Chicano murals in LA," as he recently did a run-down at the OC Weekly about some of the surviving murals in Orange County. Here is a slideshow by Janine Kahn. Also at our sister paper to the south, homegirl Daffodil Altan takes us into the world of Ronny Rios, a modest teenage boxing dynamo in (very Mexican) Santa Ana. She also recently had a piece about a legal feud between a Filipina stripper who says a popular Mexican pole-dancing teacher stole her business.

Addenda on the Afro-Mexicans piece: I'm being reminded by a few people that photographer Tony Gleaton was likely the first to comprehensively document the African diaspora in Mexico. His show, "Black Mexico: Africa's Legacy," toured in the 1990s.

* Portrait of Ronny Rios above by John Gilhooley, OC Weekly. Posting on the Tijuana weekend is forthcoming.

Layers of history: The murals of Estrada Courts *

L.A.'s premier Chicano blogger EL CHAVO! had this collection of images of the murals at Estrada Courts last week at Metroblogging. Estrada Courts, territory of the VNE gang, is a housing project in East Los Angeles with some of the most interesting surviving murals from the Chicano Movement, including the groundbreaking "Black & White Mural" by Gronk and Willie Herron III, original members of Asco. Of the work above, CHAVO! says: "I really like this one, even the graffiti seems to blend in nicely. Brown people as subject matter, someone's got to do it." I agree. The layers are themselves windows into the city's history. Link.

* ADD: The LA Weekly's web editor Mark Mauer, who has recently launched another LAWeekly.com blog, the street-art focused Lurker, linked to this mural page a couple days after it went up. Another cool post is of fragment images of trash in Los Feliz by Weekly staffer Craig Gaines.

La Raza's Third Root: Afro-Mexicans in the human family *

Race is a fiction. As a human race, we've enjoyed so many thousands of years of mixing that qualifying a person or tribe as "pure" is nearly impossible. But how we perceive race, how we look at ourselves, remains a powerful force that impacts our society top to bottom. We can start getting over it by heading to Galeria Mijares at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights for the show "African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth." This is the top chunk to my piece about it in the LA Weekly, "Relatives in the Mirror":

By the looks of history, the absence of Africa and African-ness in the concept of what it means to be Mexican is especially troublesome. Spain imported African slaves to the New World as liberally as the British did, but the first community of free blacks was established in what is now the Mexican state of Veracruz in the early 1600s — more than 200 years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. Mexico was briefly ruled by an Afromestizo president in 1829, Vicente Guerrero, who made it a point to abolish slavery. In his book African Mexicans and the Discourse on Modern Nation, historian Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas discusses the inadequacy of assumptions on Mexican racial heritage: “It should be clear, particularly in the light of new readings of history, that a considerable part of Mexican mestizos [the majority of the population], even many whose appearance would make one believe otherwise, possess black African genes.”

And yet look at today: U.S. blacks marching against illegal immigration, Mexican gangs killing blacks on the streets of L.A., and African-Americans and Mexican-Americans in petty battles over small-time politics and social-service scraps. The situation is no better in Mexico, where black Mexicans consistently occupy the bottom rung of Mexican society, and are nearly invisible in pop media — except, of course, as crude caricature.

Read more here. The afromestizo population of Mexico is miniscule compared to that of Cuba or other nations in the Caribbean, yet it is still heartening to see new research and documentary work shedding light on the topic in Mexico, where it is badly needed. The show by Ayana Vellissia Jackson and Marco Villalobos in Boyle Heights is only up till Aug. 10, and it is small. The videos, probably its strongest component, would be well served by a large screen and better presentation, as apparently the show had in previous cities it went, including New York. Check out the artists' site, maschulo.com, for more.

* Above, "La Puerta de Doña Bertina," by Ayana Vellissia Jackson. And previously, "But you don't look Mexican ..." and "Africa on Mexico's cultural radar." I'm beginning to see a trend here: A series of posts on  semi-related subjects usually precedes the publication of something that ties it all together.

** WEDDING NOTE: Blogging may be light over the weekend as I head home to San Diego/Tijuana for my lovely younger sister Erika Michelle's binational wedding to Juan Cerda Wong, a true Tijuana galán. The ceremony is in San Diego and the reception is in TJ ... Then again there's so much I want to link to it may be difficult to keep away.

The wit of the suicide: Did Theresa Duncan lie about her B.A.? *

Turns out Theresa Duncan, who committed suicide in New York a few weeks ago and was followed into the afterlife by her boyfriend Jeremy Blake in the utterly Shakespearean method of death-by-ocean, was totally paranoid and a compulsive liar, as laid out by Kate Coe in the LA Weekly.

The exhaustive piece, complete with hyperlinks, suggests that the last witty come-back of this story is being had by Duncan, who carefully built a romantic persona about herself that bloggers and writers everywhere devoured with complete and earnest belief. But behind the blog, the beautiful couple lavishly burned bridges and obsessed over the Scientologists.

Let this saga be a reminder that blogs, despite their growing sophistication and influence, are still mainly the domain of the self-absorbed and self-afflicted. (Intersections, to cite but one example, is a useful tool to promote the writing I'm paid to do.) Nevertheless, the loss of pure creative forces like Duncan and Blake is something we still mourn. And now, onward.

* Link, "The Theresa Duncan Tragedy."

** UPDATE: Kevin Roderick once noted Duncan said "the only school of higher education whose entire course of study I have ever completed" was the Westwood Driving School. See here. So I guess she didn't lie about the B.A. And anyway, what fib is not a work of art? Viva Duncan.

Bomb me: Cultural terrorism courtesy of M.I.A.

Tuesday night, home drearily YouTubing M.I.A., and my friend Dan calls with news of an extra ticket for her second and last show at the Echoplex. Click-click! We head over, and I can happily report that homegirl held it down! Her beats are direct hits, an unrelenting barrage from the sonic depths of basically the whole planet, and she performed with real hunger and faith, mercilessly flirting the whole time. The room felt aflame, and the crowd was hyped, soaked. "I need to get married tonight," she said at one point. "I have eleven months on my visa. That's enough time to get married and have a baby. Shout out to the FBI in the house!"

It's no surprise the singer's having "visa issues." M.I.A. is a walking rocket of cultural terrorism, metaphorically bombing borders by sounding like Iran mixed with Mexico mixed with India mixed with Ghana mixed with Nigeria mixed with Jamaica mixed with the Bronx mixed with Puerto Rico mixed with Brazil and pulled together by a stunning package of Sri Lankan glamour. It's like globalization carnival ride music -- for the scary rides.

The new tracks, "Jimmy" especially, are hot. At the LA Weekly's music blog Play, new music editor Randall Roberts has this report, where he asks:

If she were frumpy, was chubby and had a double-chin, would we still worship her? If her eyes were a half-shade less intense, her bouncing a little less rubbery, her cockeyed sailor's hat a little less perfect, her anthems a little less sticky, would we bow down before her the way that we did last night?  

The answer is, Yes, give us more! But who are M.I.A.'s fans, really? Anyone else besides insider-y, media savvy hipster kids like the sort that populate parts of L.A. and Brooklyn, those who got to see one of these four small-venue shows on either coast? As she grimes it up ostensibly for the world's dispossessed, will we ever hear the working poor of L.A. bumping M.I.A. while driving down Figueroa? Remember, M.I.A. might say, "piracy funds terrorism."

* Photo lovingly borrowed from the Fader.