Editor:"What is Chicano Art?" A question akin to answering, "What is Chicano Literature?" Clear your throat, rare back, and don't say anything. Let the art do the talking.
Arte becomes in the eye of the Collector. Definition by acquisition. Not because the Collector says so, but because the Arte says so. A work calls out "here I am, Chicano Art!" and the Collector buys it. Sometimes, they don't see it first. No ratiocination other than checkbook logic.
What is Chicana Chicano Art? The stuff on the walls of this particular collection is some of it. In upcoming columns, La Bloga explores the genre of arte and collecting. We welcome Guests with their own collections and views of what they're doing.
La Bloga-Tuesday's Guest Columnist, Ricardo Muñoz, stands out, among the small population of raza Fine Art collectors specializing in Chicanarte, for his support of Los Angeles artists and venerable Avenue 50 Studio.
Essay On My Attraction To Art Collecting
Ricardo Muñoz
In Memoriam: Early ConSafos, with Sergio Hernandez, qepd
© AntonioSolisGomez
Drawings by Sergio Hernandez, except
The Wall, drawn by Rafas.
Tudi Flores and I began working as social workers with the Head Start program run by the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation within a week of each other in early 1967. We had both bounced from other jobs, those days of the War on Poverty, a boon for Chicano college graduates looking for employment. Soon we learned that we were both also Lincoln High School Alumni, had a love of literature, a taste for wine and a highly developed sense of moral indignation wherever we saw bullshit or injustice. Over the course of several months, many bottles of wine, the reading of the hyperbolic articles in La Raza Newspaper and the smugly intellectual academic articles in the journal, El Grito, we both were keen to be see something more down to earth, more literature with the sweat and moral hunger of working men and women from the barrio.
Rafas
Tudi told me that his friend Ralph “Rafas” Lopez was also interested in a Chicano publication and was holding a meeting to discuss that very possibility.
The day of the auspicious meeting at the apartment of Rudy Salinas I met his two roommates Gilbert Gonzales, a History Doctoral student and Pete Fernandez who worked for the same youth Corp Agency as Rafas, and another man named Frank Sifuentes who also worked with Rafas. We seven men were the original group, gathered to discuss the formation of a Chicano publication, an idea first fostered by Arturo “Tudi” Flores and Ralph “Rafas” Lopez.
Thus we met for about a year, collecting weekly dues at our rotating meeting and finally deciding on the name for our publication. It was not an easy decision, the options ranging from more literary sounding names to the extreme one voiced by Rafas, Con Safos, a term from his wilder days as a vato loco from the Dog Town barrio, used when he scrawled his names on walls, a sign to ward off the denigrations that were expected from rival gangs. Pete was the only other true blue gang member, belonging to the notorious White Fence, the rest were never affiliated with a gang.
The name Con Safos Magazine was adopted when we settled on a subtitle that bound all of us in purpose, Reflections of Life in the Barrio.
We were now ready to publish our first issue with most of the material coming from within the group and settling in on Rafas’ apartment as a working space and later on a house extended to us by Father Luce of the Episcopalian Church of the Epiphany, where La Raza was also Headquartered as well as some other activist groups.
Fast forward to the Spring of 1968 when I was working at the International Institute in Boyle heights as a social worker with new immigrants but recently assigned to work with a summer program called Operation Adventure created by Maxine Junge, offering children classes such as Art, The Mad Scientist, Photography, Newspaper Reporter, Mexican Folkloric Dance, Film Making etc. It was expanding a year around program the Institute was conducting on Saturday mornings using college student as volunteer teachers but was now able to hire fulltime college students for the summer using money from the War on Poverty. Most of the participating children lived in the huge Aliso Pico Housing project, most were Latino or Black and all of them were below the threshold for poverty.
When our summer program started, I was able to see Sergio’s artistic talent as he worked with the children and our staff and I mentioned Sergio as a possible staff artist at one of our Con Safos meetings, telling them that I had seen that he was the real deal, born and raised in the Florencia Barrio, a quick study in producing illustrations and honest and genuine as a person. I was given permission to invite him to one of our meetings.
Sergio was not yet twenty and had attended East Los Angeles Community College the previous semester. He was interested in art, baseball, girls and cars. He drove a yellow Camaro muscle car and the back seat was strewn with papers, drawings and his art paraphernalia. I showed him our first issue and asked him to read it and to consider working with us if he liked what we were doing. He said he would and would let me know. However after more than a week had passed and nary a response from him, I asked if he had had a chance to read the magazine. He said yes, an answer that years later he revealed was not true, that he had just thrown the magazine to the back seat with the rest of his stuff and forgotten about it. But he was embarrassed to admit his negligence and agreed to attend one of our meetings.
I can imagine that he thought that he was to meet with a bunch of old vatos but our meetings were always lively affairs with lots of wine and weed if desired, robust conversion and raucous laughter, a feature that characterized our whimsical attitude towards almost everything for nothing was sacrosanct, not even ourselves. He must have liked what he experienced for he readily accepted to work with us and became a regular member at all of our meetings.
Rafas and a couple of vatos from the barrio
As per our custom, Sergio was asked to host a meeting at his house. He still lived at home with his mom, his sisters Grace and Becky and his brother Manuel. His dad was separated from his wife and it was a difficult situation for Sergio because one could tell that he admired him. The dad was a finish carpenter, meaning he did carpentry that involved fine work such as windows and trim, a sort of artist with a saw and hammer. His mother was a teacher’s aide but was beginning to consider going to college and obtaining her teacher’s credential, which she eventually accomplished when she was in her late 40s and became a classroom teacher.
Sometime before the year ended Frank “Pancho” Sifuentes, who was a natural born broker with a passion for matching Chicanos with resources and opportunities helped Sergio enroll at the Cal State College at Northridge for the Spring of 1970. It was here that he was to meet his future wife Diane the following year, when she enrolled as a student at the same college.
Although Sergio was busy at his new college he still managed to illustrate several stories and to help letter the cover. We were all pretty jazzed with the community’s reaction to a bigger magazine with better stories and great illustration from Sergio.
We moved our working space to the basement of a home that Rafas purchased atop a hill that overlooked Lincoln heights and the entire city of Angeles, on clear days one could even see Catalina Island. The work space was crude. Because it was a hillside home the basement consisted of three levels the first level at the entrance was about ten feet wide and the second level where we laid out the magazine was narrower, about 6 feet wide. It was here that we built some tables with two by fours and where we worked. The first level was where the many visitors came to get high and make music.
Tudi Flores, Bear Lopez, John Figueroa, Pancho, Rafas in the workshop
Sergio worked tirelessly on the next three issues, producing many illustrations for stories and articles as well as creating the cartoon strip Porfi and Arni. He was a joy to work with, an artist who needed little direction to produce something that was very appropriate and well done. When the content of the issue was selected by Tudi he would give Sergio a copy of something he wanted to illustrated and usually we would sit around, get high and give him ideas. Pen and paper in hand, he would dutifully sketch, take notes and nod agreement. But he never worked in the workshop on his drawings. He would go back to school and comeback with a great drawing that nobody could recognize from the ideas we had given him. But it was better than all of us expected.