Convenings

Past Learning Exchange Reports:
Los Angeles, November 15–17, 2002

Case Sessions: MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, Ties That Bind

Maribel Alvarez (MA): Introduction to MACLA. Introduction to San Jose and Silicon Valley, urban structure, political structure, cultural heritage. Thinking of ways that ethnic and cultural organizations can deal with issues of identity in a world and city of changing identity. I had a desire to mobilize a different kind of work that combines arts and humanities. We tried to identify people in the community who would come forward and identify themselves with specific ethnic groups, to talk about family stories, intermarriage, generational issues, etc.  Started with an online survey (25 questions), got 40 responses. We selected 15 of these 40 for in-depth study. We planned to have ethnographers gather data and pass along the data to artists, who would then create an exhibition. This became problematic because we were using oral history but then trying to create a visual piece. There would also be a dialogue component, to bring families together. Howerver, the dialogue component really expanded, and we found that many sub-dialogues existed. 

Problems centered around at what point can a story not capture everything and how are artists a part of the interview process? Eventually, as the artists interacted with the families and created relationships with the families, the artists became ethnographers. Artists were on a commission basis, though. As the artist got into the process of collecting stories, there arose a tension of choosing icons of representation that would reduce stories and rich history and tradition into an object form. They knew that these issues were going to be there, but it was more of a tension than they expected. They ended up sometimes, too, making people more ethnic than they needed to be (some just thought of their families as American) for the purposes of the project. 

It was a project that was fraught with need for experimentation and tensions between social and ethnographic aspects and the art aspects. Finding visual metaphors to represent the ideas they were talking about was difficult.  It required a lot of conversation. The show opening was from 6-9pm, and families came exactly at 6:00. This surprised MACLA, but the families were not gallery-goers; they showed up exactly at 6, ate the food, and left. This is a little anecdote illustrating the kind of things that popped up that were unexpected, and complicated what they thought they were doing. MACLA project provides a methodology for engaging art in a very civic orientated way. The methodology means that you really start off with some basic curiosity; you don’t know the answers until you go to the participants, start to ask some questions, and engage them in these issues.

Questions

Q: How did you select the artists? 

MA: We were looking for artists who were comfortable in intimate spaces and had experience working with families. We had a couple of artists who were not local and it didn’t work out because they found that they needed to connect with the families often over a long period of time. We chose 3 artists—the artists worked collaboratively, resulted in installations. We struggled working with a photojournalist; and the struggle he had because he only knew how to represent literally.

Q: How much did you know up front about what you wanted to see as an end result? 

MA: I had certain things in mind that I wanted to see. I came to it mainly from an anthropological perspective, but also as a curator.

Slide show of the installations.

Lissa Jones (LJ), artist, narrates during slide show. Describes events the images capture, discusses the metaphors used and represented, symbolism of the exhibition format and structure—the way the photos are hung and presented.  The metaphor of food and eating runs throughout…pictures shown alongside different food products from the neighborhoods and laid out sometimes in a table-like format.  Only b/w photography used, and this was a deliberate choice. None of the families ever asked me about what I did as an artist or asked to see the pictures or negatives or anything like that…There was just trust…In working with the families, it struck me that there’s a protectiveness about them; there was this thing abut needing to be protective, but each person within the family moves freely and independently…

Q: Is this an ongoing activity in your community, and how are others from community engaged? 

LJ: We had several different community events and others from the community participated.  Found that the families often wanted to meet other families and talk to them. There became a lot of inter-dialogue between these families. But it was very intimate and never became a huge community campaign.

Q: Were there issues of privacy that came up…things that the families did not want to share? 

LJ: Yes, and they weren’t pressed to share. But it was a slow process, and trust grew. 

Abel Lopez: I also found that the families became more open when talking about and reacting to the art.  Opened up avenues for dialogues. The art prompted them to become much more public about some very private discourse. Up to that point, some of these families had never said some of these things outside their homes.

Debra Padilla: I liked the metaphors used, very powerful.  But also liked the images aesthetically and the way ethnic concepts and objects were reappropriated. I felt that these intimate stories were honored in an aesthetic way that worked very well and was very considerate. 

Larry Hott: Did you collect comments from those who just wandered into the space and had no connection with the project…and if so, what were those comments? 

MA: We had a comment book and offered guided tours to the public. 

LH: What did you find? 

Lisa: I often work with graduate students, so they had a fairly savvy mindset…but they often asked, why there wasn’t a sound component? Not having sound was deliberate…I wanted people to hear their own voices in what they were seeing. That was the springboard for intense conversation. 

Abel: Observation of watching people confront the artwork…was very different than the conversations with people about the work…This resulted in several different reactions and types of conversations. Their individual confrontation and interactions with the work was very important and very different.

Q: How was the decision made to work with families rather than individuals…and was there interaction with these families and others in other communities? 

MA: Some people were worked with as individuals and often they ended up drawing their families in. But there wasn’t interaction outside the community largely because of time and money and other practical constraints. 

Q: Is the exhibition traveling? 

MA: It will be going to Fresno, and it will have a local component there.

Q: Were there any same-sex couples that were interested in the project or was there any intentional thought about inclusion or exclusion of these? 

MA: MACLA did say that they defined “inter-marriage” as including the possibility for same-sex couples. But none came forward.

Q: Who owns the work? How much ownership does the family have over the artwork? 

MA: The artwork belongs to the artists. But there are funds for compilation of a few of the photographs to be given to each family.

Q: When you started, did you have thoughts of outcomes that would happen in terms of the community? 

MA: We had three guiding questions: 1) how were these tensions of intermarriage experienced in every day life? 2) how can artists respond with representative sensual reflections of every day life and create a rich and warm environment and keep this about love, not entirely cerebral? 3) for ADI purposes, test this as a methodology for our organization.  Challenge our own organization to think of ways to expand our definitions of ethnicity and include a broader group/ audience/ demographic. I believe definitions of ethnicity are changing, however; we are an organization that exists as a Chicano organization. What does it mean to be an ethnic organization with the country’s changing demographics?

Caron Atlas (CA): Talked about conversation that the writers involved in this project had (Critical Perspectives writers).  They were interested in what became truth and fact. One writer who has been involved with this project is as interested in what wasn’t said as what was said. Another writer mentioned the importance of a community organization doing this work versus a university doing this work. The organization has its heart and soul invested in this community and can have different conversations with the families than a university researcher might have.

AL: The dialogue about the impact of this work on the organization has been very interesting. 

MA: I feel it became a pivotal moment for the organization, and it makes us think about how to capture some of the energy from this project and continue this in our other projects. 

Lisa Chice (LC): I like that this talks about race issues without starting from a baseline, such as black/white, or the predominate race in this country (white), but looks at relationships between races independently. 

AL:  I was struck by comments by artists and interviewers that many of these families had been so focused on assimilation that they had stripped their families and homes of traces of ethnicity. And before they could actually have these inter-race dialogues, they had to re-claim their own ethnicity and had to look more internally at their individual cultural and ethnic heritage. 

MA:  Projects like this allow organizations to tackle the issues of hybridity and critically engage questions surrounding it. I see hybridity as a double-edged sword. 

Q: I’m curious about families that have stripped their homes of ethnicity…did these families “become more ethnic?” 

LJ: In ways, yes! They became more interested in going back in their own history and reclaiming things. 

AL: They also found that even though the appearance in a home was that of assimilation, sometimes they found that behind certain doors, you found references to their ethnicity. For instance, you open the cupboard doors and the food products tell a story about the families’ ethnicity.