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Berin D. Uriegas

Chicano art exhibit opens culture to other Americans

Hispanic Link

Suddenly I was back on San Antonio's  Guadalupe Street, playing dominoes in a run-down cafe and counting the carloads of teenagers cruising the boulevard.  A marker - a large sign of blue, yellow, white, purple and green - had captured my eye and spirited me away with its dedication to an familiar theme, "C/S." Con safos.

The saying, a slang term meaning safe, or home base, has been used for years by gang members marking their territory.  It represents a verbal King's X, protecting their property from intruders.  But this was not the scribbling of some homeboy staking his claim on an East L.A. neighborhood; nor was this an alley in downtown San Antonio.  This was the Mexican-American exhibit, "Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985" at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

This was San Antonio's Mel Casas, Chicano artist extraordinaire, using acrylic on canvas to define art as a safe haven for our emotions, for our opinions and most of all, for our beliefs.

On the whole, these symbols are unsettling to those who do not understand them and enraging to those who do.  They offer a window into the minds of a people who have struggled fiercely to maintain their cultural identity and who have refused to accept the mainstream as its ideal.  This out-and-out denial of the "norm" has raised the question as to whether the nation is ready to embrace another art form that is based on a culture so obstinately "foreign."

The styles and techniques are representative of the fissure between the Chicano and the European.  For the most part, the works displayed are not what the experts would consider classic, or even technically brilliant.  They are, however, rooted in the artists' concerns for their people and their culture, thus giving them a vibrant emotional life.

The presentation started in Los Angeles last year.  It now travels from Washington to El Paso (Aug. 23- Oct. 25), New York (March 2-May 2, 1993) and San Antonio (May 29-Aug. 1, 1993) before dismantling.

As to whether the United States is ready to listen to another voice crying out for cultural equality, the answer is yes.  Apparently the voice of 13.5 million Mexican-Americans has been noticed, if not yet heard.

During the short months the exhibit, produced by the Wright Art Gallery of the University of California at Los Angeles, was in Washington, it served as both teacher and tour guide into the minds and passions of another people.

With that in mind, I sign off with a quote from off the wall of Jose Galvez's picture "Barrio Anita, Tucson": "Toda cosa a su debido tiempo." (Everything in its own time.) C/S.

Berin D. Uriegas, of Washington, D.C., is a student of art and free-lance journalist. 

[[Sun Light 8/2/92]]