Targeting Chicano

Progressive, The, July, 2002 by Barbara Renaud Gonzalez

"What's next, the world's largest burrito? Chicanismo is over the day this happened."

--Esteban Zul, Chicano writer and filmmaker, who owns the trademark to the word "pocho."

"This looks like a Chicano Disneyland."

--George Cisneros, San Antonio video artist and brother of you-know-who.

The Artist

"Baby, you don't understand." "Chicano Visions!" artist Adan Hernandez challenges my criticisms one morning over tacos at the Blanco Cafe in San Antonio. He explains how hard he has worked in the barrio he comes from, how Chicano artists have been marginalized, excluded, how the museums "have kept us out ... with our own tax money."

And he's right. While Chicano public and nonpublic art has been included in cultural centers, university libraries, and other regional museums, national tours have been few and far between. The most notable exhibit, CARA (Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985), ironically dosed in San Antonio in 1993 after a tour of ten cities. That exhibit was the first major national art show organized and represented by Chicanos and Chicanas in collaboration with a mainstream institution. As defined by scholar Alicia Gaspar de Alba in Chicano Art: Inside Outside the Master's House, "It constituted a historic, cultural, and political event.... Politically, CARA countered the aesthetic traditions of the mainstream art world, challenging institutional structures of exclusion, ethnocentrism, and homogenization."

Cheech has asked Hernandez to talk to me about my questioning. "I'm not happy," he says, "but what choice do we have? When we get through, the arte will be there, the arte will be intact and pure with its idealism."

Highlights from the "Chicano Visions!" Painting Exhibit

No catalog, little text, no audio-cassettes or curriculum guide was available in San Antonio. Gypsy Kings muzak accompanied my viewing. Brassy, startling, and at times overwhelming, the exhibit included many renowned artists: Carlos Almaraz, David Botello, Vincent Valdez, George Yepes, John Valadez, Alex Rubio, Eloy Torres, Jesse Trevino, Cesar Martinez, Frank Romero, Leo Limon, Gilbert "Magu" Lujan, Glugio Gronk Nicandro, Wayne Alaniz Healy, Adan Hernandez, Raul Guerrero, Rupert Garcia, Charles "Chaz" Bojorquez, Melesio Casas, and Gaspar Enriquez.

The women in "Visions!" included Marta Sanchez, Ester Hernandez, Carmen Lomas Garza, Diane Gamboa, Margaret Garcia, and Patssi Valdez. Queer artists are not identified.

Rene Yanez, founder and artistic director of San Francisco's Galeria de la Raza, is the curator. "When I've gone to foundations, and you want to do a Chicano exhibit that has content, they want smiling faces," says Yanez.

"Fuck the people."

--"Chicano Visions!" artist Cesar Martinez, when I asked him if he owed anything to the community whose faces he paints in return for his ascendant fame.

"I probably know more about the Chicano movement than most Hispanics."

--George W. Neubert, Director, San Antonio Museum of Art (which hosted "Chicano Visions!").

The Conquest