Welcome to MUSED: LA 2 HOU. This conversation from 2023 is about "The Other Side of Memory: Photographs by Luis Garza, that I organize and continue to tour. An essay from the catalog was by Dr. Charlene Villaseñor Black of UCLA's Department of Chicano and Central American Studies. She is interviewed along with a photographer in this episode. Enjoy.

Welcome, this is Melissa Richardson Banks, and I'm super excited to have in the studio today, at least virtually, Luis C. Garza. who is my friend and a wonderful photographer, and Charlene Villaseñor Black, who is also my friend now and a noted scholar. Charlene has just written an amazing essay about Luis' work, which is currently on view at Riverside Art Museum in an exhibition titled "The Other Side of Memory: Photographs Luis C. Garza. Today, we're going to discuss an essay that Charlene was inspired to write after viewing the exhibition in Riverside And I really wanted to open this free flow conversation with the two of them discussing really the leading topic of her essay, which is decolonial love. Welcome, Charlene. Please tell me, what is decolonial love?

T hank you. I'm thrilled to be here, to be in conversation with both of you and to have this opportunity to reflect on the wonderful exhibition and on Luis's work over the years. So important for the Chicano movement or the Chicano community and seeing. The exhibition made me think of decolonial love, which is something that scholars are talking about now. And I'm thinking of the work of people like Nelson Maldonado Torres or Yomaira Figueroa and other people. And it is an important discourse around loving each other, loving our communities and envisioning a more just future. And I think that these ideals are very much in line with the Chicano movement and a Decolonial love is a love that queries and rejects coloniality, that rejects imposed Eurocentric ideas about who we are and fights back against the legacies of those conquests, the European invasion in the 16th century of Mexico, for example, or the double conquest that happened to Chicanos here in the United States, right? When half of Mexico was taken by the US in 1848. So I think about the work of Chicano, Chicana, Chicanx artists as being one of articulating this decolonial love It's love for our community that sees a bright future for us. And it's something that goes back to the Chicano movement.

Luis, can you respond and share a little bit about what you were feeling about when you read Charlene's essay and just a little bit thoughts with respect to her focus?

My first reaction to what Charlene wrote was that I had to read it several more times. One to absorb the deep, profound meaning and thinking behind what she was presenting. and how it applied to me in particular, of course, because it's about the exhibition of my works and what it stirred in her to write that phrase and to reiterate it so many times within her essay. It struck me. much like what Armando Duran had struck in me when he said accidental aesthetics. It made me travel back in time to my early childhood when I was watching television. And as a child, you know, we had this 13, 15-inch TV Admiral television screen with a phonograph. And I was watching Westerns on the screen. And one of the scenes was, you know, John Wayne in the wagon train and circling up the wagon trains and the Indians riding on their horses in war paints and whooping and hollering and attacking the wagon train. And John Wayne taking careful aim and with his rifle and shooting at this man. onslaught of Indians riding their horses towards the wagon train. And with one bullet, 12 Indians fall off their horses. And Papa threw his chanclas at the television set and said "damn liars." And I looked at Papa and at a very young age, I understood without being able to understand intellectually. But the mere act of what he was doing and calling it a lie was decolonial. That struck me. That struck me in all the years that followed in terms of Papa's assessment of speaking about American empire, you know, entering into the affairs of other peoples and other countries. And again, not having the academic chops, the education on my part to totally understand or to verbalize it in the manner that Charlene has. And my, My sense of experiences and journey following as a young teenager, a young man, entering the military service, being in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba during that period of time when I was in the military, and certainly coming out here to Los Angeles and becoming involved in the Chicano movement, all of that struck me in what Charlene was writing about. It struck me as I began to grow and began to educate myself. I'm not so prone to academics, but I am a quick learner, much like my father, who had only a few years of education in Mexico and in South Texas. But he was an avid reader of history. And it was also another instance that struck me in Decolonial Love. When I came home from elementary school and I was, I don't know, six, seven, eight years old, and I ran to Papa and I said, Mira, Papa, Papa, we just learned about Texas and Mexico and the U.S. and how Texas became part of the U.S. And he pulled me aside. put me on his knee, took out this big history book, and started to read to me. Esto es la historia about the Mexican-American War, mijo. And he explained as best he could to a young little boy. And he said, the $10, $15 million that the United States gave to Mexico was blood money. Fue dinero de sangre. And again, he went on and on. And so the next day when I went back to school and we were continuing with the classroom instruction on how America expanded, a Reader's Digest version, of course, and I raised my hand to tell the teacher, teacher, teacher, my father said that it's blood money. And she looked at me and she said, sit down. down and shut up well all of this flashed in my mind when i read charlene's essay because i never put it in i never heard it in those terms i'm just familiarizing myself with the term decolonial love a decolonial politicalization, acculturation, et cetera. And there's so many other examples which just came to my mind when I read Charlene's essay. So it's profound in the reaction that I'm receiving from Charlene, Armando, yourself, Melissa, and others who are looking at my work and interpreting it in a way that I had not verbalized. I visualized, but I had not verbalized.

Charlene, you start your essay by asking this two questions: How did the activists, artists, and other cultural workers of the Chicano movement enact decolonial love? And then the question of did photography possess a particular power to envision and manifest this feeling and thereby heal our community? These are the guiding questions of your essay that led you to being inspired after reviewing Luis's exhibition. And you make a compelling argument of what you see manifested in his photographs. Can you discuss that?

Yes, thank you so much for that question. Thank you, Luis, for your incredibly thoughtful response. I truly believe that artists... articulate ideas like decolonial love or other theoretical constructs before academics do. I see it manifested in the work of artists and photographers in the 60s and the Chicano movement. This is well before scholars start writing about it. There's a way that they can capture things that can't quite be said yet in words or written about. And that is what struck me when I saw the exhibition, that this is a manifestation of decolonial love, of a love for our community. So there is a particular power that artists have to do this. And I wondered about photography, too, and it has to do with the kinds of photographs that Luis took at that moment. I'm thinking about regular news coverage of the Chicano movement, as I understand it from historical sources, that these photographs that Luis took, they rejected that standard news coverage to say, there's another version of this story that's about police brutality. That's about violence. That's about the dignity of our community fighting for civil rights. So that is an expression of decolonial love. And that's what I saw in that exhibition. So those two things really struck me that he was able to articulate visually. Right. Artists are brilliant visual geniuses. That's how they think. I think in terms of texts and words, able to articulate visually. these ideas before we could write about them, really. So I guess those were the things I thought about when I was looking at the exhibition, these different visions of the protests that were happening, visions of police violence and images of our community that are just beautiful. They're just the most beautiful We see ourselves there in a dignified and beautiful way. So that's what I was thinking when I saw his show.

I saw that you mentioned to me when you and I connected after your first visit. Actually, I think after you had gone multiple times and I was really, I was just, I felt really excited to hear and just overwhelmed and under, maybe just excited to hear that you felt so deeply about this exhibition and Luis's work because I've worked with Louise now for over 20 years and it's, his work has been so powerful for me. And the fact of someone with your level of scholarship and your, expertise to see all of the things in the work that just validated it for all of us. And you're allowing that credibility and helping us spread the word. And I think that's really amazing. I'm curious because how you felt about the strategic pairings that Armando Durón as curator did with Louise's photographs, because these aren't Luis' photographs are not just the Chicano movement in Southern California. He is what I always say, kind of like, where's Waldo. I mean, he's in, he seems to be when you go back, it's like going back and seeing this film and, and in a time machine. And it seems like he's strategically in key places, documenting key movements in New York. And then he's at the world peace conference in, in Hungary. And I, And I really loved how Armando Durón curated the show to kind of bring these together, because what it revealed to me was just how it was happening all over the world and how it's still happening today.

Thank you. I want to say that. I came to the exhibition knowing his photographs as important documents of the Chicano movement, and I've shown them in class. They're really important canonical images. Of course, there was also the exhibition at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles and the La Raza catalog, right? And that made, I think, his work and the work of other La Raza photographers remarkable. well known or better known than it had been. And of course, I was also working at the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA. And so they had acquired that archive. So I want to make sure I credit people I've learned from in addition to the photographer. But I love your question about these strategic pairings. And it really struck me in the show, like what a wonderful curator Armando Durón is and what a great eye he has. And I loved how the images were paired to make connections and to really make legible to us as viewers, the connections that Luis, the photographer saw that he intuited that he was suggesting to us through visual means. So at first I was like, hmm, the connections look formal. But then I was thinking to myself, well, what does that mean? I mean, how does that produce meaning? How do these formal similarities between the photographs produce meaning? And it became clear to me that Luis's photographs were suggesting the commonalities between struggles for justice around the world, that the Chicano movement was linked to world peace movement, to feminist protests and New York City, to Black civil rights movement, to the struggles of LGBTQ people here in LA. So when I saw these formal similarities, it enabled me to realize that, to really understand how his photographs produced meaning. And thank goodness for the curator, right, who brought those connections to visibility for us. So I thought it was a wonderfully curated show. And of course, deriving from these incredible photographs.

I want to ask Luis to share a little bit about how he documented many of these images. There's an instinctiveness that I see in his work. And I'm a photographer as well. Sometimes I think there's an innate feeling that we're seeing something, but we don't really realize what we see until later. And I'm always amazed with him because he shot on film. And here, later in life, I'm shooting digitally. And I can see the immediacy of what's happening. What's amazing to me is he's shooting on film and he's doing multiple shots. and not knowing what he captured until much later. And sometimes even much later, meaning 50, 60 years later, because when I was editing the book, I was doing fact-checking of some of the pieces. And one particular piece comes to mind, and that was Cooper's Donuts. And I think at the time, so he– it's almost like he instinctively knew that Cooper's Donuts was part of a movement, if you will, because it was– they captured a really important moment in time that I think he was looking at it from the restaurant and was walking by, but it really was, Cooper's Donut really was, it was frequented by gay, trans, and queer Angelenos. It is placed in the exhibit and in the catalog next to Another important work by Luis Garza, We Will Not Be Intimidated. And even Armando didn't know at the time that Cooper's Jonas was part of this until we looked at the fact check. And then we're like, oh my God, how did Luis know to shoot that and document it? How did Armando know to instinctively put it together? And actually, when you look at it now and you step back, it's an amazing pairing. And I don't know if you want to address that first, Charlene, what your thoughts when you saw that, and then maybe Luis... Maybe you could share a little bit about when you documented those two images and here they are together.

I'm happy to start very briefly and just say to reiterate that artists sense, intuit, and see things with this kind of brilliant visual intelligence that they have before. And they do it in an instant, right? Before I can think about it. write about it, knock out some pros on the subject. So that's what really struck me, was that he did see the commonalities across these various movements. And it comes through in the way he composes the shot, the way he frames the shot, what he chooses to shoot. And these are instantaneous decisions, I think. But I think he can tell us more about his process.

And Regards to your comment, Charlene, and to yours, Melissa, I think a lot has to do with my background coming out of New York City, my exposure to a multicultural ethnic environment. Remember, my family is from northern Mexico, south Texas. They migrated to New York in the 1920s. There are very few Mexicans, if at all. My family established a colonia. So it was, looking back, it's an interesting growth process. I'm raised amongst Irish, Jewish, Polish, German, Black, Boricua, you name it, it's international in the streets of New York. But inside the house, it's Mexican. My father hardly spoke any English except to tell you how he might feel. My mother was bilingual and my brothers and sisters, of course, were all bilingual. But my exposure to the streets sensitized me to people and to their backgrounds, whoever they might be, whatever their religious preferences or sexual preferences or their state of mind. might be. In that compressed environment of New York, chicken coops, apartment buildings, people crushed upon each other. I saw the best and the worst of people living in those environments. Coming out to Los Angeles, I never saw so many Mexicans in my life. There was new experience. Being parachuted into the Chicano movement when I was just beginning to pick up a camera and photographing gave me a direction. My razón de ser, as Melissa and I like to say, it gave me a purpose and it was a training ground. It was a training ground that opened up a pathway, a pathway that I continue to follow to this day. despite all the bends and curves in the river and those experiences, those journeys that I photographed. Instinctual, yes. Gut, yes. Heart, yes. Intellect, yes. All of those are combined, as you say, Charlene, as you say, Melissa. It's instantaneous. There are times when you have the moment to compose, and there are other times when you just simply compose. There's no thought process. But there is a sense of how do I frame this? How do I compose this shot? As you say, Charlene, I... I was fortunate and was mentored by a man by the name of Sam Kwong, who was a commercial photographer prior to entering into the Chicano movement. It was he who gave me the basic knowledge of composition, of darkroom work, of indoor-outdoor commercial photography. And then the street photography just kicks in automatically because that's what it was with La Raza. Now, La Raza also was... in terms of storyline and creating stories that reflect our community, that were of concern to our community, provided me the opportunity to do a life-look magazine approach to storytelling. The Mexican novela of photo comics was able to build the story. So you get a sense of, okay, what are you writing about that I can photograph that can complement what you're writing about and vice versa. So this was also helpful in terms of learning photography. Looking to the masters, Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gabriel Figueroa, Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, et cetera. So many people who I would look to, Akira Kurosawa and Japanese filmmakers post-World War II, Sergei Eisenstein, and so many other cinematographers who I would look to in terms of their work, their lighting, the German expressionists of the 1930s, the black and white films that gave me a sense of, okay, I'm dealing with black and white film. How do I do this? How do I capture the shadows, you know? So I got deeper into my photographic work. Once you master the technical, which, you know, takes time, it's like any discipline. You gotta practice, practice, practice, okay? Melissa, you've taken thousands and thousands of shots. You've improved upon your own work by looking at your work and saying, wait a minute, I could have done it this way. I gotta go back. I've got to take it at this time of day and that time of day, et cetera. So you begin to get into your work. It becomes zen. You are one with. as you, Charlene, with the written word, as you, Melissa, with all the work that you do in so many different phases. And I want to thank you both for taking the time to investigating my work and breaking it down in a manner that I find absolutely delightful. I have never felt so much love, so much affection, and a grown boy needs this. Thank you.

You know, Luis, there's something that Charlene talks about in her essay for the book. And also, there's an article that is going to be an Aztlan journal. And Charlene, please share the name of the full journal, because I don't know if I have it correct. What is it again? It's Aztlan, a journal?

Yeah, so I'm publishing a different version of this essay, but some of the same thoughts in Aztlan, a journal of Chicano studies. which is published at UCLA and it's the flagship journal of the... field. And I'm thrilled to be publishing that in spring of 2023, I believe. And it's a different take on this issue of decolonial love in this photography. And I did want to respond to something that we said that I'm happy that he's feeling the love after all these years. But what incredible love you've made us feel through those photographs and how proud we are. And what an impact those photographs have on my students when I show them those photographs and on me. So I want to thank you for this incredible act of love you extended to all of us in the

community. And if I could say that's a great segue into talking about the breadth of his work, because you mentioned not only is he sharing this, you know, the sympathy and the understanding of the Chicana, Chicano, Chicanx community from his own vantage point. It's, you know, ranging from these protests and demonstrations and movements, but he's also goes and you see him doing very wonderful portrayals with children and that. And I'm curious. I'm curious what your thoughts were with that. That really kind of ran the gamut, if you will, in terms of what he is able to share. Is

that for me or Charlene?

That's a good question. So let's discuss a couple examples of that. You know, some of your more– there's one that you recently did. It was talking about homeboys and then– Ijamia, I believe it's called. And just those are positioned together. Tell us a little bit about that. Homeboys is two teenage boys and then, you know, the father and the young daughter.

Homeboys has become quite iconic. It became a street banner for the Autry Museum La Raza exhibition. And it was first published in La Raza, magazine, 1971, 72, or 70? I'm not quite... 72, I think it was. And immediately, Corky Gonzalez published his work Yo Soy Joaquin, I Am Joaquin, and on the hardcover Bantam book edition used my homeboy's photograph, the requested it and I said, yeah, sure. And that was the first time that my photograph received publication and a major epic poem of Corky Gonzalez, 1972. So it was quite an honor. And within the poem itself, there were any number of other photographic works by different artists, photographers that were included. But Homeboys became the iconic image beginning there. And that thereafter, it was revived here and there with different publications and such like that. But it wasn't until the La Raza exhibition that it really was launched. And throughout the city, there were banners of homeboys and a few other images from the exhibition, to which when I first saw it waving in the street, I damn near stopped traffic, pulled out my camera to photograph the banner. I was stunned. I didn't know that they were doing that. Amy Scott said, well, it's a great image. We're using it. She says, you've got nothing to say about it. And that's what happened. So it was complimentary in that sense. And so many other images from La Raza. La Raza was the king tut of exhibitions for the Chicano community within the Getty presentation of Pacific Standard Time, LALA. It was the longest running exhibition. exhibition a year and a half. Over a quarter of a million people walked through the doors of the Autry over that time period and countless hundreds of thousands through the internet. It was the greatest exposure of Chicano work and photography that we have known up until that time, and still to this day. It's a hard one to top. I am proud to have been a part of it. The backstory to putting it together is a whole other novella that we'll get into some year over a case of wine, because that's what it's going to take. It's a hell of a story. And the Autry Museum itself, in transitioning to doing this and making the decision to do this, it was Rick West, Jr., who became the director, and he's of indigenous background from the Smithsonian in Washington Museum, who came on as director, and Amy Scott took over the head of curatorial responsibilities at the Autry Museum. So when we did the exhibition, they committed to it. And it changed them forever, just as Siqueiros in L.A., Censorship Defined did a decade earlier between me and Melissa. It changed them in terms of there's a demographic shift that's taken place. Let's get beyond my photographs. Let's get in terms of the impact. that Charlene and Melissa, you are talking about, much like what Melissa, you have done with Cheech and his exhibition, Traveling the United States of America. We are making an impact through the arts. We are showing the value of our work. And that value of work goes to the love that Charlene speaks of, that pride. of who we are, what we are, what we've contributed, what we continue to contribute, and what we will not be held back from saying. Most important, we have something to say. Right, Melissa? Right, Charlie? We do. You're damn right, and we ain't shutting up. Okay? That's most important. I think that also emanates from my photographs. I'm the fly on the wall. with a camera. Before I could articulate, back in those days, I visualized. I articulated through my photographs. I learned how to speak through another mentor of mine who was most important, which was Margot Albert, who was the founder of Plaza de la Raza. She mentored me as well. It was profound. She changed my life. she gave me a discipline into the arts that I never had before. As rough and odd as I was coming out of New York, she had patience with me. And, you know, she... Well, that's a whole other novella as well. But it's those people in your life that come into your life that if you take time and... Put yourself aside. Put your arrogance aside. Put your stupid side aside and put on a smart cap and realize that there are people who can help you and teach you and guide you and open yourself up to it and be receptive. Face yourself. Face the fact that you don't know nothing and you've got to learn and you've got to submit to learning. And that's what I did. despite the stubbornness that persisted in me, that's what I did. And 50 years later, it shows that it had an impact.

Charlene, you make a conclusion or a supposition after multiple times of viewing Louise's work, both at Riverside Art Museum and even earlier at the Autry Museum. You state this kind of really... popped out at me and you used two descriptor words. One is retrospective and the other is perspective. And I am curious what brought you to that point of view when you look at his photographs, which were largely taken during what the late 60s and early 70s. And how does it bring to the future? Yes.

Thank you for asking that. I was thinking about this concept of futurity and how photographs document this earlier moment, but also help us create a more just future. And those two words, retrospective, prospective, come from a book entitled Futurity by Amir Eshel. And Eshel's writing about Holocaust memorials. So I was very much interested in reading about his take on these Holocaust memorials and about how certain memorials incorporate the element of choice in the way you view the work. And that element of choice is there in the exhibition, the way we photograph, the way we look at those photographs. And that element of choice gives us agency, one can argue, right? Agency in terms of what kind of future do we envision? What kind of future are we going to create? So that's what I was thinking about. Yes, these photographs are retrospective. They're documenting the Chicano movement and other social justice movements around the world. But they're also providing us a script and a way forward. They're helping us envision, visualize this more just future that I believe was bound up in decolonial love. And the issue of the children and the families that are represented in those photographs for me is key because that is our future, right? Our families, our children, they are the future. And there was something so beautiful about the homeboy. I mean, think about how the police think of young Chicano men or think about or young black men would be another powerful example that we're thinking about the United States. Think about I love that photograph of a Chicano man with his daughter. Think about attitudes toward Chicano men in the United States. And here's this beautiful, tender image of a father loving his daughter, the future embodied in her. And I just was really really struck by how many photographs of children there were in the La Raza show and in Luisa's work overall. And thinking about this is an embodiment of hope that comes right out of the Chicana movement.

Go ahead, Luisa. Do you want to say something? You're frozen. Try it again.

It's... It's those moments capture. There's a spirituality. It's instantaneous. It's in the eyes. If you look at those photographs, it's in the eyes. The Ijamia, it's in the eyes. The little girl in the half shadow of the car with an ice cream cone and ice cream on her lips and the father laughing. looking at me, you know, protectively of his daughter. You know, immediately.

Louise, I want you to go back. Louise, I need you to repeat that because it's going to be lost in the recording. There was a glitch. So you mentioned the father and look in the eyes. Start from there.

It's in the eyes. When you look at homeboys, it's in the eyes as they look at me deeply. I

mean, I was thinking about maybe these are not... I don't know. I was thinking about... his use of light, which is so moving, or if you could maybe say a little bit more about the formal choices that he makes instantaneously, would that be... something and I can couch it in a better question. Maybe would that be, I mean, I don't know. I feel like maybe the discussion of children and families might be in the eyes of better place to end the recording, but I am curious about, um, he, he, Luis, you mentioned the light a little bit, but I'd like to maybe go back to that if we could do that. And I apologize. I'm trying to get rid of the background noise in my house. It's, I hope you can edit it out. So, um, but maybe, um, I wanted to circle back to the question of creating these photographs. And Luis, you mentioned light. And I'm so struck by your use of light in these photographs and also the relationship between foreground and background and the way you marshal detail in certain parts of the photograph. Thank you so much. captured in your final photographs?

You have to, as a photographer in your training, a sense of where the light source is. Where is it coming from? How best to utilize it within a photograph? There are times when you have the ability to position yourself for the best light possible for what it is that you're photographing. Other times you do not. You have to utilize what it is that you have in front of you before it disappears.

Charlene, In your article, you end with some thoughts. You end with a question. And the question is, what future will we choose? And I'd love to know how you would respond to that and how you would share. What future will we choose based on looking at Louise's photographs?

Such an important question. You know, the future is in our hands now. institutional structures of coloniality and racism notwithstanding. I do believe in our power to change our future, to enact our future. to create a more hopeful future for all of us. And I'm thinking about the ways that Luisa's photographs did that by suggesting the interlinked nature of global political movements by visualizing black-brown alliances in LA, by highlighting women's fight for equality. Luisa Garza's photographs provide a blueprint for us really for moving forward. And also thinking about the accidental aesthetics that, the curator Doron talks about, that connected these paired images, those accidental aesthetics visualize this argument. They visualize the path forward for us. So it remains up to us to act on these suggestions, to make these visualizations of a new way of being more fully human, of enacting decolonial love in our communities, indeed around the world, a lived reality. So that's what I see as our future.

Well, Charlene, thank you so much for being here, and thank you so much for writing about Louise's work. And Louise, any final thoughts you'd like to share with Charlene?

Yes. In regards to that message, the universal message of my work that you receive out of it, I'm photographing at a time when the world is in such conflict in the 60s and 70s. I'm traveling to all these different countries with a sense of awareness of the politics and the conflicts that are going on at that time. I'm also aware now of how much of my work has yet to be seen that I documented. And that only a handful of those images are within this exhibition. We have 7,000 to 10,000 more images. And if this is a reaction to just... This exhibition of 66 images, well, wait till you see the other 10,000. It's quite a bit of work. And so that's the next project that Melissa and I are working on, along with Armando Dron, and we welcome your input to that effort, Charlene, because there's a lot more in terms of futurity. How do you pronounce that word? Futurity. Futurity. There you go. There you go. Sounds like... Anyway. Yeah, there's so much more. So I look forward to being able to unravel more and more of my work because I got a dozen other exhibitions within the 10,000 images that I have. And so I would look forward to you curating the next show.

Thank you so much. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to talk with you and... about your work and I'm grateful for your generosity. And Melissa, thank you so much for this chance to reflect on these important photographs and how we can make a better world going forward.

I appreciate your time and I appreciate the new word futurity, which again, I love that the considering the past with the potential to create. And so I leave that word for all of us to embrace and look forward to this element of choice. And thank you for sharing that with us today. We'll see you next time.