Luis Ituarte and the cultural promotion of Tijuana

Luis Ituarte's excitement is contagious. After meeting with him at La Casa del Tunel, and going on a brief tour of the Colonia Federale, the neighborhood of La Casa, I became as excited about the art scene in Tijuana, and the cultural movement in the Baja California del Norte-Southern California region. Granted, I was already interested in Tijuana enough that I drove down from San Francisco to check it out, but Ituarte really lit a fire in me for it.

Ituarte is a welcoming and warm man, filled with ideas. He was born and raised in Tijuana, and has lived in Central America, Canada and now splits his time between Los Angeles and Tijuana. He is an artist, but also what he calls an arts and culture promoter, always looking to expand the art scene, affecting people outside of the often close knit art world.
We walked around the gallery together, and talked a bit about the MexiCali Biennial that la Casa was showing. The Biennial is featuring artists from both Mexico and the U.S. and shares some of the same goals as Ituarte and la Casa: to create an arts community and dialogue that permeates the border.

Ituarte is especially excited about the changes happening in Tijuana, "we're moving from one era into another right now," he says of the current growth of arts, the community and new international recognition of Tijuana as more than a scrappy border town but as a center of the arts. This recognition has been a long-looked for validation for the artists and has spurred on more movement and growth.

From Ituarte's perspective, this validation is late in coming to an area that has been rapidly changing over the past ten years, even though he predicts more dramatic change to come. Tijuana, says this third generation Tijanese, is particularly set up for an explosion of art because of its city is lawlessness and lack of "a mother culture. It is a region in which people from all over Mexico congregate, leaving behind the traditional way of life." As each area in Mexico has a distinct traditional lifestyle, no one culture stands out in Tijuana, but all of them blend with each other, and with the Southern California influences, coming together to create something else new. Historically, Tijuana has never been embraced, neither as a city nor as a breeding place of art. That's now changing, Ituarte points out, as the cultural movement, "the artists of Tijuana are putting out the name of Tijuana as a source of pride; these artists are going out into the world and creating goodwill for Tijuana." Ituarte sees his role as a native Tijuanese to promote the city and the art, to promote Tijuana as a place distinctly different from the rest of Mexico, as someplace more closely related to San Diego and LA, than, say, DF or Guadalajara.

Ituarte hopes to make la Colonia Federal, an eight block neighborhood of Tijuana, and home to la Casa del Tunel, the arts center of Tijuana, and la Casa the flagship of it all. Colonia Federal is set off from the rest of Tijuana by the border, el Rio Tijuana, Plaza Viva Tijuana and the highway to the downtown. Ituarte took to me to the roof of Casa del Tunel, from which I can see across the border fence to the parking lot where I left my car, and into Tijuana. The roof sports a bar, a stage (easily seen from the US side), seating and seedlings which will soon form a green roof. They use the roof for parties, cookouts, opening night events and to host literal cross-border concerts and shows. Ituarte jokes that la Casa is the only gallery in Mexico that has a 50,000 parking lot in the U.S. From that parking lot, people can gather, and see and and hear concerts on the rooftop of Casa del Tunel, creating a literal transgression of the border that Ituarte looks to permeate by uniting artists of the border region.

Within Colonia Federal, Ituarte is negotiating with home owners and Colectivo Cuatro, a group of four graffiti artists of unique style, to repaint the houses in a design agreed upon by the owners and the Colectivo. One home is already finished and three more are in the works. Ituarte takes me on a brief tour of the homes, showing my the one that is finished in a fiery design, and the scaffolding going up on another. The graffiti is unique--absent are the tags, the bragadocio and threats characteristic of US graffiti. The finished house sports brilliant pinks and oranges, seeming ripples of fire moving across the building, so appropriate to the hot setting and naturally growing brilliant colors.

On the way back to la Casa del Tunel, Ituarte brings me to his Tijuana home. Plants fill the open courtyard, just above which a ladder ascends to his studio. Everywhere are the brightly colored paintings, from tabletops, to long murals. Iturarte paints in the light and airy studio, continuing a series he began with a table, not suspecting that it would become a 45 foot mural that he paints in sections.

Already, Ituarte's efforts are coming to fruition in the neighborhood. Next door to la Casa, the owner has begun to create his own gallery of sorts, hanging signs, found objects, and drawings along his fence. Across the way, alongside the border fence, he has planted succulents and bougainvillea.

It is truly inspiring to listen to Ituarte's impression of Tijuana now and his vision of the future, especially when set against the incredible amount of negative press about Tijuana, Mexico and other border towns. I, for one, can't wait for the chance to get back to Tijuana, and see what other ideas of Ituarte's have come to fruition.
--Michelle

MexiCali Biennial

I saw the second MexiCali Biennial at La Casa del Tunel in Tijuana. The Biennial includes artists from both sides of the US-Mexican border and aims to create a cross-border dialogue that replicates the fluidity of culture in the border region of southern California and northern Mexico.

This biennial set forth the theme of economics of exchange that underlie all border interactions for the artists to explore. The art works created approach the idea in a variety of ways, some, like, Ryan Lamb's Subsistance Plan for Starving Artists, take it quite literally.

Lamb tongue in cheek installation piece maps out literal transactions alongside the I5. The wall where his piece is, sports a series of small square pieces of wood, each with a painting of an orange on it. A mesh bag hangs from the ceiling, filled with the small paintings and a sign on the wall gives directions for artists to go from buying a bag of oranges on the freeway (sold by immigrants), painting of each orange, to selling each painting for the cost of the bag of oranges. In this piece, Lamb links immigrant labor and artists, noting that neither easily survive in this world.

Ernesto Rosas' documentary, Skateboarder, also looks at literal border exchanges in his interviews of Mexican skateboarders who have immigrated to the US or Canada in the hopes of making their sport their livelihood. Rosas films in Mexico and in California, documenting the dreams of these skateboarders and all the barriers they face. The film jumps back and forth between skaters, between interviews and shots of their skating skills.

The compassionately rendered documentary examines the relationship between the passion these skaters have for their sport and the reality of making a living from it. Though one skater describes skating as a movement art, these skaters have to struggle to make it in any way at all. Rosas also shows the uneven relationship between the U.S. and Mexico through skating: the money and support for the sport is in the U.S., but the skaters don't want to have to leave Mexico to follow their dreams. Some return, and others don't, but at the end of the film, I hoped that some of these skaters would be the forerunners of a successful skating scene in Mexcio.

Pablo H. Cobian drew out a manual, Manual de Como Quemar un Billeto, or, how to burn a bill. In simple pencil outlines, he depicts two hands taking out a bill, holding it, holding a flame to it, then burning it, and the final framed piece is a shriveled, burnt bill.

Michelle Chong made a website, Find Yourself Here, that slideshows through beautiful landscapes--the desert, a forest, mountain scene, waterfalls and beaches--and then stamped phrases across them, borrowed in the language of tourist pamphlets, like "Funville," "Spa Atmosphere," "Be a Local," making the landscapes a commodity. Find Yourself Here reflects the common attitude that Americans have of Mexico, associating it with vacation, beaches and beautiful resorts. For tourism, it is a land for sale.

All of these pieces play with the back and forth movement across the borders, making the border seem insignificant against the fluidity of movement of people, culture, economy.
--Michelle

Casa del Tunel, Tijuana

I haven't been so inspired as I was by Casa del Tunel and its founder, Luis Ituarte, in a long time. Casa del Tunel: Art Center sits just feet away from the border, in a neighborhood of Tijuana called Colonia Federal and is so named for the the tunnel that inhabitants of the building had dug from one corner of the building, under the border and up into the U.S. The tunnel is now filled with cement and the building has be renovated and turned into an art gallery.

Ituarte, a third generation Tijuanese, splits his time between Pasadena, CA and Tijuana. Ituarte took the time last Friday to show me around la Casa, and the neighborhood. He has the most positive understanding of Tijuana that I've yet encounted: "We're living in a really very exciting time. We're really moving from one era into another right now. Tijuana. We have no mother culture to protect; no mother tradition that says you can't do this, you can't do that. There are so many nationalities here, so many people from all over; we can do anything. We have all the potential to create anything."With a perception such as this, no wonder Ituarte aims to do so much with Casa del Tunel.

Casa del Tunel is part of Consejo Fronteriza de Arte y Cultura/the Border Council of Arts and Culture, which has its base in Pasadena. In terms of culture and artistic production, Ituarte sees the entire area of southern California and Baja California Norte as one great, raw region that defies the political border. For this, COFAC aims to support greater cultural and artisitc integration in the area. Casa del Tunel's committments are to support the community at large and the immediate community of Colonia Federal; to address border issues and to be environmentally responisble.

Ituarte would like to see Colonia Federal, an eight block area partitioned off by the Rio Tijuana, the border and by a plaza, become the artistic center of Tijuana and the Casa del Tunel to be its flagship. To this end, he has grafitti artists working with home owners in the area to paint the houses with murals and hosts parties on the soon to be green roof.

Already, Casa del Tunel has hosted cross-border fandangos. From the roof, you can see a parking lot on the U.S. side. Bands or performers set up on the roof of the Casa and play to people on both sides of the border, or play a call and response style to a band on the U.S. side.

Leaving Ituarte and the Casa del Tunel behind as I returned to San Diego, I wished that I lived closer to the border so that I could watch this artist community sprout up. With the raw enery of the city and Ituarte's focus and drive, I have no doubt that in a few years, Tijuana will be more broadly recognized as an artistic center.

A visit with Becky Guttin

Today I had the chance to meet with Becky Guttin at her studio in San Diego. Having just renovated it, she was in the midst of organizing her space in an industrial park, that, with open doors, is filled with natural light and an array of materials, sculptures, photographs, pieces at various stages of progress and a sitting area.

The warm and energetic artist is originally from DF, Mexico, and left with her family after a series of break ins and threatening incidents convinced her that it was time to join her parents in San Diego. She has participated in several international biennials, has her work included in several museum's permanent collections, and exhibited her art around the world.

I asked her about her art and how moving to the U.S. had affected it. I was interested in knowing whether she was always conscious of the nearby border.

In response, she pointed to a small sculpture, a series of metates on a piece of varnished wood, one filled with bits of red tortilla, another with green tortilla and the last one with little metal scraps.

"My pieces are all autobiographical, they are what I experience, what I know, what I feel. When I was living in Mexico, we always have tortillas and I never saw a tortilla in another color than a natural color. Then I was in the U.S. and I saw green tortillas near Saint Patrick's day and red on Valentine's Day, and I kept seeing colored tortillas; I even saw purple at one time.

"Before I start to work, I need to smell and touch and feel this place that I live in and I was looking at all these elements and I decided to make this piece with original metates but with green and red tortillas. I wanted to keep the original elements but with something never in all my life do I see in Mexico.

"In Mexico, a woman makes mesa by hand, but here, it is industrial, so I put in the metal to show the different process. So you see, this piece, it is about migration, about how here in the U.S. you take things and change them, make them something else. I included another element," and she pointed to several bronzed twigs and seed pods that lay on the tablets between the metates, "I wanted to take something natural and make it cold and unnatural."

For Guttin, the border is a nearby contrast of cultures, and with her immigration experience she often sees things that she knew of in Mexico, and then finds them in San Diego with the same fundamental function, but the material changed. She plays with the natural and industrial contrast often in her work, and as she shows me around her studio, her understanding of the two neighboring countries becomes clear. The interesting thing is that her interpretation lacks judgement, that as she weaves together metal and fiber, the natural and industrial elements, she seems to offer a both a clear insight into the character of both countries while allowing for the two to intermingle but never declares that one way is right and the other wrong.

She showed me her "Encyclopedias" next, a series of book shapes made out of crushed metal pipes that are mounted on the wall, orientated as they would be if they were books on a shelf. In the center of each "book," is a space filled by one, two or three sacates, a small bundle of roots folded in half and held around the center with a tie that are used to scrub dishes.

"I rescued from my culture the elements that I remember, but that don't exist here, because everything has become the same. What we use here to scrub with are metal bundles and I didn't want to forget the sacates, that have the same use, but are natural so I use the contrast of the natural with industrial.

"And these, here, I take cocotes, natural plant and then I fuse the inside of it with telephone cable so that again, there is the closeness and contrast of the natural with the industrial."

These gourds are among my favorite pieces of her that I've seen. She takes the dried gourds and slices them so that pieces peel away, almost as if they are flowering, and then fuses metal to the inside, with what looks like a thick layer of beading. Some she mounts on stands, others are large sculptures, taller than she. With the fusion of natural and unnatural, the gourds and metal become something quite different than they were before, even though they retain all their original qualities, much in the way that the contrast and contact of two cultures at the border create something else entirely.

As she talks about the contrast at the border, the theme of home/house or hogar/casa rises, as is natural for any immigrant. "I think about where is my house, what is my home? Is it where I was born, where I plant a tree, where I was educated or raised? Is it where I live today, where my children were born?

"Like me, I am in American today, and there is the same sky above, and you take where you are with you: you are what you are. You carry your culture with you, but what do you carry with you when you leave? you have a suitcase, but what do you take with you?"

She takes me upstairs, to pull a heavy metal box off of a shelf, which originally held her father's paints. "What do you take when you leave? Its horrible, heavy, but I thought, I'm taking this with me. I wouldn't leave this behind." She blows the dust off and then opens it up. Inside she has placed letters and photos; a blouse; telegrams; her Grandmother's address book; her mother's baby booties and any other sentimental object of her family that she wouldn't give up, that she packed and took with her to the U.S.

She pulls another box off of a shelf, this time a beautifully crafted wood box, stained a deep brown. Inside it contains a woven husk mat, punctured with pins that poke straight up. "It is Always Painful," (pictured above) is Guttin's meditation on the difficulties and pain of being a migrant. "Inside, this is a metate, it covers floors in poor areas in Mexico. People do everything they do on them. People sleep, eat on them, children make their homework on them; this is where they make love. But this piece, it is all pins and everything you do there, is painful. It is because it is not easy to move, it is always painful."

In this carefully wrought piece, the simplicity of it reveals the hardship of leaving behind everything you know to go towards an ever unceratain and unstable future. For me, I saw depth of what people risk when they leave their home to try their luck elsewhere.

I mention this, and Guttin replies, "I don't want to send a message--not consciously, I do what I feel, I make what I need to, and whatever people see in them, they do." Near us, in the upstairs loft where Guttin stores many of her older pieces hang several woven sacks, the ones used to package rice. These, though, havel shiny metal strips woven into them. Again, they are the juxtaposition of plant fibers and industrially wrought metal. Guttin leads me back downstairs, to where a photograph hangs on the wall. It is a picture of these same sacks, but on one side, a sack without any metal woven through, the folds of the casually drapped sack resembling hilly terrain. The folds transition across the photograph into sack heavily woven with metal, with terrain in the middle that has some metal woven through. On the photograph, Guttin had mounted small houses that she had made out of metal. On the side with no metal, they have corroded, and are haphazardly placed, while across the way, the houses are shiny and neatly lined up in rows. It is here depiction of the border, but "I am not saying what is nice or not, it is a free lecture [to be interpreted however one wants]. I just do what I need to express, and whatever people can read into it, they can."

-Michelle






becky guttin's website: beckyguttin.com

More images from Chicana/o Biennial

Here are more images from MACLA's Chicana/o Biennial. I wrote about the Biennial and all the pieces here in the previous post, Chicana/o Biennial at MACLA. Enjoy! -Michelle



Ask a Chola, Rio Yanez



untitled, Vivian Paredes







Sun Raid, Ester Hernandez


Citlali, La Chicana Super Hero, Deborah Kuetzpalin Vasquez



Yellow Backpack, Margarita Cabrera



U.S. Triangle, Consuelo Jimenz Underwood

Chicana/o Biennial at MACLA

Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana has a small gallery in its downtown San Jose location. Every two years the Latin cultural center hosts a juried exhibition on Chicana/o art. Each time, they make an effort to showcase a balance between genders and among artists at various stages of their careers, from emerging to famous in order to watch Chicana/o art evolve from its highly political inception in the 60s.

At this year's Biennial, about half of the pieces were driven by border issues, and many referred to Aztlan, the ancestral land of the Mexica and Maya, and therefore Chicanos, that is now the Southwestern US.

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood most directly drew out the tension between the US and Mexican border and land rights. He made an elongated triangle of a flag, using materials in red, white and blue to mimic the US flag, but embroidered flowers that symbolize different tribes to reference Aztlan. The symbols of the two countries overlay each other in the same space of the triangular flag, mimicking the way the US lies over the same area that Aztlan does. Can the same region be considered different places, different nationalities peacefully? This question about what space political borders carve out versus what people know that space as is not unique to the Mexican-American border tension, however, Underwood's piece artfully carves the tension out that underlies many of the other pieces in the Biennial.

Margarita Cabrea, for instance, created two sculptures that directly deal with the border itself. Nopal with tunas, a large prickely pear cactus made out of Border Patrol uniforms, and set in a terra cotta planter, makes the point that Border Patrol agents--and all the markers of increased surveillance and attempts to make to border impenetrable--are as much a part of the landscape now as are cacti. Cabrea addresses the other side of the border with Yellow Backpack. When would-be immigrants are caught by the Border Patrol, the Patrol takes their belongings from them, often nothing more than a backpack. In this sculpture, Cabrea makes an unsturdy backpack out of thin, gauzy material that is transparent. Inside is a rosary, made--like the other contents spread out on the table--out of a thick, leather-like material. All in all, the backpack contains garlic, a water bottle, a can of tuna, a breast pump, a first aid kit. Each piece is sewn, but the thread isn't tied off, so long strands of thread hang from each of the meager contents, leaving them unfinished. Yellow Backpack reveals what little one can survive on and the desperate hope that drives people to cross the border with no promise that life will be better on the other side. The rosary and breast pump together make the faith that drives women across tangible. A rosary by itself would leave a sort of abstract sense of blind faith, but the addition of the breast pump shows that this nursing mother fully believes that she will be reunited with her baby soon, and is determined to keep lactating as shes crosses over.

With Deborah Kuetzpalin Vasquez's Citali, La Chicana Super Hero, we get a different view of women on the border than the faith of the owner of Yellow Backpack. This print feature a militaristic, defiant woman wearing a bandanna, braids, and bullet belt. She is young, strong and angry, and, in a Kahlo-esque move, holds her heart literally in her hand. Her heart is the center of the piece, its bright red sends the dull background into gloom, and is almost the size of this woman's head. Its vena cava extends back from her hand into the massive hole in her chest. The background features the double wall of the border fence, and a Border Patrol car coming towards her. Across the top, this poster, reminiscent of the highly politicized posters from the 1970's, reads: Nigun ser humano es ilegal (No human being is illegal) and then, in lettering that matches her heart: NO to the Mexican-US Border Wall. Vasquez bypasses any ancestral claim to land to make a her statement simple and powerful. Her message is twofold: that the land belongs to all, everyone should have a chance to move about at their will and that people will always continue to try and cross the border.

Ester Hernandez also made a political poster, but she specifically addressed the results of NAFTA, which went into effect in 1993, and has arguably had positive results for the elite in all three countries and an overall negative effect on Mexican farmers and laborers, as well as having contributed to the increased economic inequality between the US and Mexico. Hernandez's poster, SunRaid, is a recreation of the Sun Made raisin box, but here, against the bright red background, a smiling skeleton dressed in the peasant outfit of the Sun Made maid holds the basket of grapes. The poster claims: "Un-natural harvest of Sun Raid Raisins" and "Hecho en Mexico/Mad in the USA." The power of this poster comes in its framing of an ubiquitous image of a commonly seen food, making the viewer question where does our food come from? Whose hands touch it? How are they treated?

Viviana Paredes also sculpted in response to changes in our food chain; her untitled piece consists of small, blown glass bowels filled with different varieties of dried corn kernels and then mounted on a long piece of wood. One origin myth of Mexicans is that people were born from corn, indeed, corn was a wildly cultivated staple crop of the Americas, pounded into mesa, from which tortillas are made. In the past twenty years, genetically modified corn has cross pollinated with the heirloom strains of corn. By placing corn kernels behind glass, Paredes interjects the possibility that these varietals may be completely replaced by the genetically modified corn.

--Michelle

Images from Cerca de la Cerca

Cerca de la Cerca, a photography exhibition by Maria Teresa Fernandez, showed at USC earlier this year. I blogged about it in April. Fernandez recently sent me some photographs to include. Enjoy!
--Michelle

Children from Tijuana looking across the border
Caressing her Grandson
Banner: Crosses on the US Map
Alter for Day of the Dead
Three Fences--Friendship Park is Closed
Two Crosses with Offerings of Flowers
Immigrants waiting to cross