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Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago
My Life, My Work, My Art
By Josi Gamaliel Gonzalez
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Josi Gamaliel Gonzalez
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07735-7
Introduction
Marc Zimmerman
MARCH, MIRA, THE CHICAGO MEXICAN ART WORLD, AND THE MEXICAN FINE ARTS CENTER
I first met Josi Gamaliel Gonzalez when I began working as coordinator of the Rafael Cintrsn Ortiz Latino Student Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Part of my job was to meet and work with people in the community, and one of my new colleagues, Mary Kay Vaughan, told me I had to meet her ex-husband and father of her child Alicia, Josi Gonzalez, an artist and the cofounder of the Movimiento Artmstico Chicano (MARCH), the major Latino arts organization in Chicago and the one who seemed most likely to establish a Mexican gallery or museum in the city.
Very soon I realized that Josi had left MARCH. The graphic artist and poet Carlos Cortez told me that Josi had broken with the organization in a split based on personalities and policies. Then the young Chicano poet Carlos Cumpian, who had worked for MARCH as a Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) employee and was now beginning to assume a leadership role in the group, described Josi's last MARCH days as marked by his fears that MARCH was seen as a communist or left-wing front and that the FBI was out to get the group. Cumpian felt that Josi was watching his every move. There seemed also to have been a struggle over the place of literature in an organization that Josi primarily saw as a visual-arts group.
Though never a large group, MARCH had indeed been the prime organization of Chicago Mexican and Latino artists from the early 1970s. It was involved in many community struggles, developing mural projects, exhibits, and presentations throughout Chicago's Latino world. Josi was one of the better-known artists of the group, even though inside and outside of MARCH there were already several established and emerging artists like Ray Patlan, Mario Castillo, Alejandro Romero, Aurelio Dmaz, Salvador Vega, and Marcos Raya, some of whom were technically more complex and far more prolific painters than Josi. Carlos Cortez stood somewhat apart because of all the artists, he was the one who did political woodcuts and drawings in the tradition of Josi Guadalupe Posada. Gonzalez's talent was more focused on his gift for line-drawing portraiture in ink as well as charcoal, with few finished oils or watercolors and a small body of important mural works that seem on the road to extinction. As the pictures reproduced in this collection show, his was an art of intense simplicity with touches of Vincent van Gogh (his favorite painter), German expressionism, and, among the Mexican painters he so loved, Diego Rivera and Josi Clemente Orozco.
Josi was born in 1933 in Iturbide, Nuevo Lesn, Mexico, a small town some miles from Monterrey. Soon after his birth, his mother, separated from his father, brought her children to the Mexican enclave of the steel-mill town of East Chicago, Indiana, where she and her husband had gone some years before, and found permanent employment with the Inland Steel Company. After high school and some rudimentary art training, Josi, like many steel-mill children, served time in the military. He was sent to Germany and had the chance to travel in Europe and to visit some of the major museums. When he came back to the United States, he sought to pick up on his early interest in art and break with his Mexican working-class background by developing his artistic abilities though a stint at Chicago's American Academy of Art, a six-month art program in San Miguel de Allende, and a scholarship-funded degree program at the School of the Art Institute. In all these situations, Josi produced impressive drawings, paintings, and sculptures; and at the Art Institute School, he came to know the artist/activist students John Weber and Mark Rogovin, as well as the artist Mario Castillo. Then came Josi's time as a graduate student in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Notre Dame. A devout Catholic, Josi loved being at this center of Catholic learning, but his growing identification with the national Chicano movement and the Notre Dame student branch of MECHA (El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan), which he founded with Gil Cardenas, a graduate student from the West Coast, resulted in a new militancy that was unprecedented in his prior trajectory.
It is difficult to grasp Josi's transformation at Notre Dame from someone only gradually identifying as a Mexican artist to an impassioned Chicano-arts activist willing to risk all for the empowerment of his marginalized and oppressed community. Josi himself does not fully explain the transformation in his narrative. It is clear that "the answer was blowing in the wind," as national and primarily southwestern currents, personified by Cardenas, stirred smoldering resentments into a blazing fire. But there may also have been in all this mixture some early presence of the chemical imbalances that would take center stage and perhaps indeed propel Josi, as he became a sometimes volatile activist leader throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.
In what must have been a great life defeat, Josi was forced to leave Notre Dame. Returning to northwestern Indiana and then Chicago, he began finding his way first as a community activist influenced by Cisar Chavez and the national Farm Workers movement and then as a Chicano-arts activist influenced by Saul Alinsky-style organization tactics, seeking to transform the situation of fellow artists and his community. Josi lived on freelance work in the 1970s and early 1980s, but he increasingly devoted more time to political activity and arts promotion than to his own work and indeed his personal life, as he emerged as the organizational leader of Chicago Latino and Mexican artists-the one who wrote the proposals, organized the events, and represented Latino Chicago on the Hispanic national boards for the National Endowment for the Arts and other arts funders. He worked as the cover-art designer and overall arts editor for the emerging Revista Chicano-Riqueqa, which, from its home in the northwestern Indiana Chicagoland area, represented Latino artists throughout the country. However, on a more local level, Gonzalez's achievement lay with his cofounding and development of MARCH, making it one of the more significant local artists' groups in the country, ever with the goal to enrich Latino and above all Mexican poverty communities through bringing and promoting the production of great art. It was through MARCH that Josi established an impressive record of arts activity, recruiting key artists and arts advocates and coming to national recognition as the midwestern representative in the forging of the National Hispanic Task Force on the Arts in the late 1970s. But partially because of his work on the Task Force, he ran into conflicts of agendas and personalities to the point that he felt compelled to leave the organization he had cofounded and with which he was so identified and embark on a new path.
Josi exiled himself from MARCH. By the time I arrived in Chicago, he was serving as the Latino representative on the Chicago Council of Fine Arts, encouraging and developing Latino city arts projects. As I got to know him, he ran into a conflict on this job and was fired. As the newly appointed coordinator of a campus Latino cultural center seeking to work with Josi, I called his now ex-boss, Mary Cunningham, and protested this move, but was quickly rebuffed: Josi was difficult, Josi was impossible, he might even be crazy—he was certainly manic or schizophrenic, she told me. My protest was useless; Josi had already picked up his belongings, and Juana Guzman, a close friend of the writer Ana Castillo and an artist in her own right, had already taken on a post she was to hold for the next several years, playing her part in the formation of a museum that would be both a tribute to Josi's efforts and the site of what he felt to be his undoing.
In the early 1980s, before the museum project came to the fore, Josi launched Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA), which, in spite of its Chicano-sounding name, attempted to represent Latino as opposed to specifically Mexican artists in the city and the Midwest. Josi published several issues of a carefully laid-out newsletter that verged on being a journal, as it not only gave information about upcoming events, projects, and grant possibilities but featured articles on local artists and programs. Josi tried to build his arts organization with the aim of establishing a cultural center, museum, or gallery in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. He and his organization were instrumental in bringing in the artist-promoter Felipe Ehrenberg from Mexico and establishing the Day of the Dead as a major citywide event extending from Mexican households to public spaces in the Anglo-American art world. Other major events helped place MIRA on the map. But as ethnic politics heated up in the city, and as Latinos sought their own agenda in relation to the emergence of a groundswell in the African American community for the mayoral candidacy of Harold Washington, Josi became identified with the pro-Washington Mexican progressives, fund-raising for Washington and Washington-linked Latino candidates like Rudy Lozano, Juan Solmz, Juan Velasquez, and Luis Gutiirrez. As the Washington campaign continued, Josi was instrumental in leading a virtual constellation of artists and arts supporters in a series of fund-raising and solidarity-building events in support of the Washington campaign.
Josi Gonzalez's efforts to support Mexican, Chicano, Latin American, and Latino arts in the city and to link these concerns to overall community development would be crowned with success in the coming years. However, that success would not be his, and he would for several years be obscured and almost forgotten in the process. He and those supporting him would not benefit from his work in the Mexican community because, at least as Josi sees it and so argues in chapter 4, Harold Washington reached out to extend his political base, and those interested in promoting the arts for a growing Mexican population in the city sought to direct their support to other arts promoters in the Mexican community.
In the midst of all the fervor attendant to these developments, I became aware that a man who was more and more my friend was indeed getting sick, and that sickness in the early years involved constant bouts of agitation and depression with visions of persecution. In the mid-1980s, Josi had one of his fiercest attacks, which left him hospitalized and debilitated at the University of Illinois Hospital and other Chicago health facilities. Meanwhile, as he sought to adjust to what turned out to be a deepening mental health problem, the Mexican Fine Arts Center (MFAC) began to develop under the leadership of the public school teachers Helen Valdez and Carlos Tortolero. With the support of the Illinois Arts and Humanities Councils; the Chicago Council of Fine Arts, represented by Juana Guzman; and the Mexican consulate's cultural attachi, represented by Argentina Teran de Erdman, it won increasing recognition as the city's center for those wishing to be identified with Chicago cultural developments bearing a Mexican name.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago by Josi Gamaliel Gonzalez Copyright © 2010 by Josi Gamaliel Gonzalez. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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