An iconic map of an iconic place -- The Ponderosa Ranch (Autry Collections Photo)

The map is of the Ponderosa, the Nevada property where plot of Bonanza, one of the most successful television Western series ever, supposedly unfolded. From September 1959 to February 1973, audiences saw this map every week in the opening credits of the Paramount Television show that aired on NBC. It appeared briefly before it burst into flames, dissolving into a shot of all four members of the Cartwright family riding up to the screen as the strains of the show’s famous theme played in the background — and it did this for 14 seasons and 431 episodes, for audiences around the world.

The show starred Lorne Greene (1915-1987) as widowed father Ben Cartwright; Pernell Roberts (1928-2010) as urbane Adam Cartwright, the oldest son; Dan Blocker (1928-1972) as soft-hearted Eric “Hoss” Cartwright, the middle son; and Michael Landon (1936-1991) as the hot-headed youngest son. The series, mostly shot in a studio, was known more for its family dramas and for addressing contemporary themes than for western vistas and traditional cowboy action story lines. But the map of the Ponderosa was seared into the audience’s consciousness, almost as if it were another character.

The original of that map, a hand-painted, monumental work, was donated to the Autry after Bonanza producer David Dortort died in September 2010. It had hung in his home until then. Now it is part of the Autry’s permanent collection, hanging in the Imagination gallery.

But something seemed amiss to Janet Hunteman, a film history major at Clemson University.

“The map you have attached to this website, posted by luckygrrr May 25, 2011, is NOT the one originally used for the television show,” she wrote in the comments. “Where is the original map?”

An urgent question indeed. Hunteman said in her message that there are several “tells” or giveaways from the first few episodes that showed differences between the map hanging in the gallery and the one that appeared in the show’s credits.

Still of the cast of Bonanza, from a comic book (Autry Collections Photo)

“The primary tell on the one you picture is the Cartographer’s Legend,” Hunteman wrote me. “Yours is much larger and denser in inking. The map on the original air date is finer and lighter. Also, several of the icon images (farmer, miner, houses, etc.) have different substance in regards to sizing and inking.”

Well, there was no questioning the provenance on the map in the gallery: it had come from the family of the originator of the show, who had made a point of keeping this important piece of television history in his own home. The map is a beauty, hand-drawn in intense colors by Robert Temple Ayres, a Paramount employee. And late in 2011, Ayres himself, accompanied by several members of his family, visited his creation at the Autry and authenticated it.

But was there something to Hunteman’s claims?

“I think she is right that the version used in the original episodes is slightly different,” said Jeffrey Richardson, the Autry’s Gamble curator of Western history, popular culture, and firearms, who was closely involved with bringing the map to the Autry. “The map we have is the original production painting. Like all original production art, the final product used is a variation of the original piece.”

The original handwritten pilot for "Bonanza" (Autry Photo)

Richardson pointed out that another Autry exhibit, a Normal Rockwell painting used for the promotion of the Gary Cooper movie Along Came Jones (1945), also differs in minor details from the image used in the posters that advertised it.

Indeed, it’s not unusual for an original piece of art commissioned for a production to suffer minor changes between canvas and Silver Screen. Doug Cumming, a film industry art director who worked on Disturbia (2007), The Kite Runner (2008), and I Am Number Four (2011), said it’s possible many prints or copies of the map were used in making the iconic take in which flames consume the map. And it’s also possible that, for the sake of the take, alterations might have been made, including making features bigger or smaller.

“The one in the credits would have been just one of them,” Cumming said. “They would probably have experimented with different paper to see how it burns. They would have had some that were just blanks to see how the paper would burn and how it would look on film.”

Not to mention the number of takes that might have been required to get just the right kind of photogenic flame.

“There would have been a lot of takes,” he said. “It’s all about how it looks to the camera.”

A sentiment echoed by Ayres himself, when he was asked about the odd orientation of the map. The way it looks on the credits, due north is off in a west-northwest direction and Reno to the west of Carson City — not, as in reality, to the north. To look at the map in its correct orientation, one would have to flip it on its side, with the “horn” of the Ponderosa pointing upward. When Ayres visited the Autry, he acknowledged that accommodations had to be made for camera aesthetics. Hence the oddly pointed compass.

Richardson praised Hunteman’s powers of observation.

“Nice catch by the individual that there are differences with the map shown during season 1,” he said. “But there is no doubt that what we have is the original production painting.”

A statue of Kateri Tekakwitha stands at a Quebec church (Wikimedia Photo)

“It only took 400 years,” Samon said. “I was at a religious conference some time ago and somebody said to me, ‘Why do you need a Native American saint? You already have Juan Diego (the Mexican Indian to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe first appeared in 1531).’ I asked him, ‘How many Italian saints are there?’ Isn’t the purpose of a saint to serve as an example to worshipers? So we have one saint for Native Americans and how many for Italians?’”

Pope John Paul II canonized Juan Diego Cuauhtatoatzin, a sixteenth-century Chichimeca Indian venerated primarily in Mexico, in July 2002. According to Catholic tradition, Juan Diego was walking to Mass near Tepeyac Hill in December 1531 when a radiant lady appeared to him amid music and light, calling to him in his native Nahuatl, announcing herself as a messenger of God, and asking that a shrine be built in her honor on that spot.

The bishop in Mexico City doubted Juan Diego’s account, necessitating more apparitions and an ultimate miracle: the Virgin caused roses to grow in the rocky field and instructed Juan Diego to gather them in his cloak. According to tradition, when he unfurled the cloak to show the flowers to the Bishop, the Virgin of Guadalupe’s image — with dark skin, wearing a starry veil, and coming out of the sun — had become imprinted on it. That image is venerated today at the basilica of the same name.

But Juan Diego was by far not the only indigenous figure to profess great devotion to the Catholic faith. Kateri, born in 1656 near present-day Auriesville, New York, also became a devout Catholic in a life filled with turmoil. The daughter of a Mohawk chief, Kenneronkwa, and a Christianized Algonquian woman, Tagaskouita, Kateri was left an orphan at the age of 4 after a smallpox epidemic struck her village and killed her parents and brother. She also was struck with the disease. Although she survived, she was left with scars on her face and poor eyesight.

Adopted by her uncle, the leader of the Turtle Clan, Kateri became a highly sought-after prospect for marriage, but did not accept any proposals. At about the age of 20, she took an interest in Christianity and was baptized on Easter Sunday in 1676. Members of her clan could not understand her new beliefs and the mortification of the flesh, including drawing blood and walking on hot coals, that she practiced as a sacrifice to her new God. Soon, she fled to Quebec, where there was a community of Native American Christians. There, she dedicated herself to prayer and caring for the sick until her death in April, 1680.

A depiction of Kateri Tekakwitha in Santa Fe, N.M. (Wikimedia Photo)

According to some accounts, the scars on Kateri’s face disappeared soon after her death, constituting the first of two miracles required to be attributed to her to satisfy the requirements for sainthood.

The second miracle reportedly occurred in Seattle, Washington, on February 18, 2006, after Jake Finkbonner, 5, was injured while playing a basketball game. Before the next day, what had started as a fat lip had become a raging infection of the flesh-eating bacteria called Strep A, which swelled his entire head and was consuming his face with visible speed. Doctors raced to cut away flesh in an effort to stop the infection, but it continued its advance for nine weeks.

Friends, schoolmates and acquaintances prayed for Jake. Because he is of Lummi Indian descent, they prayed for Kateri’s intercession. Parents Donny and Elsa Finkbonner prepared for the worst, and Jake was administered last rites. But then, a member of a Kateri circle gave the Finkbonners a pendant with Kateri’s face on it. Elsa Finkbonner put it on her son’s pillow, and as of that day, the infection seemed to stop.

Jake, now 11, has undergone several reconstructive surgeries, but the infection did not return. Now, church officials have stated that there can be no other explanation for the recovery but that Kateri intervened on Jake’s behalf and cured him. Kateri is expected to be canonized sometime in 2012.

“For Kateri, who was born 400 years ago, to have her story gave us strength,” Samen said. “Religion has been a big part of keeping the family together.”

For her, as for many Native American Catholics, Kateri has special meaning.

Samen’s family comes from the Southwest, mostly Arizona, where her grandfather grew up at the San Xavier del Bac mission and later was trained along with his wife, as a domestic. They worked in at a resort. Samen’s father served in the military and mustered out in Los Angeles after World War II, where the family settled with the help of a federal program in force at the time that aimed at assimilating Native Americans into big-city populations.

“We wanted the same acceptance, the same ability to go to someplace and be accepted for who we are, as anybody else,” Samen said. “Being that we couldn’t get that other places, we could kind of get that in the Church.”

Samen said that, faced with the loss of many of their Indian customs and cultural traditions, many Native Americans have turned to religion — in this case, the very religion that for centuries aimed to stamp out their Indianness — for strength. And Samen works with the Catholic Church’s City of the Angels Kateri Circle, part of its outreach effort to ethnic communities, to help reconcile Catholicism with Native Americans. How does Samen herself do it?

“We know that God ,the Great Spirit, and Jesus, our Elder Brother, loves all of us,” she said. “The fact that we could be massacred, and taken to reservations, and put in Indian schools and all of that, that does not take away from the fact that we have survived. Other people celebrate Thanksgiving because they came to the New World and made a home. When we celebrate Thanksgiving, we celebrate our survival. We’re still here. People like to think of us as back in history, you know: the stoic television Native American. But we are human beings and it has taken all this time for us to appreciate that we are human beings …. Is it perfect? No. But is the government here perfect? Definitely not. Is the Church perfect? No. But we can celebrate now who we are and the fact that we’ve all survived.”

Once a month, at St. Marcellinus Catholic Church in Commerce, Samen’s group celebrates a Native American Mass, which incorporates a prayer to the four directions, the burning of sage, the beating of a drum and other practices central to Native American culture. And now, with Kateri on the cusp of becoming their patron saint, Samen says she is helping organize a feast day to be held at Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral next year.

“We’re planning to do a celebration for the archdiocese and we want to make it inter-tribal and open to Catholics and non-Catholics,” she said. “We’ve been waiting and doing this for two years. And we are sure going to the canonization.”

Braceros, by Domingo Ulloa, 1960, oil on Masonite (Autry Image)

The large canvas, which depicts a group of Mexican farm workers behind barbed wire, evokes the pathos and humanity of those who work for our food but remain out of our radar. It also clearly conjures the very similar, haunting images Allied soldiers encountered as they liberated Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II: gaunt, dazed, barely clothed and starving men and women — mostly Jews, but also other outcast victims of the Holocaust — walking out of desolate barracks, not quite believing that their Hell was over.

Because these are workers and not merely victims, the portraits show a certain determination, a clue that they retain some control over their own fate. But present there is also a question to the viewer, implicit, perhaps, in the WWII footage, but here posed by the workers themselves: “Is this a morally defensible way to treat fellow human beings?”

Racism/Incident at Little Rock, by Domingo Ulloa, 1957, acrylic on canvas (Autry Image)

According to the notes, Ulloa painted the work in 1960, after a visit to a migrant farm worker camp in Holtville, California. But he was no newcomer to social commentary in his paintings, and he certainly came by his labor sympathies honestly.

Born in Pomona and a son of Mexican migrant workers, Ulloa three years earlier had finished Racism/Incident at Little Rock, inspired by the 1967 Supreme Court decision that ordered an end to public school segregation in Arkansas and across the nation, also in the exhibition. The painting, based on news photos of the Little Rock Nine, a group of black high school students seeking  to attend one of the most prestigious high schools in Little Rock, Ark. and who were beneficiaries of the Supreme Court’s decision. Even so, when they showed up for their first day at the school, they had to be escorted by National Guardsmen, so great was the public sentiment against desegregation in general and their presence in particular.

Ulloa’s education as an artist, after military service in World War II, placed him in a local print shop whose output was modeled on the socially conscious work of the Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico City, which under the direction of artists Luis Arenal and Pablo O’Higgins turned out pro-labor and progressive political broadsides, prints and posters through the 20th Century. The TGP remains active today. Ulloa also briefly worked as a house painter in Los Angeles, and one of the works in the exhibition that extols his pro-Union sympathies is based on a painters’ strike that occurred here.

Tere Romo, one of three guest curators that made the exhibition possible, says that, because the show focuses on artists who received little attention during their lifetimes as members of the Chicano aesthetic, finding and identifying the works that form part of the show became a separate task  during the preparation of the exhibition. This meant that the whole project, from initial research to opening night, took seven years. In fact, the Braceros painting became the object of a search worthy of a detective novel.

Romo at the opening of Art Along the Hyphen, chatting with patrons (Photo by Tessie Borden)

“It was lost for so long, and images were the only things that were being circulated,” Romo said. “People knew it existed, but no one knew where it was.”

Romo said she didn’t even know where to start to go looking for the piece. All her usual sources and academic references just didn’t apply here. On a hunch, she asked the owner of Racism/Incident at Little Rock, with whom she was already in talks to arrange its loan, if he might have an idea of who might own the other Ulloa work.

“I said, ‘You know, this is a long shot, but I’m asking everyone who’s ever had any of his work if they know where this piece is,’” she said. “He’s the one that actually gave me a lead that then led to another lead, and then I was able to find it. And I was so happy.”

Romo said the owner of Braceros had wanted to keep the collection, and her ownership of the work, private, but in the end, she graciously agreed to lend it to the exhibition.

“It wasn’t exhibited very much when he made it,” Romo says. “In a sense, this is going to be the first time it really has gotten a much larger exposure. In one exhibition it’s going to be seen by more people than it has been in its whole existence! I think that, to me, was one of the highlights, to be able to not only find the piece but also to be able to show it to a larger public.”

Art Along the Hyphen: the Mexican-American Generation remains on view at the Autry until Jan. 8, 2012.

But the Wampanoag — the Cape Cod Indian tribe that famously helped the original Pilgrims survive in the New World in the early 1600s — use their own long-unspoken words to make a powerful statement in Anne Makepeace‘s new documentary film, We Still Live Here, showing at the Autry on Sunday. And their standard-bearer is Mae, a child with hair the color of honey.

From the film: Wampanoag mother and son (Photo by Trisha Barry)

The film, which showed on PBS’s “Independent Lens” on November 17,  tells of how, after hearing her people talk to her in an unfamiliar language in a vision, Jessie Little Doe Baird, a Mashpee Wampanoag social worker, began in 1993 to help her tribe reclaim its language. At that point, no living speaker had existed for more than a century. Little Doe Baird navigated tribal politics to get the members behind the project, the paperwork for a one-year research fellowship at MIT to get training, and centuries-old documents in the village halls to find a starting point.

“Luckily, we had the written language there to see where the basis of where it all came from,” Mashpee Wampanoag tribal member Russell Peters says in the film. “All of the town halls around here, a lot of the original deeds, a lot of them are in Wampanoag. If you go back far enough, you’ll find them all.”

Makepeace said one document written in phonetic Wampanoag became an ironic Rosetta Stone for Little Doe Baird’s project: a Bible, known as the John Eliot Bible, that had been translated to a version of the Wampanoag language in 1663.

“It was the first bible published in America,” Makepeace said. “It’s ironic that it was designed to convert the Wampanoag to the European lifestyle, but now it’s the key to bringing back the Wampanoag culture.”

Little Doe Baird is serious enough about the project that her daughter Mae, 7, is a test subject for this grand experiment. For the first three years of her life, Mae’s parents communicated with her only in Wampanoag, and through the film, she can be seen easily chattering in this long-dead language, while adults of the tribe practice for hours to learn it in a class room.

Makepeace, whose documentaries have garnered from Emmy Awards to Oscar nominations to accolades at the Sundance and Telluride film festivals, said at the Berkshire International Film Festival that trust was key to making the film.

“Native people have really good reasons not to trust outsiders,” she told the interviewer Colin McEnroe. “They’re very, very protective of the language. They have a policy that the language cannot be used in anything that could be sold, including books, films, etc. And they  have guarded it assiduously …. They’re the only ones allowed to speak it. So for them to trust me to make a film about the language and include the language in the film was awesome, and was really an honor and was quite a hurdle to overcome.”

Director Anne Makepeace (Photo by Jill Orschell)

Makepeace got to know Little Doe Baird and other Wampanoag while working on an episode of We Shall Remain, the PBS documentary that tells the history of North America from the point of view of Native American tribes. By the time she decided to make We Still Live Here, she had bonded with many members of the Mashpee Wampanoag.

“I realized that the story that needed to be told was this story,” Makepeace told me on Thursday. “So many media projects and films and stories about Native Americans end in disaster and devastation, which is true of what happened in history for native folks. Here was a story, the story of the language coming back. It was a hopeful, life affirming story of a culture  reviving itself, of people bringing it into the present and teaching it to their children so their patrimony and cultural heritage can stay alive. What a great story to tell!”

And yet, her central figure was squeamish about the attention.

“From the very beginning, Jessie said, ‘This film can’t be about me,’” Makepeace said. “And I’d tell her it’s about the language, but there was no way to tell the story of the language without telling her story. As a filmmaker, I knew the central character for the film was really important …. But for her, it’s not about the individual, it’s about the community. She wanted to be sure that the story that was told was about a community bringing back the language. And she is right that without the support of the community, she was just going to be talking to herself for next 30 years.”

Allie Humenuk and Anne Makepeace, filming with Wampanoag Indians (Photo by Jonathan Reed)

Little Doe Baird is a unique woman, Makepeace said. It took someone with an especially tenacious personality to embark on such an unprecedented effort without a road map.

“The fact that Jessie had these visions and then a year later she had a fellowship at MIT — she never had a BA, never went to college,” Makepeace said. “At that point, she had been meeting with the community and gotten people excited, but nobody knew what to do or no money to hire anybody. And she had four little kids at home. But she went out and got this. Halfway through her fellowship year, Noam Chomsky invited her to join the graduate program .… She found who she was and what she was meant to do in life and, by God, she’s doing it. “

We take language for granted as just so many words, but it is the basis for culture, Makepeace said. What people call themselves, the concepts around their religion and mythology and world view, all find articulation in language. Translations are never adequate enough. For example, there is a term Little Doe Baird found over and over again in the old Wampanoag documents: Nupanasham. According to a linguist that worked on the film, it means “to fall down off your feet,” and it is the term used when a person loses his or her land.

“There are hundreds of examples like that,” Makepeace said. “It was so revealing and moving.”

Jessie Little Doe Baird with daughter Mae (Photo courtesy of CulturalSurvival.org)

Ethnic conflicts in the New World all began with language prohibitions, such as bans on speaking native tongues in Indian boarding schools in the West in the 19th century. Makepeace said the Native peoples of the Northeast experienced a similar issue, but much earlier, in the 17th and 18th centuries. For example, in the Northeast, it was commonplace for children to become indentured servants to Europeans.

“In the early 1700s, 75 percent of Native American children were living in English homes as servants,” Makepeace said. “Puritans felt it was their mission to eradicate these cultures, and what better way to do so than to take away the children at four or five years of age, then to release them at 18 or 21.”

Conflicts over language continue today, as the diplomatic questions that arose around U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip this week show. Was she going to Burma or Myanmar? There were political implications to using either name in  dealing with an authoritarian regime with which the United States has had no direct dialogue for years, as William Wan wrote in the Washington Post.

Makepeace said her experience with We Still Live Here has made her, an English major, think about her own language differently.

“It makes you aware that language is this living thing with a lot of power,” she said. “I think about the literal meaning of phrases more.”

Makepeace has also opted, instead of moving on to her next project right away, to spend a year promoting the film and following up on the message it started. To that end, she has worked with linguists and others to develop an interactive website around 12 indigenous language reclamation projects, called ourmothertongues.org. The site combines video, maps, lesson plans and interactive features that explore different tribes’ efforts at reclaiming their language.

“Some people might ask, ‘Aren’t there other things more important than learning a language that people don’t speak anymore?’” Makepeace said. “But this is important. It is basic.”

"The Group Shoe" by Roberto Chavez (Image courtesy Autry National Center)

One of the most celebrated paintings in the show, for example, is “The Group Shoe,” a portrait of Chavez and three other artists/colleagues: Charles Garabedian, Louis Lunetta, and the late Eduardo Carrillo, whose work is also in the Autry show. The painting style is loose, with facial features sometimes obscured and blocks of strong color with little definition. The men appear to sit expectantly behind a table, and on it is a large brown shoe, its laces undone. Such an image might leave the viewer with a few questions: What are the men waiting for? What is the shoe doing there on the table? Is the shoe the meal of the day?

The canvas could harbor all kinds of symbolism. It could be a political commentary, or an evocation of someone who is absent, or a study in how much definition is actually required to suggest a person in paint. It could be all these things, that is, if the artist were someone other than Chavez.

But the explanation is in its back-story: Chavez was one of several Chicano artists who in the sixties helped launch the local CeeJe Gallery on Sepulveda Avenue. Its goal, at a time when the entire art world’s axis was New York, was to show and sell the work of artists from Los Angeles. The four in the painting were the inaugural artists, and the image is taken from the announcement for the opening show in 1962. The joke is that gallery co-owner Jerry Jerome had a quirky way of pronouncing the phrase “group show.” It came out as “group shoe.” Hence, Chavez’s painting.

The announcement for CeeJe Gallery's inaugural show, featuring Chavez and friends (Photo courtesy the Autry)

One sees this again and again. Another painting in the show is a self-portrait of Chavez, as a much younger man, wearing a bowler hat. It shows him looking forward but with a serious, even dour expression on his face. Behind him, one can see a table, part of a lampshade, a surrealist work on the wall — and a glass with Speedy Gonzalez silk-screened on it.

This is not to say Chavez is a one-dimensional artist. There are political statements and difficult subject matter, including a dark sketch of what appear to be the emaciated bodies of concentration camp victims at the Belsen concentration camp in Poland.

When the show opened in October, Chavez gave a gallery talk, and I had a chance to briefly chat with him. He admitted he never saw those bodies in person. Though he served in the military, he was too late for World War II, instead serving from 1952 to 1954. Even so, he could envision the violence because of what he had heard from his parents.

“From my mother and father and grandmother I heard about some of the horrible things that happened in Mexico,” he said. “And ‘Belsen Landscape,’ which is a painting of one of the German death camps in Europe, to me it was the same thing. My grandmother described a pile of dead bodies, and that stayed with me. It seemed no different, the Mexican Revolution and World War II.”

Roberto Chavez chats with patrons at the opening of "Art Along the Hyphen" (Photo by Tessie Borden)

I asked Chavez if he had a favorite of the works in the show.

“The best one is the one of T’amalito del Hoyo,’” he said. It’s a painting of a young man, a boy really, wearing high-water pants and a long blue button-down shirt. He has an inscrutable expression on his face.

“El Hoyo was one of the neighborhoods in East L.A. where I grew up,” Chavez said. “(Tamalito) was a one of the — they call them cholos now — a gang member that I knew. For the purposes of this exhibit I think this is a better painting because it shows stuff of me and my background and all that. But this one shows the essential difference in the place where some of us grew up, the kind of culture, the kind of blending of cultures that was happening, that I don’t think had ever been represented very well, until more recent times. And I even think that some of the younger artists who have tried to approach that didn’t get the full picture. Because it’s been changing all along.”

Chavez said he never knew the young man’s real name. Everyone just knew him as Tamalito.

“That was his nickname,” Chavez said. “He belonged to a rival gang. so I wasn’t buddies with him, but I saw him around the neighborhood. And I talked to him, even. I passed by his house every day on the way to school. But I didn’t know he was going to be up on my wall (one day).”

Chavez also talked about the significance of what he and his colleagues were doing at CeeJe.

“When I was exhibiting at the CeeJe in the sixties, the local galleries were more interested in the New York artists,” he said. “One art historian, he was a reporter. He wrote articles for Art Forum. And he said, ‘You know, why are you bringing in Warhol and all these other clowns? You got Chavez. Natives of the place who are exhibiting.’ And it was work that was worth paying attention to and supporting, but instead they are importing people from New York. In a sense, this is making up for it to some extent. It’s balancing the oversight.”

Rogelio Santibañez Arellanes, the Oaxacan culture promotion director who is helping with Vivan los Muertos! (Photo by Tessie Borden)

“I come to make the offerings and to help create the altars, to give them a very Oaxacan identity,” said Santibañez, a Zapotec for whom promoting his culture is not just a job, it’s an obsession. He is a folkloric dancer who has been performing since he was a boy and now heads a group of his own, and he celebrates the Day of the Dead every year. “This year the altars will be dedicated to people who figured in Oaxacan culture.”

On Wednesday, Santibañez talked about how the Day of the Dead is celebrated on November 1 and 2, in his home state, one of the places in Mexico where the tradition is deepest and most colorful.

Artist Luis Villarreal putting the finishing touches to one of his artistic Day of the Dead altars during last year's Vivan los Muertos! celebration (Photo by Abel Gutierrez)

“We have to be prepared always to receive again the people who have left this Earth,” he said. “Because they tell us that everything is a natural cycle of life, and that we should regard life with respect and with responsibility. Respect, because we do not know everything that lies beyond this sensation of temporal life. And responsibility, because we also will have to return one day.”

That return signifies that they have to actively teach the tradition to their children, Santibañez said, so that, when they return as spirits, their children can be there to receive them. He said turning this observation of respect for ancestors into a festive occasion also, paradoxically, allows them to integrate it into their everyday lives. Every person in each family, for example, has a specific task in the preparations.

Weeks ahead of time, the women go to the markets and gradually gather all the ingredients for the feast, the offerings and the decorations. The men begin building the wooden foundation and the arch for the altar, which is placed in the best spot in the house and eventually will hold offerings for the dead of water, cooked dishes, fruit, flowers and candles whose light will guide the spirits. They also make repairs to the house, clean it and prepare it “as if we were to receive the most special visitors.”

One of the community organization altars outside the Autry during last year's Day of the Dead celebration (Photo by Abel Gutierrez)

The day before, the family goes to the market together to get last-minute additions that have to be as fresh as possible, such as fruits and flowers. This is also when the children get involved in the preparations, allowing for conversations where the parents and grandparents talk about the loved ones who are absent or make plans for the future.

“We talk about the ephemeral nature of life and about the responsibilities we have as human beings to live a respectful life so we can prolong our stay here,” Santibañez said. “All of this then slowly flowers and develops. All we do is light the spark and all of it is there.”

On the day before the celebration, October 31, families go to the cemeteries and clean and decorate the graves of their loved ones, taking with them the food and drink they will offer, to eat and to share. They remain at the graves all night, in vigil, lighting candles and visiting with friends and neighbors. At dawn they return home to rest and prepare for the coming of the spirits.

At noon, everything should be ready, including the food and other offerings on the altar. The family gathers before it and, waving a censer burning a bit of copal resin, each member blesses it and speaks to the spirits of the dead loved ones.

Santibañez was at the Autry to oversee preparations for the Day of the Dead (Photo by Tessie Borden)

“It becomes a holy place,” Santibañez said. “That is the most mystical, the deepest part, perhaps. It’s a connection between what is familiar and what is unknown.”

Later, they will listen to traditional songs like Dios Nunca Muere, a song normally played at funerals, now played to welcome the spirits.

A dancer at last year's Day of the Dead celebration (Photo by Abel Gutierrez)

The following day, November 2, they bless the altar again, and at noon they go in procession again to the cemetery, this time to take their leave. Afterward, they go from house to house among the neighbors, taking baskets of food from the altar that they now give away, receiving others’ food in turn. They may also participate in parades called comparsas that feature outsize satirical images of local celebrities, politicians and devils and involve a kind of street theatre.

Santibañez said the Day of the Dead is an occasion also for family reunions, for those who have emigrated to return home for a while. He said migration has affected the traditions surrounding the Day of the Dead.

“It’s a constant transformation, because as live beings, we are changing,” he said. “Everything is changing in this life … Everything that is static is what is dead. So we as a culture have to transform ourselves, but we need to know the past so we can identify what is the best that we can appropriate from all these cultures that are invading us. Because there are positive and negative things.”

This year, the artist altars will honor five Oaxacans who have advanced the state’s culture: María  Sabina Magdalena García, Casilda Flores Morales, Paulina Solís Ocampo, Francisco Cipriano Villa Hernandez, and Mary Toledo Beltrán.

García was a Mazatec healer who Santibañez says became known worldwide. Flores Morales was a market vendor who became known for her fruit juice concoctions and who organized a group of traditional dancers known as the chinas oaxaqueñas. Solis Ocampo was an educator credited with founding the first distance-learning high school in Oaxaca who also choreographed a famous traditional dance. Villa Hernandez was a composer who created a series of dances known as the Mixtec jarabe. And  Toledo Beltrán created a regional festival to celebrate her native land in the region of Oaxaca known as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

“We know these things because they get transmitted not only orally but as heritage,” Santibañez said of the Day of the Dead celebrations. “This is like a historical memory that we keep ourselves, and that is expressed in some way at any time. You don’t have to prepare. It just comes out of you.”

“The key to remember is that everyone is indigenous; everyone on this planet is indigenous,” said Heralda, who performs his Aztec Stories at ¡Vivan los Muertos!,the Autry’s Day of the Dead celebration, on Saturday. “But how far have you removed yourself from it?”

Michael Heralda performs Aztec Stories at Vivan Los Muertos! on Saturday (Photo by Tessie Borden)

Aztec Stories is part music, part narrative, and part performance art. It is really part of Heralda’s campaign to encourage young people to learn more about their Native heritage, if they have it, and about their authentic history if their heritage is from someplace else.

Heralda got an inkling about that Native heritage in a used book all those years ago. He hadn’t been a big reader in his youth, because he’d never found anything that interested him. But with his wife’s encouragement, he began reading, and he liked it.

“Whenever we would go to yard sales, I’d make a beeline to any boxes that had books, because you can get them for a quarter; for 35 cents you can buy a hardcover book,” Heralda said. “I happened to pick up this one book.”

Heralda recently performed a show especially for children at the Los Angeles Public Library (Photo by Tessie Borden)

It was Aztec by Gary Jennings, the historical novelist known for his willingness to go almost anywhere to track down arcane details about his chosen subject. For Aztec, Jennings traveled to remote areas of Mexico in the seventies, when large swaths of the country were still considered dangerous for foreigners.

“I went home and started reading it, and I couldn’t put the book down,” Heralda said. “It wasn’t so much (Jennings’) writing style. It was more the fact that, as I read the book, I felt like I knew what he was talking about. I felt in here that I knew this. And I thought it was so strange because I didn’t really know anything about my history, my culture.”

As a Los Angeles-born Mexican-American, of parents who hailed from Arizona, Heralda was more than intrigued: he was hooked. He wanted to learn more about the real history behind the fictional story he had just read. So he headed to the Southwest Museum’s Braun Research Library, which had plenty of scholarly sources about the Native groups of Mexico. Among them were translations of the few indigenous books known as codexes that escaped the Spanish priests’ fires during the Conquest. The originals, most notably the Maya Dresden Codex and the Florentine Codex, an ethnography produced by the Spaniard Bernardino de Sahagún in collaboration with Mexica scribes, today reside in European museums.

Heralda's son and grandson joined him on the stage at the Library (Photo by Tessie Borden)

“I would make my notes and read the chapters I wanted,” Heralda said. “The more I read, the more I felt I knew, on an intuitive sense. I just dove deep. I just started finding everything I could find, book-wise, that was on the Aztec people.”

But in a sense, it wasn’t knowledge that set Heralda free. Knowing about all the genocide and slavery and poverty the Conquest inflicted on Native peoples saddened him.

“I decided I was going to write songs about what I was learning as a way of cleansing, out of my body, and sharing information and perspectives that I had about what I was reading,” he said. “That became the very first CD.”

But the music had trouble finding an audience. For starters, the record labels had a hard time classifying this music. And it was also incredibly sad. Heralda realized he still had some work to do, and it was time to leave his books behind.

Michael Heralda with a ceramic flute in the shape of a skull (Photo by Tessie Borden)

“I realized that everything I had learned up to that point was in books, and books present a specific perspective. And in this case, pretty much everything that’s written is from a European perspective. So that’s when I knew that in order to grow, I needed to go to the source. So I needed to go to Mexico, and I needed to find people there who had indigenous knowledge.”

He found a school near Cuernavaca, the Universidad Náhuatl in the town of Ocotepec, Morelos, that taught courses on indigenous life, including philosophy, music and musical instruments, food and lifeways. He spent a week and a half in a summer immersion program, absorbing, learning and making contacts.

“I knew as soon as I arrived that I was meant to be there, that I was called there,” he said. “Everything up through my life had been pushing me up to this point. It was an immediate connection with the instructors. They understood what I was trying to do and they immediately gave me a wealth of information.”

The university’s founder, the scholar and artist Mariano Leyva, is a longtime street theatre activist who Heralda says is credited with bringing the Day of the Dead tradition to the United States in the 1960s.

“During that time, the Chicano movement was building up, and they were hungry for that kind of information,” Heralda said. “It went over really well.”

A few years later, Heralda became concerned that Day of the Dead had gone over so well that it was beginning to be commercialized, and he began a project to explore the true origin of Day of the Dead so that people can have a better idea of its significance. The result was “The Journey to Mictlán,” his recent CD. He sees it as a way to expose people to concepts central to the Day of the Dead, including the idea that beings — really, all matter in nature — does not die or disappear; it just changes form.

“Energy never ceases to exist,” he said. “It just transitions into something else. It’s cycles of nature .… That’s fact. It’s fact because they can document it in a laboratory, so now it’s fact. But Native peoples have always understood this. Intuitively, they’ve known this. So it brings some validation to indigenous knowledge, indigenous culture, indigenous beliefs. And more importantly it brings an awareness of the concept that Native peoples had an indigenous philosophy, which many people still don’t know today.”

But Heralda believes that the reason the Day of the Dead has become so popular in the United States, and the reason it continues to have power in Mexico, is that people today are looking for an authenticity and spirituality that they perceive used to be at hand but has been lost. The color, smoke and ceremony of the celebrations, the altars and the food, can be a way of recapturing that spirituality, not least because all those elements are not part of the workaday world.

“I’ve done presentations where people who are obviously not from this continent will come up to me and say, ‘I really love the Native cultures and I feel bad for what happened long ago,’” Heralda said. “The first thing I tell them is, ‘Don’t feel bad about us losing that indigenous side of us just to survive.’ I say, ‘I feel sad for you because you lost yours way before we did. You lost that connection. And essentially this is why you’re gravitating toward this, because you know intuitively that you’re connected to it, but you’ve been so far removed from it that you hunger.’”

“I’ve been writing songs with David and the band for forty years!” he said. “That’s kind of scary.”

Guitarrist Louie Perez of Los Lobos, one of the creators of "Evangeline, the Queen of Make Believe" (KCET image)

Perez chatted with me ahead of the Autry’s presentation this week of Evangeline, The Queen of Make-Believe, an About… Productions theatre workshop loosely based on their song Evangeline that will be performed in the Autry’s Montgomery gallery, surrounded by the art of six Mexican-American Los Angeles artists from the Pacific Standard Time exhibition Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation. This performance is the culmination of an idea Perez has been turning over in his mind for several years.

“For me, I’ve always been interested in re-imagining things,” Perez said. “I had this idea of turning the album Kiko into a theatre piece.”

Perez said he initially thought a script could emerge from stringing all the songs in the album together. After all, what is a song but a three-and-a-half-minute narrative? He began talking to people, trying to put the project together, but soon it began to get bogged down in legalities and red tape.

When Perez and Hidalgo began considering whom to hire to write the script, they decided to take a crack at it themselves. The result was less than encouraging.

“We did a draft,” he said. “It wasn’t exactly Miss Saigon. We knew we needed to find a real playwright. Then it just got really complicated. It left a little bitter taste in my mouth.”

For years, the project crept along, until Perez was ready to just call off the whole thing.

Los Lobos in a performance at the White House in 2009 (Wikimedia image)

“It was difficult,” he said. “Five years into it, and we hadn’t even looked at a script.”

Then, a couple of years ago, Los Lobos performed at a benefit concert at Plaza de la Raza in Lincoln Park. There, Perez met an old friend, Rose Portillo, an actress and associate director at About… Productions, who introduced him to Theresa Chavez, About’s artistic director.

As they talked, they realized Chavez and Portillo’s non-profit theatre company, which works with at-risk teens and creates original stage productions, might be the perfect vehicle for Perez’s project. They began sketching out a few ideas. Those conversations got distilled into the idea of working a single song into the story, rather than an entire album.

“All the songs we’ve done, you can imagine real people in them,” Perez said. “They’re  populated with real live people. It’s the singer/songwriter thing .… So we asked ourselves, ‘why don’t we take a song that’s three and a half minutes long and turn it into a play that’s 90 minutes long?’ In a way, we’ve been doing this kind of shorthand thing all along. I’ve always thought that we had a number of songs that had a book or something in them.”

They settled on the song Evangeline, and they began looking at their own past to re-imagine this particular 17-year-old girl’s story. Eventually, they decided to set her down in the middle of the Chicano awakening of the sixties, under the sway of conflicting influences: on the one hand, her traditional Latino upbringing, on the other, the American rock-n-roll scene.

Evangeline's character is loosely based on Louie Perez's sister (About Productions image)

“It’s interesting how a lot of people have come to believe that Chicanos grew up int his kind of vacuum, like they weren’t part of this country,” Perez said. “We watched reruns of Father Knows Best and Carl Reiner comedies. We grew up being American. It wasn’t that kind of pervasive thing. To a certain degree, it’s true we were somewhat sheltered, because we were in our own neighborhoods with the tienditas and stuff.”

So Evangeline, Perez says, is the classic young girl come from the small town — or in this case, the barrio — to try to make a name for herself in Hollywood. She soon realizes it’s not what she expected, and finds herself kind of lost. Because the characters in Los Lobos songs often are based on real people, Perez said he looked around his own family to find this one. Evangeline, he says, is loosely based on his older sister.

“I wrote the part in a way that was the idea that I had at first, but it can read like a coming of age,” he said. “There’s a tug of war between her culture and mainstream American culture. My sister was there. She was listening to the music on the couch, dancing in the living room.”

Perez calls Evangeline a work in progress, and that is on purpose. Since it was first developed about a year ago, it has been performed in a handful of venues, all  with the aim of getting feedback from the audience, and based on that, making changes.

“I relate it to songwriting,” Perez said. “What looks great at two in the morning, at ten o’clock the next day you take a look at it again and sometimes you say, ‘What was that?’ So you have to take a scalpel and work on it.”

This, their fourth version of the play, is the most fleshed out so far, incorporating the work of a video artist, Claudio Rocha, into the skeletal set, making the whole production into a multi-media kind of experience.

Perez said he has enjoyed the audience participation in the process. Earlier this year, KPCC presented a version of it, but turned into a community forum and involving professionals who judged the performance. It was called Civil Rights and Go-Go Boots.

“We had an actual panel of judges,” Perez said. “Four people to discuss the historical significance of the period and to react to the piece. What a cool night that was. We had people really almost to the point getting choked up, sharing experiences.”

The project is something that has caught Perez’s imagination and helped him glimpse, perhaps, a next stage in his long career.

“To see life after rock and roll, it’s like I’m going to have to do it, to be there,” he said. “This has kind of opened this thing about community for me. I have to admit there’s a little bit of that thing of ‘You forgot where you came from.’ Sometimes, it’s so hard to get from A to B, and then B is great. Through this thing of working with Theresa and Rose, it’s brought me back to the point where I’ve got to give it away …. I’ve been back in touch with a lot of my old homies. I see them again and  get a sense that they are saying, ‘Welcome back.’ It’s kind of cool.”

Dora De Larios with one of her monumental works, representing the Earth mother. To the left is another one of her sculptures, representing the sea (Photo by Tessie Borden)

“I think what’s happening with this Pacific Standard Time is awesome, it’s just plain awesome,” De Larios said. “I think in time it will be viewed as a pivotal place in history, in art history for the city, that turned things around. More people will be aware of us as a creative force. Some people are, but you’re always talking to the chorus when you’re talking to your friends. I’m talking about ordinary people.”

Indeed, through exhibitions in more than 60 venues over six months, Pacific Standard Time explores what became the Los Angeles art scene in the years after World War II. Within that framework, the Autry’s exhibition examines the work of six Los Angeles artists who became precursors to the Chicano art movement of the 1960s. The group includes social realists like Domingo Ulloa, romanticists like Hernando Villa, and artists who discovered and asserted their Chicano identity, like Roberto Chavez and Eduardo Carrillo. And then there’s De Larios, the lone sculptor in the group, who doesn’t consider herself expressly Chicana.

“No, no. I’m 77 years old, I’m not of that era,” she said. “I just considered myself a Mexican-American. I was an artist. I hated labels, first of all. I always hated being told what to do. Why can’t we just be artists? Why do we have to say, ‘You’re a black artist, you’re a pink artist, you’re a brown artist.’ I mean, we’re all creative people working in this experience that we call life.”

The Aztec Calendar stone in Mexico City's Museum of Anthropology (worldalldetails.com image)

De Larios says her father was sometimes politically involved, and her family certainly kept its connections to its culture through  trips to Mexico to visit relatives when she was a girl. But she expresses her Mexican-American identity a bit differently than did the artists who worked in Los Angeles when the Chicano wave crested in the sixties and seventies. Rather than looking to political statements, she draws on her childhood and her personal experiences of family separation and reunion — both her own and that of her neighbors.

“The age of 8 was a very important time in my life,” she said. “I think that it’s very magical in a lot of people’s lives. They find a direction without even knowing it. I saw the Aztec Calendar for the first time at the archaeological museum off the Zocalo. At that time there was no great, grand museum. It’s so vivid in my mind seeing that.”

She compares the experience to being born, because she had to walk through a narrow, damp, dark hallway  into a room with only one object and one light over it: the Aztec Calendar.

“I had this visceral connection to the stone,” she said. “I was it and it was me. That was my history, and that was me. That was who I was. I knew at the age of 8 that I would be an artist.”

As children, De Larios and her sister Teresa lived with separate grandparents and moved often, which meant she attended different schools. In middle school, she had an art teacher who believed that art could serve a higher purpose.

“She stopped the class cold one day and she said, ‘If you ever see any injustice done, it’s your responsibility to stop it,’” De Larios said. “It always stuck to me.”

As De Larios finished high school, she won scholarships to Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and an art school in Berkeley, but her father prohibited her from going. She ended up at the University of Southern California, where she majored in ceramics and minored in sculpture, graduating in 1957.

“I didn’t feel part of it when I started because when I started, my parents could only afford eight units a semester,” she said. “The unit price at that time was $14. So I felt like a hoax. I got straight As and everything. I didn’t learn anything. I’d learned everything in junior high school because I had had wonderful teachers.”

De Larios works on smoothing one of her vase works (Photo by Tessie Borden)

Soon, however, De Larios fell under the tutelage of Vivika and Otto Heino, renowned ceramics instructors. She said it took her six months to learn how to center a block of clay on the potter’s wheel. But Otto Heino kept working with her and encouraging patience.

“He said, ‘You have to be patient with yourself. You’re going to learn it. You’re going to be wonderful, just be patient with yourself,’” she said. “I never forgot it. His kindness really affected me. Kindness in any form just really gets me.”

All the while, De Larios kept developing her whimsical, figural style in plaques, murals, statues and pottery. She drew on the cultural connections she experienced as a child: the connection to her Mexican and pre-Columbian Indian heritage was there, of course, but there was also what she witnessed in her own Los Angeles barrio during World War II, when the federal government deemed thousands of Japanese-Americans  should be turned out of their homes and interned in camps with guards. De Larios at the time lived in a neighborhood that was home to many Nisei, or second-generation Japanese-American families, and she had considered them friends.

“The Japanese, the Nisei, when I was little, they helped me by giving me a little potted plant to give to the teacher when I was late for school in that old neighborhood,” she said. “It was just a tiny little thing, because I was always late for school. “

De Larios felt such a strong connection to the Nisei that she studied the Japanese culture and in 1979 was commissioned to do a mural that became a gift from the city of Los Angeles to its sister city of Nagoya, Japan. She was a guest of the Japanese government for a month and was squired in a limousine to see important sights.

“I’d taken pots on the plane to give as gifts to various people, because I knew I’d be meeting a lot of people,” she said. “The night before I went to meet the mayor of Nagoya, who then had me to his house for dinner … I didn’t have wrapping paper. So I ran out and got coloring pens and stuff, and blank paper, and I decorated paper, hand-decorated it, and then wrapped these things.”

The occasion was a very formal, white-glove affair. She was introduced by a friend and was so nervous she almost broke down.

“I was so incredibly grateful to be there, and my art had taken me there,” she said, her voice cracking. “Anyway, he said, ‘Where did you get the paper?’ I said, ‘I made it.’ He said, ‘I’m going to frame it! So that was a kick.”

De Larios gives the impression that her entire life has been a series of “kicks” like that. Her conversation trips all over itself as she remembers events and episodes. But all of it comes down to her love of what she does.

“It’s been a very rich life, is what I’m telling you,” she says, throwing up her hands. “All along the way.”

George Sanchez revisits his seminal text, "Becoming Mexican American" at the Autry on Sunday (Photo by Tessie Borden)

Sanchez, professor of American studies, ethnicity, and history at the University of Southern California, in 1993 published Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945, a seminal work on ethnic identity that he revisits this Sunday at the Autry’s Becoming Mexican American and Beyond,  a one-day conference exploring contemporary Latino ethnic identity.

Ethnographers used to think Mexican and American cultures were distinct from each other, without any common threads, he said.

“The scholarship particularly coming out of the seventies and eighties sort of drew some stark distinctions between Mexican culture on the one hand and American culture on the other,” Sanchez said. “If you were into assimilation you wanted to  say, ‘Well, lets’ have them move on and become American.’ If you wanted to retain Mexican culture, you talked about it as if it was a sacrosanct sort of separate entity, very distinctive. So people at that time would debate what allowed people to retain their culture, what allowed people to move on to another culture. But it was very much a separate either-or kind of scenario.”

None of that picture resonated with what Sanchez had seen growing up in Los Angeles, in his own blended household of immigrant Mexican parents and U.S.-born offspring. What he saw in them was a much more complicated relationship with both cultures, in which they blended them, took from each as needed, and even recast some parts.

“My father had this incredible music collection of albums, a whole bunch of Mexican artists. Mariachi, but also contemporary stuff, trios, everything. He was very proud of this,” says Sanchez, by way of example. “At the same time, the news comes up (on Spanish-language television), and a Mexican politician came on, and he’d yell at the TV.”

In other words, the fact that he was a proud Mexican man didn’t keep him from criticizing aspects of his homeland which he found frustrating, like the way politics got made. It also didn’t keep him from appreciating or criticizing aspects of his life in the United States.

“It was a complicated portrait of what it meant to be related to Mexico,” Sanchez said. “(And) it wasn’t just us children that were born in the United States, with no connection to Mexico, that were changing. They were changing. They’d always changed. That’s what happens.”

Late in college, Sanchez began thinking about these questions and trying to predict where they might lead him.

“My feeling was that the way that culture was being described was much too flat, much too generic,” he said. “And it didn’t give either for the changing of Mexican culture nor for the ways that immigrants themselves sort of took whatever they wanted from U.S. culture, incorporated that, repackaged it, thought about it a different way, (even) thought about it as Mexican-American or Mexicano.”

Sanchez talked with me this week about the book's influence on the mainstream view of culture (Photo by Tessie Borden)

Sanchez said he witnessed this picking and choosing as his family moved from one neighborhood of Los Angeles to the other. He was born in East Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights, a neighborhood that we today think of as quintessentially Mexican-American. But when Sanchez was a kid, there were also strong Jewish, Italian-American and Japanese American communities. Later, they moved to South Los Angeles, which was predominantly African American.

“African American culture has always influenced Mexican culture in Los Angeles,” Sanchez said. It was hard for him to believe that none of these strands would have had an influence on either his own sense of identity or that of his parents.

“It just seemed more fluid,” Sanchez said. “We didn’t have a good sense yet of how culture actually shifts and changes. And I wanted particularly not to only concentrate on the U.S.-born but on the immigrants themselves.”

So Sanchez set out to write a book that would give all of this cultural mixing a historical perspective. And he began with the earliest generation that could really be called bi-cultural — those who arrived in Los Angeles at the beginning of the twentieth century, in an effort to escape the Mexican Revolution.

There was also much about the 1930s, the topic he had actually chosen for his senior thesis.

“A lot of the biggest cultural shifts and changes that I saw on the ground in Los Angeles happened in the 1930s, and it happened for a number of reasons,” he said “You have repatriation, so one-third of the Mexican community goes back to Mexico. So I was interested in what effect that had on the people that stayed.”

During the 1930s, U.S. immigration authorities rounded up about 500,000 people of Mexican descent, regardless of whether they were legally in the country, and deported them to Mexico, in some instances filling boxcars in trains headed south. The roundups took place mostly in states with large populations of Latinos, including California, Texas, Colorado, Illinois and Michigan.

“The other part of that is that it was happening in the Depression,” Sanchez said. “One of the ways in which people talk about immigrant cultural change is to always talk about upward mobility that somehow when immigrants do better they shift and they change and they become more like Anglos. But the fact that the cultural change was happening in the Depression meant that there was very little upward mobility. And whatever shift I was seeing was not happening because people were making more money or moving out of communities, but it was happening inside of communities that were still poor, still working class, and were remaining put. They weren’t moving to some suburb. “

For example, Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans were marrying among themselves, and moving across the Los Angeles river to start families. So the East Los Angeles we think of as the heart of Mexican tradition here was something brand-new in the thirties. Those couples were trying to move away from the then “traditional” Mexican neighborhoods downtown. Further, they generally married earlier than couples did in Mexico, even though the common perception  was that marrying early was the traditional Mexican thing to do.

“People were finding their own space that they could feel comfortable in, and it was quite different,” Sanchez said. “I argue that one of the ways young people got out of their houses was by saying ‘I’m doing the traditional Mexican marriage very early’ … When in fact that was something new in the United States, but they were ascribing it to traditional Mexico. So the ways people use Mexico as a kind of reference point is not always truthful.”

Sanchez uses these and other examples in other areas of political and social life to illustrate precisely the fluidity and ambivalence of cultural identity among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the early part of the twentieth century. So why revisit Sanchez’s study in 2011?

Sanchez says many of his students, either U.S.-born or Mexican-born, who “when they talk about culture, they put it up on a pedestal somewhere.” So they identify as Chicano or Mexican-American, but they do things that they themselves don’t consider Chicano or Mexican-American, like listening to, say, rap music.

“When one claims it, makes it one’s own, and then celebrates it and incorporates it, that is fundamentally Chicano culture and Mexican-American culture,” Sanchez said. “What I want to do more than anything else in my work is to allow young people to understand the decisions they make are part of Mexican-American culture. That they themselves actually control what that culture is and is going to be.”