The Art of Community: An Interview with Malaquías Montoya
- The Art of Community:An Interview with Malaquías Montoya
Let me first say that it is a real pleasure to have you here in Chicago, at the National Museum of Mexican Art, on the occasion of this excellent exhibition [Galería sin Fronteras, from the private collection of Gilberto Cárdenas, Winter-Spring 2014]. Your painting, The Immigrant’s Dream (2003), provides the first visually arresting vision of the show for visitors. I know that you started experimenting with the issue of immigration, especially in the 1980s, but I was fascinated by the details of your early experiences [growing up] in the San Joaquín Valley [Central California]. I’m wondering at what point you first started to awaken the sense of who you were and how to articulate your identity. Did you realize that so many of the people from your own community were immigrants struggling either through the Bracero Program or with some of the same issues that maybe in a decade or two you would really grapple with [in] your work? Were you already recognizing immigration as a central concern from an early age?
I think I was, because growing up in that area I remember at a very young age being out late at night and coming home and hearing this loud commotion, and all of a sudden stopping and seeing immigration [officers] chasing two or three men down the alleyway. And you could see the men, most of the men half-dressed because they were awakened at night, and they’re running down the alley, and the police or the migra making more of a joke: “Hey, look at that son of a bitch, look at him get up that fence, I think we got [him].” And then, you know, flashlights and such, and I remember seeing gentlemen running and the look of their faces, which was a look of terror, and I remember thinking how glad I was that their children were not there to see their fathers being pursued like a sport, you might say. So at that age, no, I didn’t know that I was going to go on and do images of these people, but they stuck with me. They really stayed with me for many years.
Those are powerful memories for sure.
Yes, really, yes.
So El Movimiento [Chicano Civil Rights Movement] in its first decade or two is sometimes described as somewhat geographically fragmented, with the clearest coalescence in California, of course in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. While you were at Berkeley, the formation of your collective MALA-F [Mexican American Liberation Art Front, founded in 1969] seems to have been an extremely important step in building alliances between artists and other groups. Can you talk about your awareness of similar activities outside of the Bay Area at that point? Did you have any connections to artists here in Chicago, for instance, like Mario Castillo, or Ray Patlán, who had also been moved by things like the Plan espiritual de Aztlán [Chicano nationalist manifesto, adopted in 1969]?
In 1970, I was being considered for a position in a newly formed Chicano Studies Department at UC-Berkeley because I had been a student during the Third World Strike demanding an Ethnic Studies Department. We were actually demanding a Third World College but we ended up getting an Ethnic Studies Department, made up of Chicano Studies, Native American, Asian, and Afro-American Studies. Because part of the Plan de Santa Bárbara [a manifesto calling for Chicano Studies in higher education, adopted in 1969] talked about an art component to a department, they considered me for a position because, being a student, I had already been actively involved and had exhibitions and other things. So I was given a grant that summer of 1970 to [travel] throughout the Southwest and photograph and meet other Chicano artists for a possible class that I might teach. And that’s when I went to Denver and met Corky González, I met Manuel Martínez who was then an artist there in Denver...
