NOTES
Though I have designed this book as a (chrono)logical exploration of some of the concerns and strategies of Mexamerican melodrama, and though I share the genre’s creed that meaning lies in the accumulation of detail, I also hope to serve readers for whom melodrama’s single token—say, one chapter—manifests significance. To these disparate ends, the chapters, each with full-citation notes, serve either in concert or as discrete movements that may be approached as the spirit moves. PROLOGUE 1. Freeman’s SPARC- (Social and Public Art Resource Center; 1976–present) sponsored mural, a culmination of a project that honors founding muralist Judith F. Baca, painter Christina Schlesinger, and filmmaker Donna Deitch’s vision that public art should “arise from within communities” rather than being “imposed upon them,” could not have been better imagined nor better placed. Not only did the mural incorporate local residents’ ideas in its conception and completion, but the work seems to engage a dialogue with other artistic projects in the neighborhood. A few paces from Lummis’s Arroyo Seco home, it stands in eloquent debate with this greatest of L.A. mythmakers. Writer, archeologist, historian, Charles Lummis (1859–1928) trumpeted the city’s magnificence to mask its misery. Los Angeles historian Mike Davis debunks the “impresario who promoted the [California mission] myth as the motif of an entire artificial landscape.” He discusses how Lummis’s contribution to mission literature, with its insistence on “race relations as a pastoral ritual of obedience and paternalism,” influenced local literati. That the “Arroyo Set” could argue racial superiority of EuroAmericans while elevating the image of indigenous people is the kind of foundational paradox Freeman’s work seeks to unveil. See Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990; London: Verso; New York: Vintage, 1992) 24–30. For an opposing outlook on Lummis as “advocate and promoter of the splendors of the Southwest,” see “Charles F. Lummis,” Southwestern Wonderland, University of Arizona Library’s Special Collections Pamphlet and Travel Brochure: n. pag., online, Internet, 29 July 1998, which points out that Lummis “was quick to scold the American public N O T E S 197 about their ignorance of their own backyard.” For a view of the city’s very different champions, including Charles Freeman, see Robin Dunitz, Street Gallery (Los Angeles : RJD Enterprises, 1993) and Robin Dunitz and James Prigoff’s Walls of Heritage, Walls of Pride: African American Murals (Rohnert Park: Pomegranate Communications , 2000). 2. Novelist Arturo Islas defines “migration” in its widest sense. His saga of the Angel family’s life in the Mexican/U.S. borderlands forces us to rethink how the binaries of “migrant” and “immigrant” affect the enfranchisement of “citizens” in “nations.” Islas’s narrator observes that “The Río Grande—shallow, muddy, ugly in those places where the bridges spanned it—was a constant disappointment and hardly a symbol of the promised land to families like Mama Chona’s. They had not sailed across an ocean or ridden in wagons and trains across half a continent in search of a new life. They were migrant, not immigrant, souls. They simply and naturally went from one bloody side of the river to the other and into a land that just a few decades earlier had been Mexico. They became border Mexicans with American citizenship.” Migrant Souls (New York: William Morrow, 1990) 41. 3. A celebration of 140 years of foreign photographers’ images of Mexico, the catalogue features prints and autobiographical material from forty-nine artists. Gertrude Blom, whose image of the Tzotzil religious leader adorns both the book and the poster made of the traveling exhibition, has documented life in Mexico since she made her home there in 1940. Having chronicled women’s work in factories as a government-sponsored investigator, she became a photojournalist in 1943, traveling on behalf of the State on her first of more than seventy expeditions into Lacand ón villages in Mexico and Guatemala’s border region. Over the years, her interventions have helped to preserve both indigenous culture and the rain forest where these native peoples live. See Blom’s “The Jungle Is Burning” in México: Through Foreign Eyes, ed. Carole Naggar and Fred Ritchin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993) 144–53; 292. INTRODUCTION. OF MELODRAMA AND OTHER INSPIRATIONS 1. Charles Freeman’s most recent political art extends transcultural dialogue. Jefferson Middle School in South Central L.A. is host to a new mural that honors African American and...
OR
Buy This Book in Print