Barbara Carrasco Interviewed by Karen Mary Davalos on August 30, September 11 and 21, and October 10, 2007
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CSRC ORAL HISTORIES SERIES NO. 3, NOVEMBER 2013 BARBARA CARRASCO INTERVIEWED BY KAREN MARY DAVALOS ON AUGUST 30, SEPTEMBER 11 AND 21, AND OCTOBER 10, 2007 Artist and muralist Barbara Carrasco lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from UCLA and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Carrasco has taught at UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara, and Loyola Marymount University and is the recipient of a number of fellowships and grants. Her papers are held in the Department of Special Collections at Stanford University and the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Karen Mary Davalos is chair and professor of Chicana/o studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Her research interests encompass representational practices, including art exhibition and collection; vernacular performance; spirituality; feminist scholarship and epistemologies; and oral history. Among her publications are Yolanda M. López (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2008); “The Mexican Museum of San Francisco: A Brief History with an Interpretive Analysis,” in The Mexican Museum of San Francisco Papers, 1971–2006 (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2010); and Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (University of New Mexico Press, 2001). This interview was conducted as part of the L.A. Xicano project. Preferred citation: Barbara Carrasco, interview with Karen Mary Davalos, August 30, September 11 and 21, and October 10, 2007, Los Angeles, California. CSRC Oral Histories Series, no. 3. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2013. CSRC Oral Histories Series © 2013 Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Interview © 2007 Barbara Carrasco. Do not reproduce without permission. THE CSRC ORAL HISTORIES SERIES The CSRC Oral Histories Series publishes the life narratives of prominent Chicano and Latino figures. The life narratives have been recorded and transcribed, and the interviewer and interviewee have reviewed and corrected the transcriptions prior to publication. These oral histories are often undertaken as part of a larger research project and in tandem with archival collections and library holdings. CSRC ORAL HISTORY SERIES PROJECTS L.A. Xicano documents the history of Chicana/o art in Los Angeles with a focus on artists, collectives, and art organizations. The project resulted in new museum and library exhibitions, public programs, archival collections, and scholarly publications. These efforts were part of the Getty Foundation initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980. The project received support from Getty Foundation, Annenberg Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and California Community Foundation. Related support includes funding from Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, AltaMed Health Services Corporation, Entravision Communications Corporation, Walt Disney Company, and individual donors. A Ver: Revisioning Art History stems from the conviction that individual artists and their coherent bodies of work are the foundation for a meaningful and diverse art history. This book series explores the cultural, aesthetic, and historical contributions of Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and other U.S. Latino artists. The A Ver project is made possible through the generous support of Getty Foundation, Ford Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Joan Mitchell Foundation, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation. The LGBT and Mujeres Initiative seeks to increase archival and oral history holdings that document the Chicano/Latino presence in LGBT and women’s histories, the role of women and LGBT people in Chicano/ Latino histories, and the importance of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in “mainstream” scholarly research and archival institutions. The project receives generous support from the Ford Foundation and individual donors. ARTISTS INTERVIEWED FOR THE L.A. XICANO PROJECT Judy Baca Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez David Botello Barbara Carrasco Leonard Castellanos Roberto “Tito” Delgado Richard Duardo Margaret Garcia Johnny Gonzalez Judithe Hernández Leo Limón Gilbert “Magu” Luján Monica Palacios John Valadez Linda Vallejo INTERVIEW WITH BARBARA CARRASCO August 30, 2007 .........1 September 11, 2007 ......22 September 21, 2007 ......49 October 10, 2007 .......76 AUGUST 30, 2007 Karen Mary Davalos: This is Karen Mary Davalos; I am interviewing Barbara Carrasco today, on August 30, 2007. And Barbara, I wanted to start with some really open questions about your early childhood. Some of these are really basic: when were you born, where you born, where were your parents from, things like that. The size of your family. Barbara Carrasco: Okay. Well, I was born in 1955 in El Paso, Texas, and that’s where—both my parents were born there, and we moved to Los Angeles when I was a year old, and my mother had . There were two of us born in El Paso, my older brother and myself, and then the other three siblings were born in Los Angeles. So they’re a total of five of us. But our grandparents were born in Mexico on both sides. And anyway, but we’ve been living in—we grew up in Culver City in government housing projects for veterans, Mar Vista Gardens. KMD: Who was the vet? BC: My father. He was in the Korean War, in the Navy. And—but there was a lot of family members in the service. I had an uncle who was considered a war hero in the Korean War also. He was very young when he died, he was nineteen years old, and Hal Wallis, the famous movie producer, spotted him in the Army and pulled him out, along with seven other guys from his company, and did a movie called Cease Fire! It’s a full-feature film called Cease Fire! Paramount Pictures made it, and then Chon [Noriega] actually found it at UCLA. Paramount had donated the film to UCLA Film Archives, and I asked Chon if we could see it, so he screened it for our family. That was real exciting. We’ve seen our uncle—he starred as himself, Ricardo Carrasco. KMD: Wow. BC: And the ironic thing is, he died several days before the actual cease-fire in Korea. He was—they offered him a film contract, which he turned down to go fight “the Commies.” And so he died—it was pretty sad. Anyway, but I just thought I’d say that, because I thought that was pretty interesting. We just found that out about ten years ago, so it was something new to us. KMD: In other words, growing up, you didn’t know him as a war hero. BC: Never. My mom or dad never spoke of him. But then again, my father died when I was twelve years old; he died of a heart attack. He really is the person who introduced me to Mexican art. There was a book on Diego Rivera, and he showed it to me when I was very young, about ten or eleven, and I was inspired. I mean, it was the real famous painting of the man with the white horse, and that image has stuck with me ever since; it was amazing. Because my dad drew pretty well. He would draw women. My mother didn’t like it. [laughter] And then my mother, her—she was very gifted herself, and when we were growing up in the projects, she was very creative. We were very poor, but she was very resourceful as a mother, she was always making things. There were always art projects, there were always athletic projects. She was a very creative person, and she was very good at drawing and painting. KMD: So would she plan these things for the kids, or . 1 CSRC ORAL HISTORIES SERIES BC: Yeah. Not just our family, but also the kids in the projects. Well, the projects was set up like Army barracks, so our building—we lived in building 55, and there were like eight families in that building, something like that, eight or nine families, and so we were really close. And some of the other buildings in back of us and in front, they were . That’s what I really liked about growing up there, we became a big, huge extended family. And we were really keenly aware of the way people perceived us outside the projects. We were “poor, uneducated Mexicans,” and there were blacks, a lot of people of color that lived there. But I didn’t realize we were so poor until I got into junior high school. Well, actually a little earlier than that, when I— KMD: When were you aware of these perceptions of how people thought of you? BC: Well, I went to St. Gerard’s, a Catholic school—my mother put us all in Catholic school, thinking that, you know, even though we’re poor, we’re going to be provided with a good education. But at the same time, it was actually smart on her part to put us in Catholic school, because she didn’t have to buy clothes. You had to wear uniforms; we had like two sets of uniforms so she would wash one while the other one was . And so anyway, the four of us were going to Catholic school at the same time, and I think it was at that time, it was a lot of money for her, it was like twenty dollars—it was like twenty dollars each a month to go to school. And—but I remember, there was one day in the school year that was called “free dress day,” and that was the worst day for all of us, because we wore the worst clothes to school that day. And so I think that’s when I realized—I was pretty young when I realized we were extremely poor, because all the other kids were wearing really nice dresses and nice socks and nice shoes, and my sister and I would come with our Salvation Army dresses and our tattered little shoes, and it just—they were clean and pressed, that was one thing they instilled in us.