Richard Duardo Interviewed by Karen Mary Davalos on November 5, 8, and 12, 2007
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CSRC ORAL HISTORIES SERIES NO. 9, NOVEMBER 2013 RICHARD DUARDO INTERVIEWED BY KAREN MARY DAVALOS ON NOVEMBER 5, 8, AND 12, 2007 Richard Duardo was born in East Los Angeles and is a graduate of UCLA. His serigraphs have been shown internationally and are represented in notable public and private collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He is a recipient of an Artist of the Year award from the California Arts Commission. In 1978 he established Hecho en Aztlán, a fine art print studio, followed by Aztlán Multiples, Multiples Fine Art, Future Perfect, Art & Commerce, and his present studio, Modern Multiples, Inc. He has printed the work of more than 300 artists. Duardo lives in Los Angeles. 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: Richard Duardo, interview with Karen Mary Davalos, November 5, 8, and 12, 2007, Los Angeles, California. CSRC Oral Histories Series, no. 9. 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 Richard Duardo. 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 RICHARD DUARDO November 5, 2007 ........1 November 8, 2007 .......44 November 12, 2007 ......74 NOVEMBER 5, 2007 Karen Davalos: This is Karen Davalos with Richard Duardo in Los Angeles on November 5, 2007, for the [CSRC Oral Histories Series]. And I wanted to start, Richard, with just a few really general questions, and then we’ll open it up for specific information about growing up. So you were born where and in what year? Richard Duardo: I was born in Boyle Heights, May 15, 1952, at the Lincoln Hospital on the corner of 4th and Soto Street. KD: You have that well memorized, huh? RD: I always drive by that when I buy my tamales. KD: Okay. And you’re number one of how many children, or what? RD: I’m number two, second oldest, of nine children. KD: And were your mother and father both in the picture? RD: Let me see. Okay. My mother is from the northern Sonora desert, out in . What is it? Prietas [Agua Prieta], which is a desert town close to Arizona. So we’re kind of—we’re Mexican, but we’re Yaqui Mexi- cans. So our family is Yaqui Indian. KD: And was she the person who crossed over, or— RD: My mom was the first in her family to cross over on her own at the Arizona border, I think, near Tucson, illegally. I think back then, they called them mojados. And I think she was about eighteen years old. And she came alone on her own, the proverbial immigrant story to find a better life for herself. And she met somebody in Tucson, a gentleman, a good samaritan that bought her a ticket, a train ticket that brought her into Union Station in Los Angeles. She was eighteen years old, I think. I don’t quite know what her story is with my father. I don’t know if they met here or if they met down there, but I suspect they met up here. And I understand, what little I knew of him, that he is from DF, the central part of Mexico. So he was another immigrant, probably an illegal. But they got married, and they had three children, my two sisters and myself. And then he left my mother. I don’t know if they got divorced. He left my mother, and he returned to Mexico, I’ve never seen him since. I suspect he’s probably dead by now. But my mother then—what does she do? I mean, at the time . She’s only told me once, when we were driving downtown, she said, “I lived here first, for the first two years,” which was around Staples Center, which used to be a bunch of tenements. And then she met . I’m a little kid, so I don’t recall a lot of stuff, just little vignettes of memories. But she said then we moved to Boyle Heights. And when they separated, my mother . I think she might have been about twenty-one, twenty-two, with three kids, undocumented, fourth-grade education. My mother then took my older sister and myself, my older sister, whose name is Irma, back to Sonora, and left us there in the care of my grandparents, or my grandmother and my aunts and uncles, in some dusty village. That’s all I remember. Everything was dusty, dry, and dirty, or just dry. Desert. KD: And you’re about what? RD: I think about two or three. And I recall going to school. They put us in school, my sister and I, which was an adobe. Going to school, it was . I know it was a dirt—everything was dirt. The floor of the school was dirt. It was—what are those bricks called? KD: Adobe? 1 CSRC ORAL HISTORIES SERIES RD: Adobe bricks. And it was like a tiered seating area on planks, and then a slate board, and we learned the alphabet. It was pretty much [our] situation for about the next two years. I don’t remember much of it. And my mother coming down to visit us now and then to see if we were okay, and then she’d leave. And she kept one of my sisters with her up in Los Angeles. And then the next—I don’t know what duration of time it was. She finally came and picked us up, because she had met a man who was going to marry her, so she wanted to bring the kids back up, my sister and I. KD: Did you feel—do you have memories of feeling, like, “Where’s mother?” RD: Oh, of course. I’ve been dealing with abandonment issues for fourteen [years] with my therapist. So we came back, and I met my new father, my stepfather, Arthur. And they changed my name from my original name, which was Saul. Because they called him Ritchie, he changed my original name from—my middle name was Richard, and my first name was Saul, which it still is. I didn’t know what my real name was until I was twelve. But they switched my middle name to become my first name. KD: Did you have a sense why? RD: No, I didn’t even know I had a different name. I mean, you’re so young. KD: You’re so young, right. RD: Yeah, you don’t know. You just know that this is—not until I saw my birth certificate, I think, when I was twelve, did I see my real name. KD: Wow. And when did you learn your family’s—your mother’s migration story? RD: From her. Between all my—I have five sisters and four brothers, counting myself.