CSRC ORAL HISTORIES SERIES NO. 10, DECEMBER 2013 JOHN VALADEZ INTERVIEWED BY KAREN MARY DAVALOS ON NOVEMBER 19 AND 21, AND DECEMBER 3, 7, AND 12, 2007 John Valadez is a painter and muralist. A graduate of East Los Angeles College and California State University, Long Beach, he is the recipient of many grants, commissions, and awards, including those from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the California Arts Commission, and the Fondation d’Art de la Napoule, France. His work has appeared in exhibitions nationwide and is in the permanent collection of major museums; among them are National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian, Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Mexican Museum in Chicago, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Valadez lives and works 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: John Valadez, interview with Karen Mary Davalos, November 19 and 21, and December 3, 7, and 12, 2007, Los Angeles, California. CSRC Oral Histories Series, no. 10. 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 John Valadez. 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 JOHN VALADEZ November 19, 2007 .......1 November 21, 2007 ......32 December 3, 2007 .......76 December 7, 2007 .......98 December 12, 2007 .....124 NOVEMBER 19, 2007 Karen Davalos: This is Karen Davalos with John Valadez for the [CSRC Art Histories Series] and today is November 19, 2007, for our first session on John’s life history. John, why don’t you start by telling me where you were born and the year and how many folks were in your family? John Valadez: I’m fifty-six. I was born in 1951 here in the general hospital, in Los Angeles here. My mother was seventeen when I was born, and my father, I guess, was about nineteen. She was from Garfield High School and he was from Roosevelt High School. They pretty much separated when my brother was born. He was born a year and a half after me—my brother Leonard. We pretty much grew up in the Geraghty— Geraghty Loma area, which is right down from Chávez here. It was Brooklyn [Avenue], it was kind of off of Rowan [Avenue]. It’s kind of where Self Help [Graphics & Arts] is, but up in the hills, overlooking, if you keep going, if you keep going up into the hills, east of the hills. These are called the “sticks.” There’s a bar- rio called Geraghty, Geraghty Loma. The other side is the freeway and the Cal State LA [California State University, Los Angeles]. So we grew up there, with my brother and my mother and myself. And then at a certain point, I don’t know exactly how old I was—six, seven, could have been five—we moved to the Estrada Courts Housing Project. And my mother pretty much raised us. She had a job. She finally got a job as some secretary, I think. My mother never really drove, so every time we had to go somewhere, we’d either be on the bus or one of my aunts would take us with . I pretty much grew up in the neighborhood, let’s say. And from Estrada Courts, that’s where I saw some of the early gang stuff. My brother and I never really joined any of the gangs, because my mother would beat the hell out of us. She was very [strict]. We grew with a very, very strong matriarchal thing. My mom, she was really tough. She was really strict with us about that. But we weren’t really religious. We never really went to church or anything. But she really instilled in us a sense of right and wrong. KD: Was that through expressions, little sayings she would tell you? JV: Oh, yeah. KD: Do you remember any of them? JV: Yeah. Basically anything—basically, about lying. I grew up never really . “Don’t lie!” Basically, as kids—I always remembered that. Ever since then, and from there, I’ve always had a sense that it’s actually easier, I don’t know—just to launch off into that—it’s really easier to be honest. It is, it’s much easier because you start trying to go into this deception stuff, you even deceive yourself. Maybe that’s how I got into the kind of art . I always wanted to be an artist, because I felt like I was always introverted. I stuttered. I had a stuttering problem that kind of kept me quiet, withdrawn. I took speech classes all through grammar school. And I finally got to a point, I think it was in high school, where I finally figured out how to stop stuttering that all these teachers never told us. All these speech teachers, you would take the recorder and they would hear yourself, and someone would want to shame you into speaking clearly. It got to a point where, there was this friend of mine’s father, who said that the reason 1 CSRC ORAL HISTORIES SERIES why I stuttered was because I think faster than I talk and all I had to do was take a deep breath. No one told me that! And sure enough, I’d run out of air. And that’s why you stutter, because you’re trying to talk and you don’t have any air. You’re just a kid, you know? So when I learned that, to just take a breath, sure enough, I could. And that was from years of all these speech classes and all these things that I took. There was this big mystery of why kids stutter. So anyway, that was very interesting. KD: What was your first elementary school? Where did you go? JV: I went to Dakota Street School, which is between Estrada Courts and Wyvernwood. In those days it was Wyvernwood Apartments, right down [along Olympic Boulevard]. When we finally moved from Estrada Courts, we went in there for a while. Then my mother got married for the second time to this Italian guy. That lasted a few years. And from that, we were able to move into Wyvernwood. I think my brother and I were the first Mexican American kids who were able to rent in Wyvernwood, because our mother was married to this Italian guy. We weren’t Mexican kids anymore. So some of my friends in that place, they were—it was all working class families, but they were all Anglo and Jewish. It was the Goldbergs and the Ripleys and the Buckleys. These were friends of mine then. So we grew up in Wyvernwood. Let’s say between when I was ten to twelve until I finally went to East LA College [ELAC].