CSRC ORAL HISTORIES SERIES NO. 5, NOVEMBER 2013 CHARLES “CHAZ” BOJÓRQUEZ INTERVIEWED BY KAREN MARY DAVALOS ON SEPTEMBER 25, 27, AND 28, AND OCTOBER 2, 2007 Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez is a resident of Los Angeles. He grew up in East Los Angeles, where he developed his distinctive graffiti style. He received formal art training at Guadalajara University of Art in Mexico and California State University and Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Before devoting his time to painting, he worked as a commercial artist in the film and advertising industries. His work is represented in major private collections and museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the De Young Museum in San Francisco. 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: Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez, interview with Karen Davalos, September 25, 27, and 28, and October 2, 2007, Los Angeles, California. CSRC Oral Histories Series, no. 5. 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 Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez. 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 CHARLES “CHAZ” BOJÓRQUEZ September 25, 2007 .......1 September 27, 2007 ......48 September 28, 2007 ......98 October 2, 1007 .......153 SEPTEMBER 25, 2007 Karen Davalos: This is Karen Davalos with Chaz Bojórquez, and today is September 25, 2007. We’re in Highland Park. Chaz Bojórquez: Yes. KD: And I just wanted to start with some basic questions about your childhood experience, where and when you were born, and a little bit about your family. CB: Yeah. I think you can say if there is a definition for Chicano, what it is, I qualify. I was born here in Los Ange- les, down in Chinatown, right on Sunset and Beaudry. And as a child we moved from there when I was one years old, just further up there at the Arroyo Seco River, just the branch of the river up into Highland Park. So I’m just, like, two and a half, three miles from downtown LA up where we were. My parents—I’m fourth generation. Well, [it’s] sort of like mixed up. Because my grandparents—my grandfather and grandmother were—he was an American. He was half Mexican and half Basque in Arizona, and [came] around the turn of the last century. And then my grandmother had English, and she was from Guanajuato. And she had English and Indian blood in her. And my grandfather had Papago. That’s one thing about being Chicano: we all have pride in our European ancestry, but we all could also name our tribe. And I don’t know a thing about being Papago, but I do have a lot of pride. It gives me my sense of place, of where I live. I’m not European. I’m from here. [laughter] I always tell people, “When the Aztecas marched from Utah, down to Mexico City from Aztlán to Mexico City, they also turned around and marched back.” So I feel that that immigration is still going on today, and I claim my native cultural land- scape, my Aztlán Hollywood—because I was really raised in LA with a huge Hollywood movie, West Coast, surfer, sushi eating background. And that’s my part of my culture defining who I am as a Chicano. In some ways, Chicanoism defines my Americanism. KD: What do you mean? CB: What kind of American am I? I’m a Latino American, with culture from Mexico and Europe. And my grandparents—the ones that I said were American, [from] Arizona—they moved to Tijuana during the Pro- hibition and gave up their American citizenship. There was issues before that on my mother’s side about the family being shipped into Mexico during the riots and the strikes of the miners in Arizona. KD: In Arizona, right? CB: And right before World War II right around in there. I’ve been seeing it on TV. So on my mother’s side [they] were shipped to Mexico, but they were American citizens. KD: Oh, you mean the deportations [during] the Depression? CB: The deportations. Yeah. My mother’s side was deported to Mexico, and my mother would say she was a little girl, and everybody disappeared. And after a couple of months, everybody kind of came back and all that. The uncles and things, they all were able to come back to the United States. KD: Yeah. CB: And from there, they came to Los Angeles. So my mother’s family, she was a stepdaughter, and she had a stepsister. And she was raised—and her mother died early, in her twenties—TB. And the whole fam- ily migrated to Los Angeles. And they moved to the old Jewish section, Lincoln Heights. And in Lincoln 1 CSRC ORAL HISTORIES SERIES Heights, they lived behind the temple, the Jewish temple [on] Brooklyn Avenue. She would tell me all about the Jewish experience there in her early times. And about the pickles and the barrels, and about all the baseball teams, because East LA was—and downtown was all connected through baseball teams. KD: Right. CB: And then she would say later on, she went to Belmont High School. And her and her aunts [would] go down to the movie theaters, and she experienced the race riots of ’43. She was there in the theaters when the sailors came in. And she had been dating a sailor [laughter]—a Latino sailor—and who disappeared when she was in high school. He disappeared. Anyway, long story short, he came back into my mom’s life in her late sixties, early seventies, and they remarried. And so my mom has been married for about eight years now with this old boyfriend who was a sailor from those times. Long story short, my mother experi- enced the riots, and she said how the sailors came in and grabbed the young Latino men and hauled them outside, and stripped them of their clothes, and burned their clothes and beat them up. And she was very much influenced by that, not having anger, but feeling very sorry for what she saw, feeling that these are our people that it was happening [to], but also understanding that she didn’t live in East LA. And I said, “Mother, it was. East LA was three miles away.” KD: Yeah. CB: She says, “But those three miles were across the river. It was another country in East LA.” KD: Yeah. CB: So she said she never really connected to Chávez Ravine, which was just three blocks away. She said, “No, we were Belmont,” and she felt that she was raised in a very Anglo culture. She didn’t see the divisions of the Latino or the brown and white cultures as much from Belmont.