Down These Mean Streets

The very first story in “The Republic of East L.A.,” a collection of short fiction by Luis J. Rodriguez, opens with the arresting image of a limousine parked at a curb in Boyle Heights, one of the byways of the barrio that Rodriguez calls “East Los.” The limo, a universal symbol of wealth and privilege, is seemingly out of place in a neighborhood that shelters the poor and powerless.

“The unshaven men gather around to put words together about this wonder on the roadway, to excavate a new vocabulary for this intrusion that seems to smirk at their poverty, to lay like a diamond on a garbage-strewn lot,” muses the narrator of the story titled “My Ride, My Revolution.” “But still, it’s kind of their hostage.”

Rodriguez himself is devising a language that will enable him to describe the experience of the barrio to his readers, and he delights in exploring the cross-wired cultures that sizzle and pop on the streets of East Los Angeles. The limo driver, whose voice we hear in “My Ride, My Revolution,” for example, is both Mexican and Indian and proud of it. “We’re known for taking on the Aztecs--the Mexikas--back before the conquista.” He plays in a “rap and rock” group called La Cruz Negra (The Black Cross) whose songs are rendered in “mostly unintelligible English.” And he announces that his favorite books include the Bible and works by Black Elk, Marx and Jung, even Stephen King.

“I have a spiritual curiosity that isn’t just to fill in the voids,” the young man declares, presumably voicing the author’s own credo. “[I]t’s the satisfaction one gets from learning about the vibrant universe of arts, words, images and ideas that human beings have created over time.”

But Rodriguez understands that a terrible price is paid when, for example, the bearers of a rich and ancient culture are tempted to abandon La Virgin de Guadalupe and embrace a pop singer named Madonna. The point is made in “Shadows,” the story of a promising young man who ends up sprawled on the corner of 1st and Soto streets, clutching a bottle and begging the passersby for spare change.

“What they saw wasn’t just a strange broken man in a strange broken body,” Rodriguez observes. “He was the specter of their deepest aches, a reminder of what happens when you leave so much of the old for the new.”

But he also shows us figures of valor and courage. “Las Chicas Chuecas,” for example, is the tale of a young woman called Noemi, one of the “troubled girls” at Garfield High, who survives and ultimately prevails over the stresses that result from an absent father, a heroin-addicted mother, a sister whose murder she witnesses at the age of 8 and a rape that results in pregnancy. She is running with a gang--Las Chicas Chuecas means The Bent Girls--and Rodriguez explains that they were “pushed into all kinds of shape by forces stronger than their innocence could withstand”--but Noemi ultimately finds a way out.

“Their hearts were bent,” writes Rodriguez, “but not broken.”

At the end of the book, we come upon a story that offers, at last, the grace and redemption for which he and his characters search so insistently. “Sometimes You Dance With a Watermelon” introduces us to Rosalba and Chila, a woman and her granddaughter and invites us to accompany them on an excursion to the fruit stands of the Grand Central Market. Rodriguez has already shown us the journey that took Rosalba from a poor but decent life on a rancho in Mexico to the mean streets of Los Angeles, but nothing quite prepares us for the magical moment when Rosalba dances down Broadway with a watermelon balanced atop her head.

“Rosalba swayed back and forth to a salsa beat thundering out of an appliance store,” Rodriguez writes. “She danced in the shadow of a multi-storied Victorian--dancing for one contemptuous husband and for another who was dead. She danced for a daughter who didn’t love herself enough to truly have the love of another man. She danced for her grandchildren, especially that fireball Chila. She danced for her people, wherever they were scattered, and for this country she would never quite comprehend.”

Rodriguez is best known for his memoir of gang life, “Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.” His more recent experiences working with “at risk” adolescents in San Francisco were the inspiration for his manifesto of community activism, “Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times.” But he is, first, always and above all, a poet and a storyteller, and the tales he tells in “The Republic of East L.A.” are elevated and enriched by his gifts.

Posters are usually relegated to the “margins of art,” as one of the contributors to “Just Another Poster?” puts it, if only because the poster has been used so often and so forcefully as an instrument of protest and political activism. Indeed, the very name of one of L.A.’s own cultural landmarks--Self-Help Graphics, an art collective in East Los Angeles--says as much about building a sense of community and promoting self-esteem as it does about making art.

“The poster exists somewhere between the unique art object and the mass media,” explains Chon A. Noriega, editor of “Just Another Poster?,” which serves as the catalog of a traveling exhibition organized by the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara. “It blends the formal qualities of both in order to reach an audience neither cares about: urban exiles in search of community.”

The point is made in each of the various essays collected here but nowhere more forcefully than in the 56 color plates and various other incidental illustrations that decorate the fully bilingual text. The skeletal figures in a 1975 poster by Ricardo Favela, for example, evoke the iconography of Mexican folk-art while reminding the viewer that the Chicano community in California represents something rich, new and potent: The poster is the work of a Sacramento art collective called the Royal Chicano Air Force and proposes that the making of art is an alternative to the gang life.

So, too, does Herbert Siguenza use the traditional imagery of loteria cards in a 1986 poster titled “Drogas y SIDA” (Drug Abuse and AIDS), which shows that love, life and family are imperiled by the bottle and the needle. “No juegues loteria con tu vida” is the plain-spoken message, printed in both Spanish and English: “Don’t play lottery with your life.”

Of course, many of the poster artists aspire to be fine artists, too, and their work is not always overtly political. But even when they seek to transcend the wall poster, they are still rooted in tradition and they still make artful use of deeply familiar imagery. In a 1988 silk-screen titled “La Ofrenda” (The Offering) by Ester Hernandez, for example, the image of the Virgin as depicted in religious art appears as an elaborate tattoo on the back of an otherwise contemporary young woman.

“The Chicano poster’s immediacy and portability, which had made it invaluable as a political tool,” concludes Tere Romo in an essay titled “Points of Convergence,” “also made it a perfect vehicle for imaging the cultural reclamation process.”