Scene one, take three.
Jose, you said once that your art was influenced or maybe some of your political feelings were influenced by things you saw in San Antonio, the Alamo and the fact that those heroes weren't really your heroes.
Can you tell us about that? Well, see, the heroes of the Alamo are not heroes at all to nobody in my mind, most especially to the Mexican people because they were occupying the country, see.
So those are the Alamo plus whatever else they got there or mostly like symbols of reaction, you know, to the Mexican people and to a lot of other people, but mostly to the Mexican people.
They don't see it as a monument, you know, to heroism, but to oppression, you know.
Has that influenced your art, what you think? Well, political art, that's only a small part of it, you know, the political art evolves from seeing whatever happens around the world, you know, or even here in the U .S.
Do people respect the murals out in the community in a special way? Well, most of the murals are painted like Spaulding in North and Kastner in 26th Street.
People leave them alone.
They usually don't deface them or anything like that.
For instance, I wanted Spaulding.
It's got graffiti all around it except on the mural, you know.
So people usually leave them alone.
They respect them, yeah.
Why do you think that is? Well, because a lot of times the people participate in them, you know, and they identify as part of the community.
You had talked about not thinking of yourself as an artist or not wanting to be called an artist.
What did you mean? Well, mostly as a member of the working class, I'm a culture worker, you know, because artists can cover a lot of things, you know, like Andy Warhol or people like that, you know.
And they come from different classes, you know, so I would say to me I consider myself a cultural worker, you know, as opposed to artist.
How are you treated differently in the community because of your work? No, because I consider myself more a cultural worker than an artist.
I'm treated just like one of the people there, see, or like here, you know, I'm just a worker here, you know.
I just work for everybody else, so they say you just work for us, you know.
But you mentioned, you told us a story about being the mural man, people calling you a mural man.
Can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, that's 26th Street because I've been going there every year, you know, so instead of saying the artist or the guy who's painting on the wall, he says they refer to me as a mural man, you know, the man who works on the wall, you know.
Have you seen the results of your murals in terms of what you painted and you shoot? Scene one, take four, roll three.
How do the murals affect the feelings and opinions of people in the community? Well, for one thing, a lot of them are anti -drug, you know, or anti -gang, whatever, so a lot of times, especially young people, especially the ones that help, would say, well, this is a good way of doing things and a good way of thinking, you know, instead of using crack or heroin or whatever, the mural sort of invites them to think in a different sense, you know.
That drugs are negative or that gangs are negative or whatever the issue is.
If you could paint a mural anywhere you wanted on any subject, what would you paint and wear it? What would I paint? Well, I've been doing stuff in schools and churches and there's a church on North Avenue that the guy wanted to paint and I would like to paint the altar and it would deal with, you know, people in the community and what they do as compared to other people around the world, which a lot of times there's a lot of things in common with people here in Chicago or El Salvador or Guatemala or whatever, Ireland or the Middle East.
It's a nice idea.
Are the murals changing since you've been involved? Do you see different techniques, different things? Well, the techniques are advancing, you know, because before they used to do it like collage, they just put up the pictures without taking into consideration the geometrics or taking into consideration the spectator, how he would look at it.
They would just place a picture like a large painting, but now the people are advancing to a more advanced way of doing it so the spectator can see it from different angles and still appreciate it.
Who are the muralists? Is there a certain kind of person who's a muralist or do you come from all different backgrounds? Well, they're from all different backgrounds because, like the guy I was working with at one time, the one that I was working as an apprentice with, he teaches at Amherst.
He's an artist known around the world.
His name is John Weber.
So it's from different walks of life that people paint, paint murals.
But basically they all have political ideas.
Murals, especially murals are political.
They're not just mere decorations.
Mm -hmm.
How did you get into painting murals? Well, because in the 60s.
I should just wait a moment.
Yeah, he was just.
Okay, now we can.
When I met John, we were doing like cartooning.
So he was doing murals and he asked me if I wanna help him to learn the technique that he knew in doing large areas as opposed to small canvases.
And I started working with him.
Then I picked it up on my own.
What do you think is the most important thing a mural can do? Well, like in this case, in the case of this mural, it can make people think that they can do bigger things than just paint the whole flat.
You know, like you saw Bernie doing the lines.
This is a way of introducing a new form.
And it makes people think of different colors and that there's other ways of doing things besides the same way they've been doing it before.
Why is it, do you think that murals are such a strong part of Hispanic culture and tradition? Well, it's not really, in my opinion, not confined just to the Hispanic.
Though the people who brought it to the highest form were Mexican artists, you know, like Diego Rivera and Orozco and Cicero.
So they identify mural art with them.
But actually, mural artists at this point has gone beyond that being just Hispanic.
It's not Hispanic only.
It's, you see it at the Board of Trade Building downtown.
You see it at the Expressway over there on, what's the name of it? Expressway? The Kennedy.
And different places you see it in.
So it's not just, well, this one right here, you know.
But it does seem like you see more in the Hispanic neighborhoods.
Do you have a feeling about why that is? Because when they started doing them in the 60s, that's where they were confined to, you know.
And people would identify that it was art in neighborhoods such as, you know, poor neighborhoods or slum neighborhoods.
That was identified with that then.
Especially coming from L .A., a lot of the people in L .A.
were doing it in their communities, the barrios, as they call them.
And so of course they identified with the Hispanic community.
But now I don't think that can be said, you know, because it goes beyond being just Hispanic.
You see people doing murals downtown at the fancy store, what do you call it? Bloomsdale, whatever, you know.
Doing mosaics and different forms of art.
It's mural, still mural, but it's being taken downtown instead of being confined to the neighborhoods.
How do you feel about that? You're making it cold.
That's okay, you can wait in here, I'm sorry.
Scene one, take five.
How do you feel about the transient quality of your work, the fact that it's outside and it can be affected by the environment or a building can be torn down? Well, see a lot of the murals that are being done outside now are being, we do them in a different way.
We use better paints.
We prepare the wall better.
We tuck point it, we have to be tuck point it, we tuck point it.
Scene one, take six.
Okay, it's really the same question, but what I'm trying to get at is.
About one step to your right, please.
What I'm trying to get at is the fact that they're not protected in a museum.
You put all this time in and they're outside.
If you could address that, how you feel about that.
They're not as protected? They're not as protected, they're out in the environment.
Well, those are the chances we take.
We do what we can to prepare the wall and then after the acrylic is put on, the acrylic's got a life expectancy of about 10 years without even being nothing done to it.
So when we do treat the walls with the polymer gloss or a protective, some people call it varnish, it's good for at least 20 years before it starts fading.
