Olga - RL #3 - 9/18/88 Interview Murals

This is the interview with Olga or Lourdes and it is 9 18 88 and this is real number 3.

Ask anything and please tell us.

Okay.

I just have like 3 more questions and then you guys can ask some questions.

I wanted to get back to what you were talking about the immigration.

The way you were describing it just almost sounded like the Gestapo or something and like this kind of sense of fear in the community and I guess if you could kind of describe a little more for people who might not really understand what you're talking about and way in which the murals tie into a voice against that when they were first showing up.

I think I could tell you about a personal example because the magnitude of fear that it created is the kind of fear that you experience when you're very young and that as you get you learn how to suppress that intensity of fear.

When the people that I knew came to the United States that did not have legal papers were people who literally were starving back home and they knew that they had to make it somewhere and once they were here they literally didn't have money to go back.

So they often they left their families in Mexico.

They often had 8 kids or more and they were really people that were starving.

Where the kids went to bed hungry, they didn't wear shoes, they lived in very crowded conditions.

So that was the motivation for them to try something as daring as going to another place, particularly a place where they weren't sure whether they were going to be accepted or not, whether they would be seen as human beings or not.

That was the motivation to come here.

Since to work it was required that you be a citizen or at least a permanent resident here.

These people had to lie.

They didn't either present some fake papers, documentation.

So what stood, the adversary in this thing was the immigration man because he was the one that had the power to send them against their will back to Mexico.

That would mean that their children continued to suffer and their families.

The rumors kind of spread out.

Okay, this is the man who frees you, so how do you recognize this man and what can you do to avoid him? Well, they came in different disguises so you never knew who was an immigration person or who could possibly report you.

And it was often in factories, everybody kind of knew who didn't have papers.

So they got the hint if you got a low salary, it's because they knew that they hired you.

And the lowest of salaries was still a lot better than working in Mexico.

So the person who could report you to the immigration could be anybody that was just angry with you for that.

And it is a practice, I think, probably still is, that you're hired, they know that you are illegal, they pay you the least amount they can pay you, and before you can qualify for benefits, they call the immigration and say, oh, we think we have some people here, and they just come and pick you up.

He had a distant relative who, when I was growing up, when I was in Mexico, used to take me out horseback riding and was kind of a very nice guy.

Very funny, very energetic, very extroverted, kind of happy, a relaxed guy.

He got married, had lots of children, was in trouble.

We had a very bad drought around that.

I think it was the 1950s, 1960s in Mexico, so a lot of people could not support themselves from agriculture.

And so you have a big group that comes to the United States looking for a job.

He was working and someone reported that he was illegal.

And my mother took me to the immigration office to translate, to try to at least negotiate that he would go on his own, but enough so that he could at least pick up his things, his clothes, and be sent back to Mexico.

Because literally, they could just pick you up and the clothes you had on, back you go to Mexico.

So here, whatever you were working with, if you put money in the bank, you left your bank account, you left everything.

So you returned worse off than before, which was a very humiliating experience to return worse off than before.

So we went there, and what I remember was seeing this man.

He was behind bars and his face had dropped.

And it was like it no longer had life to it.

His shoulders drooped.

He didn't look at me anymore in the face.

And all he talked about was how he wished he wasn't alive.

That, for me, I was, I felt such a sense of loss that I had known this person.

This was the person that did things with me that was made me feel good and alive and happy.

And he was so depressed.

And at that moment, it occurred to me that our roles had changed.

All of a sudden, I was the powerful one that had at least some chance of getting him something negotiated.

And I experienced it as such a heavy burden.

Also, I experienced a sense of terror from seeing the adult be so afraid and feeling so hopeless.

That feeling, I think, was what the community continues to have, because I'm sure there's legal stuff.

In the community is that you see people that you admire looking like that, afraid of this sense of terror in their eyes.

And for those of us who were the translators who were a lot younger, I did a lot of this translation between the ages of 12 and 18.

It mythifies the immigration person.

Immigration man becomes a larger -than -life bigger enemy that has great powers.

So in the unconscious, I think, of the community, even though they're aware that the laws have changed such that any abuses are minimized, that's what still hangs, the sense of terror towards this person.

And I think it's been passed on through what the translators witnessed.

I have this impression of this community that has this fear, that it had no voice.

And then, like the murals, it was...

That's right, you asked me to see whether there was any connections or check to see if there...

I think there is one mural that depicted, I guess, a version of the immigration man and someone in chains.

You did see people, they were handcuffed as criminals.

That's the other thing that I heard people say that was so dehumanizing, that you were a criminal for going out and daring to try to work towards making things better for your family.

That was very dehumanizing.

The experience was dehumanizing.

You were a criminal, not because you killed somebody, not because you robbed somebody.

The usual things that made you a criminal, that association was very humiliating.

And a process that I think is universal is when you are in terror of something, the first thing is you try to identify it.

And then you try to make it seem less, because it seems larger than life initially.

You try to bring it down to size, something you can handle.

When you put it in the murals, if you make a large figure of this immigration person, immigration man, it transmits that sense of larger -than -life force that you have to fight.

I would imagine that as a community becomes comfortable with this or feels that they can master this, the immigration man will decrease in size in either the literature or paintings.

But being able to identify it, that's the first step.

And I think that has occurred.

And that it's not an alien force.

I didn't intend to pun, but it's something you can contend with and deal with.

Murals identify the forces that were acting in the community that were either distressing or that were positive.

I haven't seen any murals lately.

I wonder how the immigration person has evolved.

I'll be curious.

This is what I was going to ask you, moving up to today.

They're still doing a lot of murals.

I'm sure the images and things change.

It seems like you're living this really bi -cultural experience.

When you do see the murals, the experience you're having now is the next step.

Is reflected in the murals? Do you still see yourself reflected in the murals? Some of the ones that I can identify with or relate to are the ones that speak of unity and brotherhood, which there are some.

The ones about morelos that had the historic figures, there's less.

That initial impact is gone.

I think the ones that I now relate to better and the ones that I would like to see painted are ones that speak of community, brotherhood, and communicating.

I would see it as something negative if those murals stay the same.

The new ones that were being painted had the same themes.

I would be concerned that what that meant was that in the community people still felt that those forces were there, alive and kicking and healthy and making people's lives miserable.

I don't think murals will come up if people were happy.

If murals were painted, people were happy.

They wouldn't, unfortunately, even writing on a personal basis and from what I've talked with other people, the art forms seem to generate rapidly during periods of great trouble, periods of transition.

The community is evolving.

I think there's a lot of concern about...

I get the sense that we're at the step where we feel good about ourselves.

We do feel that we have something to contribute.

There's still that fear of being engulfed in another culture.

Recently, a Mexican -American writer wrote on, I think it was Newsweek or Times, a very nice article or essay that I think captures that feeling of there's still the fear of being engulfed by another, losing your culture.

That tension is going to be there.

But as long as there's acceptance of differences between the cultures, that's certainly a better step than before.

Then there's using the differences to really abuse.

There was a lot of abuses that occurred.

Some of the new murals reflect that sense of we can be a true community, accept the differences, and use them for the benefit of the whole.

But we're not there yet.

I think it's still an image that is still very much a fantasy, but partly.

Take that back, partly a fantasy still.

An ideal.

That's the thing we didn't talk about was that I think there is a process in evolution, evolving or developing of an individual or a community, where you really dream yourself up.

You dream what you want to be, and unless that dream, if that dream doesn't occur, you're not going to evolve, you're not going to develop.

We dream ourselves as communities, as individuals.

We dream what we want to become.

The murals have that.

This is where we're at, and this is what we'd like to be, we'd like to be a unified community.

For those who are interested in political activities, we see it as we've got to translate those dreams into a form that we live as opposed to just imagine.

Those murals are the world of dreams.

Either the dreams of a glorious past or the dreams of a possible better future for our children.

Anything else? That was a beautiful one.

Okay, someone else can ask questions if you're still up for answering questions.

Okay.

Susan, that was really beautiful about the dreams.

I thought that maybe you could look at a couple of murals and talk to us about what some of the specific images in the murals make you think of.

You just mentioned chains, and that's a real popular image in a lot of murals.

Chains used in different ways.

Let me just tell you what I have.

I have some of Casaslan, and I have one of Cisipoide, Reforma, which has some chains in it.

I could get out the chain picture from here.

I don't know if we can talk about some specific...

Okay, so you can just sort of look at that.

Is that the exterior that you remember originally? Okay, this was much later.

Initially, only the inside was painted, and this was after they repainted some of the inside.

I think this is still there.

Mm -hmm.

Do you like that one? I like that one.

These are...I love the colors.

I love the colors and also the edges, which would recognize as being present in sarapes and lots of clothing.

The...which was the main figure, the one with the...looks like the...the spiked, which I believe represents one of the gods.

That's kind of a...was difficult to recognize initially.

It just looked very different.

It was only if you look very carefully at some of the pictures or if you visited the rooms in Mexico and some of the temples in the Mayan areas, do you recognize it as even being a god.

But that's one of our criticisms that we had about it, is that you couldn't recognize it as well.

But it was a version of...when these were painted again, the people wanted something that were kind of copies of what they knew, because that was home, and they wanted pictures of home, postcards of home.

And so any variation was kind of seen like, you know, that's not very good, you know.

And so that was one of the criticisms about this one, is that you can't recognize it.

What's that, you know? It's...in retrospect, if I'd been the painter, I would also like to add something to it, not just copy.

So let's see, I have a couple of the...of what's now on the inside, and I suspect they're different than what you remember.

I have like three, so let's start...this is sort of a big view of the room.

Alright, stick it in there, and we can push it down.

Another...an aside on that particular mural, the color was shocking to my friends from Yugoslavia and from the Ukraine.

They were too colorful.

They, however, liked the figures themselves, and this particular...these figures were not as...they're not threatened.

Again, I wonder about the choices, because the majority of the community at that point was still Ukrainian and Yugoslavian.

So they had a say so as to what the murals would depict, too.

This is from the inside of Kasa and Slan? That's what's there now.

Okay, these are harder to...for me to recognize.

These were not the original ones, I don't think.

At least not this part.

The ones of what looks like panchavilla or zapata, that part was there.

But the front one where you see this man with some ropes, people pulling, was not one of the original ones.

I can't see it very clearly, so I don't have a lot of comments about it.

Let me just show you one other one that's a close -up of one of the panels.

I was wondering, that one maybe was there.

Yes, that was there.

They left...it was the front that they repainted, the side again.

This was during a period that people seemed to accept whatever was kind of like a postcard of home.

The style in which these are painted are very reminiscent of some of the murals that were done in Mexico and Guadalajara.

So it was basically sort of like taking a picture of a place at home, from home.

The remarkable thing about this painting is the strength that you see in the figures.

Even for people who don't know who these men are, I think that the colors and the way they're positioned is a sense of...you get a sense of strength.

Plus, they're also...one of the figures is holding the...like a machete.

Holding it up, not towards you, which was very wise not to paint something like that.

Someone who's ready or cheering themselves for war or protest, which was what the community felt we were doing at the time.

It's interesting.

I had not looked at these for a while.

I really love them, actually.

They are, they're really strong.

They're strong figures.

Let me show you one.

I think I told you we used to have meetings there.

So being surrounded by these strong people, it'll give the meetings a sense of electricity, of charge that we were going to be able to accomplish what we set out to do.

Even if it was just getting the garbage picked up.

It's okay.

It is a big accomplishment.

Do you remember that one? Yes.

This was one of the...this was, I think, painted a couple of years after the ones at Casa Aslan.

And this begins to depict...it's very little.

There's nothing subtle about it.

It says, si se puede, which is we can do it.

And again, the fist, fist of protest.

And the integration of the flags being side by side, the flag for the movement from Cesar Chavez, who was at that time probably our local hero.

That is, someone in the United States who was a hero who was recognized by people who had started a movement, a protest.

So the flags that was used and played side by side with the Mexican flag, and it's the old Mexican flag, which is unusual.

And that is where the eagle has its wings spread out, similar to the wings spread out of the Union flag, which I think in the mind of the observers, you see that parallel, that connection.

And again, Chavez was our success story.

So that association is very strong, not only by the caption saying that we can, but also making that association.

Again, the emphasis on the groups and people together can make a difference, or you can do it together.

Emphasis on unity.

The figures depict different colors, and they also depict both sexes, which is progressive.

In the Mexican murals, you do see women depicted there, but not as much, not so much at the front.

And this has a large figure of a woman at the front.

So again, the choice of those who came up with the concept to translate into a mural was emphasis on unity as opposed to together, we can do it, which I don't know if it's a theme that you see in other murals in other countries.

You mean the fist also is determination? Yes.

See, I take it for granted that that's what it means.

Well, I think you mentioned a second or two before, fist being protest, This is a double -edged sword.

Yes.

It's a sign of protest, but also a firmness that you will, I guess you say determination, but firmness is what, that you are ready to fight if necessary, that you will stand firm as well.

Resolved? It's not resolved at all.

It's again, it's a protest, supposed to an open hand, which will, it's greeting, it's saying it's meant to make a person comfortable if this is to produce the opposite effect of making a person uncomfortable.

This is a sign of war, a sign of protest.

I have one other quick question about Sisi Puede.

Do you think everybody who saw that mural from the community would recognize the UFW flag, you know, the Cesar Chavez flag in there? People in my generation would.

So when they saw that eagle, they would just say, ah, you know, that's the farm workers, and this is Cesar Chavez.

Our generation, that is, people that went to high school with me, that went to grammar school with me, we were pretty much involved in the sense we knew that there was a boycott of lettuce or a boycott of different vegetables, and we participated in that.

We did.

Again, as a translator, you have a lot of power.

Since you're aware of these things going on in general, because you listen to radio and TV, then you can just tell your parents, you can tell them, you know, this is going on, and I got my parents not to violence.

It's been a strange experience for me growing up, I tell you, being a translator.

This was the one that people had mixed feelings about, where it has morelos and the open, and it's hard to, I suppose it's a dove.

People wonder whether it was an eagle or what.

The other eagle that's in this mural is the one that is, the one that's used in the Mexican flag.

So these are all symbols that one is familiar with, but there's that mixture, and it's of the old symbols tying the more traditional thinking with, I think, the new hope.

And this one, basically, the hope is the way I would interpret it or the way I interpret it, and I'm trying to give you a combination of both my impression when I first saw this as a teenager and now looking back at it.

It was the hope for peace.