of that.
Just looking at what they experience and trying to understand what it is for illness in immigrant populations.
So I've done a lot of looking at that.
Since we're at the beginning of the real, could I just get you to say, just say real number two and then give us your full name? Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Um, sir? Yeah, just go ahead and say your real number.
Real number two, my name is Olga Nuno.
Okay.
You were talking about the details that bring people together.
Let's talk about that some more in terms of the murals, how they sort of brought the community together and also how they helped channel energy or what effect they had on the community.
Okay.
For some of the families, they became a topic of conversation.
And it allowed people to have something to start with as far as expressing their feelings.
I think for my parents, even though they came in, even had to live worse conditions than I did, they didn't talk about it.
They didn't talk about it.
Other people dealt with it by even trying to forget that they knew Spanish and just emphasizing their own English.
Or learning English and encouraging their children not to speak Spanish.
They wanted to belong.
We all wanted to belong.
But felt that we just were too different and couldn't fit.
And there were lots of signals that we didn't fit.
And for our family, or for me, I guess because I'm the analytical person in my family, I could use the murals.
I could talk to my dad and I said, you know, did you see what they're painting? They're painting morelos and would have discussions about how accurate, whether he looked like him or not.
And he then would go ahead and tell me stories about what he knew, what he had grown up to learn about these people that were in the murals.
So we got little history lessons from them.
The other nice thing that occurred was that not only within the family, but other families that we knew.
And we exchanged views of what was happening.
Looking at it back, I think it was just very difficult to talk about those initial experiences for my parents' generation.
It was just too painful.
And this was something on the outside that kind of reflected, it reflected at least their sense of oppression at times, their sense of the protests.
What they really wanted to do was protest.
And their hopes, because some of them did depict sort of a sense that there was a way out.
Certainly other ways.
And we talked about those.
Before that, there was this silence.
So for the people of our generation, it was very strange.
Our parents just didn't talk about those things.
And they expected a lot from us, too.
They felt that if you get education, you're going to know how to master whatever it is that we're experiencing.
You're going to make a difference.
But they didn't know how to guide us in our education.
So it was kind of a strange situation.
So having those things in common, nurtured communication.
And it was, I mean, so it's a strange sort of way, but it opened avenues for communication.
Not only within families, between families and between the community itself.
Because also, my teachers, probably until high school, most of my friends who were not Mexican or Puerto Rican or black were the teachers and the priests.
And a few girlfriends, one was from Yugoslavia.
She was curious about it.
So it gave us an opportunity to talk about some of the history of Mexico.
And I got to know a little bit about their history.
So we got interested in family roots, that sort of thing.
And they thought it was a strange thing to do, to paint these things.
But they saw some value to it.
They said, well, at least it's not graffiti, and it's a lot nicer than graffiti.
So they thought it was at least a more positive move on the part of the community.
So it was accepted.
Strange, it just hit me right now that indeed, not only was there enhanced communication between the different ethnic groups there, too.
Something to talk about.
Can you give us some kind of picture? I mean, there was a time there were no murals.
And then, can you describe that? Were they all of a sudden popping up? I mean, what happened? Yes, they seemed to all of a sudden start popping up.
I think that most of them were painted within either 1969 or 1975.
It was during that period, it seemed like a lot of unrest.
I think in the nation itself, there was a lot of unrest.
So it affected us.
There was more of a sense that we need to protest and things can change.
It's hard to know why, but from the perspective of the people who were there, from my experience, I think that the fact that this was a generation that had to make a decision about where they were going to put their energies and commitment, and they weren't so sure that going back to Mexico was going to solve it, and what we saw on TV or heard about in the newspaper, all of that, and our teachers, I know that the teachers I had were very progressive.
And it's very strange because I went to a very small school, but looking back, they were very progressive people.
There was an emphasis on getting people together.
And in the late 1960s, we experienced the riots, and we couldn't ignore them because our friends were black, we have black friends.
So it affected their lives, so it in turn affected us too.
And I think there was, you just couldn't ignore it anymore.
You couldn't ignore the problems anymore.
There had been at least 10 years, at least 10 years of people feeling like they were, of people suffering.
I don't know if every decade we kind of go through this re -evaluation, but it just coincided, it coincided with, it was a generation, I guess like in the rest of the United States, the most educated group of people also.
The contact with the different people from all different nations and backgrounds and cultures also created an atmosphere where people were looking at differences not as something threatening, not as something that you're less, you're worthless if you look different.
So we started feeling like, no, our parents are wrong.
We're different, but we're not inferior.
And this is our home.
We have to do something about it, improving our things at home.
I think that was happening in the black community.
I think they, I learned a lot from the black organization and their own movement to improve their situation as well.
And I think that the murals were just probably another form of communicating this.
Great advertising.
We couldn't afford putting ads on TV or radio or anything like that.
So this was a way of advertising, at least in the local community.
Another thing that they did, most of these murals I think were painted in centers, community centers like hall houses, churches, or the grocery store, you know, the market.
Those were all the places where people gathered.
So it was great advertising.
Or inspired or whatever by these murals.
That too is the strongest message.
Mm -hmm.
You had talked about being sort of an interpreter and a translator for your family when you were a kid.
And you told a story about going with your mother to the grocery store and sort of the difficulties of interpreting between two cultures.
And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little and maybe tie it to what you're doing today if in some senses you're still in the same position.
As a translator.
Yeah, I remember now we were talking about translation.
And I said that one of the advantages of pictures is that most people are universal.
And it takes a lot of the work out of translating.
As being the person that got the education, learned English, starting about 11 years of age I was basically responsible for making sure that, you know, be it telephone bills, anything where you needed to talk in English, was the translator.
Which to my parents it seemed like, you know, English, so it's going to be so easy.
So to give you an example, my father wanted me to, he had been a mechanic in Mexico.
So he bought this technical auto mechanics book.
And here I was, 11 years old, brought it home.
I said, well, okay, translate, tell me how to fix this thing.
I didn't know the names in English, much less in Spanish.
Certainly I couldn't tell him anything about process.
But it was just this naive belief that all he took was just knowing how to speak English and knowing how to speak Spanish and you got it, you know.
What they didn't recognize, and I didn't recognize initially because I was under the same naive notion, was that there were a lot of things that are not equivalent.
There are a lot of experiences that we call culture that are just, you don't find equivalents in a different culture.
Things like, as simple as different ingredients for foods, you know, you can't find them at the store.
Different concepts of what illness is, you know, what produces illness.
Different concepts as to what, how to solve things.
And you can't translate those kinds of things.
Sometimes you don't even have the words for it in Spanish, you just know they exist.
So there's not also the words in English.
So for me it was also a process of becoming familiar and also acculturated into American life, which I could do.
I was in a better position to do that.
And it was only when I became, I was more cultured, familiar with the American culture, that I think it improved my translation because then I could find words that would approximate.
Language, in the different languages, there's just many words that you will not find in others simply because of the differences in the collective experience, culture, whatever you want to call it.
So my very early, I became a little acquainted with legal terms.
It was very strange.
My parents didn't have names for it because they grew up in a rural community.
So I could never translate back what was being said.
My mother has always been interested in helping out the neighbor, we call her a local social worker.
So she always takes me to translate when someone was at the immigration office or to get some papers corrected or to the dentist or the doctor or when we went grocery shopping at Sears was the popular place.
It's really funny, behavior is very funny.
Places where you went and you were treated decently, then word of mouth got around.
You can go there, they'll treat you nicely.
There were other places where you went and they totally ignored you.
You stood there wanting to be waited and they would just ignore you.
Other places they would also, they may just ask you to leave.
We had experiences of going to a restaurant and not being waited on.
We'd have to leave.
So word got around as to where you could go and they would make an attempt to communicate with you and they would treat you nicely.
When now at this level that I'm involved in medicine, I find that I continue to be a translator.
Now I translate between one culture and another.
There's more interest in learning about the Hispanic, Mexican and Hispanic, which involves all the different cultures.
And so I continue to do that.
It was a very big challenge for me.
It continues to be a challenge.
I certainly feel like I'm just a beginner still.
But primarily, I think, it gave me a sense of mastery enough that I am in this field of psychiatry, which I see a lot of as in the area of mental illness or just difficulties with stressful life events or stress.
Because there's not the physical ways or signs.
We depend a lot on language.
We depend a lot on those subtle nonverbal kinds of things to communicate, to try to find out more, to try to see what the problem is so that we can start taking steps to resolve it.
So I see this all in the same.
So I think I approach medicine and psychiatry now with that same kind of attitude.
It's just a different language to learn.
And being open to different ways of doing the same thing, which I think the cultures are, it's helping me a lot.
So I just feel like it's natural for me.
I can make that assumption.
And again, what was, I make that assumption, that kind of explains as to why they were so accepted and why they popped up all over in just that brief span.
They had to reflect what people were feeling or thinking.
Or else why wouldn't they be defaced just like everything else? As a matter of fact, when there was some conflict or controversy, some of them did get defaced.
The ones that, according to certain groups, did not reflect the spirit of the community, those were defaced.
But in general, the ones that reflected what was going on, and I use spirit because it wasn't always something you talked about.
Those were the ones that stayed and are still there.
In Kazakhstan, the first ones that people didn't like, they were too political, they said.
So those were painted over.
The, just how in a random process, the ones that survived it, I think, at the least, are, it's because they reflect the spirit.
That non -verbal, non -physical thing that was going on.
There are murals now in other communities, I know that, and probably they were painted at the same time or around that time too.
And there, I look at those too, and I get the message, you know.
It's, that they're experiencing things like we did.
And it's made me more understanding of others, other ways of looking at the world.
They're pretty universal.
They started, again, when I was a kid in high school, they seemed like very personal.
Now I see that the themes are very universal.
I can say that those murals are not talking about any people that feel different, that feel like outcasts, that feel like they're not sure of themselves.
That have a lot of hopes and inspirations, and they want to let people know.
Because I think it's in the other, some of the ones that I've seen in other communities are in what were at one time or another very poor communities.
And that's where a lot of hope is needed, a hope of getting out.
So you think there's a correlation in between a poor community, a struggle, and this kind of expression? How would you describe that? I mean, the kind of expression where you're actually painting on walls versus other kinds of expression.
That's an interesting question.
Let me think about it a minute.
Well, thinking about it from being there, what we call emphatic experience.
Just think about it.
If you are feeling that you are either suffering or in a situation that's unbearable, and you feel helpless to do anything about it.
You engage the help of someone that you feel comfortable with, which is usually someone that looks like you, or things like you, or at least in some way makes you feel comfortable.
If that's not enough, you have to get more people involved.
And how are you going to get people involved when they have a different point of view, different language, different experience? What I would do is I would look for things that are universal, that are symbolic, but recognizable by others.
Music, the arts are it.
They're still it.
And another thing that is called folk arts that we haven't talked about is songs.
And there's a lot of songs that we heard during those times that were written that are kind of like counterpart of the murals, that they talked about history, famous heroes, whatever, and carry that message.
So for a community that's trying to communicate their experience, murals are acceptable.
They're recognizable by even people that have not gone through the same experience.
And they're very effective means, if only the fact that you're listening right here, I think.
And that someone took the trouble to take photographs of them is evidence for it.
In Mexico during the 1960s, there was a lot of troubles, too, and dissatisfaction with the government.
A lot of those popped out, too, in Guadalajara.
Places where you'll find them will be universities.
And they were seen initially as protests, and often they were painted and repainted.
And some of the people, artists that painted them were very politically, and they were political, too.
And I think perhaps the artists that painted these had that in mind.
But the choices, I think, were unconscious.
It ties too neatly to be something that was planned, manipulative, as maybe some of the commercials on TV maybe.
But it was people who were listening and looking at non -verbal kinds of information that just basically captured it in a form that could be understood by others outside the group.
Yeah.
