Harry Gamboa Jr. Finds That Single Iconic Frame
Harry Gamboa Jr. helped select and popularize ‘Chicano,’ a term that conveys a tenor of pride and cultural resistance. It replaces ‘Mexican-American,’ the categorization many felt was constructed by white American society — assimilationist. Half a century later, the multimedia artist, creative writer and activist sees his work as an extension of the ‘Chicano’ significance.
On July 3rd, a skywritten demand hung in the sky above the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, California:
NO ICE NO ICE NO ICE
The water-vapor words appeared and dissipated in all of 30 seconds, but their message was transmitted across the country: the installation was one of 80 that appeared above ICE detention centers, immigration courts, borders, and historical markers in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and New York City that afternoon. Coinciding intentionally with the weekend of July 4th to draw attention to the injustice activists consider indicative of American hypocrisy, the day of action was organized by In Plain Sight, a coalition of artists who describe themselves as “dedicated to the abolition of immigrant detention and the United States culture of incarceration.”
The cloud-like messages hung readable to protesters, artists, detention center employees, and detained individuals alike.
As the author of the “NO ICE” message, Gamboa Jr. made the two hour drive from LA to capture his portion of the sky in a photograph. The whole afternoon “was like a mirage,” he explains. For Gamboa, this work helped complete an artistic arc that began nearly 50 years earlier.
“I’ve grown up under the threat of death.”
Gamboa has been fascinated with precarity all his life. He grew up in 1950s East Los Angeles, which he says, “was apartheid, in a way.” Redlining, gentrification, and the construction of LA’s highways contributed to the segregation of the city’s Black and Mexican communities. This systemic and infrastructural inequality characterized the “constant threat of not having an education, of having my art destroyed,” Gamboa says.
“Mexicans are the only surviving people who have actually declared war on America,” he says, referencing the 1846 conflict known in the U.S. as the Mexican-American War, and in Mexico as the Intervención Estadounidense en México (translated as: U.S. Intervention in Mexico). “We live in America as occupied people, and are therefore never going to be forgiven.”
This constant struggle for survival is one that Gamboa learned as a child. In kindergarten he was forced to wear a dunce cap because he only spoke caló, a code-switching Spanish he calls “the language of resistance.” His elementary school classmates suffered from fatal leukemia and renal failure, symptoms of the fallout from the United States Department of Energy’s nuclear tests, which began in Nevada in 1951, the year Gamboa was born. “My body is imbued with 2,000 unique radioactive signatures,” he writes in his 2020 collection of poems, Flower of the Dead. “It is why I glow so impatiently / Eternally.”
Throughout high school, Gamboa witnessed countless friends who were sent to, and never returned from, Vietnam. This helped shape his “ephemeral connection to school” even further, as did the “negative stereotypes and harsh, physical brutality” of non-white students. These were consequences, Gamboa says, of an overpoliced campus. In 1968, he led the East LA Blowouts, a series of school walkouts which protested this violence and the lack of resources in non-white public schools. Three years later, by then a developing organizer and artist, at an anti-police brutality march in Los Angeles, Gamboa was among the crowd shot at by uniformed County Sheriff Deputies. The attack wounded many, killing at least one.
Along with prominent political figures who were the targets of government surveillance, like Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, and Martin Luther King Jr., Gamboa’s name landed on COINTELPRO documents. The acronym was shorthand for the illegal FBI program that surveilled and violently disrupted the causes and lives of communities of color and political activists in the 1960s and 70s.
“Bad things could happen to people,” he says. “I realized I had to change my trajectory, otherwise I would end up in Leavenworth, or dead, or in the fields of Vietnam.” Leavenworth is a U.S. penitentiary in Kansas, known for holding activists like Leonard Peltier, a leader of the American Indian Movement and Frank S. Emi, a Japanese American who protested internment and encouraged other incarcerated Japanese Americans to resist the draft.
Art and language became Gamboa’s primary vehicles for activism and Mexican liberation, what he saw as a potentially lower risk way to agitate for change. He began by challenging vocabulary: by the 1940s and 50s, the term ‘Chicano’, and variations of it, had been used for decades within English- and Spanish-speaking vernacular as a classist and racist term to disparage working-class Mexicans. But beginning in the 1960s, inspired by and alongside the Black Power movement, young, West Coast Mexicans like Gamboa began to flip the term’s negative connotations. Whereas the term Mexican-American, writes scholar Ian Haney López, was meant “to convey an assimilationist ideology stressing white identity,” the term Chicano sought to reject this notion. Chicano became an ethnic, political, and cultural identity that embraced its own kind of empowerment, an end to anti-Mexican and anti-Black violence, and a hybridity of heritage. As Juan Bruce-Novoa, a professor at the University of California-Irvine, wrote in 1990, “A Chicano lives in the space between the hyphen in Mexican-American” (see Pat Mora’s poem, Legal Alien).
There was a fluidity to what the Chicano identity meant. In a 1970 piece for the Los Angeles Times called, “Who is a Chicano? And what is it the Chicanos want?,” journalist Rubén Salazar wrote, “A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.” Salazar, celebrated as one of the first mainstream journalists to cover the Chicano community, was killed six months later by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy Thomas Wilson during the National Chicano Moratorium March on August 29. In 1971, writer Armando Réndon published the Chicano Manifesto. In it, he writes, “I am Chicano. What it means to me may be different than what it means to you.”
Gamboa joined other activists — including Salazar, Rosalio Muñoz and Ramses Noriega, two prominent organizers of the National Chicano Moratorium March — in choosing ‘Chicano’ to convey a kind of ethnic and cultural pride, providing an empowering group term in defiance of the political and social marginalization, and colonization, of Mexican and indigenous peoples (Aztlán, the ancestral home of the Aztec peoples, is for some Chicanos a geographic symbol of identity; it is also the name of UCLA’s Chicano Research Center’s interdisciplinary journal).
“A line was drawn in the sand early on, and that was crossed over immediately.”
In 1972, Gamboa became a founding member of ASCO, a Chicano artist collective named after the Spanish word for disgust. The name was chosen “to denote our disgust with American capitalism, police violence, the Vietnam War, and that really set the parameters and stage, as it were,” Gamboa says.
ASCO’s conceptual and performance-based works sought not only to challenge and critique the traditional art canon, but to present parodies of a broken, anti-immigrant, anti-Chicano society. One of the collective’s inaugural works, Spray Paint LACMA, was a response to the LA County Museum of Art’s refusal to showcase Chicano artwork. Gamboa and fellow ASCO founding members Gronk, Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez signed their names on the museum’s white outer walls. They were erased an hour later, but not before their message was captured and enshrined on 35-mm film. Recollecting, Gamboa likens this spray paint from almost 50 years ago, as the genesis of this summer’s skyward water vapor.
“The moment that I was first publicly, broadly identified as an artist, came with the piece that we did called Spray Paint LACMA,” he says. “An iconic image took a lot of work to get it into the world. It’s self-sustaining, to then take it to the next level of writing in the sky.”
Taking ownership of anti-Chicano spaces has remained a common thread in Gamboa’s art, as is the tendency for his older works to maintain contemporary relevance. In the late 1970s, he turned his own childhood portrait, taken in a photo booth, into a character for an activist art series: Young Boy In The Fifties. The episodic pieces spoke of a young Chicano boy targeted in Los Angeles because of his immigrant status. He sent these photos, attached with writing, to newspapers, journals, and editors monthly, seeking to tell the stories that he felt mainstream media often did not.
“How do I attach an idea to an image that’s dispersed?” asks Gamboa. “If you leave it up to mass media, [a Chicano] is always someone who’s in the negative realm, as opposed to someone who is on the level of intellectual and creative endeavors as anyone else on earth.”
Graphic violence and biting media satire is ubiquitous in Young Boy In The Fifties. In 1977’s “No Slapstick” installment, under the headline “Serious Joke Injures Many; One Dead,” and paired with three identical photos of Gamboa as a young boy, he tells of an explosion that interrupted a party celebrating “the record breaking raids which have been used to deport large masses of undocumented and quasi-salaried workers from the Southwest.”
“Investigators are now attributing the disruption to a bomb which had been cleverly disguised to look like a high level INS official and have located a detonating device which had been placed underneath a party hat,” Gamboa writes. “A young boy in the 50’s was allegedly seen to be wearing the hat in question… Registered D.O.A. with 99.9% burns to the body, the boy is remembered for his role in killing 1977’s silence.”
Though his letters didn’t initially achieve widespread publication, to Gamboa’s surprise, his episodes had piqued the interests of independent collectors — Young Boy In The Fifties went from “just a little project” to a full exhibit at Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, in 1978.
In recent decades, Gamboa’s poetry, fiction, films and photographs have slowly made their way into museums and galleries in Los Angeles, across America, Mexico, and Europe. His works are no longer seen as solely ‘disruptive,’ gaining international recognition for both their beauty and message. Yet with this acclaim, Gamboa has had to negotiate identities forced upon him in the art sphere.
Less than ten years after his name was added to the COINTELPRO list, he received a National Endowment for the Arts, and was called a “great American” by Jimmy Carter.
“This was all very strange,” Gamboa says. “A couple years ago, Princeton University referred to me as an American artist. It was the first time in print I was listed as an American artist. I had gone from being a Chicano artist, to a post-war artist, to an American artist.”
Especially now that his art is somewhat more accepted in traditionally white spaces, Gamboa considers these labels an imposed Americanization that exert a cognitive dissonance towards what his art is saying. “It’s taken a lot of personal work and self-funding to reach out internationally to bounce back to American academia,” he says, explaining his need to clarify his Chicano identity within the American art canon. This effort has reminded him of the Mexican-American label and its connotations of ownership, particularly in the era Gamboa’s immigrant father lived through, wherein “you’d be better off identifying with white America than with Mexican culture,” says Gamboa, to avoid the country’s “harsh racism.”
“I’ve always been on somebody’s radar, and so my role has always been to contribute societally”
Gamboa’s photography represents some of his most celebrated work, communicating potent anti-establishment messages. In his 2018 fotonovela Aztlángst 2, Gamboa satirizes capitalism and surveillance with metaphors which, retrospectively, convey an eerie foresight: “I’m worried about psychological pandemics,” one man says, his words popping three-dimensionally on the photograph, graphic-novel style. “Who will survive the media frenzy? Where does self-sabotage begin and end? Run for your lives.” The fotonovela, all black and white, harnesses flashes of light and moments of unexpected blurriness. Its final text is equally as foreboding: “Take a quantum leap into the era of post-capitalism. Win-win or lose-lose.”
Gamboa feels that quantum leaps in mainstream perception are desperately required to erase prejudice and racist assumptions, and this has been the through-line of his 30 year-old, acclaimed photography series, Chicano Male Unbonded. Since 1991, he’s been photographing Chicano men on the streets of Los Angeles. The profile subjects — actors, artists, librarians, Gamboa’s own father — stare directly through the viewer, implicitly rejecting the notion that Chicano men are threatening objects to be appraised by external gazes.
“I’ve had people, when I’ve shown the work in various museums, come up and ask what gang it is,” Gamboa says. “Early on, in the early ’90s, I had a group of ten photographs in a museum, and I went out, dressed in black with my head shaved, and when I came back to the museum, they didn’t let me in. I looked too much like the guys on the wall.”
The motifs in Gamboa’s massive body of work are rooted in the in-between: the hyphen in Mexican-American, the purgatory between imprisonment and freedom, the lived experience between illegitimacy and acceptance. In his 1983 short story, INS and Outs, Gamboa writes of a Chicano man confronted on the street by two men from an unknown agency. He’s handcuffed on the sidewalk: “You are not under arrest,” says one man. “You are being restrained from continuing your activities on the basis that you do not appear to be a legitimate element of our society.” The man’s photograph is taken and his citizenship is questioned. It is only when he gives the men a photograph of Iris Chacón, the famous Puerto Rican dancer, that he is unshackled and free to go.
“How would a Chicano appear if you encountered them on the street at night?” Gamboa asks. “How would a policeman look at them? How would anyone look at them?”
With NO ICE, NO ICE, NO ICE, a message that has received significant attention online since July 3rd, Gamboa feels that he is realizing a goal of linguistic ownership. As he once did with white-walled museums, Gamboa hopes to infiltrate the country’s gated lexicon with Chicano words and messages of his own.
“This idea of introducing phraseology, or terminology, into the English language, has been my counter going all the way back to the dunce cap,” he says. The remaking of language is one form of Gamboa’s resistance.
Gamboa’s writing, which he describes as a “surrealist, dream, urban psychosis, a way of identifying and commenting on society and capitalism, and being Chicano, and surviving in a polluted environment,” has become even more explicit in recent years. As the pandemic continues to ravage the U.S, disproportionately impacting marginalized communities, Gamboa finds the Zoom app medium to be a stirring, literal example of what he strives with his art to accomplish.
“Now you’re an icon when you’re speaking. The whole notion is: how do you adopt, and become iconic?” he asks. “It’s by being iconic that you’re able to contribute societally.”
Harry Gamboa Jr. searches for what he calls a “single iconic frame.” He doesn’t need 24 frames per second, grand reels of film, the long length of cinema, or millions of dollars to create “the single frame you’re going to walk away with.” He needs spray paint. He needs clouds. He needs memories of a young boy in a dunce cap, his own bones.
In describing his career’s intention and goals, he sounds almost scientific. “The way I see it, is to add one single band to the visible spectrum. By doing that, as a mathematical equation, this fundamentally alters the spectrum. You have to recalculate, because now there’s something else that’s added.”
What he told me felt like it resonated with a stanza from the ending of Gamboa’s 1989 poem, Urban Decay Buffet:
“I have survived the commute / Only because / I drove against the / One way.”
