Editor’s note: Amigos805 welcomes guest columns, letters to the editor and other submissions from our readers. All opinions expressed in submitted material are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the viewpoint of Amigos805.
“This passionate dedication to collect the artists’ stories and try to preserve their works is a love mission for me.”
Armando Vazquez.
By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor
As a child growing up dirt poor in Mexico I was raised by mostly women, my mother, my two beloved curandera abuelitas; Madre Elvira and Chavelita, along with four overly protective older sisters. Even as a kid I was amazed by the level of cooperation, love and support that they gave to one another each and every day. The matriarchs of the family knew if they were to survive, while their husbands, sons and other male relatives where toiling in the fields of El Norte, they had to work and live their lives in harmony and communion with one another, to fend off the ever present and real possibility of starvation and disease, along with all the horrors that poor, illiterate india “viudas” faced every day in our small village of Ahualulco. And so, they did, I was surrounded by love and affection my entire childhood. These Mexican women, the women of my family, were the original giants in life. These guerilleras in large part molded the man I am today. Mi madre sagrada and my godly abuelitas are now dead, but they are always in my thoughts and my prayers. God, I miss them.
I have written extensively about my family, both women and men, it is my way of keeping their lives, their history, and contribution to our family alive. It is my way of honoring their memory and keeping it fresh in my mind and heart. In writing about my family, I began to also think about other men and women that have come into my life and whose lives, struggles, and accomplishment have had a tremendous influence on my life. Recently the idea of interviewing, writing about, and memorializing the lives of these “giant” has become almost an obsession with me. I am 74-year-old, and I know my body, and it is telling me that I am running out of time. So, if I want to get this project going and make it come alive, I better get on it!
Another prime factor that that is pushing me to write about these “giants” is the fact that while there is infinitely more information out in the world today, our kids, our people have become addicted zombies to the gratuitous, superficial and the immediate gratification that the internet provide. In the process we are losing our greatest human qualities and traits of empathy, humility, compassion and our ability to love one another. Ironically, the more internet content we get, the more we become cold emotionless strangers to one another.
We in the United States, and I dare say, any where in the world that is possessed by the internet, are being drowned and poisoned by the propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies that are incessantly being streamed 24/7 worldwide. The internet, of course is both a curse and a blessing: it is the human beings that decide how they will deploy and use it.
So, my dear friends out there in Aztlan, and beyond, I will be contacting you, visiting you, and chronicling your wonderful life stories, and the contributions that you have made to our community and the world at large. I have had the honor and the privilege of rubbing shoulders with many wonderfully interesting, eccentric and hardworking activist giants in our community, and I want our children, our community and the world to know their stories.
Finally, and I believe most urgently, with many of my artist friends (and other eccentric friends) that I have known are now deceased. A couple of rather awful things seem to persistently occur shortly after the death of one of these artists, their glorious art work is thrown away and discarded as “junk”, and they are forever forgotten. As I am writing this, I can think of about 20-30 of my artist and activist friends who have had this dishonorable act “bestowed” on them upon their death. When I have been made aware of my artist friends’ deaths, I have tried to rescue as much art work and other artistic creations, from these now dead and discarded artists, that I could. I have always felt that my effort, to preserve these soon to be lost treasures, was never nearly enough.
This passionate dedication to collect the artists’ stories and try to preserve their works is a love mission for me. My passionate hope is that in preserving and memorializing both the artists’ lives and their glorious works, and then subsequently presenting these collective stories (it vision is that the presentation will be multi-disciplined; lectures, community events, film and video, art shows and convivios) to our youth, their families, our community, and all other addicted zombies currently being held hostage by our all-consuming internet can be as transformational for our community as it has been for me. By the way when I tune into the internet I seldom if ever see the giants, our giants, that I will showcase.
— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., founding member of CORE and the Acuna Art Gallery and Community Collective.