IMAGES OF A LOST LATINO L.A.
REYNALDO RIVERA’S PHOTOGRAPHS DOCUMENT THE ARTISTS AND TRANS PERFORMERS OF A DISAPPEARING CITY
REYNALDORIVERAdidn’tpickupacamerawith the intention of making art. The Yashica he retrieved from a pile of his father’s things was a way of bringing order to a peripatetic life that had him bouncing between the care of his mother, his grandmother and his father, between Mexicali and Los Angeles, between Stockton and San Diego de la Unión, a small, agricultural outpost in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. “I did it out of this need to have something stable in my life,” he says. “Photography makes time stand still. And for someone who has had a crazy life, hectic and
moving (I left home when I was very young), it gave me some kind of normalcy . ... It allowed me to freeze time in moments that were special to me, and I was able to relive them over and over.”
Those frozen moments are the slivers of Los Angeles of the 1980s and ’90s, pieces of city that no longer exist or have been rendered unrecognizable.
For Rivera’s L.A. was a city of $300 apartments and low-budget art happenings. It was a singer roaring into a mic at a house party. It was a turbaned performer swaddled in feathers, staring imperiously at the camera.
These intersecting worlds all materialize in the artist’s beguiling new photographic monograph, “Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City,” published by Semiotext(e) last month. Its images also make an appearance in the Hammer Museum’s biennial, “Made in L.A. 2020: a version,” which has yet to open due to the pandemic. (Rivera’s photos, along with a video piece, are featured in the biennial’s parallel shows installed at the Hammer and at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens.)
The book gathers 190 images from Rivera’s early career, a time when he was avidly recording his milieu for no purpose other than his own. Rivera photographed artists,
writers and curators hamming it up at apartment parties, post-punk bands rocking club stages and Latino drag queens and trans performers in shining gowns putting on resplendent floor shows in oldschool Silver Lake bars. It’s a milieu that, like Los Angeles, is largely Latino — straddling both sides of a border along with its in-between states.
Rivera, whose career has been as peripatetic as his life, has shown his work infrequently. But as L.A. has evolved and the neighborhoods he once frequented have been gentrified — and the Latino presence in those neighborhoods has been overwritten — he says he felt an urgency to publish a record of the city as it once was.
“To find things about Latinos, you have to read other people’s footnotes,” he says. “I wanted a book about us in L.A. where we are not the footnote.”
In this monograph — his first — Rivera not only makes Latinos the centerpiece, he brings nuance to visions of Latino life in Los Angeles.
U.S. pop culture industries often reduce the Latino to archetypes: the laborer, the cholo, the long-suffering matriarch. Rivera explodes those blinkered visions with a textured rendering of a polyglot Latino bohemia, all of it within view of the mountain where the Hollywood sign lords over Los Angeles.
black-and-white images chronicle now well-known figures from the L.A. art world at moments when many of them were coming up. Conceptualist Daniel Joseph Martinez is seen chatting in a kitchen as Rivera’s sister, Herminia Rivera, observes. Painter Roberto Gil de Montes poses playfully amid garden statuary. Curator Rita Gonzalez, who now heads the contemporary art department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is shown, hands on hips, facing down the camera in an Echo Park apartment. Performance artists Marcus Kuiland-Nazario and Vaginal Davis are captured in unscripted moments before and after their shows.
Interspersed with these images are photographs that Rivera took in working-class nightspots throughout the same era, places like La Plaza, the Silverlake Lounge and Mugy’s, which catered to largely queer Latino clienteles of all ages and genders.
In these spaces, cross-dressing impersonators and trans performers staged elaborate shows that paid tribute to Mexican singers such as Yuri, Gloria Trevi and Paquita la del Barrio, women who crooned about love and heartbreak and the exuberance of big hair. (When the pandemic hit, La Plaza and the Silverlake Lounge were still going — albeit with a shifting, increasingly white customer base; Mugy’s, once located in Thai Town in East Hollywood, no longer exists.)
Amid all of the pageantry, Rivera found intimacy.
Thanks to Miss Alex, a performer whom the artist befriended early on, he gained access to the dressing rooms at these venues, where he recorded private scenes of trans performers primping before vestidas