MAKING A DIFFERENCE
Meet these Houston Latinos who are making a difference
Mari Carmen Ramirez, curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is one of 10 extraordinary people profiled by the Houston Chronicle for Hispanic Heritage month.
FIRST IN A SERIES
The Houston area is home to a vibrant and diverse Latino population that has made it one of the most successful and interesting regions in the country. From artists and activists to academics and authors, Houston is full of Latinos at the top of their fields who don’t get the same daily recognition as politicians and athletes. For Hispanic Heritage Month, the Houston Chronicle will be profiling 10 of these extraordinary individuals over the next four Sundays in Zest.
ONLINE: To see who else made the list of 10 extraordinary Latino leaders, visit HoustonChronicle.com/notablelatinos
Education, literature NICOLÁS KANELLOS
Founder and director of Arte Público Press, the oldest and largest U.S. publisher of Latino literature. Professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Houston.
BIO: Born in New York City of Puerto Rican and Greek parents, Kanellos is an author and editor of more than a dozen books and compilations, and has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. He has received many national distinctions, including the American Book Award and the White House Heritage Award for Literature, and has served as an appointee to the National Council of the Humanities and adviser to the Smithsonian Institution.
Q: What, for you, does it mean to be Hispanic?
A: It’s not a racial identity. Being Hispanic or Latino is a blend of cultural backgrounds and perspectives of the many peoples brought together by the Spanish empire, beginning in the 15th century.
It brings together and celebrates the ways of being human as represented mostly by the Spanish, Amerindian and African peoples brought together and blended, but also by the Arabic and Judaic backgrounds of the Spanish and the Asian and other ethnicities that made the Hispanic New World their home over time.
All of these diverse peoples, who speak Spanish and now English as well, have forged a cultural cohesion and, here in the United States, faced racism and discrimination in the past and the present.
What is authentic and enduring about Hispanic or Latino identity cannot be melted down into questions on the U.S. census nor into one “typical” physical appearance. What is authentic and enduring about Hispanic people is the openness to blending and consolidating diverse cultures.
Q: How do Hispanics enrich the American culture?
A: There is so much in American culture that was incorporated from our ancestors. … These things include the introduction of such crops as cotton, the founding of the cattle industry and mining, building railroads up to the Midwest and to California. It includes innovations in city planning, architecture and even a strong influence on country-western music, as well as jazz — just think of the Spanish guitar and the congas.
Our heritage is represented in laws from Hispano-Mexican jurisprudence that resulted in the concepts of communal property, women inheriting property, adopted children having full blood inheritance rights, and many other concepts adopted when the United States incorporated formerly Hispanic lands and peoples.
So (the Hispanic heritage) is in the layouts of our cities in the Southwest, in the music we listen to and the food we eat. Mexican food is the most popular ethnic cuisine and salsa the most popular condiment!
Q: You were a pioneer in publishing Latino authors such as Sandra Cisneros decades ago, while most publishers were not paying attention to Hispanic and minority writers. How do you see diversity in the publishing industry moving forward?
A: For at least the last 20 years, the publishing industry has been aware of its lack of diversity and its shrinking market of Anglo-American or white readers. Despite lip service and the forming of diversity committees, more than 95 percent of the books published and authors published are not minority books or authors. Even where the population statistics are most obvious and demanding of a response, that is in books for children, less than 5 percent of books deal with minority culture, and about half of those are written by nonminority writers.
So the question is not what the publishing industry is doing, but what we can do to produce minority and, specifically, Hispanic or Latino culture and
history in print and e-books.
We need more publishers like Arte Público Press because we need to be mediators and promoters of our own culture and its place in American life. We do not need to filter our arts and history through the colander of multinational corporations whose mission is the homogenization of peoples around the world into one identity to be exploited in publishing, film, television and online.
We need to produce, control and distribute our own images and make sure they become part of the education of all Americans because ours is a quintessential American story.
Q: What has been the most rewarding aspect of your career?
A: On a personal level, working with the dedicated management at Arte Público has been the most rewarding experience. Close behind that is the joy I get from seeing our books in the hands of kids.
Curatorship, visual arts
MARI CARMEN RAMÍREZ
Curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and director of its International Center for the Arts of the Americas.
BIO: Born in Puerto Rico, Ramírez has been credited as the first dedicated curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art in a mainstream U.S. museum. She has created and conceptualized some of the top collections and exhibitions of such art, in the MFAH and previously in the University of Texas’ Blanton Museum. She has received national distinctions and was named one of the most influential Hispanics in the U.S. by Time magazine.
Q: You have brought attention to Latin American artists and movements that were barely known in the U.S. before. How has your work contributed to changing perceptions about that art?
A: The idea of organizing a permanent collection of 20thand 21st-century Latin American and Latino art in a major encyclopedic museum such as the MFAH represented, in 2001, an unedited, challenging, if not daunting enterprise. Leaving aside the iconic masters of the first half of the (last) century — Diego Rivera, David A. Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, Frida Kahlo, Wifredo Lam, Rufino Tamayo and Roberto Matta — most of the artists from Latin America who contributed to international Modernism were not only unknown in the United States, but their work had been ignored or left out of the canonic histories of Modernism. As a result, this production had relatively little market presence or
value; its acquisition involved risk.
The emphasis on research provided by the Center for the Arts of the Americas allowed us to mitigate that risk and to map a course that established new points of reference for the market. The kernel of the collectionbuilding effort focused on key exponents of the avant-garde in Latin America who set out to push art’s limits through innovative, experimental approaches and programmatic texts.
Our intention was to introduce new values to the U.S. mainstream. These did not imply emerging artists but artists with long trajectories who were underrepresented in the U.S. For example, the first work that came into the collection was a Reticulárea by the German-Venezuelan Gego, who was completely unknown to mainstream audiences. The same situation applied to Joaquín Torres-García, Antonio Berni, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús
Soto, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and many others who are now in great demand.
Q: What is art for you?
A: Art for me is a unique experience that involves the senses and the mind. The most intriguing or beautiful works of art have the ability to transport us into a different dimension and trigger emotional or psychological responses that expand our sense of the reality that surrounds us, whether that implies insights into processes and materials, or issues such as violence, injustice, or even solidarity.
Q: Has your Puerto Rican and Latino heritage played a role in inspiring or strengthening your goals?
A: Yes, indeed. Even though I left the island decades ago, I still consider myself an authentic isleña (islander).
Being a fully bilingual colonial
subject provided me with an outsider-insider perspective that has been the foundation of my work. It placed me in a transnational, transcultural position, an in-between vantage point that I call “con un pie entre dos aguas” (with a foot between two oceans). Instead of a backlands limitation, this peripheral vision is broader than what you would have from the center and reinforces a perspective of strength.
(Puerto Rico went from being a Spanish colony to a U.S. one when the latter invaded the island in 1898. It hasn’t been either sovereign or fully integrated into the United States, a status that many Puerto Ricans and scholars consider a form of colonization.)
Q: How do you see Latinos like yourself shaping Houston’s future?
A: At 46 percent of the Houston population, Latinos are a majority-minority community in Houston. One that, believe it or not, will continue to grow and transform the city in unprecedented ways.
Leadership strengthened by institutions provided us with the big picture and moral responsibility to promote the social and cultural achievements of this heterogeneous community.
As we know, Latino cultural institutions in Houston are lacking in resources to carry out their mission of exhibiting and projecting this outstanding art. We need to change that. I am convinced Houston can indeed become an important center for Latino art. I am personally committed to raising the visibility and appreciation of this art through research, collections and exhibitions.
Fortunately, there are undeniable and promising signs of change at the local and national levels.
Art
MARIO “GONZO247” FIGUEROA JR.
Leader of Aerosol Warfare, artist
BIO: Figueroa Jr., the artist who works as “Gonzo247,” is an East End native who grew up practicing his art on the walls of Houston after discovering hiphop and graffiti in the 1980s. Decades later, his work can be seen on surfaces across Houston, from Market Square Park to several of the city’s universities.
Q: How do you express your upbringing in your art? Do you see yourself as fitting into the larger tradition of Mexican muralism?
A: Because my parents are from Mexico, and it’s a relatively short drive, it would be Friday and it was like, “Hey, we’re going to go to Mexico to see the family,” and then we were there. As a kid, as soon as you cross the border, there’s all this instant change of culture. Growing up, I guess I took it for granted because I was so familiar with it, but I absorbed it all.
I don’t know how my life would have been any different if someone who knew I was interested in art would have said, “Yo, check out David Alfaro Siqueiros,” or “Yo, check out Diego Rivera.” Hip-hop, thankfully, showed me graffiti, which was on trains and then evolved to be on walls, and so I just naturally gravitated toward painting on walls.
Being Mexican, maybe I would have identified with that quicker and gone down that path, which wouldn’t have been bad, but that door was never opened. I do work on a lot of walls and exterior surfaces, and that lines up with my heritage. But where I’m at now, I want to push the art form and the genre so that I can create something that will inspire younger people.
Q: How do you use your platform to support Latinos in the arts?
A: I’ve spent most of my career helping other people. I do my own thing as far as my art but have focused a lot of my energy trying to help everyone else catch up or bring them across so they could be in a better place. We’ve done lectures in schools, from elementary to high school, just to give back that message that it’s possible.
Growing up, there was never an artist or someone who saw what I was doing and said, “Let me help you out and give you some advice.” There wasn’t anyone that looked like me that came to school and said, “Hey man, you can do something with your life.” I just try to show them that, yeah, I didn’t come from a wealthy background, I didn’t have the best grades or go off to a four-year college, but I was able to do something with myself, and I was able to find something that I love to do. I never kid anybody and say it was easy. I never kid anybody and say it’s going to happen overnight. You have to put in the work.
Q: Why is it important for Latino communities to have vibrant, visible arts scenes?
A: Having something on the ground level that’s accessible to everybody is critical. Growing up in my neighborhood, I only knew of one mural — “The Rebirth of Our Nationality” by Leo Tanguma — and it changed my life. Looking back on that, I think what would two murals have done? 10? 100? As a kid, I was the passenger in a car and we didn’t have iPhones to distract us, so I had to just look out the window. And every time we drove by, I just can’t tell you
how important that was to me.
My parents, no discredit to them, were working hard to pay the rent and put food on the table, so time was a luxury. They didn’t know about the Museum of Fine Arts or the galleries; it just wasn’t a priority. It wasn’t like, “Let’s take you somewhere to see art.” But if there’s art everywhere as you’re driving and experiencing the city, and you see it, then it’s readily available. A lot of times (with galleries and exhibitions), you may not have the transportation, or you don’t know where to go, or you have to pay to get in. When it’s something that’s free and open, you have the opportunity to inspire somebody and spark curiosity.
Community leader ANGÉLICA RAZO
Texas director of Mi Familia Vota
BIO: Razo was born in the border town of Mercedes. She graduated in 2016 from Rice University, where she honed her leadership skills as vice president of the Hispanic Association for Cultural Enrichment before working with Mi Familia Vota, one of the largest national organizations mobilizing the Latino vote and among the most active in Texas. She is part of leadership teams at other organizations, such as Houston in Action.
Q: What drove you from your origins to leading an organization at the state level?
A: I was born in the Rio Grande Valley, but my family moved to Arkansas looking for better job opportunities right before I entered kindergarten. And my first day of kindergarten was when I realized that I couldn’t speak English, so my academic career didn’t get off to the smoothest start.
I grew up in a mixed-status family with seven children, three born in Mexico and four in the United States. My family mainly worked in landscaping and any other odd jobs that you could think of to make ends meet. Like many immigrant families, if we weren’t at school, we were helping our parents, mainly with landscaping work, sometimes cleaning houses. I’ve seen my family and others work tirelessly in heat, cold, rain, early morning, late night, wherever, whenever. I’ve experienced a snippet of this life, and I reflect a lot of what my father always used to say: “Everyone uses tools in their work. Mine is shovels and hardware, yours should be a pencil and your brain.”
Just like my father predicted, my current work tools are different than his but still make a dent. What I do is more than work to me. It’s my way of challenging the way we value immigrants. In immigrant households like mine, there’s an unspoken agreement that our parents will have to endure hardships without much reward. My generation is where we can maybe begin to thrive economically and in leadership spaces.
Q: How do you work to civically engage Latinos, and what’s your leadership goal?
A: The Latino community has been historically regarded as the “sleeping giant,” but I refuse to accept that. Democracy was just not built to include us, and in Texas, it’s intentionally created barriers that prevent us from participating.
As an organization, we confront every systemic challenge and invest the necessary time and resources to ensure that our community is empowered to participate in civic life. Since
2010, we’ve registered over 50,000 Hispanic individuals in Texas and mobilized them to the polls. We do this in a way that resonates with our community. We don’t lead with elections and voter registration. We lead by providing a space for people to tell their stories and we share ours, too. Then we connect our stories to issues, decision-makers, elected officials and elections. We encourage people to advocate for themselves through legislative visits, town halls, voting and so much more year-round.
As a state director, my goal is that our work creates a democracy that reflects and values Texas’ diverse populations and issues. I voted for the first time in college and am proud to say that I am the first person in my family to vote. But I was alone, confused by the process, and felt defeated by the long ballot with strange names that I had never seen before. Voting, and any civic activity, should be about celebrating our power and asserting our life experiences and needs. I love sharing that joy with others who need to be reminded that they are important to our democracy.
Q: Most of the members of your team are young women. Is it intentional?
A: Partly, yes. I’m so fortunate to work with amazing young Latinas and women of color who are leading Texas into a new political era rooted in justice.
Young women, especially women from immigrant communities, have to navigate so many things in life, especially when we’re just getting our careers started. We can be overwhelmed with societal and cultural gender norms, family responsibilities, financial uncertainty, and so much more. We’re all first generation, too, in the team. We don’t have professional (knowledge) or experience from our parents or family members. We’re figuring it out as we go together, and we look to the women before us who have paved the way. I hope I can create an organizational culture that values and uplifts young Latinas.
Q: Some people describe you as a powerful young leader with outstanding strategic intelligence but not looking for the spotlight. Is that accurate?
A: I consider myself a social introvert or “ambivert.” My instinct is to not draw attention to myself, but I crave being in social settings where I can listen, learn from others and share my own thoughts.
I would say that individuals like myself don’t fit the profile of a natural born leader. It’s hard to prove yourself when you’re shying away from the spotlight. But I’m learning that the loudest voice in the room is just as important as the softest, and the work behind the scenes needs to be recognized. Being more soft-spoken has taught me that I do have to assert myself through action, and I think that goes a long way when you’re still trying to find your footing in your sector.
My own leadership style allows me to work well with individuals who are more outspoken and exuberant because we’re not clashing. It’s also helped me identify people’s hidden leadership qualities that they don’t always see in themselves.
Q: Is your Hispanic heritage something of significance for you?
A: Absolutely! I’ve realized I can’t separate my culture (from) who I am as an individual. And I don’t want to either. Because I grew up in a predominantly white town, I spent a lot of time hiding my culture and its significance to me. I thought that if I wanted to be successful, I had to put on a mask that erased a lot of my identity, and it was exhausting.
I also admit that we have aspects of our culture that fuel machismo, colorism, elitism and other inequities. Appreciating my culture means that I also have a responsibility to call it out when I see it being used to oppress others.
Q: What are you looking forward to now?
A: I’m in no way trying to rush through the rest of 2021, but I’m excited about what 2022 is going to bring. I imagine that the 2022 midterms are going to come with a lot of political drama, fast-paced days and professional and leadership development for me. I also signed up to run the Houston Chevron Half Marathon in January (nervous laughter), which is very much out of my comfort zone. I also hope that the pandemic doesn’t deter me from watching World Cup 2022 games in jampacked restaurants with explosions of “goooal!”