The pain of gentrification meets healing power of art
Recently I stumbled into what I thought was a really good party.
It was on 24th Street in the Mission, normally a sleepy area for nightlife. I was passing the Juan R. Fuentes Gallery, and there was a crowd filling the space and spilling into the street. There was laughter; families had brought children and coolers. I glanced at the crowd, which I can only describe as Misionero — people with deep roots in the neighborhood’s many Latin American communities. They’re the ones who organize lowrider car shows and have strong opinions on the right way to eat a pupusa.
From within the building, I heard oldschool songs playing. Pulled in as if by centripetal force, I saw the stunning women from the Chulita Vinyl Club spinning. I started dancing and snapping photos, so it took me a while to recognize that there were big, beautiful, mural-style paintings on the walls. Looking closer at them, I saw images of the neighborhood’s struggles — burning Victorian buildings, a portrait of Alex Nieto, who was killed by police
— and its iconography, in the form of Mayan and volcanic gods.
In a flash I realized that the community was here because they needed to be here. What I’d thought was a party was actually a healing ceremony.
It was the opening night of “¡Géntromancer!,” a solo exhibition and community project by Josué Rojas. Rojas, 36, wanted to create a positive community response to the “large, scary, looming monster” of gentrification.
“People invested heavily in creating the community of this neighborhood,” he told me. “It’s important to come together and form creative responses to threats.”
In addition to Rojas’ large artworks, “¡Géntromancer!” includes a broadsheet with a wide variety of students, teachers and poets responding to the theme of gentrification. Contributors include everyone from young students in San Francisco’s juvenile justice system to San Francisco’s poet laureate, Alejandro Murguía. (You can read them online at http://bit.ly/2duYpyd.)
The poets joined Rojas for a reading in partnership with Galería de la Raza and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in September. They were part of the reason that the exhibit’s opening night was so packed. Rojas is dreaming up even more ways to involve them in future iterations of “¡Géntromancer!”
“Now that I know this is a seed, I’d like to extend the invitation to the entire Bay Area,” Rojas said. “I’ve always seen this as something bigger than me, because we’re all dealing with it.”
Rojas is intimately familiar with the violence of displacement. He arrived in San Francisco at the age of 1½ — his family was fleeing El Salvador’s civil war. He grew up in the loving radius of 24th Street — panaderias, San Francisco’s bilingual El Tecolote newspaper offices, the Balmy Alley murals.
“Even as a child, I understood that the neighborhood was a jewel because so much unpaid work had gone into making it special,” Rojas said. “There aren’t elves making the murals or cooking the tacos.”
He credits the community of Precita Eyes for saving him during the summer he was 15 — the summer both his father and his cousin died, the summer he almost lost himself to alcohol and gangs.
“Murals opened up my life,” Rojas said. After learning the basics through Precita Eyes’ arts education programs, he went on to study art at California College of the Arts and Boston University.
While he was getting his bearings, his family was evicted from the Mission in 1999.
“The landlord was able to get much more in rent than what we were paying, so he basically said he could give some money to lawyers or he could give it to us,” Rojas said. “At the time, my mom didn’t realize what that meant — that agreeing to leave effectively meant we’d have to leave the neighborhood for good.”
After watching similar stories play out recently for his Misionero friends and neighbors — many of whom had also fled war, poverty and violence in their home countries — Rojas realized that displacement would have to be a subject for his work. He started thinking about turning gentrification into gente-fication — people power.
“There’s a saying from (Edgar) Degas — ‘We draw the devil so we can have power over him,’ ” Rojas said. “It’s important to personify this so people can speak it out, to face it, to respond to the fight.”
Rojas’ enormous, powerful artworks tie the whole exhibit together. The pieces reflect all of Rojas’ influences — the classic mural techniques of Mission artists like Juana Alicia, the La Palma-style folk art traditions of El Salvador, the Voltron cartoons of his childhood, and the Pop Art history he studied in art school.
“I’m very intentionally taking the artistic traditions that exist and combining them with contemporary subject matter,” he said. “It’s a way of bridging the Mission’s past, its present and the future we’re fighting for.”