Harry Gamboa, Jr.:
L.A. Urban Exile

Nora Benavidez

It was 1956 and at age five, Harry Gamboa, Jr. was already a contender for least likely to survive natural selection. He remembers being squeezed tight inside a swarm of sweaty kindergarten boys who were huddled together in an alley behind Spence Street in East Los Angeles. "A group of cholo guys surrounded us after school, trapped us in with their cars and forced us to watch this guy get stabbed repeatedly."

Gamboa says he listened silently. Inches shorter and pounds lighter than any of the other boys, he deliberately hid within the height and noise of the death scene. Then the gang bangers continued the initiation by telling the boys to repeat the chant: "Viva White Fence." Gamboa looked around at his friends' simultaneously terrified and excited faces, glimpsed the asphalt sprayed red with fresh blood and, on impulse, decided to run.

It was a not an unusual event in the world where he grew up; but it was a decisive one in Gamboa's development. Fleeing, flying home, he realized just how dangerous a place the world really was. His five-year-old mind deduced that survival would require a network of support; so with methodical exactness, he devised and implemented a plan. He worked in the school cafeteria and the no-pay job generated a few perks: a few free cookies, a carton of milk, a slice of chocolate cake here and there. (And what he didn't earn, he learned he could pilfer.) "What I had in the end was currency. So I'd turn to one of these big, brainless thugs and ask him if he liked chocolate cake. I'd tell him to see me on Friday because I had some for him." In almost no time, Gamboa recalls, he had about 25 friends who didn't want anything to happen to him.

Then one day, he got attacked by a guy who was not yet clued to his social prominence, "and he was nearly beaten to death in front of school by about 40 guys." Gamboa didn't encourage it. "They just didn't want to break the chain of receiving those gifts. So I figured I had a good plan; and I stuck with it."

As he got older, of course, the currency had to change. Almost unconsciously Gamboa developed a more sophisticated awareness of himself and his surroundings. "And I learned early on that I could tell stories. I could make things fun." It was in developing this extraordinary knack for oral narrative that Gamboa, the artist, was born. By his own admission, his stories were wildly absurd melodrama. Like his mother, he could turn any prop, any snippet of conversation into an entertaining yarn. This ability, common in the best liars and con-artists, allowed Gamboa to blur the line between reality and fantasy. As he honed his talent he became more and more like a surrealist painter, less concerned with what had actually occurred and more focused on what he viewed to be the meaning of any event. So his stories became fables. People listened, wide-eyed and open-hearted. And when he was finished, they begged to hear the tale again.

Throughout the obstacle course of his adolescence, Gamboa relied on stories to get by, to wiggle through and out of countless bad situations. He was graced with talent. And cursed with an awareness that few had been born that lucky. He had grown up surrounded by violence, sex and death in the streets; raised in a neighborhood inhabited by people with no better place to go. He had consumed a steady diet of disappointment and anger. Along with his peers, he had been shoved into crowded classrooms where nobody cared about the future. "The schools were designed to create a product and the product was either soldiers for war, cheap labor or prisoners. That was it." Gamboa especially remembers being treated like fodder for Vietnam:

Gamboa recalls that he never took a single test, never did one night's homework, never opened a textbook. The only math problem he ever worked out was done by accident: the first day of one school year he kicked his flimsy arithmetic book all the way home. By the time he reached his front door, there were only a few pages left. "So I calculated how many times one would need to kick it in order to lose all the pages inside," he explains. "And I figured that was all the math I needed to know."

Then something happened. In the late spring of 1968, just a year away from high school graduation, Gamboa watched as several hundred Mexican American students stood up one day and simply walked out of their public high schools to protest the community's high drop-out rates and substandard educational facilities. More an observer of the "Blow-Outs" than a participant, he was still inspired by this gesture of justifiable defiance. By just walking away from an educational system that gave them nothing, the striking students turned their back on a society that promised only more of the same.

"So I graduated with 1.1 GPA," says Gamboa. But along with the Blow-Outs, three teachers had inspired him. "I left with a meaningless diploma, but a keen interest in current events, literature, philosophy and socialism." These became elements with which Gamboa's built his life and career.

In August of 1970, the Chicano National Moratorium was organized in East L.A., to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam and to publicize the disproportionately high rate of Chicano war casualties. Between 20,000 and 30,000 people participated and by dusk, three were dead, several others were injured and 1,200 police officers occupied East L.A. neighborhoods. For Gamboa, it was a day of stark reality and profound transformation. "You suddenly felt like you didn't belong, like the people in charge were there to liquidate you. Quite literally, I saw police beating up children. I saw police shooting into crowds." But when he told people what he'd seen, they only looked at him: Gamboa the Trickster, the Storyteller. "I'd been telling stories my whole life, and I realized that stories without proof can just be dismissed as fiction." He went out and bought his first camera.

He carried it with him everywhere. He was determined to make people believe him, to see the violent truth of the streets and to contradict the inaccurate accounts of his community that dotted the media. If he could see it, point the camera and document it-then he could capture the truth. And make it matter. In a sense, Gamboa's early photographic work (which he sold to second-rate publications and exhibited at eastside venues like Self Help Graphics) was an attempt to distance himself from make-believe. "For many, many years," he explains.

Always a skilled writer, Gamboa worked briefly as editor for a small Chicano newspaper, Regeneracion. It was 1972 and starving for an edgier creative outlet, he invited three visual artists from the neighborhood to collaborate with him: Gronk, Patssi Valdez and Willie Herron. Together, they formed the art group known as Asco (literally translated as "nausea"). The union was cataclysmic for Gamboa, the beginning of an era in Gamboa's life that lasted until 1975 when the group dissipated. "That was the year the Chicano movement died," Gamboa has said. "It was the year we all cut our hair,"

While virtually all other Chicano artists of the period were producing mural art-or perhaps because they all were-Asco rejected that medium. By intent, their work was absurd and at times very political. It never generated much money and was not well-known outside of East L.A. until years after it had disbanded. Sometimes they performed for small audiences. Other time they paraded about East Los Angeles in a series of statements dealing with Chicanos and their urban experience. One of these elaborate but makeshift, untitled street performances was conceived as an anti-gang statement. The ASCO the members laid down one Friday night, in the middle of a street on the barrier line between two warring gangs, and simply stayed there disrupting traffic and halting all nearby activity until the police finally came and drug them away. Another of their extravaganzas was staged on Christmas Eve in 1972 and was entitled "Walking Mural." All four members dressed in costume, taped themselves to a cardboard wall and as the peculiar "float" cruised down Whittier Boulevard, they each in turn torn themselves free. The idea was to comment on a mural movement that they saw as polluted by its growing acceptance among mainstream art critics.

Asco's first major impact on Los Angles art came in 1973. Despite the fact that there were many established Chicano artists working in the city, not a single one of them had been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. To protest that exclusion, Asco members went to the Museum one night and spray-pained their names on the outside of the building. "We felt like if we couldn't get inside, we would just sign the Museum and it would be our piece," Gamboa remembers.

The combination of a now developing photographic eye and a taste for performance art led Gamboa, naturally enough, to a fascination with filmmaking. Once, in the 1970s, with an idea for a movie he wanted to make, Gamboa felt inside his pocket. He found only five cents. With Gronk beside him, he asked for some patron support, but all that generated was an additional nickel. To Gamboa, the solution appeared obvious and simple. With no money but a good idea for a movie, he figured he could photograph a scene as if it were a still from the movie. His new medium was born: "No Movies." Working with the Asco collective, Gamboa created dozens of No Movies, using his colleagues as actor/models. He produced untold photographs, each of them looking like a candid extraction from a film that was never made.

***

Nearly thirty years later, as he sips espresso in a gentrified Starbucks situated on Olympic and Sawtelle, in the middle of upscale West Los Angeles-Gamboa does not particularly radiate the artful, insightful or even haunted. At 54, he is now married (to Barbara Carrasco, an established artist in her own right), raising a young daughter, enjoying a relationship with a grown son from a previous marriage, and teaching English at California State University, Northridge. His geography has shifted by a thirty-minute car ride from his childhood neighborhood. His hair has thinned and he wears it in a small, stubby ponytail at the nape of his neck. Time has not added bulk. He is still slight; not a physically large or imposing figure. And he still displays the quality he has nurtured since childhood: the quiet choice to blend in. He seems a man almost comfortable in his own skin.

That's not to say Gamboa is nonchalant; or even relaxed. In fact, he exudes tension. He keeps his camera in its case, tight against his hip every second, and his cardboard covered notebook does not leave his left hand. No limb ever extends more than a few inches away from his chest. As his eyes dart quickly and constantly around the coffee shop, he appears a mature but wild animal constantly on guard against possibly imminent danger. For all his charm and buoyant verbal calisthenics, Gamboa still has a very jagged edge. He moves with apparent ease and willingness from one subject to the next, but always there is the slightly unsettling undertow of anger, cynicism and bitterness in what he says and how he says it.

Over the past three decades that Gamboa he has spent generating his own work, he has created a body of photography, poetry, short stories, plays and film that staggers the imagination. His work has been exhibited at art houses no less impressive than the Whitney in New York City. He has received countless grants and fellowships from private foundations and federal arts agencies. Much of his work is now housed at Stanford University, which collects every bit of documentation that it can gather on his past and current creative projects. None of this ruffles his feathers, though. In fact, it precipitates a monologue of self-deprecating humor. "It seems that for some time now, if I write down on a scrap of paper, 'I need to buy coffee and toilet paper today'-that little scrap of paper will wind up somewhere. That scrap of paper will determine how someone will assess whatever I produce...I feel like everything is potential evidence."

In some way, Gamboa's response has been to split himself in two, to become simultaneously the raw-edged artist (who resists imposed parameters and disdains reverence) and the moderating auteur (who feels obligated to do more polished, completed work). In typical Gamboa fashion, his art has continued to imitate his life and one of his plays, Shadow Solo, presents an existentialist dialogue between two characters. One stands before the audience in clear view; the other performs nonsensical, rebellious antics behind a screen that transforms him into (or perhaps reveals him to be) just a shadow. To know anything about Gamboa is to guess that both these visages are self-portraits. Solo rambles confidently and in intricate detail about his daily escapades. Shadow mocks him, annoyed with the minutiae of "the fool."

Shadow Solo was first performed in 1982, while Gamboa was in his thirties and reveling in what he now describes as "affected cynicism." He is quick to explain that at that time, he was living a miserable life and deliberately generating sarcastic, miserable work. "I think I used to think that I could somehow match the terror and the horror of pain and war, the insanity that causes people to do things," Gamboa says. "But maybe the last ten years, it's occurred to me that there's no way to match that. You shouldn't even bother trying because what's out there is truly, really bad. I don't think there is any way to mimic it."

Until very recently, Gamboa consciously refused to work carefully or in an organized manner. His stories were always written, literally, on the corners of paper or napkins from drive-through burrito shops. So when Professor of Critical Studies and Associate Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Chon Noriega, approached him in the mid-1990s and proposed a book of Gamboa's collected works, Gamboa knew it would have to be created out of tidbits, nothing more than trash-like notes. Miraculously, though, the book happened. Published in 1998, Urban Exile is an almost haphazard journey through Gamboa's eclectic artistic career. Like so much of what's directed his life, the project took him unaware, and upon reviewing the completed manuscript, Gamboa remembers feeling more than a bit of reservation. "I read it from beginning to end and I was shocked to find that my personal and intellectual limitations were so evident, that the parameters of my creativity were just laid there... and I died of embarrassment, is what really happened."

Not everything in the book bothered him. In fact, one of his own favorite short stories appears here, incomplete as it was left when he wrote it in 1992. "Oscar's Middle Finger" is the story of a boy living in East Los Angeles who gets stabbed to death with a pair of cutting scissors by Olga, the proprietor of a hair salon near his home. His death occurs suddenly, almost comically, after Olga catches him fondling the breasts of a mannequin she displays in her shop window. She stabs him to death in the back of the head and drags his limp body out to the alley behind her salon where it remains undiscovered until it eventually decomposes.

As the search for Oscar's missing body goes on, Olga visits him in the alleyway, muttering to herself, "Boys like you go straight to hell, dead or alive," and she chops off his right middle finger with her shiny scissors. Inside the salon, she spends hours cleaning the crooked finger and stuffing it with cotton. She adds a long fake nail to the tip, paints it a tacky lavender, glues on vibrant rhinestones of red, green, yellow and blue, and covers the knuckles with spray-on gold. Finally, she strings the surreal digit to a fake gold chain and wears it as a pendant. Leaving Oscar's body to rot in the alley-robbed forever of it's ability to express "fuck you"-she confiscates the finger and its gesture along with it.

No one ever finds Oscar's body. It just stays there, consumed by maggots and ants. Although the story was never finished, Gamboa claims that of all his stories, photos and plays, "Oscar's Middle Finger" is the closest to his own childhood. Left dangling unfinished, the macabre story leaves its reader not sure if they should laugh or cry. Asked to comment on that, Gamboa only chuckles softly.

***

If, as has been said, the artist is a person of observation, the Harry Gamboa, Jr. is naturally suited to his chosen profession. Whether it's in his measured speech, through the lens of a camera or on paper, he seems always to be searching for the right word, the perfect visual nuance. He is altogether uninterested in making repetitive art, he claims, easier (and likely more lucrative) as it would be. Each piece he writes, directs, shoots, has to be different. Therefore, he is hard to label. Not quite a legendary photographer, or writer or filmmaker, Gamboa says he is happy to remain a bit of a renegade, working outside what he perceives as the rigid confines of twenty-first century art. He remembers, years ago, when fans and detractors alike sought to label him. Their efforts never bothered him; but he never allowed them to define him, either.

Yes, Gamboa does look unassuming in the cookie-cutter Starbucks coffee shop. But looks can be deceiving. When asked to comment on where he's heading creatively, he pauses. "You know," he muses, "I walk around and I always think to myself that I've seen it all, done it all. But then every so often, it still happens. I hit something that's never crossed my path before. An image, an idea. I stumble across something that's new. That keeps me incredibly excited. I'm 54, but that part hasn't gone away. I constantly feel that things are still possible. So who knows."

Nora Benavidez is a writer and Cultural Studies student at NYU. She also works as a T.A. at an elementary school in the Lower East Side. Her interests range from magical realism to Klezmer music.

http://www.harrygamboajr.com