Below is a photo of me on our porch in East Los Angeles. I am the youngest of four with three older sisters. My oldest sister Yolanda is holding me and my scary looking stuffed lion. We are our past and so I want to start this blog by covering my own history and how it helped me become an artist.
My earliest memories are of great home cooked Mexican food, running around the neighborhood with my best friend Charlie and of helping our neighbor who we all called abuelo with his chickens.
Thirty-four year before the chicken chasing my father was born in a very small town in Arizona in 1929 and moved to Los Angeles at age twelve with his mother, younger brother and sisters. At seventeen he joined the Air Force a few years before the Korean War. That same year my mother, who grew up in Mexico City, was visiting an uncle in Los Angeles for the summer of 1947. One day she saw a skinny boy with big ears (her words) walk into the house where she was staying. Of course, that was my dad, who was coming home from basic training and did not know the pretty young woman who was in his living room.
This is where this true story gets Gabriel García Márquez complicated. It turned out my mother was from the same small town in Jalisco, Mexico as my father’s mother who was dating my mother’s uncle. See. My maternal grandmother was single. She had divorced my grandfather when my father was twelve years and moved to Los Angeles. My grandfather also decided to move to Los Angeles.
We think (my sisters and I) my grandmother and mother’s uncle had a plan to get my father a Mexican bride. The plan almost did not work. My mother hated being in Los Angeles and wanted to leave the very first week. She was studying nursing in Mexico City, had many friends, loved sports and going to dances at the Governor’s mansion. But her uncle would beg her to stay one more week for many weeks and she did until my father returned home…
