Little Central America, 1984: The joy of creating community
A conversation with visiting MIMS Professor Rubén Martínez
Friday, April 2, 2021— Maira Delgado Laurens (MA ‘21) sat down with visiting MIMS Professor Rubén Martínez to discuss art, activism, Central America, and how 1984 became a pivotal moment for El Salvadoran activists in Los Angeles, California.
Tell me a little bit about yourself and your academic and professional background.
Whenever I'm asked about anything that has to do with my academic background, it's kind of a convoluted answer. The term autodidact -autodidacta- isn't used quite as much these days because of the professionalization of arts education in higher education. These days an MFA or even a PhD in creative writing is very common. Indeed, I taught in an MFA PhD creative writing program at the University of Houston.
I applied to colleges straight out of high school. I got into UCLA, but I didn't make it through undergraduate. The same year that I entered college, the war broke out in El Salvador. At the same time, I was very, very, very lost. I knew I wanted to write, but I didn't know how. I didn't know anything about MFA. It's not that there was that much about that at that time anyway... just very confused culturally, having grown up in a Salvadoran and Mexican American family in Los Angeles and a mostly Anglo-Jewish neighborhood of Los Angeles. Long story short, I dropped out.
“It took me a long time to find myself. I kind of made an area of study for myself organically, and it revolved around Central America and Mexico.”
Working a little bit to make money here in the United States, odd jobs, and then traveling to Mexico City and El Salvador. This was during the civil war in the 1980s. I literally sought out elder writers, poets wherever I went, including at the University of El Salvador (La Universidad Nacional de El Salvador), the public university. That was my education in literature! I was in the middle of the war, and the concept of art serving a political function was central to the praxis. I took that very seriously, maybe too seriously, maybe too dogmatically when I was that age.
Can you elaborate on how that artistic side can serve a person and served you to advance activism? How does art become a form of activism?
It's a very difficult question. There's a long history of argument, certainly across the 20th century, about art and politics, aesthetics, the aesthetic practice, and political function. There's much theorizing about it. Then there's pushback against the idea that the main function of art is political. I do agree with the statement that all art is political, but not in a narrow sense. I don't believe that all art should be vetted by the Communist Party. There is a very schematic and dogmatic argument about art and politics that I do not subscribe to. And the way I'm framing the argument is kind of like halfway. The argument is played out in the United States, and halfway it's played out in Latin America.
For example, Heberto Padilla, a Cuban poet in Cuba during the revolution in the 1960s, was persecuted by the Castro regime for being homosexual. He became a cause celeb among liberals and conservatives in the United States on the grounds of freedom of expression. And it's indefensible today to say that what the Castro regime did, in that case, was in any way revolutionary. It was just the opposite; it was homophobic. It was a new kind of oppression under the guise of the revolution.
At that time, homophobia was just kind of normalized on the Latin American left and in the world in general, so it was a mess. I could not say, through my art, promote the ideals of the Cuban revolution uncritically. I could not say that. I couldn't even say that about the FMLN in El Salvador. I was vocal criticizing certain things that I thought were new kinds of oppression within the left itself.
Rubén Martínez
In the end, art has to be dialogical. I briefly mentioned Bakhtin, the literary theorist in class. The idea of a dialogical art rather than monological. Can there be a poem that serves a direct political purpose for a political party or campaign in one moment? Yes, of course, there is, but it's probably not going to be a great poem. A really great poem -not that I have written one- a really great poem would move in all kinds of different directions. It would have an aesthetic -una propuesta estetica- an aesthetic proposal, and it could not be read narrowly in the ideological sense. It would open itself in many different directions in terms of subjectivity.
That's kind of the art and politics argument, right? There's a way in which art is political in a broader sense. To use the term political at its root: the Greek root of political, polis, which is the city, the life of the city. The Ancient Greek conception of politics is the public life. Engaging in public life, in public discourse, and art has a dialogical and dialectical relationship with politics always.
The examples are you could say Kendrick Lamar or Lil NASX right now. Lil NASX is the big controversy about his quote on quote "satanic" video that is very much serving a political function in the sense that people are engaging with this text that's moving in all kinds of different directions. It's a text that comments upon sexuality, sexual orientation, identity, race, religion, and especially fundamentalist religion. So it's moving in all kinds of different directions, and it cannot be reduced to just a simple slogan. If it's something that causes people to scratch their heads and look at it two or three times, and each time you look at it, it has another layer of meaning; that's art!
April 2021 event
Have you worked on any kind of artistic work, or are you working on any kind of artistic work that you see having that dialogical capacity with politics?
I'm working with a Costa Rican performance artist, Elia Arce. She's a performance artist, theater artist, actor. We've been collaborating for almost all of our adult lives together. She is from Costa Rica. There was no civil war there, but Costa Rica was thoroughly immersed. Whenever there's a crisis in El Salvador, Costa Rica feels it, or Guatemala or Honduras. It's a tiny region. Elia came out of the same generation and was formed in that intense moment of crisis, and the artists, as I said earlier, were swept up into it. I'm a writer, so we would come together, and I would bring poetry, she would bring her theatrical stuff and puppets, and I would bring music. We would just do this interdisciplinary kind of presentation and always gather a lot of artists from different disciplines.
We've been doing performances like that across decades. We're working on one right now. It's called Little Central America 1984. It is a collage of voices reflecting the 1980s and the formation of Central American communities in the United States as a result of the refugees arriving here. How those communities had to invent something out of nothing, and how they did it mostly on their own, of course, with some key solidarity from progressive and radical American allies. But also how painful, how traumatic the precipitating event of the war was, and arriving in the United States facing a whole new set of challenges here.
That's the backbone of the idea. The reason we're doing it right now is because there's a whole new Little Central America that's going to be formed out of this generation of refugees arriving as a result of the current crisis. We're focusing on the past to give context to today.
October 2020 event
There's already a clear kind of idea there, especially media coverage. The Central American refugee crisis of today appears to be ahistorical. It appears to be this same vague notion that there are really evil drug gangs, and then there's these poor victims, and they're held in detention centers, and Trump hated them. Just this very, very reduced narrative and identity.
“We want to expand that and dig deeper into presenting a fuller, richer identity and not just presenting victims but presenting the joy of creating community.”
Yes, it was traumatic, but there was tremendous joy. I think everyone who lived through that moment, the 1980s, the civil wars, and all that happened, as a result, recalls trauma. But certainly, there was great joy, relationship, and kinship forged out of that trauma. Community emerged, a community that remains, that has made deep roots in this country. Whether you're talking about the mission in San Francisco, or Pico-Union in LA, or Mount Pleasant in Washington DC, Central Americans are all over the country. That's the project that I'm working on.