This L.A. Delivery Man Amassed One of the World’s Largest Collections of Chicano Art

*Wow! Six-thousand six-hundred pieces of Chicano art, kept in a two bedroom apartment in Whittier, California. Seventy-four year-old Enrique Serrato has been collecting since he was 16. VL


artsy_logoBy Emily Rappaport, Artsy

In the fall of 2000, the Santa Monica Museum of Art hosted “East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous,” an exhibition surfacing several sprawling collections of Chicano-made ceramics, paintings, and works on paper. (Chicano/a is a term for a Mexican-American that has politically radical origins in the Latino branch of the civil rights movement, which largely took place in the Southwest.) All seven of the private collections that contributed work to the show were otherwise permanently on view in the collectors’ respective homes. Two of those homes were partially recreated for the show—furniture, rugs, and all—in order to display the art in its usual habitat. “Like home movies,” the Chicano studies scholar Alicia Gaspar de Alba wrote at the time, these collections “reflect and display the identity of the people that reside in the home as much as the work of the artists.”

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It is hard to imagine that there is someone who brings this theory to life more vividly than Enrique Serrato, a 74-year-old Los Angeles county native whose 6,600-object collection currently lives in his modest two bedroom apartment in the city of Whittier, 12 miles southeast of Downtown L.A. When I visited him there earlier this month . . . READ MORE



[Photo courtesy of Artsy]

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Luis Valdez
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“This critically acclaimed play by Luis Valdez cracks open the depiction of Chicanos on stage, challenging viewers to revisit a troubled moment in our nation’s history. From the moment the myth-infused character of El Pachuco burst onto the stage, cutting his way through the drop curtain with a switchblade, Luis Valdez spurred a revolution in Chicano theater.
Focusing on the events surrounding the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial of 1942 and the ensuing Zuit Soot Riots that turned Los Angeles into a bloody war zone, this is a gritty and vivid depiction of the horrifying violence and racism suffered by young Mexican Americans on the home front during World War II. Valdez’s cadre of young urban characters struggle with the stereotypes and generalizations of America’s dominant culture, the questions of assimilation and patriotism, and a desire to rebel against the mainstream pressures that threaten to wipe them out.
Experimenting with brash forms of narration, pop culture of the war era, and complex characterizations, this quintessential exploration of the Mexican-American experience in the United States during the 1940’s was the first, and only, Chicano play to open on Broadway.
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