Café On A

Witness miracles of transformation: Love conquers all

Sunday, October 19th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

By Armando Vazquez
March 27, 2005

Last week was my son Aaron’s 18th birthday. Today, he is a
man in the eyes of society, and will be blessed or cursed
with all the afforded responsibilities and benefits that are
bestowed upon adults of this country. In fact, my son has
been an “hombrecito” for as long as I can remember. He has
always, it seems, demonstrated, extraordinary maturity,
intelligence, integrity and kindness to everyone he meets.

As an athlete, in soccer or basketball, he was always the
leader. He was not the best athlete on the field, but because
of his intelligence, work ethic and love of the game and his
teammates, all responded to Aaron’s leadership. He worked
tirelessly to create teamwork, so that all of his teammates
would participate to their fullest potential in the game.

In the classroom, Aaron has always excelled. As a senior at
Ventura High School, he has a 4.0-plus cumulative grade-point
average and has more than 20 units of college credits. He is
a member of Who’s Who Among American High School Students,
National Honor Roll Society, and The Society of High School
Scholars, California Scholarship Federation.

Aaron has participated in a variety of youth leadership
conferences all over the county. All of these activities are
a precursor to a career in serving his community.

In middle school, Aaron decided to explore classical music,
and was convinced by his music teacher that he had the
temperament, work ethic and aptitude to take on one of the
most difficult instruments in the orchestra — the oboe.
Today, Aaron is considered one of the best high school
oboists in the state.

Power of love

In October, our son was struck down with a horrific disease.
Aaron was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. By the end of
October, the MS had completely ravaged my son. He was
confined to a wheelchair. The prognosis was grim, and so
began Aaron’s medical odyssey into the unknown.

With God, family and friends, “nuestro hombrecito,” took on
the illness as his greatest challenge. The power of love has
made our son a courageous man. Multiple sclerosis is a
diabolical mystery that attacks the central nervous system. A
typical side effect of MS is extreme fatigue, weakening of
limbs, migraine-like headaches and numerous other physical
and psychological effects, and these symptoms and attacks can
manifest at any time.

Our son has suffered mightily in the past six months, but
each day, this courageous young man wakes up with the
strength and fortitude that only love can create and sustain,
which he will use to defeat this disease. One day he will!

A disease like MS affects the entire family. Our life as we
knew it has been altered irrevocably and forever. The entire
family will have to work as a team to fight this disease. It
may be a medical battle for the rest of Aaron’s life. The
Vazquez family is committed to this lifetime of support,
advocacy and love for our son. We were always a close and
united family; Aaron’s illness has brought us closer; our
love for family grows deeper by the day.

Different battles

Many young men and women will turn 18 this week in Ventura
County, and some of these adults will do battle with their
problems, illnesses and pains — both physical and
psychological. For far too many of our county’s youth, their
struggle will be solitary. Trusting no one, they will be full
of fear; their only defense against an indifferent and cruel
world will be violence and rage.

The arrival into adulthood for many of our sons and daughters
is meaningless and cruel. Far too many lack even the
rudiments of socialization into the greater society, which,
of course, requires an individual sense of worth, pride,
discipline and service — foreign attributes for this abused,
troubled, vulnerable and isolated population of young adults.

Without love, respect and a sense of meaning and purpose for
their world and the greater community, many of these young
adults will develop anti-social pathologies, attitudes and
behaviors that serve for their individual survival and little
else.

Sooner or later, strapped with psychological monsters, fed by
drugs, alcohol, deviant peer modeling and a hatred and rage
that know no limit, they will come home to create harm,
destruction and pain in neighborhoods throughout this county.

Sociologists, parents and good common sense tell us that 18
years of “good or bad” living is more than sufficient time to
shape and mold us into whom we will be as adults. A child’s
life can be full of support, guidance, tenderness, respect
and unconditional love; and a kid like Aaron has a real
chance to blossom into a manifestation of God’s love here on
Earth.

Or an indifferent society — and make no mistake, it is
society’s doing — can fill a kid’s life with pain, hate,
abandonment, violence and fear. And society will ensure that
these troubled souls will attack the world precisely as we
have programmed them to — full of rage and madness that will
push them to lash out at everyone and everything in society
that created them.

We have worked with thousands of these damaged, at-risk young
adults over the past decade, and they are perpetually at our
doorstep, begging, pleading and acting out for attention,
guidance and love.

What should we do?

The question before us as a just society is how do we deal
with these troubled souls? Who will play God with these lost
and often-violent sons and daughters? What manifestation of
God will we invoke? Will it be the God of mercy,
unconditional love and redemption for all? Or will it be the
God of vengeance, judgment — an unforgiving, eye-for-an-eye
God?

I dare say that for today, for the sake of expediency, we
have called on the latter God to guide us in dealing with our
most troubled and at-risk youth. It has been a cruel and
unwise choice. We are failing miserably and sending far too
many of our young people to jail, isolating them to the
farthest margins of society, making them permanent outcasts
of an ever-growing underclass.

Or we can commit as a society to long-term rehabilitative and
restorative community programs that are guided by love, mercy
and redemption.

Keys to empower youth

In Oxnard, we have such a program. It is called, Keys To
Empower Youth In the System, and the principle that we adhere
to is that unconditional love can provide the miracle of
redemption to anyone.

Of course, along with love, you must have a strong
empowerment program. In 10 to 15 weeks, the KEYS program
provides young adults with enrollment in a community college
(with full support and guidance of college staff), career
training, a job, academic support and remediation, arts and
cultural appreciation, hands-on art projects and activities,
community improvement projects, researched, purposeful and
progressive activism — all with a capable and caring, broad-
based mentoring network and the support of respected leaders
of the community.

The KEYS program has far more successes than failures with
the “untouchables” who no one wants to work with. But even
when a young adult backslides, gets in trouble, or drops out
of our program, he or she is not deemed a failure. We have no
failures in the KEYS program, “only detours on our new road
to redemption.”

The young adult who took the temporary detour, once he/she is
back on track, is immediately readmitted when he/she agrees
to respect the principal re-entry rule of the house, which
is, “Welcome back to your new life of love, respect, and
service to your community. Work hard to improve your
community.”

For the unconvinced and doubtful, we invite you to volunteer
as adult mentors in our next KEYS program, which will begin
April 5. Give us your time, your energy, your expertise and
as much love as you can heap on these young adults and I
promise you will witness miracles of transformation right
before your eyes.

This is not rocket science. Give a kid hate, he will hate.
Give her/him love and she’ll give love. The problem, as we
see it, is that our society has acute attention deficit
disorders and has lost its common sense. We want the quick,
fast and easiest fix. We forget that love, kindness, caring,
respect are not so much actions as they are learned and
ingrained attitudes, which, of course, take many years to
inculcate into individuals, and much longer into the greater
society.

So, we can continue our tough-on-crime draconian policies and
continue to send our sons and daughters to jail, and we have
solved nothing. Or we can commit long term, as a society, to
turn penitentiaries into universities, juvenile jails into
art and cultural centers, “three strikes” into “three home
runs,” guns into paintbrushes, hate into love, violence into
peace, and I assure you that kids like my son Aaron will
populate this great nation and we will create a society that
will be quite capable of solving its problems through love
and peaceful resolution.

– Armando Vazquez, of Ventura, is co-ffounder and co-director
of the KEYS Leadership Academy, which is run from the Cafe on
A Street in Oxnard. Cafe on A is a community-based
organization that works with at-risk youth to provide
educational and employment opportunities to help them become
contributing members of the community. For more information
about becoming a mentor, call 216-4530.

Armando’s email is AVA1040@sbcglobal.net.

The Power of Unconditional Love

Saturday, October 18th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Artwork remains on Walls

Monday, October 13th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Tags: Armando, Art, Debbie, Rich

FACES - Oil Paintings by Rich Brimer

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Rich Brimer comes to us from the Conejo Valley where he is a recent graduate of California Lutheran University. The development of these paintings have created a significant collection of some of the faces we see around us every day and even on far off vistas. Rich has also painted the face of our planet with many landscapes and seascapes.

About painting, Brimer says, “Ever since I was a kid, I have loved the ocean and I have loved creating images with pencil or brush. I go to the California shoreline as often as possible. These times allow me to reflect on the important things of life that God has given me and the fortune I have in my family. Painting allows me to have a time alone in the power of nature. I paint quickly in order to make the impression of what I am experiencing find its way to the canvas.”

Thanks for all who joined us at Café on A on Friday night October 3rd to meet the artist and his works. If you were unable to attend, be sure to stop by and see the art work and visit Armando and Debbie and the great work they are doing in the community.

Tags: Art, Painting, Rich Brimer

Café on A: An Appreciation

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Café on A: An Appreciation

by David Howard

The paradox of holy places: they exist—spatially, materially,—but they’re also all in your mind. And heart.

This is a reflection on our sacred space in the heart of Oxnard—Café on A.

On March 14, 1979, twenty-five years before I met Café on A co-creators Armando Vázquez and Debbie De Vries, a pre-dawn earthquake off the coast of Guerrero rumbled through Mexico City and destroyed much of the Iberoamericana Univeristy where I worked. Had it struck a couple of hours later, the campus would have been teeming with students, teachers and staff. Because of the fortuitous timing hundreds of people lived who would otherwise have died.

When I got off the subway and arrived on campus that afternoon, I was shocked by the devastation. My classroom had been reduced to rubble. But more than the material catastrophe, what I remember most vividly are the signs posted and painted on the walls that remained standing. Anonymous muralistas had gone to work immediately to bring forth image and poetry from the ruins.

One graffiti was seared into my brain forever: La universidad no es un edificio. The univeristy is not a building.

It was the perfect aphorism for the campus existential crisis. We read it and went about the work of sustaining what the university really was—a community. I like to think that no one who experienced the jolt of earthquake and poetry that day ever again confused a building with its meaning, existence with essence.

The Jesuit founders of the Universidad Iberoamericana knew something about sustaining institutions. The best among them knew the secret of sacred space: build it with your heart, your soul and your integrity, and it will last. Earthquake proof. Even if it all falls down.

Paradoxically, the institutions that are built in full consciousness that they are not (merely) buildings tend to be the most beautiful, the most soulfully imperishable. Build them of brick, steel, silver and gold; or build them of wind, sand, mud and straw. The materials don’t matter. The heart of the matter matters.

Debbie and Armando have designed our beloved Café on A as a sacred space that’s in a building, but not of a building. And thus Café on A becomes the molten core, the epicenter of a different kind of earthquake. The kind that shakes asunder the foundations of injustice, that inspires artists to rock our world, that releases underground tectonic energy to radiate in mystery and transform lives.

Café on A is exactly where it’s supposed to be: on Oxnard’s spiritual faultline, on the frontera, in the circle whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.

Que dure mil años. May it last a thousand years.

Tags: Armando, Art, Debbie, Painting

REFLECTION ON THE CHICANO ART MOVIMIENTO

Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

A PRIMER: BY ARMANDO VAZQUEZ

SETTING THE STAGE

At the turn of the twentieth century, art in the Americas made a radical departure from the yoke and pervasive influences of Europe. In fact, Europe and the entire Western World was experiencing tremendous social upheaval. The old order was being challenged on all fronts; the First World War loomed over the horizon. All of the political “isms” were on the tips of tongues of the world’s intellectual political and social theorists and revolucionarios, ready to spew fire and revolution to the world.  The art world was being transformed into a revolutionary maelstrom. The Dadaist and the Surrealist would create chaos in the art world. As always, the Americas lagged behind the Europeans in breaking away from the classical chains of western art homogeneity.

The global whirlwind that smashed much of the old order was especially profound in the art world. Art in the United States for the first time became original, fresh and uniquely American. With the advent of the industrial revolution and the demonstrative superiority of the American capitalist system to the rest of the Western World, all sectors of American life were buoyed with creativity, originality, legitimacy and power.

This was also true for art in the United States.  The birth of Modern American Art was, however, a closed shop: racist, aloof, pretentious and elitist. American art was an Anglo-Saxon, male- dominated bastion. It would remain so for another 50 years. It was not until the early 1950’s that Chicanos, Jews, Blacks, Native Americans, and women by singular sheer artistic genius and courage, were able to penetrate this monolith know as “American art and culture”.  But, of course it was not nearly enough. Success for the minorities was singular and isolated; minority groups were completely excluded from full participation in the American art scene. It was not until the 1960’s that the wall of exclusion and segregation came tumbling down around the traditional American art citadel.

MI BAUTISMO

In 1967 my older brother, the last of the silent stoic warriors for Uncle Sam, went off to war in a distant land called Viet Nam. It was the year that my idol, Muhammad Ali, was stripped of his title for refusing to go to war in Viet Nam. Ali’s refusal, was, as he put it, “ I have nothing against the people of Viet Nam; they have never called me nigger.” The Johnson administration, in political free fall and moral decay, escalated the Vietnamese war effort, and in the United States, internal war in the form of urban riots raged in over 100 cities throughout the nation. Leading the war protesters were many young Chicanos, Blacks, Native Americans and other minority groups that opposed the war and the discrimination that they faced at home. In 1967 I came to understand that the war to be waged was on the soil of this country.

In 1968 I registered for the draft, and was prepared to go to jail as a conscientious objector, no longer the stoic warrior for Uncle Sam. I would not fight “their” war. That was the same year that I turned my back on a dream. I knew that year that I could never be a professional baseball player: simply put, I was not talented enough to play at the pro level. I replaced my baseball gear with pencils, brushes and canvas, I wanted to document and create this fascinating period of the Sixties, and I was intoxicated by the revolutionary movimiento. I became a Chicano artist that year.

NUESTRO CUENTO

Two historic events in the Chicano Movimiento helped shape and define Chicano art and the direction that the Chicano art and cultural movement would follow.

El Plan de Santa Barbara, was conceptualized, drafted and written by students in 1968 at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was a Chicano liberation manifesto, a blue print for educational, cultural and socio-economic change for the Chicano.  We proclaimed to the world that we as Chicanos were demanding and would assert and fight for our freedom to forge our own cultural and artistic identity.

In 1965, Cesar Chavez and Luis Valdez would form their historic collaboration and combine guerilla teatro with political protest.  The United Farm Workers and El Teatro Campesino created a brilliant and scathing artistic backdrop to the UFW”s national grape boycott campaign. It was sheer genius: political theater on the often hostile and deadly grape fields of Califas.  In short order the entire nation became aware of the farm workers struggle in the fields of Delano, California.  The campesinos and students joined forces and created a historic synergy that fueled the Chicano movimiento and in the process liberated countless artist, scholars, and intellectuals in the Southwest to move forward toward a Chicano aesthetic that was new and exciting.

In 1968, in the city of Sacramento, a group of artists, poets and radical scholars formed the Royal Chicano Air Force; originally know as the Rebel Chicano Art Front. The Royal Chicano Air Force, were two California State University art professors Jose Montoya, Esteban Villa, and Ricardo Favela, an art student. Satirists and gifted social commentators, they popularized two art slogans, “la locura lo cura y aqui estamos y no nos vamos”. These gifted radical artists combined poetry, prose and visual arts in their works that were bold and revolutionary, and grassroots in its orientation. The Royal Chicanos Air Force goal was to create political conscience, promote the art and education in the barrio, and explore our history and culture as Chicanos.

In Los Angeles there were two seminal art groups that would forge a new Chicano art sensibility, the first was Los Four, which included the late Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert (Magu) Lujan, Roberto (Beto) de la Rocha and Frank Romero; later the collective would include Judithe Hernandez and John Valadez. Los Four were the intellectual vanguard of the Chicano art movement of the early 1970’s.

It is safe to say that this grouping of artists, known collectively as Los Four, “legitimized” Chicano art in the Anglo American art world and inspired the younger Chicanada to forge ahead with a school of art that would come to be known as Chicano Art.  Today, Frank Romero, Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert Lujan, Judithe Hernández, and John Valadez represent a group of Chicano artists that have obtained international respect and are admired by producing original and exceptional bodies of work throughout their artistic careers. Los Four opened the commercial door to all in the Chicano art world.

The art group Asco, was composed of Gronk, Willie Herron, Patssi Valdez and Harry Gamboa, to be joined intermittently by Daniel J. Martinez and Diane Gamboa. Asco members were street punks, involved in everything from street actos, punk music performances, and various mural works that today are considered master works of the golden age of the Chicano Mural period. Asco was a young rebel art posse bent on taking over the streets for the sake of art, anarchy y asco. The group Asco also focused its sardonic eye on the Chicano Movement and punctured the romanticism of the cultural nationalist. Asco was more about anarchy and rebellion than Chicano purity and self-determination.

In 1984, Guillermo Gomez Pena and his art cuates began The Borders Art Workshop/ Taller de Arte Fronterizo a cultural artist/ activist amalgamation of radical think tank research and discourse projects, public actos and visual arts spectaculars, and political activism that bridged las fronteras of San Diego and Tijuana. Gomez-Pena always the intellectual genius of the Chicano art movement proclaimed that Taller de Art Fronterizo was, “a bi-national collective that combined critical writing, site-specific performance, media and public art with direct political action …on both sides of the border.” Chicanismo, according to Gomez-Pena, was looking at the world without borders and art was the jackhammer that would crumble the walls of xenophobia, tribalism and nationalism.

Judy Baca, the founder of the Social Public Art Resource Center, or SPARC, introduced a Chicana feminism that, frankly, was missing in the early days of the Chicano art evolution.  Baca directed the Los Angeles River Mural Project, the largest continuous mural project in the world. Baca has also assisted countless young artist with their careers in the Los Angeles area with her business acumen and political know how and well placed palancas. A critical contribution made by Baca was that she brought to the male- dominated art table the discourse between Chicano art and its views of machismo, racism, sexism, violence and misogyny as viewed by the Chicana artist. To Baca and the other Chicano Feminist artists, the status quo in the art world, and in particular, Chicano Art, would not be controlled by the myopic machistas.

There were many more Chicano art warriors, intellectuals, scholars and others that helped create the school we have to recognize as Chicano art.  The current success of Chicano art did not just materialize; we fought hard to create our own unique place and identity in the American and international art scene.

These were my Chicano art mentors. I wanted to contribute, participate, document and create in this fascinating period of the Sixties. Like many of my art comrades, the Chicano Movimiento intoxicated me. 1967 was cathartic and revolutionary for me. The dialogue world  and I changed forever. Like so many people of that period I came to question the entire order of things, and how they operated. I would come to learn how to dissect the American systemic and institutional construct with a critical mind; I would never again be satisfied with the old order. I evolved into a Chicano artist and activist.

ACADEMIA Y ATRE CHICANO

The Chicano Movimiento open the university doors for me, as it did for thousands of Chicanos throughout the United States. It was here that my revolutionary ideas were honed, encouraged and directed.  College life was glorious and intoxicating, I had found my niche: academia and Chicano art.

We were there at the beginnings of the Chicano Movimiento, a group of student artist- activists from throughout the Los Angeles County brought together at San Fernando Valley State College, later changed to California State University at Northridge. The group, that later came together to form the nucleus of El Jardin de Flor Y Canto in the early 1970’s, was developing a unique, bold and social activist art philosophy and style that connected with the community and its social and political concerns.

From every barrio throughout southern Califas we were brought together in the turbulent, exciting and fertile halls of academia. Everyday at CSUN there was a Causa; dawn delivered another revolutionary day. The civil rights struggle at the university and the communidad fueled our artistic work. Arte was an indispensable arm of the moviemiento.

As we grew as artists, we felt the need to expand our artistic endeavor far beyond the university; this is where the idea of a community cultural center had it inception.

The original group of artistas that formed the El Jardin de Flor y Canto collective was

Smiley (Ismael Cazarez), Guillermo Bejerano (Billy), Joe Bravo, Frank Martinez, and Armando Vazquez. Sergio Hernandez was involved with El Jardin de Flor y Canto along with other commitments that he had with art groups in Los Angeles. By the time the Jardin was opened, Sergio was already producing his seminal cartoon strip, “Arnie and Porfi” for Con Safos magazine, still considered the best cartoon strip of the Chicano Movimiento.

EL JARDIN DE FLOR Y CANTO

The mission of El Jardin de Flor y Canto was simple: help fuel the movimiento with our art. We took to the street and began mural projects throughout the San Fernando Valley and the greater Los Angeles County. Some of the murals painted during that period were highly controversial; many of the murals were condemned as incendiary and highly political and were quickly white washed. I am sad to note that probably all of the murals that we painted during this period (1972-1976) are gone, covered up or destroyed.

Back at El Jardin de Flor y Canto, in the tiny quarters we called both studio and art gallery an incredible energy emanated from our art collective. We painted and experimented, shared a communal artistic experience that was all consuming, it fed us, made love to us, implored us to create and work with the gente of our communities.

El Jardin de Flor y Canto was the incubator for many political and art ideas. It served as   the home for some talented artists that emerged in the ensuing years. It would be wrong to suggest that great art was produced during this period.  However, it is clear that this magical period in the early 1970’s, El Jardin was a critical and formative artistic experience for many of us. Today Chicano artists like Frank Martinez, Ismael “Smiley” Cazarez, Joe Bravo, Guillermo Bejerano, Ramon “Psycho” Cisneros, and Sergio Hernandez, Felix Perez and Armando Vazquez are well known and respected in the art world. They all got their formative start at El Jardin de Flor y Canto. Just as quickly as the Jardin was born, it disappeared.  The core group of us lasted about 4 years; it was enough to convert us all to disciples of the Chicano Art Movimiento.

ENTER THE RUDY F. ACUNA ART GALLERY AND CULTURAL CENTER

One rainy winter afternoon, my business partner Dr. Deborah De Vries and I were looking for a building in the downtown Oxnard area. We wanted a commercial building that would serve as a multi-purpose space, suitable for the arts, instruction and would hold a large number of people for meetings, seminars and community events. I wanted to revive the spirit of the EL Jardin de Flor y Canto in the ombligo of Oxnard. By sheer luck and providence we found the Cafe on A Street, located in heart of downtown Oxnard. Since we opened the door to the community, approximately five years ago, we have been honored to host and participate in hundreds of cultural, political and social events at the Cafe on A, with our community. My dream has come true; I am again involved in the noble affairs of culture and the arts.

The reception that you are attending here tonight, represents another important passage for me: it will be the first time that I have exhibited my artwork in over 27 years. In fact the last time I showed publicly was at El Jardin. I have come full circle and I am honored to be a Chicano artist, basking tonight in the glory and splendor of our Chicano culture, art and history. Y como dicen los carneles del Royal Chicano Air Force! el rollo sigue!

Tags: Armando Vazquez, Chicano Art Movement, Reflection