Recuerdos Orales: Interviews of the Latino Art Community in Texas

Interview with Franco Mondini-Ruiz
Conducted by Cary Cordova
Alameda and San Antonio, Texas
July 7-8, 2004

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Franco Mondini-Ruiz on July 7-8, 2004. The interview took place in Alameda and San Antonio, Texas and was conducted by Cary Cordova for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Recuerdos Orales: Interviews of the Latino Art Community in Texas.

This transcript has been lightly edited. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

MS. CARY CORDOVA: All right. We are recording. This is Cary Cordova for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, interviewing Franco Mondini-Ruiz on July 7, 2004. This is Session One and Disc One. And I’ve got a really easy question for you. When and where were you born?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I was born on June 2, 1961, in San Antonio, Texas.

MS. CORDOVA: Okay. And now, your family – your father was born in Italy, is that true?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes. My father was born in Bracciano, B-r-a-c-c-i-a-n-o, Bracciano Italy, a small town north of Rome on a beautiful lake called Lago Bracciano, and that’s where he’s from.

MS. CORDOVA: When did he come to the United States?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: My father was born, actually, in an upper middle class family. My grandfather was actually mayor of the town, his name was Giuseppe Mondini, G-i-u-s-e-p-p-e. My grandfather was quite, I think, a disciplinarian, and my father did not enjoy living under my grandfather’s rule. And my grandfather, being a mayor, had a lot of bourgeois aspirations for my father, he probably wanted him to be a lawyer or a doctor.

And my dad joined the Italian Air Force, and he went to the Air Force Academy, which was very prestigious in those days. This is in the late 1950s. My dad was stationed in San Antonio, Texas for English training and missile guidance training. He was part of NATO and he was with the mission that was pretty high – pretty secretive. Apparently it was during that period where he met my mother, who was born in San Antonio.

Her name is Stella Ruiz. S-t-e-l-l-a R-u-i-z. She always felt bad that she was never even given a middle name, which is kind of rare in Latino culture, and she never liked the name Stella, although it is an Italian name meaning star. She always stylized it and called herself Estelle or Estella. Apparently my father had a childhood sweetheart at the time, back in Italy – and at the end of the tape we’ll probably return to this part of the story – but today my dad is living back in Italy and married to that childhood sweetheart that he had left when he got my mother pregnant with me and married her.

So the story goes full circle, and the story deals with a lot of issues of class and culture and people branching out and trying to join a larger world, but sometimes retreating to the small world they came from in the first place. My mother –

MS. CORDOVA: What year did your parents marry?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: They would have been married in 1960. My dad is still in the Italian Air Force, he is getting his butt in trouble. He is not supposed to fraternize with the locals and marry them. This is a high security NATO mission. Not that security, but they didn’t want a lot of this kind of thing going on.

Apparently my dad and many of his buddies fell in love with the Mexican women. Now, it was a time of Spaghetti Westerns and a time of high romanticization of Texas. So my dad remembers loving San Antonio, he’d go into the mercados and it was full of bubbling cauldrons and Mexican – it was like a movie set. And here was my mother and her friends that were beauties, that were very European, they didn’t look very Indian, they were very Spanish-looking women with snow white skin, jet black eyes and jet black hair.

And in many ways, very sophisticated in my father’s eyes. Although my father was upper middle class, here were these women dressed in really smart suits and dresses and driving cars. Only very, very rich, eccentric women of my mother’s age were driving cars. Her sisters were working in banks and fancy department stores. At that time some of the better-looking, better-educated middle-class, even lower-middle-class Mexican American women could get jobs like that.

But in my dad’s eyes it was very prestigious, so he was already confused about class and culture at the time. Of course, he fell in love with her for her beauty and her very eccentric personality. But he also thought, I think, at the time he was kind of marrying into his own class. It turned out though, as he got to know my mom better, here is my mom living in the West Side in this crooked house that my grandfather had built out of material scraps, that was trying its hardest to look like a middle-class white person’s house.

It wasn’t a Mexican bordello, it was a little casita. It was, you know, a kind of a middle class white house made out of lumber and there were five beautiful sisters living in it. There was not one correct right-angle in the whole house. The house was full of cheap linoleum and cats and dogs and women and bourgeois knick-knacks, not Mexican-style knick-knacks, but the kind of things that Mexican-Americans, at that time, were collecting: little porcelain white figurines of ladies and stuff like that.

My dad still romanticized all of that stuff, still kind of liked it, that they had chickens and my dad, you know, being Italian, was still very pastoral, and had aunts and uncles also that lived in farms and lived in the countryside that had their beautiful daughters and all that.

Turns out, though, my father married my mother and she wasn’t a virgin, which was really bad. My mother had already been married before, which was difficult for my mom, and kind of scandalous for my dad to have married a woman that had already had a baby. I grew up with a half brother, my older brother Mark, who looks a lot more Mexican than I do or my siblings. I didn’t find out till I was 21-years-old that he was really my half-brother, that my mother had had a previous husband.

MS. CORDOVA: Did she just decide to tell you about that?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: No, I went to – [phone rings] – let’s see if we can get our phone turned off.

MS. CORDOVA: Okay, let me pause this.

[Pause.]

All right, we’re back recording. And you were saying about your brother.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: So I don’t find out that my brother, who always looked more Indian than I did, who was always treated much like an indentured servant, was [actually] my half-brother. So I’m 21-years-old, I’ve gone to Italy for the first time and I kept being introduced by my grandfather as the first-born son. Now, my father had an estranged relationship, pretty much, with my grandfather. I’m here in Italy now, and I haven’t gone to Italy ‘til I was 21, and now I’ve found out why they always made it so difficult for me to go, they didn’t want me to find out that that was my half-brother.

So my grandfather in Italy did not have the decency to recognize my brother, nor did my father have the will strong enough to demand it of his father and his family. So the secret was out, and although this is my brother’s story, it takes some interesting angles, because the truth about my family is, and it’s become a – not a metaphor – but maybe you had a different experience, hopefully, you did. But I really felt there was issues of race and class prejudice within my own family.

And I really feel, in a microcosm, I grew up in the Conquest. I really grew up with an arrogant, talented, in many ways, on paper, superior father from European lineage, and a mixed-race, inferior mother of mestizo lineage. I grew up in the shadow of the Conquest with him, out in the suburbs of San Antonio, Texas. But it might as well have been 1512 because that is the battles that went on within my family on a daily basis. They weren’t always spoken very clearly, but it does exist and it’s something that I’ve become hypersensitive to throughout my life.

Now I’m mellowing and I’m older and I’m not as angry about it, but there were issues that scarred me.

MS. CORDOVA: When do you think you were gaining consciousness of this kind of equilibrium?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I didn’t gain consciousness until I would have been in law school. My father, although grew up upper class, he had some good qualities and we were kind of Bohemian. You know, we lived in a trailer, we had kind of a junkie house, and then sometimes – but in many ways we were also – there was high culture and low culture being mixed together, but we also had gorgeous paintings that my father painted, and we had the best food you could eat anywhere, probably, in Texas. My father would make incredible gourmet dishes.

So I grew up with this high culture-low culture mix which I loved. However, I was a product of the 60s, I was gay, I was also a product of the 70s and 80s and Texas was booming. So all of a sudden all of my peer group – I grew up in the suburbs – it was a time of conspicuous consumption. So I really just wanted to be a successful person, that’s what I cared about at the time. You know, all my friends were mostly white, I grew up in the white suburbs, you know.

MS. CORDOVA: Which suburbs?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Boerne. Boerne is a small German town north of here. So most of my friends were upper-middle-class white kids with tennis courts, and swimming pools, and ranches, and brand new Trans-Am’s for their 16th birthdays. And my parents had the Radio Shack stores. We were peddlers. We had the electronic stores, but they were very interesting because my dad was so cultured. He spoke six or seven languages, there were wealthy people moving to Boerne, and they had lived in New York, they had lived in California, they had lived in Paris, and so it became kind of this bizarre community.

And they loved my dad because our TV stores became cultural salons. You know, my dad didn’t want to talk about football and hunting, he wanted to talk about culture and recipes and books and history. And so we had this weird television shop, my mother in the back, jealous of my dad talking to all these women, crunching numbers in her messy, shabby office, like Sanford and Son. And then I set up the store gorgeously because I used the store as an installation.

So the stores were beautiful, you know.

MS. CORDOVA: How many were there?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: We had three at the peak, but the one in Boerne was the main one. But it was a mom-and-pop store. And my brother was really the bread-winner. He wasn’t allowed to play sports, he was belittled, he wasn’t allowed to do anything, and he loved working. And he poured all his energies and his sorrows into work.

[Knock on door, pause.]

MS. CORDOVA: All right, we’re back to Boerne.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Okay, so we’re back in Boerne, Texas, this hill-country town.

MS. CORDOVA: And this was your brother Mark?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: This was my older brother, Mark, yes.

MS. CORDOVA: And you have a sister?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I have two younger sisters.

MS. CORDOVA: Two younger sisters. And their names are?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: One is Angela and one is Bella.

MS. CORDOVA: Bella?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Bella. So we prospered. We went from lower-middle-class to middle-class to almost on the – putting on airs of upper-middle-class-dom. And so you asked me about my consciousness. So I went to St. Mary’s Law School [St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas]. For my mother’s generation that would have been a dream come true. That’s where the boys of the good families went.

And of course when she was growing up there would be a few Mexican families, and mostly white, Catholic families. By the time I went it was really a school that had heavily recruited middle-class Mexican Americans. Then I –

MS. CORDOVA: That was St. Mary’s?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: That was St. Mary’s undergrad. I was an English major. I was gay, in the closet. All I believed in was work and in self-improvement. I finished college in three years. I worked at my parents’ store. I still hung around with a few of my friends from high school, but I was very, very serious about making something of myself.

I did not party yet, I did not go to lunch, and I did not go to parties: I was not fun. I did not do drugs. I had no idea you were supposed to enjoy your life. I just thought your life was a valley of sorrow. But I knew that maybe if I worked, something would come out of it. So I made very good grades and I got accepted to St. Mary’s Law School. I was one of the youngest accepted and it was a brand new world, because it was not like the undergrad.

All of a sudden it was this parking lot full of BMWs and six-foot-tall gorgeous blonde people, you know. And three Latinos and two blacks, in a city that’s 80 percent Latino. I might be exaggerating, maybe it was like 10 percent Latino, but very, very underrepresented. This was white, elite, rich Texas kids. So although some of my friends were upper-middle-class smart kids, this was the first time I’d been exposed to Gringo Texas, ranchers’ sons and beautiful blonde girls and all that kind of stuff.

MS. CORDOVA: And that was dramatically different from the suburban life?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah, from the suburban life as well as going to undergrad at St. Mary’s. Maybe undergrad from St. Mary’s had some rich kids, Mexican kids who were the sons of judges in Laredo and all that, but as far as the waspy, rich Texas kids, this was the first time I had ever been in that world.

MS. CORDOVA: A kind of confrontation with class?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Class.

MS. CORDOVA: Like, the wealthier class.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes, and you could see it. I mean, the parking lot was full of BMWs and gorgeous clothes and people traveling. And I liked it, and I wanted it, I wanted a piece of it. So I worked hard, some more. And I probably, at that time, still bought into what my father had taught me, that I had work-ethic, and Mexicans were lazy and inferior, and I wasn’t quite one of those people. But there were some of us that were that way.

I was conflicted. At the same time when I had gone to undergrad, I was starting to meet these glamorous Mexican kids, which is the first time I had met glamorous Mexican kids. Keep in mind, San Antonio for the most part has two Latino populations. It’s changed a lot, but we’re still talking about the early 80s. There was this secret society – not secret, but very closed society of the Mexican elite, which I knew nothing about that world.

There were rich Mexican nationals, which I knew nothing about that world, and there was huge, huge lower-middle-class Mexican kids, like myself. I didn’t look like one, I looked like a European. I didn’t talk like one because I grew up in a white-boy town. Anyway, so I was – I didn’t know what world I belonged to yet, but I wanted to succeed and I wanted – it was the ‘80s.

Okay, so I haven’t even had sex yet, I haven’t lived yet. And I’m already graduating law school, top of my class. I’m one of the editors of the law review and I’m always worrying about weight issues, and I’d lose weight – and I wanted to be a preppy. I was a preppy wannabe.

Why are you laughing? [Laughing.]

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughing.] You’re just bringing visions and memories of youth.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Exactly.

[Laughter.]

So I’m a preppy wannabe. So I get to intern at two very prestigious law firms in San Antonio. The law firms in San Antonio at that time are still lily white. But I went to two lily-white law firms – no they’re not. I went to Cox and Smith, where I end up working, where I felt more comfortable. It was guys and girls that I identified with. We weren’t high-born, but we were the brains and we were the top law firm, it was the biggest law firm. And I felt comfortable in that.

The other one was Matthews and Branscomb. Now, that had people from the old, old money families of San Antonio, which are mostly German, German stock. You know, this is a law firm from the 1860s, probably. It was the Germans. Now, they were more progressive and they knew that they had to start actively recruiting people from Harvard and Yale, and stuff like that.

So I was clerking – there was a few of us Latinos from San Antonio that were brainy and had made the good grades and got these jobs. The other Latinos that were coming in were from Harvard and Yale, and probably products of affirmative action. They were – a couple of them were beautiful, but most of them weren’t that beautiful, they were like Indian-looking. Their parents were migrant workers. You know, that was another world that I had nothing to do with.

You know, I was a middle-to-lower-middle-class Catholic Mexican-American, light-skinned from San Antonio that grew up in the white suburbs and didn’t speak Spanish. And here were these, dark-skinned, migrant-worker parented children that somehow – through affirmative action, through luck, through brains, through desire, all of these things that I would have to filter through later – were in these prestige law schools firms and going on these yachting trips with us, and blah, blah, blah and blah, blah, blah.

And one time, one of the girls said to me they liked – I didn’t know who I was yet. I was a baby, I meant well, you know. So I tried to befriend all of them, but I didn’t have a whole lot in common, but as they started to – and they treated me with suspicion, and they were so advanced, having gone to Harvard and Yale with Latino – their consciousness had been raised and mine hadn’t been yet.

And one time at a barbecue, they said, “Franco, you’re Chicano, aren’t you?” And the word Chicano was a bad word in San Antonio. And even the word “Mexican” wasn’t said yet. And this is five-minutes-ago, this is mid 80s. So I bristle at the barbecue, and I go, “Well, my mother’s Spanish.” You know, maybe I even said Mexican, maybe I’d learned enough, my consciousness had been raised just enough to say that, you know?

I said, “My mother’s of Mexican descent, you know, but I guess I’m a Chicano,” but I never use that word. “Well, then if you’re Chicano, then why do you act so white?” And I said, “Well, honey, you’re wearing those Oaxacan Mexican dresses, you can’t get any whiter than that,” you know – you know what I mean? So already, I was aware of the nuances and the ironies of cultural exoticization.

So here were Mexican girls wearing Oaxacan dresses. Their parents would have been horrified. Girls in Oaxaca don’t dress like that, unless you’re an old Indian lady, you know? And here were these college girls telling me I was so white and that they had raised their consciousness. Little did they know that those Oaxacan dresses were only in vogue because blonde girls, that were sorority girls at UT, decided to bring them into vogue, you know?

So that was this – that explosion summed it all up. My consciousness was being raised, but I also had a – I was also from a place where I could see the big picture, you know what I mean?

MS. CORDOVA: And you were sort of in your early 20s around then?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: By then I would have been – 1985, mid-20s, yeah. So then I realize eventually – okay, so then it’s like I – it plants a seed. The seed is planted, but I’m still thinking, oh, any Mexican could make it if they decided to work as hard and be as miserable as me, you know what I mean?

[Laughs.]

MS. CORDOVA: That’s a great phrase to live by.

[Laughter.]

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Well, you know. Only later did I realize that the privilege of growing up in a white suburb, of learning how to talk like a white boy, the privilege of having a European father that speaks six languages, the privilege of having a light-skinned mother – the privilege of all these things worked in my favor and I wasn’t aware of it yet.

I work with Cox and Smith, I am the darling of Cox and Smith because I have these skills that I’ve learned as a Latino. I’m charming, I’m friendly, I’m open, I’m not snobby, I’m obedient, you know, I’m a good – all these things I have going on, you know, as far as Mexican stereotypes are concerned. And I also have all the qualities of a white boy, you know.

MS. CORDOVA: You’re non-threatening?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes. I’m a non-threatening Latino. Not only that, I’m a closet Latino, they don’t know yet. My name is still Franco Mondini. And through college, I’ve been an Italophile. Every summer in college I’m going to Italy, and just being crazy about my Italian culture, which already was a little bit rebellious against white culture, you know? But I wasn’t yet prepared to get in touch with my Mexican side yet.

I graduate, I finally start going to lunch and drinking and drugging and having sex, and had sex with boys and going to gay bars, and I will never be the same again.

[Laughter.]

MS. CORDOVA: So post-1985 you have an awakening?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah. It’s like Helen Keller, you know, when the water – “water” – the pump. I’m like, what was I thinking? So, okay, all the energy I made to making straight A’s, I use all this energy now to learn everything I could about my culture, to study it, to explore it. I made a lot of mistakes. But I was voracious. I had sex with everyone and it was wonderful, and I learned other people –

See, when you’re gay, also, you get this social entrée. So all of a sudden I was part of the glamorous gay bar in San Antonio was the Bonham. So it was this – you could one night go to bed with some gangster, you could one night go to bed with some poor Mexican guy in the West Side or an illegal alien, I mean a migrant worker from Mexico, or the richest boy in town. You know, so all of a sudden every night is this new lesson in sociology, like, “Oh, so that’s how rich people live, oh, that’s how someone lives there.”

And I did it. I just lived, and I was making money, and I was handsome, and I was buying Hugo Boss suits, and the world was my oyster. And I was working hard, we had to work like 15 hours a day, but I had so much prestige. I was running, exercising twice a day. I was a yuppie living it up and making wonderful friends, starting to notice, though, that there are no other Mexicans in my world.

It gets bad when I finally – I, when I was in college – am I getting too scattered?

MS. CORDOVA: No.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: So when I was in college there’d be this little group of internationally cool people. I was a nerd, and I’d look at them and I’d say, one day I want to be like them, I knew. So I’m at a gas station, I run into one of those boys, and he’s Ito Romo, who became – he’s an artist, and you’ll probably hear his name some day. And he became a mentor, in a way – we’d been enemies and friends many times since then – but Ito was something I had to grasp onto that I hadn’t found in San Antonio.

Ito and his peers represented upper-middle-class, well-educated Latino people in touch with their culture. They grew up on the border. The border was so different. They did not lose their ancestral lands, they grew up having beauty pageant winners that were Mexicans and football players and coaches and mayors and city council members and car dealers that were Mexicans, orthodontists and veterinarians.

In San Antonio we did not. We were a very invisible majority of the population. We weren’t the ones – we weren’t the beauty queen throwing the candy, we were the little Mexican kids chasing after the candy. So Ito and his generation represented all that world, so I’ve now aspired to be a bourgeois Mexican, okay? That’s my next manifestation.

So, I wasn’t alone. There was a critical mass of Mexican Americans, mostly gay, for some reason, I haven’t studied it completely, but there was a critical mass of homosexual, Mexican American men who were mediating their culture and not just aping white culture, being able to be successful in white culture, but coming to terms with their culture.

For example, you interviewed Rolando Briseño. They’re 10 years older than me, but as soon as I came out and became a member of society in San Antonio, I started befriending Mexican Americans in Rolando’s age group. A: these boys mostly, like Henry Cisneros, not that he’s gay, but they went to central Catholic high school, okay? So they were bourgeois boys. They were acculturated by Irish priests who said, “You can go to Harvard, you can go to Yale, you have a soul.”

You know, it was like the Conquest all over again. These were the priests that were telling the Indians, “You have a soul, you can go to Harvard, and you can be president if you want.” The boys were still Anglicized a lot, but it was a nice hybrid, a hybrid that I felt comfortable with, that my generation also hooked up with Rolando’s generation.

So there was a critical mass of us middle – go ahead.

MS. CORDOVA: Who would you consider of your generation?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: My generation is a bit younger. My generation would be me, Chuck Ramirez, David Casas, Philip Avila, even Sandra Cisneros is between the two. But the Rolando is definitely – they were probably the first Mexican-American, bourgeois boys that were able to come out of the closet. I think that’s why this hookup happened, you know.

Probably all the brothers that taught them were gay. I almost see it as a gay conspiracy, how the Latino culture evolved here. You know, it was the lesbians and the gay guys that somehow brought this to fruition, or were allowed to. And part of it might be about passing. For us to succeed in the first place we had to learn the game of wearing masks and camouflaging ourselves.

When you’re gay, you learn at a very early age to camouflage and to act like the dominant group to survive. So we were probably using these skills with white culture. I wanted what white culture wanted, so I’ll do what I have to do. I know it’s not the real me, who cares? You know, I’ve been wearing a mask my whole life anyway.

So maybe – that’s a theory I have, I’m not sure of it, and it’s – you know, Jesse Amado, who’s straight, will have a different theory. But his theories also would intersect with mine, because we’re all in this kind of sexually ambiguous, artsy-fartsy conceptual, intellectual socio – you know, culturally-active battle that’d been going on in San Antonio.

So it was that generation that also had influenced me. So it’s the 80s, I’ve come out of the closet, I’m sleeping with everyone, I have money. I’m ready to live, because no one had ever told me. So I’m –

MS. CORDOVA: I think it’s also the time that AIDS had just come out. I can’t help but think that you’re coming out right at the same time as the news.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes, and I probably presume I’m going to die any minute. So I think I, subconsciously, want to just get it over with. And I’m having unprotected sex all of these years. I meet the most amazing people in the world, and they’re all dead. AIDS changed the world. And two things happened. One, it became cool to be Mexican because of altars. The whole concept of altars and Day of the Dead was kind of a product marketing – not meant to be – but it became a way that even white people were grasping to Mexican culture because it allowed a way of dealing with death and sorrow.

Oh, Mexicans, we’re the best in the world. No one can touch us when it comes to death and sorrow and loss. And, you know, the gringos bought it and that’s where we united. That there altares built, there were shows all about altars and shrines and –

MS. CORDOVA: Did you grow up celebrating Días de los Muertos?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Of course not. You know, not celebrating, but it existed. And this is what I had to bring to the table that I won’t be able to articulate for another five or 10 years. I didn’t grow up with Day of the Dead celebrations, I grew up with the dead, living amongst our family. My mother thought our cats were reincarnated spirits, you know, in the suburbs.

I grew up, not with the form, I grew up with the substance. So now the form of being Mexican became very celebrated. So I’m a yuppie and all of my friends are rich, white liberals living in the most beautiful homes in San Antonio. They have houses in Tasco and San Miguel de Allende, they speak Spanish, they wear ropas, they’re all blonde, and I get invited to their fiesta parties, and they have Frida Kahlos and Diego Riveras in their houses, and there are no Mexicans at the parties.

None. Me. Me and maybe one other light skinned-friend, and the servants are Mexican. There might be some rich Mexican nationals that jetted in from Mexico City or Monterrey. Other than that, it is everyone playing Mexican wannabe. Mexican dishes, Oaxacan plates, Oaxacan mole, you know, everything Mexican. But no Mexican-Americans. I’m not the right kind of Mexican yet. They’re not fully aware of the upper class, bourgeois Mexican I’m trying to be, but they’re definitely not aware of the working-class Mexican-American hybrid that I really am.

That is just not on the radar screen. We don’t even matter, we are just this – I’m working at USAA, and an executive says, “The population of San Antonio is actually about 150,000. Although it’s a million people, if you compare it to Austin, it’s really 150,000.” He meant that Mexicans don’t count as far as marketing or we just were mongrels, we were stray dogs in the street.

MS. CORDOVA: That was at USAA?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: That was at USAA. That was a top executive talking about that, you know. So - [laughs] –

MS. CORDOVA: What steps were you taking to educate yourself, to do your own consciousness raising?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: It didn’t take long. You know, I’m not a – it was – and like, oh, I was blind and now I see, you know? My mother was taught to be ashamed of who she is, my grandmother was taught to be ashamed of who she was in public, but who they really are existed and permeated the way we were brought up. It took a while to – it didn’t take long to understand it, but it took a while to articulate it.

And I was just on fire for 10 years. How did I educate myself? I got drunk and I got in fights, and I talked things out, and I engaged in dialogues with people of every class. I brought up taboos, I got kicked out of parties, and I got welcomed to parties. I just lived. I talked, and I was honest as can be, and it was terrifying. It was scary how people that you thought were your best friends, when you start to articulate yourself, just thought you were from planet Mars.

Now, I hadn’t learned strategies to do it correctly without offending people and threatening people, but it was purity. It was honest conversation and there was a lot of it going on in San Antonio, and that’s why there was this magic period going on from the mid 80s to now, even. You know, the word “Mexican” amongst even us Mexican American artists had not been said yet.

And, of course, I aligned myself with anyone I could. People like Rolando and his peer group, most of them were gay. Some of them were in the closet, but they were all gay. And I aligned myself and I learned as much as I could, and they weren’t completely right yet, either. And I was still looking for this proper utopic formula, which I might not ever find. It’s what I’m seeking as an artist.

But my consciousness, as you had said, was raised, and there was no turning back after that, until the point now, that I’m mellowing out. But for a while I was a broken record, where I saw everything through the lens of cultural bias. And I still kind of do. I don’t think – you know, things have improved so much and San Antonio is a bicultural city, or multicultural. And people think that just means that, you know, you decorate with Mexican flowers. It just means there are people from different world views and mindsets and value systems.

And I feel adept at it and very angry about it, and aggressive about it because of how I had grown up, where everything superior about me was because of my European white lineage, and everything inferior about me was because of my impure bloodlines, which finally boils down to Indian blood. You know, we’re Asians and we’re white. And everything not white is suspicious or is an issue that has to be dealt with at all times.

And I get weary of it, and I was very weary of it. So my father treated my brown stepbrother like a mule, like a working mule. And –

MS. CORDOVA: Was there a specific incident that you remember?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: My brother – yeah, just belittling. Like, my brother would want a car, you know, what do you want to do with a car? My brother vomited one time at a party and my dad just humiliated him about it for years, horrible, horrible, you know? And my brother actually was very virile, which probably my father feared too, you know?

To him my brother, which was a different race, a different racial blood, and was physically virile. And my father is a narcissist and is very virile, and beautiful also. And I was the son that had his blood and was flabby and gay and – you know what I mean? So there were these issues that I knew, even as a boy, something was going on. I could never put my finger on it, but being a greedy second child, I loved being the chosen, golden-haired son. I was blonde, even, in my early –

And I was talented in ways that my dad responded to. I was artistic and articulate, and I had – my brother had very, very – my father would describe it as peasant-like ways of communicating. “You’re just like your Grandpa Ruiz,” you know? The myth was that Grandma Ruiz, my Mexican grandmother – she’s dead now – she and her sisters look like German ladies. They had piercing blue eyes and they had blondish hair.

The myth is that in those days there was a lot of German blood in the Mexican families, but it was something to be ashamed of because it was not through marriage, it was usually through affairs. Often, maybe illegitimate, German children were even sold to the Mexicans. These are myths, but there was – you know, if there was German blood in your family it wasn’t through a fancy wedding, it was through something.

MS. CORDOVA: Miscegenation.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah, exactly.

So that’s what that meant. But all these things were spoken so secretly, you know. Anyway, so Grandma Ruiz looks like a big German lady, and there’s Grandpa Ruiz, who is a very humble Mexican man that was not very good at expressing himself. And all he ate was pan dulce with milk. You know, just a real hen-pecked Mexican husband with a 300-pound Germanic-Mexican wife.

MS. CORDOVA: And these were your mother’s parents?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: These were my mother’s parents.

MS. CORDOVA: And she was born here in San Antonio?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Mom was born in San Antonio, probably grandma was too. I think we are descendents of the Canary Islanders. We don’t even know what part of Mexico we’re from. My dad would scoff at all that and say, “You don’t speak Spanish, you don’t speak English, and you don’t know where you’re from.” We were bastard, mongrel people, you know, after a while. My dad romanticized the Mexican culture at first.

MS. CORDOVA: And he said this to you children?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: In front of us, and stuff like that. You know, you don’t even speak English, you don’t speak Spanish. Oh, yeah, he called my mother a whore, and my sisters were whores, yeah.

MS. CORDOVA: And what about that? Did your mother speak Spanish to you, or –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: No, she was very ashamed of her Spanish and so were my grandparents, and if I ever tried to speak Spanish they made me feel like a fool or they made fun of me. They said, “Oh, you speak like a Cubano,” and they’d get real red and look the other way, and they would not allow us to speak Spanish.

Now, the myth in the family is that my brother, Mark, was very, very spoiled, as Mexican boys can be. So my brother is living in a little crooked house in the West Side, which is the Mexican side of town, on Leal Street. There were all these other little crooked houses all around my grandmother’s house, that I find out later, are all relatives, like sisters and stuff, that she doesn’t talk to. You know, there’s all these feudings, you know, people fighting over crumbs.

My dad adopted – okay, so mom had this baby and then she was abandoned by the father of my brother. The story gets good – really. She’s abandoned by the father of my brother. No, they divorce, they divorce. He’s a womanizer. His name is Tony Calderon. He’s a politico-womanizer, I think, and then has a drinking problem, very gorgeous.

But anyway, my grandmother and grandfather raise my brother. They never had any boys. They had one, but I think it died as a baby. So my brother was spoiled. He didn’t have to go to school, they didn’t even want him to go to school, and he was a mijito. They just made French rice for him all day long and bought him cowboy suits and spoiled him rotten.

Dad, as the Manifest Destiny European that he was, married my mother because she was pregnant with me and agreed to adopt my brother. And he meant well in his “European Manifest Destiny, he will make the world a better place” way, and maybe he did, the verdict’s still out. But he feels my brother would have ended up like my cousin, you know, minimum wage jobs or heroin addicts or dead, you know, or in gangs.

So he always – once the secret was out that – I think the secret had already been out. Even though my brother was never told point blank he was adopted, he understood that dad had rescued us, you know, he had saved us from being poor Mexicans. So my brother bought into it. Recently my brother had a liver condition and finally said, “My doctor said I need to find my real father.” And mom gave him all the information and he called the family, and the man had died the day before of psoriasis of the liver. So weak livers run in that side of the family, my brother does not drink.

To top it off, Tony Calderon, although he was a big drinker and all that, his nephews and sons had become successful people. And one of them was one of these Harvard Mexicans that I had clerked with years before, Raul Calderon, who was my brother’s half-brother or half-cousin.

Now, he wasn’t one of the ones that went through affirmative action; Tony Calderon’s family was actually a good family. So here’s my brother, always thinking that he was an inferior Mexican that had been rescued by my European father, when all along my brother’s Mexican blood was one of the top families in the community. You know, it would have done so much for his self-esteem and all that, but he bought into the fact that, you know, dad had improved the race. How do you say that Spanish? There’s an expression for it. At least in Texas there is.

So my brother now, I think, is a little scarred by that and is just this staunch, Catholic, reactionary republican that can’t talk enough about Bush. And he lives in a beautiful house in the North Side. He’s doing his own style of cultural activism, like, he had a Quinceañera. The high school’s all white, but he gave his daughter a Quinceañera.

So he has his dagger out a little bit, too. But he’s real proud of the fact of being a republican, but that’s a growing phenomenon, too, among middle-class Mexican families, that they’re voting republican. But he’s a perfect example where extreme Catholic and republicanism has united. And he knows I’m gay and all that, but he’s always niggling me about republican issues. He can have it.

[Laughter.]

But he has a beautiful swimming pool and he has a big house in a very prestigious neighborhood, and he’s the uncle that made it.

MS. CORDOVA: In many ways you could have been a republican alongside him, I mean, you early direction of your life.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Possibly, maybe because I was gay I had a liberal slant to me. Maybe a lot of successful Latinos got seduced by republicanism, and maybe being gay kept us at the left and grew – that’s another theory – and allowed us to become more enlightened by hanging around with more enlightened people. Because I really did – it took me a while to learn.

It was just lessons that were learned that I eventually. I remember I took a – Ito Romo, who in a way is almost an aristocrat, you know, he’d laugh if he were here, but he does, he’s noblesse oblige. He has an aristocratic way of thinking, his father’s family owned the Mexican bus companies. And his mother is probably from working class.

So he was a more extreme example of the hybrid, like I am, a class hybrid. But in some ways he’s so aristocratic that it would just drive me crazy, but in many other ways he was enlightened, you know? And I really still was cocky and arrogant and thought that if anybody worked as hard as I did they would make it. It took a while of working in corporate America, of being mistreated myself, of seeing others mistreated, of seeing myself being given breaks when other people weren’t, it took that sensitivity, and it took a while to understand that.

MS. CORDOVA: Had you ever just felt racialized as a child? I mean, was that – did you suddenly feel different from that suburban existence?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes, different, but even being Italian would have been different enough, or living in a mobile home. You know, we’ve actually got a nice house and had land, but I knew what it was like to be not one of the beautiful blonde kids. But I did have a strong personality. I was as popular as I could possibly be, and I was one of the smartest kids. I find out now that I was in top 1 percent in my IQ test. Now, they should have done something about that.

So the school plays – and, you know, the German kids would get all the good parts, and then they’d find out that I was the best singer and they’d say, you know, why didn’t we put you? You know, well, I’m thinking, I don’t know, because I’m a fat, brown-haired kid with weird parents that aren’t blonde Germans. Yeah, slight, nothing compared to my Latino friends. Nothing. You know –

MS. CORDOVA: How’s the obvious sort of educational tracking?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah.

MS. CORDOVA: Like the ABC –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: No. I was an elite. I mean, I definitely was probably one of the smartest, if not the smartest kid in the school. I mean, it’s a small school. But I wonder if the teachers knew that or not. But I never really was – there was a glass ceiling, but it was very, very, very subtle. And I was the good Catholic kid, and my parents were so strict.

[End Side A, Tape 1, Begin Side B.]

You know, there was that romanticization that I was the good Catholic kid that everybody wanted their kids to hang around with. And if I got to do something, everybody in town got to do it.

I mean, I had – my dad was a tyrant. He was a fascist. He was very fascist, and almost to the point of mental illness. Really, I thought life was just sorrow. I just thought you were just supposed to cry and be beat up if you went to go see a movie. And how he treated my sisters – have you ever seen that movie Carrie? You know the scary mother?

MS. CORDOVA: Yeah.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I can’t watch it because it’s too close – if you saw my parents you’d think they’re charming and nice, but it really captures that creepiness that that Piper Laurie character has, this Catholic, almost sexually erotic weirdness that my parents were involved in.

MS. CORDOVA: Very controlling.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Very controlling. And my mother was older than my father and always felt intellectually – and was – no, I don’t think she was – but felt intellectually and culturally and socially inferior to my father. So she would allow any tricks to happen to keep the marriage together, you know?

MS. CORDOVA: And they both raised you as Catholic? They were both from Catholic families?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Very, very, very Catholic, yeah. My mother’s family would not have been the ideal Mexican family, going to church and all that. They were a bit scattered. And the girls turned out all pretty sexy. They were sexy girls, and they may have used that as a mechanism of self-improvement, which they did. They all married – a couple of them married better, married their way out of the West Side and out of their social class. But they weren’t – they were kind of – my mother was religious, but her sisters weren’t that religious.

MS. CORDOVA: And are you still a practicing Catholic?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Oh, my God, no.

MS. CORDOVA: So when did that change for you?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I think even in – this does bring back things.

So I have this little fantasy going on. Before I become a born-again Mexican, I’m this classy Catholic. That’s kind of my fantasy going on. You know what I mean? I’m a good Catholic boy going to a good Catholic school with good Catholic friends. It was rumblings of being anti-WASP. I mean, that’s as close as I could get, as far as rebelling. So that’s weird, I was rebelling in the form of being a Catholic, but I was still being anti-WASP, which most of my friends were WASP, you know. So I had this fantasy of a good Catholic, Kennedy-type family or something like that.

MS. CORDOVA: Were you an altar boy, ever?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I don’t think I was cute enough to be an altar boy. The priest didn’t like me. He always like the cute boys as the altar boys. I was too chubby. Now I can figure out what that was all about. [Laughter.] But I taught C.C.D. [Confraternity of Christian Doctrine] and all this kind of stuff, and I was very honest about confession. You know, did I believe it all at the time? I just believed it was something you didn’t question.

Now, going to Catholic university, St. Mary’s, I mean, we even had religious classes. But all my teachers, I am sure now, were gay. You know, were lesbian nuns and gay brothers. And between the lines, they would teach us real progressive stuff. Like I remember even remembering my nuns in my Catholic school – I mean not Catholic, but my small town. We had Benedictine nuns, and they got in trouble with the Pope for wearing their skirts too short.

[Laughter.]

And remember, this was the Catholicism of guitar playing. And it seemed kind of cool at the time. So we had these really militant nuns that were beautiful. They probably were lesbians. They’d give themselves boys’ names: Sister Paul, Sister John. They played the guitar, they wore light pastel dresses, and their dresses were miniskirts. The Pope, the Vatican sent a letter that they had to wear their dresses longer because they were getting so extreme. And I wanted to be one of those nuns.

So I had kind of – Catholicism even seemed more liberal than other things. I remember the nuns would teach us – they’d say not to tell our parents – but they would teach us evolution and stuff like that that they weren’t supposed to be teaching. So there was some weird stuff – there’s always something going on between the lines. And even university teaching, I’m happy with what I learned. I think I learned – it was still within a Roman Catholic framework, but once intellectual pursuits were pursued, they were right on, I feel. I feel some things were discussed that were progressive and open-minded and philosophies that I feel comfortable with. But as far as –

MS. CORDOVA: So it was a sort of leftists’ liberal progressive –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah, what did you use to call it? Uh-huh. In the closet, uh-huh. Subverted.

MS. CORDOVA: But at the same time you also were learning your own history, Mexican –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: No. We still weren’t learning any of that. There probably were – probably not, though. I think still that only 3 to 6 percent of the makeup of UT Austin [University of Texas, Austin] was Mexican. It was still just – I mean, at best, you could become white like me. At best. That’s as good as it got, maybe. And probably – but maybe two or three years later there would start being socially conscious Latinos.

UTSA was built way out in the North Side, where all the whites lived, and where all Latinos would have to commute. All these little colleges all over the place now weren’t open yet. You know, it was just grab a life-vest while you can and maybe get a few crumbs. Yes, there was a Mexican upper-class bourgeois going on. But they pretty much kept to themselves.

MS. CORDOVA: And you said your father painted.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: My dad, yes. My dad fancied himself a renaissance man and does really bad paintings, which I’m kind of doing with this show coming up, not even tongue-in-cheek, I guess I grew to love them. But he’d paint the Coliseum and ruins and all that. And he fancied himself an artist, yeah. And he is an artist.

But a lot of my artistry came from my mother. And that didn’t flow out till much later. But my father would beg my mother to clean the house, and she wouldn’t do it. She suffered what Victor Zamudio Taylor calls – the horror vacui, the fear of empty spaces. So there were piles of laundry and piles of outfits never finished that were being sewn, and 20 lampshades and five toaster ovens and every Cool-Whip container from the last 20 years. Nothing could be thrown away. And my father would beg and beg and beg. He wanted this beautiful, clean, idyllic “Italian clean,” as they say, house. You know, Italians are very tidy inside their houses, almost neurotically. And now his new wife is too skinny and too clean. Even she can’t please him.

So - [laughs] – what was the question?

MS. CORDOVA: Well, I was just asking about your father’s artistry, and then you sort of led into your mother’s.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah, so my mother. Yes. But it’s my mother whose artistry really is the hybrid of three things. It is the discipline and the self-confidence, and almost this Manifest Destiny, or this European way of looking at things that I have inherited from my father, I must admit. You know, even San Antonio. I would give away everything I own. I would work and work and work to make the city beautiful and orderly, and better, and more gorgeous, and fill every parking lot with a beautiful building. You know, where does that come from? It’s not quite the Mexican in me. You know, the Mexican in me finds beauty in the way things are, and I learned that later. But the Italian in me wants to build and improve and make the ground fertile – that European things.

Then there’s the white modernism, minimalism that influenced me too. I’m gay, I’m growing up in South Texas, I’m five-years-old and seeing a Weekly Reader, and I see this little black-and-white photo of an Andy Warhol exhibit or a Rauschenberg exhibit. And I know in my deep – my gay DNA that there’s an oasis there, that there’s refuge there. There is someplace that people like me would be safe and privileged.

MS. CORDOVA: Were you having an opportunity to learn about these artists in school? Did you have artistic creativity?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I was always the school artist. I was always the school artist. There would probably be like a Weekly Reader. There’d be like a – no. But, you know, the few little – doesn’t take much to hold onto. And we gay boys grew up in Texas. And I remember my friend, Garret Mormondo [ph], he heard that song, “We Are Family” or something like that on the radio. You know, he’d only heard country music. And it only took two seconds for his parents flipping the channel and him hearing that and saying, “wait,” and he had changed forever.

So, you know, it doesn’t take much. Water seeks its own level, as my friend Drew Allen said. And, yeah, there’d be glimpses. You’d be at a department store and you’d see these people from a different class, or from a different world, or from a different sensibility and you’d know, oh, that world exists and I’m going to get me some of that someday, or I want that, you know?

So I don’t become socially mobile until law school. It takes me two seconds to figure it all out. You know, there’s Blue Star art spaces happening and there’s Contemporary Art World. There’s all these AIDS fundraisers and I am sleeping with boys that are smart and are even not modernists, they are not minimalists. They are celebrating Mexican culture in this really hippie, cool, progressive over-the-top way which I will later replicate in my shops and in my artwork. So I’m digesting that.

At the same time, I’m being welcomed into homes of privileged, mostly white, people with expensive homes and expensive cars and good educations: the good life, I think at the time. And I keep having this –

MS. CORDOVA: Are you out to them?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah. Now I’m out and, you know, I’m the new boy in town. And I imagine my life’s just going to get better and better. And I’m a lawyer and I haven’t even made a piece of art yet, and I know, somehow, I’m going to be showing in beautiful white-cube, prestigious museums throughout the world and be invited to the most elegant, beautiful women’s houses in the world. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, I just know it’s going to happen.

And within 10 years it happened. Within 10 years I’m in the Whitney Biennial [Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY]. And I say it on the tape. I said, “I knew this was going to happen and it’s not what I thought.” [Laughs.] You know, it’s not what I thought it was going to be. And I thought people who were modern and enlightened and like minimalist art, that was going to be a refuge for me. And I just realized there’s all kinds of other walls and ceilings and closed minds, just the setting’s different. So I just had a show at Marfa [Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas]. Marfa is all about Donald Judd. Donald Judd is all about white, macho artists that are talented, but are creating this utopic world.

And I visit this, and I was still attracted to it because the women, not the men-folk, but the women-folk, who were part of this modern world, were enlightened, well-educated women. And as an artist, I have mostly been empowered by this subgroup. It is rich – not necessarily rich – educated, art-world, straight, white women. There have been a few Latino gays, there have been a few white gays, there have been a few maybe gay women that have empowered me, but normally it is this rich-white-woman world that has allowed me – maybe as a gay person or as a Latino person – to enter the doors of the art world and of social mobility.

So Donald Judd-modernism and the de Menil collection [The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas] and all of this high art-world stuff, Michael Tracy, Linda Pace, Alamo Heights, Houston, you know, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Blue Star [Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, San Antonio, Texas]. Oh, my God, I am a peer of these people, at least I think I am. I’m getting on boards that they’re on, welcomed to their homes. I never knew. And I loved it and I ate it up.

MS. CORDOVA: And this is in your position as a professional, as a lawyer.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes. As an art-loving professional, starting to be taken seriously as an artist, which really is a great, lucky twist of fate.

MS. CORDOVA: Yeah. So how does that happen?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: So I’m going to the bars and I just meet beautiful people with beautiful clothes and beautiful lives. And I want some of that. [Laughing.] You know, I keep saying that. [Laughter.] But that’s a big theory, the theory of desire. There was this desire that in my generation – now I desire nothing. I don’t want any material possessions. I don’t. I’m just going to have my toothbrush and my pills. And we’ll get to pills later, okay.

Oh, and then there’s drugs and partying and pleasure. Oh, so remember, I went to the party. I told you that it was a fiesta party and everybody’s in fiesta garb and there’s no Mexicans. Well, I put my money where my fucking mouth was and I started throwing the best parties in San Antonio. And I invited transvestites and I invited fat people and skinny people and poor Mexicans and the richest ladies in town, and Republicans and devil worshippers and politically correct lesbians and Log Cabin Republicans. And I had cocaine, and the best liquor, and a beautiful glass house with only two Mies van der Rohe chairs in it.

And I spent every paycheck just – I had this – I was so pathetic, I loved San Antonio so much. I had this dream that it was going to become this cosmopolitan city, with the rich Mexicans from Mexico City and gangster boys and white elite and smart people.

MS. CORDOVA: I read you describing it as “San Antonio was like the Paris of the 1920s.”

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Where did you hear that?

MS. CORDOVA: That was in an interview or something like that.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Uh-huh. That’s going to come out again. But that took a while. That’s after I quit being a lawyer. But I had that vision. And don’t forget, Sandra Cisneros is in town. People like Rolando Briseño are coming into their own. There’s a critical mass of us that are saying: we came from somewhere amazing and beautiful and hip. And you know what? White people aren’t all that. And you know what? Rich people aren’t all that. And you know what? Educated people aren’t.

It was just a time of maturity and celebration, and it was awesome. And of anger and of fighting, you know, of good, healthy fights. Because, you know, I passed for a white boy, and I was one of the cutest new boys in town. And I was rich and I was very handsome and working out. So I can’t tell you how important this mobility, through sexuality, was, because it was – I can go into any city in the world and I can meet the most elite people if I’m good-looking enough, or if I look good, you know. It’s an interesting tool, having that as a gay man – or maybe as a gay woman – but definitely as a gay man. I can go into any city and get social entrée through gay subculture, through maybe sex or through personality or through position. It’s a club.

MS. CORDOVA: It is fascinating to hear you describing this identity as your entrée.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes.

MS. CORDOVA: But also it must have been a struggle to reckon with.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes, well, it did. Well, luckily I wasn’t alone. There was – it takes one to know one. So friends of my social class and are gay, we found each other right away. And we formed this unspoken group. I also befriended like Anglos, and most of them were younger. They were my mentees, and I was educating them and educating them. And my mentors, some of them were white. And I was educating them, and educating them because they’d find me charming and intelligent and one of them.

And whenever I tried to show them a little bit of where I come from, some of them would reject it. You know, that there was things – they all loved Mexican culture, Oaxacan culture, or high-class Mexican culture. But no one yet respected Tex-Mex hybridity. And I didn’t know if I respected it yet, I was working on that.

Anyway, yes, there were struggles because I was pretty much perceived as a white boy. I became more Latino through the years, I think, but I was perceived as a white boy, yeah, and so I’d be allowed into peer groups of very, very wealthy white, aristocratic white boys that I was flattered to be part of. And it looked like I was in a Ralph Lauren commercial, but I had to assert who I was.

And, you know, I didn’t yet want the white boys to start dating Mexican gangster boys, but I wanted – I had this fantasy the city would become this integrated city where people of different classes were also racially and culturally mixed. And I just wanted the city to be an interesting, cosmopolitan hybrid. And in many ways it is now, compared to how it was at one time. You can’t go to a party now and not see any Mexicans, but you could as little as 10-years-ago.

MS. CORDOVA: Now, how did your family respond to you coming out?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Very cool. I wrote a new book and it’s coming out in 2005, and it’s going to tell all these little stories in little joke form.

MS. CORDOVA: What is it, Historia de un Amor?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes, but we’ve changed it. We’ve had to anglicize the title. It’s going to be called High Pink.

MS. CORDOVA: High Pink?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Uh-huh.

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughing.] Okay.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: But it’s still pretty Mexican because it’s going to be a hot pink cover. Yeah, my dad jokes that – he doesn’t joke. He said, first of all, so many funny things. One theory is he says it’s his fault, because he wanted the baby to be a girl and he kept calling the baby Francesca to my mother, he’d talk to my mother’s stomach. So that’s his – you know, that’s how narcissistic he is. He willed a female, and he got one. [Laughter.]

Two, and this is a real sick theory. “Well, are you the man or the woman in the relationship?” I said, “Dad, it’s not like that anymore.” I go, “But if you want to know, I’m usually the male part.” He goes, “Oh, then you’re not gay.” [Laughing.] So I started thinking, what does that mean? Do you know what that implies. Oh, then you’re not gay because everybody does that. You know, so who knows what that meant.

Another theory was I was just trying to be trendy, you know. He was very proud of me. I mean, I did become what his father wanted him to become, I became a lawyer. And I had money. He probably thought I was so spoiled that I was now tinkering into kinky things, and decided to be a gay boy because it was fashionable. But they’ve been very cool about it. They never made me feel ashamed of it or anything like that.

MS. CORDOVA: Your mother too?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah. I think if I had not achieved a level of social class above theirs, then they would have thought I would be ruining my life. Because that’s kind of what that generation feared. They just thought gay people were the most extreme cases they would see. You know, forlorn transvestites, penniless and alcoholic. Or they thought we’d have no friends or no happiness in our lives. That was the big fear that you’d always hear, that homosexuals were unhappy people. And boy, were they wrong. And I would tell them how wonderful my life is, and they’d meet all my decent friends. They knew I was part of an intellectual, artistic community.

MS. CORDOVA: And what kind of law were you practicing?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Corporate and real estate, and it was very, very boring. And I wasn’t that good at it, you know, because by then I was boozing and drugging and partying. And, you know, and I’d go to bed with somebody and go to work the next day in the same suit. You know, I was making up for all of the good times I had missed. So I really – I was like 15-years-old with a lot of money. And I still worked hard, but it was such boring work. I just hated it. And I did it for 10 years. But there were so many people that loved what they were doing, and I was not one of those. And I hate corporate America and the way it forced you to act a certain way.

MS. CORDOVA: Were you ever shy? Was this sort of a coming out –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Definitely. Yeah, I always felt a little – I mean, I’m sure everyone at work knew about it, but I always felt it was my duty not to force my morals on other people. Maybe I was just being a coward, but I just didn’t want to do it. The cruel thing is I didn’t care enough about these people to even do that. You know, I wasn’t that close – a few friends at work I came out to. I know with my talents and my personality, I could have forged an amusing way of dealing with it, you know? I could have become that character in that sitcom, that it works. But I didn’t want to – I mean, I had too many other battles to fight.

So me being the accepted homosexual employee at my law firm was not my battle. There were others that were doing that, but my battle was bigger. I had social and societal upheaval that I wanted to accomplish. And so, you know, let’s say I was put on a board at – so I had two lives. I had Franco, the wild playboy lawyer that wants to be an artist, and Franco the lawyer that, I don’t know what his life’s all about, but he’s always late for work. You know, I’d try to keep both lives.

But then as I became better known as an artist, then, you know, it broke my heart because I could tell all of these mainstream and well-educated people that I was working with – I could have been nicer – not nicer to them, but I could have been more educating to them. I just was too busy. And, you know, the work environment, it was so macho and so potentially homophobic that I didn’t even go there. It wasn’t necessary.

Anyway, and then I also went through the demons of perhaps feeling I wasn’t being taken seriously as an artist. That I was just a rich boy, dilettante, wannabe, ethnic artist all of a sudden. So here I am having all the privileges of being a white boy, and then, da-dah!, now I want to be a Latino artist. You know what I mean?

[Laughter.]

MS. CORDOVA: I do. I do. I’m going to stop this tape and put in a new one, and that’s probably a good breaking point.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes, that is.

MS. CORDOVA: Okay. Let’s stop here.

[Audio break.]

MS. CORDOVA: All right. We are recording again. This is Cary Cordova for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, interviewing Franco Mondini-Ruiz. This is Session One and Disc Two

And actually, while I’m thinking of it, Franco, when did you finally add the Ruiz to your name?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: It’s the mid-80s again and I –

MS. CORDOVA: The story of your name actually because you have an official –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes. First of all, my parents, like I say, were from different classes and they lived unhappily ever after. One of the biggest fights is my father is sent back to Italy to finish his tour of duty, and he’s also in trouble for getting my mom pregnant and all that. But my dad says, “Do not name – if it’s a boy, do not name him Gino. You only name boys after their father, only if the father is dead, so I would take that as a very bad omen so please don’t do that.” Sure enough, she names him – names me Gino. And then Francisco is my grandfather’s name, so there’s – that is the Mexican side and then there’s Mondini.

It’s the mid-80s in San Antonio and I’ve seen the light, as you recall, and I’m trying to get put on boards and trying to get on everybody’s mailing list. And there’s always mailing lists where - oh, not mailing lists, but there’s an invitation or a fundraiser and there are 80 prominent names on the list, the kind of people that live in Alamo Heights and go shopping in New York, once in a while, and know the art scene. The liberal Democrat Party-types, and there’s not one Mexican there. So I’m just sick of it and I think at least I’m going to show that I’m a Mexican. At least I’ll be on this list and there’ll be at least one Mexican name on there.

So that’s how it started. It started I just didn’t want to hide my Latino culture under my father’s Italian surname. Just as your name had been Irish, you might have been wanting to – you know, show part of your identity. So I did that and it just was at least to get one more name on the – and there was a time where just every single thing like that was just a big battle. I’d be put on boards and I’d say, “I will not be put on the board unless you put an Hispanic female.” I said, “The majority of San Antonio is Hispanic females and you don’t have one on your list.” So it was those little political activist activities that I was really getting into.

MS. CORDOVA: Did you feel political? When did you start to feel – it sounds like you did?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I wonder what caused it? I think I became politicized as I started realizing I was being pressured a certain way how to act, and if I would talk about things from a different perspective, other than the cool, white status quo of the city, that some people were just ready to be on my side, and some people were just telling me to shut up. You know, when I had white friends that would get to show in Mexico about Mexican art and they weren’t Mexicans, and I’d bring it up. I’d go, “Well, why don’t Mexicans get to be in Mexican shows from San Antonio?” you know? “Come on, man, that’s reverse discrimination. You have it better than anybody else in this town,” you know. That’s when I became really politicized.

Whenever you’d even start to express anything – if you’d say like, “Why aren’t there any Mexicans at this party?” or things like that or, you know, I’d be with white new friends in the gay bars or something and they’d say, “Uh, there’s Cha-Cha queens coming here.” You know, “We’ve got to put a stop to that.” And I’d say, “I’m Mexican.” You know, it didn’t take long to realize I had to take make a step. And there was just – plus, like once again, there was that critical mass emerging where we were taking politics into our own hands.

There was a generation ahead of us that was politically active. They didn’t quite know what to do with we more assimilated, acculturated Latinos who hung around with the rich white folk. They didn’t know what to do with us. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves yet either. And plus then there was all the arguments of who was more Mexican than thou, which is still a problem: who’s the right kind of Mexican, who’s the sellout, who’s the coconut, who’s not? Who was there first?

MS. CORDOVA: Right. I like Rolando Briseño’s, “Will the real Chicano please stand up?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes. Rolando was a very good influence on me. I think I had good mentors, and I treated those people as mentors. I wanted to learn and I prospered. And I hope I’ve given back to them and I hope I’m helping other people. And one of my friends that I keep bringing up, Ito Romo, even though there have been times that I’ve hated him: I’m remembering now a really important realization.

So I’m happy – you know, I’m with Ito and all these kind of bourgeois Mexican kids: what I always wanted to be, you know? And we’re driving down Commerce Street and it’s the Tejano Music Awards, and I say something like - ‘cause, you know, when you’re with your friends everything is a joke and you’re drinking and driving and having fun. I see these four-foot-two chocolate-brown Mexican women shaped-like, you know, the big Fig Newtons, and they’re wearing these short turquoise dresses with silver belts and silver shoes and wigs. And I go, “Ito, why do they – why do we dress like this? Why do we – why do they dress like this?” And Ito goes, “What are you talking about? They’re beautiful and they think they’re beautiful and they are beautiful.”

My fantasy at the time was, you know, overweight Mexican women would be in ankle-length black skirts with a Vidal Sassoon pageboy and some Spratling silver earrings and red Chanel lipstick. You know what I mean? I wanted to turn Mexican women all into that.

MS. CORDOVA: Vogue magazine.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes, uh-huh. And it would have been nice too. But the problem is what women are wearing right then is what ended up being in Vogue. So Ito taught me the Twist, he taught me the Spin, and I have spun ever since and I will always owe that to him. Why we’re not best friends any more I keep forgetting, but it also is part of this bigger story why we Latinos have not been able to quite be consensus builders, and haven’t been able to really take ourselves to the next place, unless it’s happening right now: you interviewing me and all this is happening, maybe. I think it is. I hope it is. But there was a long, long period where we don’t seem to let each other prosper, up to a certain degree. But I’m only feeling now confident and magnanimous because I have prospered, but I had to leave town, or I would have been killed. I would have died.

MS. CORDOVA: So what advice would you give to someone to sort of say “these are the steps to become a Latino artist?”

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Okay. [Laughs.]

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughs.] So what path did you follow? Like, what did you suddenly realize you needed to do?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I’ve done almost everything well, I think. I really followed my heart, and I was passionate and sincere about what I’ve done. I’ve been generous with everyone, I’ve tried. I’ve accepted my friends and all their foibles and they’ve accepted me. You know, I have Anglo friends that tell me, you know, “Don’t hang around with these losers any more.” And these losers are the people that made me what I am today.

One of my friends, Michael – he’s not a loser. Michael, you’re not a loser. But somebody that might be perceived wrongly as a loser because he’s this long-haired, hippy-looking guy that owns nothing; he helped my career. It’s his little sentence that he wrote about what I did with Infinito Botánica [Mexican folk-healing shop turned boutique] that was put as a quote on a wall text that got me the “Whitney Biennial [2000].” You know, it was –

MS. CORDOVA: What was the quote?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: It was - “Infinito Botánica was a place that finally allowed a space,” it just makes you cry. I can’t even say it. [Laughter.] But a very moving text, you know. And it was true. It had become a place for others. It became a place for the queer, for the disenfranchised, for all of us who thought there was no place for us at the table. And instead of making a place, we created our own table like no one else had ever had. You know, it was real what was going on. And it’s these quotes that I’m never going to forget, you know, that my friends had said. And sure it’s all talk. [Laughs.] Mexicans are – the actions from these friends aren’t as good, but the eloquent words and the passions and the sentiment, that’s where the white boy-brown boy fight always happened.

Rolando is like me. We’re like Germans: we do work and we do push in ways that some Mexicans might consider tacky – that we’re pushy, we’re like white boys. And then I have so many Mexican friends that are eloquent and passionate and polite that somehow think saying they’re going to do something is the same as doing something. And as stereotypical and cliché as it sounds, it just happens so many times. You know, saying, “Yes, I’ll be there,” or “Yes, I’ll call you back,” or “Yes, I’ll volunteer and help you,” or “Yes, you can stay at my house,” or “Yes, I’ll pledge $500,” or “Yes, I’ll mail that package.”

I’m sure all cultures do it. But definitely it has ruined so many opportunities of what could have been. The words are polite and sweet, you know? And it’s kind of Mexican where just the eloquence and the courtliness of saying something starts to matter as much as doing it itself, and there seems to be a rift in that, the talk and the action, you know? Like, a gringo might not do the talk; might just say, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to do that for you,” and they end up doing it for you. But they did it. A Latino will say, “Franco, consider it done,” you know? “Bueno, of course. You know you can always stay with me,” you know? And then you’re like, “Where are you? You said you were going to be here. I’m hungry,” you know. You find out later they were on the other side of the door and they just didn’t want to be bothered – [laughter] - so, I’m serious.

MS. CORDOVA: I know.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I’ve seen it so many times, I was like – so that was the white boy, you know, “My friend said I could stay with them, so I will stay with them.” And I’d be like – I won’t name names, but like – you know, I’ll just say Joe, “Joe, how can you do that? That’s your cousins. They drove all the way from Monterrey.” You know, “I can’t be bothered.” I said, “But I was with you when you said they could stay with you.” You know, it’s just – [laughs] – Right? I don’t know.

But there is some little – and my friends and I, those of us that have, quote, “made it” talk about this rift between spoken generosity and the action of generosity. And I really try to do both. But sometimes I’m shocking because I’ll say, “No, I can’t do that. My ticket is full” and I’ll still do it. So that is the acculturation and assimilation process that I went through. So I’ve learned some Anglo skills. And you tread on dangerous water once you start talking about what culture is better than the other.

And I’m still dealing with it as an artist. You know, maybe you should – as a culture – culture means culture. Culture means it’s a group of people that will do things a certain way, so maybe it’s not a taboo to talk about. But it’s something I’m still dealing with. And the ideal once again, is the hybridization. And I’m not trying to say I am the face of the hybridization, but I am a person that’s cognizant of it, and possibly, you are too. I don’t want to get into your personal life, but it’s no mean coincidence that you and I are both bicultural Latinos.

MS. CORDOVA: Both half.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah, that we’re half breeds.

[Laughter.]

MS. CORDOVA: Yeah. And maybe that much more conscious of a certain identity or how our identity is constructed?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes, and a knowledge of difference. You know, I think Anglos think everyone thinks like them, and Latinos think everyone thinks like them. And then we know that they don’t. I think people are all basically the same, based on DNA. I mean, for the last even thousands of years we were the same. But, you know, through socialization we change, and there’s some very precious, wonderful things about the socialization that Latinos have gone through, and some very worthwhile things that Anglos have gone through.

Anyway, so what would be my recipe for success for a Latino artist?

MS. CORDOVA: Or you can just –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: One, return your fucking phone calls. [Laughter.]

MS. CORDOVA: Communication.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: But, you know – yes. Communication skills are – fear of the phone, fear of the e-mail, fear of the fax, that things are just going to happen? No, it’s not going to happen. And I had to learn the hard way too, I really did. Communication skills, communicating, following up with promises that you make; you’ve just got to keep them. You’ve just got to do, you know, you can’t charm your way out of every single thing.

But really, communication skills are what’s really, I think, hurting us Latinos a lot in the – Two: recognize what the rules are, play by them, win by them and then change them. And that’s cocky, but those are the rules, you know, and unless you win the lottery or change the world, those are the rules and they’re not that hard.

MS. CORDOVA: Or create a separate universe?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: [Laughs.] Or create a separate universe, yes. Exactly. If you so choose to, you know? But even creating that separate universe, you’re going to need resources and we are not the dominant culture. We are not and we still only get the crumbs, I feel, even in San Antonio. We get the crumbs. So it’s going to be hard separating your own universe, so get those crumbs and spin and turn them on their side. Fight.

I see things as cultural battles, I really do. I want more. I want more for my people, you know? [Laughter.] You know, I really do. I want more for San Antonio, and everybody will be better off. I want the rich to give more and the rich to make things happen. And I have some very wealthy friends in liberal places that didn’t do enough, and I had to cut them out of my life. I really did because life is so short and I’m so impatient and I think things could happen so fast and so easily, I think.

MS. CORDOVA: How did you put your first show together? What show was that?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Okay, I’m sure I’m going to die of AIDS any minute, and I am in my Brooks Brothers/Hugo Boss suits and I come home from my sterile, fluorescently lit office and, yes, I’m having sex and, yes, I’m working out and, yes, I’m finally – I’m handsome and happy and, you know, top of the world. But the sex isn’t enough, nothing is enough. I just know I’m going to die. So I’m making like cheesy alters, I think, very Catholic, very baroque, but out of anything. I was making alters out of toilet paper and spray paint, and I wouldn’t even take my suits off, I’d have to create art so badly.

And it was just beautiful. It was neoclassical things, but mixed with rasquache, you know, imperfect. And my friends would see my art, because by then I had befriended the artsy types – the gay artsy types, you know, the effete, the cool, young, good-looking effete, you know. And they liked my work and I just kept making it until Dave Hickey, one of the most important curators in the world, comes to my house. Now, the reason he comes to my house is because I’m a glamorous, young guy living in Alamo Heights. I’m networking, you know. I’ve turned my crumbs into ways of – and he came to my house because it was – he didn’t do drugs, but it was a fun – it was a hip place to be, it was a hip – and so he was there. He liked my art and before long I was put in a show. Maybe not underneath his direction, but he was one of the curators and he was very kind to me.

In the meantime, Latino friends are starting to get more organized, so there’s the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center [San Antonio, Texas], Graciela Sánchez.

MS. CORDOVA: Right.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: And then there is Michael Marinez, who I brought up earlier. They’re starting to have shows and multi-cultie is in, Day of the Dead is in, people coming out of the closest is in. So there’s things going on. And I’m kind of a dilettante, socialite artist being allowed to enter those shows. And people really like my work. And then I do a show with David Casas and then – ha, ha, ha – Ito Romo comes back into the picture. Remember, Ito I loved because Ito represented all this bourgeois, Mexican prince world. He was a prince, you know. He gets jealous of my success as an artist and really, really sabotages my career for years, much to my pain.

MS. CORDOVA: How?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: He’s very charming and everyone likes him and he’s a good artist and we’re both Gemini twins and we’re one day apart and all these things going on. And he pretty much maligns me or makes me, like, I’m abusing my position or I’m not a real Mexican or downright telling the gallery that represents him, if they represent me, he’s going to not show with them any more, you know, and guffawing at me behind my back. And I was big enough to take all of that. But, yeah, always a thorn in my side. Always like I was a wannabe artist. And by then he and Rolando and a few other artists were the successful ones, and I still came across as a socialite wannabe.

MS. CORDOVA: Who were your alters dedicated to?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: The very first alters would have been with no meaning, just pieta, just this – you know, just beautiful Catholic, Romanic classical. Some of them turned out really just beautiful. They were made just out of paper. At the same time, there is Danny Lozano at Tienda Guadalupe who totally loved me, and I loved him. And his world became the visual manifestation of what was what I celebrated after that.

But in all honesty, we must remember that Danny had simply gotten the confidence and put his own mark on something that was really gringo-driven. Tienda Guadalupe was started by Big Mike. It was the white –

[END TAPE 1; START TAPE 2]

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: – white, elite gays that were first embracing Latino culture before we Latinos would have. Does that make sense to you? So it was a white thing.

So Danny added a layer of authenticity but it really wasn’t authentic. He had to learn about all that stuff through white people. But what he did and what I did is that we twisted and added a layer of substance to it, not just the form but the substance where, yeah, we didn’t believe in Day of the Dead because we weren’t taught that because only Mexican poor people from across the river did that.

But we also believed that, you know, our dogs had spirits of our ancestors and, you know, bizarre things like that. So he was one of – he was me. I mean, he understood that part of me and it was unspoken. And he added that layer of authenticity to the exotica of our culture.

So it went from authentic Mexican to culture vulture Gringo to Tex-Mex Latino who had entered the same class as the white Latinos that were collecting the stuff. So it’s so funny how objects change their meanings as they flip-flop through different generations. Danny died.

MS. CORDOVA: Right. In 1992 or something?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I think so. Craig had the store. Craig has the store. Craig loved Danny. Craig loves me. But there was always some suspicion as to – there was never a deep respect for who we are, our middle class Mexican American culture. And then there was Sandra Cisneros who was articulating it. There was Rolando Briseño. There was myself. There was Ito. There was a bunch of people that were finally articulating it.

MS. CORDOVA: How did you meet Sandra?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I was still a glamorous lawyer and I’d just flown in from a big project in New York and she was washing my dishes.

MS. CORDOVA: Seriously? [Laughter.] How did that work?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I wouldn’t lock my house. I lived in this gorgeous, gorgeous, very, very fancy looking glass box, that I’d have the air conditioner turned down to 68 degrees and I had two Mies van der Rohe chairs and exotic chickens and a big huge bed with $1,000 sheets and that’s it.

MS. CORDOVA: You were really living the high life –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I was living the high life.

MS. CORDOVA: – in the 1980s.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes. Uh-huh [affirmative].

MS. CORDOVA: You were on top.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: And mixed with a little of bit of Spanish colonial objects. I mean, I knew I was on to something but I didn’t realize I had skipped so many generations. I was already, like, aesthetically equivalent to like an old rich Houston queen. I mean, I usurped this culture. So Michael Tracy would be at my house and Sandra Cisneros because Ito, Ito would show off my – I think he was more in love with my house than me. So he would show off my house to his – you know, it was a big statement. And not only that, it was on the most expensive street in San Antonio.

MS. CORDOVA: Where was it?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: It’s on Geneseo and I was next door neighbors to Lowry Mays who is the richest San Antonian, owns Clear Channel Communications. They’re probably worth billions. And then my other neighbor was Adela Sepulveda, a 6-foot tall gorgeous Mexican, high-class, snobby beauty that spoke in a British accent with platinum white hair and ankle-length mink coats, who knew everyone from Dolly Parton to – And so it was just some wonderful time.

And once again, remember, I’m thin and tanned and just full of energy. It was a great time. So I used all of these skills to – I forgot what I was doing – accomplish something. And I didn’t let anyone – God, I was just so tireless in preaching. I was a preacher boy. I was tired of preaching but I was always – because there were so many politically incorrect things. Not even politically incorrect, there were just so much crass insensitivity to the differences in cultures and viewpoints towards things.

MS. CORDOVA: But your house was serving as a meeting point for people or –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah. It could be because I never locked it. So there would always be somebody new at my house. And, you know –

MS. CORDOVA: And Sandra was just there?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Sandra was there, hanging out, uh-huh. I think she was a bit suspicious of – she was very guarded with who she’d meet. And Ito could have easily had the charm and the power to keep me from getting too close to her. He was threatened by that and he did try.

But remember where I was saying how actions speak louder? Ito was the type that would make all these wonderful, florid promises. You can’t help but love him. He’s charming. You might even interview him some day. Extremely charming. But I’d be the one who would deliver, you know.

So the old girlfriends of mine finally told Sandra, you know, yeah, Franco is mean and he gets really drunk and he’s crass and – you know, I’m not a caballero. I’m not, Ito truly is. But they’d say he’s the one you can really depend on when you need something. He’s never let me down. So it was almost the Gringo side of me that allowed Sandra to develop this close bond and trust with me.

MS. CORDOVA: And I don’t want to jump too far ahead.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: No, no.

MS. CORDOVA: But the Dave Hickey show, was that the sculpture show?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes.

MS. CORDOVA: Was that your first show? 1989.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I think that would have been, yeah.

MS. CORDOVA: Okay.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Even before the Esperanza show?

MS. CORDOVA: Yes.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: It is?

MS. CORDOVA: Yeah.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Okay. I’m getting mixed up. But, oh my God, yes. So what an entrée I made. And I would have been in the show with Jesse Amado. And there’s Jesse and really handsome. And in those days, any good looking guy I saw, I thought, umm – I’m going to. I’m still that way, I guess, but especially back then.

I’m sure I flirted with him. And I was still doing figurative and very religious based art and he was doing the more sophisticated conceptual art which I remember not feeling deserving to do it because I wasn’t educated as an artist. I think I said something offensive like, “Isn’t it too easy to do something like that?”

You know what I mean, I was so green. And I didn’t mean to offend him but, you know, it didn’t take long until – I just learned fast. I saw the light. I said like, “Oh I am allowed to make art like that.” I don’t have to have a Ph.D. in art or – you know, you just don’t know. I didn’t have role models and things happened fast.

So I think that influenced me, seeing another Mexican American making very simple conceptual art. I just thought it was something that only – maybe I never said it or even – I didn’t even articulate it to myself. I just presumed it was something smart, white, older, richer people get to do, you know, that live in big cities.

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughs.]

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I know it’s so naïve but I was still in my early twenties, so there was a lot of learning going on. And then Artpace [San Antonio, Texas] came and that also made San Antonio more cosmopolitan where people from different cultures were understanding what I was doing because I kept trying to say my Botánica isn’t – it’s a sculpture. And they’d go, “Yeah, right,” you know?

But finally, outside curators, like Maaretta Jaukkuri, at a museum in Finland, recognized my work. But I remember being jealous because Jesse was getting all the attention. And I’d keep saying like, well, do we have to make Joseph Beuys, white people art? Are we like monkeys? Like, oh look, this monkey can make Joseph Beuys looking art, you know – not calling Jesse a monkey but it gave me that feeling, like we’d only be rewarded to the extent that we can replicate the art of white, dominant culture.

MS. CORDOVA: In hindsight, how do you look at that?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: In hindsight, I think I’m right. I mean, I think – for example, this is controversial but no one is going to read this for 50 years. I think Jesse’s work fetishized white culture. I call Jesse a senti-minimalist because I put him in shows and I do respect his work. And it is minimalist and it is conceptual.

But it is also – there is a very Latino based sentimentality in it which is – and very sensitive and tender. So for that, I don’t have problems with Jesse’s work at all. I had problems where successful artists of Jesse’s generation were being forced – not being forced but only being rewarded if they were producing “quality” work.

Quality became a very dangerous buzz word in the ‘80s which really meant no fags, no women, no blacks, you know? It really meant straight white manufactured, designed, detailed work. And I was fighting against that. That’s why my work got sloppy. I wanted to say that something can be effortless and beautiful and valid. And Jesse, his generation, feared that in my generation.

One, we artists that were successful in my generation were gay, self-destructive, lazy, in the sense of we didn’t want – and disorganized, in the sense that we didn’t feel that things had to be measured and galvanized and manufactured; and rebellious against this constant macho pressure that had been put on us. So Jesse would often wag his fingers at me and my generation that we weren’t going to make it if we don’t start – just how I’m saying answer your damn phone calls, he was saying do work that doesn’t fall apart in two seconds. So, you know, there’s this generational mentoring going on.

And Jesse is a beloved regional artist. And now I am a successful artist of the national and now international community and I don’t how good we’re getting along right now. And we normally discuss this just when we’re drunk. But we should discuss this later to see what happened and how and why, you know? So someday we are all going to talk about that.

MS. CORDOVA: Well, and you know, we can reserve that space.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah.

MS. CORDOVA: Now how about getting connected with the Esperanza Center, right, because that was going on also. It was really starting, I guess it started in 1986 87 and you were part of the first, as I understand it, really the first outwardly gay show.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I guess it was, really. I bet it was.

MS. CORDOVA: It could have been. I’m not –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I know it was exciting. Whatever was going on was exciting. It was grassroots. It was low-budg. It was sexy. It was just fun. So it was a good time. And that’s what seduced me. It’s like, this is what I really am. I want to make art and be around other gay people and do rebellious things.

And it was a time of great optimism that we could change the world. And it was also very rasquache. So this fight I just talked about between the other generations and the other genders, you know, I was cocky in the sense that you can do sloppy work and it means something. It doesn’t have to be always, you know, a production.

So you’re right. So there was the Esperanza.

MS. CORDOVA: What kind of work did you do for that show?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I had very angst-ridden – because I really thought I was going to die. I was sad. I wasn’t sick, but I just presumed that it was my fate. So there was this neo-classical, gestural angst thing. It was like a triptych. I found objects and I painted these kind of allegorical figures of justice and – you know, I forget what the piece was called.

The second year, I got even more – by then, I was like really – like, the way I dress or the way I talk or the way I carry myself is pretty conformist in the sense that, you know, I shop at Banana Republic or GAP. You know when you see someone on the street that’s really eccentric and like, God, I wish I could be that person? I can’t be that way, but in my art, I can. I can be totally free, avant-garde, uninhibited and creative.

So I would do these weird pieces. One was, I think, pink cakes on a fountain with dried fish that I had just bought from Mexico. I don’t know exactly what it meant. But it was just shocking and absurd and beautiful and easy and sexy and confusing and – not confusing just for the sake of being confusing but just beautiful, just shockingly beautiful and hybridized.

MS. CORDOVA: When did you start using food in your art?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I got a big huge studio after the Dave Hickey show, on Commerce Street called Patio Andaluz. It was an old dance hall from the 1920s, and I started using found objects and botánica objects and panadería objects. So I started using food then. And it was a show – one of my first Blue Star shows, and I used like this sausage that I stuck a diamond in, a real diamond that got stolen. I remember that. But it was insured. It was great.

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughs.] Oh, good.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah. Then food also was part of my mother’s culture. There was dried and dehydrated food everywhere. And that was one of the premises that we didn’t have Frida Kahlo altars but – and I think in working class Mexican American culture, all these cakes and baroque cookies – and this baroque, these remnants of the baroque usually one of the few things left is the cakes. If you go in a Mexican house, there would always be some kind of cakes or pastries and stuff that you can’t really get into, or cakes under domes or – and to me those were altars.

If you go to my mother’s house there’s an extreme, she has mummified cakes and cookies and candies everywhere. And it’s just so beautiful, so junky and depressing, like my republican brother won’t even step into the house because it just smacks of poor Mexican lady. And I get tired of it after a while, but I kind of love it. I know I love it because it influences my art incredibly.

Mom would have sexy carrots. She’d have this carrot that she’d keep in the deep freeze and she’d bring it out once in a while. And it looked like the bottom torso of a woman. She’d have cupcakes that were dehydrated that had lasted for six or seven years and we weren’t allowed to touch. So there were these sacred fetishes of the food.

MS. CORDOVA: Were they sort of mementos of special parties?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Probably mementos of special parties, yes. But just also preservation and life and, you know, they were baroque, just baroque ornamentation. They were just ornamentation also that would be around.

MS. CORDOVA: But what possessed you to put a diamond in a sausage?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I think what I was doing then was unknowingly starting to start these extremes of hybridization. The diamond, I mean the sausage, was from a brand new H.E.B. store, not the Gucci B or not even Central Market. It was another experimental one called Fiesta Market or something like that.

And they had all these – like these 70 different types of sausages from Spain, 50 sausages – so it was real yuppie. So there was this sausage that was really tacky, actually shaped like a football, but it was just such a beautiful object. And when I cut in half, it made this beautiful pyramid.

And the diamond was like, my friend Danny Lozano was always hawking it for some reason. And so I just wanted to juxtapose mainstream and contemptuous objects with fabulous objects. I didn’t realize what I was doing yet but I realized that I was asserting myself, my cultural mongrelism, my hybridity, my class hybridity.

And I wanted to do things very effortlessly. I wanted to do it lazy. I wanted to be cocky and have $500 and buy a diamond and stick it in a sausage. And you know, because – I’m not picking on Jesse now, but I feel bad that I brought that up, but on all these straight boys that were telling me I am not doing things right. And it was cocky.

MS. CORDOVA: Did you find there were artists that you were gravitating to at some point?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I was loath and afraid to read art magazines, and I had so much pent-up visual imagery and pain and sorrow and anxiety and political anger that I didn’t need to draw on any sources. I just drew on what was in my immediate environment. Also, I was reacting. Don’t forget, 10 hours a day, I’m having to be in this sterile, incredibly efficient corporate machine.

USAA is one of the most efficient companies in the world. So 10 hours a day – so, I would react with absurdity and I would look for just things that were just so unlike that. I was reacting against all of that. So it’s not that I was being attracted to other artists. I was just being repulsed by other worlds that I had to spend the majority of my time in.

MS. CORDOVA: Did you ever feel like the law inspired your work in some way?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Not until later. Not until later when I was able to reflect on what I was doing and why and how. Although it was irrational, the law had given me the skills to articulate it to different groups of people. So that is what has helped me.

I am able to articulate what I’m doing to a museum curator, to an intellectual, as well as to a Mexican grandmother, to a kid, to someone who doesn’t like me, to someone who loves me, to someone who loves me but doesn’t like my work. But those are skills I learned as a lawyer. I am going to use my verbal skills to try to persuade you to see my point of view on what I’m doing. That really helped me. So that legal skill did.

Also I loved my legal training in the sense that it taught me to address issues rationally, which also meant it allowed me to address taboos rationally, like when I’m saying, okay, Mexicans have this reputation for doing this and you know, that is a taboo based on stereotypes and all that. But there is also ways to look at it that would be fair and rational. And many, many times, I tried to address that way of thinking to why I am making art.

What is art? What is being a human being? What is culture? Constantly, that’s all I think about. So that, my legal training goes to that.

The same energy that I would have used to negotiate a 600-page shopping center lease in Las Colinas Velas, now I can pour into making paintings of pandulces that I’m going to be selling next week. So I think the same energy level of thought go into these things.

MS. CORDOVA: And what about painting? Have you had any sort of professional training?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: No. My paintings actually are very bad. But fortunately, bad painting is in vogue right now. So it’s really a good place. I also look at things from a – don’t forget I come from – we are peddlers, you know, and I love selling things.

Painting has been great because I’m known for my sculptures but they are a hassle. They break. They’re fragile. I have to buy materials. I have to store materials.

And that was a very Texas thing. Working with junk, that’s easy in Texas. You have trucks. You have transportation. You have storage. You have tons of people with tons of stuff.

And living in New York, it was the opposite. Working with objects was a very, very extravagant delicacy because I didn’t have much room. People buying my art was extravagant. For anyone to have wall space to own one of my paintings – I mean, not a painting but a three-dimensional sculpture; even a small one, they had money. Or to have a house that is somehow fancy enough that it can be kept clean. In New York, we get all that fine black dust so people are kind of scared of buying objects and stuff.

The sculptures were successful but they got in the way of my creativity because I have a decent gallery in New York. But they have to sell my work for at least $1,000 to $1,500 a unit for it to be worthwhile to them; both spiritually, because they don’t want to deal with junk, and from a capitalist, they don’t need the money but just for it to be worth it. I don’t like that, because that means I can only sell work to a very, very small part of the population that likes my kind of work and is willing to spend a few thousands dollars for it.

So, you know, every year then, I can only produce like maybe 50 to 100 pieces that would sell. The rest, I have to worry about storing or destroying them or giving them away. I hated it.

So right now, painting has been great because I get this unlimited creativity and very, very inexpensive materials. And I get to create things. I don’t have to wait. I can now create thousands of vignettes when I could only create a few hundred vignettes a year before.

MS. CORDOVA: Are you mostly working on small things?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Really small, cheap canvases and I am doing that on purpose. I am not trained as an artist but the paintings, I think, are charming. And I did a show a few months ago and that was the first time – I had been traveling non-stop for five years since the Whitney Biennial. So I just kept doing what I’m doing, what I’m doing, what I’m doing. And I am starting to fear that I was just doing it because it’s expected of me. So I had this residency in North Carolina that was supposed to be three-months long. I hadn’t been anywhere for three months, even New York, you know, consecutively. So I loved it.

Charlotte – it was in Charlotte. Charlotte is real corporate. I don’t know if you know that. Bank of America and Wachovia is based there. So they pretty much bulldozed the city and built this brand new city with Dean & DeLuca and Starbucks and fruit stands and bookshops, this instant fake yuppie city.

But I liked it and the people were nice and the program was great. And they said I would – they said it was called the McColl Center for the Arts [McColl Center for Visual Art, Charlotte, North Carolina]. And they said it was going to be really, really easy, no pressure, and it wasn’t. They needed me to interface with the Latino community. Charlotte has the fastest growing Latino community by number in the United States.

So they got me involved and I did my job. I could have run for mayor. All the skills I learned as a lawyer. We did meetings. We did planning and the city is very organized and corporate.

I was working with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and Hispanic this and Hispanic that. I turned my space into a gallery botánica that pretty much featured the art of 40 emerging Latino artists in the community. Some had already emerged.

So I mixed – and once again, I studied, like, what is a Latino community? A lot of it was expatriates from Central and South America. A lot of it is corporate people. A lot of it was waiters and stuff. But I did all my research and got all these people together and it was a great success.

The bottom line is that I wanted to still create. This was my chance. I was away from the critics. I was away from my collectors. And plus the people in Charlotte were very nouveau riche corporate people. They had like two hummers and three houses but they didn’t know how to buy art.

So I beat them at their own game. I started making paintings for $99, allowing them to, in a very non-threatening way, make artistic – they didn’t know how to assert their taste. So for these $99 paintings, they started buying five of them or 10 of them. So I would sell out. I had a show. I did 100 and I sold out in two hours.

So this is my new favorite spiel – is $99 objects. So my new show at Marfa, I made this 800 square foot sculpture and I sold it by the square foot. And paintings, I sell for $99 each and I finally, I think, have come to – that I’m not even dealing with Latino issues or class issues. I am just dealing now with broader issues of what art is all about, and what contemporary art is and what is its place in society. It has become just this elitist construct, maybe it always was. But as far as making a living on art, I want to do it in a more socialist way and this is going to be my formula.

I might lose my gallery. But right now, she is going to allow me to do a four-day show in New York. She is embarrassed about it but I’m going to sell 300 paintings for $99 each. But anyway, you know, she was like embarrassed because this is a prestige gallery. But I said conceptually, this is what I want to do.

She said, “But Franco, most of our clients,” – I go, yeah most of your present clients have already bought my work, the ones that are going to buy it. And if you have some rich clients that are embarrassed about spending $99 for a piece – which I don’t think they are, everyone in New York loves a bargain – they can buy 20 of them.

But I said, I also want my barber to buy a piece. I also want real people and my friends to buy pieces and maybe they are not the best paintings in the world. But most of them are worth $99. And I’m doing the math. I can make $100,000 to $200,000 a year if I really wanted to and I’d be extremely happy.

I’d be extremely happy making $20,000 a year. You know, there is no reason why art has to become this lofty experience that we have to depend on crumbs again. You know, that recurring theme of fighting over crumbs keeps raising its head, and I don’t want to fight for crumbs anymore.

I want to just have this business that – it’s very democratic and I make work that’s very affordable, and worth my while and makes people happy, and I don’t have to depend on the white elite to give my life meaning, you know?

MS. CORDOVA: Well, it’s interesting. You have reached, I guess, a certain stage in your career when you can opt to go into the inflated art –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: I could. It doesn’t – am I being a Mexican and afraid of success? You know, is that the Mexican in me that wants to stay humble and you know, Sí, señor, buy my tamales for a dollar. You know, is it this Catholic fear of success or am I just onto something – I don’t want to be rich. I’ve been rich before. I don’t care.

The only reason I’d be rich is to build skyscrapers and make San Antonio beautiful. I really would. Maybe that’s worthwhile. I want to enjoy my life. I want to create. I want to make art. I want to sell it. I want to have sex and have food and party and enjoy my friends and people I love and express myself and be a good person. And I don’t really want to be rich.

If I watch television for a few days, then I think I’m a failure. I’m like, “Oh, J-Lo made $600 million this year, I’m a failure.” This is an epiphany that’s happened in the last few months where I’ve really grown, that I don’t want, I thought – I don’t.

MS. CORDOVA: This is a complete switch from where you were in the 1980s, right?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes. Well, yes. I did it. I was at the best parties with the best people and, you know, they didn’t work for it, most of them. They all inherited it. I not only was at the same place they were, I had to teach them. You know, I had to teach them “Mexican style” how to be rich.

You don’t need money to be rich. It’s a mentality. I had to teach them. You have guests, you offer them water. You know what I mean. They had no clue. I’d have all these rich friends that were poor and starving. So not only did I get rich. It got to the point where I realized where I had come from really was rich. Does that make sense?

Then I wanted to prove that I was an artist and I was successful. And I guess, having a good gallery and all that was important. But now I just want to make a half-decent living from my art.

MS. CORDOVA: I loved hearing you talk about selling things. You learned to sell things in your parents’ store.

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yes.

MS. CORDOVA: But what was the process or what are your memories of learning to sell?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Well, first of all, my dad was a horrible salesman. He talked too much and he thought too much. In this 1950s way, that men are, he was more into protecting people or teaching people stuff rather than selling, which is kind of good. So he wasn’t like a soap salesman. But he’d be like, “I don’t know if you want a microwave oven. They could cause sterilization.”

And we’d be like, “Dad, why don’t you go to the back, you don’t want a satellite. They can give you cancer. Or you don’t want your kid watching that much television.” We’d be like, “Go. Computers are just a fad, you’re going to buy a computer and then you’re not going to – this is going to be a waste or it’s going to be so obsolete in a few years. You should just wait a few years.”

So my brother and I, we’d be like, “Go away.” So we got him to just like play his violin all day and make garlic toast. And so, in a way he was very honest or too honest or just too alarmist. He was that 1950s alarmist type, product of that generation.

And I – for some reason, it’s really still what I’m doing still in my sculptures – I created miniature utopias. And even when I was 8 years old, 9 years old, 10 years old, in charge of my stores, keeping them clean and displaying, I just imagined they were cities. And I had different districts for the cities, and the real expensive televisions were where the rich people lived. And then there were working class areas and there were – so it’s in my DNA that I have always just been fascinated with class structure and integration and utopic and visions and cityscapes.

So really what I do is create these idealized gorgeous, I mean, I wish cities were like this, you know? I wish San Antonio hadn’t been so sterilized. I wish you could go outside and there would be Mexican mercados streets, you know, mixed with everything else.

MS. CORDOVA: Did you learn skills for selling? What were your techniques or what –

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: Yeah. I got that from my mother, a kind of a gypsy way of wanting – loving the cash, just loving the cash, touching it and counting it. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do with it. And I think also I see selling something as someone accepting me. So I’m kind of whoring myself, but I’m a real inexpensive whore.

You know, if the metaphor for being an art – you know, I’d be the one charging a dollar in the back room, because that’s really what I want to do. I want volume. So I do get a little high. You know, people buying my art, to me, turns me on. It rings a bell.

And when I had the little store in Boerne and all that, people buying things from our store turned me on, because it means we were going to eat better. It means we could afford better things and prettier clothes for my sisters and, you know, a car and improvement. We wouldn’t have to live in a trailer. We could live in a nice house and we eventually got a tennis court and a swimming pool, a pool table, and braces.

You know, it meant something. And now all I want is enough money to use it to socially lubricate things. I mean I know what my needs are and my desires and my lusts. I need money for that but, in general, I try so hard to be spending a little bit of money in a way that makes a normal experience an extraordinary experience. Like if I have assistants, I’ll take them to a restaurant that they’ve never dreamed of going to.

I believe in using money as creating education and societal progress and entrée. So that’s what I still like to get money from. People can give me all the flattery they want or talk of – you know, if you really like it, spend $99. You know, if not, let’s talk later. But for now, I’ve got to make some sales because there is this big party I want to throw, and the big party is going to allow people to meet each other that normally wouldn’t be meeting each other.

MS. CORDOVA: Do you remember the first work of art that you sold?

MR. MONDINI-RUIZ: That’s a very good question. No, but I do remember the most important sale I made. Michael Tracy, who was one of my mentors, who is now one of my nemeses, but I forgive and forget. I really mean it. But he was a very important – h