Oral history interview with Jacinto Quirarte, 1996 Aug. 15-16

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Jacinto Quirarte, 1996 Aug. 15-16, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Oral History Interview With
Jacinto Quirarte
In Helotes, Texas
August 15 & 16, 1996
Interviewer: Paul J. Karlstrom

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Jacinto Quirarte on August 15 & 16, 1996. The interview took place in Helotes, Texas, and was conducted by Paul J. Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

JQ:Jacinto Quirarte
PK:Paul J. Karlstrom

[Session 1]

PK: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, an interview with Jacinto Quirarte, an art historian, professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio, where this interview is being conducted on August 15, 1996. This is Session 1, Tape 1, Side A. The interviewer is Paul Karlstrom and this is part of a Latino Documentation Project.

Okay, here we are, and we have so much to talk about and we have to be disciplined and try to focus in on those things that are most relevant to this project that we have under way, and which in some respects, I would have to say, grows out of the pioneering work that you did back in the really very early seventies, I think, regarding Chicano art. There’s a fascinating story, of course, how you came to that, but I should mention that you are, first and foremost, an art historian concentrating on Pre-Columbian, I do believe, and you can fill in the details on that. But somewhere along the way, you looked around you and saw interesting things happening that resonated in terms of your own personal experience and you then shifted your focus a little bit north of the border at a critical time in the development of the Chicano Movement. And then you published widely—probably, I would expect, more than almost anybody else on this subject. Most of these interviews, of course, are with the artists themselves, many of whom you worked with like two decades ago or more.

JQ: Yes, yes.

PK: Anyway, so that by way of background, other than my acknowledging or expressing how much I enjoy this opportunity since we met only at the end of May in Mexico City at the conference then.

JQ: That’s right.

PK: So there’s something very comfortable about the way all of this is evolving. Anyway, why don’t we just start at the beginning for you—you know, your own background and your own experience. Well, family background but also specifically in terms of ethnicity and how you found yourself here in America, an American with special background.

JQ: Yes. My childhood and early adolescence were spent in a mining town in northern Arizona, a place called Jerome. It was founded in the late nineteenth century when rich deposits of copper and other minerals were found and the [Phelps-Dodge] Mining Company, I believe, came in. Jerome was chosen because one of the owners of that corporation included a Jerome. I only found that out recently when we went back for some sort of reunion with my own mother. I believe Jerome was at its height in the 1920s. I believe it actually ended up having about ten thousand people. But because I was born in the Depression and almost everyone was out of work, as was the case throughout the country, the population went down. We were fortunate because my father was among the very few who was able to continue working. There were several mines, actually—I shouldn’t have just mentioned one. And my childhood then was in an area of town that was called El Barrio Méxicano. Sometimes people would call it El Barrio Chicano. So I had. . . .

PK: Already?

JQ: Yes. It wasn’t until I began to do research on the origins of the word "Chicano" that I found a bibliographic reference to "Chicano" in a book published in, oh, around 1917, and used in that context to refer to unskilled Mexican workers who were coming up to the U.S. during the extreme violence caused by the disruptions, given the revolutionary times. In any case, when I was growing up I, as all children, just simply accepted so many things because everyone around us was from essentially the same part of Mexico. My family—well, my father—came from a little community right outside of Guadalajara, Jalisco. My mother was born in that town in 1912 and her parents had arrived there just several years earlier from the same part of Mexico. So what has held true for so many such communities around the country—and, I assume, in other parts of the world—that word of mouth reaches back to a village—either in Mexico or a city or anywhere else—and people find out about these things and they end up in this particular town so that there was a sense of kinship with these numerous families. So the children I grew up with were essentially bilingual.

PK: Um-hmm.

JQ: I learned Spanish before I learned English. I didn’t start speaking English until I started school, and so growing up in such an environment, where Spanish is the dominant language and everything about the community was Mexican. . . . Because we were all first generation. All our parents were from Mexico. We had the ice cream vendor in the Mexican style. We had a magazine and newspaper vendor who pedaled all the Mexican publications, so that, for all intents and purposes, we were really in some northern-most suburb—well, not a suburb—but a province of Mexico. For all intents and purposes, the border was not down in Nogales, Arizona, but up in Jerome.

So, anyway, this was one of those small communities that was predominantly Mexican. I went to school with other Mexican-American children and what we now—or have called, since the 1960’s—white ethnics. They were Slavs and Serbs. Almost everyone who wasn’t Mexican had a name that ended in i-c-h, like Starkovich, Barich.

PK: How did they get there?

JQ: Well, evidently just mining.

PK: Yeah. So everybody in that town was involved in. . . .

JQ: In the mines. There was really no other kind of work. Except services.

PK: Right.

JQ: And the professionals like dentists, doctors, and they had a very fine high school. . . .

PK: Were they mostly Anglos? Or no?

JQ: No, there were some Italians. Mainly Central Europeans. A few Irish. And among the very few Anglos I met. . . . I didn’t know that’s what they were called until I went. . . .

PK: Whatever that means. [chuckles].

JQ: Exactly. "Non other." The one Anglo, who was actually one of my friends, was named [Donald—Ed.] Hollingshead, and his father was evidently an engineer who worked with the mines. Because I didn’t really catch up with him until we had a reunion in ‘93 and I found out that he’d been to Harvard and he’s lives in Los Angeles. It was a wonderful experience to meet up with one of my childhood friends. So Jerome is essentially my formative years, where the Mexican culture—or the Spanish language, the Mexican family structure, the extended family—all of these things were deeply ingrained in what I was to become. And so right after World War II my parents decided to go out to California. Because, after all, I’ve always thought of California as being the place where everyone ends up. It’s almost as if the entire continent was tipped on its side and all the debris from every part of the nation ends up in California.]

PK: "Debris," that’s a good word.

JQ: One of the things that I found as soon as I became acclimatized to San Francisco, which is where my parents ended up—because my mother had a brother there—was that there were people from everywhere. Jerome was a place where there wasn’t a racial or ethnic mix. I remember there was one Spaniard, for instance, and he was referred to as "the Spaniard"—"el Español". He was a tailor. There was one Jew and he was called "El judio." And there was one black couple. He was the janitor of the school that I attended in elementary school. There was. . . .

PK: Did they call him "El Negro?"

JQ: No. In fact, he was not very black, in fact. He was almost white.

PK: What was he called? I’m just curious. Was he set aside because he was African-American?

JQ: We didn’t think much about it, really . . .

PK: That’s interesting.

JQ: . . . because he really was not much darker than a lot of Mexicans in town. In fact, he was just a curly-haired Mexican. We didn’t make the connection. And there was one three-story house that we always avoided on the fringe of the Mexican community, full of Chinese men that had been allowed in—we found out. If any one of these different races appeared on the outskirts of a town—I didn’t find out until years later—that they were not allowed in town. I have no idea how they managed to do that but. . . .

PK: The city council was in. . . .

JQ: I have no idea. Since I was a kid, I just didn’t know these things.

PK: So there was discrimination of a sort . . .

JQ: Oh, yes.

PK: . . . already there but of slightly different nature than. . . .

JQ: Yes. It wasn’t of the virulent nature that you read about or that everyone becomes aware of in the 1960s. Which had always been there. And I found out that the Chinese were there to run at least one or two Chinese restaurants, of course, in a very small three or four block downtown area.

PK: Chinatown.

JQ: Yes, it was a miniature Chinatown. So that was my introduction to other races, other cultures, which was essentially minimal. Now sometime in the 1940s, when I was reaching adolescence, I realized that the Mexican community was certainly insular but not because they really truly wanted to be but because they were set aside. There was a Mexican part of town and the municipal facilities—say, like the swimming pool—was open on alternate weeks so that Mexicans and so-called Anglos weren’t allowed to swim together.

PK: I didn’t know that.

JQ: And, of course, as a child you don’t think about it.

PK: Did your family live in the Mission District in San Francisco?

JQ: Yeah.

PK: So you were right in the. . . . Where was it?

JQ: But, no, here I’m still talking about Jerome.

PK: Oh, I’m sorry. Yes.

JQ: I went back [in the conversation—Ed.]. Just to give you . . . so that you’ll know that I didn’t come from an ideal community.

PK: A little utopia.

JQ: Yes. No, it was not that. But when you’re young, when you’re a child, you don’t question things in the way that you do as you begin to become aware of things around you. And so what one of my best friends and I did was to go to the neighboring town where there was a smelter, which was obviously part of the same corporation where all the ores were shipped by train down toward the [Verde] Valley, and there was a Mexican community there, but they had a swimming pool and so we would use the Mexican pool in Clarkdale that we would get to by hitchhiking. As kids, you know, ten, twelve years old. That’s how we could do that, if we didn’t want to wait for the alternate weeks, and, of course, we used to joke about how they would drain the pool after all the Mexicans had been in so that then the Anglos could use it.

PK: But you did talk about that? Even though you were joking you were aware of the fact . . .

JQ: Oh, sure. We laughed about it. Oh, yeah, we joked about it.

PK: . . . that they didn’t want that kind of intimate, fluid contact.

JQ: Exactly, exactly. I mean, you just don’t want to associate with those people. [chuckles] And my mother would always say, "Well, these Mexicans just deserve such treatment because. . . ." They had built the pool in the twenties in the Mexican part of town, but these ignorant Mexicans would go in there and start washing their clothes and bathing with soap. [laughs] I don’t remember that but that’s what she would tell me. When I would ask.

PK: So she was disapproving of . . .

JQ: Oh, yes.

PK: . . . the etiquette that the Mexicans _____.

JQ: Exactly. And like they brought it on themselves. Which may be true. But that didn’t address the fact that they were still being discriminated [against—Ed.]. Separate facilities, you see, for Mexicans and the others. So coming from that experience and landing in California right after World War II was quite extraordinary. But we ended up in a very similar environment in the Mission District, because almost everyone there was white ethnic. They were all Greek, Irish, Italian, and central European.

PK: In the Mission?

JQ: The Mission District was not all Latino then. There were very few. I remember meeting a few Central Americans for the first time in my life. A few Hispanic-Americans—or what we later began to call Hispanic-Americans—from New Mexico—people who had gone there from New Mexico. But there wasn’t the kind of enormous Latino community that you have in San Francisco now. So the Mission District then was essentially working class. It was not the kind of community that you see now. And so when I attended Mission High School, we had in the city around ten or eleven high schools, I remember. There was Commerce High School, where almost all the students were African-American. And Commerce was right next to City Hall. That later was . . . it’s a building that was converted into, I guess, city offices. And right after I graduated in 1950, I remember being aware that that school was closed down. I don’t know exactly when. And then larger numbers of black students—or African-American students—began to attend Mission High School. But when I was there in the late forties, almost all the students were of Greek, Italian, or Irish background. And a few Hispanics.

PK: What year was it that you moved, your family left?

JQ: We left in the summer of 1947.

PK: Where did you live?

JQ: Well, we first moved in with my mother’s brother. And they were way down in the industrial section on Fourth Street, which is just down the street from where the Mosconi Center. Is that the name of it?

PK: Yeah, the _____.

JQ: It was a pretty horrid place.

PK: So just south of Market, really. What they call South of Market.

JQ: Yes. I remember Howard Street between Third and Fourth was Skid Row. I’d never seen anything like that in my life.

PK: And that’s where you lived first of all?

JQ: Well, we lived about ten blocks from there. So as kids, when we went to the Catholic Church, which was just inside. . . . I guess that was St. Patrick’s on 4th and Mission. Because it’s Howard, then Mission. We were way down by Bryant. We were near the [S.P. - Southern Pacific] depot, at one of these little streets. . . .

PK: _____.

JQ: There was a little street called Freelon Street, and the whole street was full of flats, and there were a great number of families there, in fact. We lived there for about a year—I don’t remember exactly—and I kept telling my parents we should move out of there, because it was just not a good neighborhood. And they were shopping around, and I actually took the lead in my family and began to look around the city and found this house for them on Twenty-eighth Street.

PK: Twenty-eighth and. . . .

JQ: Duncan and Diamond, I believe.

PK: Oh, yeah.

JQ: It was called Diamond Heights.

PK: Much nicer.

JQ: Oh, absolutely. And I took them up there, and, of course, they liked it because it reminded them of Jerome. Jerome was on a mountain, and you could actually see for fifty miles, it seemed. On a clear day, you could see the San Francisco peaks, which are north of Flagstaff. And, of course, you always had a view of the Red Rocks where you find Sedona, [Oak Creek] Canyon—where we used to go on picnics, by the way, when I was a child. So, in that respect, it was really a fabulous place to grow up. But being in San Francisco that first year was really a shock. To be in a city. . . . You know, to be in a little tiny town where you know everyone and there’s no public transportation; you walk everywhere. There are cars, of course. But we had no telephone in our house. We had no reason to have a phone because nobody else had a phone. In that neighborhood you could just go out the back porch and you yelled at somebody. I mean, it’s that kind of a peculiar background.

PK: Sounds nice in some ways.

JQ: It was, actually. And we walked up. . . . We would walk for miles when we were kids, all over that area. You’d go up into the mountains, and it was pine forests. You’d go down toward the valley, and then it would be sagebrush and cactus. So all the kind of environments that you find around Reno, for instance. You go up into the mountains, and it’s all pine trees and Lake Tahoe. And you go eastward from Las Vegas, the land begins to level out and it becomes essentially arid desert. But in Jerome it was the opposite. Then there was a beautiful valley, where there were a number of communities that have since grown quite a bit—Cottonwood, Cornville, and then up into Sedona, of course.

But anyway, getting back to San Francisco. I remember being absolutely fascinated with Market Street, because that was the core of the city, and at that time there were four streetcar lines.

PK: That ran along Market?

JQ: Yeah, there was like a four-lane streetcars going up and down Market and, of course, being a kid from the provinces you don’t know what car to get on. So, anyway, it was like being in playland, and, of course, when you’re that young you just love all the noise. I remember my very first experience of the Pacific Ocean and loving to go to Sutro Baths, which were still _____ _____.

PK: Still operating?

JQ: Ah, they were always open.

PK: What was that like?

JQ: They were incredible pools. You could spend the entire day there.

PK: I’ve seen photos. And, of course, the debris . . .

JQ: There was an ice rink.

PK: . . . the remains are still there.

JQ: Oh, yeah. There was an ice rink as you came in, with the usual type of music. Then you kept going further down, and then you saw all the different size pools. Some were very warm water. Then there was the Deep diving pools. Then there was a very large shallow pool with a lot of the slides. And I remember one particular evening—because we’d be there in the late afternoon and then come out at night—being absolutely frightened by the roar of the ocean simply knocking up against the cliffs right there by the Cliff House. So coming from that kind of environment and then experiencing the Pacific Ocean was really something. So, anyway, those are vivid memories.

PK: When did they close that down?

JQ: That happened after I left, so I don’t remember when.

PK: I think there was a fire there or something. I’ve never been quite sure. That’s interesting. I didn’t realize that it was operating in the late forties.

JQ: So, with that kind of background, I had always been a very good student and very industrious from the time I . . . all the way back to my early schooling. And also drawing. I did a lot of drawing as a child.

PK: Well now, how did that come about? What would be your inspiration or encouragement for drawing?

JQ: I just started drawing . . .

PK: I mean, did you. . . .

JQ: . . . doing desert scenes, landscapes and. . . .

PK: Did you have examples around you, though?

JQ: Not really. And then one of teachers in third or fourth grade became aware of my drawings, and she had been a drawing teacher or had known about art, so she showed me reproductions and I began to be aware of art.

PK: What kind of things did she show you?

JQ: Oh, the typical Arizona thing with the saguaro cactus. Southern Arizona things.

JQ: Which I had never seen, so, I mean, I only knew those through photographs. What I was doing were things that I saw in that environment, and I also did a lot of drawings of photographs, where I would reproduce as closely as possible the photos of people in the family. And so there was some native ability there and a drive to make images, and since then I’ve realized a lot of artists are left-handed, which I am. My mother said that I didn’t start speaking much until my sister did, who is a year and a half younger than I am.

PK: Well, I was going to ask you, what about siblings? Are you the eldest?

JQ: Yes. There were six of us. I had a brother. My brother died just a few years ago in San Francisco. In fact, he lived in Pacifica with his family there. He had four sons. And I have four sisters. Three of them still live in the Bay Area. One lives in Concord, and her husband works in the city. In fact, she works [there—Ed.]. They commute. And then one sister lives in Burlingame—or down the peninsula—and my other sister lives in Daley City. . . . No, around [Stone’s Town]. I’ve forgotten what they call that area. On the way to Pacifica. And then my brother settled down in Pacifica. I asked him once why he had moved down there—they used to live in the extreme southern end of the city—and he said that his kids were always being beat up by the other school children . . .

PK: Really!?

JQ: . . . so he left the city for that reason. So it was the brown flight. [laughs]

PK: That’s extraordinary. I mean, even at that. . . . Well, I don’t know how old. . . .

JQ: That was in the sixties. . . .

PK: That was in the sixties?

JQ: Yeah, I think it was in the sixties when he did that.

PK: I would think that by that time there would have been a strong enough Mexican-American community to pretty much protect from that kind of treatment—certainly in the Mission District.

JQ: Well, no. Even then the community was not that large. And also you have to remember that my family—as has been the case and continues to be the case with many Latino families—that you literally end up marrying outside the group. My brother married an Irish girl—or Irish-American. So their children are Irish and Mexican.

PK: Now wait, are these the grandchildren that . . .

JQ: Oh yes, my father, who. . . .

PK: . . . would take them out and. . . .

JQ: . . . always spoke with a very heavy accent, would take his four grandchildren, my brother’s four sons—one is a redhead and one is almost a towhead, when they were children—to his favorite place on Market, which used to have a large marketplace, to show off the kids, and, of course, his old friends would tease him about having stolen the children because they just didn’t have. . . .

PK: How could he have. . . .

JQ: Exactly. Where did he get these children, in other words. That’s by way of explaining that my family was never really a barrio Latino family, let’s say. My sister married an Irishman named McElroy who is, I believe, from Detroit who arrived in San. . . .

[Break in taping]

PK: Continuing the interview with Jacinto Quirarte, this is Tape 1, Side B. You were talking about your family background and the experience in San Francisco.

JQ: One thing I should mention relating to my formative years is that, early on, I have a very clear memory of my first, second, third-grade teachers. I remember their names, I remember the classes, I remember teachers I had through grammar school. I remember in the second grade. . . . My first grade teacher was a woman named Parker, my second grade teacher was named Blackwood, and my third grade teacher was named Thomas. All Miss-This, Miss-That. And in the second grade I remember feeling for the first time that I was excelling in something, because Miss Blackwood would have . . . not the spelling bees but the mathematics or arithmetic bees—if you can call them that—and she’d make all of us stand up as we gave answers to arithmetic problems, and I remember almost always being the last one standing because I just knew my numbers backwards and forwards. I just never had any trouble with math, and in the seventh grade I remember taking algebra and doing extremely well, and so academic areas were extremely easy. And sometime in the third of fourth grade I remember being taken out of my regular classes, which were really composed of just my colleagues—other Mexican-American children—and that’s when I first met some of the so-called Anglo children like Donald Hollingshead and there was another boy named Morrison and a girl named Margaret [Dykas] . . .

PK: That’s amazing you remember them _____ _____.

JQ: . . . Billie Jean [Fain]. . . .

PK: You remember all of these names!

JQ: I remember all these kids. What obviously happened is that they wanted to take me out of a particular environment—where I had essentially been segregated—into a more challenging environment, and I began to be around children who didn’t speak Spanish. And I remember even in some of the grades where we were asked to recite that some of my friends would hem and haw and they would speak with a very heavy accent. They never really got that involved. I don’t mean to generalize. I’m only speaking about my experience. But I remember, in many cases, a lot of my friends were not doing that well in the academic. . . .

PK: The Mexican-Americans?

JQ: Yes, yes. So when I got to Mission High School, I took just about everything that there was to take in the sciences and in the arts, and for the very first time I had. . . . We actually had three art teachers. We had one in poster-lettering, and we had one in drawing and portrait painting, then we had one in stage design. With Miss Goodrich—in fact, I remember her name—I became a calligrapher, so I actually was able to earn quite a bit of money when I was a graduate student doing calligraphy years later. So I was able to master certain craftsmanship type of things, and also at Mission High School I ended up getting into all of the college prep courses, again all of the what we would now call the advanced classes, where I took the maximum number of English courses that require a lot of writing and analysis of sentence structure and so forth.

PK: And you liked that? I mean, that was _____?

JQ: Yes, because I excelled. I also was very physical, so that I was on the varsity basketball team, and in my junior year, I believe, we won the city championship—basketball.

PK: What position did you play?

JQ: I played center, believe it or not. I was the shortest man on the team, but I was an elbow expert, just a mean fighter under the boards, and I remember that we had one kid named Flowers who was six foot eleven but he was so awkward we would only put him out on the floor to scare the opposition. And one guy was six-six. His name was Pugh, and a kid named O’Brien—a forward—he was about six-four. So we were all obviously tall. And I was around six-two and a half at the time. I remember beating the freshman teams at Stanford and we played in the Cow Palace. So I had that side of my experiences as a jock, so to speak, although my coach was constantly ribbing me about drawing pictures and spending my time in all those art classes with Miss Goodrich and Miss. . . .

PK: You mean "girl stuff," that’s _____.

JQ: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Miss Michaels and. . . . We had to practice every day—and on Saturdays—because [in—Ed.] the high school—as is the case with all the high schools in San Francisco at that time—sports were extremely competitive. So if you wanted to be a baseball player that’s all you did—or if you wanted to be a basketball player or a football player. We rarely had anyone who could do all of them. Oh, I should have mentioned that in Jerome I had played basketball on the junior high team, so I had that experience. I had also played in the band in Jerome, where I played the trombone, and then at Mission I took up the trumpet, so I was taking music

PK: Sounds to me like you had far more opportunities in public school than anybody does nowadays in this country.

JQ: I think so.

PK: They don’t even teach art and music and these things.

JQ: No. No. At least that was the case then, and I remember getting. . . .

PK: So you were privileged, even though you came from this small _____.

JQ: This barrio, you know. [laughs] So-called barrio. The one thing I remember with particular pleasure was getting a number of awards, because I belonged to a great number of clubs, and I had been on the college—I’m sorry, the California State . . . the California Scholarship Federation. I guess it was CSF, I’ve forgotten what it is. But they gave you little pins if you had a certain grade-point average. And when I graduated I kept being called to get awards, and I remember getting one particular award that I was very proud of and that was one for scholastic achievement because I had a straight A average, just straight A’s in everything, whether it was English or mathematics or physics or, of course, gym or the sports, the music and, of course, the art area. So I was a very, very busy kid.

PK: That’s amazing!

JQ: What we would now call an anxious-ridden type who is constantly working.

PK: Over-achiever.

JQ: And then I was working after school as well, after practice. So that didn’t leave any time for what a lot of my friends were doing—girlfriends, that kind of thing. So I didn’t. . . .

PK: Oh well, that can wait.

JQ: Yes, I didn’t waste my time

PK: Although I never thought it could _____.

JQ: [laughs] Well, now this is. . . .

JQ: Now, I went over to Berkeley to see if I could get over there, and I did get a scholarship—a partial scholarship—but I didn’t have enough money to get across the Bay to attend classes and I certainly couldn’t afford to live over there. And so that’s one of my regrets, of not having had that opportunity.

PK: Not having [been able to] find a way to finance it.

JQ: Yes.

PK: And your family clearly couldn’t help?

JQ: No, no. And so my first year I went to State [Cal State San Francisco—Ed.] because that was accessible.

PK: That cost almost nothing at that time.

JQ: No, no. And it was there, right there near the [Federal—Ed.] Mint. That was the downtown campus.

PK: Oh, really?

JQ: Oh, yes. The new campus wasn’t built until ‘52 or ‘53. I was taking all my classes at State my last year, 1954.

PK: You mean, Woods Hall, what’s now the University of California Extension? Is that where San Francisco State was at the time?

JQ: Well, it. . . .

PK: No, by the Mint. . . . There was the one way downtown and there was also the Mint out closer to the lower Haight.

JQ: Oh no, not that one. The one downtown.

PK: Okay.

JQ: There was a Safeway built there later next to it and a tall apartment building. Some temporary buildings had been built in this four-block area that had been a girls’ teaching school, I believe, or where schoolteachers were trained—which is essentially what all the state colleges were at that time until they were renamed state universities.

PK: And this wasn’t near the Laguna and. . . .

JQ: Oh no. This was downtown near. . . .

PK: That’s another

JQ: I guess Fell was on the northern side. I frankly have forgotten the names of the streets, but it was a small campus. There were very few art students. And, of course, I focused on art, an artistic. . . .

PK: Now how did you make that choice? Because here you’ve described. . . . It sounds to me like you were prepared in every area . . .

JQ: Yes.

PK: . . . and somehow you focused. . . .

JQ: I didn’t get the right counseling. We didn’t have counselors. I remember my English 8, which is the designation for the highest course that you could take, [teacher—Ed.] coming up to me right after graduation, when she realized that not only had I done very well in her class but in all these other classes, that she actually asked me about doing anything possible to get a scholarship to Harvard. And I said, "Well, no, I never thought about that." And it’s unfortunate that I didn’t pursue it and she didn’t advise me on what to do. There weren’t the kinds of opportunities that, obviously, all students have had in the last twenty, thirty years. So I often say that I have done extraordinary things in spite of my education. If I can term it that way. I never thought, given my initial inclination to create images, that I would end up writing books and teaching.

PK: Yeah, a scholar

JQ: Because I had only studied for a teaching credential as a stop-gap. I mean, I just thought of that as, "Well, that’s something you do to earn a living." But I had wanted to be. . . .

PK: And that’s where you got a secondary credential, didn’t you, at [Cal State].

JQ: Yes, exactly.

PK: In fact, you did so in, I do believe, in fifty . . .

JQ: . . . seven.

PK: . . . eight.

JQ: Yeah, ‘58.

PK: . . . along with your M.A.

JQ: Yes. I came back from the Air Force and enrolled in the masters’ program, in the teaching credential program, and finished the entire thing in one year, where I just loaded up on all the seminars. And by then I had the discipline of having gone through navigation school for a year and then special weapons school—that is, nuclear weapons and radar bombardier training, so I had gone to school for a very intensive period of eighteen months, having gone in as a second lieutenant right after graduation in 1954, and by the time I finished. . . .

PK: What about [undergraduate, your graduate] school?

JQ: And I went back to State. Now after my three years in the Air Force, where I flew—I was on a bomber combat squadron with the Strategic Air Command—I. . . .

PK: Hm! This is. . . ?

JQ: ‘54 to ‘57. I went through a year of flight training and then six months of technical upgrading, and they were trying to get me to stay in to take up pilot training at that point so that I could then be one of these triple-threat people, as they were called, because toward the end of my term in the Air Force they were then going into these highly specialized aircraft that at that time were with the B-58. We flew the B-36, which was the largest plane ever built because the nuclear weapons were so enormous, and my crew went into B-52s. They were among the very first. So had I stayed in, I would have been into the B-52s and possibly gone into the B-2s or what later became known as the B-2 bomber. So, anyway, I went back to school. I didn’t want to spend my life in the military, although I did enjoy the flying.

PK: Let’s go back to undergraduate, because I’m still not clear. I need to know how you finally focused on art. I understand how you got to San Francisco State and how you felt that—maybe not at the time so much but, certainly, in retrospect—that perhaps you should have tried harder to find a way to take advantage of some other opportunities, at least going to Berkeley. But what strikes me is that you were very well prepared in all these areas. You could have concentrated on various fields.

JQ: Yes.

PK: For some reason, you chose art and art history.

JQ: Yes. I toyed with the idea of architecture, but that seemed so beyond the realm of possibility because I had no models to follow—no one to encourage me to pursue any given area. So everything had to be self-generated, in a sense, and when you only have a limited experience in school, regardless of the range of areas that you explore, you really don’t know what you’re doing. Now there is one thing that I should mention. At that time the Bank of America had an achievement award for high school students in San Francisco in the various disciplines—art, science, and others. And at that time they would select a student from each high school to compete with their counterparts in each of the other ten or eleven high schools in the city. My school selected me for art, and I won the city-wide—I believe it was city-wide—achievement in art for 1950. And that was the result of my own perception of what I wanted to do. In a sense, I had a major in art. I took all the courses they had in art, whether it was drawing or poster-making or lettering or anything that was offered. And so when I took music, that was not central. Or if I did sports, and although I did well in that, that was not my be-all. I didn’t aspire to do that, whereas art had always been part of what I felt I was. And I didn’t have a notion of what it would mean to be an artist, let’s say, but I knew that’s the direction I wanted to go in.

PK: How did you imagine you would support yourself?

JQ: That’s where the teaching credential came in.

PK: Ah, right, yeah, you would teach.

JQ: That seemed within the realm of possibility. When I saw real artists, like John Gutmann, who took me under his wing and. . . .

PK: So you had courses from John at State?

JQ: Yes, yes.

PK: Photography.

JQ: My first art history courses.

PK: Oh, art history. Did John teach art history?

JQ: That’s what he taught.

PK: I thought he taught photography.

JQ: And I took photography with him, yes. I forgot about that. Yes, I took a lot of photography with him.

PK: _____ _____ _____ now.

JQ: Yes. He would fuss at me because I wouldn’t pay attention to the details. He also taught life drawing and he loved to tease me.

PK: He would love to teach life drawing, by the way.

JQ: Oh, yes. And for an eighteen, nineteen-year-old it was absolutely extraordinary to see a Scandinavian-type—if there is such a type—blonde, nude model with a black model or an Asian model. It was really an amazing situation. And, anyway, that’s the kind of thing John Gutmann liked to do to. . . .

PK: That’s interesting.

JQ: Yes. So I had life drawing with him, and he would go around and check each of us and he would sometimes grab me because I was wearing jeans—I think everybody wore jeans; are they jeans? or like Levis, or khakis—and he would always put his fingers in my belt, behind me and say, "You’re too close," and he’d physically pull me away from the easel. And sometimes I’d be standing back looking at what I was doing and he’d come by and nudge me and say, "You’re standing too far." And so that was his way of encouraging me, in a sense, so I felt that he took an intense interest in what I was doing. My very first art history course was on nineteenth and twentieth century European art and I remember getting A’s in all the exams and quizzes, and he took me aside and talked to me about the possibility of my going into art history. And he also got me involved with putting together a film series for students where I was taught how to order films and how to present them, which was the very first time I went before a group—other than in classroom recitations, which I’d always done. John Gutmann, then, directed me in certain ways toward that. Although I didn’t initially go into art history because State did not offer a degree in art history. They offered degrees in art. And so I continued to emphasize printmaking, painting. That’s where I met Roy [deForrest, de Forrest, Forrest], for instance. He was a student there at State.

PK: Oh I didn’t know that. Is that right?

JQ: Yeah, and I think I ran into Manuel Neri over at School of Fine Arts because I used to go over there.

PK: I wanted to ask you about that. With your growing interest in art and, I guess, increasing idea of what that can mean in terms of something beyond just commercial art or teaching. . . .

JQ: Yes. I wanted to be a painter and printmaker, because that’s what I focused on.

PK: So at some point you must have become aware of what was going on at the California School of Fine Arts, which I think it was still called then . . .

JQ: Yes.

PK: . . . which had had, of course, a great deal of excitement in the late forties and then into the early fifties with Douglas McAgy . . .

JQ: Yes, and Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still were there.

PK: . . . Clyfford Still.

JQ: Yes. Oh, yes.

PK: And that was very much, I believe, in the air and you must have picked up on that at some time. Were you ever interested?

JQ: Oh yes, but you see, that’s where that conflict was. There is a decision you make where you think you want to be an artist, but on the other hand there’s this other thing pulling you and saying, "Well, I want to be a teacher. This is my. . . ." I was an unusually serious, responsible type of person, because I wanted to make sure that I would have something to fall back on. You would imagine the parents telling you that but, no, that came from me.

PK: And besides, you obviously had a sort of humanities, what shall we say, academic parallel interest, and I would expect. . . . I don’t know if you were aware of this, but the California School of Fine Arts was hardly strong in that. Still isn’t. It has much more sort of the heroic idea of singular expression.

JQ: Exactly. Also, I was out of sync with what was going on in art at the time. I was interested in figurative art. Which is what I think so many people as children, when they begin to make images, it’s of things they know. Whether it’s their surroundings or the human figure and since I had such a strong Mexican experience. . . . My father subscribed to many Mexican publications, and my earliest experience with Mexican images were of some very interesting cartoons that were caricatures of world leaders that were always on the covers of these Mexican publications. So I became aware of Mexican art, and then they often had articles on Mexican painters, so I knew of the muralists when I was an adolescent.

I had this parallel track, actually. On the one hand, there was my experience growing up, not only in the town that I mentioned but within the kind of family that I come from, and knowing about Mexican art up to a point, of Mexican politics—a Mexican view of the world and how the war was going on, for instance, and how it was viewed in my household. So that right before or during my first year at State, I actually painted a huge mural in a Mexican restaurant on Third Street of your typical Mexican images: the Mexican cowboy on horseback, a [china poblana] on a horse—a beautiful horse—a Mexican landscape scene, and then a huge map of Mexico. And the Mexican restaurant was called México Lindo, and I remember lettering. . . . Since I had become an expert letterer by the time I was sixteen, seventeen years old, I did the lettering as well as the map. I took some pictures of it. I have at least one of them in my files somewhere.

PK: What year was that?

JQ: This was 1949-50.

PK: Oh, so this is. . . . Well, my Lord, you were still . . . you were just starting college.

JQ: Yes, yes. I was a freshman. And I remember going to San Jose, spending a summer with my uncle—with whom we had lived—and by then he had moved to San Jose and had started a business down there and he had gotten me a job painting some mural in some Mexican restaurant down there—which I did. So when I began to take classes with the other painters on the faculty, there was a man named [________—Ed.] [Nepote] who was a landscape painter, a very sweet man. But not a challenging person, because I was a very restless young man and my personality was very much in synch with John Gutmann, who is a very challenging man.

PK: [He] was also privy to all of that wonderful European culture, and so forth.

JQ: Yes, and then. . . .

PK: It must have come through.

JQ: Yes, and there was [Mundt], who had been an administrator at California State

PK: Ernest Mundt?

JQ: Yeah, Ernest Mundt. I took some graduate courses with him. He was giving seminars in art history, I believe.

PK: [I would say, Actually] art history.

JQ: Then [________—Ed.] [Johansen], who was a Swede—or [Johannsen (pronouncing it Yo-hahn’-sen)]; I forget his first name—with whom I took seminars in aesthetics, where we had to write papers every week and then discuss them. The usual format. And Seymour [Locks], who was a very important person in my life. After I left school and got married and then came back, my wife and I became very close to Seymour and his wife, Faye Locks, and their children—whom I had actually documented when I was a photography student. I had spent many days taking pictures of his children and his family and printing them for them. So anyway my relationship with him was very close and he had gotten. . . . He was one of the veterans returning from World War II. I believe he got a degree at Stanford, an M.A., and then started teaching at State. So John Gutmann and Seymour Locks were the key figures in my life.

PK: Well, that’s pretty good! I mean, maybe you had to go to State for reasons that. . . . Well, you would have preferred going elsewhere, but that sounds to me like a pretty solid, stimulating art environment.

JQ: It was—because of where that particular school is and the people that it attracted. Now, unfortunately the times demanded that one be involved with Abstract Expressionism . . .

PK: Yeah, that’s right.

JQ: . . . and I tried, and made a valiant effort to become an Abstract expressionist. But my heart was in figurative art, and so, gradually, after going into the Air Force and then going on to graduate school beyond that, I just simply drifted away and then began to focus on art history.

[Break in taping]

PK: Continuing the interviews in Session 1 with Jacinto Quirarte, this is Tape 2, Side A. And we left ourselves—or rather, we left you—in San Francisco. You were talking about, basically, your art education and experience . . .

JQ: Yes.

PK: . . . there at State, and some of the, well, faculty. We’ve been talking about them but then some of the other students and your valiant but unsuccessful struggle to become a heroic Abstract Expressionist.

JQ: Exactly. I did exhibit with groups of artists in San Francisco and, of course, as was the case at the time, I always was included in the annual art exhibitions that were held at the Palace of. . . . Not the Palace of Fine Arts. . . .

PK: Legion of Honor. California Palace of the Legion of Honor is where those annuals were. . . .

JQ: What were those called? Where there was a city-wide exhibition.

PK: Well, they also had them in. . . .

JQ: We had them in Union Square, we had them out at that palace that was _____.

PK: And also at the Civic Center. They would do that sometimes.

JQ: Yeah, where students were included. I’ve forgotten now what they called it. It was an annual event. So anyway, I was in those. I exhibited my works in The Place, which was . . .

PK: Oh, sure.

JQ: . . . on upper Grant, off Union Street. And then across the street there was a place called A Village Sandwich Shop, where I would. . . . I was doing mobiles. I got involved with mobiles as well as printmaking, and I guess I was fascinated by the scientific or the technological end of it—of how to find the fulcrum in order to balance each and every part of the sculpture.

PK: Also, mobiles were really in at about that time. I remember [________—Ed.] [Ellevus] had them, who was maybe a little bit later.

JQ: Yes.

PK: And [Alexander—Ed.] Calder was a big influence.

JQ: Exactly. When I became aware of him I was fascinated with that. So I did those and I would exhibit them.

PK: Were you living in. . . . Now, from our conversation earlier. . . .

JQ: I lived with my parents my first year of college, and then I was able to get an apartment—a flat—on upper Union off Grant Street.

PK: That’s right by Washington Square Park, I think. [In North Beach-J.Q. ].

JQ: Yeah. My landlord had a dingy flat above [Fenocchio’s]? What was that place. . . .

PK: That’s on Broadway.

JQ: Broadway and Columbus. I remember having to go and pay the rent. It was fourteen dollars a month for this two-room flat and a little kitchen and bath. And if I didn’t pay the rent on time, I would come back to the flat and I’d have a little piece of paper on my door saying, "Please pay flat rent. Landlor." Landlord was L-a-n-l-o-r. It always gave me a charge because it reminded me of my dad. Obviously, one of the many Italians who had come many, many years earlier and had learned English phonetically. And so that’s where I was living—on upper Grant. And later a friend of mine and I—named Fernando, who was from Mexico City and who had studied architecture—rented an apartment in the Mission District where the rents were more reasonable. If you can imagine. [laughs]

PK: That’s amazing!

JQ: Yeah, that was the early fifties. So essentially, I’m still exploring all these many possibilities, but I’m still thinking of myself as an art student.

PK: Well, if you were at North Beach at that time, it was a pretty exciting time still, because that was, really, the heyday of the Beats.

JQ: Yes. Well, it was right before. Then it was all the Bohemians.

PK: What was that like? Describe what the scene was like. And were you aware of being in a special place where some interesting. . . .

JQ: Oh, absolutely. There were people from all over the country there constantly. Everyone was talking about car trips across the country, Mexico. Everybody had to go to Mexico. Fernando and I spent an entire summer there in 1953. That was my very first experience with Mexico [itself—Ed.], because I had always heard of it from the time I was a child and my father never ever stopped talking about it. And so this was this mythical place where I felt immediately at home. I had no problem dealing with it. It was something that I had known as a child, although indirectly.

Once I came back and did my graduate studies, I began to turn toward an area that had been of major interest to me all along but had always been on the back burner, and that was pre-Columbian art. I remember browsing through bookstores on Fourth and Market, for instance. There were a number of bookstores that, to me, were like fantasy lands. I’d never seen that many books that I could browse through—outside a library. And I remember picking up a book on the Maya—it had just been published—by Sylvanus Morley, called The Ancient Maya. I remember buying a copy of that, and so I was in high school when I first became aware of that. And I remember when the murals at Bonampak were discovered, right around then, and so I became fascinated with mural painting. And when I came back from the Air Force, when I went back to San Francisco to work on my doctorate—I’m sorry, my masters—I took all the requisite courses for a teaching credential, where I had to take puppet-making and how to run a projector, all the Mickey-Mouse things—especially where I had been dealing with nuclear weapons and radar bombardier training . . .

PK: Sort of low tech.

JQ: . . . and then being taught how to run a film projector was real Mickey-Mouse to me. I was a grand old man of twenty-five, twenty-six, having gone through three years of this intense experience where I was always on alert, couldn’t go anywhere because we were always being called on alert. And I went through all of that but I wanted to write my master’s thesis on Maya painting, so. . . .

PK: Oh, you knew that already?

JQ: Oh yes, and so I dug up all the books I could get hold of in the library—archaeology books on painting, wrote a masters under John Gutmann. He helped me as best he could.

PK: What was the M.A. topic?

JQ: On Maya painting.

PK: Okay, so already on the M.A. [level—Ed.].

JQ: At Bonampak. Yes. And so my appetite was just barely whetted, so that was the beginning. Fifty-six, ‘57, all of a sudden I had an opportunity to actually write a lengthy paper on Maya painting, and I remember seeing an announcement somewhere that somebody who had been down there to look at the Bonampak murals was going to give a talk at Berkeley. So I went across the Bay to listen, and I soon realized that it was of such a general nature that, although I had never seen them, I actually knew more about them than the speaker. Now the speaker obviously knew them in a personal way, but didn’t really know how to place them within their proper artistic and historical context.

PK: Where did you get all this information at that point? This was pretty, well, it seems to me it was a pretty new field, wasn’t it?

JQ: As far as art history is concerned, yes.

PK: That’s what I mean, yeah.

JQ: It was all archaeology.

PK: Yeah.

JQ: It was all mainly archaeologists. And so my wife and I had spent our honeymoon in Mexico. We both loved Mexico. We had married in December of 1954 when I was in the middle of my training as a navigator in the Air Force.

PK: Well, let’s just quickly talk about that. Where did you meet Sara?

JQ: I left San Francisco in September of 1954, several months after graduation with my B.A. I was a second lieutenant. I entered the Air Force in San Antonio. I made arrangements to travel with other young men from the western U.S. I remember, there was one from the state of Washington, there were several along the way, so we all carpooled and we drove together to San Antonio. We spent two, three weeks here being mustered into the Air Force. Bright, bushy-tailed second-lieutenants, all college grads, university graduates, waiting for our orders. So then I was assigned one of two navigator training bases in Harlingen, Texas, which is thirty miles north of the border, the southernmost part of Texas. I arrived there at the end of September. I met this young lady, who had just returned from New York where she had been modeling and had come home. She had been a student at the University of Texas. We met and within two months we were married.

PK: Needless to say, you still are.

JQ: It was a very decisive move. And we’re still married. We have a daughter.

PK: So you guys made the right choice.

JQ: Yes, yes, very much so.

PK: And that was in. . . .

JQ: December of 1954.

PK: Okay, ‘54. So then she became part of this. . . .

JQ: . . . journey. Essentially, the journey that we began.

PK: And you part of hers.

JQ: She went back to San Francisco with me when I went back to finish my master’s degree, and that’s when we became very good friends, very close, with the Locks, Seymour Locks, and soon after I graduated. . . . We had already begun to make plans to. . . . I was going to study toward a doctorate. That’s when I made an absolutely definite, or definitive, decision to get a Ph.D. in art history. That’s when I began to look around and realize that there were no universities in the U.S. who offered Ph.D.s with that specialty. There was one at Yale. The most important art historian, named George [Kubler], who had written numerous books on Spanish art, Mexican colonial art, the colonial art of New Mexico, the pre-Columbian art and architecture of Meso-America or ancient Mexico and Guatemala, but he had not published that book, for which he has become famous. That came out in 1962. So here we’re dealing with 1958 when I got my degree. And so I had to look around, and I did look at Berkeley but all they had were archaeologists. Their anthropology program in pre-Columbian was very strong. There was one of the key figures in Olmec studies, but I was not particularly interested in Olmec, I wanted [Maya, Mayan]. So my wife and I decided after long, long discussions that we would go to Mexico. We said, "Why not go to the source?" And I had three years of the G.I. Bill left, and so that was our stake. We had saved enough money to get there and to get started. Our friend Fernando [Carrera] was down there, working on his doctorate in Spanish literature.

PK: Same place?

JQ: Yes, so we were going to the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and when we first got there we stayed with Fernando and his wife.

PK: Now, is that where Americans would generally go if they wanted to study in Mexico?

JQ: Yes. There were a number of people working on doctorates in Spanish or Spanish literature, which is normal, I think natural, for someone to go. I really didn’t know what I was doing, as was often the case, but as it turned out I really lucked out because when I arrived I studied with world-renowned people—people who had written all the books on pre-Columbian art, on modern Mexican art, on colonial art of Mexico. I had an opportunity to study with all of these. I didn’t know that I would be studying with people of that stature. So that was an amazing experience. And then once there, I began to meet to people from Yale and Harvard, because the national university of Mexico [________—Ed.] being of international renown, given the achievements of its faculty for the hundreds of years that it’s been in existence, was a natural liaison for Harvard and Yale-based people—as well as people from the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Los Angeles, University of New Mexico. I met them all.

PK: They all came through.

JQ: Exactly, they would always go through, and they would touch base with the people with whom I was studying, and as soon as I arrived I became a special assistant to the most famous Mayanist in Mexico, because he had discovered the tomb in Palenque, which is just known all over the world now for the extraordinary materials that were found in that tomb. He hired me—once I was in his seminar in Maya glyphs, where I learned to read Maya glyphs—to do architectural drawings and to do translations for him. And through that. . . . And, of course, he was head of the Institute of Maya Studies, and through that I was able to meet George Kubler for the first time in 1962.

PK: Who was this professor you were working with? The distinguished Palenque discoverer?

JQ: He has since passed away. His name was Alberto Ruz—R-u-z—hyphen Lhuillier. He was part French. Lhuillier was L-h-u-i-l-l-i-e-r. Ruz-Lhuillier is world famous for that achievement of having found that tomb, which changed the way in which all of pre-Columbian Mexico had been viewed. He later became the head of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. So I mean, he was . . .

PK: A great [little museum].

JQ: . . . first-class. He was a first-class man.

PK: You couldn’t have done better.

JQ: No. No. So, I lucked out.

PK: Did you consider going to Yale, to try to go to Yale to study with Kubler? Or no?

JQ: No, because I didn’t really know that much about Kubler. I only found out about him once I got to Mexico. And that’s when I realized that there really weren’t any places in the U.S. where you could study pre-Columbian. Certainly not for a graduate degree. You could go to Philadelphia, for instance, at the University of Pennsylvania, and I later worked with a colleague at the University of Texas, who got his degree about the same time that I did and he was interested in very much the same area in art history, but he’s had to study with archaeologists.

PK: Yeah.

JQ: There were no art historians, other than George Kubler. And he later trained a few people in art history.

PK: Yeah, like [Judith] [Bettleheim], who teaches at State.

JQ: Yeah.

PK: An old friend of mine. She went back to Yale from UCLA to study with Kubler.

JQ: So getting to Mexico was the best thing that ever happened to me. I studied with the eminent Justino Fernández, who wrote all the books on José Clemente Orozco. He wrote a key book on the work of Orozco in 1940 called Orozco: Form & Idea. He wrote the book that continues to be the best source on nineteenth and twentieth century art of Mexico, in the 1950s. I studied. . . . He was my thesis director, my dissertation director—because of art history. And Ruz-Lhullier was my director in archaeology, since that’s the area that I would, of necessity, have to cover. I also studied with the most eminent colonialist, named Francisco de la [Maza, Masa]. He wrote most of the books on colonial art of Mexico. So, all in all, it was an extraordinary experience, and once I became acquainted with people from Harvard and Yale, but particularly Kubler at Yale, I made contacts that were later to prove very, very beneficial for me. So following graduation, [and, in] publishing for the first time a number of papers on pre-Columbian art and architecture, I ended up in the Foreign Service, because that opportunity came up. I didn’t even think in terms of applying to any university in the states because I knew that would be next to impossible.

PK: Why was that so? At that point you would be one of the few. . . .

JQ: There was no demand for such people at that time. This was. . . .

PK: Not in art history.

JQ: No. This was 1964. I had been working at the University of the Americas that had been known as the Mexico City College, first as dean of men and then teaching my very first class in pre-Columbian art and architecture, and before that, teaching art to junior high and high school students at the American School.

PK: In Mexico City?

JQ: Mexico City. And I was able to get some experience teaching. But because the pay was so low and the raise I received after getting my Ph.D. in June of 1964 at the University of the Americas was so minuscule that it was ludicrous, I thought, "We need to get out of here." And we were ready to leave—after six years. And this opportunity to go to the Foreign Service came up—through an old friend from San Francisco State. A man named Richard Cushing was one of the many returning veterans at State, who had been a newspaperman with The Chronicle, and, anyway, he was a public information officer at the American Embassy in Mexico. We became real good friends and he said, "I’m being transferred to Caracas. Why don’t you come along with us?" And he ordered his people to interview me, so it was getting a job—as so often happens—through a friend.

And the only interesting thing about that interview that was a pro forma thing was that these foreign service people asked me how I would explain the riots that were then taking place in the U.S. and our problems with Latin America. I was at a loss because when my wife Sara and I left in December of 1958 there was no such thing on the horizon. And in the summer of 1964 that was about as alien as anything could be from our experience. So we only knew about it as a distant thunder, and there was obviously no way I could answer that and I had no ready answer and I passed over that. And then he asked me another question about the problems between the U.S. and Mexico and when I started, "Well, our problems with the U.S. . . ." the interviewer immediately asked me, "Wait a minute. What side are you on?" And that’s when I realized that I had been gone too long.

PK: [laughs]

JQ: I was already looking at the world in terms of Mexico—or Latin America. Anyway, that was the fun part, and we did go to Caracas.

PK: And this was in ‘64 . . .

JQ: Yes.

PK: . . . that you went to Caracas.

JQ: Yes. We came back to the U.S. for six months. Not six months. Actually it was about three months for training—on how to live abroad.

PK: [laughs]

JQ: So we had to take the Foreign Service Institute where a number of people gave us lectures on Latin America. Again, it was like the experience I had had when I went to hear that person talk at Berkeley on the Bonampak murals. We did have a Puerto Rican—I remember this very clearly—give us a talk on Yucatan, where my wife and I had traveled extensively and that’s where I focused on my dissertation. I wrote a four-hundred-page dissertation on Maya mural painting. So that’s when I realized—one of my particular personality traits—that I knew that this man really didn’t know very much, but that under the circumstances there would really be no reason for me to interrupt him, nor to even tell him afterward that he really should consult this or that source in order to make a more meaningful presentation. because I realized, first, that he probably had been pressed into service, that he had many other more important things to do in his life, and that my doing so, either in the lecture or afterward, would just be showing off. And so I have always been very reluctant, even in situations where I know that I know more than an individual. And so I have always been relatively quiet in that sense, other than when I’m in my classroom or. . . .

PK: You mean, unlike La Maestra in Mexico City, Raquel [Tibol.]?

JQ: Oh, gee, yes, yes. Well, you have to show how much more you know than the individual. So at least I recognized that that is not part of my personality, where I need to show off. I think many of us do show off in certain ways, but that certainly is not mine. I don’t have a need. . . .

PK: Well, _____ _____ what it’s accomplishing in the case of _____.

JQ: I don’t have a need to do that kind of thing.

PK: But you did. . . . I think it is interesting that you began to be very much reinforced in terms of your understanding, familiarity with the whole Latin American situation, and from, in some ways, almost, I guess, eventually, really an insider’s perspective. Even though you were American . . .

JQ: Yes.

PK: . . . you had the tools and the education to easily fit in.

JQ: Deal with this material. Yes. One of things that I often mention in first going to Mexico, opening up an account at the bank and giving my name, and just before I was going to say, "Let me spell it for you," which is what I’ve always had to do in the U.S., the man just simply wrote it up. That was an amazing experience, to have someone actually hear my name and literally have no problem with it. And so that was a wonderful experience to say, "Jacinto Quirarte," and not have to say, "Let me spell it for you." So, in that sense, I was able to deal with that experience and go with it.

PK: In some ways, because of your name and because of language, your identity fit more comfortably in some ways—in that way, at least—in Mexico than had been your experience in the U.S. You always, just using this as an example, having to explain yourself within your own country.

JQ: Yes, I was. . . .

PK: You didn’t have to do that in this foreign country.

JQ: Exactly. They knew I wasn’t from there, because, as the people got to know me in school. . . . And I was just taller than all my classmates, so that my classmates—in a very nice way—called me "El Grande," the big one, because I towered over everyone, and at that time I weighed about 175 so I looked even taller than I was. And it brought back the memories of Jerome, for instance, where I really didn’t have a problem with my name because everyone there was equipped to hear it. And so I was called "Jacinto" or ["Chinto" ], which is a short, a nickname, and when I got to San Francisco I experienced for the first time that problem. All my schoolmates were—as I mentioned earlier—either Irish or Italian or Greek, and one of my best friends was named Tom Jackson, and he used to rib me about my name, and he’d say, "Well, what. . . ." He’d ask me how I pronounced my name and I’d say, "Hacinto," and he couldn’t pronounce that and he’d say, "Ha." And then I would say, "Well, just think in terms of Ha-ha." And then, "Oh! Ha-ha-cinto!" So that was the worst thing I could have done, and so he just constantly called me "Ha-ha-cinto." Then he began to call me, "Jack-cinto." And then he just called me "Jack."

PK: [chuckles]

JQ: And the last couple of years in high school—I’ll never forgive myself for having done that—I actually just, rather than fight it, I just simply asked people to call me Jack. Even my kid sisters began to call me Jack and my nephews. . . . Well, at that time were they calling me that? Were there any nephews? No, there weren’t any nephews then. No, of course not, there couldn’t have been. But even later, when my sisters were married and their children would call me Jack. . . .

[Break in taping]

PK: Tape 2, Side B. Just finishing up one thought before we go to lunch, "Jack." [laughs]

JQ: When my wife and I returned to San Francisco and she heard my siblings call me Jack, my wife stared in horror to realize that I had been using "Jack" in high school, so I was very embarrassed to acknowledge that I had not been able to deal with that problem of having people call me "Jacinto." [chuckling] And, in fact, I remembered many years later that Seymour [Locks—Ed.] was the very first one to shame me into using "Jacinto," because even my first year in college I must have been using "Jack" and I had actually forgotten that. So it must have been Seymour who first told me, "You have no reason to be ashamed." Of course, I didn’t realize that I had been ashamed. I wasn’t really thinking of it in those terms. I was just tired of people asking you, "What kind of a name is that? How do you pronounce that?" etc. So that was a revelation in Mexico to begin to deal with my own background and emphasize those things that eventually became very, very important—and to begin to come to terms with that very special experience of being bilingual and bicultural, and going back to the source, and, once there, acknowledging all those things that were Mexican and the many more things that were American. And that’s when I realized that I was far more American than Mexican. So in a sense I felt liberated, because I began to see things far more clearly now, and to sort out the Mexican part with the American—and beginning to see the myth of Mexico as opposed to the reality of Mexico. There was my father’s Mexico of the provinces—the revolutionary Mexico—and the multi-million-population city of Mexico City, which is just unique. It isn’t Mexico; it is an entity onto its own. It’s a cosmopolitan city. It’s a world center, where you have people from all over the world. Even beyond San Francisco, which I felt was an extraordinary place to have finished up on my formative years. It didn’t come anywhere near the kinds of things that I found in Mexico City. It was a drawing center for people from the U.S. as well as from Europe. I met many people from New York for the first time in my life. Even though I had met a few from New York in San Francisco, I was more apt to meet someone from Connecticut and Idaho. I had never met people from Idaho, except in San Francisco. Somehow they’d ended up there. Or from Washington.

But Mexico City was something truly special. We met people from South America for the first time—artists from Argentina, from Peru, from Colombia. people who later became actually quite famous as artists. We met people who were about my age at the time. That is. . . . Well, obviously, if they’re still around, they’re still my age. [laughs] What I meant by that is that we were all about the same generation, men and women born in the early thirties. So we were in our late twenties, early thirties at that time. Truly formative years. And meeting Kubler, meeting colleagues from Harvard, and then others was a truly inspiring experience. I met a young man from Germany—I’ll never forget. [Lothar Kanauth], who had been in the German Youth Movement, had emigrated to the U.S., and ended up in the Midwest right after World War II. He was just my age. So there could not have been two more different backgrounds, and we ended up in 1960—no, I’m sorry, 1959; January 1959—in a seminar on Maya glyphs and iconography—or [epigraphy], hieroglyphics and iconography. So I was there from the U.S., Lothar was from Germany via the U.S. There was a Czechoslovakian woman who is still in Mexico—in fact, they’re both still in Mexico. They became authorities in their respective fields. Her name was [Uchmani] [Havah] Uchmani, who married a man named [Peña], had a daughter. And I met two of the most extraordinary people in that seminar who are now world renowned. One unfortunately has passed away. [Beatriz] [de la Fuente] later became head of the Institute of Aesthetics at the National University. She will be giving the evening lecture next month at this huge Olmec show in Washington, D.C. She has headed the sessions of the International Congress of the History of Art. So Beatrice and I go way back. We were students together and our paths have crossed many times professionally. So Beatrice has written books on Olmec art and architecture, on Maya materials along the same lines. Given my experience, once I came back to the U.S. I was able to introduce her to the U.S., and for the first time she was invited to give talks at one of these conferences back in 1972. By then I was at U.T. Austin [University of Texas, Austin—Ed.]. But, anyway, I’m getting ahead of the. . . .

PK: Let me just. . . . Before we leave it, we’ll go get a little lunch. Just a couple observations and a question, I guess. One, the "Jack" anecdote.

JQ: Oh, yes.

PK: Your name, it’s interesting to hear. . . .

JQ: It never appeared after I went to Mexico.

PK: But, for one thing, that was, of course, a standard American immigrant story—taking names that were too difficult and just changing them however one had to to match what then could be understood . . .

JQ: Yes.

PK: . . . as part of, well, the requirements, the immediate requirements of a kind of assimilation, functioning in an English-speaking country. So you went through that. But what interests me is that when the Chicano movement—and other movements as well, can politicize all of this identity and ethnicity and nationalism—that kind of an experience would be given a very negative cast, as if you were being oppressed, forced by the culture into, then, giving up something that was very important to you . . .

JQ: Yes.

PK: . . . and the way you describe this, that wasn’t, from your perspective, the case at all. It was a pragmatic _____.

JQ: Yes, I wasn’t ashamed of who I was. I simply got tired of having to explain to someone whose ear was not tuned into that kind of sound or those vowels, that just don’t exist in English. It’s bizarre that I finally ended up using Jack, because I could have used anything else, something that wasn’t quite as Anglo as that. Who ever heard of a Chicano named Jack? I mean, it’s just ridiculous. But it came from Tom Jackson who ribbed me about Ha-ha-cinto and then finally got tired of calling me Ha-ha-cinto and started calling me Jack-cinto. And he said, "I’m going to drop the "cinto." I’m going to call you Jack." And I sort of liked the sound of it and then I thought, "Well, all right." And then I actually began to sign the yearbooks that we all had every year, "Jack." I actually have some of them and I look at them and I blanche. "Oh, my God."

PK: The second observation. . . .

JQ: Oh, by the way, let me just mention one other thing. When I became a dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio where we now sit, in 1972, I had been teaching at U.T. Austin for six years, and I had begun to make a name for myself professionally, having published a number of things in pre-Columbian art and architecture, somewhere along the line—I believe it was in 1975 toward the end of my six-year tenure as a dean—one of my old classmates came through. He had gone into musicology and was teaching in the Pacific Northwest. He married an Asian woman, I believe. His name is [Robert—Ed.] Garfias. He later became a dean at Long Beach, I forget exactly where. But at that time—late ‘75 or ‘76—he came through the campus—it was just pure accident—and when he saw my name and then came up to me, I was standing around with my division directors—I am their boss, you see—music, art and architecture, and Garfias says, "Jack, how great to see you!" [laughs] And, of course, everybody looked around . . .

PK: Did you know _____ _____?

JQ: . . . "Where’s Jack?" [laughs]

PK: Did you respond to it? You knew. . . .

JQ: Of course, I just started laughing because that. . . . And, of course, even to this day one of my . . . when I told him the story, my boss, now he’s the head of the division where I am a professor, he often will rib me and say, "All right, Jack, you’d better get off your high pedestal." [laughter] So, anyway, that’s enough on the "Jack" part.

PK: Well, it does have. . . .

JQ: It’s very peculiar. In fact, I’m embarrassed by it now.

PK: I don’t know, that’s part of your American experience. But looking at the Mexican experience—and we will talk more, of course, a little bit about Caracas—but it seems to me from what you’ve said that you felt at that time that Mexico City was truly the great crossroads of the Americas . . .

JQ: Yes.

PK: . . . and that you actually had more opportunity there for interaction with interesting people from all over the world than perhaps anywhere in the U.S., with the possible exception of New York . . .

JQ: New York, yeah.

PK: . . . but that’s an interesting observation, because then you were. . . . We tend to be insular in our thinking, and hearing of that great urban center—cultural center—as just, well, it’s a little bit far south of us . . .

JQ: Exactly.

PK: . . . but not that far.

JQ: No.

PK: . . . and yet I think in most American’s thinking it just wasn’t a factor. We almost didn’t have any image of it. And I’m not sure that I did so much, until and Ann and I went, by the way, in about ‘65 or ‘66 . . .

JQ: Is that right?

PK: . . . for our first visit to Mexico City.

JQ: Yes.

PK: The only one until we returned . . .

JQ: Just recently. That’s amazing.

PK: . . . back in _____.

JQ: Oh. Well, it was a seminal experience for me, and it allowed me to know Mexico far beyond anything I ever expected, because we were able to study what we had in our classes directly. Every one of my professors had excursions on the weekends, so that we went to all the pre-Columbian sites within the region. And then if we had to go beyond, like Yucatan or Chiapas, we went on our own, which my wife and I did. Or Oaxaca. But in the immediate environs, we went to Teotihuacan, to Xochicalo, [Texcoco], [Tlatilco], [Azcapotzalco], [Tenayuca]—all of these places. And then the same with colonial. Now I had not thought anything about the colonial, but I was absolutely amazed at the materials. For the first year I went out every Saturday or Sunday morning with our professor. We would charter busses, and we would visit all the sixteenth-century churches, the seventeenth-century churches, the eighteenth-century churches. It was amazing to have this renowned authority guiding us through all this material, and then, of course, going through the classroom, with slides and lectures. So that was really truly extraordinary, because in the past I had works of art available at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, at the de Young [Museum—Ed.], and down at the San Francisco Museum of Art. But the collections, being certainly strong, are not world class. They were not world class at the time. It was fabulous when you compare it to other cities, but when you go to a place that’s as rich as Mexico and Mexico City with the rich. . . . At least the areas I was interested in—pre-Columbian art and colonial art, as it turned out. And then the murals—the Mexican murals. I knew about them, but. . . . And then when I was able to study with Justino Fernández, who knew. . . . He actually knew Orozco, he knew Rivera—he knew them all. He wrote about them. So it was the kind of intimacy that you just can’t get in library research. You obviously have to get them together.

In Mexico I did have a reverse problem of identity, because I was part of the American colony but at the same time within the Mexican community. First, because I was teaching at the American School. I was teaching all the children of all of the executives who have companies down there—American companies—and other Europeans, but mainly American. And then at Mexico City College the same thing with American college students from all over the U.S. But at the same time having Mexican friends, Mexican colleagues. So it’s a dual thing, and when I first registered at school, they included my mother’s name, and in Mexico—as is the case in all Spanish speaking countries, the first surname is your father’s name and the one at the end is your mother’s name. So I became Jacinto Quirarte Jiménez, which is my mother’s name. So when I first published things—and my dissertation is Jacinto Quirarte Jiménez—and these were cataloged at the University of Texas, Austin, for instance, and other places—I’m listed under Jiménez. Why? Because in the U.S., you take the one at the tail end of the name. So once I started publishing in the U.S. everything is under Quirarte, but there are some things that are under Jiménez because of that peculiarity—or what we would consider peculiar.

It’s at that time that I became very much interested in what I later called the confluence of cultures, and my teachers always talked of the [choque de culturas]—culture clash—and what they were referring to was the impact that the Spanish invasion had on the Mexican Indian. We had entire courses on how that affected the architecture, the painting, what it did to the Indians, how they reacted when they had to stand underneath a barrel vault. They thought the thing would come crashing down because they have no visible means of support. It was simply unknown architecturally. So I became fascinated with the outsider and the insider relationship in terms of culture and civilization. So the impact of the Spanish invasion—or what we refer to as a conquest, the Spanish Conquest—was really fascinating because I became aware for the first time that the Indians had had a terrible time dealing with a whole new system of pictorial conventions that differed from their own. And it’s just wonderful to see all those early images that are found in the manuscripts. So that was my introduction to that kind of material.

Then when I began to deal with the pre-Columbian, I saw that very similar things had happened. Because, after all, we tend to think of finite borders. People, of course, are supposed to be Czechs or Slovaks or Alsatians, or whatever you want to call them—Basques, Catalans, and so forth—but people have always moved around. They won’t stay put! And that was the same thing in Mexico. We don’t have a little reserve where we find Olmecs or [Totonacs] or Aztecs, Toltecs, Mayans. I soon found out that these people were always moving. So the Olmecs were found in the Gulf Coast and all of a sudden they show up in the Valley of Mexico three thousand years ago. Or the Mayans are in central Mexico, or the central Mexicans are in the highlands of Guatemala in the fifth century. So that these people go in—through one means or another, either through trade or conquest—end up imposing how they do things on the local people. And so this, in the art, is one of the most fascinating things that goes beyond influences. Because we tend to think of the generating center’s model for art, in the generation of art. We tend to think of Florence in the fifteenth century or Rome in the sixteenth, Paris in the nineteenth, and . . .

PK: New York.

JQ: . . . and New York since World War II, and that the further away you are from that center, the less faint [more faint - J.Q.] those signals will be, so that you get all the way over to the provinces and you just hear these faint echoes of the generating center of a style. Well, in this case you have two full-fledged styles coming in contact, and then what comes out of that, whether it’s imposed or of their own volition, you get some extraordinarily interesting results. And so that kind of thing, being a bilingual, bicultural person, brought me naturally into areas that were the result of similar confrontation or confluence, simply the coming together of two different ethnicities—two different art styles, for instance. And there are some significant dates in the history of pre-Columbian art where you find these very distinct art styles. The [Teotihuacanos], who established an empire thirty miles Northeast of Mexico City around the time of Christ, who built some amazing structures and paintings in their buildings, extended southward as far as Guatemala, so in the fifth century you find little Teotihuacan-type of structures in a place called [Kaminaljuyu], and then northward of there in a place called Tikal, which is one of the most famous Maya cities, you find these [Teotihuacanos]—or Mexicans as we call them in the field—in the fifth century. And then all of a sudden the Maya change because there are these people from outside, and all the art—the painting, the sculpture, and the architecture—have this influence, and then, within fifty years, they disappear. So we want to know why these people were there, and so we study the visual remains of this contact. There is the one that is. . . . And, of course, this has only been known in the last thirty years—the extent of it, after extensive excavations at Tikal. The Kaminaljuyu—or suburbs of Guatamala City—were known as a result of excavations in the 1940s. The one that’s been known from at least the time of the Conquest is when the Spaniards arrived in Yucatan and they found these Mexicans there—that is, Toltecs. They knew, because the Maya spoke of these Mexicans who had come in around five hundred years earlier. We call those Mexicans Toltecs. So we refer to them, particularly at Chichen Itza, as Maya-Toltec, because the two peoples come together. Now, the Spaniards were horrified at some of the things that they saw. Like there was a very strong phallic cult, where there were some really very interesting sculptures and this was. . . .

PK: This was Mayan? And Toltec? Or we don’t know?

JQ: Well, the Mexicans brought it in, the phallic cults. And the thing that’s interesting is that when the Spaniards as the conquerors were very disapproving—certainly the priests or friars—the Mayans, being human, would say, "It’s not us. It was not us. We did not do such horrid things. It was the Mexicans who came in five hundred years ago who did these things." And, of course, the Mexicans in turn had gotten it in [Tula] from people from the Gulf Coast. We do know that these things did develop in certain areas of Meso-America. So that’s an area where you find some fascinating things, and in 1975 a major Maya mural was found in a place called [Cacaxtla], which is just east of Mexico City, north of the city of Puebla, where you have a full-fledged Maya mural that just threw everything that we thought about ancient Mexico up in the air because the Mayans weren’t supposed to be there. And so you have a Maya style deep in Mexican territory around the eighth century A.D., so that we are constantly seeing these groups coming together and the creation of really interesting bodies of work that compare to the kinds of murals that were done right after the Conquest that are part Spanish and they’re part Indian. The Indian painters continue to make dragons, for instance—the so-called dragons—but instead of making them in the manner of the pre-Conquest configuration, they’re full of acanthus leaves.

PK: [chuckles]

JQ: Well, they could only know about acanthus leaves through these picture books that the Spaniards or the priests, friars, brought over. So these are the things that fascinate me. The Conquest itself includes borderlands people. The young woman who is infamous in Mexican history today, Malinche or Malintzin, who helped Cortéz find out what was going on, was herself a borderlands person. Because she had been sold—or however the story is told of how she ended up in that area—she was an Aztec-speaking person—or Nahuatl, which is the language they speak—into a borderlands that was not Mexican nor Mayan, where people spoke Mayan and Aztec—or Nahuatl or a Nahuatl-type language. When the Spaniards came through there, after having picked up a Spaniard who had been shipwrecked in 1511 and had lived among the Maya for six or seven years—learned Mayan-so with him on board and Malinche on board. . . .

PK: Malinche!

JQ: . . . Malinche . . . she would tell [Aguilar] what the Aztecs were saying in Nahuatl, and then he would translate it. . . . I’m sorry, she would tell him in Mayan—since she knew that language—and then Aguilar, who knew Mayan and Spanish, told Cortéz. Had it not been for those borderlands people—Malinche, in particular—the Conquest would not have taken place as it did. Or as effectively or as quickly.

PK: They didn’t feel any loyalty then to. . . .

JQ: Well, there was no such thing as Mexico. There were . . .

PK: These other _____.

JQ: . . . the Aztecs—or what we now call the Aztecs. They called themselves [Mechicas], from which we get [Mechico] or Mexico—or [Mejico, México] or Mexican. So it was these things that fascinated me, because I found a responsive chord in my experience, where all of these things began to come together, and so when we returned eight years later and I became aware of all those changes—and particularly the fact that artists of Mexican-American background were trying to find their roots in ancient Mexico and were calling themselves Chicanos—I thought, "Voila! It’s another borderlands group." They’re operating within an American context, trying to deal with their own experience, their own background, for whatever reasons. And, of course, we know that it was the result of the turmoil of the sixties with the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women’s movement, the Native American movement, and, of course, the Chicano movement. All of these groups that were aiming to get their share of the economic, educational, political pie in the U.S. Power. So it just seemed a natural to me. And so that was my interest in that. First, they kept using pre-Columbian, they kept using pre-Columbian language things, they were referring to Aztlán. I said, "Well, who are these guys? What are they doing? What is this?" So I began to look around and interview people, and I wrote my first paper on that. And that led to the first book on Mexican-American and Chicano art, published in 1973 [________—Ed.].

PK: And that is perfect, because we’ll break here and then come back to this second part of a story that seems absolutely logical and seamless—you know, how you got from pre-Columbian to all the work that you’ve done on the Chicano artists.

JQ: And, of course, because I was fascinated with pre-Columbian, I just continued with that.

[Break in taping]

PK: Continuing the interview with Jacinto Quirarte, this is Tape 3, Side A, and we’re still on August 15, 1996, continuing with this first session. Jacinto, we broke for lunch at what seemed to me the perfect point, the perfect point, because we’ve been talking about your personal background, family background, educational experience, then going on in your early work in the field of pre-Columbian art, some of your teaching experience, but basically we have you still out of the country during that period of time, which you seem to think was probably crucial to your later work—that it gave a kind of experiential perspective that you brought to bear on the situation in the United States when you returned. And I think the one thing . . . we talked about Mexico quite a bit but we didn’t really do much with your time in Caracas. So maybe we can start there.

JQ: Yes. As I mentioned before, I accepted a position with the Foreign Service in the summer of 1964, soon after my graduation from my doctoral orals, and then spent a few months in Washington going through orientation, basically learning how to deal with the problems that arise from living overseas. The experience was good in just the fact that we were able to get back to the U.S. to get a sense of what was going on and have first-hand experience to see the kinds of racial tensions that had been developing. In Washington, D.C., there was an absolutely enormous black population. We prepared ourselves for our departure for Caracas. We were in that country in October of that year, and we spent the following two years carrying out the contract that I had signed for two years. It was under the Cultural Affairs Office, and my job was to deal with the Venezuelan art community, so I began to establish liaison with artists, with museums, and other individuals involved in the arts. So this was perfect for the kind of thing that I was interested in.

And while there I met one of the leading architectural historians [________—Ed.], who was very much interested in pre-Columbian art, and he introduced me. . . . Or I should say he invited me to give lectures at the National University in Caracas on pre-Columbian art and architecture.

At the same time, I was acquainting myself with the local art scene, meeting the leading artists, many of whom had studied in Paris, were known on the continent, were known nationally as well as throughout Latin America, and subsequently would be known in the U.S. as well. Among them was a man named Alejandro [Otero], who was part of what we called in the 1960s the Op Art movement. But given his experience as a Venezuelan and interest in the work of [________—Ed.] [Vasarelli], he and Jesus Soto, who is also a widely known artist in that area, along with another Venezuelan named Cruz-Diez—all of whom resided in Venezuela—that I was introduced to yet another aspect of Latin America, and I found that they were fascinated with someone from Mexico because they didn’t know any Mexicans. It’s hard to believe that you [don’t, know we] have thousands upon thousands and millions of Mexicans in the Midwest and the West Coast, the South, even in New York, and of course Mexico, but there weren’t any in Venezuela, and they only knew about Mexicans through film. So it was truly a novel experience for them to hear someone speak Spanish with a Mexican accent. This became a wonderful experience, because it gave me an insight into the multi-faceted art and cultures of Latin America. And Caracas being a very wealthy city, attracted—perhaps even more than Mexico—numerous artists from all over South America, as well as Europe, because there were always political upheavals in all these Latin American countries, and every time there was a revolution or a coup, artists would come in by droves to Venezuela.

Among the things that I did was to organize a Pop Art show in the Spring of 1965, and for that exhibition we brought works down by the leading pop artists—[Andy—Ed.] Warhol, [Tom] [Wesselman], [Roy] Lichtenstein, [Claes] Oldenberg—although he didn’t identify himself as an [Op, Pop] Artist. It was comprised of all of the leading figures, and we were able to get money from Phillip Morris International. I shouldn’t mention the name, but in Latin America they’re known as [Tabacalaira Nacional]. Which simply allowed us to bring Roy in, and he spent a week and I did simultaneous translations for him on television and in public meetings. We had people coming in from as far away as Bogota, Colombia—which is really next door—just to meet Roy Lichtenstein and to listen to him talk. So this was a wonderful experience for me as well as for Roy Lichtenstein, because for the first time I saw politics in the art area, because whenever anyone got up to ask a question it would turn into a speech. And when I tried to wade through all of the political statements I would only concentrate on the question and would translate that for Roy, and as soon as I did that everyone started screaming that I wasn’t translating. Many of them, of course, knew English, and Roy was very excited because he had never seen anyone get so worked up over art. Certainly not in the U.S. We were so blasé that it didn’t matter what artists did. And certainly that’s when Claes Oldenberg was doing his storefront pieces and using the garish pigments on plaster works. There were the funk artists of the Bay area, there was [Alan—Ed.] Kaprow with his happenings. There were just a lot of things that were going on that the American public really didn’t get exercised about. But in Latin America, art is a very serious business, and it is part and parcel of what it means to be a human being. And if they felt that art was not addressing the problems of life they were offended by it. So that was an experience that even living in Mexico had not provided for me, because I wasn’t in that kind of public forum that my work for the American Embassy gave me.

But the part that became particularly pivotal in my career was my involvement with George Kubler, who, of course, was known hemispheric-wide as well as in Europe. Finding out through my new friend, [Gasparini]—[Graziano] Gasparini, who was an architect/historian, that Kubler would be coming through town, I said, "Well, we need to host him." I got some money to have him stay over, and, of course, the Venezuelans were wonderfully impressed with that. And we asked him to give a lecture. Gasparini hosted him in a wonderful gathering of intellectuals in Caracas, and Kubler sat next to my wife and began to ask her what in the world we were doing in Caracas. Because he knew me through my work as a pre-Columbian student working on my doctorate and, of course, I had gotten the degree. And Sara said, "Well, Jacinto did finish his dissertation." Of course, George knew because I had sent him a copy of the dissertation and he had been very much impressed with it. And, as the conversation progressed, he wanted to know why in the world we didn’t come back. And my wife said that it’d be wonderful if we could come back but there was no position. Thereupon, Kubler said, "Well, why doesn’t he come up to take my classes? I will be on leave for the next academic year of 1966-67." And my wife got me my first teaching job, because I would never have ever talked myself up to Kubler in the way my wife did. We were certainly very excited, but I didn’t really think much about it. I thought that he was being very nice, and within the next week after he had gone on to Peru and then returned to New Haven, he wrote to me with the contract—for a one-year contract. And, needless to say, I was really on my way because the leading figure in pre-Columbian studies had anointed me.

The last year we were there was truly exciting, in just working in preparation to return. And there was one other thing that had happened. At that time, in ‘64-’65, Yale University and the University of Texas in concert helped or financed a truly ground-breaking exhibition of Latin American art called Art of Latin America Since Independence. So this was the first truly important hemispheric-wide-focus exhibition put on in the U.S., with scholars from all over Latin America and Yale and Texas. And the two people involved were John Goodall, who was the chairman of the art department at U.T. Austin, and Todd Catlin, who was an old, old hand in Latin American studies or twentieth-century Latin American art studies at Syracuse. They had a number of conferences, etc., and when Goodall came through town I met him. I took him around to meet all the Latin American artists. So he was favorably impressed, but I had no idea that our paths would cross again. So when he found out that I was going to be a visiting professor at Yale he invited me and my wife to go through Austin on our way back through the States, where they’d hold a barbecue for us and put us up at a hotel and host us and hoped that we would like Austin and so forth. So we did, and my wife and I had an absolutely wonderful time because they put us up in the suite where we were jumping up and down in bed because it was so huge—it was Texas-size—that we were just jumping around with glee.

And so it was the beginning of a totally new experience. We went on to New Haven, and one of the first things we found [was—Ed.] that [Kubler], like a proud parent, had been talking about me to his colleagues, and since he was already in his fifties at the time, the younger faculty members were acting in a way that our children will act in a tolerant way. "We got so tired of Kubler walking around with that huge thesis or dissertation under his arm constantly saying, ‘Now this is a dissertation’’" that I thought, "Well, I’m home. I mean, this is wonderful that someone would think that highly of my work." And we made wonderful friends with Bob Herbert, who is a leading figure in nineteenth-century French art, Jules [Prown], the Americanist, and, of course, Kubler, who is a leading figure in these areas.

PK: So he was around; he was just on sabbatical not teaching?

JQ: He went to teach a number of seminars at Harvard, and I know he was up there for a semester. I don’t know if he was there for a year. I was able to use his office, where all his files. . . . It was amazing. It was an amazing experience. So I felt that if I could teach in one of the preeminent universities in the United States, I could do anything. And so that was the kind of confidence-building experience that I needed. "If they can do it, I can do it."

So I started publishing from then on. I began to do that very seriously. I had already published a ninety-page text on the art and architecture of two major Maya cities and several other smaller papers and . . . one other thing. I forget. But, anyway, those are the first things that I published. Important things, serious things that I feel very pleased about. And once there, with that experience of being back in the U.S. and, as I mentioned in other conversations, constantly being complimented on my English and, after explaining that I was from California, New Englanders just simply ignored that and continued to do so, so then I stopped explaining.

While on one of Goodall’s many trips, he called me from New York, asked me if I was interested in coming to Texas, and I said, "Well, certainly we would consider that," and asked me what Yale was paying me and said, "Well, we’ll pay you two G’s more." And at that time two G’s [two grand, $2,000—Ed.] was a lot of money, so I said, "Yes, I’ll come down."

I had failed to indicate that on our way to New Haven one of Kubler’s best students, who was the only other pre-Columbianist at Tulane [University—Ed.] and whom I had met in the early sixties in Mexico City and who wrote the seminal work on Mexican manuscript painting, named Donald Robertson, had invited me to be chair at Tulane University, and I had stayed there for about a week on our way to New Haven interviewing with all of the faculty—I think there were about ten or twelve faculty members—and found after that experience that the last thing I needed that early in my career was to be a chairman. I was not experienced enough. I’d been gone too long. The last thing I needed was to get involved with that, so that when the Texas thing came through obviously I was more attracted to that.

So when I got to Austin I began to seriously get involved in my career as a pre-Columbianist, but it really wasn’t too long after that that I realized that something else was going on in the country. And I began to get soundings on this Chicano movement, and I began to hear that there were artists who were talking about Chicano art. Well, I didn’t know that any such thing existed. In fact, I’d never even heard of it. And, as it turned out, just about everyone else in the country had no knowledge of it. And as it turned out, another American corporation came into my life just as Phillip Morris International had helped finance the Pop Art show in Caracas, Humble Oil Company—which has since become Exxon—in Houston wanted to include an article on Mexican-American art. They had just. . . .

PK: What year was this now?

JQ: ‘67 or ‘68. I don’t remember exactly. I would have to look at my records.

PK: Because you started in sixty. . . . You started at University. . . .

JQ: Let’s see, I was at Yale in the fall of ‘66 through the spring of ‘67. So it was mainly the spring of ‘67. Then I got to Austin in summer of ‘67. So I had to have been there about a year. So it would have been about ‘68. A man who edited The Humble Way had had someone do an article on African-American art, which was called. . . . Not African-American. "Black art." Or "Black Artists." Or something like that. And so he wanted. . . . I’m sure that if he hadn’t done one on Native American artists he probably would do one, and so he thought, "Well, we’re going to have to have a Mexican-American artist," so it was obviously was a public relations thing. It would give them a good public image and it would be doing a good service to that community that [they] certainly should serve.

So it came, as a result of that assignment, that I began to look into it, and I wrote an article called "The Art of Mexican America," that appeared in a great number of Sunday supplements all over the Southwest. I began to get copies of Sunday supplements in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, all over Texas, and other parts of the country. So it received very wide dissemination. And shortly after that the University of Texas Press asked me if I was interested in doing a book on Mexican-American artists. I don’t remember the details, but Humble Oil may have been instrumental in that as well, because it had been so well received that they assisted in providing a subvention to defray part of the cost of publication.

So through that grant or contract I felt, "Well, maybe this is worth looking into." But if I had not had an interest in what I talked about before—the fact that they were using pre-Columbian references, that they were making references to the Mexican muralists, they were referring to the Aztecs. . . . I thought, "Well, I want to look at this." Which I did. I began to compile lists of artists. And it turned out that LBJ [President Lyndon Baines Johnson—Ed.], before he left office had asked his people to compile a list of artists. I may be simplifying here but I know it was LBJ’s administration that was interested in putting together an exhibition of art that would go from one end of the U.S./Mexico border to the other—from Brownsville to San Diego, let’s say. And they had done a preliminary list. So some unnamed bureaucrats in Washington—in goodness knows what agency—had compiled a list of about a hundred people, which I then was able to obtain as a start-up. And then I began to contact all of the museums, university departments, and galleries in the Southwest and other parts of the U.S. to ask them if they had works of art by Mexican-American artists—or Chicano artists. And I invariably received exactly the same answer. "There is no such thing. No, we don’t have any such thing. There is no Mexican-American art, there is no Chicano art, there are no Chicano artists." And along the way I received lots of interesting replies. People would send me works by non-Mexican-American artists, but the subjects were Mexican-American, and so I would have to write and say, "Well, the fact that Peter Paul Rubens did some drawings of Africans is not African art. He was Flemish, and I don’t need to go further. It has to be an artist of Mexican-American descent or background."

And so I wrote to all the artists and finally brought the list down to a manageable size, and in the interim I had obtained some grants from the Latin American Study Center at the University of Texas, Austin, to provide me with travel money. So in the summer of 1970 my wife and I traveled from one end of the Southwest to the other, through the Pacific Coast, and then up to New York where I interviewed artists. And so I had lengthy interviews with many of the artists that I later would include in a book that was published in 1973. So that was the beginning of my interest, but always parallel interest in pre-Columbian art as well as Mexican art.

PK: Now this project of the quest—the detective work tracking down these artists and interviewing them and so forth, which I hope you’ll describe i