Oral History interview with Carlos Villa, 1995 June 20-1995 July 10

Oral History Interview With
Carlos Villa
In San Francisco, California
June 20 & 21, July 3 & 10, 1995
Interviewer: Paul J. Karlstrom

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Carlos Villa on June 20, 21 & July 30, 1995. The interview took place in San Francisco, California, and was conducted by Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

CV: Carlo Villa
PK: Paul Karlstrom

[Session 1]

PK: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. An interview with artist Carlos Villa on June 20, 1995. Carlos is a San Francisco artist, but this interview is being conducted at the interviewer’s home in San Francisco, 73 Carmelita Street. The interviewer for the Archives is Paul Karlstrom, and this is Session one, tape one, side A.

So, Carlos, with that introduction out of the way we can proceed, and I think I’ll start out by saying a couple things by way of introduction. This is an interview that I feel has been long postponed, and it’s certainly time to do it. I also should say that you showed up here at my office this morning without planning to do this, so we just decided to grasp the moment—or the opportunity—and begin, which I think is perfectly fine, and I’m grateful to have this opportunity.

We were talking earlier about a couple of projects that are under way, one of them being this Asian American art-history symposium that’s coming up in the fall and you’re going to participate on that. But, in a sense, more important, I think—related but more important—is this project that you’ve been working on, which I gather is wrapping up and has to do with, in effect, retrieving Filipino-American art history here, specifically, in the Bay area. This is something that I think then we’ll come back to later on in the interview, but that gives a kind of focus to how our conversation began.

You were telling me about a change for you in your experience as an artist that in a way shifted, I think, your priorities, is the way I understood it, and what you felt really was important and ultimately led to this kind of involvement with these special projects trying to understand, to preserve a culture, to retrieve it, and with that long introduction I’m wondering if you could kind of pick up at that point again, by way of a prelude to this interview.

CV: Well, thank you very much. It gives me a lot more things to think about in terms of how this could go. I could go on by continuing our conversation this morning in the sense that how my life had changed in terms of being an artist first off. I’ve been an artist who’s been exhibiting art professionally since 1958. And I’ve exhibited with some of whom I felt were artists of the California School of Fine Arts’ golden age. I was classmates with Bill Wiley, Bill Allan, Joan Brown, Manuel Neri. I had teachers such as [Richard—Ed.] Diebenkorn, [Elmer—Ed.] Bischoff, Ralph DuCasse, Dorr Bothwell, Walt Kuhlman. I mean, on and on. Bill Morehouse. I had the best of the best that the region had to offer, and I was pretty much a mainstream artist. And so my life had gone on, I guess by anyone’s standards really quite well. I’d gone to New York, I exhibited in many great galleries there. My first one-person show was at Poindexter Gallery in New York in the early sixties, and I was at Nancy Hoffman’s gallery. There were a whole lot of things that were really very, very good at that time, which made me think that I was fairly successful, you know, like in mainstream. I had friends. . . . When I came back I met up with a lot of friends who were Chicano. Now there’s a difference between Chicano and Mexican-American. Chicano happens to be a preferred politicized statement by a Mexican-American that, "Hey, I’m taking my heritage by my hand, and I’m going to call myself what you termed Chicano, a bad term, and I’m going to make it good. And I’m going to recuperate this. And I learned that word recuperation from El Movimiento. Artists such as René Yañez, artists such as Rupert Garcia, and Amalia Mesa-Baines. I didn’t know Amalia then, but then there were many artists in the barrio at the time that allowed me to think along these lines. Okay, I’d gone through the methodology, all the methodologies and strategies that I was oriented to by dint of my education, MFA at Mills College, and my experience at Art Institute, and being a professional artist outside—showing and hitting on collectors and the whole shot. I was talking with René Yañez and I was wondering about his gallery and what he was going to do, because I saw like, well, okay, "Gallery, gallery. This might be a good opportunity for me." The more that he talked about it the more inextricable the idea of artists and their function and their role with their community in non-art terms became just as important as the art that they produced. That making a political poster was just as valid as doing a copy of a drawing by Velasquez. Or something like that.

PK: So this would be, in that case, with the example of Rupert Garcia, his very powerful posters. Was he doing them about that time?

CV: He had just started getting into them. He was doing a lot of writing. He was incredibly active. He was an educator, a street scholar. When I say street-scholar, he was gathering all these wonderful kinds of snippets of information that weren’t really fully . . . that weren’t completely fully blown, and by conversations with other scholars at the time, like Tomas Ybarra-Frausto and people like that, able to put together this Chicano history. And so Rupert was very involved. He was doing silkscreens, mostly. He wasn’t doing as many paintings as. . . . He was doing drawings. He was doing a lot of writing. And at the time it was very, very interesting. He was together with Amalia and a number of other artists looking into the aspect of Frida Kahlo and talking. . . . And I kind of knew who Frida Kahlo was because we have a great big mural by Diego Rivera, of course, at the [San Francisco—Ed.] Art Institute. So I know a little bit about Frida Kahlo and I know a little bit about that, but then the thing is is that all of a sudden they were sharing this history. They were sharing this [artist’s, artists’] strategy and methodology of what Diego was about and what Frida was doing. There were a lot of artists that were in the barrio doing these incredible murals, like [Michael—Ed.] Rios and Patricia Rodriquez, etc. They were doing all these incredible murals, and they couldn’t wait to go down there to do these things. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t want to see somebody like [Helen—Ed.] Frankenthaler as opposed to seeing somebody like Michael [Steiner—Ed.] doing his take on somebody like Diego or Orozco. And I was just wondering about that. But then I’d go down and I’d see the power and the passion of what this work was about. I didn’t necessarily particularly love overt imagery such as that, but the thing is, though, is that everyone on the street knew what that was. That aspect I really liked, and it really hit home. Because my mother didn’t know abstract art. Neither did most of the people on the street know what abstract art was. But you go down to the barrio, and certainly they might not know who the artist is but they know. They know because they’re sharing some part of history that’s depicted on some of these murals.

PK: What year was this?

CV: Seventies. Seventies, anywhere from about ‘74, ‘75. And murals were just going up everywhere. I mean, it was amazing. There were symbols from Aztec cultures coming out, and there were low-rider cars in some of the murals. There was this instant of history where it was present, past, and, because of the discourse of the images, it maybe talked about the future.

PK: So this was the moment that you point to as representing for you a new awareness. You developed a new awareness and really shifted in some ways your thinking in terms of what was important.

CV: Well, I. . . .

PK: Is that right or is that overstating it?

CV: It might be a little overstated, because still, you know, like I was very much into wanting to show in New York. And indeed I had shows there, and I was showing my own kind of work, which was trying to look at old cultures—old traditional cultures—African cultures, Polynesian cultures, cultures that were around the Philippines that weren’t trashed or colonized.

PK: Well, so these issues were already of interest to you at this time.

CV: Oh, yes.

PK: So this wasn’t brand new. It wasn’t as if you had an epiphany.

CV: Well, what it represented to me was that I wasn’t alone. See, I mean, I was working pretty much in my own vacuum through my own questioning. Because I [had] remembered when I was a student, I remember asking Walt Kuhlman about Filipino art history and he said there is no Filipino art history. And, lo and behold, I go up to the library and, of course, there wasn’t any. I don’t say "of course," but there wasn’t any, and so there was nothing I . . . there was no bottom. But when I came back from New York after having been a minimalist in New York, I started asking some questions because I just didn’t like solving aesthetics viz a viz a community. I mean, I didn’t want to just. . . . What I meant by that is that sitting down at a table and talking about Don Judd or [Dan—Ed.] Flavin or what kind of light bulbs Flavin used on his piece at [Maxis] Kansas City, etc. I mean, after a while, what did it add up to? And I just started realizing that my art was going further and further away from me and becoming more and more something else. I had no attachment to it. Which made me start realizing that I would have to develop something like that.

And so when I came back to San Francisco I got a job through the Art Institute being an artist in residence down at Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center which a lot of young black and Asian kids would use as sort of a clubhouse, and I was supposed to be their artist in residence there. And there was just something that really connected with me because I saw these young guys asserting themselves with their. . . . You know, the black kids with their afros and dashikis and like that, and then to these Chinese kids who had completely their own style, their own hairdo, their own style of cars. And I saw how important that was. Somehow it kind of hit. The idea of a self-affirmation, this idea of their rasquache.

PK: Rasquache?

CV: Yeah, rasquache is a [calo, callo] term; it’s a Chicano term. Rasquache is. . . . For instance, if I were Chicano, if I were Mexican and all I had was. . . . And, you know, like we had less than two or three thousand dollars a year to buy clothes with and food with and everything else like that. And to be able to take a T-shirt that my father bought for me and to be able to bleach it snow-white, whiter than white, and to be able to put creases on the shoulders and for it to have the right folds, right on the cuff, and to be able to, you know, look in the mirror and say, "Hey, man, this is me." You know, you’d go out with this T-shirt and this T-shirt would be. . . . You know, that would be the thing.

PK: And that’s rasquache?

CV: Well, that’s a form.

PK: How do you spell that?

CV: R-a-s-q-u-a-c-h-e.

PK: Okay.

CV: Like rasquache in the most grandest sense would be. . . . In an African-American culture, jazz would be ultimate rasquache. Being able to take shards of musical culture and noises and to be able to put them together in their own way.

PK: Um hmm.

CV: Rasquache, for instance, would be the low-rider culture, you know, going over to Safeway and then seeing all of those magazines and seeing all of these cars. All of which are about. . . . You know, they’re 1950 and 1940 and 1960 cars. . . . Able to make these old cars something of theirs.

PK: Yeah, something of theirs.

CV: Something of theirs. And making it maybe even greater than maybe what it was.

PK: So, to transform the cars and, by so doing, to transform yourself.

CV: Exactly. Rasquache.

PK: Rasquache. Got it! So you, then, became familiar or began to appreciate in a new way this concept through working at the Telegraph Hill. . . .

CV: Yeah, down at Telegraph Hill. Well, it all came home to me. See, it all came home. All of a sudden there were things that I was picking up, and there were things that were making more and more sense. I didn’t quite put it together as a methodology for art, per se, but as expression, yes. But as art, I’d have to wait many more years for me to develop a mind-set that would include these methodologies as alternative to those that I’d grown up with. Does that make any sense?

PK: Yeah, it does. You said when we were talking earlier that—and you were very direct, I think—early on in our conversation you said that all this business somehow had something to do with your heart—you know, what was in your heart, and that struck me as interesting, because that’s in some ways a different level of experience than a sort of calculated strategy or methodology.

CV: Yeah, well, you know, like we’ve seen artists in the seventies and we’ve seen artists in the late sixties, and we’ve seen this kind of networking and hitting up on people in galleries, you know, for shows, for this, for that. "How can you use me because I want to certainly use you" kind of thing. Which is okay. Hey, that’s the way business is conducted. But at the same time there was just something about the coin that wasn’t ringing true. And the idea of El Movimiento and the barrio and the artists in the barrio and what their connection with the barrio was as opposed to my unconnectedness, or my trying to be connected to my mainstream present, wasn’t doing. And there was just something that was wrong.

So back in the sixties I started with my own art. I started trying to recuperate some of things. And not to do a Filipino art but to do an art of my own. To do a visual kind of excavation of things to bring me closer to my own root—whatever that root was, being Filipino-American. So after a while I started seeing the dearth of art history, the very little mention of social history and concern with Filipino-Americans. Asian-American history, which was amazing, because there were so many instances in that history that I’m now gathering that a lot of us share, and it’s all about self-loathing. A lot of self-loathing there. Hating, just hating yourself. Just really hating yourself. And so it’s taken a long time for myself to even admit that. And, for instance, you know, like I started making a lot of money working with bronze. . . .

PK: Um hmm. That wasn’t all that long ago.

CV: Yeah, it wasn’t.

PK: I mean, I went over to the foundry and saw some castings, what, like six years ago?

CV: Yeah. Eight, nine years ago I was doing that stuff. And it was making dough. But that wasn’t it.

PK: So that was like a relapse you had.

CV: It was a relapse, yes. I thought that, "Well, like, okay, that window is open, that window is closed now. Now it’s time for me to go on with my career." But as I kind of went around the cycle again, it just occurred to me that, being who I am, without that going into the foundry kind of business and recuperating on all of these different levels. To be able to start symposia and do all of these kinds of things. So I went from the idea of artist as being a competitor to artists with the idea of cooperation. And to be able to do community actions was of just as much importance to me as having a group or a one-person show downtown.

PK: Is it going too far to say that that. in effect, then, became your art expression?

CV: No! Not at all. Of course! I think, yes. I think that. . . . Okay, then, we can talk about Joseph Beuys, and if you want to think about mainstream history and what he had done with the Greens party. And he did countless pieces that had to do with—you know, performance pieces—that had to do with the community. Okay, then taking that, going to the other end of it, I saw no difference with a lot of artists that were working in El Movimiento. Except they didn’t take it to a performance. They didn’t think of a performance aspect as much as that they were thinking of a more active aspect of being part of the community.

PK: Well, you mean, activist in a political sense?

CV: Political. You know, if they took out the word "racist" or even the word "political," you know, in terms of adjectives that we use, we’d really get down to some real humanism.

PK: You think these are off-putting terms that it’s hard to get beyond?

CV: It’s just like saying "politically correct."

PK: Um hmm.

CV: Now whose terminology is that?

PK: And what does it mean?

CV: And what does it mean after a while? It’s an "in" coin.

PK: But your history, your progress, which we will have the pleasure of, in a more leisurely fashion, pursuing. . . . But, you know, this broad outline that you’ve given, it is a kind of progress of self-discovery and then determining what does that mean, in respect to your art. How do you employ your art to keep it honest in connection with yourself within a certain world? Is that, roughly speaking, the progress that you’ve seen?

CV: Yes, I’ve extended the mind-set and the physical being of my studio. I could be at a Xerox machine, you know, as much as I could be at my drawing table. I could be on the phone. You know, there are just so many ways that an artist could be as viable. And after a while you start asking the questions of yourself about your art, you know, like, "Who’s it for?" "What’s it for?" And you start thinking about the idea that you can do actions as well as objects that would have as much meaning, being an artist. Like, for instance, I just got a book published, and the book is not because I’m a great author. It’s probably the best [commodification] of an object as a sculptor that I could imagine. You know, I put some people together and these people did active, incredible discourse that just numbed me.

PK: Mention the name of the title of the book.

CV: Worlds in Collision.

PK: And its publication date, is it just this year?

CV: Just this year.

PK: ’95.

CV: Just this year.

PK: Based on a series of symposia, right?

CV: Four multicultural symposia that [gainseed, gained seed (perhaps means gainsaid?—Ed.)] from 1988, and there were four symposia held at the San Francisco Art Institute, and there was one symposium that dealt with art education. There was one that dealt with . . . that was basically a call to arms in which we started questioning and kind of delineating an agenda for artists of color.

But, talking about artists of color, you know, like I invited all colors. [laughs] Bill Berkson was in that one. So was Mark Van Proyen. So, you know, like everyone is of color.

The second one was "Sources of a Distinct Majority," which delved into communities and methodologies used by communities and different groups of artists. And then a contextual symposium where we tried to put it together and ask ourselves the questions—challenging institutions as to what the rule in the new world was.

[Break in taping]

PK: Carlos Villa, continuing session one, tape one, side B. Carlos, you were just about finished, I think, describing this book project, your book that just came out and had these different sort of aspects to it, and it seemed to me that it was being described as, well, at least two things—one of them being representing where this progress, your progress, led you. And it also, if I understood you correctly, sort of expanding awareness on your part, that this kind of activity isn’t separate or other than art. For you, in your creative life, this is very much connected to your art. Is that true?

CV: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. That even as I hustle foundations, it’s the same thing as hustling a collector. I mean, there’s no difference except one is a lot larger. The thing is, though, is it that one thing that’s been very, very important for me in all of this is that I’m not doing it for myself. I’m doing it with people and I’m doing it with the idea of not just putting, quote unquote, "my name" out there, but then, you know, putting my heart out there. And it just makes much better sense. Now, I’m not saying . . . I’m not denigrating where I came from, you know. I mean I’m going to be having a show at Bomani Gallery with a good friend of mine, Keith Morrison, you know, coming. . . .

PK: Oh, I know Keith.

CV: Yeah. And I’m also going to be having a show at San Francisco State. So it isn’t about letting one go,but maybe what I’m trying to do for myself is to allow the idea that artists need to set their own paradigm, as opposed to doing the old ["okey-doke"] at art school. You know, "Look at this monograph and be like this guy." There hasn’t been enough monographs for women; there haven’t been enough monographs for artists of color either.

PK: So you create your own model?

CV: You have to.

PK: And probably the best way to start is to do a little, as you say, excavation. Dig into the history that hasn’t yet really been brought to the foreground.

CV: Absolutely. I think in your own community, whatever that community is. A couple of years ago I wouldn’t have known or even considered. . . . I teach art history now, too.

CV: Oh, do you?

PK: Yeah, I teach . . .

CV: At the Art Institute?

PK: Yeah, I teach a class called Worlds in Collision, in which I’m dealing with community social histories as inextricable to visual expression. And we talk about visual expression as inspiration for other kinds of things, either art in the community or expression within the community. Or to even think about artists going outside of the community and showing their art. I’m seeing a lot that now particularly with Asian and Chicano artists. There’s certainly a lot of Native American artists that are doing it, too. So, it’s like there’s this tightwire that we’re all on, and I’m glad to be part of it.

CV: I think that this is a good point to now move back in time, because this is your life, as they said on the TV show. . . .

PK: Oh, Ralph Edwards. [both laugh]

CV: This is your story, and I think it’s most useful to start out by having an idea of where you’ve come from and where it led. But what I’m going to do is just pause a moment here, and then we can start up with some of your family background.

CV: Sure.

[Interruption in taping]

PK: All right, well after that brief break we now can climb into our time machine and go back.

CV: Okay

PK: I would like this part to be pretty straight biographical—you know, really for the record. Where you were born, something about your folks, about your background and early family experiences.

CV: Sure. Okay, I was born here in San Francisco, December 11, 1936. Spent most of my life before twelve years old at an apartment house in the basement on . . . let me see, between Polk and Larkin on Geary. The Market Apartments. It’s still there. And we lived in the basement. And I went. . . . Let me see, I grew up there in the Tenderloin. I had a lot of dealings with our own family group, which was in the Fillmore District. I attended parochial schools until I went to Lowell High School. Graduated from Lowell. Went into the army. Came out of the army and through the GI Bill I went to California School of Fine Arts.

PK: Was that your first college-level experience? I mean, you went directly from high school into the army?

CV: I went to City College, but I hated it. You know, I mean, everybody. . . . It just seemed that there were all these Korean veterans there at the time, and it was like a party school. And I couldn’t get a job and I couldn’t. . . . You know, there was just [somewhere] that I needed that City College wasn’t it. And I took art classes and I hated the way that I was being taught art.

PK: This was after the war. I mean, after your service?

CV: No, this was after high school.

PK: Okay, directly from high school to the City. . . ?

CV: Yeah, directly from high school. And so I left and I came back and I started really connecting with my cousin Leo. Leo was always my hero.

PK: That’s Leo Valledor?

CV: Yeah. He was always my hero.

PK: He grew up here as well?

CV: Yes. He and I were very, very close. Matter of fact, his drawing was the first drawing that I had ever seen. And I thought that magic was performed in front of me. I mean, he drew this little farmhouse scene and I was just completely transfixed. And then I just started drawing. But I would never tell anybody about it. I would just draw and just throw it away after I’d finished it. And I never really took that side of me very, very seriously. And I remember coming from. . . .

And I took a couple of classes at Lowell High School. You know, crafts classes and poster classes but not art classes.

PK: Did they have much of that at Lowell at that time?

CV: They did. They had. . . .

PK: They had a good art program?

CV: Well, I was in no way to judge how good it was or how bad it was. It was a two-man . . . a two-person art department, and there was sketching and throwing an occasional pot and carving into a little bit of plaster. But everything else had to come, necessarily, from whoever the student was. So it was not a big deal.

PK: Were there any other sort of—what shall we say?—proto-artists there? Do you remember anybody else that went on in the arts? Or at least in the visual arts. Here we’re talking about painting and sculpture.

CV: I only knew Leo.

PK: Now, but wasn’t he a little older than you?

CV: He was one year older than me.

PK: Just one year? So you were. . . .

CV: But he was genius.

PK: Was he at Lowell as well?

CV: No, no. He was at Commerce High School and he went to Galileo when Commerce High School closed. But he was genius. I mean, he didn’t have. . . . His father ran away from him when he was twelve, because he ran off with somebody’s wife. His mother died at twelve years old. You know, he was pretty much by himself. And yet, at about sixteen and seventeen years old, he was doing these paintings in his house that were ten- by ten-foot abstract paintings.

PK: Really?

CV: They were shown. . . .

PK: Where did he get that, do you suppose?

CV: Well, he showed them at the Dilexi Gallery. He was at California School of Fine Arts for one year at [Famous Studio 15, famous Studio 15] with Wally Hedrick and Joan and Bill Brown and Manuel [Neri—Ed.] and all of these people. And they said, "Ah, you ought to get out of school." So Leo quit school after the first year. And he had a show next year at the Dilexi Gallery . . . or a couple of years later at the Dilexi.

PK: About what? Like ‘58 or ‘59?

CV: Ah, something like that. And huge paintings. And I just said, "Shit! What is this?" I mean, I didn’t understand what the hell that was, but I sure did like going into his studio smelling oil paint and turpentine. I mean, it’s another world.

PK: It’s a longtime aphrodisiac [sort of, for, according to] people They describe that in a sensual, sort of thrilling way, don’t they?

CV: Oh, God, well it is an aphrodisiac. And unfortunately now it’s against the toxic whatever, you know, and you can’t do that anymore. But, you know, I remember going in there and seeing these paintings and I was just completely thrilled. And when I came back from the army I had lessons. I took lessons from Leo. I was paying him for lessons You know, drawing. Drawing from actual things. And he encouraged me to go to art school, so I took my GI Bill and I went to California School of Fine Arts in ‘58.

PK: If we may, that’s a good sort of resting point in terms of your eventual career as an artist. And I’m very interested to hear about Leo. We’re going to have, I’m sure, lots more opportunity to talk about him as an artist. But what I would really like to do before we get too far ahead is to learn a little bit more about your family and, let’s say, your ancestors. You know, if you will, the immigrant story of how you came to be here, and what you remember from your early life in terms of that background and that culture and tradition.

CV: With pleasure.

PK: Okay.

CV: Yeah, you want to do that next time?

PK: Sure can.

CV: Tomorrow, because it’s almost. . . .

PK: You need to leave now, right? Well, yeah, let’s stop it here and then pick up at that very point.

CV: Okay, that’s real easy.

PK: Okay, good. Thanks.

CV: That’s real easy.

PK: End of Session One.

[Session 2]

CV: . . . the forties and fifties, that’s interesting because nothing. . . . You know, everything is kind of under water, seems to me. . . .

PK: What do you mean?

CV: I mean, there was a lot of stuff happening but nothing comes to surface as much as, say. . . . Okay, at the time, for instance, at the time, say, after 1945 when [________—Ed.] MacAgy takes over at CSFA [California School of Fine Arts—Ed.], and then shit starts happening, right? I mean, it really gets intense and it gets really serious and everybody’s really thinking about the seriousness of all of this. But then there’s all of this stuff that was happening. I mean it was fascinating because, you know, like just looking at a lot of the stuff that Mark has. . . .

PK: Mark Johnson over at San Francisco State working on the Asian-American project.

CV: Yeah, right. And I’m seeing how important Dong Kingman was. I mean, he’s not just this poster baby for Fisherman’s Wharf. You know, I mean, he’s not. . . . You know what I’m saying?

PK: Yeah, yeah.

CV: And if you look at his art his art is grounded in so much of what was happening in terms of a hotbed of information at U.C. Berkeley at that time. That was really the hotshit place in the forties and thirties, right?

PK: Um hmm.

CV: I mean, that was when all those guys got hired. The house of wax. [laughs]

PK: The house of wax. That’s an allusion that will be lost on some. . . .

CV: [laughs]

PK: . . . but we don’t want to get specific about any of the . . .

CV: . . . survivors? [add explanatory note?—Ed.]

PK: Let’s sort of start out on this. . . . We’ve dropped into recording here. . . .

CV: Okay. Yes, that’s great.

PK: . . . just almost arbitrarily. But I need to identify this taping session. This is continuing an interview with Carlos Villa. This is session 2, on June 21, 1995.

CV: Longest day of the year.

PK: Summer Solstice. It’s downhill from now, but at any rate here we are. It’s a great day, and this is a great way to celebrate it because if there’s anything I love it’s the Summer Solstice and the light and sun. A beautiful day. The interviewer for the archives remains Paul Karlstrom and the interview is being conducted at. . . .

CV: [sotto voce:] Oh, it’s on!?

PK: Yeah.

CV: [Still in sotto voce:] I’m sorry.

PK: That’s all right.

CV: I didn’t mean to pop in.

PK: No, no, no, that was good. The interview is—this is our tag, you see, our i.d.—the interview is being conducted at the interviewer’s office on Carmelita Street in San Francisco. And we had an informal sort of prelude to this introduction, which is just fine with me, but what we wanted to do today was pick up where we left off yesterday, and you had laid in a bit of a sort of a biographical skeleton, or armature. . . .

CV: Right.

PK: . . . for you, really getting up to the art institute, California School of Fine Arts/Art Institute days. You talked about Leo Valledor and his importance—your cousin—and you’re going to talk more about him, I hope.

CV: Sure.

PK: But I suggested we might then move back again and begin to flesh out a little more your own background and your family and, perhaps, values, what it meant to be growing up Carlos Villa in San Francisco at that time, eventually moving into the arts.

CV: Okay. As I stated before, I was born at Mary’s Help Hospital over on [Dorero, Guerrera] Street. We lived in an alley—Myrtle Alley—between Polk and Larkin, and it was in a basement apartment of the [Marquette, Market] Apartments. And our family group, which was a very, very small enclave of Filipino families, had a meeting place over there on Laguna between Ellis and Fillmore. And it was actually a ghetto within another ghetto within a metropolis. It was a Filipino ghetto side by side with a Japanese ghetto in the middle of a black ghetto, which was at Fillmore, and in the middle of San Francisco. And so the thing was is that in 1936 when I was born and in the forties when I was a kid, there weren’t that many Filipino families because of the Oriental Exclusion Act. The Oriental Exclusion Act excluded mostly women, because the powers that be did not want these people to propagate, and all they wanted was the cheap labor. And so much so that in some towns in the west coast the dearth of women produced a quota of forty men to one woman. And so myself and my cousin Leo and a few others were lucky to have been born during that time.

PK: Because there were very few couples, very few procreative families, is that right?

CV: That’s right. And then also . . .

PK: I didn’t know that.

CV: And also the thing was is that there laws, miscegenation laws, that stopped Filipinos from marrying outside of the race. They definitely did not want anybody to marry white; they did not want anyone to marry any other race. There was just. . . . So you had a group of men who were my uncles, at that time, not just because. . . . It wasn’t just a title that was given to Filipinos, being my uncle, it was because at that time most of the Filipinos came from the north of the Philippines in an area called the [Ilokos, Illukas], the Ilokos region. There’s Ilokos Norte, there’s Ilokos [Sur]. Ilokos North, Ilokos South. My parents came from Ilokos South, and a lot of the Filipino immigrants during that time, if they hadn’t settled in Hawaii, they came over in the first wave to America. And my father came a little after the very, very first wave . . .

PK: Now what was the first wave? When?

CV: The first wave was actually in the twenties, if you don’t count the students that came before that. But then that was another thing. I say it’s another thing, because like here we’re separating within those Filipinos the two different classes. My folks come from a very, very poor farming class in the Philippines. Those are the people that got targeted by steamship line agents who would come into small villages in the north to talk about how wonderful it would be to come to America to be able to achieve all their dreams. Well, after the Spanish-American War there were all of these American Christian brothers who came in and took over the education and also the. . . . There were the lay people along with the priests that came from America who had really propagandized the learning of the Filipinos then. So you had people—you know, my people—learning songs like "White Christmas," and it doesn’t even snow in the Philippines. And you had things like that, so they were really more familiar with the American culture than maybe a lot of the Americans themselves. So when they came. . . . And even to now English is a very, very strong second language. Filipinos grow up bilingual—or trilingual. They learn their native dialect, the regional dialect, they learn Tagalog, which is the national language, and they also learn English. And before that they learned Spanish. So it’s quite. . . .

PK: Still!

CV: Yeah, and Spanish is still the lingua franca of the very, very rich. They speak and address each other as Senor, Senora, etc., etc., so. . . .

PK: So it’s an elitist thing, an aristocratic thing?

CV: Incredible. Yeah, well, I mean we could go into, you know, like the mestizo class. The mestizo class was actually the bastard sons and daughters of the priests who wanted at the time to take the power away from the priestesses, the native, the indigenous priestesses.

PK: It’s sort of a matriarchal situation there where the women really were. . . .

CV: Yes. They had the powers and everything, and so they had the priests, the Catholic priests, do this number on the women, and so they became the ruling class of the Philippines. So to be a mestizo or a mestiza was. . . . Hey, we’re talking about the class. You know, besides being Spanish and European, which is the top of the line, then you had mestizo and mestiza and everybody else were Indios.

PK: So what about your last name? Which everybody thinks is Spanish or Mexican?

CV: Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing is is that it definitely is Spanish. It’s a Spanish . . . it’s a Latin name, and there was just some. . . . You know, my uncle used to say, "Well, God, in the Philippines, we’re so much like dogs and cats, anyway."

PK: [laughs]

CV: So it just. . . . So I don’t know that our family tree really goes back really that far. I mean, I’ve not looked into it. But when I did go back to the Philippines I found out that in my family there was a state senator. In my family, there was a military rebel who’s still living, who went up against Marcos and was a kind of an underground national hero. There are a couple of doctors, lawyers, and people in the military. I mean, they’re pretty high up. It really surprised me, because, like coming to America, we don’t know. . . . You know, like you give up, you’re cut off from that kind of history, and every day is. . . . It’s existential, if you will. I mean, you just deal with it. And at the time there was rampant racism. There were. . . .

PK: Here?

CV: Oh, absolutely.

PK: So you’re talking about your own experience in growing up then?

CV: Oh, absolutely, yes.

PK: I was going to ask you about that.

CV: Oh, yeah. Well, there were districts that we were allowed in. We were allowed to hang out in Chinatown, we were allowed to hang out in the Fillmore District, but, boy, you know, don’t get caught in a lot of these other places. I mean, like don’t go into North Beach. Don’t go over there with the Italians, you know, you’re going to get. . . . That’s their territory over there. Don’t get caught up with the Irish, which is over. . . . You know, I mean, they. . . .

PK: Originally. . . . Now where were they? In the Richmond or the Mission at that time?

CV: Who?

PK: The Irish.

CV: Oh, the Irish were in the Richmond and big-time in the Mission District.

PK: That’s what I thought, yeah.

CV: Big-time in the Mission. And so you had all of these enclaves. They had something called pacts up and down California and in certain parts where specifically written into charters that Orientals—or people of Mid-East origin, meaning Jews or Armenians—couldn’t buy land. Couldn’t buy land, couldn’t buy anything, you know. And I remember my father driving around in my uncle’s car, and he was saying, "Well, this area is exclusive, that area is exclusive." Of course, what he meant was white only. And so I grew up very much with that. And where we lived in the alley, particularly during World War II, my parents always used to freak because there was this bar around the corner where all these sailors and soldiers used to hang out and they’d go pissing in the alley and getting drunk and getting into fight, and my mom and my dad, they wouldn’t say don’t trust white people, but then, you know, there was a body language that was incredibly pervasive. I mean, I picked up the vibe in a minute. So I mean I grew up not trusting very many white people because, well, we were either. . . . You know, like, my mother was a maid, and so when we went off and my mother was working they would have me over there but then I’d be scared to even talk with them. I mean, it was just frightening to talk with white people.

PK: Really?

CV: Absolutely. I mean it was just amazing. I was speaking Filipino—[Ilokano]—at table with my parents until about six or seven years old, until fin[ally]. . . . You know, that was when World War II started happening, and then all of a sudden, you know, like they knew that because I was born here I was an American citizen. so all at once they wanted me to speak English. They didn’t want me to be mistaken for Japanese, also.

PK: I was going to ask that.

CV: And there were just a lot of things that happened that I’m detecting now. Particularly when I study the East-West society and I study the artists then and what they had to go through, because. . . . In two words, the thing that broke up that beautiful East-West group, and that destroyed a lot of Asian-American, Asian-immigrant artists, and people at that time—and I want to just say that it was all of the people that were here at the time—the two words are self-loathe. I mean there was just a very, very silent kind, "Well, I’ll get to what I need to get to, and I’m gonna work my ass off for it, and this is what I’m gonna do." But meanwhile always knowing that they’ll never ever achieve anything really great because even though the Philippine was a colony, an actual colony—taken over in the Spanish-American War—of America, citizenship was always denied to the Filipinos. So I always had that on top of my head. You know, I mean, I always in [the background]. . . .

PK: You thought about these things? I mean, you were aware of this?

CV: Oh, well, they talked about it.

PK: You mean, your folks did? And your uncle. . . .

CV: Yeah, my uncles.

PK: . . . . the community?

CV: Yeah, well, they talked about it, you know. Whenever you see pictures of a crossed Filipino flag and an American flag, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot to people maybe my age or even younger. But to them, to the people that were of that preceding generation, it meant really making it, because in World War II, you know, like you would see pictures of Douglas MacArthur doing his [old, little] salute and you’d have the crossed flags and, God, you know, like you’re talking about the first time that they ever. . . . You know, because Filipinos were fighting side by side in the army with white American soldiers, they were all of a sudden allowed to become citizens. And so they thought, God, you know, I mean, they thought that they went to heaven, a lot of them. And the army was the best job that they ever had, a lot of them. Because many of them would just be chasing crops up and down the San Joaquin Valley. . . .

PK: What did your folks do? Or what did your dad do specifically?

CV: My dad was a janitor. He had a couple of part-time jobs. The job that he had at the[Marquette, Market] Apartments he worked all morning, six days a week, and for that. . . .

PK: That’s where you lived, right?

CV: Yeah right. And so he got. . . .

PK: So does that mean he worked off some of the rent that way?

CV: Yeah, he worked off some of the rent. And then he had a couple of other part-time jobs that he worked in the afternoon and at night to get money for the table. A lot of times Filipinos weren’t hired and so I’d remember our household as being a hub of a lot of people coming in because since my father had the only ice box—you know, no refrigerator, an ice box. . . .

PK: Ice box, right.

CV: And he always kept the ice box full. He said, "That’s the real money." You know, because of the Depression. And so my mother didn’t mind cooking for thirty or forty people, twenty people, whatever, you know, and she knew how to stretch the meal. And so everybody happily ate, you know, and it was mostly all bachelor guys.

PK: Because of what you just described, that there was still like a quota. . . . Was this all Asians? Or Filipinos. . . .

CV: Except for the Japanese. The Japanese made something called "the Gentlemen’s Agreement," which allowed a Japanese to bring over families. But very, very few Filipinos, if any, got to do that. My mother and my father came over at a very, very young age. My father came over, God, about fifteen or sixteen years old. My mother came over when she was about thirteen.

PK: They met here, not in. . . .

CV: Yeah, they met here.

PK: So they must have come over in, I don’t know, in the late teens?

CV: Oh, about the twenties.

PK: Early twenties.

CV: Yeah, very, very early twenties. They had it tough. I think that they had a rough life, but I’ll say one thing right now—and I’m glad that we’re recording this—even though they’ve gone through a lot of rough shit they never ever thought of themselves as victims.

PK: Right.

CV: I mean, they were too proud. They were really too proud.

PK: What were their names? Let’s give them identities here.

CV: Oh, yeah. Pedro Corpuz Villa.

PK: Pedro Corpuz Villa. . . .

CV: And then my mother’s name is Prisca Gorospe Villa.

PK: Prisca?

CV: Yeah, Prisca. P-r-i-s-c-a.

PK: And the second name, that being a. . . .

CV: That’s a maiden name.

PK: A family name?

CV: Yeah, a family name.

PK: And how does that go?

CV: Gorospe.

PK: Gorospe?

CV: Yeah.

PK: Spell it.

CV: Oh, boy. [chuckles] Long names.

PK: Gorospe.

CV: Yeah.

PK: Because remember some poor transcriber has to turn this into print.

CV: Oh, G-o-r-o-s-p-e.

PK: Oh, that’s not too bad.

CV: And Corpuz is C-o-r-p-u-z. And that’s Leo’s second name also.

PK: Oh, okay, well, since we’re here why don’t you tell. . . . It seems to me that family, and extended family, was very important in this community. So what is the nature of the connection with Leo Valledor?

CV: Well, everything became closer than close. I mean, you have a designation "fresh off the plane" or "fresh off the boat." Well, my folks were fresh off the boat. And coming fresh off the boat, and coming in at the time that they came in, they were all very, very young. They were all very, very young, very, very hopeful immigrants who wanted to make it in the new world. Because, definitely, their world of being in the Philippines offered no solution at all in terms of any kind of future. There was no future there in the Philippines. You know, it was either you were a landlord who never lived there in the province that you owned, or you were tenant—or you owned land, but then, you know, you owned so little that it didn’t make any difference. So when these steamship people came and they talked about, "Hey, young man, you could be going with movie stars, you could have a car, you can have a job. You know, you can [be, do] anything that you can do." I mean, all of these people were really jacking these young kids off. And, of course, you know, like with the propaganda of the Christian brothers and pictures and all of this stuff about the new world and what’s happening in America, that’s going to whet any young man’s appetite. So this is the picture: When they come in off the boat, the American President lines, or countless of the steamship lines that came to San Francisco, they would go to the Mark Hopkins or they would go over to the Palace Hotel and they would go, "Where do I sign? I’d like a room for . . . how many." The waiter would kind of just bring them on the side, and they would say, "Your kind is welcome up on Kearney near International Settlement." You know, "your kind." And so that’s why International Hotel played such a big part, because it was like one of the many hotels that was part of the Philippine neighborhood. My father would always used to say to me, "Son, if ever you get lonely, at any time, and you want Filipino food or if you want to see a Filipino face, you always go to Chinatown and you go one block north, south, east, or west to the outskirts and you always hit a Filipino town, a Filipino neighborhood. So that always stuck with me. And very true. If you look at Kearney Street, juxtaposed with Chinatown, you have a description that fits that neighborhood. So fresh off the boat, young men, young women . . .

PK: Mainly young men.

CV: . . . young men would come together and they would cherish these times that they would be able to get together with their town-mates to be able to talk about the past, and maybe even the future, and maybe even how to cope with the present. I can remember going to the meeting hall. My father and uncles had a social club called the Native Sons of Lapog. . . . Lapog is a small town in which a lot of the guys were from.

PK: In the southern section. . . .

CV: Ilokos Sur. And so. . . .

PK: Lapog, L-i. . . .?

CV: L-a-p-o-g. And so all these people would come and play cards and gamble and tell stories and have home-cooked food, and. . . .

PK: Cooked by your mom? No, no, this was at the. . . .

CV: Yeah, well, cooked by my mom and other women and other men who could cook, you know, because it was always. . . . They would have these things and everybody would bring in food to get cooked and everything and it was a wonderful place because that was where I got to meet my cousin Leo and all my other cousins. And it was a wonderful place to be part of.

[Break in taping]

PK: . . . say this much. Here we are continuing session two with Carlos Villa, and this is still tape one but now we’re on side B. And we were talking . . . or I was hearing some very interesting accounts of what it was like growing up in San Francisco in the Filipino-American community and what it was like.

CV: Well, you said something very, very important during the break, Paul, and that was something to the effect of friendships and these kinds of things between communities. Number one, America as such was not a place of melting pot as it were, as I remember it. I mean, I could remember the Irish going up against the Italians, I could remember the Latino-Mexican gangs going up against African-American gangs, I could remember the kinds of definitions and boundaries that were set up in between Asian communities. I could remember the kind of insidiousness that the Chinese and the Filipinos had against each other, even in the Philippines, which was brought all the way over to. . . . You know, the Chinese were always characterized in Filipino adventure tales as always, you know, the Chinese plunderers or pirates and they were always the bad guys. And they, we, were always _____.

PK: And that carried over, then, these attitudes to here?

CV: Oh, yeah, well, even more so, because we were after the same jobs and we were put into the same category of the Oriental Exclusion Act of a lot of womenless men. I mean, I think it was Wayne Wang that did Eat a bowl of Tea [film—Ed.], and, you know, like he talked about that, from a Chinese-American standpoint. From a Filipino-American standpoint I would say it was basically the same but a little different. But it was just like a lot of really lonesome guys. I mean, just really, you know. . . .

PK: Except your dad and uncle because they had their women; they had wives.

CV: They had wives. They were probably the most settled of all of the relatives. And they were always considered, you know, like having made it. I mean, everyone else was having either no affairs, you know, or illicit affairs with women, or going to taxi-dance halls and going dime-a-dance and like that.

PK: Now Caucasian women were available within that framework, is that true?

CV: Absolutely.

PK: And so that was a way to break the color barrier if one wanted to.

CV: Ah, boy, well, it was like they were the exotic species, and here they were robbing them blind. [laughs] But the thing was is that they wanted to get robbed blind, you know. I mean, hey, there was no victim here. I mean, they knew what they were. . . . This was the price.

PK: And it was in a way worth it.

CV: Oh, man, that brought them all the way to next week, you know.

PK: What about. . . . I have seen photos and I can’t remember exactly where and they’re really quite wonderful. It may be that Mark actually has some of these but there were some famous clubs, I think here in San Francisco, I think in the Northwest—basically Filipino-American clubs—and my impression, without delving into this very much, is that that was central to the community, or certainly the social life, that it all happened around—and I don’t know what the years were—but there were these nightclubs.

CV: Oh, yeah.

PK: This is where you had a chance to really step out and. . . . Is that right?

CV: Oh, yeah, well, the thing was is that Filipinos—if I could stereotype my own people. . . . You know, we talked a little bit about rasquache. Well, okay, that’s very, very specific. Going into that idea of rasquache, going into the idea of self-esteem through clothes—through identification, through clothes—I mean, you see a lot of . . . there are a lot of people—you know, like people of color, or maybe even all people—who find an identification through clothes. And if you hit the right fashion, you know, you’re like, hey! You know, this transforms you from Joe Schmoe to all of a sudden you’re this movie star that you’ve been reading about. You’re Clark Gable, you know. And so you’re that for a couple of minutes. And so there would be these incredible transformations of guys working for fifteen hours a day at a nickel an hour or something like that and then going home and taking a small bath and then pomading their hair and putting cold creme on their face, and putting these McIntosh suits on, these Florsheim shoes, and these. . . . I mean, they dress like crazy. I mean, they really dress and when they went out they were "guapo." You know, that was the word, "guapo." And they just went and, you know, they were scorned by everybody, just because of the attitude that they take on with their dress. You know, I mean they just had that attitude that went with the clothes. And, God, even Chicano chronicler José Montoya, when he spoke at Yale in about 1972 and he talked about zootsuit, he spoke about the Mexican zootsuit, he talked about the black zootsuit, and he talked about the Filipino zootsuit. And he said, "Of the three the Filipinos had it right."

PK: They got it right. [chuckles]

CV: They had it right. I mean, everybody else was either too floppy or, you know, too much fabric here, the coat was just a little too long there, but the Filipinos just had it just right.

PK: Well, now, this of course moves us into the whole area of a sense of style and aesthetics. And what I need to ask at some point, of course, is to what extent do you feel your way of looking at things may have been affected by this sense of style within your own culture.

CV: Absolutely. Those were my role models. Those were my role models. You know, like there were many times that Leo and I would say, "God, did you see Uncle Jimmy’s new shirt? Wow!" "Yeah!" "Did you check this out?" And then we couldn’t wait to go up to, say, Uncle Jimmy’s room and talk to Uncle Jimmy about, you know, like what kinds of things he did and everything, because he was our role model, and then when he pulled out his little half pint of whiskey and he let us have a sip, you know, all of a sudden we became men, you know, we really felt great.

PK: [in a conspiratorial whisper] That’s all it takes!

CV: That’s all it took. And, you know, I mean, we’d look at all of the sharp guys, and we’d look at our aunts and, God, we used to see how big their tits were and all of this other stuff. I mean, we had that thing but style was a big thing. Style was everything. I mean, it was a way, it was identifi[cation]. . . . It was more than identification. It was all of a sudden you were who you were dressed like, and you completely took on that persona.

PK: The clothes make the man.

CV: Absolutely. And you’d be in the mirror for hours just to try to get the right wave, to try to get the right look. You know, smoking a cigarette in front of the mirror?

PK: Well, you’ve got to get it just right.

CV: Oh, you had to just get it just right, you know, and you had to turn the lights down in this room, and all of a sudden this mirror and you was this incredible universe.

PK: Who were your heroes or role models? Now obviously there would be sort of adults, some of your uncles and so forth within the community. But beyond that was there anything in popular culture or in the movies that you could identify with? What about [Humphrey—Ed.] Bogart and the way he smoked? Or was that sort of inaccessible?

CV: Well, Bogart was maybe a little earlier. I think that people a little younger than me would look at Bogart as, say, somebody real. Of course, you know, like we liked Bogart, we liked Edward G. Robinson, we liked The Dead End Kids and everything, but the thing was is that they were just almost a generation ahead of me because, since I was born in ‘36 the people that I was looking at, more or less, was Tony Curtis.

PK: "The Tone."

CV: Yeah, Tony. With the waterfall, you know, and Sal Mineo with the waterfall. . . .

PK: I met Tony on one occasion, yeah.

CV: Well, I’d be surprised if he wasn’t in the archives.

PK: Well, he’s an artist, you know.

CV: [laughs] I know that. I know that.

PK: Most of the people don’t. [laughter] Anyway, excuse me, back to your. . . .

CV: All right, well Tony was definitely one of the people that I was looking at. I mean, as far as music, my cousins were very hip. Like I used to sit there and watch my cousins and their girlfriends and classmates dance to Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. And that’s how we started listening to jazz at such a young age. You know, I mean, I have a tattoo of Diz when I was about twelve years old.

PK: Oh, yeah. What is that. . . .

CV: Dizzy Gillespie.

PK: Oh-h-h.

CV: And it’s a beret, glasses, mustache and goatee, so. . . .

PK: [chuckles] You’re right.

CV: Yeah. . . .

PK: I had to look at it this way to _____ _____.

CV: Yeah, well there’s no profile. But jazz always played a great role in my life. I mean, much more so than I could ever acknowledge, because like I thought of jazz as the very, very ultimate expression of communities of color. And since Filipinos really didn’t have those kinds of beginnings in the country and since Asian-Americans are really quite the babies in all of the solidarity within communities, Filipinos mostly took on a black code. We identified because of where we were in the neighborhood. We spoke black, you know, among ourselves. We had a black. . . . You know, we used to play the dozens, with each other and with black kids.

PK: Tell me what that is—or tell us what that is.

CV: Oh, they’re called snaps, they’re like very, very deadly. You know, to a lot of uninformed communities or groups of people, you would think that you were hurling insults at one another. And the dozens was about, you know, like thrusting your manhood out. I mean, like you could cap on each other and call your mama down. I can remember one: Let’s see, "If you cap you better cap fast because your mama got a face like a bulldog’s ass."

PK: [chuckles]

CV: And then somebody would have to come with a retort to that. So the whole thing was you had to be witty, you had to be quick, and when you got your opponent to a place where that opponent was about to cry and kick your ass you knew you had him. And you’d have to have a crowd around you and then you could just walk off and just say, "Well, I got that dude." You know, and then he’d be crying and [you, he] couldn’t sleep for the rest of the week and everybody would say, "Whoo-ee," you know, "Carlos, kick your ass!" You know, and then they’d cap on him again and then the kid would turn into a puddle.

PK: Ohhh.

CV: And so, you know, this would. . . .

PK: How old were you at this time, about?

CV: Oh, jeez, I was about twelve, eleven, you know, I mean I was going to a Catholic school in that area. It’s a Montessori school at this point.

PK: Where is it?

CV: At Pine and Octavia. It’s called Morning Star School. . . .

PK: Oh, yeah, I know that.

CV: . . . and it was right across from a Japanese Catholic mission, and that was where I served mass. And I went all the way up to the eighth grade before I went to Lowell. And so even in that school when the Japanese were interned, you know, like the kids who were in that school were all either black or Filipino. So there was a lot of, you know, wearing our pants down and all of this other stuff like that and capping on each other and playing ball with each other, fighting each other. You know, having each other as best friends. And so that was basically how I grew up until. . . . Then the Japanese came back and then when they came back very, very slowly they made a very, very quiet presence.

PK: After the internment?

CV: Yeah, after the internment. I mean, it was so sad seeing them come back. I mean, I wasn’t sad that they came back, but it was just they looked very, very beaten down.

PK: I can imagine.

CV: You know, they looked very, very beaten down and then they would come back into their old neighborhood and their old neighborhood was taken over by black folks. And so it wasn’t the same. Like they’d live in a house that maybe they once owned but they could only get one room in it.

PK: Yeah.

CV: And there were a lot of single parents because a lot of people committed suicide in the camp or were killed in the war.

PK: Let me ask you about that a couple questions—well, at least one. We’re talking about you growing up within . . . it’s a subculture, ethnically defined, and it sounds to me if I understand you correctly that you’re emulating blacks. . . .

CV: Yeah.

PK: . . . for a reason that. . . . You know, I’d like to look into that a little bit. Another way to look at that would be "Here are—if you’ll excuse the term—’niggers,’ they’re somebody even lower than we are."

CV: Yeah.

PK: But let’s hold that for a moment. But what I’m really interested in is how other Asian-Americans viewed the plight of the Japanese-Americans at that time, when they were shipped off. Did you identify with them or did you say, "Well, they got it coming because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor?" Can you answer that?

CV: Well, that’s a very, very complex thing, because, you see, the Japanese were at war with everyone in Asia. . . .

PK: Yes.

CV: . . . and so there were atrocities that happened in China and. . . .

PK: By Japanese _____?

CV: . . . and the Philippines and in Korea. And other places also. Burma. I mean, you name it, wherever they were. And the thing was is that here in America I was too young to remember when they got interned, except for one point in my life where I had an aunt who was Japanese by marriage and she had to go in. And I remember that that was real sad. Because it left my uncle out of the camp and running all of the family businesses. And I don’t know if that marriage was about love, or it was convenience, or there was some kind of deal that was being done. I couldn’t tell. I like to think that it was about love. I could be wrong. I remember growing up and looking at comic books, and all of the comic books were "Kill the Japs" and, you know, they all had big teeth and they all had this and they all had that. But I remember when the Japanese first started coming into school and I just said, "Jesus, God! They look just like me. And they look just like my cousin. There’s no difference. There’s really no damn difference. What is it?" You know, I mean, the whole thing about politics and brotherhood of man and everything, I mean, the first inkling that I ever got of real institutional prejudice was when. . . . You know of course nobody’s going to bother with a little kid a lot. But then I sensed things but nobody would really talk to me about it. But then I remember I saw a sign that said "Brotherhood week, let’s be kind to these people here." And I was one of those people! [laughs] "Be kind to me." And so it was like, Wow! That’s a real strange clue. And all of a sudden I just started seeing differences. I started seeing a lot of differences.

PK: What about the. . . . You said when the Japanese-Americans started returning from the camps, back into the community, you said, "Oh, these monsters, these warmongers, wait a minute, they don’t look like those propaganda images." But does that mean that up until that time you had. . . .

CV: Yeah, I had an image. . . .

PK: You said, "Whoa, yeah, these are dangerous killers.

CV; Yeah, I had an image of these people. I mean, I didn’t even think they had children, you know. It’s just weird.

PK: But didn’t you draw some distinction—and I think this is the critical question; it remains the critical question for all Americans—between the Japanese, these warmongers, who indeed were conducting a war and had attacked the U.S., and these Americans who happen to be of Japanese descent?

CV: Well, the thing was is that it was very, very complex. Of course I then had uncles going into the Pacific theater and fighting for the homeland against Japanese soldiers. I would hear of atrocities perpetrated against specific relatives in the Philippines that were done by Japanese soldiers. And then the whole propaganda of going against the Germans and going against the Japanese. I mean, I wasn’t blind. I mean, that was that, but after 1945 going into ‘46, when people started coming out of Utah and places like that and they started coming back to the school, I saw in these people a very, very gentle people, a very, very shy people, a people who were just kind of sneak. . . . I guess they were kind of just sneaking back into the community. And then all at once, you know, like we would have our May festivals, and then we were eating sushi. What the hell is sushi? What’s Japanese food? And I found myself fascinated by the culture on that level—of food, and meeting new people, and people that looked like me that. . . . In a lot of ways, you could forget the past because we were in this wonderful enclave. I’m sure though if we were in a different neighborhood, in a different situation, it would have been a whole lot different. If I weren’t living in the Fillmore. . . . See in the Fillmore the Japanese kids that grew up either became nerds or they became just like a lot of the Filipino kids, just really into the black culture. I mean, we definitely had an enclave.

PK: Okay, well explain that to me.

CV: Well, blacks, number one, were people who had gone up against the face of white people—in jazz and sports or whatever, you know, and in language—and then you kind of noticed them playing the fool in school and stuff like that and getting away with a lot of shit, and at the same time looking really good doing it. You know, I mean they would be funnier than

hell, and that came from the dozens, you know. I mean, they were funny, they were loud, they were audacious. You know, like a lot of it wasn’t smart but a lot of it was smart-acting. And the clothes were of a certain kind of, you know, they had a certain velocity to them, you know. And when they’d walk, you know, like they would do their pimp, the walking like. . . . [demonstrates] You know, kind of dragging one foot behind

other, or having a toothpick in the mouth and a funny hat thrown at a rakish angle.

PK: Style!

CV: Yeah, stylin’. And that was a way that you could identify with some kind of self-esteem, because there was really no other way to do it. You know, like even if you got good grades in the honor roll, even if you got this, or even if you got that, you’re always put into a second-class trip anyway. I noticed that at Lowell, even though you make the honor roll or anything else like that, it didn’t mean everybody said hello to you anyhow.

PK: Right.

CV: So who gave a shit? And at the same time. . . .

PK: Especially for kids, because they. . . .

CV: There were no other role models that preceded me to tell me any different. I don’t know if I’m telling you what you need to know or what this needs to know. . . .

PK: This is a machine!

CV: Okay.

PK: Let’s stop.

[Break in taping]

PK: All right, here we are continuing session two with Carlos Villa. It is 21 June, summer solstice, 1995, and this is tape two, side one. We’ve been having. . . . Well, I can’t say we’ve been having an interesting conversation. You know, I’ve been listening to you tell interesting things about your background and the reality of growing up, the interaction between groups, even with an Asian-American community, and then what’s, I guess, especially interesting is how the blacks—supposedly the lowest on the rung of the ladder in the American hierarchy—in fact, ended up being the admired ones within. . . . I don’t know if I want to use a word like marginalized groups but. . . .

CV: Oppressed communities.

PK: Yeah. And this is something that I hadn’t really thought about much but you’ve been quite explicit and clear on this, but I would ask this question at least: Certainly in other situations there was an opportunity that blacks provided a great gift to other groups who just weren’t, for one reason or another, realizing the American dream, is that there’s always somebody lower. And yet the situation you described is that blacks were not perceived that way by the kids. What I want to know is, but what about the adults?

CV: Well, there was two agendas there. Okay, now I want to just talk about a for example. Okay, growing up, you know, like I love my mom, I love my dad, I love my uncles and my aunts—when I saw them and met them—and I loved my cousins, and the thing is that, you know like, when you’re young you kind of go along with the game, but then after a while you kind of outgrow the game, particularly when you start wanting and needing things because, you know, here you are: You’re getting straight up the immigrant dream; when you come to America it’s just very, very straight and very, very forthright. "I want to make it. I want to go from step a to step b. There’s going to be a lot of shit between step a and step b but then I know my goals are very, very clear." When you’re a kid there are too many layers in terms of growing up here in America. It’s not straightforward. There’s many, many layers of social standing that you don’t realize, but then it goes everywhere from choosing to eat a peanut butter sandwich versus the garlic rice that your mom had cooked, in a greasy bag. And, you know, like having the high-priced penny loafers versus going to school in two-dollar Gallenkamp shoes. And so like you know those differences and, meanwhile, your parents are getting a nickel or fifteen cents an hour and they can’t afford these things and here you want these fifteen-dollar shoes. And so that’s when communication just starts not happening. All of a sudden you’re going to a high school where everybody’s wearing cashmere sweaters and you didn’t know what the hell the difference a cashmere sweater was from anything. But then, boy, your colleagues or your peers will make you know that difference in two minutes. And the poorest people will tell you before the richest people will tell you. And then, when you start seeing all of these things happen, then all of a sudden you can’t come home and deal with the anger that you have inside and you can’t explain it to your mom or your dad because they have different dreams. They have dreams of maybe, perhaps one day, "Jeez, it’d be nice to have a house. It would be nice to have an extra room. It would be nice to have a car—we don’t have a car." You know, that kind of thing.

PK: What about education? Was that part of the picture for the Filipinos, if you can generalize? Like other Asians very much so, that education was the key, you know: "Wouldn’t it be great if maybe the kids could go to college?"

CV: Well, the thing is that it’s all about class and it’s all about the structure that you’re in, in terms of your family and stuff. Myself, I was very, very lucky. I was very, very lucky. I think I was the first one in my family to have graduated from not only BFA but MFA And to be a professor. You know, I mean, in a lot of ways I made it even more so than say a businessman in my family. Even though the businessman in my family would be the most envied, but at the same time I had achieved something that a lot of my family hadn’t achieved. I happened to go to Lowell because. . . . You know, like, I don’t know, I was completely. . . . I didn’t talk to anybody about going to Lowell.

PK: They didn’t have affirmative action or quotas then.

CV: No, they didn’t have affirmative action but they really did look at the grades.

PK: You had good grades.

CV: I had a great GPA.

PK: Well, all right!

CV: But it was a social thing though that really kicked my ass.

PK: What do you mean?

CV: Well, it was the idea that I never really fit into the Chinese-Japanese population, which was a small minority at the school.

PK: At Lowell?

CV: At Lowell.

PK: Which of course is now [a, the] majority.

CV: It’s the other way around now. But before it was mostly people from St. Francis Wood who were basically, you know, like English, Scots, Scots-Irish, European descent. And then there was a huge population of Jewish-American kids. And so you had these kids that were kind of flaunting this whole idea of style in your face with convertibles and cashmeres and that kind of status—besides grades. And there [just] was this thing that I couldn’t understand, that I couldn’t talk to anyone if I didn’t have the right clothes. And so a lot of times I was always in between transferring or being completely . . . you know, completely acting the underdog.

PK: Of course, in the Fillmore it wasn’t that different, from what you’ve described—the right clothes, or everything—it’s just that these were different clothes.

CV: Very, very different clothes.

PK: Still the values. . . .

CV: But you see it was a different code.

PK: A different code but the same values, in a sense, once you _____ ____.

CV: Exactly. Exactly. You hit the nail right on the head, except they were just different clothes. There was a beautiful quotation in last Sunday’s Times in which I believe it was the director from the Latin American Museum in the Bronx, I believe, was talking, and in the very, very end of the article this artist had admonished her because she had said, "Oh, those are fake pearls." And he said something to the effect, "No, they aren’t fake pearls. That’s wrong. They’re not fake anything. These pearls are what the people want." You know, they could buy lots of them, they’re plastic. "This is what they want." Now that says something about the idea of values.

PK: Yeah, absolutely.

CV: You’re talking about commodity, you’re talking about something that looks really nice, it’s not about finding the one black pearl in the perfect lagoon in Malaysia twenty miles deep. Who gives a shit! I’d want twenty of them.

PK: [laughs]

CV: I don’t want that one fucking little pearl. You know, I mean. . . .

PK: So cost isn’t the index—rarity, this kind of thing. It’s what you want.

CV: It’s just another. . . . Yeah, it’s just values within a culture.

PK: So that cheap then can become desirable and, what shall we say? express _____ _____.

CV: Yeah, right. It’s not even the cheap. It’s "I could get all of these colors! I could get all of these things!" And it’s not even. . . .

PK: Right. Well, let’s talk about aesthetics, because I think we’re starting to move in that direction anyway aren’t we, a little bit?

CV: Yeah, we’re getting to one of the ramifications, most definitely. But definitely as I was saying before, rasquache, the idea of making something out of what was a throwaway from another culture. Like jazz, you know, like, "Okay, then, we don’t need those old instruments any more. We’ll just throw them away or we’ll put them into pawnshops. You know, "I heard Bach, but this isn’t Bach, but this is my version of Bach." "I love these drums. Let’s play these drums behind that, whatever you’re trying to play."

PK: [Behind, Like] the Brandenburg Concerto or something.

CV: Yeah, right. But then, my way. And so you get a whole set of other values. So I would imagine these kinds of things, if you want to identify with that, can kind of come in with your art. And I see it happening more and more now. The idea of rasquache. The idea of "Here are my values." You know, in concern with the pearl. I don’t want the most rarest, most wonderful pearl in the world. I want ten dozen pearls.

PK: I want a lot of them.

CV: I want a lot of them. I want that crushed velvet. You look in low-rider magazines. Well, Jesus, this certainly doesn’t look like the Peugeot that’s parked in the driveway. [laughs]. I mean, "Hey man, I don’t need all that chrome. I don’t need my tires to be looking like that." But this guy wanted his tires to look like that because of these values. And so there’s that and then there’s also a thing about. . . . Well, it’s rasquache. It’s about making the best out of being poor.

PK: Yeah.

CV: The best out of being poor.

PK: Tell me some specific stories if you can remember about, you know, as you were growing up and as your, quote, "values" or aesthetics or ideas about culture, if you will, were being formed. What had the impact? What are the models? What are the things that come to mind? Did you go to any of these clubs? Where did you hang out? What did your uncles do? What formed your aesthetic?

CV: Oh, God. . . .

PK: Big question.

CV: I love my. . . . I guess it was my Uncle Rudy, who’s my father’s brother. He was a chauffeur for this guy, Mr. Price. And Mr. Price at the time had these incredible shoes. I mean, Price’s Shoes. It was like everybody had to have Price’s Shoes. And not only the Filipinos or the African-American teenagers, but it was all teenagers in San Francisco had to have Price’s Shoes.

PK: Price’s Shoes?

CV: Yeah. And so my uncle happened to be Mr. Price’s driver. And being Mr. Price’s driver put my uncle really into the cat-bird seat, so to speak. He could bring one of three cars home, any time that he wanted. He had twelve tailor-made suits. He had a whole closet floor filled with Price’s shoes—of every style: suede, everything. I mean, Scotch grain, smooth, alligator. I mean, anything. Anything you needed, it was there. It was, wow! you know, I mean, it was like. . . . He was my role model.

I had another uncle who had a red 1940 Buick convertible with a white top. And at the time, the Filipinos were being pulled over, hunted down, and beaten, and no questions would be asked.

PK: When was this? As late as. . . .

CV: This was all the way from the thirties all the way through the forties.

PK: Almost up to 1950, you mean?

CV: Yeah, well, it was open season. Up until about ‘43. See, ‘43 was when, all of a sudden, a lot of Filipinos were allowed to go into the army and they were given citizenship. But before that it was like. . . . I remember a song in From Here to Eternity, and it was these soldiers marching down the road and they were singing, "The monkeys have no tails in [Zambawonga]." You know, Zambawonga is in the Philippines, and so we were always called monkeys or goo-goos or, you know, there were a lot of very, very specific terms for Filipinos.

PK: Was this hurtful for you in a personal way when you were a kid? I mean, do you remember that? Or is it more looking back?

CV: Well, sometimes it would. Sometimes it would if it was a direct kind of thing. But then if I would be talking with my cousins, you know, like we could cap on each other and call each other monkeys. . . .

PK: And goo-goos.

CV: . . . and goo-goos or whatever, you know, and then just. . . .

PK: Like blacks do? Like saying "Nigger this," and "Nigger that"? .

CV: Oh, yeah, well, we’d do all kinds of things, you know, not dissimilar to that. We wouldn’t completely trash each other as bad as African-Americans because we were only copying the form. They had the form down. I mean, that form was culture. And, as derogatory and as strange as it was, we understood that—that that was the way that they were. I mean, we could be this because we were just teenagers. We didn’t understand all parts of that. But growing up Filipino, and acting black was really our true essence. You know, a Filipino-American essence. And the thing was is that it’s just like when you make progress in history: a lot of people often forget the real lessons to be learned.

And so there’s a lot of my generation that kind of went off into that zone, as it were. And all of sudden got lost because after a while there wasn’t any kind of real communication as to practical values for Filipinos, where young Filipinos my age could go. You know, how many really get to college? How many graduate? You know, like a lot of my cousins went to places like city colleges and got their A.A. there, like in drafting, so that they could get a better job. To be an artist, that was not a real calling. Maybe commercial art, if your parents were real liberal. But to be a fine artist, that’s trying to be. . . . That isn’t really a step up at all. Besides that, we don’t understand what they’re doing, anyhow.

I mean, with Leo, that was really easy. He had a real incredible life. His father and mother came to America married, which was a real rarity, and they came very, very early. The father would be following crops up and down the west coast and the mom would kind of follow where there weren’t the right crops they would stay in San Francisco and Leo’s mom would have card games in the house quite regularly. So she was "the house". So she was actually supporting the family for a while. And after a while Leo’s father never went back to pick any more. Leo’s mom got shot by an uncle of mine.

PK: Shot?

CV: Shot. And paralyzed her.

PK: Why?

CV: Because . . . gambling.

PK: By your uncle?

CV: Yeah. He was pissed off. He was pissed off that he lost all his money. He accused her of cheating.

PK: Was she cheating?

CV: I don’t think so. Well, she didn’t have any reason to, because you never lose if the house is yours.

PK: So this uncle shot his . . . well, some sort of relative, sister-in-law or. . . .

CV: Yeah, he shot his cousin. And so he went to jail and left Leo’s mom paralyzed.

PK: Was Leo’s dad still around?

CV: Yeah, he was still around but he was hanging out and he was being a playboy. He played tennis all the time and he did all of this stuff he was really being a playboy.

PK: Tennis, that’s a white man’s sport, or it used to be.

CV: Yeah, well, it was but there was a Filipino association that played tennis. Matter of fact, they had a club. They had a Filipino tennis club that met where the restored Maybeck Buildings are down in the Marina where the Exploratorium is now. And before Treasure Island, that was all tennis courts. And so there was a Filipino tennis club that met over there, and he was part of that whole thing. There’s still a Filipino tennis club.

PK: Really?

CV: But they never made it. You know, I mean, it’s just like the Filipino Flyers. Now who the hell ever heard of the Filipino Flyers? There was a Filipino flying club. But, you know, I mean, it’s just . . . that’s a subtext.

PK: So go back to Leo’s situation, and his mom was shot. . . .

CV: Okay, well, Mom was shot. Father was being the playboy. Mom dies when Leo’s about twelve years old. Father splits because he ran off with somebody else’s wife. So Leo’s pretty much alone. And so, you know. . . . I always loved his mind. I always liked coming over to his house and playing. He always like to come over to my house and play. We used to like to go to movies together. Because we loved each other’s minds. And he was more intellectual and more imaginative than any of my other cousins. My other cousins were nice but were limited. I had couple of cousins that were really wonderful, but they didn’t spark me like Leo did. Leo was just amazing. He read things and then he’d show me the things that he was reading, anything from any kind of dirty little Mike Hammer book to. . . . I forgot who wrote about opium, a famous writer. You know, he would show me stuff. He would show me all of this stuff. And he would talk about Aldous Huxley and all of these people like that. All these L.A. guys, you know, and so he had me going. And he would do these incredible models. He did these great sculptures. And he would do these fantastic self-portraits and stuff. And I’d go home and I’d try them, you know, and I. . . .

PK: This is before you went to art school?

CV: Yeah. And I’d go home and I wouldn’t tell him that I was drawing or anything but I had a lot of time by myself, anyway, because there weren’t that many kids around where I lived, in the Tenderloin. So I spent a lot of time drawing by myself, but I never paid attention to myself as being an artist. And he went to public school so he had art classes, and so I went to Catholic school and Catholic school is, you know, like draw a circle and two triangles and you have a cat’s face. I mean, that was the extent of that.

PK: So in those days the public schools really had the best art programs?

CV: Well, they had a semblance of some kind of creative situation. But Catholic schools, I mean, what you wanted to be was work in city hall. That was that, you know. Post Office. But at any rate, though, Leo was this person who I just followed all the way through. And then after he got into California School of Fine Arts, jeez, I just thought that was amazing. But there was one thing that he said to me that really fucked me up. He was about to take a scholarship there, and after the first half year, he said, "You know, I’m going to go into fine arts." I said, "God, you’re going starve to death, Leo! I mean, what are you going to be doing?" He says, "I like abstract art."

PK: Did he tell you why? _____ _____ _____.

CV: Yeah, well, you see, the thing is is that when he was. . . . When I was in my last year of high school and he was in his first half year at the. . . .

PK: California School of Fine Arts?

CV: . . . California School of Fine Arts, and even a little before that, he was doing these. . . . You know, his art god became my art god. My art god and his art god was David Stone Martin. And David Stone Martin was. . . .

PK: I don’t even know if I know who that is. David Stone Martin?

CV: David Stone Martin was this incredible illustrator who copped a lot off of Ben Shahn. But he was an incredible book illustrator who did a number of things, and the things that he was most famous for were covers on Norman [Granz’s] [Jazz the Philharmonic, "Jazz the Philharmonic"]. And he would do these line drawings of jazz scenes—of tenor saxophones on beds and guys with pork-pie hats and playing trumpets and drum kits, kind of down in a very, very sketchy kind of . . . or kind of an agitated line drawing done with India ink and pen. And then, every once in a while, he’d throw some water on there and then he would have this big blur. And it would be beautiful! You know, I mean, these were. . . . That was art! You know, I mean, we. . . .

PK: And it wasn’t abstract. . . .

CV: Oh, but it was far out enough to. . . . You know, it would make you doubt what you were seeing. So that was cool.

PK: That at least pointed in the direction of abstraction, I guess. Let’s stop and turn this. . . .

[Break in taping]

PK: Okay, here were are. This is session three [meant session two—Ed.] with Carlos Villa, tape two, side B, and we’ve gotten to the interesting point where cousin Leo says he’s going to the California School of Fine Arts and he’s interested . . . he’s going to be an artist. And you say, "No way! This is not a smart thing to do."

CV: Right.

PK: He says, "I’m interested in abstract art." And so you were telling how you had this shared art god, David Stone Martin, a book illustrator. I want to know how do you get from there to an interest in abstract art. How did this all come about?

CV: Well, you see, it’s all about the underdog. I mean, when you start thinking of life in the fifties and life in the late forties, you’re either straight or you’re underground. And you have the jazz world, and aficionados of the jazz world, which are kind of either fucked up white people or hanging out with these dope-taking black people, or you’re somewhere in between. And so to be. . . . I mean, like Wally Berman and a whole bunch of other people, you know. They always thought of themselves as white Negroes.

PK: Um hmm, exactly.

CV: Okay? And Norman Mailer wrote something about . . . a whole book or article on the white Negro.

[Interruption in taping to answer telephone]

CV: Right, Norman Mailer. . . . I mean, well, those are people who . . . intellectuals who’ve really documented a kind of position that a lot of people . . . a lot of my friends took. I mean, for a Filipino to listen to jazz was like being able to be in a kind of a nirvana: into a place, into a situation where, all at once, you become creator, you become empowered by these abstract sounds, and it’s so hip to know the liner notes that you could kind of exchange with other people and you, too, could be hip. Or if you went to a certain session at Jimbo’s Bop City on Post Street, you know, like you got to catch Sonny Rollins or somebody, and you were all of a sudden cognoscente, you know, like on another level. And so, being an abstract artist was not like being a figurative artist. You know, you had something. It’s like latter day. I mean it’s just like looking at graffiti writers, and it’s like listening to hip-hop and it’s about talking about certain DJ’s. You’re talking in encoded terms and you’re talking about culture, sub-culture. So jazz, abstract art. . . .

PK: All went together.

CV: Yeah, Sonny Rollins, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Zen. I mean, hey, that’s. . . .

PK: But were you, before Leo announced his intentions and took that move, were you, Carlos Villa, aware of these artists? The music, yes. . . .

CV: I’ll tell you what made me feel about these artists. Here I am in my chintzy little crafts class over at Lowell High School, a junior, and then Leo, his first year there at California School of the Fine Arts, every night I’d be on the phone with him. "And then what? What did you do then? And then what did you do then?" He’d say, "Well, how would you like to come to a Halloween party?" "Halloween party? Oh, far out!" And so here I am, I got invited to the Halloween party, you know.

PK: I’ll bet it was wild. Was it wild?

CV: Well, it was wild to me. Now, we’re talking 1953.

PK: Not a very wild time, but. . . .

CV: Not a very wild time but it was incredible to me. It was eye-opening. And I’ll tell you why it was eye-opening. Okay, I dressed up in what I thought was very far out. What I thought was really far out was to wear my sweatpants with "69" written on them.

PK: Oooh!

CV: Oooh! [laughs] And a T-shirt. Now I thought that was pretty far out. In 1953 we’re talking gonzo. [laughs] And so there I am, a junior at Lowell High School, meeting my cousin over at California School of Fine Arts. And so I come in and, you know, we’re on the Stockton bus and everybody’s kind of looking, "Who the hell is this guy?" And so I’m walking up the hill past Bimbo’s and then it’s real dark. I go into the Diego Rivera Gallery. The Diego Rivera Gallery, incidentally, has a big curtain with a Diego Rivera mural.

PK: Now?

CV: No, then, 1953.

PK: Oh, then.

PK: Oh, because it was Communist?

CV: Absolutely. And you how much we used to ______.

PK: Now it’s no longer Communist, or at least we won so we can see it. [chuckles]

CV: Right, right. No Marxist. . . . You know, I mean, we were all against that. There was a toilet bowl right in the middle of the Diego Rivera, you know, in the middle of the exhibition floor. A toilet bowl.

PK: Really? This was for the party?

CV: Yeah. And then here are all of these lights. And here are all of these spider webs all over the place. Studio 13 jazz band is playing in the background. Nobody really is dancing, but. . . .

PK: Is that the one that Wally Hedrick was. . . .

CV: Yes, absolutely. And there was Charlie Still playing the clarinet. Charlie and Wally were the originals and guys are still doing it, but there they were. They were real young. They were still happenin’. Leo had given me a rundown on all of these people that were around at the time. Bill Morehouse was there and, you know, all of these people were there, and I read this "Dixieland Jazz," and I said, "Jesus, this is weird music." But, man, it kind of fit in, you know? It was kind’ of smoky in there and it was real dark in there and they had this toilet bowl and it was really Dada. Everything was kind of Dada-esque. And then there was this woman by the name of [Yakabena, Jacobena], who was dressed in the first bikini bathing suit that I’d ever seen.

PK: Wow!

CV: This is 1953.

PK: [laughs]

CV: And so here were all of these veterans. . . . At that time there were nothing but veterans there at the school. And so they were chasing Yakabena and laughing, and Yakabena was laughing, too.

PK: Was she a model, or what?

CV: Oh, she was one of the students. She was a very, very well-endowed young blond woman, just kind of very, very Rubin. . . . Not Rubinesque. She was very Renoiresque. And she was just, you know. . . .

PK: Enjoying it.

CV: Oh, she was loving it. They cornered her into a phone booth, the phone booth fell over and everybody was laughing and everybody was just having a great, great time. And I remember I was just kind of standing around, and then I finally got enough guts to ask this woman to dance. And she was kind of. . . .

PK: Yakabena?

CV: No, no, not Yakabena. There was another woman. This other woman was dressed up like Helen of Troy, except she had glasses on. And so I asked Helen of Troy if she wanted to dance, and she said first she must have a sip of this, and she pulled out a gallon of wine. And I thought, "God, how far out!" [laughs] And so here we are, we’re just dancing whatever the kind of dance. . . . I guess we were doing the dirty boogie or something while we were listening to Dixieland music. I mean, it was more or less free-forms. But we were dancing and stuff like that, and I had the most wonderful time there, because it wasn’t like I was this teenager and here were these older people. These were all artists. And. . . .

PK: You were a junior at Lowell at that time?

CV: Yeah. And then later on we went to these apartments on Russian Hill. They’re very expensive condos now, but at the time they were just right for people on the G.I. Bill.

PK: They were dumps.

CV: They were dumps. And so we went up for after-party kind of . . . after-party party. And so I remember for the very first time in my life I got into a discussion with these two guys that were artists from the institute who were veterans of the Korean War and we really got into it. All of a sudden it was like about six o:clock in the morning and I didn’t even know what the hell I said. But they were interested in what I said because I was interested in what they were saying and we got into a conversation. And I said to myself, "Jeez, this is the best time I ever had in my whole life." It was the first time I got understood by older people. And . . . white people! Because there was always like that gap, ever since I was a kid. And I kept that in back of my mind because, of course, you know, like a little more than a year later I went into the army and I decided that, irregardless of whether I turned out to be an artist or not, I needed to go to California School of Fine Arts because it was the only place that ever made me happy. Because the artists really made an impression on me. I never really took what I did seriously. I had no value. I was _____ _____.

PK: So it was a community that you were seeking, rather than training to become some idea you had of what it was to be an artist.

CV: Yeah.

PK: Is that true?

CV: Yeah.

PK: Or maybe your idea at that point of what it was to be an artist was to be with this group of people with whom you felt comfortable and who were interesting.

CV: Well. . . .

PK: Bohemians.

CV: Well, it was that, I mean, but then there was Leo, you know, and he was an artist. But all I knew is that there was this community that I needed to be with. And then when I came back after . . . you know, in 1957, and I took lessons from Leo. . . . You know, I paid Leo to teach me how to draw. And what was his aesthetics behind things and would show me reproductions of different artists and stuff like that, and why he respected what they did and everything. It got me more and more interested in the technicality and the integrity of what art was about. Through this, he encouraged me to go to art school. And I wanted to go anyway, just to hang out, but he gave me more reason. He gave me more reason because Leo would never ever tell me a lie anyway. He always told me the truth. And he said, "I think you could make it as an artist at California School of Fine Arts."

PK: So he really was your mentor.

CV: Absolutely. He was Damian. He was Damian to me. [Referring to Herman Hesse’s novel—CV] He was my way out. I mean, in the middle of a ghetto without any parents and doing ten-by ten-foot black-and-blue paintings that were going to be shown at the DiLexi Gallery, the biggest contemporary gallery in the city—or in California—next to Ferus. I mean, shit! I mean, that was really something. I mean, I didn’t know all the ramifications, but then here were all of these hoity-toity people saying that he did great art, and I said, "Yeah! That’s my cousin!" You know? I was really proud of him.

PK: Did it surprise you that through art there was this entree to white society?

CV: Well, you see, the thing . . .

PK: Was this a surprise for you?

CV: Well, I learned how to differentiate, because when I was in the army I met many different kinds of people—white, black, Asian. And by that time the army was becoming segregated. It just started becoming segregated—I mean integrated—when I was in the army. Like there were no all-colored units any more. Everything kind of dispersed.

PK: How long were you in?

CV: I was in the army for two and a half years.

PK: Two and a half years. You got out in ‘57, is that it?

CV: I got out in ‘57. And got into California School of Fine Arts spring semester in ‘58.

PK: Is that when you did a stint at City College?

CV: No, that was. . . .

PK: Oh, that was earlier. That was _____ _____.

CV: No, that was right after. . . . That was ‘54.

PK: Okay. I got that straight.

CV: Yeah, that was ‘54. But, you see, it was all. . . . All of this stuff was hand-in-hand with being kind of in a situation of a hip-cool situation as opposed to a straight 9-to-5 situation. There were hip white folks, and there were square white folks. There were hip [Pinois (Pee-noys)]—hip Filipinos and there were very square ones. I mean, there were people who could understand my code as much as I could understand theirs. Not that I didn’t understand anybody else’s but, whatever situation I wanted to be in, you know, like I was able to, after the army, more or less choose.

PK: Did it come to seem to you, over time through these experiences, that art—we’re talking about avant-garde art, at this point—was a way to get out of, beyond the restrictions of racial limitations?

CV: Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there was something that Leo had shown me, when I was in the army, and I always thought then that it was really Communistic. [chuckling] Because here I was in the army and they were telling me, "Don’t look at any kind of Communist thing." And so I kind of knew that Communism and Marxism and family of man and getting together with everybody was. . . . "That ain’t the way it really is but this is an ideal that is not American. It’s Communist." And so when he showed me this fabulous book, Family of Man, I said how wonderful it is on one end of it, but then on the other . . . but my left brain was saying," Communist!" . [said in a stern tone—Trans.] [laughing] I mean, it was just really kind of weird. I had to try to figure that one out. I never had. . . . I was more reactionary than idealist. My cousin Leo was more idealist and more intellectual. As I was just kind of a bull-in-the-pasture kind of guy. And I never really thought about . . . in terms of family-of-man kind of stuff, and that art was a. . . . Art at that time was a language that didn’t have any race, color, or creed being any kind of obstacle, but that art is art, you know, and that was it.

PK: Is this even more the case if it’s abstract?

CV: Even more so.

PK: Is that exaggerated?

CV: Yeah, well. . . .

PK: Because that removes even the possibility of coloring. . . . With representation you have people. . . .

CV: Sure.

PK: . . . and they’re going to usually be colored one way or another. And that’s all removed.

CV: Well, yeah, it’s all removed. Well, very, very specifically, Leo turned me on to Kandinsky, The Spiritual in Art. And so that became the foundation for the idea of this language. And it seemed to me to be very, very significant because it was almost analogous to what I felt jazz music was about without the rhetoric. The rhetoric made it interesting because it was down-home, it was colloquial, and it was people-to-people. But then, there was just some[thing]. But to understand jazz music and to look at Kandinsky’s work, or to look at Diebenkorn’s landscapes at the time—you know, those abstract landscapes. . . .

PK: You mean the Berkeley series?

CV: No, before.

PK: Before that, yeah.

CV: Before the. . . . The period between New Mexico. . . .

PK: And then Berkeley.

CV: . . . and being in Berkeley. I mean, there was that kind of freedom. Leo always talked about freedom, and I knew when he talked about freedom it was going beyond the ghetto. And for me it was being able to be classless and faceless kind of thing.

PK: Faceless? What do you. . . .

CV: Ah, yeah, I mean it was. . . .

PK: What do you mean by that? Why is that desirable?

CV: Well, it was a whole thing of. . . . It was all about self-loathe. I mean, I was always given the model of just basically white male as being the way to be handsome, and so, okay, that’s the way I grew up and I obviously wasn’t that, so it was. . . . You know, the nose wasn’t sharp, the face wasn’t angular, the hair wasn’t. . . . I mean, there was all this stuff, and so it was like, well, if I didn’t have that that means that I couldn’t be part of. And not to be part of would be eventually to loathe myself because of my inability to come to that. So, no matter what, I was always at a point of marginalization. Again though, it’s not to say that I was a victim of but it was close to it a lot of times.

PK: But, Carlos, does this reflect the way you were thinking then? Or is it possible that there’s some projection—with the benefit of reflection, back to that time?

CV: Oh, God.

PK: It’s hard to say, I know, but. . . .

CV: Well, I’ll tell you, when I was in art school from ‘58 through ‘61, it was the most freeing years that I think that I ever had because it was just like everything that I did was almost recognized as art. And all of a sudden people were looking at me not because I was Leo’s cousin but it was because I was doing art. And then when they would say, "Oh, Leo’s cousin? Ah, yeah, okay, cool!" You know? But then it was like as soon as I hit there, it was incredible. You know, like in 1958 when I was there I did a sculpture. I did a sculpture that I made from an old water-heater box and some wood that I had wrapped in some red and white and blue bunting and I put hide-skin glue over the whole thing to kind of glue it together. But then there was this stench of hide-skin glue, and I put it up there near the fountain, and immediately Bruce Conner came up and he said, "I want to show this in my "Rat Bastard Show." And it became a piece that headed a poet’s parade from the bagel shop down to Dean [Russell] [Long] Hall where Phillip Lamantia had shredded this Eastern poet with two words. And they were using my coffin to lead this whole procession down. I mean, it was. . . .

PK: It’s incredible!

CV: Yeah, I mean, that was my. . . . And then it got shown at Spatsa Gallery, and that was my first one-person . . . the first time that I was shown.

PK: What year was that?

CV: ‘58. Summer of ‘58.

PK: Yeah, well I mean you were just brand-new. You were a student at the California School of Fine Arts.

CV: It was my first half-year.

PK: God, how interesting! What an interesting time to be there.

CV: It was incredible. It was incredible. I mean, everything seemed to be popping all at the same time. And then Joan made a . . . Joan Brown, you know, like. . . . All of a sudden we were in Manuel Neri’s first sculpture class in the summertime. He got kicked out the semester before for non-payment of tuition, and then, because he got the Nealie-Sullivan award and stuff, he got a position teaching a class, and so there were about five people in that class. Me and Joan Brown, an Italian priest, Forrest Myers—he was a sculptor in New York—and I forgot the other person, but, jeez, we made these great plaster sculptures. Joan made this plaster wreath for my figure. It was fantastic. I mean, everything I did there, everybody really took a second look at and shit and hanging it up and everything. I didn’t know what the hell was happening, to tell you the truth. [laughing] But everything was clicking.

PK: Everything was good.

CV: Everything was great!

PK: Now, there will be a number of things to talk about, I think, on this when we talk further, because this was a very important time at the California School of Fine Arts, the art institute. . . .

CV: Ah! It was great!

PK: And you were there at a great time. Your fellow students and the teachers. . . . But tell me, as we come towards the end of this particular tape, in terms of the instructors, who do you really remember?

CV: Bill Morehouse—that summer—and Manuel Neri, because they were my first links to an incredible freedom. Bill Morehouse taught a class at that school called. .