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Luisa Moreno Biomythograpy – Mytyl

admin — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 03:05:21 +0000

Mytyl Lorraine, my beautiful daughter, was born in Spanish Harlem. Her childhood would not resemble mine.

Instead of a sprawling coffee estate, Mytyl had to make due crawling the narrow confines of the tenement we lived in.

Months after we arrived in New York Miguel was still unemployed, a condition he would come to enjoy, and soon after giving birth I found myself bent over a sewing machine and stream press so we could eat.

I didn’t want my mother’s life, and now all the romance had been stripped from that desire.

While I suffered work, Miguel got to know the local bars. He often took little Mytyl along, and just as often forgot she was with him.

We argued about many things. He was no longer so dashing, and I wasn’t as young and exciting.

There are things that happened between us in that time and place that I will not speak of here.

I was no longer married. I was stuck. But what could I do? There was Mytyl now.

Then it happened.

That moment that pushes you from being part of yourself to being whole. From being afraid, to having no other option than feeling your own power.

I was walking home from work with my amiga Grace when she invited me to her apartment to see her baby.

We had barely started up the stairs when we heard an infant crying. As we climbed, Grace soon recognized the screams as her child’s voice.

We rushed to reach her door which we found unlocked. No babysitter in sight.

Grace picked up her baby and carried her through the dark room to the window. The fading sunlight struck the child’s face and we fell silent in horror.

A rat had eaten off half the baby’s face. Grace fell to the floor, still cradling her mijita, sobbing.

The baby died soon after.

Like so many times before, I felt trapped and unsure what to do. But now I knew I had to do something, I would do something. For all of us. We could no longer go on living in these conditions.

* Biomythography: ‘the elements of biography and history of myth … fiction built from many sources.’
- Audre Lorde

La Compañera Moreno inspired and informed by the work of Vicki L. Ruiz

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Luisa Moreno Biomythography – Mexico

admin — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 07:31:00 +0000

Mexico felt like the edge of the world. A place beyond reason where I could practice being.

I guess you could say I was a Flapper – Las Pelonas they called us. Which just meant we cut our hair as short as was our tolerance for acceptability. We wore lots of makeup, drove cars, and had sex who whoever we wanted.

I was even naive enough to think I was a poet. Yes, I have a book of poems. El Vendedor de Cocuyos.

‘and i have lived/ i have dreamed/ held in the fire of your arms’

If the world had proven just, I hope I would have been a poet writing a life of love.

But the world is not just, and like a fad hairstyle, such sentiment never stays in style.

Miguel Angel de León pursued me. And I wanted him to. He was so romantic in the beginning that I forgot I was trying to be someone else, and was content just being with him.

He played at being dashing and mysterious, and I was too young to know the difference.

Diego was not impressed by Miguel’s caricature drawings, and refused to call him an artist. Nor was he moved by his professions of love for me (but I would not be deterred by Diego’s protests after wiping away Frida’s tears over so many lunches at the Blue house).

Miguel Angel de León, 16 years my senior, was to be my husband.

Any illusions of a life full of verse were shattered on our wedding night when he took me to a horrible hotel and left me for other business … womanizing.

I cried myself to sleep, and woke up a year later pregnant. Mexico was magical, but bohemians don’t make the best parents. So we headed to New York where my child could be a ‘Latin from Manhattan.’

We arrived in August of 1928 on the SS Monterrey. The depression waiting to greet us.

* Biomythography: ‘the elements of biography and history of myth … fiction built from many sources.’
- Audre Lorde

La Compañera Moreno inspired and informed by the work of Vicki L. Ruiz

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Luisa Moreno Biomythography – Convent

admin — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:03:07 +0000

The convent taught me things it did not intend. Meant to civilize and bind my soul to silence, I learned I would rather be a savage.

Back home in the shade of my fathers estate I did not know what it was to want. But at the convent, I watched the nuns get fat on sumptuous food, while us girls made due with stale bread and water. Hunger is the best teacher.

I learned to fight for myself when the nuns, who were supposed to serve, proved unwilling to do so. When that girl, the one who never bathed, came across me and Alma in the garden and called us “Spanish Pigs” the nuns did nothing. She was their favorite. I always imagined this was so because they mistook her blond hair for a halo. I had no such attributes with which to seek redress, so I belted her!

I misbehaved my way back home to Guatemala.

Back home nothing was the same. It couldn’t be. I still carried the hunger with me, a gnawing ache that would not relent.

So at 15, I decided I would get a university education. However, it was quickly impressed upon me that intellectual pursuits were not a privilege extended to women.

Was that all there was for me – a nun or peacock?

No. And I was not the only one who was hungry.

I organized my compañeras, and we formed the Sociedad Gabriela Mistral to push the gates to the university open to us.

We held petition drives and lobbied for change. We would later be called “una generación que hizo historia.”

And we were. But as I looked around, not enough was different. My father still filled the fountain with Veuve Cliquot champagne for parties. Migrant workers still traveled the back roads on a perpetual search for sustenance.

I could enter the university, but all I would be was a smarter peacock.

So I ran away. Hoping Mexico City offered me something else to become.

* Biomythography: ‘the elements of biography and history of myth … fiction built from many sources.’
- Audre Lorde

La Compañera Moreno inspired and informed by the work of Vicki L. Ruiz

Back to Luisa Moreno tribute stamp

Luisa Moreno Tribute Stamp

admin — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 19:38:16 +0000

Read the latest posts from the Luisa Moreno tumblr biomythography:

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Luisa Moreno Biomythograpy – Blanca Rosa

admin — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 22:29:00 +0000

When I was born Blanca Rosa in 1907, there was no doctor. Only a midwife my mother looked upon with disgust as she worked between her legs to bring me into the world.

But now there was a doctor. I couldn’t see him through my fever, but I could feel his cold hands and smell him sweating. He didn’t want to be the one to tell my father there was nothing he could do. Tell my father that I was dying. At nine years old.

My family was important.

My father, Ernesto Robriguez Robles made his money from coffee, or rather, as I would come to see, from workers forced from their lands. Forced to come from the highlands and harvest our coffee trees for less than their labor was worth.

My mother was a peacock. The kind of woman I would spend my life living not to be. She woke up just in time for lunch, and spent the day dressing for dinner.

She was what women were supposed to be. Pretty, with no point of view beyond the tips of the long white gloves that were her favorite to wear. She had not the stamina to stay by my bed, waiting for my fever to break.

So it was left to my father. He prayed for my life. And prayed with my life.

Promising that he would give me to God and send me to a convent. If only I lived.

The doctors prognosis proved wrong. I recovered. And my father, always true to his word, took me on a steamship bound for California. Where I would spend the next four years of a life that was no longer mine at the Convent of the Holy Names.

It would not be the last time others would attempt to determine my life. But I would never again go along so easily. And for that I would pay.

*all images, except for coffee plantation, from the scrapbook of Luisa Moreno in the Southern California Library collection.

* Biomythography: ‘the elements of biography and history of myth … fiction built from many sources.’
- Audre Lorde

La Compañera Moreno inspired and informed by the work of Vicki L. Ruiz

Back to Luisa Moreno tribute stamp

admin — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 22:26:52 +0000

* Biomythography: ‘the elements of biography and history of myth … fiction built from many sources.’

- Audre Lorde

La Compañera Moreno inspired and informed by the work of Vicki L. Ruiz

Bunchy Carter Tribute Stamp

admin — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:23:18 +0000

Bunchy Carter was the founder of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party, which he led until his assassination on UCLA campus in January 1969. He left behind a legacy of understanding and serving the needs of oppressed communities, based on his insistence for a spirit of unity with the people. The Bunchy Carter tribute stamp features the artwork of Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. SCL extends its thanks to Emory for use of this image.

MORE ABOUT ALPRENTICE “BUNCHY” CARTER…

Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter was the founder and leader of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Bunchy had been a leader of the Slausons, a street organization which had, at that time, over 5,000 members. Like so many, Bunchy was incarcerated and spent four years in prison at Soledad. While there, he studied the teachings of Malcolm X, and he and his friend Eldridge Cleaver decided that when they were released they would start a west coast chapter of Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity. On his release in 1967, he found that Eldridge had joined the Black Panther Party and later that year Bunchy began organizing the Southern California Chapter of the BPP.

“A Revolutionary Memorial to Alprentice ‘Bunchy’ Carter”

Excerpted from the Black Panther Party Newspaper

“From the Slausons, from Soledad Prison, from the day to day confrontation with street life, Bunchy Carter brought with him all of his experiences, all the knowledge and love for the people that a man could give. He delivered a clear understanding of the situation that caused the oppression of Black people, and the subsequent need for the Black Panther Party.

“Bunchy was insistent that we understand the importance of unity—not the false unity proposed by government agents—but that unity that would be a key to the liberation of oppressed people. So a few months after the Chapter was formed, Bunchy issued a directive stressing the importance of unity in the community; it read: “The Black Panther Party must never be the enemy of the people. The Black Panther Party must never put itself in the position that other organizations can make it seem to be the enemy of Black organizations and thereby, the enemy of Black people….Therefore, we do the people’s thing!…The people will relate to the Party which relates to them. Therefore, we must continue to relate to the people.…”

“In keeping with the Party’s goal of becoming more and more one with the people, to better understand and serve their needs, Bunchy participated in a special educational program for Black students at UCLA in the fall of 1968. He felt that there, he would be able to recruit and educate other Black students around the need to serve the Black community. On January 17, 1969, after a Black Students Union meeting, Alprentice Bunchy Carter, Deputy Minister of Defense and John Huggins, Deputy Minister of Information of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party, were shot down and murdered
by members of US organization. Alprentice Bunchy Carter and John Huggins represented that force, that emerging unity that would someday flourish, the unity of all oppressed communities—Black, poor, and student alike.

“The spirit and wisdom of Bunchy’s leadership made the Chapter forge ahead, continuing and improving its service to the community. Like other Chapters of the Black Panther Party across the U.S. empire, the Southern California Chapter has implemented survival programs to serve the basic needs and desires of the people.

“And so we salute him, commemorate him, honor him, through our daily service to the people and the programs for their survival—the survival he believed in, lived and died for.”

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE

The Bunchy Carter tribute stamp features the artwork of Emory Doulas, former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. For many, their understanding of the Black Panther Party and its ideas was shaped by access to Emory’s art—which appeared every week on the pages of the Black Panther Party newspaper and was widely circulated in the United States, Europe, and the Third World. His powerful visual images illustrated the conditions oppressing, particularly, poor Black people, while at the same time portraying a vision of hope for everyone. SCL extends its thanks to Emory for use of this image.

TIMELINE

October 1966: Huey Newton and Bobby Seale write the first draft of the
Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) 10-Point Program.
August 1967: Cointelpro, FBI short for “counterintelligence program,” is launched against Black power organizations, with the BPP as its main target.
January 1968: Bunchy Carter organizes the Southern California Chapter of the BPP (which stretches to San Diego).
March 1968: Arthur Glen Morris, brother of Bunchy Carter, is shot and killed by “agents” of the U.S. government. He is the first member of the BPP to be killed.
August 1968: Police kill BPP Captains Little Tommy Lewis, Steve Bartholomew, and Robert Lawrence at a service station in Watts.
September 1968: Bunchy Carter, John Huggins, Geronimo Pratt and Elaine Brown all register as students in UCLA’s High Potential Program.
January 1969: Two Los Angeles Black Panther leaders, John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, are gunned down by members of the US organization on the UCLA campus. In internal memoranda, the FBI take credit for the incident.
April 1969: The L.A. Panthers begin their Free Breakfast for Children program in honor of John Huggins. “The Breakfast for Children Program,” wrote Hoover in an internal FBI memo in May 1969, “represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”
May 1969: The Party office on 41st and Central is raided by the police. During a two-week period around this time, the LAPD makes 56 arrests of 42 Panthers.
July 1969: Two Black Panthers are wounded and a third, Sylvester Bell, is killed in San Diego. The FBI again congratulates itself for its “success.”
December 1969: The LAPD deploys its new SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics, a militarized police unit) teams and 400 police officers to raid three L.A. BPP facilities including the Central Ave. headquarters. Only after holding off the police for five hours do the Panthers surrender, alive.
December 1969: The Bunchy Carter Free Health Clinic opens in L.A. By 1970, People’s Free Medical Clinics had become a requirement for every BPP chapter.

Download this Bio and Timeline for Bunchy Carter.

Samella Lewis Tribute Stamp

admin — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 02:44:23 +0000

In a life dedicated to African American art and art history, Samella Lewis has worked for over seven decades to ensure that art is understood, and experienced, as an essential expression of our lives, communities, and struggles. The Samella Lewis tribute stamp features her 1996 oil painting, “Interior.” SCL extends its thanks to Samella for use of this image.

MORE ABOUT SAMELLA LEWIS…

Artist and art historian Samella Lewis has touched the lives of artists, educators, students, and countless others; we love her for her commitment to African American art and art history. Born on February 27, 1924, in New Orleans, Lewis began her art career as a student at Dillard University, where she was instructed by the African American sculptor Elizabeth Catlett. She completed her graduate studies at the Ohio State University, and in 1951 became the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in fine arts and art history.

She was hired as education coordinator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1968, and was amazed to find Black and African art gathering dust in the museum’s basement. Administrators ignored her suggestions to display this art in the museum and attempted to discredit her in public after she hired Black art teachers to conduct workshops. The museum eventually apologized to Lewis, but it had become clear to her that African Americans needed institutions where they were making the decisions.

She left to establish the Contemporary Crafts Gallery in Los Angeles with artist Bernie Casey, and developed new ways of thinking about the relationship between museums and African American art. The gallery directly connected African American artists with community members, specializing in the distribution of inexpensive prints that would quickly bring art into the hands of ordinary people. In 1976, Lewis founded the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, and organized numerous exhibitions as the staff’s senior curator there until 1986. Through these and other efforts, she played a critical role in fostering, supporting, and growing the creative community of African American artists in Los Angeles.

Central to Lewis’s writings, and her work in general, is the idea that African American art should explore an “art of inspiration” based upon the experiences of African Americans themselves, instead of striving for a refined expression separate from ordinary life. As she stated in her book Art: African American, “the artist is a community resource, valued and supported because he or she forsakes the ‘ivory tower’ and gets to the heart of community life.”

The Samella Lewis tribute stamp features her 1996 painting, “Interior,” SCL extends its thanks to Samella for use of this image.

TIMELINE

1941: Samella Lewis enters Dillard University in New Orleans on a scholarship and studies with sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett.
1940s and 1950s: Lewis becomes known for her realistic artworks that explore the experiences of African Americans in the South.
1951: Lewis becomes the first African American women to earn a doctorate in fine arts and art history.
1953–58: While serving as art department chair at historically black Florida A&M University, Lewis emerges as a leader of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), drawing the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan, which fired shots through the windows of Lewis’s house.
Early 1960s: Lewis travels to Asia to study Chinese and Japanese art.
1963–1964: Artists including Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff form the group Spiral, dedicated to defining problems faced by artists linking art with social responsibility, heralding the beginning of the “Black Arts Movement.”
1968-69: The L.A. County Museum of Art hires Lewis as its education coordinator. The African Arts Magazine is established at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Late 1960s: Lewis begins to make films about African American artists.
1970-84: Lewis serves an art history professor at Scripps College.
1970s: Lewis and artist Bernie Casey create the Contemporary Crafts Gallery in an old building in Los Angeles, and the gallery remains a leading showcase for African American artists throughout the 1970s.
1976: Lewis founds the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles and remains as its senior curator until 1986.
1976: Lewis founds Black Art: An International Quarterly (now The International Review of African American Art) to lend visibility to the work of African American visual artists.
1978: Lewis publishes a textbook Art: African American, which quickly becomes the standard college textbook on the subject, as Black Studies programs are being established on college and university campuses across the United States.

Download this Bio and Timeline of Samella.