Jarabe Creativo: Paul Valadez & the Transgression of Español
Artist Paul Valadez is from Stockton, California. After attending Delta College he attended the San Francisco Art Institute for his BFA and eventually completed his MFA at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley. This collection of 93 works was generously donated by the artist and we are extremely grateful for his selection of the Latin American Studies Program at the University of the Pacific as the recipient of this tremendous group of artworks, which will enrich the knowledge of our students about the Latinx experience in our country. I am grateful to Lisa Cooperman for organizing this exhibition at the Reynolds Gallery.
Paul Valadez’s art incorporates elements of everyday life in a city of migrants where Spanish is the common currency and traditional expressions and names of food become objects of nostalgia and the fertile soil for “la patria.” Indeed, “la patria es el lenguaje,” the homeland is the language. In his selection of “anuncios” or ads, Valadez makes us look again at what Mike Davis called the “Magical Urbanism” of American cities - the barrios, taco trucks, and colorful murals that flourish across America. Here Mexican restaurants become embassies; transmitting culture through the smells of tortillas, soup, carne asada and the refreshing raspas. His paintings recreate the menu of culinary Spanish: “BYOB Michelada cup 2 dollers,” “Fresanada,” “Beef burritos,” “tacos,” “enchiladas,” and “chimichangas,” as in the “ready-made” boards we can see on any taco truck: “carnitas,” “fajitas,” “sopa de tortilla,” “huaraches,” and a “Chile Verde Burretto” (as if written in Italian); another canvas says: “Exotic’s Mexican Food.” All these images make us rethink the place of Mexican food in contemporary American culture, a country where salsa has replaced ketchup, and the influence of spicy Mexican food has reconfigured American culture in such a way that some people think that “tacos” are American, no longer an exotic food. If anything, the “reconquista” is not an imperial desire of territory, but a recognition of our past rooted in the Spanish language.
In the painting that says: “Carta Blanca: Es un placer!” we read in the background the word “wetback” in capital letters, as a counter-narrative to the pleasure of the beer ad. The Spanish language may be seen as the bigger political narrative looming in the back: an offensive epithet to migrants who have crossed the river, the Rio Grande’s border wall. Paul Valadez’s works operate in the ekphrastic conjunction of image and words, as in the portrait of “abuela,” here a smiling blond grandmother, or in the piece titled “gringo” accompanied by a “calavera” in the Day of the Dead tradition and the grabados (imprints) of José Guadalupe Posada. In “Mexican Hillbilly” we read in red capital letters a font that resembles the old west “bandido” posters. How do you say hillbilly in Spanish? provinciano, palurdo, campesino, cerrero? Can there be a Mexican Hillbilly? A hillbilly is a person from the remote areas of the Appalachians. Is this a contradiction or a redundancy?
Valadez’s collage compositions in the series called Selections from the Great Mexican -American Songbook connect contradicting images such as a martial arts advertisement with the word “Afecto” (affection). In “Alvino Rey,” the American Jazz guitarist is superimposed with images of colonial Monterrey and the slang expression“¿Qué pedo?” the composition seems to ask “what in the world?” or “what is going on here?” In another composition, we read “The Beautiful City” then, “buñuelos bacanora” (Bacanora is a municipality in the Mexican state of Sonora). Instead of sweet fritters the artist collages swift moving tanks, jeeps, and war planes. The visual concoctions that Valadez creates decolonize the progress of technology with a word that remits to Mexican culture, an expression of oral cultural machineries. A Warholian jar of “Miracle Whip” is forced to dialogue with birria; “chapulines” (grasshoppers) hover over a perfectly decorated pastry; the old masters (Mozart, Handel, Bach, Beethoven) have to share space with a fashion catalogue sprinkled with the words “Chiles” and “Sophist”; and another album is covered with the words “creativo, jarabe” and a poster from a magazine in Spanish that reads: ¿has perdido la línea? Have you forgotten the line? We read in other compositions the words: curitas (band aids), despistado (clueless), discutidor (argumentative), and “Dream tacos.” A blond little boy reading a book is contrasted with an ad for oriental pills that stimulate mammarian growth, and the word “Estoy grifo” (I’m high); prelude and a fugue are occupied with the words “mambo ambicioso,” and a 1950s Stepford wife is rewritten with the expression “Me vuelves loco.” The word “Frijoles” disrupts the album “If I Built a World for You”.
All these images are a palimpsest of cultures, as in an old wall that has been covered once and again with different posters. Timeworn 1950s magazine ads are visited now with Spanish, the second most spoken language in the USA. Another album says “We sell the…” which the artist complements with the word “gringas” or “no mames” across a television advertisement. In another commercial that promotes a remedy for ulcers, we read the word “me vale madres,” as if the best remedy for ulcers is that old Mexican state of zen: “valemadrismo.” Paul Valadez’s art looks at the American past with a Mexican lens. As if Norman Rockwell is visited by a Pachuco; it revisits the monocultural past of America and reads it again by its absence of diversity.
Paul Valdez’s art is connected to a long tradition of Latinx artists, including Melesio Casas “Barrio Dog” (1987), the compositions of Pepón Osorio and Carmen Lomas Garza “Lotería Segunda Tabla” (1972), the illustration “Dead Mickey” by Artemio Rodríguez, and Enrique Chagoya’s “Printed Códices.” The traditional game of “Lotería” circles the ekphrastic explorations of some artists, the sometimes-redundant game, do we need the word “El sol” to refer to a picture of the sun? la sirena? la escalera? Yes, we do. The word in Spanish is as plastic as the image. Paul Valadez also continues the tradition of the 17th and 18th century “Castas paintings” that depicted the mixed-race individuals of Spanish America with innovative racial terminologies such as: mestizo, mulato, tentenelaire, saltapatrás. The most important painter of this epoch being Miguel Cabrera. In the 93 samples of the creative syrup of Paul Valadez we are provoked with what it means to live and create in a hyphenation of Mexican American culture, drawing from two traditions and the cultural richness of being bicultural and bilingual. Spanish language occupies his compositions and disrupts the normativity of the American past depicted in magazines and advertisements that did not represent the “other” or the narrative of migrants. In Paul Valadez, we see a celebration of biculturalism, and the freedom to reconstruct the past and exhibit how much we have progressed in the configuration of America. Valadez invites us to open our eyes and embrace the beauty of the language displayed in a Mexican restaurant, on a taco truck, and how the deliciousness of a burrito is also in the sonority of its name. He also invites us to decolonize our past and uncover the buried mirrors, as Carlos Fuentes would say, to study our past is to clear the dusty buried mirrors to find the image of ourselves.
Martin Camps, Ph.D. Director Latin American Studies Department of Modern Languages & Literature University of the Pacific July 2019