Altarista Ofelia Esparza heads to Washington D.C. this year to create a Día de Los Muertos ofrenda honoring her indigenous ancestry for the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. Image: L.A. Museum of Natural History  By Abel M. Salas Although she will blush and shudder with nervous embarrassment to hear it said, or read aloud from these pages, Doña Ofelia Esparza is clearly on her way to becoming synonymous with the ofrenda. Literally an “offering,” the ofrenda, or “altar” is a spiritually-based expression of reverence or love traditionally assembled to honor the lives of departed loved ones. Today, however, it is just as likely to represent an idea or a political message. In the course of a quiet and unassuming second-act career as a fine artist over the last 30-years, Ofelia has earned a pristine reputation as one of the nation’s preeminent altar-makers. Widely acknowledged as a leading exponent and master practitioner of a cultural tradition she was first made awar...

Rufino Romero (l.) as Luís J. Rodríguez or “Chin” with Haylee Sánchez as  “Camila” in the new stage adaptation of Always Running by author Luís Rodríguez and director Hector Rodriguez at Casa 0101 Theater. Photo by Ed Krieger Review by Abel M. Salas Based on the best-selling book by Luís J. Rodríguez, the Casa 0101 world-premiere of Always Running is a subtle tour de force. Directed by Hector Rodríguez (no relation to the renowned poet, novelist, youth advocate and founder of Tia Chucha Press), the production benefits from a surprisingly effective adaption of the classic memoir, a theatrical adaptation developed collaboratively by the director and the author himself. A Carl Sandburg Literary Award winner that garnered early praise as a New York Times “Notable Book,” Always Running was originally published in 1993. The searing, achingly honest and often brutally personal account of the author’s struggle to overcome the soul-scarring wounds imprinted on his psyche as the p...

  A scene from The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo . Photo by Michael Sedano     by Abel M. Salas Filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez still can’t take his eyes off the metropolis he calls home. If anything, his gaze has intensified, zeroing in on the untold paradigms of racial divide and the dynamics of difference that have long beleaguered Los Angeles, a city not yet completely comfortable with its Mexican soul. In the 14 years since the broadcast of Los Angeles Now —one of his earliest documentaries for PBS—an examination of the demographic shifts that signaled the “browning of America,” the now grey-bearded Angeleno has mined contemporary issues of race, identity and cultural diversity with increasing depth and intuitive foresight. This even as his lens, calibrated by an acute, erudite and humanist Latino perspective, has been artfully rotated toward the past. His recent focus on subjects culled from the period of social turmoil and political unrest that erupte...

  Richard Azurdia (l.) and Cheryl Umaña in This Land . Photo: Grettel Cortes Photography by Abel M. Salas What would you do if you were commissioned to write a piece addressing the demographic shifts in L.A. and told to pay especially close attention to places like South Central, Watts and Compton? If you were advocacy lawyer-turned-playwright Evangeline Ordaz and were asked to author a new play for the most prestigious civic theatre in L.A., you would dig. You would draw deeply from the well of unspoken and buried history. You’re assiduous research would take you to places, events and hard, cold truths those well-intended arbiters of culture and high art who award commissions might not have expected, or even cared to be reminded of. Oh well. If you were Ordaz, you would know, instinctively, that whatever considerations lay behind initiatives branded with terms such as “outreach,” “diversity,” “audience development,” “new voices,” “opportunity,” or “enrichment,” writing a p...

Left - right: Jimmy Gómez, Wendy Carrillo, María Cabildo and Arturo Carmona By Abel Salas With the appointment of former Congressman Xavier Becerra to a post as the California State Attorney General, the seat he leaves vacant has drawn a crowded field of congressional contenders. A contest in which no clear front-runner has emerged from among the 23 Washington D.C. hopefuls seeking to replace Becerra in the 34th U.S. Congressional District, the race is as much about redefining the soul of Latino leadership in Los Angeles as it is about effective fundraising and the community-building required to generate enough ground-level campaign momentum between now and the April 4th special primary election. The top two primary candidates, regardless of party affiliation, will appear on the ballot in the general election on June 6th, 2017. In what might be best described as a densely populated political fray, the 23 candidates represent a broad swath of experience, leadership styles and ...

Interview by Pancho Lipschitz, @pancho_lipschitz Master muralist Wayne Healy calls Isabel Rojas-Williams “La Reina de los murales,” but in reality she is more an ambassador or a madrina ; making friends and building coalitions among artists, politicians,  academics and arts supporters on behalf of public art. Her love of street art and murals began in the ’70s when she sprayed anti-government slogans on the walls of Pinochet’s Chile. She wrote her Masters’ thesis on the history of murals in Los Angeles and, unsurprisingly, gave birth to a muralist.  Her son, former street artist Pablo Cristi, studied at the California College of the Arts and now teaches at the Oakland School for the Arts . But her most significant role now, many believe, is her post as the Executive Director at the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (MCLA) , where she leads an epic and long overdue mural restoration initiative. We met on a drizzly morning at her outdoor office— Nicole’s Cafe in Sout...

by María Cabildo Today’s patriots make self-deprecating jokes about their height and use sports analogies to describe the depths of the foreclosure crisis and the devastation it has caused across the country. Others have floppy salt and pepper hair that rivals my fourteen-year-old son’s worst bed head.  These patriots work at the White House, 2,700 miles away from us. Their names are not household names, but the policies they fight (in less partisan times I would have said ‘work’) to implement and to block have everything to do with our future as a nation. There was no compassion deficit in evidence when I, along with housing advocates from across the country, met with and heard from the President’s economic team, I felt reassured that their hearts and our hearts were in the same place. I came away knowing that the compassion deficit in Washington, ...