Word: art
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nowadays the mainstream is receiving a rich new current. More and more, American film, theater, music, design, dance and art are taking on a Hispanic color and spirit. Look around. You can see the special lightning, the distinctive gravity, the portable wit, the personal spin. The new marquee names have a Spanish ring: Edward James Olmos, Andy Garcia, Maria Conchita Alonso. At the movies, the summer of La Bamba gave way last year to the autumn of Born in East L. A.; now the springtime of Stand and Deliver blends into the summer of Salsa. On the record charts...
...equivalent Latino surge is reaching the higher cultural circles. The art world is opening its eyes to Hispanic artists whose work, sharp and full throated, owes its strength to aesthetic intelligence, not ethnic scenery. Meanwhile, Latino playwrights are supplying off-Broadway and the regional theaters with new voices. And while the great Hispanic-American Novel is still waiting to be written, the splendid figures of Latin American literature -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes -- are being translated straight into the American literary fabric, not to mention the best-seller lists...
...charts and box-office receipts is not much help in the struggles against such things as low wages and poor education, the things that count most for Hispanics still in the barrios. There are misgivings too about the kind of treatment Hispanic life will get from big art galleries and entertainment conglomerates that can grind whole cultures into merchandise. Does anyone really need a sitcom with characters named Juan and Maria mouthing standard showbiz punch lines? The trick for Hispanic talents these days is to get to the market fresh, not canned...
...hemmed in by any preconceptions at all. Consider the Los Angeles artist known as Gronk. He has impeccable Chicano credentials: born in 1954 in mostly Chicano East Los Angeles, he was a co- founder in his younger days of an ad hoc group of Latino artists who brought their art to the streets. But all of that was the forcing ground for a talent that resists ethnic labels. His paintings carry echoes of Mexican symbolism, but they also wear the signs of European expressionism, new-wave imagery, old- fashioned camp. And he recalls low- and high-culture influences...
...blacks got a brief ride on the B-movie circuit in the '70s (Shaft, Superfly), and Hispanics got short shrift, even as Mexicans were streaming into California to tend moguls' gardens and kitchens. When Latin actors did seize center screen, it was in art-house fodder like Alambrista!, Zoot Suit, El Norte and Crossover Dreams. These films meant well, but they rarely did well. They staggered under the weight of their liberal messages like a postman with the A.C.L.U. on his route. So many good intentions were riding on these films that they became morality plays, long on the uplift...