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osa: I was born Teresa Ann Hidalgo.1 Now it is Dr. Osa Bear, or Osa T. Hidalgo de la Riva. My mom renamed me Royal Eagle Bear because when I was traveling once in Berlin, I kept having nightmares about war and my mom sent her magic. When I came out to my younger sister, Liz, I was fifteen and she was eleven. Her response was, “So what, I’ve been gay!” I thought, “Probably so, since she has five planets in Scorpio.” I don’t like getting into the whole debate about whether you are born gay, lesbian, transgender, or bisexual, or if it is just past lives, or the power of evolution. There is an underground story of sexuality within the Chi- cano movement that is important to tell because it has been omitted. I hope my story contributes to undoing that erasure. My aunt Sally being gay was a good role model. Then, when my mom came out much later, it was really cool, but she came out at a different time, like in the eighties. I learned a lot from my aunt Sally who was actively gay in the 1950s. From both of them, I get those two different languages and culturally and his- torically specific representations of how Chicana lesbianas were, even if it was primarily through my family. I always say my family is matrilineal because the power of the energy runs through the women or the female part of the family. With the de la Rivas, this is really strong and there is a lot of lesbian presence. I don’t like the word “matriarchy” even though matriarchal is more accepted. It makes me think of a more dominant system and it reminds me of patriarchy. I use “matrilineal” because matriarchy seems like merely the opposite of patriarchy, but I am describing a completely different situation. For me, matrilineal is having the energy running through or the decision making centered within the women.
C O N V E R S AT I O N S O N M UJ E R I S TA M OV I E M A K I N G vIsIons of utoPIa wHIle lIvIng In oCCuPIed aztlán Osa Hidalgo de la Riva and Maylei Blackwell
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s I know my aunt Sally is butch-identified. She told me that in her day, before the second wave of feminism in the seventies, “butches were butches and femmes were femmes.” There was not much confusion about the roles. While this may seem sexist or simplistic, she thought that with second-wave feminism the roles got confusing or washed out and diluted and that is why people couldn’t stay together that long. Before that, people had their roles and that is why they stayed together longer. Now, I think because people are having children more and more in lesbiana relationships, I think they are lasting longer overall with more marriages with children. But for a while, there in the sixties and seventies, it was just more open. Not that there weren’t relations and children like that, but I think what my aunt was saying is that they literately had like forty- or fifty-year relationships. It was a different world. In her day, it was illegal to be gay. She got persecuted for being gay. She got strip-searched in a way that was a form of rape by the police. She definitely participated in the queer clubs as a dark-skinned, Chicana lesbiana, and she didn’t use the word “lesbian” that much or “homosexual.” She told me about the word “homophile”—that she preferred the word “homophile.” She did the same things [as we do now]: go listen to music and dance at parties, but they used to have lesbian brawls all the time. In Stockton, there was a lesbian bar by the port and she and her buddies would go there after they played baseball. They would go with their girlfriends. So many sailors and military guys would go have drinks there as well, and they would start hitting on the women but the butches wouldn’t have it. Almost all fights at the time were with the guys because they thought that they could just come in and take some of the femmes and start flirt- ing with them and all of that. She also told me stories about the San Francisco scene and celebrities who were gay and would go to the clubs on the down low. She used to tell me all about the women’s clubs back then, but it was hidden and they had codes to get in the club. The Daughters of Bilitis were predominantly white, and she told me that lesbian women had their own organizations but they were not as known as the gay men’s organizations and clubs. But she is old-school. She bought a house in Dublin [California] because she always worked full-time as a teacher. My mom had just had the twins, and even though I had already been gay I came out to my mom. She took me to aunt Sally’s house who said, “Mija, if it was up to me, I would not want you to be gay because it is such a hard lifestyle.” I remember she told me, “Don’t ever, ever put in writing that you are gay.” That was way back in the late sixties, and ever since then I wanted to be a filmmaker and tell everyone I was gay. Even in Morelia [where she has lived for many decades], they have asked Aunt Sally to publicly read, when she published her own book of poetry, prose, and photographs entitled Lágrimas y Cadenas/Chains and Tears.2 She is connected with a lot of the different generations of gay folk. It’s cool because my mom was gay too and she came out in her own way in the eighties. My mom came back from Mexico, and women were asking if she was dating anyone. It was weird because
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basically they were asking me on the side if she was available. It was so funny. Liz and I were looking at each other like we were the grandparents who felt that Lola [their mom] really had to calm down, but she was happy and free. It was good to see the different generations since Liz and I had our coming-out in the seventies, before our mom. We definitely have a matrilineal, lesbian, feminist, mujerista, multigenerational spectrum.
MayleI: What was it like when you came out?
osa: When I came out, it was traumatic for my mom because at that time she was a single mom in Southside Stockton. She worked in the canneries and she still did art and her political work, but it was difficult because I was the oldest. I was always such a model kid because I was involved in politics, in school, and I was getting good grades. I helped with the family. I was a good girl and all of the sudden I started missing school and cutting classes, lying and doing a few things. What happened was that I was coming out and I would want to go see my girlfriend. It was hard. I went to the library in Stockton—now it’s called the César Chávez Library—and read all the things I could about homosexuality because nobody really talked about it. It was a big taboo. When I came out to my mom, I wrote her this long, poetic letter about all the people that were gay in history, telling her that I was in love and that people should be celebrating that I am in love. I ran away. She thought that I was on drugs or something, so we ended up at the police station in Stockton. It was a challenge coming out as a teenager when you are in Stockton. I ran away because my mom didn’t know what was going on, and she had just had the twins or was pregnant with the twins. She was going through her own difficulties being a single mom with five kids on welfare. It was a hard for her and she didn’t know what was going on. They called my dad, so all of us, we went down there. My dad was really cool and my mom said, “If that is what you want to do, if this is really the issue, then I accept it.” She was cool with it and she even let me move in with my partner. My dad said, “Well okay, let’s go have some pizza.” Right now there is an epidemic with our youth and teen suicides. I think I was really fortunate to have my aunt Sally and my parents. Of course, my sister Liz, she is my cosmic twin. Even though she is four years younger, she is so wise she feels like an older sister.
MayleI: It seemed like there were sexual subcultures in the Chicano movement that are not well documented.
osa: Back in our day, the lesbian thing was in full practice in the seventies with the Whoremonia Society that Liz and I founded. The Whoremonia Society was a secret society encouraging women to explore their own sexuality and bodies through female-to-female free love. I can’t really say more because it was secret,
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s so I can’t talk about it or else it won’t be secret. To this day, Liz and I still argue over who was president. Well, now all of these words around gender and sexuality have changed their meanings, like how we now think of gender with the trans movement, but at that time, it was simple. In Southside Stockton in the seventies, we were young, free, and gay. Being with women was probably on the forefronts of our minds . . . a lot. We went to school at Cal State University, Long Beach in LA, so we continued to have encounters with women who were straight and some that were gay. Mainly, you have to realize it was during the sexual revolution, you know? The early seventies and all of that, so there was a lot of sexual openness at that time.
MayleI: Were you an activist/artist when you were young?
osa: We all did our own thing. My sister Liz and I had our own newspaper called Mama Sappho Press.3 Really, it was more like what people came to call “zines.” From 1973 to 1975, we would make it in Long Beach, literally in a little closet. We had subscriptions from about 250 people in California and even all the way to Texas, where some Latino library ordered a regular subscription. We were inspired by what Lorna Dee [Cervantes] did with Mango Press. We ran our own paper made of articles, community chisme, comics, a calendar, and advertise- ments from various Stockton community members, businesses that supported us like our gay friend who had a flower shop or the colleges, so we got different little ads. We ran these advertisements and that allowed us to go back and forth from Long Beach to Stockton. We took them around the community, building up our subscriptions base so that at one point we had 250 folks that subscribed to Mama Sappho Press. We did that for a few years, going back and forth across the state on our motorcycles, delivering the paper. We didn’t want to publish in a patriarchal press so we made our own. Then we took the show on the road.
MayleI: What was the motivation for the press?
osa: All I can say is, we grew up on a patriarchal planet where the dominant religions are patriarchal, Hollywood, the press . . . everything. This was before This Bridge Called My Back came out [in 1981], so we never wanted to publish or fall under patriarchal systems, even in publishing.4 The queer situation in Stock- ton was so radically different than say LA, I mean it was totally the opposite. We had more of a rural situation and in LA you had an urban situation. I think that the idea was to be more inclusive of whoever wanted to be in this little gay rag. It allowed us to be ourselves, and since in many spaces we were discriminated against often our work was separate. We were involved in the women’s circles, and that was white and middle class. The Raza organizations were male-centric, heterosexist and sometimes we experienced homophobia from our straight Chi- cana sisters. The gay liberation movement was primarily white. My mom took
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the twins to La Escuelita de La Raza, a bilingual preschool and community centro in Long Beach. At Long Beach State, we were involved and influenced by strong Women’s Studies and Chicano Studies Departments. My mom was in the Art and Chicano Studies Departments and she was pro- ducing a lot of art. She met artists Leo Limon, John Valadez, Yreina Cervantes, Pete Ruiz, Linda Vallejo, members of Tierra then, and so my mom opened up her home and began running the Centro de Arte in East Long Beach. All the young artists mentioned above, and then some, actually, a lot of local, national, and international artists came through the Centro de Arte over the years. Liz and I were both working on our degrees in psychology and the Psychology Department was in the same area as [the] women’s studies program, but the problem was that all the women’s studies faculty were primarily white. We would ask, “What about the Chicanas and the women of color?” and they said, “If you are interested in that you have to go organize that yourself.” They were being separatist. Trying to bridge two worlds together, Liz, my mom, and I started the Mextiza Colectiva, and we worked out of the Centro de Arte that my mom started in her home. That was the first time I met Sylvia Morales, since she came to the Centro. Anna NietoGomez came by too. Luis Valdez, lots of activists, artists, musicians, UFW farmworker organizers, and so on visited the Centro de Arte, many even spent the night while travelling through. Director Lola Dela-Riva was very generous with her home and familia.5 René Yañez and different directors from the first statewide coalition of Chicano art centers, the Concilio de Arte Popular, would come and go. From the Mextiza Colectiva, Liz also did her own collections of poetry. She wrote her first collection when she was about sixteen years old called Phoenix and later, Primitive and Proud. In fact, that is where I would get the title for my later film. Liz wrote her book through the Mextiza Colectiva and I edited Women’s Poetry, an anthology based at Long Beach State. My mom did the cover art and design. So we did Mama Sappho from ’73 through ’75. It was a little homemade publica- tion—eight and a half by eleven inches—and we folded it in half. It was really grassroots. For the typography, we used rub-on letters at that time. We had the Mextiza Colectiva probably between 1973 through the early eighties because the twins were really small. The Colectiva hosted discussion groups and organized a Chicana lesbiana poetry tour in 1976. It was during the Bicentennial, so Liz and I went with a couple of the other women. We went to some of the first battered- women’s shelters, women’s bookstores and cafes. We set out across the country with a packed itinerary. We went in my little Dodge Colt station wagon, which had all these murals on it including a pre-Columbian goddess painted on the door whose hair went all the way back to the tail light. Four of us took that car on tour and we got invited all over the country, so we were going to drive to Florida, New York, Boston, and all over Texas and the Southwest. In the end, we couldn’t drive the entire tour, so we did make it to Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Denver, Boulder, Phoenix, Tucson, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley. Basically, we performed all across
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s the golden states of Aztlán. The Chicana lesbiana poetry tour was sponsored and produced by the Mextiza Colectiva. Liz and I read our lesbiana flor y canto poetry, and that was before This Bridge Called My Back, so it was nice to see when This Bridge came out because it was like, “Wow! This is right up our alley!”
MayleI: Were you active in the Chicano movement?
osa: Well, we were all active, as a family. My brother Louis did Chicano murals and he was always painting. When we organized events like a poetry reading or a Chicano art show, we would always have family and a large mix of people. Our community crossed many boundaries. For some events, the audience would be more Chicano and straight. At others, it would be maybe more white women or lesbians of color, but we would still have a mix of family and friends coming together. At that time, I think it was important to bring everyone together. I had a poem at that time, I don’t remember the title, but what was important to me was to consciously want to read my lesbiana gay stuff to the Chicano groups, and I would read my pieces about being a dark brown woman to the white women’s and gay groups, so I would always mix it up to make them feel a little uncomfortable. I felt that all those communities, identities, and sensibilities and culturas were part of me, so I didn’t mind being in your face about it at that time. I remember that feeling of a Chicano renaissance. I remember a lot of the artists painting, musicians making música, dancers, teatro, healers, lovers, writ- ers, photographers, and so on surging with the creative spirit, doing their thing, especially at my mom’s Centro de Arte. She offered her home base truly as all of our home. Mí casa es su casa. I was always traveling, coming here and going all over the planet and returning to Long Beach. But the community was a beautiful blend of the radicals, community leaders, and even the Chicano power guys that believed in violence. They believed, like warriors, that you have to fight fire with fire. They are the Aztec warriors, ancient power and pulse. Maybe another natural reason why it was easy for me to feel the matrilinear vibrations of las olmecas.
MayleI: What was it like to be a lesbian around the Chicano movement?
osa: My family teases that I think everyone is gay. I think because Liz and I were with so many women that were straight it has always made me think that given an opportunity, people can just be sexual, you know? This is my own theory. I think that for straight women the dynamics are different since it is a straight world. They can go experiment or have an experience with another female because they know they can go back and get married and have children and live a traditional life without any repercussions. On the other hand, the women, and this is where it’s really—you know, this is the first time I am coming out with this. . . . Any- way, I am coming out with my own identity and my own experiences, but that is why I have avoided mainstream media involvement. I am sixty-one. I’m going to
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be sixty-two this year. I know things have changed a lot, but there are so many straight Latina or Chicana women that I was sexual with. I would never, even until this day, if I see them at a conference or school or anywhere, whether they were married or whatever, out them because I respect their identity and however they want to identify. But, I know back in the day either we slept together, or we cuddled, or we kissed, or we made out, or we had sex, you know, one time, two times, three times, o más. I never felt that because I slept with a woman that I would have to ask her to change her identity. I was openly lesbiana and gay, and a lot of women at that time wanted to experiment or they felt safe with me or Liz, or both. Our pride and energy of being open lesbianas created a synergy, and women expressed their attraction to us. It was the era of free love and for us, it was the era of free Chicana lesbiana love. Two-spirited sexuality y más. This was way back in the day, so it was all good, you know. I hope I don’t get in trouble. Because if somebody like Trump gets voted in I am going to be the first to burned at the stake. They are going to pick me up because I am a visible outsider as the out, dark-skinned lesbiana. We are who we are. Qué viva!
MayleI: What does that mean to you? To be an out, dark-skinned lesbian for your life, your political work, and your art?
osa: I think that it is so much a part of me that it is hard to know anything dif- ferent, even in the films I made. That is how mujerista moviemaking happened because you see the white, male, straight hero so many times over and over, even if the majority of the context of the story was set in the neighborhood of people of color, or lesbians, or women. It’s still so many white male heroes. That is why I thought it was important to put together my mujerista moviemaking theory and praxis. In needing to finish my dissertation, I was able to work with Sylvia Morales and Lourdes Portillo. I was able to interview them and to immerse myself in their work. I always say they are the veterana filmmakers because they were the first generation. They both produced their main first films in 1979. Chon Noriega says it’s mainly because the schools at the time included affirmative action and they were able to go to college and do their art. So both make their first two pieces through schools, Otis for Lourdes and Sylvia at UCLA with their master’s degree. As I studied their work, I interpreted their work from a queer Chicana lens.
MayleI: When did you start making your own films?
osa: The filmmaking for me evolved because my mom, Lola Dela-Riva, was doing art with farmworker children at migrant camps in the sixties and being an artist and going to art camps. Because she was a teacher in the sixties, I was always surrounded by art in the house growing up. She had her little space where she had her art area and we were always encouraged to be artists, but I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to be a mathematician when I first arrived to Long
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s Beach. Anyway, growing up, there were always artists around the house. My mom recorded musicians and took us to a few concerts even though we were on wel- fare. Even though she was a single mom with five kids, we were still encouraged to be around art and be creative, so I and all my siblings always drew. I started writ- ing poetry when I was seven. It was like my first language. I say that because I still don’t speak Spanish too well, nor English, and I lived in Germany for nearly a year and can’t speak German either. Some folks are natural at spoken languages, like my sister Liz. She learned conversational Chinese at twelve years young, was one of the first Chicana lesbiana mainframe computer programmers for IBM, learning many computer languages, and so on.6 But poetry came out of me and music. I played the guitar since I was four, when my aunt Sally give me a little guitar. She had a whole lot of queer Hawaiian friends like in the late fifties and sixties when I was baby, and she would come to Stockton and get me and take me to meet her friends in the city where she was studying to be [a] teacher at the then San Francisco State College. I would sing, sing, sing at four and five and six years old. I remember growing up always listening to the ukulele. I remember them singing beautiful harmony. I loved that. I think that film followed my writing. I remember when I was seven my mom busted me when I was supposed to be in bed sleeping. This was in Southside Stockton. I was under the covers with a little flashlight. I just felt compelled to write about nature and love. “The bright yellow full moon is shining so bright down upon me / The surrounding trees are saying, good night, sleep tight.” So I was writing that when my mom came in and saw the flashlight under the blan- kets and she said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m writing a poem.” So poetry has always been my best friend since I was [a] kid. I have cases and cases and cases and cases of poetry. That is one thing: I have tons of journals and just like this, it is kind of hard to let everything out. I am finally letting out my first book of poetry, mainly written in the seventies, with Korima Press, working with pub- lisher Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano.7 Film encompasses the writing, the storytelling, the music, the sound, you know? All of it! It is the closest thing to being alive and allowing our imagination to create our past, present, and future worlds and universes. One thing that we didn’t talk about because we are talking specifically about [the] sixties, seventies, and eighties, but a lot of my time I am thinking it’s a lot in the future and a lot of the ancient past like the Olmec. I feel for sure that I was there. I feel close to them ever since I read about them. I write to create my vision of utopia. I think that it is good to critique our here and now, but you do have to have an idea of a better world or a more perfect world even though it is still in the realm of fantasy. Of course, you don’t want to stay in fantasyland all the time, but it allows me to play with this idea of science fiction. This whole thing about cancer is like science fiction. I have been thinking about this connection a lot lately. I have this whole way, a parallel universe of sorts, of understanding why cancers have come through my body. I had my first bout with
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malignant cancer when I was fifteen in my thyroid. The doctor told me that there was a one in 10,000 chance that someone that young, fifteen or sixteen would get that type of cancer. Seven years later they removed something from my breast, along with lymph nodes under my armpit. Over the years I had biopsies several times because they thought I had melanoma. At the USC Norris Cancer Center they monitored and removed a node from the back of my neck. A year later I had to have a total hysterectomy. Then at sixty years old I had malignant cancer again in my kidney. Shortly thereafter they took my gallbladder and then the appendix. They wanted to cut me open again within this two-year period, but I got very proactive by going to acupuncture weekly, taking supplements, and going to sup- port groups. Working on my mind-body-spirit. Now they found another nodule, another node they are going to deal with probably next month and then possibly something still with my throat area. It is funny because that is the chakra of communication, the throat chakra—so I think that doing music, doing poetry, is all part of healing. I tell people that the cancer thing has been a science-fiction experiential narrative the way that I understand, feel, and interpret it. I think it is cosmic. Some of it is karma. Some of it is symbolic for different things at different times in my life. So I say this cancer stuff is science fiction because even today in Western medicine, they don’t know about cancer. They don’t even really care too much because a lot of women are dealing with cancer. I won’t go into all of that, but even in the hospitals, the health care system, the environment, and our stress levels, I think that a lot of it is on us, obviously, to heal and to understand our journeys that way. I think this is in part why I call it science fiction because they don’t really know about the healing and the therapies that well. They don’t even know about cancer that much yet. I’d rather just do it my own way and, you know, we are all going to die at some point and I am lucky that I have lived this long. I give thanks every day. I go in the morning, I go say a little prayer by the ocean to give thanks I am alive. I live near the ocean. At night I try to always say good night at sunset to the sun, hello to the moon, and give thanks for the day, for my beautiful familia and friends. So in my own way, I have my own spirituality and religion. I wonder if one-third of my life has been spent on the here and now and one- third on the past and one-third on the future. What if the brain’s hemispheres are divided as such—one half is in the here and now and the other half is split into the past and future? And then there is the un-time, non-time of both hemi- spheres, as well as their various combinations? Do you know what I mean? I don’t even know how to do the math map of it, but I know that a large part of my creativity is what you can call in the logic of fantasy, imagination, creativity, or dreams, whatever that other way of thinking and feeling is. It is hard to quantify quality. Measuring the delta, mythopoetic realities . . . Audre Lorde’s work on the “uses of the erotic” touches this logic.8 So, the Olmec, I don’t know why, and I know some people might cry heresy, but I am very connected with the Olmec. I have read everything I could about
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s them. I visited where their temples are and where they have mounds in Veracruz. Studying the calendar, they say the Aztecs were the more recent culture, or we can say the Chicanos are the most recent. I see it as a continuum in that we are all related, like cuzins. The Aztecs, Toltec before them, Zapotecs before them, the Mayan before them, and then the mother cultura, las olmecas. The Olmec are the ones that came up with the concept of zero. For example, you cannot have the pyramids made until you know about zero. The advancement of science and mathematics depends on this concept and the Olmecs had this information. Some people say they are from Africa. Others say that they are Chinese or Asian. Other people say that they are indigenous to las Américas. And maybe it was all the above or none of the above. I do believe that they could communicate off the planet because so much of the cosmos or universe are imprinted or written in these architectures. I could go on and on. I am fascinated and that is why I was inspired to make the animated film Mujería: The Olmeca Rap.9 At the time, I was a poet, you know, I had about three minutes to do my thesis at San Francisco State University. We had this media collective, FOCUS [Film- makers of Color Us], of all film graduate students of color at San Francisco State University. We got a $5,000 grant and we split it ten ways so we all got $500 each. It allowed me to do the project. A friend who is a musician came over to my house in East Oakland and saw the little animations that I was doing of the Olmec. I made them into females because I always say the actual stone monolithic heads don’t have any body or genitalia and they found thousands of little brown clay female figurines buried around the giant stone Olmec heads, so I figured there is at least a 51 percent chance that they could be female, right? As I’ve mentioned, the Olmeca connection to me is in essence matrilineal. After extensive study at Harvard, in museums all across Europe, in archival work, and with a few leading archaeologists, I believe the early Mesoamericanists have it wrong because their worldviews were patriarchal, so their interpretations of many ancient cultures are misinterpretations. Or maybe just in my imagination, or mythopoetic imaginary and cosmic worldview, the Olmecas, to me, represent the mighty suprafemale. Along with the concept of zero, with all the binaries, with the gods of duality, all this comes together and almost vanishes into infinity with the Olmec. Their culture is said to have disappeared, so nobody has any real evidence and the big question for archaeologists has been, where did the Olmecs vanish to? Personally, I think they are still around. I think their energy is still around. Maybe even from outside, or inside of the planet . . . but I will stop there. The thing about the Olmeca Rap was that the film equipment at San Francisco State was so broken down. It was from the 1950s. They were building a whole new building when I was a graduate student there and they were transitioning into the digital world. But we had this old analog equipment that was all outdated. The animation stand where all the master’s students were doing their thesis was broken, so every- body’s film came back and it was jumping, glitched, you know? Like maybe you have somebody walking in the original footage but it came out jumping up and
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down because the machine was dilapidated and everyone freaked out because film is so expensive. When I saw the animated Olmeca heads footage that I had spent so much time drawing and shooting frame by frame and they were jumping up and down, I said, “Oh, they could be dancing heads and have a little rap.” So I put lipstick on them, shades, a little bling, and all that stuff. I didn’t have time to rework it all because it would take a long time to remake all that movement with cell-by-cell animation. My friend Rita Lackey was getting ready at my place to go to a singing gig that evening. I was working on my animation cells and she looks at the characters and says, “Hey, they look like rappers!” We started laughing, “Oh yeah, a blast from the past.” Then she left for her gig. That is when I wrote the Olmeca Rap, “The Olmeca Rappers with the blast from the past, are here to rock our world, are here to rock us at last. The Olmeca Rappers, ancient women with color, ancient Indian stones, are here to rock our world, are here to rock our bones!” And with those lyrics it turned in to a three-minute music video. This little film, made on broken-down equipment, went across the United States, all through Europe, to Canada, Mexico, and to South America. The pre- miere showing was at the Kabuki Theater so the heads were like life-size. It was so exciting, it was too real. It was . . . oh my goddess, almost spiritual. They were coming out again, not larger than life, but nearly actual size! Then Mario Barrera from UC Berkeley was teaching Chicano studies and it was the first time that I was invited to go speak about the Olmeca Rap. Another coincidence was that the class I visited, Ethnicity and Race in the US, was the class he created, but when he retired, I began to teach that class for about five years every spring and every summer from 2008 to 2013 at UC Berkeley. Next, our company Royal Eagle Bear Productions, comprised of familia and friends mainly, Mama Lola Dela-Riva codirector and art director, and I did Mujería: Primitive and Proud.10 The idea was to have the Mujería trilogy based on the story that Little Eagle Bear gets accidentally lost from the ancient Olmeca women’s meditation circle. During mediation her healing crystal gets too hot and she drops it. In reaching down to find her crystal her third eye light beam leaves the center of the circle of the meditating women and gets crossed with an elec- tromagnetic TV antenna wave from 1954. She gets transported across time and space and ends up in Stockton as a Chicana newborn. The ancient Olmecas realize what happened to little Eagle Bear, that she got lost by mistake across 3,000 years and 3,000 miles, más o menos, and they call upon their woman warrior goddess Xicantzín to find and return lost Eagle Bear to their meditation circle. Artista activist veterana Dorinda Moreno helped name the Chicana goddess character Xicantzín that my mom, Lola Dela-Riva, designed. She had originally drawn her for this woman’s calendar in Santa Cruz, a moon calendar. My mom was showing Dorinda Moreno the character and Dorinda said, “I think her name is Xicantzín.” We used her as the ancient warrior goddess to find Eagle Bear and send her back to the meditation circle. That is the real feature-length movie idea but since we
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s never had money, we did the Olmeca Rap to introduce the characters. Betita Mar- tínez even put drawings of the Olmeca Rappers in her book 500 Years of Chi- cana Women’s History.11 Without film critics like Chon Noriega and Rosa Linda Fregoso, I don’t think the Olmeca Rap would have received so much attention and play. Chon Noriega took it over to the Whitney Museum in New York to be screened early on and listed it in his popular essay “The Aztlán Film Institutes’s Top 100 List.”12 At that time, I had been in Europe. I was in London actually the first time I saw This Bridge Called My Back. I saw the book over there so it must have been the early eighties. It must have been around ’81 or ’82 or something. Cherríe and Gloria asked me to submit something in This Bridge. Gloria had wanted me to write something about my experiences with white women in the women’s move- ment. At that time, I was doing my poetry. I was finishing my master’s program in poetry at San Francisco State U, but at that time it was difficult to commit to outing racism within the women’s movement. At the time I was just consumed with other issues. I remember I went to Berlin after I finished my first master of arts degree and returned home to Stockton for a year where I worked in a maximum-security prison with Raza. Upon my return to the United States, we started doing Me and Mr. Mauri: Turning Poison into Medi- cine because all of my friends were dying of SIDA/AIDS.13 I had gone to Europe before the wall came down and when I came back AIDS had been going on for a while. I think I started working on Me and Mr. Mauri: Turning Poison into Medicine somewhere around ’85.
MayleI: What was it like to see so many gay friends in the community get sick?
osa: I took off to Europe and when I came back that is what blew my mind. This thing . . . AIDS had all the beautiful young Latino friends and friends of friends sick and dying! All the young people that I knew. Since I had just been to Germany, it reminded me kind of what Hitler had done. I know there are conspiracy theories but I thought it was too strange to have a disease so targeted that hit only certain populations. Coming from Germany, it felt like history was repeating itself.
MayleI: So, you started making the film?
osa: Well, I became friends with this young guy Mauricio Delgado from Nicara- gua. Like all the other young Latinos, really cute, real sex-positive and everything, smart, and active politically. We just hit it off and became really good buddies. We met at Chili’s house [Diana Felix, known in the community as DJ Chili D].14 I was helping her paint her house one time, well, I helped her paint several times here and there over the years. I met Mauricio and then we became friends. I began to interview him and continue to document his life. He didn’t mind. At the time, I used to do a lot of massage and bodywork and he would ask if I would give him
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massages so I would. I witnessed his strong healthy body become so frail. It was hard for us all and for those of us left behind. It is still difficult to deal with all of this contemporary genocide. So this documentary was really nontraditional. We took the film rough cuts to the first Latino AIDS organizations and healers that were responding best they could. Some people were shocked. “Oh my god you’re touching them without gloves” or “You were touching them with those rings on,” but they liked it and wanted me to show them how to do the body work. So, I was being called to go and do what I could do. To touch them in their process of dying and to love them as familia while they were still alive. You know how they say the lesbians were really the caregivers early on and in the middle of the crisis? I feel as if I didn’t really have time to stop and ponder the situation. Everyone was being affected before our eyes, hearts, and memory. Then our other friend Francisco Xavier Zamora got sick. Then John Juarez one of the cofounders of AGUILAS.15 Then Liz had many, many gay men friends who died. Her good friend Chente Villanzuela. Then Rodrigo Reyes. Then our friend Margarita Benitez. We were really close and I even pierced her son’s ear when he was a kid. I still love them all. Other people started hearing that I was documenting people at that time. I would just grab whatever camera and I would ask people, “Do you have five dollars so I could buy a tape?” So, it was really ghetto, guerrilla filmmaking but I knew that time was short so I was just trying to capture their last words, and people had so much to say. In fact, people started requesting I take their video testimony. Rodrigo told Chili D, “I want you to bring Osa over to my house.” He and my mom were close friends and used to party and hang out in San Francisco a lot together back in the day. Rodrigo Reyes, Juan Pablo Gutierrez, and Francisco X. Alarcón wrote one of the first gay Latino men’s book together, an anthology of poesía. Rodrigo Reyes and Chili D cofounded the first gay Latino AIDS centro in San Francisco, Community United Response against SIDA [CURAS], to respond specifically to the needs of Latinos with SIDA/AIDS. Do you know we marched all together back in the day with GALA [Gay Latino Alliance]? I rode a motorcycle way, way back in the day during SF Gay Pride—it had to be in the seventies. GALA was a gay Latino organization that had all mixture of men and women and different types of Latinos. Rodrigo started it first and then Chili came from San Jose to join. Then my friend Debbie Huerta, I think she changed her name to Xihauanel, although I am not sure how it is spelled, whose father was a bodyguard of César Chávez, grew up around the movement as well. So, one time she took me to GALA and told everyone that I was a Chicana lesbiana poet, I did a poetry reading with them, and then they passed around the hat. It was one of the meetings that they had in Chili’s house, it was a big group. All those were amazing times and with all that I went on to get a BA in psychol- ogy, community clinical psychology, at Long Beach State. They had one of the few BA programs where you could actually go work in the community, so we worked at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center there in Longo [Long Beach]
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s there, was the African American community center. Then we worked with Casa Orizaba and that is where we worked with Yvette Flores. She was a graduate stu- dent when we were still undergrads. I worked on a double minor in women’s stud- ies and in industrial arts because I wanted to be an architect. From there I went to UC Santa Cruz for the first time in 1976 or ’77. I did one year there with Professor Art Pearl in the Education Department. I did my teaching credential coursework for multicultural K-12, and I did my internship at Santa Cruz High School. I did work in the prison at that time as well, teaching Nancy Shaw’s Women in Revo- lutionary Struggle [course at UC Santa Cruz]. I went into the women’s prison in over in Santa Rita, and I worked at Terminal Island and CIW [Correctional Institution for Women] and all that. In the early eighties I returned to UC Santa Cruz to start a PhD program in history of consciousness. I was able to sit on a student-faculty committee to hire Angela Y. Davis, for her first time to teach in the UC system since Reagan fired her from UCLA back in the day. In 1987 I got the boot from his. con., so I took off for a while. MALDEF [Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund] got involved, and a class-action suit was being considered. Many domestic Latinos, the majority of whom are Chicanos, were being admitted into the PhD program, but few were actually graduating, or they were taking a very long time to do so. I couldn’t physically or emotionally handle such an extended battle at the time. Anytime something wild like that happened in my life, I’d take off. That time, I went to Mexico and I lived there for a while, traveled, realized the importance of independent scholarship and the meaning of community scholarship. I was given a second master’s degree for my time in his. con., one of the few ever awarded. Over the years I have been so extremely grateful to witness the powerful impact Professor Angela Y. Davis has had on diversifying the program, student body, and matriculation of graduate women of color with the university at large.
MayleI: So, you went to the Lesbian Feminist Encuentro in 1987?
osa: I went to four encuentros in one year. I went to Cocina de Imagenes, the Latina women’s film festival in Mexico City in 1987.16 I got to meet all these women filmmakers, then there was the huge international Feminista Encuentro in Taxco, and there was the Lesbiana Encuentro in Cuernavaca, I believe. After that, some of the organizers and some of the Latinas from South and Central America, the Caribe, and from the United States stayed around Mexico City. One place women stayed at was with this woman Amparo Jimenez’s house in Coyoacán. I stayed there for a week, and that is when I met tatiana de la tierra. We hung around for a while with a lot of the other women from South America and all over. That experi- ence was yet another encuentro that I called the fourth encuentro.
MayleI: What was it like to be a Chicana lesbian and go to Mexico and meet film- makers and feminist and lesbian activists?
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osa: Well, there were several things. Of course, there were the contradictions that some of us Chicanas or Latinas from the United States do not speak Span- ish or didn’t speak Spanish well. While this was read as a marker of privilege, we were low-income or poor and many of us had even darker skin than those who spoke Spanish. I found some of the women from South America, Mexico, or Central America, mainly South America, were light-skinned and affluent. So, that was the first time I kind of tripped because they were not even middle class, they were well-to-do, you know? They were trying to criticize us for being gringas because we didn’t speak Spanish. I was like, “That is still a European language, you know?” and they were being all uppity calling us gringas. I would be like, “They don’t get it but it’s okay.” At that time, I was doing my own thing and I got close to a lot, a lot, a lot of women. I felt like we were having our own encuentro, with our own language, being able to communicate. Without words, we loved each other, you know?
MayleI: Without words? What are you trying to tell me, Osa?
osa: Well, you know, it was sexual healing, sexual revolution, communication, and not just intellectual. You can just intellectualize your world away, and they did so much verbal fighting. My god, women were crying and fighting. They had two different camps in the Latina lesbiana delegation and you could tell from body language and all the fighting. It was so dramatic. The fighting was about politics, what was the right way to lead the world and what were the right politics for women to have. It just got so gruesome. I was so saddened and shocked I would just go out on the swing and start making out with somebody. I would sit out there and it was really beautiful. One time I remember they were fighting so bad and they had come to a standstill. Maria Cora just started singing a song in Spanish and it was so profound because I was in the room there. I would still try to sit in as many meetings as I possibly could until I couldn’t take it any more because it just seemed so counterproductive and just like the male stuff, fighting for power. Maria Cora was so profound. Her singing calmed everybody down and helped them to take it to another level with music. Like the sound, I had to experience things in a different way. That is what I felt about being a little tactile. I was touching and feeling. So, I pierced a lot of women’s ears. A lot of women would trust me for some reason. People were asking me to do their ears, so I did a lot of piercings. I didn’t want to be in front of the camera a lot. People were taking pictures and stuff, but I think that tatiana de la tierra took a picture of me on the grass and she told me she had it on her altar for a long time. I still kept contact with many women from many countries afterwards. I think over the years people maybe knew that I was there or remembered me but I didn’t really talk a lot. I definitely did not. Another example was the National Women’s Studies Associa- tion in Atlanta one year. Again, I didn’t do the politics like that. I wasn’t a fighter. I would do poetry or pierce ears or give massages. I would have fun and interact
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s easier in nonverbal ways. So they asked me to speak. One time they worked really hard and had these points they wanted to submit to the general assembly. The women of color and lesbians of color wanted to submit to this educational encuen- tro, in Atlanta, their statement they had drafted up. The group I cared about most asked me if I would read it out loud to the large plenary. I was shocked and proud because finally I got to do something that they wanted and meant. I read it and I think that is on tape somewhere. So, at encuentros, I was always kind of there but not in the traditional way. Even in Mujerio, the San Francisco Bay Area organiza- tion for Latina lesbianas, I was always there with the camera, playing my guitar, painting signs, banners or whatever, always doing poetry, but I would never lead the meetings or seldom argue during meetings, caucuses, or breakout sessions.
MayleI: So all these experiences brought you to the Mujerista aesthetic?
osa: So, that is how I came to the utopian concept of the mujerista aesthetic. I think you have to deal with the movements, movimientos, not just Chicano, but women’s movements and gay liberation. You have to have the vision of what the better world you want would look like. You can’t just criticize and say this world sucks, and this system sucks, and this racism sucks. You have to have at least a concept of what that better world would be. Imagine a better world and visualize how to make it happen. Like drawing up blueprints. I think that’s where aesthetics comes in. What is beautiful and what is love—that’s the mujerista moviemaking part in theory and praxis. I developed seven principles, and that is what gave me the momentum, the focus to do my dissertation. No matter if I was around film if it was Women Make Movies, as a company, the women of color filmmakers, like the film festivals, the one in Santa Cruz where I was able to participate as a speaker or filmmaker or participant in the majority of all [of] them. If it wasn’t for these organized events I wouldn’t have been able to meet all the people internationally and nationally and locally, so I felt blessed to have had these experiences.
MayleI: I think that is where we met. I co-curated and helped to organize the Women of Color Film and Video Festival in Santa Cruz for five years.17
osa: Yes, that is what I think. We didn’t really get to talk a lot at UC Santa Cruz, but we were both going to Mexico and we made plans to talk over there. In Mex- ico, we met at a café and that was the first time we had time to talk and to get to know each other. So, the mujerista aesthetic was inspired by Alice Walker’s womanism. There are seven elements but they are not in hierarchical order. Number one, the Mujerista filmmaker loves herself unconditionally and often radically. She is [a] woman-identified woman whether she has experienced emo- tional or physical intimacy with another woman. The Alice Walker definition says, “A woman who loves herself loves other women sexually and/or nonsexually.”
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Number two is getting the job done, willfully, using nonconventional methods, those outside of to the traditional Hollywood studio system. It is the successful production and aim towards the liberation of self and others. It focused on mak- ing access to technology by any means necessary, its ideology informs its praxis, its praxis or methodology is informed by a responsible set of personal politics, this is always in flux, changing and transforming with the changing times. Num- ber three: Mujerista movies are educational but in a nontraditional sense, not indoctrinating or subordinating all people to a WASP patriarchal mindset and hegemony. Rather, they offer transformational experience about people, events, issues, and point of view usually not dealt with, underrepresented, and misrepre- sented in mainstream media. Fourth, Mujerista filmmakers are activist in nature and reclaim our stories from a women-of-color and children-of-color POV. Fifth, familia is inclusive of all peoples, ages, religions, colors, abilities, classes, genders, and sexualities. Six is teaching others and including our communities in the pro- duction process as crew members. Seven, taking risks, being outlaws to create change and transformations for healthy beings. These principles talk about hav- ing a healthier world and that is why I think filmmaking has that responsibility. We don’t do art just for art’s sake. You just can’t be talking about it, you actually have to make it. You are an activist in that way. The thing about the hero in Holly- wood movies, that is the visual narrative dominating the planet with the same white male heterosexual hero. Mujerista moviemaking was really important in trying to get other types of protagonists and characters. Another principle is that we even make the films with our own crew members. To be sure, not only within the story or the narrative or the movie itself, but also in the making of it, that you become inclusive and intercultural in your crew members so the production process also serves an educational purpose. Those were the things that I felt were really vital in doing our work. Art is the vanguard of the revolution. The artist or cultural movement was a major part of Chicano movement with the murals and the teatro, the poetry, and all of it. Being working class and dark skinned, being in my own body and being an out lesbiana, I was never closeted whether I worked in a men’s maximum-security prison or USC, I always told people that I am gay. It is almost like it is part of my name because I want people to deal with that up front even if their religion does not agree with it. Sometimes the young Chicanas would get embarrassed but it would give them an opening. Even at UC Davis, I was just visiting there a few months ago. It is so sweet. After I came out, after class several students came to tell me their own thing, you know how it is with the students. Students would regularly come out to me. You hear all these things, like “I have always thought I was gay” or “My family is against this but I never really got to meet somebody,” I mean that is still going on. I feel like, oh my god, they are getting degrees and going out into the world, they are the next generation of workers and they can’t even deal with it still or even talk about. Not just my sexuality, let alone their sexuality.
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s So, I don’t know how I jumped to that, cuzin. But in the process of this inter- view, I realize that the presidential election was ripped off. What is passing as good is evil, and what is being sold to all as evil is really good. Those were the ancient prophesies of many tribes. Like-minded conscious folk will gravitate towards each other, and we will have once again the ability and responsibility to make correct choices, decisions to love ourselves, each other, our planet, and beyond. We still have a long way to go . . . and of course, on course, Sí se puede!
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