Talking with Chicano artist Emmanuel Martinez
Standing alone and decaying: this is the state of “Arte Mestiza,” the mural in the parking lot outside of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Painted in 1986 by artist Emmanuel Martinez, it is listed as part of the museum’s collection, but has never seen restoration or protective efforts. Now, with real cracks splitting the mural’s wall to match the cracks that were painted years ago, this testament to the work of Emmanuel Martinez and Chicano muralists like him idly waits for the day that someone comes along with bigger plans for it. And for Emmanuel himself, who says that most of his murals have already been wiped out, that day is ever more anticipated.
As I pull into the snowy driveway of the Martinez’s Denver home to meet one of the greatest Chicano artists to ever live, an elderly, silver-haired woman exits the front door and makes her way toward me. Switching off my car and opening the door, I start to step out, but before I can fully stand, I’m met with her small, brown hand.
“Hello,” she begins. “Lucha said you would be coming. I’m Maria Martinez.”
“Hi,” I respond. “I’m Esteban Candelaria.” Maria takes a small step back, and I have room to stand up.
“Mucho gusto,” she says, nodding.
“Mucho gusto, señora,” I reply. For a moment our hands remain suspended, and we both wordlessly recalibrate. Then, Maria promptly gets to the real reason she came to greet me—she asks me if I can move my car, as I’ve blocked her in and she will soon need to leave. I move to a different parking spot, and by the time I’m done, Emmanuel’s daughter Lucha is there to take me to her father’s studio just a few streets over.
Approaching Emmanuel’s studio, I am greeted by an unfinished, life-size carving of la Virgen de Guadalupe propped against the side of the house next to a Bernie 2020 poster. As I step into the main room of the studio, I’m slightly taken aback by the magnitude of its colorful display: paintings hang neatly alongside traditional native weavings, covering every sensible square inch of the room’s high walls. It feels almost as if my eyes need to adjust to the spectrum of color before me.
As I stand there gawking, Emmanuel emerges from my right. Medium in height and build and sporting a quaint sweater, his presence is a quiet, unassuming one. We shake hands awkwardly, exchanging typical greetings and niceties, and talking over each other as we do so, we head to the next room.
Stepping into Emmanuel’s dining room, I feel like I’ve entered a very different world from that of the high ceilings and framed art in the main room of his studio—this feels more like a home, and a Chicano artist’s home at that. From top to bottom, the room exhibits the trappings of rasquachismo: painted ceramic bowls, some filled with pistachios, act as the centerpieces for tables of varying heights, while mass-produced, hyper-realistic models of local fish line the tops of cabinets. Colorful talaveras, decorated with skulls and roses, are hung sporadically throughout the space, and an assortment of sculptures dedicated to the muse of the human figure occupy every eye-level surface. We sit at a long dining table on mismatched foldable chairs, nursing steaming tea that Emmanuel and Lucha prepared. As we discuss Emmanuel’s art, life, and legacy, my eyes continue to land on the small yellow sign framed on the wall that reads, “Menudo: Breakfast of Champions.”
During the first few minutes of our interview, Emmanuel seems a bit reserved, though I can’t quite place why. His large eyes follow my gaze and my hands as I shuffle with my papers or reach for my tea, and he seems to avoid Spanish in his speech, abruptly stopping himself every time he starts to use it. Eventually, though, he asks me about my family and what my last name is.
“Candelaria,” I tell him.
"Oh,” he says, chuckling slightly. “So you're a Chicano…"
"Yeah,” I say. “Sí"
"Oh, yeah, it’s just that you look real güero," he explains. Heh heh heh. "I wasn't really sure, I didn't wanna... "
“Oh, I know,” I reply, laughing just a little anxiously. I don’t mind his confusion over my light complexion, and though his forwardness is a little jarring, I’m also grateful for it—from then on, Emmanuel speaks of his art as our art.
The first time I remember seeing the work of Emmanuel Martinez up close was in 2004, when I was 5 years old, although it’s likely that I had encountered it in passing many times before then. I grew up in the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where there are at least two public art projects by Emmanuel. Even then, at an age when the Chicano themes and topics addressed by Emmanuel's art would have been lost on me, I was transfixed by the colorful expression, geometric concentricity, and lofty aestheticism of the art I saw. I would later come to find that these motifs are some of the many for which Emmanuel has been recognized as a naturally gifted creator.
Emmanuel has always come back to art, and his intrinsic, creative ability has been the trail he has followed throughout his life. Emmanuel first discovered art in a jail cell, where his medium was matchsticks on paper towels, and he wouldn't soon let go of it. His is an art of necessity on many levels, one that has been as integral to his survival as the lungs with which he breathes.
“I come from a family of 12,” Emmanuel tells me. “My mom knew nothing about the arts, and my dad was always wondering when I would ‘get a real job.’ So I had, really, no support system.”
At the age of 13, Emmanuel was incarcerated after he was caught joyriding with a friend in a stolen vehicle. Troubled, locked up, and suddenly alone, Emmanuel turned inward to the best thing he had left: his talent. Using burnt matchsticks and paper towels smuggled to him by his facility’s nurse to create charcoal portraits of those around him, Emmanuel sculpted his identity as an artist from what he could, such that he would eventually even recall these days gratefully.
“In relation to other people,” he says, almost wistfully, “I would say that I had a different opportunity. A lot of kids who grew up in more affluent areas than me and that wanted to pursue the arts would go to colleges and all that, and have their support systems that way. I didn’t have that … the only real support I got was in the facilities, from the art itself, and from the people around me there.”
“But the difference,” he makes sure to note, “was that I had someone that believed in me—my mentor, Bill Longley, who got me involved in an apprenticeship training program that he was implementing at the time for high-risk youth.”
Bill Longley, an art instructor committed to seeking and inspiring artistic talent in at-risk youth, was the first person to acknowledge Emmanuel’s potential. When Emmanuel was fifteen, Longely was able to strike a deal that got him out of the youth detention center and into a two-year apprenticeship. In addition to artistic instruction, Longley encouraged Emmanuel to use political action as an outlet, introducing him to the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, where Emmanuel organized alongside leaders like Corky Gonzales and César Chavez. He would eventually go on to study under master of Mexican muralism David A. Siquieros. Upon his return from this experience, he started to develop his own, distinctively Chicano art form that could bridle his activism. Armed with raza and a paintbrush, having come from the humblest of beginnings, Emmanuel became a pioneer of El Movimiento, the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. From his enormous body of work, which includes sculptures, paintings, and of course murals, to his litanous history of Chicano activism, Emmanuel is a revolution in himself and an inspiration to those around him. One of his most recent efforts, The Emmanuel Project, has sought to reach out to at-risk youth across the country for artistic intervention, the same way Bill Longley did for Emmanuel years ago.
Now, as Emmanuel sits before me, an elder of an art form that his own city no longer feels obligated to acknowledge, little about his fire has changed. His brown, discerning eyes, lined from years of concentration, have retained their ability to captivate and immobilize; his proud, eagleish eyebrows, silvery from their years of service, haven’t changed in their tenacity, and his strong, skilled hands maintain the same command they have always had. Only now, Emmanuel says, his message has changed.
Though he only admits to being semi-retired, Emmanuel’s work has certainly slowed down. He’s 73, but says that the biggest reason he doesn’t produce like he used to is because he’s no longer being asked.
“Most of my art nowadays is on [private] commission,” he tells me somberly. “People ask me to do sculptures of different things that they like. They don’t ask me to do murals.”
Emmanuel says that this is in large part because the city of Denver no longer wants to see Chicano art. In recent years, despite official encouragement from city personnel for public projects, Emmanuel and Lucha have noticed a steep decline in interest in Chicano art.
“Chicanos just aren’t getting picked,” Lucha tells me. “My dad applies every single time there’s a call for entry, and he’s been a finalist a few times, but not once has he been chosen.”
Lucha tells me that another cause for alarm is the rapid rate at which existing Chicano murals have been erased. In some cases, this occurs when private businesses buy the buildings on which the murals are painted and for their own reasons, white them out. For the most part, though, it’s the city that fails to protect the art. Gentrification, Lucha says, has claimed the majority of the Chicano murals in the city of Denver, and despite her efforts through the Chicano/a Murals of Colorado Project, which she started in 2018, that number is growing steadily. Between this erasure, the suppression of new Chicano art, and the fact that her dad and his generation of widely-known Chicano artists are getting older, Lucha fears for the future of Chicano art in a city that was once a prolific center of it.
“Denver has always had this insecurity,” she says, “about not being a centerpiece. They’ve always strived for that, and I really think that’s what motivates this. It’s a need to be the ‘cosmopolitan center of the Rocky Mountain region,’ or whatever, that makes them willing to overlook their local artists. Sure, let’s bring in the tourist dollars, but those are only here for a short time. The locals are always here, and they are the ones that go to the museums and pay taxes. It’s our masters that we are going to lose. The people of the community are the ones that should be represented, and Denver doesn’t support them.”
“They’ve got tons of money,” Emmanuel adds, “and they have these mural projects going, but like Lucha says they’re not really taking care of, or even maintaining, what they already have because they don’t see it as significant.” Pausing for a moment, he concedes: “I get real upset with the city. And I don’t really care, sometimes, about them. I’ll still go out seeking work opportunities, but I’m pretty used to getting rejected.”
Before I can even ask him about it, and twice before the end of our interview, Emmanuel actually brings up “Arte Mestiza” to me. Forever proud of his work, he always has a lot to say when it’s been failed—but about our hometown mural, he’s particularly angry: “the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center didn't pay a dime for what I did, this mural. They accepted it from the Chicano community in Colorado Springs. It was all community fundraising, community supported, in terms of the actual payment. We had a great unveiling, there were a lot of people there, even the fire department had helped clean it up. The director said it would be a part of the collection—and treated like that—in his speech, but I don't think they've ever cleaned it. And I [painted it] in '87. They're supposed to be someone that really values our art. But will they support this?” he asks, gesturing at a picture of the mural, “I don't know. I hardly even go see it, in the many times I pass that mural, because I'm disgusted that they don't support this. And I've talked over the years with different directors, and they just say ‘well, we'll look into it.’”
———
When our interview is over, Emmanuel, Lucha, and I all admit that we’ve gotten hungry over the past two hours. We decide to head into Morrison and go to the Cow Eatery. It's a spot that Emmanuel and Lucha seem to frequent, maybe in part because of the mural Emmanuel painted on an adjacent building. We eat quietly for the most part, but there is a sense of ease and familiarity about the table. At one point, Lucha shows her dad a picture on her phone of Mayan body armor she saw on exhibition in Spain and openly nudges him to paint it. We finish our meals quickly, and once we are done paying we leave promptly. On our way out, Emmanuel grabs a few toothpicks and, without turning, passes one over his shoulder to me.
“I better get going,” Emmanuel says as we step out of the restaurant. “Gotta go home and get ready for my poker game.” Though he plays twice a week at the bar across the street, Emmanuel is hosting that night’s game at his studio.
“It was nice meeting you,” he says, extending his hand. I fumble to free mine.
“It was great meeting you,” I say.
By Esteban Candelaria
Art By Hannah Stoll
Childhood Issue | May 2020