LACMA

1987 Havana, Cuba The prestigious Havana International Film Festival honors pot-movie auteur Cheech Marin for his recently completed film Born in East L.A., the story of a an assimilated Chicano sent to Mexico and unable to cross back to his home in the United States. Taking a lyric from a Bruce Springsteen song, Marin produces one of the most subversive Hollywood movies of the decade, not to mention making the best use of a Neil Diamond song ("America") in any political film ever. 1981 Oxnard, California Fanboys Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, along with their brother Mario, send their self-published comic to indie publisher Fantagraphic Books. Love and Rockets #1 hits the stands, receives instant underground critical acclaim, and becomes a vanguard title in the then-bourgeoning alternative comic world. Skillfully referencing American pop culture, Mexican movie lore, classic Latin American literature, U.S. comic book history, Chicano barrio culture, and punk rock—and despite working in the often maligned world of comic books—Los Bros Hernandez, with their stories of Maggie and Hopey and the fictitious Latin American village of Palomar, produce the most exciting narrative art of the 1980s and 1990s. FEBRUARY 19, 1982 San Antonio, Texas Rocker Ozzy Osbourne urinates on the Alamo and is arrest- ed for "desecration of a shrine." With this single drunken gesture, the British metalhead accomplishes what genera- tions of Mexican American activists have only dreamed of. Ozzy, however, has trouble remembering what happened. At his concert that night, after he is freed on bail, tens of thousands of San Antonio's Mexican American metal fans cheer their new political hero. The city council's lifetime ban on Ozzy performing in San Antonio ends ten years later, when the rocker donates $10,000 to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, custodians of the Alamo. 1978 San Diego, California Yolanda López paints la Virgen de Guadalupe, mother of Jesus, spiritual inspiration to revolutionaries from Fr. Hidalgo to César Chávez, in running shoes. A second painting from her series portrays Our Lady as a garment worker, sitting at a sewing machine. 1978 East Los Angeles, California Renaissance man/entrepreneur/philosopher Bill "Al Capone" Mufflers opens El Pedorrero (The Farter), a muffler shop and museum in East Los Angeles. This baroque marvel, painted in yellow and blue stripes, contains "a million and one items," including the Pedomovil and a collection of paintings, advertisements, assemblages, and designs for various inventions including a 3-D chessboard and the self-standing ice cream cone. 1979 Los Angeles, California Newly arrived Mexican immigrant Guillermo Gómez Peña wraps himself in a serape, binds his body with rope, and lies in an intentionally pathetic heap on the floor of a well-traveled elevator in a downtown Los Angeles office building for twenty-four hours. Uncomfortable yuppies in business suits ignore the performance, titled Loneliness of the Immigrant. A phantom sighting.

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