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Artist Lissa Jones is one of three photographers selected to document Asian/Latino families living in Santa Clara County.
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Different Colors
MACLA will exhibit 'Ties that Bind' this coming September
By Kate Carter
Photographs by Jacqueline Ramseyer
A new multicultural project by San Jose's Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA), called "Ties that Bind," also has ties to Willow Glen.
Willow Glen artist Lissa Jones is one of three local photographers handpicked by project director Maribel Alvarez to create artwork out of the experiences of 15 interracial Asian-Latino families in Santa Clara County. A quick look around Jones' apartment shows that Alvarez knew what she was doing.
Jones' walls are covered with art and artifacts from her more than 14 years of work in Mexico with artist Curtis Fukuda, documenting Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) altars created by the same families year after year. Collections of trinkets from Latin America, Indonesia and elsewhere combine with a plethora of model robots, sculptures and works by Jones and her friends to create a riot of color and texture to stimulate any imagination.
But Jones' connection to multiculturalism is more than skin deep--she herself is the product of an interracial family. Jones' birth mother was Chinese and her birth father was Armenian, but she was adopted at a young age by her mother, who is Irish and Spanish, and her father, who is Welsh. She grew up in San Jose, graduated from San Jose State University and is supportive of exploring MACLA's thesis that the Silicon Valley creates a unique environment that fosters interracial families.
"The lifestyles that these people are living, I think that happens in places like Silicon Valley," Jones says. "It's easier to do that here. We benefit from having such a cultural richness. There are hidden and unseen lines, but you can't go anywhere without seeing a diversity of backgrounds."
Alvarez says the project is so exciting because it's on the cutting edge of a new trend of multiculturalism in California's culture. She also hopes the project will add some excitement to people's impressions of art.
"I think it's fascinating," Alvarez says. "This is very close to the philosophy of MACLA, which is always thinking about affirming identity but also challenging it. Identity is really what we make of it. We put ourselves and others in categories; that doesn't mean there isn't value in that. But, on the other hand, I think it's amazing that this is changing in front of our own faces. And we'd better change. By mid-century, the majority of California children will be of mixed race. This great sweep is really exciting. But this is something that you really want to get close to, by focusing on individuals rather than general themes. Then it's all just social theory."
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Crossing Barriers: Willow Glen artist Lissa Jones, a graduate of San Jose State University, will cover the lifestyles of five interracial families in the next several months.
Exploring Multiculturalism
The "Ties that Bind" project is exploring the impact of multiculturalism in the area by delving into the lives and experiences of families made up of people from both of the area's most numerous ethnic minorities, says Alvarez, who is an anthropologist and a former director of MACLA.
"We've been thinking about this project for a long time, several years," she says. "We're immersed in work that has a lot of cross-cultural sensibilities. The word 'multicultural' doesn't really capture it."
In 2000, MACLA took its idea and applied for Ford Foundation, in conjunction with the Americans for the Arts Foundation grant, for civic-based art projects, Alvarez says. She says that interracial marriage and diversity in general are as emblematic of the Bay Area as other traits such as innovation and risk-taking. The group had heard anecdotal evidence about interracial marriage, especially Asian-Latino intermarriage, as being prevalent in the Bay Area, but there had never been an effort to study intermarriage in Silicon Valley, she says.
In October 2000, MACLA was one of about two dozen projects nationwide to receive the grant. Since that time, Alvarez says, the team, that includes community advisors and sociology, anthropology and history professors at Stanford and Sacramento State universities, has been doing research to support its theory, gathering evidence. They found statistics, confirmed by those from the 2000 U.S. Census, that Santa Clara County leads the way in intermarriage in the U.S., she says.
Then, last fall, it started a website to solicit stories from people actually living the Asian-Latino experience. From those stories and initial interviews with family members, including one with San Jose Vice Mayor George Shirakawa, who is a member of an Asian-Latino family, the group selected 15 to be featured by artists in an exhibition at MACLA this September.
Alvarez says about 40 individuals took the time to answer the website's 25 personal questions, and all of their stories, including those the team continues to receive, will be incorporated in some fashion into the final exhibition. Those chosen for more in-depth involvement were selected for their intra-diversity, Alvarez says, to try and capture all the permutations of the interracial experience. The project is featuring families of different ages, some with children and some without, and of all different ethnicities: Vietnamese and Mexican, Panamanian and Vietnamese, Pakistani and Mexican. Alvarez says about 80 percent of the couples include a Mexican individual, which reflects the number of Mexican-Americans in the area, but the variety of Asian people is more pronounced.
Meanwhile, Alvarez was choosing local photographers to spend time with and capture the individuality of the families. She says she chose local artists who could develop relationships and trust with their subjects over time, as well as people who would notice details and be able to extrapolate stories from those.
Honoring the Dead: Willow Glen artist Lissa Jones has been photographing and creating pieces of art out of her work for many years, such as this piece titled 'Inner Sanctrum,' created by her and artist Curtis Fukuda in 1996.
Artwork created and photographed by Lissa Jones and Curtis Fukuda
Choosing Photographers
Paul Myers, a former photographer for Silicon Valley Community Newspapers, was chosen for his experience in photojournalism and visual documentation. Jennifer Ahn, a recent San Jose State University graduate, was chosen for her interest in culture and family history.
Myers says he and Ahn look to Jones as their leader in this project, in particular because of her wealth of experience, not only in photography and other cultures, but also with creating artwork in a variety of media. Alvarez says she wants the photographers to push themselves beyond the limits of the lens and film to incorporate family photographs and artifacts, symbols and digital recreations, to move the scope of the project past that of the typical photo essay.
Jones started out in sculpture, particularly interested in site-specific works. She started working in photography after meeting Fukuda and beginning to collaborate with him in his photographic documentation of San Jose's Taiko, or Japanese drumming group in the mid-1980s.
"I came to photography as another medium," Jones says. "It's just a different tool. It's temporal; the romance is that it resides in people's memories."
One of their friends was familiar with Mexico and its traditions, and had one of their photos sent to Mexico to be highlighted with paint. When the photo came back and Jones saw it, "I thought, 'I want to do that,'" she says.
She and Fukuda then began their work in Mexico, taking photos of people's personal Day of the Dead altars, which are filled with symbols reminiscent of the family and its member who have died. The two artists returned to the same homes year after year, documenting the altars as they changed and stayed the same, much as Americans' Christmas trees can reflect family changes and traditions over time. After the photos were taken, the pair would then highlight the silver gelatin prints with oils to create soft tones and colors in the works.
Jones' and Fukuda's works have been exhibited in Mexico and Germany, and last year the two received a grant from the Silicon Valley Art Council, given in photography only once every five years, in recognition of their body of work.
For this new project, Jones is looking to the five families who are her subjects to provide her with inspiration.
"I'm breaking out of a method of working," she says. "My work is going to be sculptural in approach, more dimensional, finding a way to image the family stories. It's still in the very budding initial stages; [the families are] very linear, not very three-dimensional yet. I don't know exactly what I'm going to be exposed to."
Jones says she has only met with the families once so far and has not yet begun to take photos or doing any work. Instead, she's "just listening" as she visits the families with an ethnographer on the project, who asks the families questions to stimulate discussion about how being interracial impacts them. Jones says she's amazed at the families' willingness to be documented in this way.
"There's such a leap of faith on their part," she says. "I think that's extraordinary. These people are very extraordinary. They have a faith that I would be respectful and get that this is such an honor. If the tables were turned, I'd be asking all kinds of questions of the artist, like, 'What have you done?"'
Some of the things she has already heard, coupled with her own experience of interracial families, have already begun to create ideas for her, especially when she sees a member of a couple answer a question in a way that surprises his or her spouse.
"There have been little glimmers" of real experience," Jones says. "I've only seen the tip of the iceberg. I want to see how does an interracial family buy groceries--they can't just go to one market. I want to see what happens when different cultures collide. I see things maybe differently and I've looked at the dynamics with my own perspective. The beauty of it is, I'm a product of my environment. It's not all genetics; it's our environment that makes us."
And, even though she knows she is a part of the project, as she is creating the artwork, she says she wants to try to represent the families as accurately as possible.
"I don't want to imprint my preconceived idea onto them," she says. "I think my work is going to be less literal about the family, but more [based on] icons, so more people can step into the work and see something."
Multirracial Families
Alvarez says the project is already generating information and showing that many of the Bay Area's interracial families reflect the general data on intermarriage, like being well educated and concentrated in diverse places.
But she also notes that its is bringing in new information. She says the single most surprising discovery she's made during the project is that "diversity runs in families." Many members of interracial couples have siblings and other family members also in interracial relationships. Also, individuals described as "Vietnamese" or "Mexican" often also had parents of other races, Alvarez says.
"Diversity and intermarriage is pretty much a value within families," she says. "We're still seeing that that's where people learn their prejudice."
And while the project is certainly about celebrating the richness and beauty of interracial families, it also will reflect the reality that interracial marriages aren't always easy, both within themselves and in relationship to the rest of society.
"The stories, of course, are more complicated than they seem," she says.
Alvarez points out that in many areas of the United States, interracial marriages were illegal until the late 1960s and really only began to gain currency in the 1970s.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
