Interview ...
Cada mente es un mundo
A Day in the World of Luis Tapia
Interview by Edward Hayes
On November 15, 2016, I travel to Santa Fe to spend a day with Luis Tapia as he prepares for an exhibition of twenty-five sculptures, Luis Tapia: Cada mente es un mundo, to be held at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, from June 10 to September 3, 2017. Luis picks me up at the home of Stuart Ashman, executive director of Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts, who first introduced us. We head out in the artist’s Ford F-150 for a daylong drive and conversation as easy, enlightening, and meandering as the New Mexico landscape. Luis explains that the title for his upcoming exhibition is an old New Mexican dicho (saying), “Cada mente es en mundo,” or “Every mind is its own world.” Before the day is over, our talks will traverse the complex world of Luis’s New Mexican Hispano heritage, his political commitment rooted in Chicanismo, and his creative process and technique.
First stop: El Comal, a traditional New Mexican strip mall café on busy Cerrillos Road, where most of the staff and many patrons know the artist as a regular. Here I have the pleasure of tasting my first blue corn enchiladas with a side of crunchy chicharrones and hearing Luis’s story for the first time. As we are getting to know each other, a patron asks if Luis is available to teach art at a nearby community center. Our conversation on pause, I get a sense of his humility and approachability. Luis kindly declines the invitation, and we get on with coffee and conversation.
EDWARD HAYES: Tell me a bit about where you grew up.
LUIS TAPIA: I’m a Santa Feo, man. I’m a true blood Santa Feo. [Feo, meaning “ugly,” is Luis’s humorously self-deprecating play on Santa Fean, the common term for a Santa Fe resident.] I was born in Santa Fe in 1950, in an area called Agua Fría, which in those days was the village of Agua Fría. Today the village is incorporated into Santa Fe, so it’s just a street now. I was born with chickens and goats and cows in the backyard, a very rural area, and spent most of my life in Santa Fe, through grade school and high school. I went to college for a year at Las Cruces at New Mexico State University but didn’t last there very long. I spent more time in Juárez [then a college party destination just over the Mexican border] than I did in school [laughs]. That was my life until my twenties.
HAYES: What changed in your twenties?
TAPIA: We’re talking late sixties, early seventies . . . and that’s when all the Chicanismo really came to life. Cesár Chávez was doing his marches [in California]; Reies [López] Tijerina was doing his marches in New Mexico. So I got involved in all that and started thinking one day, you know, there I was on the streets chanting “íViva la raza!, íViva la raza!” And I come to realize that I really didn’t know anything about mi raza . . . even though I was living the life of mi raza. So I started to research my own culture. And that’s when I fell upon the santero tradition, and music, and that’s how it all began.
I mean, who was I? I was calling myself, at that time, Spanish American, but what did that mean? It was confusing for me because I didn’t really have the knowledge. I think . . . the thing that brought me to where I am now is finding out, getting that knowledge, and then doing something with that knowledge. And even today, my work comes from a Hispanic and Chicano background and logic, but all the issues I deal with in my work are everybody’s issues. I mean, if I’m doing a piece that deals with gangs, there are gangs in every culture.
HAYES: What does the term Chicano mean to you, in New Mexico?
TAPIA: Many people here don’t understand the
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