Well folks. This is it! It’s been a sweet and gentle ride these past 8 (minus a week) Sundays, posting interviews with my queer artist friends. It made me realize I could’ve gone on like this for years! I (and we) are surrounded by so many brilliant and productive people doing really challenging and amazing work. It makes me so proud that I am a part of such a community. But alas, it is time for me to go off and focus on my own work. As I’m sure I mentioned 80 times already, the University of California, Berkeley is about to grant me an MFA, if I don’t blow it…
Laugh now, Cry later
For my final post I’m coming full circle. Back to my roots. This week I’m speaking again to Irina Contreras (you may remember her from my first post on The Miracle bookmobile), and for the first time to her other collaborator in performance, food, and love: Nico Dacumos. The two are currently putting together an evening of performance, called Scenes Unseen for the National Queer Arts Festival which happens all of June in gay ol’ San Francisco. If you are around you should definitely check it out. Til then read this!
Hello again, Irina! The OP readership may remember you from my first blog entry about The Miracle Bookmobile, and now we’re here again for my last entry. Full circle! And hello there Nico, for the first time! Will you both introduce yourself, again and anew…
the charming Nico
Irina Contreras : I feel like it would be fabulous to introduce myself in some new way to OP readers, like “My name is Lola. I escaped from the Ringling Brothers Circus when I was 12. As a teen I traveled with a gang of knife-carrying lesbians who homeschooled me and taught me to scale very tall walls…” Anyways, I am still the same Irina! I am from Pacoima or the Northeast San Fernando Valley. I am an artist and a writer who works in Community Mental Health, and I have recently found out that I enjoy the gym and lifting weights!
Nico Dacumos: Hi again, Chris, I don’t know if you remember, but I was just telling Irina how I started talking to you years ago at the Oakland Y because I was trying to find workout buddies and kept bugging you to do spin classes with me. I think you either thought I or spin classes were really weird… Wow, another reference to the gym. We sound like a couple of gym bunnies, don’t we? I’m really not that into working out. But I am into writing poetry, memoir, and pseudo-theory, producing shows and performing, cooking tasty food, shit starting and talking, and being a high school teacher.
Oh how I miss the Oakland YMCA! I promise to try a spinning class with you when I renew my membership, Nico. Til then tell me, and the kind OP blog readership, how you met and how you started “collaborating” (wink-wink)?
Clean, crusty, art school kid: Irina
IC: Oh my, Chris! I have always heard you are a chismosa! Nico and I met via Nobody Passes, an anthology edited by Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein in 2006. I might be blushing now… Well, I remember hearing Nico read at our first readings at the San Francisco Library and then the next day at City Lights. I was very hyper and overly excited to meet this new, interesting, handsome, critical, and smart person. In 2009, I was about halfway done with a text and thought I was going to make an audio documentary about queer migration stories, immigration law, and the effects on queer and trans bodies. I had a conversation with him about Victoria Arellano, a transwoman in LA who died two years earlier after being denied her medication in a detention center. I knew he was a poet and asked him if he might be interested in writing something. To my surprise, perhaps no more than two weeks later he sent me the poem “Hasta La Victoria” and I was floored. And smitten. And impressed. I am just going to get it out: I pretty much hate poetry. But once in awhile I think there are things that people write that just say exactly what needs to get out there in the world. I felt that thing the first time I read “Hasta La Victoria” and I had a feeling we would keep making things together. And it appears that Nico is not interested in answering your wink wink question…
I hear you’re working on something for the Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco this summer called “Scenes Unseen.” What’s that project all about and how’s it going?
IC: I am super-excited about Scenes Unseen! Scenes Unseen is an interactive and multigenre production. We have a wild cast. It’s basically like Lollapalooza! Juba Kalamka, Amitis Motevalli, Byron Jose, Diego Gomez, Cherry Galette, Kristina Wong, Ms Barbie Q and additional writing from Bamby Salcedo and Nenu. We have selected several scenes based on the ways in which we feel queer and/or POC bodies have been affected by immigration laws and policing, including processing sites and depots. One scene for example looks at the 1931 Placita Raid** in Los Angeles, which was really the beginning of the contemporary ICE Raids that we think of now. INS blocked all entrances and exits and began to “check” people’s papers and load them into paddywagons. Much later, community researchers and academics concluded that around this time many of the people sent to Mexico were US citizens that had never been to Mexico before.
I guess part of this seems like a relevant story to tell you and the OP audience because my grandmother before living in Pacoima lived a few blocks away from the site of the raid. She went to elementary school at Placita and I often think now about how so many of the things she told me when I was little were intended to protect me. She used to tell me that I was lucky to be a citizen like her but that there are many times when we cannot be sure that we will not be sent back. As time has gone on I have realized where this fear came from. Did you know for instance that the same year, around 1931, the INS raided Pacoima alongside Laurel Canyon on Easter Sunday. The rumor I have heard is that INS drove down with their bullhorn as people came out of church.
So this is just one of the stories! That piece has been adapted/commissioned by Cherry Galette, our lovely friend and Oakland-based artist, who has revised the story as a meeting between this particular history and that of her family from Washington State. It is going to be this wild collaboration between myself, Cherry, and our grandparents/parents beyond the grave. I usually laugh at the word intergenerational but this feels very much so to me. Cherry has written and planned for several dancers and accompanying video for the piece.
ND: I am also so excited and invested in the stories of Scenes Unseen and the concept itself, at the very least because of the ways that immigration affects my family and loved ones. For instance, my sister’s husband has been banned from seeking citizenship due to messed up provisions of the Patriot Act. To support their children, she ferries back and forth from the US to Tijuana almost every day. You can’t imagine the strain and stress this puts on her and her family. To me, gathering an audience to address issues of immigration, race, sexuality, and gender is a way to honor both my family, the brave people who tell their stories in the show, and trans and queer people of color who negotiate borders of all kinds every day.
Another important aspect of the way that Irina and I are committed to doing shows is the interactive format. I think that these days people who go to a performance have reached a point of fatigue–you can walk into all sort of shows where people talk about anything from their sexual fetishes, to their pet’s adventures with a pet psychic, to their experiences with abuse. We’ve heard it all yet we haven’t, because people might still go on with their lives without thinking about how other lives impact their own or implicate them in some of the ill shit that is happening in the world. So our idea is not to let people off that easy. We want audiences to join us in creating a performance space and to participate in the action so that they begin to see how the stories they are interacting with affect them. We think that there is potential for challenging and engaging people. And having lots of fun and laughs, too!
I bet I’m not alone in saying that I can’t wait for Scenes Unseen! You also do a “roving supper club” called Lubao’s. When did that start, what does it take to put together, and what is an evening like eating supper up in your club?
ND: The concept of Lubao’s is to take the food influences that Irina and I have grown up with and try to incorporate them into some sort of cohesive whole. So we also say that Lubao’s is “where the Philippines and Mexico” sit down to dine. To me, that means that our food is nourishing, plentiful, flavorful, and is served in a way that makes you feel like you are at a family gathering.
celestial Lubao
On another note of origins, we came up with the name of our supper club while playing a drawing game called “Exquisite Corpse” where we agreed that we were going to create a new god. We came up with a celestial being with the calm, bovine eyes of a carabao, a charming elephant trunk, and a lower body with mischievous, twinkling tentacles. After we were done, we made up a word, Lubao, and named him that. Come to find out Lubao is actually a place in the Philippines that is in a region familiar to my family! We like to think that this makes our supper club a little magical.
IC: When Lubao’s started we did a few nights in an old church on Macarthur and Telegraph in Oakland. But now we are committed to doing it at our house more paladares style in North Oakland.
Lubao's Jesus Loves Meatballs Dinner
That would kind of be my dream way of doing it: having a set menu for a few weeks and then people drop by when they feel like it. So it didn’t take much to get started: we planned a menu, checked prices at as many places as we could, bought really simple bowls at the Dollar Tree, and asked our friends to come and to invite more people. I grew up in a pretty big family so I always watched my grandma (I almost feel like you know her now, Chris!) cooking large portions without ever looking at a cookbook. Later on, I was part of the first run of LA Food Not Bombs when I was a baby crusty. I actually learned a lot in that time period about making food for people. We made terrible fucking food and someone once threw a bagel that landed on my head after telling me they didn’t want any more damn bagels. It hurt, but I heard the message loud and clear: we needed to make better food!!! Everyone deserves food à la FNB but also everyone deserves good food that is cheap, and it doesn’t have to be elevated “ethnic” food like all the fancy crappy food trucks in SF and LA. I also really want people that eat meat and are vegan to be able to eat together and enjoy space together. That was great at the church! We saw people that ordered meat and then tasted the vegan version and wanted that.
I do appreciate vegetarian inclusivity. How is the latest installment of Lubao’s merging with your Scenes Unseen project?
IC: We are hosting a special Lubao’s/Scenes Unseen Sneak Peak on April 17th in Oakland with Cherry Galette, Diego Gomez, Juba Kalamka, and TBA. Also, if you are in LA, you can come to a Scenes Unseen fundraiser as part of Tranza. The LA fundraiser is largely because I am just an LA girl at heart that is madly in love with Oakland, so much of Scenes Unseen is inspired and about LA, and of course we want to encourage more Oakland/LA interbreeding since I believe they are sister cities. LA will have a lock-picking station by Sandra De La Loza, performance by Byron Jose, Nico…ahem…professor Amador…, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, readings by Bamby Salcedo and Liz Latty, and DJ sets by Rudy Bleu, Sara Tea, Pan Dulce and Rancherita Feliz.
Thanks for talking to me, Irina and Nico. And best of luck with your productions.
IC: Thank you soooooo much!
ND: Thanks, Chris! See you in spin class, maybe! Wink, Wink!
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For more info: scenesunseenproduction.com
Scenes Unseen: Facebook Page
Donate money to the production: kickstarter.com
**2001 LA Times article remembering La Placita Raids: “Ghosts of a 1931 Raid“
