Beto de la Rocha doesn’t notice the hummingbird darting around his head.
Seated on his sister’s patio in El Sereno, the 85-year-old artist only wants to focus on his latest painting in front of him — even as the bird sings to him.
“I’m having some difficulty,” he says with a frown, holding a paint brush and somewhat bothered trying to explain his craft. “I don’t know how to … explain it.”
Instead, he describes chasing after crawdads along the L.A. River as a boy. He’s lost in thought, seemingly unaware of the world around him, and he goes back to the painting.
It’s long been hard for others to imagine him painting anything that could be put into words. His still-life “La Mesa de Frank,” which appeared in a landmark 1974 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, practically quivers like an animated gif, vibrating on a different frequency from that of reality. The black-and-white drawing depicts a kitchen table surrounded by the words “Chicano art” and other floating text amid a frenzy of mugs that seem to tip over but never fall, a bag of coffee, utensils, crockery and a cosmic frenzy of stars and moons.
The drawing was part of the Los Four show at LACMA featuring the works of De la Rocha, Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert “Magu” Lujan and Frank Romero — the first major exhibition of Chicano art in L.A. during an era when Latinos were largely ignored by mainstream art spaces. The show’s 50th anniversary brings into focus the genius and career of De la Rocha, who now lives in assisted living but continues to paint whenever he visits his sister.
Family and friends describe Beto’s approach to drawing as either simple sketches or a torrent of pen strokes, depending on the era. In the 1960s, he was inspired by abstract expressionists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
De la Rocha’s son Zack, lead singer of Rage Against the Machine, likens his father’s painting style to that of jazz legend John Coltrane: Both artists build from a simple concept, delve into a frenzy and land back on something familiar.
Zack recalls as a young boy watching his father instinctively draw in a rapid-fire process.
“Like a confident controlled chaos,” Zack said, adding via email: “I was pretty blown away when the subject of the piece would take shape through the storm of scribble.”
Beto de la Rocha cannot recall his early art. Loved ones describe his memory as fragile but don’t attach any medical terms to his condition. In conversations with the artist, it’s clear that the details from his life are constantly shifting in his mind, as though his memories refuse to stand still.
He thinks that his early paintings were lost when he moved, or that someone left them out in the rain, or that they were stolen, according to Beto’s younger sister, Carola de la Rocha.
He doesn’t recall that he destroyed much of his own work in a bonfire in a Lincoln Heights backyard. He can’t put words to what led him to do that. Those close to him say he was allergic to talking up his work in order to sell it, and for a time he gave up art altogether and turned to the Bible.
“Which was odd, because we grew up Jewish,” Carola says.
But her brother does remember — smiles, in fact — when asked about the groundbreaking LACMA exhibition he helped to put together with his fellow Chicano artists.
“We wanted to show people who we were,” he says proudly.
Los Four were college-educated artists who did not set out to have their work appear at LACMA. They had day jobs and often debated art theory at Romero’s kitchen table in Angelino Heights, where they wrote their ideas and sketched pictures — one the same featured in Beto’s monochromatic drawing.
“We were talking about doing something bicultural, bilingual, bi la, la, la,” Romero, 83, says.
In 1973, Almaraz persuaded UC Irvine gallery curator Hal Glicksman to showcase their work, and that university exhibition caught the attention of LACMA curator Jane Livingston.
Despite the city’s enormous Latino population and the widespread adoption of the term Chicano by writers and artists, their stories were not showcased at LACMA or any other major art spaces. The previous year the Chicano art group Asco spray-painted the LACMA facade to protest the lack of Latino representation in the museum.
Initially, Los Four were offered a corner of a gallery at LACMA. But the artists kept bringing in more work and flirted with the idea of parking a low rider in the middle of their exhibition. A car wouldn’t fit in the museum elevator, so they settled on a portion of a 1952 Chevrolet.
Eventually the museum surrendered an entire wing, Romero says. The four artists showcased a collaborative mural, paintings on canvas, sketches on paper and a pyramid of dolls, masks, ceramic figures and books.
The Times reported that the exhibit “functions partly as a spoof of the museum, its bloodlessness and general uptightness.” But the newspaper also said, “The mirror reflects both ways. The museum’s stuffiness reflects ‘Los Four’s’ self-conscious scruffiness. If both sides can accept those balanced truths with a laugh, maybe both will learn something.”
The review in The Times said LACMA was airing the point of view of “special interest groups” and were “subject to political influence.”
In response, muralist Judithe Hernández wrote a letter to The Times. “The Ghetto and the Reservation do exist,” she said. “They are a very real part of American society.” (Hernández joined Los Four just before the LACMA show, but her work was not included because it was not featured in the UC Irvine show. She would go on to become a regular member with the group.)
Despite the contempt that the paper held for the show, “Los Four: Almaraz/de la Rocha/Lujan/Romero” was viewed as groundbreaking for Chicano representation, Romero and Hernández say.
Unlike other Chicano artist groups of the time, Los Four captured the socioeconomic and political histories of Chicano culture, says Loretta Ramirez, assistant professor of Chicano and Latino studies at Cal State Long Beach.
Los Four, Ramirez says, “are pulling from a lot more heritage and cultural practices. I’m thinking about the mixed media that they use, found objects, the quoting of cultural heritage, some of the Indigeneity. They’re responding to much of the visual politics, visual rhetoric from the farmworkers’ movement, as well as the Vietnam protests.”
The show arrived at a tumultuous time in the city, just a few years after the Chicano Moratorium, a movement of Chicano activists who opposed the Vietnam War. Until then, Latinos were largely absent in the structures of power and culture.
Romero printed large posters to promote the show, with one featuring a portrait of Beto’s mother. She floats in a sea of stars, a heart and the handwritten font that would become synonymous with Cholo-style tagging. The names of his contemporaries and his family join declarations like “Arte Chicano Existe” and “Que Viva La Raza.”
Zack imagines people looking at his grandmother on the poster and wondering whether she was a queen or an heiress or a famous musician. In reality, she was a “working-class Mexicana from Mazatlan who fled north to reclaim a tiny corner of a Los Angeles barrio, Frogtown,” he says.
“You don’t need to have written a book or have read one to understand how much of a coup that was or how redemptive and therapeutic the act of painting was for that young firebrand from East Los,” he says.
Carola says she and her brothers were first-generation Latinos who spoke Spanish fluently but felt that the term Chicano didn’t belong to them. It didn’t seem fair to take away the Chicano identity from the pachucos, cholas and other groups who had endured so much mistreatment in America.
“It was a new term and we struggled with it a bit,” she says.
Around 1963, Beto attended East Los Angeles College and met Lujan, who introduced him to the concepts surrounding Chicano struggle.
“I was American at the time — not even Mexican American,” he joked during a 1999 interview with Lujan and Romero preserved in the Cal State University digital archives.
“We were very isolated Mexicans,” he said, joking about growing up in Elysian Valley and Lincoln Heights. “We were leery of Chicanos and Americans who didn’t appreciate our being higher class Mexicans. We were like caught in between.”
But he would make up for lost time. He worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers movement, painting a mural with Almaraz honoring their fight. He helped to popularize the observance of Día de los Muertos in Los Angeles, working with Self Help Graphics in the early 1970s, according to his friend, photographer Oscar Castillo. Beto also contributed art, essays and short stories to the Chicano literary magazine Con Safos.
“He was his own artist, and he created images that were important to him,” Castillo says. “Beto did not hit you over the head with his ideas. He was quiet, but he was an important voice.”
Los Four’s legacy as Chicano pioneers is firmly established today, according to Tiffany Ana López, dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at UC Irvine, who says the group provided a “landscape of vision and voice for the next generation to find their way.”
“One of the most impactful things about Los Four is that they pushed against the status quo and resisted traditional mindsets,” López says.
But success was not guaranteed after the LACMA show, Romero says. The members did not immediately find steady work.
Beto’s creative flair was admirable, but he also struggled with his mental health, Hernández says.
“He was struggling with his own personal demons,” she says.
“There was a time when Magu and Carlos had to take Beto to be admitted to the hospital, because he was seeing things,” Romero says. “We were all a little worried about him.”
Zack recalls growing up with a father who appeared stoic and difficult to read.
“But over time I sensed some real regret,” he says. “When you’re fighting through episodes of real depression, I think it can skew your perspective and leave you with some feelings of diminished self-worth. So, when faced with the praise that he deserved or when his work was granted a certain historical import, I think there was a part of him that struggled to process what he thought was a contradiction — even if it was coming from me.”
It was during this period that Beto blamed art for the failure of his marriage to wife Olivia. He took up a fanatical and literal interpretation of the Bible, says Carola.
He believed he had created graven images of false idols with his art, and he gave up a teaching position at East Los Angeles College. He moved into his father’s home in Lincoln Heights, boarded up the windows, placed locks on the doors and began a 40-day fast.
“He was fasting on orange peels and water,” Romero says.
Already a thin man, Beto became emaciated and dropped to about 75 pounds, Carola says.
Around this time, when Zack was about 5 or 6 years old, he asked if he could have one of his dad’s landscape drawings. Beto said no.
“Here was a very tender young boy asking for this thing — a piece of flat canvas with paint, an object, a nothing — and I denied it to my son, a human,” Beto told The Times in 1995, fighting back tears. “How could I have been so possessive?”
Beto made his son gather all the art in the house — landscape paintings, intricate woodblock prints, abstract works — and he shredded them with scissors and set fire to the scraps in a trash can in the backyard.
Family members tried to reason with Beto and convince him to break his fast, Carola says.
“We really thought he was going to die,” she says.
Beto’s mother, Cecilia, arrived at his bedside and force-fed him drops of juice while the family waited for an ambulance. Hallucinating, he kept yelling at his mother, insisting that something was lurking in the room.
It would take 20 years before he would open himself up again to art, according to friends and family.
Because De la Rocha destroyed so many of his early works, demand is high for his drawings and paintings, Carola says. She has approached private collectors to see whether they would give their works back to him, since he could not afford to buy back his own art. She largely blames Romero, whom she believes profited off her brother’s art by selling his work.
Romero says he returned multiple paintings and drawings by Beto to Zack. Romero donated other works to art institutions to preserve Beto’s work, and he held onto only a handful of sketch drawings, he says.
“I have nothing left, or they’re very small really,” Romero says, referring to a few framed sketches that Beto made during their kitchen table group discussions.
The two men were at Eastern Projects Gallery for a recent show celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Los Four exhibition, but they missed each other by a few hours.
“It would have been a wonderful reunion,” Romero says. “I would have loved to have seen him.”
Carola believes her brother still holds a grudge against Romero. But it’s unclear what Beto thinks about his old friend, because he doesn’t remember anyone by the name Frank.
Hernández recalls that when she first met Beto, he was opposed to including a woman in the group. He was cold to her and didn’t make the effort to listen to her input. Then in 2009, Zack brought Beto to her birthday party at a restaurant.
She was shocked to see him, because they had not talked in decades.
“He walked into the room, he came over to me and just burst into tears. He said, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I owe you an apology. I was so mean to you,’ ” Hernández says. “I’m sorry that didn’t happen sooner, because I really didn’t get to know him that well.”
The other members of Los Four continued to make art throughout their careers. Lujan died in 2011 from prostate cancer, and Almaraz died in 1989 from AIDS-related causes.
Today Beto’s studio is his sister’s patio. He cannot re-create his old paintings and says he would not want to. His sister’s home is filled with his unfinished sketches and portraits of his family, including one of Zack.
“It doesn’t have that same amount of detail that the other pieces he did of the family, but I didn’t get into the weeds about it,” Zack says. “My attitude was like ‘gracias maestro, you earned your peace, I’ll fill in the rest.’ ”
Beto’s latest work, the one giving him trouble on his sister’s patio, is a painting of two dogs, Bichons named Luna and Miel — Moon and Honey. A reference photo shows the dogs in neutral tones, but Beto’s Impressionistic painting bursts with golds, blues and pearl.
Carola, a former dancer with Ballet Folklórico de México, puts on a recording of a Spanish guitar. As the music drifts over him, Beto appears at ease with himself, unbothered by questions about his legacy.
He does not have the words to describe his world, but like always, his work speaks for itself.
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