Taking another look at race with stories of resistance, justice, equity

Antonio De La Garza grew up in what he describes as a “pretty rural” part of Idaho where his family experienced a lot of stereotyping and racism since they were one of only about three Chicano/Latino families there, at the time.

“My mom’s family is Irish, my dad’s family is Tejano and Mexican.  … I had a lot of confusion about race growing up,” he says. “That was one of the things that got me investigating this sort of thing because I’m half White; I’m half Latino. I don’t speak Spanish because I grew up in a small town in Idaho. I never really passed for White there, but I’m kind of light-skinned, so how do I fit in? This started my kind of investigation into race.”

Later, he moved to Los Angeles with his cousins where everyone around him was Latino and Chicano, spoke Spanish, and were deeply connected to the culture. It was a real political and cultural awakening for him, he says, and eventually led him to study and earn degrees in communication, ethnic studies, and political science. Today, he’s an associate professor of communication and media studies at Cal State San Marcos. His research focused on the rhetoric about the borderlands and race — how society talks about race, immigrants, and anyone who’s different — looks at these broad, social discourses that have tangible consequences for the people who are being discussed, and how this affects the conditions of these groups of people. That has included his work in Tijuana for the past four years, working with refugee communities in an effort to understand their conditions and experiences. He says it’s what led the Museum of Us in Balboa Park to reach out to him about helping to develop a research program for its new exhibition, “Race: Power, Resistance & Change,” which opens today.

According to a statement from the museum, the collaborative work on this exhibit began in 2018 and was shaped through close work with artists, scholars, community members, and the museum’s exhibits team, who combined research and lived experience into a shared narrative, reflecting the museum’s “values and efforts to uplift community voices, histories, and knowledge.” Presented in Spanish and English, the exhibition explores the construction of race and the ways that has shaped laws and daily life, locally and more broadly, using installation art, sculpture, photography, animation, poetry, and archival resources.

De La Garza, 45, lives in Oceanside and worked on designing the research process for this project and developing the timeline and narrative about race in the region. He talks about the importance of this kind of public scholarship, and helping people understand race as a political category and legal status, rather than biology.

Q: Talk a bit about your involvement in this exhibition.

A: The part of this that was so interesting for me was the museum is a decolonizing museum. They’re doing an exhibit about race, but traditional anthropological methodologies are very top-down, very strict and academic. That’s one of the critiques of anthropology museums. So, I got to help them design a ground-up method for doing this research. They brought in some interns from USD (University of San Diego), and I kind of trained them in the critical race/decolonial research practice. We looked at archives, we did short interviews, we did tours of the city, we just did a ton of research across all different types of formats to create the grounding of the narrative. I was really helping on the research side. Once we collected all of the research, the plan was that we wanted to tell the story of race in our region, but we didn’t want to make it look like the typical scenes of victimization, which is often what people go with when they talk about race. We started to investigate what the strategies are that racialized groups have produced, invented, developed to survive, persist, and resist. That’s where the research was being directed. I’ve just been a collaborator on that part, helping to fact check things, making sure that the research was developed in a way that was ethical and appropriate for the needs of the institution, but that was also being responsible to what the community had said they wanted after being consulted about what the exhibit design could be.

Q: Why did you want to be involved?

A: I think it’s really important and just an interesting project. It’s important because what I have seen throughout my research and communication about difference in race is that, very rarely are people on the same page, or even using the same definitions, when they talk about race. That’s often why conversations about race go nowhere. When I teach about race in my class, I’m telling them there’s this biological definition, and we think that’s real, but race really isn’t biology. Then, there are all of these cultural narratives, story definitions about race. We think those are real, but these are stories. Then, you’ve got these legal definitions of race that have existed since the founding of the country, and these legal definitions have real effects; people are categorized into them, but they have changed over time as the nomenclature and the laws have changed. So, how is it that we can make some kind of coherent sense about what race is when it’s all these different registers, and when people are using all of these terms meaning different things?

It was this opportunity to be involved in, and work with, a whole bunch of really smart, creative people on something that’s super important-not just to our collective understanding of ourselves, but what I also think is very interesting about this exhibit is it’s really focused on our region. It takes into account the border region and the various layers of colonization, from the Spanish to Mexico to America. In that regard, it’s a really rich and complicated exhibit.

Q: What was important to you to be able to accomplish in this exhibition?

A: For me, there were two things that I really thought were important. First and foremost, that race is not biology and it’s not destiny. That said, it is very real. The impacts of it are real, the effects of it are real, what it does to people’s sense of identity and belonging is real, what it does to people’s health outcomes and opportunities in terms of getting a job is real. But, we so often get caught up in this notion that race is some kind of biological fact or truth when, really, what race is, is a political category and a technique of control. It’s a legal status and a technique of control. So, it was really important that this exhibit, one, undermine that notion that race is in some way rooted in our biology, rather than race is a product of our law and our discourse. The other thing that was really important to me about this exhibit was that it show people not as victims. That even while they’re struggling with these oppressive systems, and they are struggling, they are inventing ways to resist and survive. They’re building family, they’re building community, and those are the also the tactics that are the antidote to racism.

What I love about Oceanside…

I mean, everything. Oceanside is the best. I love being close to the water, I love the feeling of community and pride in my neighborhood, all of the locals know each other at all of the local spots, and you’re never really alone — in a good way — because there’s so much community in this area.

Q: Can you talk about how race occurred here, in San Diego?

A: This starts in colonization. You have the papal decrees that say that the Catholic Church is on a mission to civilize and that Catholics owe it to the world to colonize it in the name of Christianity. That’s when we first start to see race happening in our in our region, is Catholic missionaries, the Catholic Church, the encomienda system happening here. The missions all the way up California. There’s Indigenous resistance to that the entire time. This might be apocryphal, but you know those tile roofs? The red tile? That was developed because of Indigenous people resisting and shooting flaming arrows into these missions to fight back against the colonization.

Then, we have this colonization period, we have Mexico’s war for independence, and this place becomes Mexico. In Mexico, slavery is illegal, so we have Black folk, early Black folk, coming here to escape from slavery because Mexico does not believe in slavery. So, there’s a small wave of a Black population. There’s also a small wave of Chinese people during the railroads who flee, again, to Mexico because they’re freer and their rights are more respected, and this area being Mexico at that point in time. Then, you’ve got the second wave of colonization after the war between the United States and Mexico. The U.S. recolonizes all of this territory and racializes the people who are living there who are either descendants of Native Americans or Mexicans, or refugees escaping slavery. That gets re-racialized, the border gets redrawn, and as that border becomes more and more solidified—not just physically, but in our natural national imagination as something that’s real and necessary—we start to see the discourse about drugs and the cartels and violence. As we start to see more and more discourse about undocumented people, the racial lines and the narratives of race begin to really cement themselves. Now, we’ve got this very complex region with four languages spoken. San Diego is one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the country. People from all over the world, all sharing this space right in the Borderlands.

Q: Reading about this exhibition reminded me of a conversation I had in 2021 with Seth Mallios, a professor of anthropology at San Diego State, who has done extensive work on the life of Nathan Harrison, San Diego’s first Black homesteader. His research showed him that San Diego was known as the “Mississippi of the West,” that Southern California was settled by southerners and Northern California was settled by northerners, and that Los Angeles was a hotbed for the Confederacy during the Civil War. These are all things I’d never learned before. Are there things you learned about during the process of working on this exhibition that surprised you?

A: Oh yeah, there was a bunch. I don’t know if you’ve heard of La Chinesca. La Chinesca is a Mexican Chinatown in Mexicali. During the Gold Rush, the treatment of the Chinese in California was really horrific and their labor was exploited. There was lots of racialized violence directed at them and La Chinesca is this community in Mexicali of Chinese immigrants who fled there because it was safer and they were still close enough to California that they could come do the work, but they had more rights and freedoms. I had never realized that there were people, both Black folk and Chinese folk, who were kind of using the border as a way to escape that oppression. Oftentimes, especially in my own scholarship, we don’t think about the ways that people could use the border resistively. That, to me, was just really amazing.

Q: What do you hope this experience of visiting this exhibition is like for others? That it helps them understand about race?

A: First and foremost, I hope it leads them to ask questions. I think that might be one of the strongest concepts in this exhibit, is it invites the viewer to ask questions about how race has implicated themselves, how it shaped their own identity, whether they view themselves as racialized or not, and I think we’re at a time where people need to reflect and engage in discussion that is fact based, and also recognizes the human. I really hope that this exhibit gets people to ask questions and engage in dialog about race. The other thing, and I think this is super important, is that this is an intervention in the archive. Oftentimes, the stories of resistance and survival get ignored and we don’t recognize that, even in the face of oppression, the people who are struggling with it and surviving it are the ones who really hold the answers to undoing it.

Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

A: To not wait for permission to do the work that fascinates you or interests you.

Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?

A: I love Jiu Jitsu and I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu here in San Diego. I really love that as a sport.

I’ve also befriended my neighborhood crows. They come by every afternoon to get treats. I absolutely love my crows here, in Oceanside. They’re very smart and very loud.

Q: Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend.

A: I’m a little bit of a homebody, so for me, that would be to maybe go out to the pier in Oceanside, watch the sunset, have drinks, maybe a show at the Pour House that evening. I love live music, and local live music is the best. Then, coffee and a drive down the coast in the morning.