San Francisco Chronicle - Friday, November 7, 2003
Rona Marech, Chronicle Staff Writer

The director's answer came slowly over eight months of an unusual collaboration. Artists Jime Salcedo-Malo, Melissa Lozano, Paul S. Flores, Rico Pabón and Pablo Rodriguez fanned out in the East Oakland neighborhood -- known for both its vibrancy and, recently, violence -- to teach workshops, plant gardens, paint fences, organize celebrations and interview a colorful array of denizens, from street vendors to dress merchants to teenage Raiders fans to the newest immigrants. As they went, the resident artists collected stories that they turned into sketches and profiles and presented them, as works-in-progress, to the community they had adopted. The exchange culminates this and next weekend, with performances of "The Fruitvale Project" at La Peña Cultural Center and Fremont High School.

The artists -- all first- or second-generation Latinos from around the state -- spoke of how they were inspired by the Fruitvale, a community that is largely inhabited by a dizzying mix of immigrants.

"For me, immigrants are the citizens of the future. They're the ones who come with a clean slate full of hope and full of dreams. They come in with such a positive attitude and working strength that they shake everything around them," said Arce, 42, who immigrated from Costa Rica two decades ago. "People who have been here or were born here get beaten down, worn down. Immigrants shake things up just by behaving with optimism and with complete belief.

"I'm just so touched. I'm so touched. I'm completely touched," she said, starting to cry. "They give me back what I've been losing."

"Through the artists' eyes, I don't take everything for granted, from the tamale vendor to the Catholic Church," said Andrea Aguilar, the youth coordinator at Spanish Speaking Citizens' Foundation, one of the project's host agencies. "Through their eyes, we could appreciate that. That was beautiful. It helped us to focus on the beautiful, positive things we have here."

The project took seed several years ago, when Flores saw a video of Arce's one-woman show "Stretching My Skin Until It Rips Whole" (one of three solo pieces she's created), and subsequently heard her speak at a Latino arts conference. Other speakers were bogged down in trying to define community or had bland, vague notions about working with people of color, Flores said.

"Elia was ahead of them. She had actually done the work a lot of people were theorizing about: the integration of artists with specific communities to really deal with specific issues."

In Arce's collaborative shows, which have been performed to much acclaim in several cities, including Los Angeles and Houston, she has worked with untrained performers, helping them tell their stories about topics such as struggling with HIV or surviving breast cancer.

Flores invited Arce to La Peña to create a show with Latino spoken-word artists. "As a performance artist, she had a large repertoire of media that I felt could help myself and other spoken-word artists to further actualize our stories of being Latino in the U.S. and being immigrants," he said. The result,

"We Carry a Home With Us," debuted last year.

"Because I'm an immigrant, I've lived a nomadic life since I came to the U.S.... I was always in search of a place I can call my home, until I realized my body was my home," Arce said. In the show, performers created pieces from "memories they had in their bodies."

Buoyed by that success and a grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Arts Partners Program, the group reconvened -- with some substitutions -- for "The Fruitvale Project," which Flores and Arce conceived together.

"The idea was to take it outside of the artists. How can we make these issues be written from the community's point of view?" Arce said. They decided to focus on the Fruitvale District because of its large immigrant population - - of the past and present.

"This is an experiment. Not only is our performance an experiment, but so is the Fruitvale. It's so alive. That's why it attracted us so much," Flores said. "We're talking about a new community here. It's the 21st century. Mexican culture isn't just about mariachi and hitting piñatas, and the Fruitvale isn't just Mexican . . . It's representative of what America is. It's a microcosm of the American dream."

Pablo Rodriguez, who was born in Mexico and grew up in the Central Valley, had never been to the Fruitvale District before. "I was really concerned about being viewed as an outsider, but that went away really quickly," he said.

"It felt like home."

Walking through Fruitvale feels like being in a Latin American town, said Arce, except, "because you're not in Latin America, everyone talks to each other. You go into a store and immediately strike up a conversation with people. They want to know about you and tell you about themselves, like it's a normal thing. There is a kind of recognition of feeling seen and being able to see."

But the artists didn't want to simply storm the neighborhood, take stories and run with them, Flores said. So they entered delicately, offering themselves to the community first through partnerships with two local nonprofits, the Spanish Speaking Citizens' Foundation and the Spanish Speaking Unity Council. And gradually, the stories came.

"They want us to know their stories. They tell us their stories with pride," Arce said. "The deeper we went, the deeper we could go."

The show includes portraits of people the artists encountered, such as a Cambodian immigrant who works as a neighborhood watchdog, a gay hairdresser from a local salon, a teenager who has been in the country for three weeks, a Native American who volunteered at a community garden project, and a drag queen -- a construction worker by day -- who Arce met at a wig shop on International Boulevard. In song and with words, movement, video and poetry, the performers address everything, from the history of the neighborhood to the Raiders Riots to piñata-breaking and tamale-making. A neighborhood vendor, Teresa Mondragón, will appear on stage with her food cart -- and with samples -- to describe in Spanish how she makes tamales.

"Their pieces put a real face on the masses of people who you walk by every day and don't know," said Jenny Kassan, the program manager at the Spanish Speaking Unity Council. "You really sympathize with the people. You can imagine yourself in their shoes. The issues they face are universal."

E-mail Rona Marech at rmarech@sfchronicle.com.
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