Salvador Plascencia
by Max Benavidez
Bomb Magazine - Issue 98 Winter 2007

MB interviewing SP on his novel, The People of Paper: “On one level the book reflects my own experience of having grown up here in Southern California, in a place, Montebello, very much like El Monte. I know these starved cities with their lovely names. At another level, you move into this place of myth…through the process of creating this narrative, you become a mythographer…And, with Saturn, you give us back the optical ability to gaze at the galaxy, at the heavens again, and see myths up there, not just floating satellites…”

The Global Migrant On the Sacred Highway
by Max Benavidez

“It was a cold day in February and I was looking closely at the self-portrait of Yasumasa Morimura as Frida Kahlo while Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, a banned remix of JayZ’s The Black Album and The Beatles’ White Album, swept insistently through the air. The Japanese male face painted with Kahlo’s familiar Mexicanidad wore a sly knowing expression as if to say, “We are in the realm of the global grey.” Because we are living in a fluid moment of extreme transition where cultural remixing rules the day, we need to shift the way we speak about art…”

Of Immigrants and Exiles: True L.A. Stories
A Meditation on John Fante & Xavier Villaurrutia
by Max Benavidez

“Tortuous flickering, nocturnal dread, decaying rapture, death. These are the submerged realities coursing beneath our vast sun-kissed metropolis in the 21st century and our prophetic precursors are two obscure writers named John Fante and Xavier Villaurrutia, an immigrant and an exile, who foresaw the future in the middle of an economic depression a long time ago.”

Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge
by Cheech Marin

"The Chicano is a synthesizer par excellence by heritage and ancestry," writes Max Benavidez in the excellent exhibition catalog essay. Benavidez traces the origins and aesthetic antecedents of Chicano art, which began in the late 1960s. "Ultimately it can be stated that the Chicano represents the migrant consciousness, a territory between the familiar and the strange, between languages, between cultures." Chicano art is informed in part by the great Mexican muralists (Diego Rivera, etc.), political struggles (past and present) and graffiti of the Los Angeles streets. "Stir it all up and we have true art noir, Chicano style," writes Benavidez.