“Outlaw Artists of 18th Street” reads a sign above the booth Marcos Raya and his comrades have set up on Blue Island Avenue for Fiesta del Sol, Pilsen’s annual summer street festival. Raya’s selling posters of his murals and paintings for a buck or two apiece. One has a spaniel in sunglasses sprawled between a half-empty wine bottle and a ripped postcard of the Loop. Raya says the work refers to his “dog years”–the period in the 70s and early 80s when he was down and out in Pilsen, painting explicitly political murals inspired by the neighborhood while wrestling with his own personal demons, leading what he calls “la mala vida, the bad life, the gutter boho life.”
“The beautiful tradition that we have in Mexico is that art takes on a social-political dimension,” he says. “You become a public figure. You are the spokesman of the proletariat, of the oppressed. It becomes a collective dialogue–you speak for the people through the walls you paint.”
Now, after years of eeking out a living, Raya has started to achieve wider recognition outside of Pilsen. He was one of only two Chicago artists (the other was Carlos Cortez) to be included in the monumental exhibit, “Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985,” which opened in 1990 at UCLA’s Wright Gallery and toured the country through 1993. Within the last three years Raya’s paintings, installations, assemblages, photographs, and painted furniture have been featured in four Latino art exhibitions that have traveled Mexico, Japan, and the U.S. He was one of 20 artists in the Mexican Fine Arts Center’s 1993 survey of contemporary Chicano art, “Art of the Other Mexico: Sources and Meanings,” and his work was shown in a half dozen regional shows last year alone. The Legacy of Manifest Destiny, a large painting combining images from his outdoor art, capped the recent exhibition “Healing Walls: Murals and Community,” a history of Chicago’s public mural movement at the Illinois Art Gallery. Raya’s found-object installations are in the Mexican rasquachismo style, using whatever’s at hand. Currently he’s working on an installation that will be featured in “Art in Chicago, 1945-1995,” which will open in November at the new Museum of Contemporary Art.
“I prefer the art installations, the art objects, the little boxes. I’m not too crazy about some of the easel paintings. But his three-dimensional pieces really grab me–he has the magic power to make it happen in that media–like his bottles wrapped and tied in twine, which have to do with the feelings of being alcoholic. They’re like bottles that have life, and the life in them wants to get out, but it’s self-contained, imprisoned. That relates to his own being, and it really touches me. . . . He has great potential, but there are problems he has to deal with.”
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Raya says he had a rough time when he first came to the U.S. to live with his mother in 1964. He quickly learned how to defend himself from the neighborhood’s Italian “street clubs” and joined the Taylor Barracudas, a Mexican clique. “It was so ugly here, extremely gray, dirty buildings and streets, big empty lots where the university is.” Most of Taylor Street’s Mexicans had moved on to Pilsen, and Raya took his first job washing dishes for 50 cents an hour at a 24-hour restaurant near 18th and Blue Island.
Raya sprouted an afro like Jimi Hendrix and experimented with psychedelic drugs while drawing in his notebook. He decided to evade the draft by moving to Mexico City in the late summer of 1968. He hung out with art students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, though he didn’t attend classes. He’d arrived just in time. The school was one of the centers of student protests in that tumultuous year. “Our aim was to have a public dialogue with the president of Mexico to discuss the problems of Mexican society,” says Raya. “But his response was force. I was in the demonstrations. The army blocked the streets. The university was the only place to hide, the only free zone in the city.” The university had enjoyed administrative autonomy for nearly 40 years, but the government ordered the military to occupy the campus in early September. On October 2 students assembled in a downtown plaza, and the military opened fire on the crowd. The official tally placed the death toll at 50, but England’s The Guardian newspaper reported there were at least 325 killed. Thousands of students were injured, and thousands were jailed.
