Having spent most of my adult life living outside Mississippi, I would occasionally encounter people that would react a certain way when they learned I grew up in the deepest of the Deep South. Once, I met a native Los Angelino who said, “Oh, I’m so glad I didn’t grow up in a racist place like that.” At the time, I think I shrugged it off with a, “Yeah…well,” but what I really wanted to say was, “Have you ever heard about Watts? Do you remember 1991? The Black Panthers and the LAPD?” I think this person must’ve been born in the late ‘90s or a product of selective homeschooling, because any cursory reading of Los Angeles history will reveal that the American South doesn’t have the market cornered on state-sanctioned, racist violence. I would recommend the masterful tome, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties by Mike Davis and John Wiener, which explores much of this.
I can now also recommend director Travis Gutiérrez Senger’s absolutely engrossing documentary, ASCO: Without Permission, which premiered at SXSW on Tuesday. Executive produced by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, the film explores one part of Los Angeles’ violent history, but focuses much of its attention on a response to state-sanctioned violence by a group of Mexican American artists collectively known as ASCO (translated from Spanish means nausea or disgust). While the collective would morph and grow over time, its core members were Harry Gamboa Jr., Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro, Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez.
As seen here, the group was impossibly cool. Perfectly composed photo shoots that looked like scenes from popular films, these creations were actually called “no movies” because the movies would never exist. Even if they had scripts, the Hollywood gatekeepers wouldn’t have let them in. They also took to the streets for public, performance art that drew from religious iconography. Perhaps the most striking of these were their moving murals, brave and provocative processions through the streets of L.A., as seen below.
ASCO: Without Permission is a deeply Los Angeles film but also a profoundly American film, as it profiles individuals and a community that knew oppression but were determined not to let it defeat them. It shows how art and creativity can break the cycles of violence and despair that plague us…if not collectively, then at least individually. ASCO were trailblazers who knew they belonged in the “art world” but who also knew the violence of exclusion. Thankfully, while all four founding members were still alive, that world recognized that they did indeed belong and honored them with a retrospective of their work at LACMA in 2011, a place where they graffitied their names decades before. This exhibition would eventually tour around the world.
Few films are as timely and necessary as ASCO: Without Permission. Violence of neglect, exclusion, and “governmental efficiency” are sweeping across our country, resulting in fear, despair, and anger. As Bernal said in the post-screening Q&A, “People talk about behaving properly. But what does it mean to act properly at a time like this?” To recall the work and words of the late John Lewis, times like these call for good trouble, the kind that defined the lives and work of ASCO.