University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

By the rivers, I stood and stared into the Sun

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By the rivers, I stood and stared into the Sun

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Content Copyright 2019 Star Montana
By the Rivers, I Stood and Stared into the Sun
By
Star Montana
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS (FINE ARTS)
August 2019

i

Dedication
I dedicate my thesis to my Mother Louisa M. Silva, my brother Frank Soto, and my nephew
Louise (Louie) Soto. You are the sun, sky, and moon of my life. I owe my life to you, mom. I
owe you for holding on to me when I thought our world was over, brother. I owe all the first
love and happiness that I felt after the long darkness to you, my sweet nephew, my sunshine.

ii

Acknowledgements
I would like first to acknowledge and thank my mother Louisa Mary Silva for being the best
mother she could be with the tools she had at the time. Everything I do is because you told me I
was your unique diamond, and I was your star that was brought to you from the sky. I could
never imagine a bigger cheerleader than you, I wish you could have seen me graduate, but all my
research and art is to figure out why we have died so young and so unjust. I promised your death
would not be in vain, and this thesis is acknowledging the history of us. To my brother Frank
Soto who is my sounding board, my other half in this world. Who knows what I am thinking
with just a stare and a smirk. Thank you for being there all these years for me in academia, I
would not have survived without you always picking up the phone or picking me up to hear me
cry or explain what I was thinking in terms of my art and thesis. To my partner Jesse Monsher,
who has been my supportive love these past two years and cheered me on as I’ve gone through
this emotional, academic journey. I could not have done this without you.
To Professor Andrew Campbell of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California
Roski School of Art (USC) for agreeing to be my thesis advisor and always being available to
me throughout my time at USC to discuss theory, art, and life. I am a far better theorist, artist,
human because of you. I am indebted to your amazing service of being my thesis chair. Thank
you for being you, Andy. To Jennifer West Chair of 4D Art at the University of Southern
California Roski School of Art, thank you for agreeing to be on my committee and being my
second reader. I felt very connected to you during my time at USC and always thought you cared
deeply for me and my work. I treasured your critiques on how I should push my work and
writing. Thank you for being the riot girl feminist punk professor I needed in my life. To Nao
Bustamante Director of MFA Art at the University of Southern California Roski School of Art,

iii

thank you for being there for me since day one. You changed my life with that call and told me I
was going to graduate school. I am thankful you are my third reader and in my life.
To my Cohort, I am grateful I met you all, we have been through the thick and thin together. To
the two people in my cohort who have held me the most and wiped away my tears, I love you
both deeply Noé Olivas and Jake Freilich, I can’t imagine graduate school without you. I thank
you for holding me when I needed true friendship in a process that was confusing and alienating.
I am glad I had you both in Texas and Mexico.

Table of Contents

Dedication i
Acknowledgements ii
Rio Grande Diaspora 1
Chola Descent 7
Intergenerational Brujeria 13
10,000 tears to Teotihuacan 20
Bibliography 27

1. Rio Grande Diaspora
I am standing next to the riverbanks of the Rio Grande on the border of El Paso, Texas
and Sunland, New Mexico in this dreamlike state. I try to take off my sandals for my self-
portrait, but my feet get pricked badly. The marshland next to the Rio Grande is not soft marshy
grass like I thought it would be, it is instead coarse desert grass. The pain I feel from stepping on
it centers me back to reality, a thought that I need to protect myself from the world instead of
forcing pain on myself for the sake of obtaining a self-portrait. Today is August 12th, 2018 and it
starts the eighth-year anniversary of my mother’s passing in a hospital, a long process that began
when I was ten years old. After years of systematic oppression and failures through the
healthcare system, we watched my mother Louise M. Silva die at 49 years old on August 13th,
2010. She was not the only mother to die young in our family. This is an ongoing, destructive
cycle. My great-grandmother Elena, who crossed this Rio Grande from Mapimí, Durango during
the Mexican Civil War for a better life, died at 55 years old in El Paso while she was visiting
from Boyle Heights, California. Her daughters never forgave the river, the town, and no one
from the Minjares family returned to El Paso after her death. Before I take this photograph on the
bank of the Rio Grande, let me tell you of my mother and me, about the river I grew up on, and
the town my family lived in after we migrated from El Paso, Texas 73 years ago.
I was born and raised in Boyle Heights, California. Until a few years ago, most people
outside of the barrio had not heard of this neighborhood. Boyle Heights was the smaller town
version of East Los Angeles, which was more well-known because of negative portrayal in mass
media of Latinx culture. Nowadays, Boyle Heights is in the local and national news because it is
at the forefront of the fight of gentrification that my generation leads with our anarchist punk

2

attitude.
1
When I was born in 1987, Boyle Heights and most of Los Angeles’ lower economic
areas were in the height of the crack and heroin epidemic. My mother used to tell me how she
would want to escape from the neighborhood, but it was different back then to be a poor
Mexican-American woman. My mother told me “You just couldn’t leave, so you had to
survive.” My mother Louisa had tried to escape three times and considered them failures. Twice
she failed because of her weight. There were “Weight standards for flight attendants,” and for
joining the United States Airforce, and mother always struggled with her weight.
2
Most of her
life she weighed 200lbs. She carried her weight in an hourglass shape, that is now the fashion in
current society with Kim Kardashian, but at the time my mother was just considered fat. We are
descendants of big women with big mouths and big spirits. Her third attempt, she married an
Indian man so he could receive his green card in exchange for money. It was a common hustle
most of her friends did in the 1980s. He was going to New York to start a business and invited
her to come with him and start a new life in New York City. She said yes. At the last moment,
she thought better of it and declined. She would say “I think he got an annulment.” I would yell
“Mom, you don’t even know if you’re married to a strange man!” And she would laugh and
shrug. This was our mother/daughter relationship. My mother never left Boyle Heights, but she
put all her hopes and dreams on me.

1
Andrew Romano, “A New Generation of Anti-Gentrification Radicals Are on The March in Los Angeles And
Around the Country,” Huffington Post, March 05, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-new-generation-
of-anti-gentrification-radicals-are-on-the-march-in-los-angeles-and-around-the-
country_us_5a9d6c45e4b0479c0255adec.
2
Tamar Lewin, “USAir Agrees to Lift Rules on the Weight of Attendants,” The New York Times, April 8, 1994,
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/08/us/usair-agrees-to-lift-rules-on-the-weight-of-attendants.html.

3

When my mom got pregnant with me, Ronald Reagan was President. Nixon declared
War on drugs in the 1970s and President Reagan created the “Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986,
which established mandatory minimum prison sentences for certain drug offenses.”
3
This
legislation created a war on lower income drug addicts that has left a lasting impact that is still
felt today. The war of drugs was aimed towards drugs such as crack-cocaine and heroin that
minority addicts like my Mother tended to use, which were cheaper and considered lower class
than cocaine. My family was affected by Reaganomics in many ways, but the Anti-Drug Abuse
Act caused my mother to become imprisoned because of her heroin addiction.
4
Before I was
born, I accompanied my mom to prison while she was pregnant with me. My mother had already
been in the prison-industrial complex system since she was thirteen years old. She told me she
knew had calculated the months she would do in prison and if she had perfect behavior, she
would be released prior to my birth. Luckily for me, she was released when she was seven
months pregnant, and I was born at White Memorial Hospital in Boyle Heights and not in the
Medical ward at Chowchilla Women’s Prison. My mother hoped she would change after I was
born because she wanted to be the ideal version of the American mother, but by the time I was
born on November 19th, 1987, things were already not living up to her ideal situation. My father
Antonio Montana was a drug dealer and a married migrant man from Mexico, but after my mom
was pregnant with me, she asked him to leave her alone. She just ended up getting arrested for a
parole violation, and when she was released from prison, he was gone. It would take her another

3
Tom Lobianco, “Report: Aide says Nixon's War on Drugs Targeted Blacks, Hippies.” CNN Politics, March 24,
2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html.
4
History.com Editors, “War on Drugs,” History.com, last modified August 21, 2018,
https://www.history.com/topics/crime/the-war-on-drugs

4

eighteen months of heroin use before she could be a good mother to me. I do not have any
memories of my mother as a drug addict, but I knew she was one. Her drug use is what ended up
doing the damage to her body twenty years later and to the drastic action of taking her life
through liver failure from Hepatitis C when I was twenty-two years old. My mother Louisa was
born in 1960 in Boyle Heights, California. When she was 10 years old, she joined the Third
Street gang, whose territory ranged from Third Street and Soto to larger areas depending on the
strength and dominance of her gang. During the 1970s she became addicted to heroin, like many
other Americans. My mother said she wasn’t really a drinker, but it was what you did when you
partied. You got high, and you drank. When I was 10 years old, and she was 37 years old, many
of her friends started testing positive for Hepatitis C. She thought she had already missed the
plague during AIDS crisis when she was a heroin addict. But slowly everyone she knew started
testing positive for Hepatitis C. and then she went to the doctors, and her results came back
positive. As I type this, I feel incredible sorrow because I remember when she told me she was
Hepatitis C positive and I said to her “it’s going to be okay, mama.” But now I know she died
from this event. My mother told me she cried for months because she did not know what to do,
no one ever talked about this disease. Everyone feels sympathy for mothers who get cancer, or
killed in an accident, but who will mourn the mother who contracted a disease by injecting
heroin? Way before she died some of my first memories as a child was when we would escape
Boyle Heights into Downtown on the number 68 metro bus and pass over the Los Angeles River.
The Los Angeles River is 51 miles starting in Simi Hills zigzagging throughout the San
Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, and releasing the water in Long Beach. The Los Angeles River
had existed in Los Angeles since this was indigenous Tongva land and provided resources for all
those connected to the area around the water source up until the Los Angeles Flood of 1938. The

5

flood lasted for five days and brought 10 inches of water that destroyed several cities and 115
lives.
5
As Linda Tuhiwai Smith states in Decolonizing Methodologies “Indigenous space [was]
colonized. The landscape, the arrangement of nature, could be altered by 'Man': [Rivers] could be
drained, […] not simply for physical survival, but for further exploitation of the environment or
making it 'more pleasing' aesthetically.”
6
Mayor Frank L. Shaw in 1938 decided the Los Angeles
River needed to be “tamed [and be] brought under control” with a project with the Army Corps
of Engineers. Over the course of 20 years, they used “3.5 million barrels of cement, placed 147
million pounds of reinforced steel, and set 460,000 tons of stones” to change the natural river
into a concrete river. This would change the visual, environmental, and philosophical landscape
of Los Angeles.
I have never seen the Los Angeles River flow naturally. I have only seen it flow in a tiny
stream every time I pass over the Los Angeles bridges from Boyle Heights to Downtown Los
Angeles. When I was a child, my indigenous self would crave to live in a place that was not
polluted and man-made. I wanted to be close to rivers and dirt and meadows, I use to dream
about it and make-believe little streams of runoff water pools in the parks in Boyle Heights were
rivers I could explore the Americas through. In my public education, they never taught us that
Los Angeles use to have a natural river that existed before the United States Government
destroyed it. They claim to have improved it, so it would not destroy all the areas adjacent to it,

5
Justin Cram, “Los Angeles Flood of 1938: Cementing the River's Future” KCET, February 28, 2012,
https://www.kcet.org/history-society/los-angeles-flood-of-1938-cementing-the-rivers-future.
6
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Colonizing Knowledge in Decolonizing Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples,
(London: ZED 2012), 61-80.

6

but many years later, the water is polluted and cannot be used for anything because of the
pollution.
When I returned home in 2014 from New York, I felt half-dead. I had been in an
emotionally abusive relationship, and New York had eaten me alive. My skin looked like a latte
that had too much milk. I told my friend to take me to the Los Angeles River. I thought of the
passage “Besides the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept.” We went to the Los Angeles River,
and we sat, and I wept. I decided to walk into the water. My friend told me I was crazy for
getting near the polluted water, but I told him it felt magical to be home and it was beautiful. I
almost felt baptized back into Los Angeles. A few days later I got an infection in a small open
wound I had on my leg. The romanticizing of the Los Angeles River was over, and the reality of
its polluted state took a toll on my body, and a week to heal. In recent times, with the
gentrification of the Los Angeles Eastside area, there is a plan to revitalize the Los Angeles
River back to its natural state.
7
This is after a 60-year failure, but really, it’s because the affluent
people who are trickling into areas next to the Los Angeles River do not want to live with the
concrete river and pollution that the lower economic communities who border the river lived
with for these last 80 years.

7
Tyler Putnam, Shana Thrasher, and Tori O’Campo, “Doing the Impossible: Los Angeles River Revival,” Medium,
April 15, 2018, https://medium.com/green-horizons/doing-the-impossible-the-restoration-of-the-la-river-
167f5abd0d6f.

7

2. Chola Descent
When I was growing up, I did not care where my family migrated from or where I lived. I
grew up in a small neighborhood, and we rarely left the one square mile radius of Boyle Heights.
I didn’t dream of returning to a Mexico homeland because I lived in a micro Mexican-
[American] neighborhood. I was not interested in learning about my family’s history or returning
to the place where we had become “Americans.” I was just so angry and ashamed. I felt trapped
within my family’s existence. I had always known my mother and her cousin had become Cholos
and Cholas when they were kids in East Los Angeles. I knew I came from Old School Gangsters.
I learned the terms Pachucas and Pachucos through Gerardo Licon’s dissertation Pachucas,
Pachucos, and Their Culture: Mexican American Youth Culture of the Southwest, 1910-1955.
8

But when I was getting ready for my trip to El Paso something changed the way I thought about
the whole Pachuco culture. I had been stalling asking my step-dad for any information on my
Mother’s family. I love my dad, he has raised me as his own daughter, but he is not an emotional
man and, after my mother died, he lost his best friend. We rarely talk about my mother, although
once in a while he talks about her in present-tense and I see how much he misses her, and he
misses all her “crazy” family as he says. I asked him, “Dad, where do we come from, in Texas?
You know I’m going in like two days.” He said, “Segundo Barrio, where we invented Pachucos,
you know that right?” Licon connects the origin of Pachucos to El Paso and Diaspora of
Mexicans.
9
Most scholars link Pachucos only to the Zoot Suit Riots/Uprisings and Los Angeles
but in actuality Licon claims that communities in El Paso originated the Pachuco look. The term

8
Gerardo Licon, “Pachucas, Pachucos, and Their Culture: Mexican American Youth Culture of the Southwest”,
1910-1955, (PhD diss. University of Southern California), 2009 (1-76).
9
ibid.

8

was coined because of El Paso nickname El Chuco and how youngsters from Juarez would say
“Pa’ El Chuco?” “Going to El Paso?”
10
Pachucos created a subculture to reject both American
and Mexican culture and created their own hybrid youth culture. I believe Pachuco and Pachuca
culture is the great foundation for Latinx punk and many subcultures that we celebrate today and
use to cope with our transnational identity.
I was always told I was the last hope of my family and education would be the way for
me to break the destructive cycle of poverty and living within the same one-mile radius. I
dreamed of escaping Boyle Heights and my family. I was ashamed of who I was. My mother was
so much more beautiful than many of the other mothers. She would come to back-to-school night
in full glamour makeup with a different (retired) Gangster every two years. Other children had
traditional Mexican families where their parents were married, and their mothers dressed like old
ladies even though they were in their late twenties. I wanted my family to be typical and fit in.
Perhaps reflecting on herself as much as me, my mother always said I was born to be different,
and that’s why she gave me the name Star. Every time she would say that, even as I type it, I sigh
and look down because I will always be much shyer than she was. My teachers always told my
mother and grandmother I had a chance to make it out of Boyle Heights and I was the smartest
girl in my class.
In my early education I was groomed by my teachers so that I had a chance to leave my
community. As Smith describes in Decolonizing Methodologies, “Some indigenous peoples were
ranked above others […] 'nearly human; 'almost human' or 'sub-human,' […]therefore be 'offered'

10
ibid.

9

salvation and whether or not they were educable and could be offered to school.”
11
I am using
Smith’s framework to coin a term Hood Exceptionalism: the notion of an exceptional person
from a disenfranchised area that can be “saved” from multiple issues through education that
allows upward mobility from the area. The saved person must not look back to the
disenfranchised area they came from but instead only look to the front facing a bright future
because they will transcend. Although I do not think the teachers and counselors in my
educational upbringing meant true malice, looking back, I believe there is a “Social Darwinism”
placed consciously on students who grow up in lower economic areas.
12

When I entered High School, I was a troubled teen. I was failing all my classes, and the
vice principal gave me some advice that I still remember to this day, echoing Smith’s critiques
on institutions for indigenous people. He told me to “drop out of High School, it’s too late for
you now.” I replied, “I am only 14 years old; I can’t make it up?” He told me “No, sure you’re
smart, but you hung around the wrong crowd and threw it all away. Drop out, get your GED in 2
years and maybe you could get a decent job. Either way, you’re expelled. Goodbye Miss
Montana. I’m sorry but good luck.” I had broken the social contract with my educational system,
I was the “'native' intellectual” that should have been grateful for all the praises I received, but
once I showed myself to be a “savage” like others in my community, I was disregarded and
thrown away.
13
Education was supposed to save me, but in reality, it only condemned me for
being an angsty teenager. There was this idea of the wrong crowd who were the troublemakers,

11
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Colonizing Knowledge in Decolonizing Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples,
(London: ZED 2012), 61-80
12
ibid.
13
ibid.

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the rejects, and I felt like the savage who could not be saved. But in my reality, school wasn’t
challenging at the time, I was dealing with a mother who started to show aggressive signs of her
Hepatitis C diagnosis. She was taking a treatment that echoed chemo which caused her to
become a shadow in my life. My lifetime depression and anxiety were eating me alive. I could
not sit still, I had to run. My friends at the times were teenagers escaping trauma at home. We got
high all night and talked about our hopes and dreams. I always said if I hadn’t been on drugs
during that period of my life, I probably would have committed suicide. I was thrown away by
the Los Angeles School system but saved by the Los Angeles underground street life.
When I was a little girl, I never took an authority figure’s answer as the ultimate truth. I
questioned everything everyone ever told me. I wanted sources, and when I got those sources, I
wanted sources for those sources. I wanted endless information for every question I had so I
could have the best possible answer to my questions. It used to drive my mother and
grandmother crazy, but when my mom got sick, I became my mother’s best ally. My mom did all
kinds of treatments to prolong her life. Her treatments had her sedated on bed rest. I was angry at
the world. I was mad I was given a mother that couldn’t be there for me. I didn’t have a
biological father, most of my family was dead or in jail, and I just felt alone.
It was during this time, at 15 years old that I started to dabble with photography. I began
photographing my life and what I saw in front of me. A fragmented family, a sick mother,
destructive sad teenagers like me. I didn’t talk a lot when I was a teenager. I often was
considered the shy one. I gravitated to people who had louder voices than me because I wanted
to see the world, but I had nothing to say to the world, but I continued photographing my life.
My destructive life and photography were what grounded me in the world. My mother had been

11

what rooted me as a child, and when she became ill, I was lost. I left this destructive life for
community college when I was eighteen years old.
My mother started to recover from her treatments when I was seventeen years old. Our
relationship had always been close even though I was in so much pain from her being in physical
anguish. Nights when she was awake from insomnia I would come inside from drinking and talk
to her about my hopes and dreams, and we would smile, and she would call me her star. One day
everything changed. She got sick from a cold and couldn’t get better. We had to rush her to the
hospital. Her organs had shut down from that cold. She almost died from that illness. It took her
three weeks in the hospital to recover from that incident. The doctor told me she would have
another two years left with her liver unless she got a liver transplant, but no one would give
someone with “her history” a transplant. I asked the doctor what that meant. She said we would
instead give them to people who hadn’t intentionally destroyed their livers. My mother had a
two-year death sentence because of her past. I never forgot how institutions will mark you for
life.
I fought for my mother’s life for years after that incident. It wasn’t until the night she was
laying on her deathbed did we find hope. The doctor in residence asked me why she had never
had a liver transplant, her liver was gone. I told him other hospitals had told me she didn’t
deserve one because she had been a junkie. He said that’s absurd, he could find her one tonight
except she has an infection and he could only do the transplant without the infection, but this
infection is causing her body to go into failure. It was a Catch-22. He started to cry, and my
eighteen-year-old brother and I looked at him without tears because we knew this was always
going to happen. The healthcare system was always going to steal our mother away. I thanked
him for his help, but there was nothing that could be done. I sat with my mother, and I watched

12

her slip from this world into the next and knew it was an unjust death. I promised myself I would
never let her death be in vain.
I am always thinking of my history when I am creating my work, especially when I am
making work about my fragmented family. When my Mother died, I thought I would commit
suicide within a year of her death. She was my rock, but then I looked at my brother and my
nephew, and they needed me, and I realized many systems of oppression had helped my
mother’s death be expedited. I was born stronger, and I never took no for an answer, and I knew
the latter part was special. I decided to dedicate my practice to dismantling the secrets of my
family and connecting our family’s traumatic migrating history to Boyle Heights.

13

3. Intergenerational Brujeria
I take you back to the river of Rio Grande, now that you understand why I am obsessed
with waterways and marshlands. I have grown up next to a concrete river, and I am finally in the
homeland of my ancestors who have crossed and been born by this river. I am with my friends
Noé and Sarah, and each one of us is on our own journey in El Paso. Today, August 12, 2018,
they have decided to help me capture these images at the Rio Grande. I am terrified. This is my
first time being in the Frontera, the land of my ancestors. Being in El Paso, Texas makes me
scared of uncovering an intergenerational black hole that will suck all my living family and me
in—never to return—but every day I confront something in my family’s past with my camera,
and the emotional weight is lifted a little more. It is frustrating during this time. I know almost no
addresses of where my family used to live, only my stepdad’s former address. So, I wander with
Noé to confront the history of my family in a suppressive town, on an oppressively hot day.
I created a photographic self-portrait and video of myself on the banks of the Rio Grande.
I am standing in front of the river; behind it is the Sierra de Cristo Rey and on the far left a tiny
cross marking Mount Cristo Rey. The area I photographed myself in is near a small barrio that
used to exist but no longer does, named Smelter Town. While I was in El Paso, I did not know
any of this information, about Cristo Rey, Smeltertown, or any local knowledge. I just knew my
family had lived there for a generation and I was seeking what remains through my own
photographic process. I establish myself as a stand-in for who and what remains.
The self-portrait video (Untitled, 2018) I create on the riverbank of the Rio Grande is a
different healing process. While I confront the camera in the photographic self-portrait, in the
video I enter the camera from the left walk towards the river and stop, throw an unidentified
object to the viewer, stare at the river and walk back towards the left, out of the frame. I created

14

this piece as a Transnational Bruja spell to counter a transnational intergenerational spell that is
said to be attached to the women of my family. I was always told as a little girl by my
grandmother that my great-great aunt had slept with a Bruja’s husband in Chihuahua, Mexico,
and the Bruja has cursed the women in my family with insanity, unfaithful husbands, children
who will die young, etc. My grandmother always said this curse would be activated on your
wedding day. I used to listen with interest and then in repulsion until one day I proclaimed I
would never be married or have children. My grandmother was shocked. She said, “why would
you say that, you need to do both!” I wasn’t sure if I was crazy or if she was crazy when she told
me that at that moment. Years later, and a few years in therapy with a good psychiatrist, I’ve
learned that the curse could be explained by the maternal intergenerational genetic depression
that has most likely been passed down for many generations in my family. The day I found out
that news, I cried. I thought back to all the years I saw my grandmother and mother sleep away
weekends and how frustrated I was at that then. I thought back to their moods and how my
grandmother could be happy one moment, then in despair the next. I would try to explain it to
my mother, but she would shrug it off that her mother was crazy. I would tell my mother she
often had anger/peaceful moments, did that make her crazy? She would snap and started
screaming at me. I wanted to call my mother and grandmother, the day I found out we carry a
depressive gene, but they were both gone from my life. My mother is dead, and my grandmother
is kept from me by a first cousin who shows mental instability. I knew the only way to make
peace with all the women I had lost in my family to mental illness in both countries was in this
transnational river that was once our great hope, crossing into America. When I created that
piece on the transnational river, I said to myself and everyone who was not with me that day, “It
was never our fault, it’s not our fault, it’s okay, we are not cursed.”

15

When I returned from El Paso back to Boyle Heights, I felt different. I had a weight lifted
off my spirit. I had finally visited the land where we had crossed into the United States many
years ago, but still, something was missing. I was sad I had not been able to visit any of my
ancestor's homes. I knew my family had once been there, but I could not find any concrete
information on them before I had gone to El Paso. I decided I wanted to try to find out more
about my family through the internet. I wanted to know where in Mexico my great-grandparents
Elena Orozco and Gilbert Minjares had been born and what year their births took place. I had
always been told we came to the Frontera of Chihuahua, Mexico because of the 1910 Mexican
Civil war, and then we crossed to El Paso. Everything changed when I started researching my
family tree online through services like ancestry.com and familysearch.org and found out my
family lived in Texas longer than what has been passed down through my family’s oral history. I
have long placed myself as a fourth-generation Mexican-American on my mother’s side, but
through research I discovered I am actually a sixth-generation Mexican-American. I found
through a 1920’s US Census my great grandfather Gilberto on my mother’s side’s birthplace was
in Smelter, Texas, and it states his father Ohenio Minjares was born just in Texas.
14
This change
everything I’ve known and yet changes nothing in my current life. I tried to research this place,
and it kept giving me memorial sites dedicated to Smelter Town. The city was demolished in the
1970s because of “pervasive lead contamination.”
15
When I researched “Historical Smelter
Town,” Texas, the area was located right next to the Rio Grande and in the industrial part of El

14
“United States Census, 1920,” Database and digital images, FamilySearch.org, (http://www.familysearch.org:
accessed 1 December 2018), Search for Gilberto Minjares Born 1905 Father Ohenio Minjares.
15
Lauren Villagran, “Before Flint, Before East Chicago, There Was Smeltertown,” Natural Resources Defense
Council, November 29, 2016, https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/flint-east-chicago-there-was-smeltertown.

16

Paso.
16
This would indicate that my great-grandfather’s birthplace was in that same area where I
photographed myself earlier this year and the photograph I describe earlier in this chapter. I
started to cry when I realized my wandering had led me to the place my great-grandfather had
been born. I wanted to know more about how Smeltertown existed in El Paso, which led me to
find the book Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community by
Monica Perales.
17

Perales’s book helped me to learn about the many complexities of El Paso.
18
The (lead)
smelter was a big part of creating jobs for thousands of people and luring people to El Paso for a
better life than what could be had in Mexico. Capitalist governments (such as the democratic
republic of the United States), since their creation, have depended on cheap labor. After
Emancipation, when the U.S. government could no longer exploit slaves, it used migrants fleeing
third world countries such as Mexico.
19
This has been the case from the 19th century to current
times. The United States Government in conjunction with Mexico created a transnational
railroad system that connected much of central Mexico to northern Mexico with the railroad
tracks ending in El Paso. The railroad system helped to create a labor force that could be shipped
in from Mexico by the thousands beginning in the early 20th century. The Mexican was not to
become the ideal citizen but rather the worker for the endless businesses being created in the

16
Google Maps, “Historic Smelter Town,” accessed December 1, 2018,
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Smeltertown+Historical+Site/@31.7862215,-
106.5267558,15z/data=!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x0:0x2ab708ff4b30b685!2sSmeltertown+Historical+Site!8m2!3d31.78
62215!4d-106.5267558!3m4!1s0x0:0x2ab708ff4b30b685!8m2!3d31.7862215!4d-106.5267558.
17
Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (North Carolina: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 21-96.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid.

17

economic boom in El Paso. Smeltertown gave me an in-depth look at how people created
communities and their ideologies in Smeltertown.
20
I never had the privilege to meet my great-
grandparents, and my grandmother and her sisters always lived in a thick veil of mourning when
they talked about their parents. I was never really told about my great-grandparents except for
how they died or their journey to Boyle Heights from El Paso, so it was heartening to be able to
hear stories from the residents of Smeltertown and how conditions were in the Barrio. I always
wonder why my dad and grandma feared questioning authority and had this suppressed quality. I
always felt they were different than most people I grew up with, but when I read the accounts of
the experience as a Mexican in Texas, especially in a border town where the Mexican is always
trying to prove they are twice as American and twice as Mexican, I finally understood why they
have this fear ingrained in them.
Fear is an emotion I read a lot about, but one thing that has come up a lot in migrant
communities is faith. To be honest, I grew up without a lot of hope. I remember my mother
telling me to have faith, and I would roll my eyes and say whatever. I just didn’t have the type of
religious faith my mother and grandmother had in the Catholic church, and I connected the
Catholic religion of migrants to the faithful idea of one day we will be okay. My mother used to
tell me, “one day everything will be okay. You will see,” and I would say “no it might not.” I
wasn’t a nihilist, just a realist. When I was standing in front of the Rio Grande, I was staring at
the big beautiful hills en la otra lado and they were magical. The sun was illuminating them, so
they looked golden and on the top of the left hill was a tiny cross. I wondered how that little
cross got up there. I wanted to make sure that cross was in my image. I was baptized in the Our

20
Ibid.

18

Lady of Solitude Catholic church when I was a little girl, but I am not Catholic. I told my mother
I refused to be part of the church when I was little, she thought I was a rebel or demonic. I was
just a free spirit, and I knew how to say no. But I tend to place Catholic iconography in my
imagery as an ode to my family and to deconstruct it. I later learned the residents of Smelter
made a pilgrimage to build Mount Cristo Rey.
21
This barrio was a sub-barrio of El Paso, and
with their faith they decided to leave their lasting mark on the area and remember their home.
They had built a little Catholic church in Smelter for their lower economic community that made
Mount Cristo Rey
22
. When I read that information I was stunned, I felt connected to the world
and my family and El Paso. So even though their town was torn down in the 1970s and my great-
grandfather is long gone, I am still here. I realized, after the fact, that I created this image of me
at the river in front of Mount Cristo Rey near Smeltertown for the next generation. We will never
live in El Paso again, but we did exist; and my work is the testament.
I have always thought I will be killed in Boyle Heights. It’s not something that scares me,
it's something that looms over me like an omen. When my mother died, my grandmother told me
this albino pigeon that was much more beautiful than the other pigeons started to visit her. I
never believed in omens, I just knew everyone I had ever loved was taken from me in this small
city, knew that one day it would be my turn to face death. Yet, when I finally left the United
States for Mexico in August 2018 it wasn’t until my leg began to throb in immense pain did, I
realize that I had already faced death Boyle Heights in at least once and survived.

21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.

19

It was 1991, and I was four years old. My mom didn’t know how to drive so we always
got rides from her friends. I was a big mouth even as a small child and often voiced my
discontent for the violence and social injustice that surrounded me. I hated “La Bamba” the name
given to my mom’s friend Marsha’s car. It was a 1960’s junker. It reminded me of Marsha, the
car’s owners, for it could have been beautiful, but instead it was rusted, broken and loud. Marsha
reminded me of an unglamorous drag queen, and as I try to remember her, I can’t remember her
ethnicity. Her voice was so husky from decades of smoking, it just sounded like a lounge
singer’s voice. She was not sweet to me, she just treated me as my mom’s accessory. I
understand now that my mom’s friends were often times dealing with intense addiction and
needed a compassionate friend. As a child, though I hated the ones that took my mother’s time
without interacting with me. As a child people like Marsha were enemy number one.

20

4. 10,000 tears to Teotihuacan
My Mom, Marsha, and I were supposed to head to a party after a Narcotic Anonymous
(NA) meeting. I had been playing with a little boy at the NA meeting, and his family asked if I
wanted him to ride along with us so I would have company. The one thing about growing up in
NA and AA meetings is there’s a lot of children around, because most of our parents had us
while they were using trying to have better lives. My mother had a conflicted relationship with
her mother Paula Minjares. Oftentimes, my grandmother refused to watch me, and since my
mother couldn't afford a nighttime baby sitter she brought me along with her to meetings. While
the adults were inside the hospital room or church room at night discussing their painful past and
how to stay clean, us children played in a world of make-believe outside the four walls of the
support group. Some of the greatest days of my childhood were spent playing hide and go seek in
a hospital building and as we grew older, we’d look around to see who was cute on a Friday
night with the other NA kids. Many years later, I found out the boy who rode with me that day
was named Victor. He would have a lifetime of trauma from that event. I remember getting in
the car and slamming the door. You had to slam “La Bamba” and then lock the door to keep the
door fully closed. There were no seatbelts, and so we didn’t have any on. We started on our
journey.
I remember driving down Brooklyn Ave. to head to the 5 freeway. Some days when I’m
in a car I have a flashback, and I’m four years old and making a left on Brooklyn Ave (now
Cesar E. Chavez changed in 1992) to get onto the 5 South Freeway and my body tenses up.
Marsha and my mom were blasting oldies. As you merge onto the 5 Freeway from the Brooklyn
Ave entrance you have to swerve to the left and right and at that moment, I saw my door open

21

and I was terrified. I looked at the Victor and then back at the open door. I don’t know what
happened, or how I fell out.
I assume Marsha was swerving to the left to get to the faster lanes, but I fell out and was
able to hold on to the ledge instead of entirely falling out and being run over by the next car
behind us. I remember screaming and crying and Victor in shock staring at me. No one heard my
screams over the blasting oldies. The one thing that saved me was my mother, and I had this
connection. She used to always look back at me every time she was riding shotgun in the car and
smile at me every few minutes. It was just her way of saying “Hi” “I Love You” or “It’s Okay.”
until our last car ride together, she always did that. This was perhaps why I didn’t die that day.
Unfortunately, by the time they stopped the car, my right leg dragged, and I have a scar that until
this this day shows up whenever I tan. As soon as my mother picked me up, I passed out. She
didn’t take me to the hospital. I don’t know what they feared about taking me to a hospital but
the ramification of that that decision still lives with me. My right leg has always given me issues
and pain.
When I was in Mexico City in 2018, I wanted to be free and explore everything, and my
leg limited me in a way that caused me shame. I didn’t want people to think I couldn’t walk
10,000 steps, because of my weight, but instead, it was because I survived the poverty and fear
Boyle Heights residents have had conditioned into us. Marsha had survived drug addiction, yet
she couldn’t get rid of her destructive car that had already shown to be hazardous to adults, prior
to me ever entering the car. My mother knew morally it was wrong for her not to treat me or my
leg that day, but I feel she was afraid that I would be placed in “the system” if she took me to a
hospital for examination. I remember Marsha being paranoid and I could imagine she helped my
mother make the decision not to take me to the hospital. Many times, throughout my early

22

existence I would be enraged by the disenfranchisement I experienced, and my mother said “that
is the way things are for us” I would always remember such anger in my core hearing those
words from the person I loved most. How we seemed destined to die tragically. I would ask
“Why did Uncle Angel get shot and die?” “Why doesn’t the bus come more often?” She never
answered me empowered but defeated. After a while I started to accept, well that means one day
I will be taken in a systemically unjust way, the way everyone older than me in my family has
died in Boyle Heights. When I meditated on that in Mexico City, I let it go that Boyle Heights
would kill me. No one in my family had ever traveled this far since our ancestral migration let
alone for pleasure or research. I realized I had been surviving death since I was a child, and I
finally made it to the furthest place from home and yet the closest place to a homeland breaking
the cycle of settling for what is destined for my family and me and returning to the place of our
origins, alive, slightly maimed but thriving.
I dreamed of Tenochtitlan as a Mexican child. I wanted to explore it with my Mexican
Indian father. My mother wouldn’t tell me much about him but the most she would say to me
was he was a smart, noble man from Mexico City name Anthony Montana. Later, I realized his
name was Antonio Montana, and that my mother Americanized his name because she grew up in
a culture where my Grandmother’s name was Americanized, and in turn my mother gave me an
anglicized name. I thought about how I would explore Mexico City and feel at home in a place,
similar to how I felt at home in Los Angeles with my Grandma and mom. My Mexican Los
Angeles was Downtown Los Angeles and East of the River before the gentrification started to
change the landscape of Los Angeles once again. I realized a long time ago, that I would never
find my father.

23

Expressing the desire to reunite with my Mexican father’s family my mom broke my
heart. She was so angry that I continued to pray to meet them, and said, “Mexicans, they only see
other Mexicans as real Mexicans. You think your father’s ex-wife, wife whatever she was would
have accepted you? Around her ugly little children? The answer is no, she would have seen you
as a whore’s daughter and a whore yourself, never as their sibling, never as their equal. You will
never be a Mexican to them. Stop trying to be a Mexican.” It took me a long time to recover
from her words because although they were harsh, I knew there was truth there. Most of my
friends’ parents were from Mexico, and some of their fathers had been unfaithful to their
mothers. When my friends talked of their fathers’ illegitimate children, they never considered
them as their own siblings. They would say those children were damned or children of whores.
Connecting these dots between my desire to know a part of my family and my lived experience,
I remember the words of my mother and I knew that somewhere out there my Mexican siblings
lived and I wondered if we ever connected would I be the “Hija de puta” that is often associated
with someone of my mixed breeding. As an adult I would never meet my father or anyone in the
Montana lineage, all I wanted now was to return to the place where I knew half of me came from
very recently. I knew my maternal family was from Durango, but my paternal lineage comes
from Mexico City.
I finally had the privilege of making it to Tenochtitlan, and it was one of the most surreal
moments of my life. I was dressed in a beautiful white flower dress that I had unfortunately
spilled decaf coffee on earlier in the morning. Luckily, I rinsed it out at a rest stop before we
reached the ancient city. When we arrived at 9am it was cold, and I remember I thought it was
going to rain. It had been raining most of the time we had been in Mexico City during our
weeklong stay, and I was expecting more of the same. I was with my grad school cohort on this

24

trip, and by the time we decided to see and walk up the pyramids, my cohort were getting on
each other’s nerves; but rain or shine I was going because it was a dream of mine. It was an
intergenerational dream and I was going to achieve it. We talked about which pyramid we would
climb first, and we all decided the Pyramid of the Sun would be best because it was steeper,
bigger, and when the sun came out later it would be too hot to do the Sun Pyramid pilgrimage.
There were five people on the trip to Tenochtitlan the day I made it to the top of the
Pyramid of the Sun, but I wouldn’t have done it without my friend Jake. We started all together,
and I brought my equipment because I knew I wanted to photograph this place and myself here;
My heavy equipment was a burden I was ready to carry, I didn’t care if it broke me. We began to
walk up the first flight of stairs, and I knew something was wrong. All of a sudden, I was out of
breath, and my right leg, my leg that had been injured in that car accident felt like it was going to
explode. Everyone kept going at their own speed, but Jake looked back at me, and he saw I was
struggling and out of breath and I was trying to be prideful because I have never liked to be
vulnerable to anyone but my mother. I was doing this climb of the pyramid for everyone in my
family that could not make it, but I was failing. He walked back down, and he asked me if I was
okay and I said “No, I am not okay. I can’t breathe, and my leg hurts.” He said “Okay, let's go
slow, give me your backpack” I never lie to people I love, and Jake and I had grown immensely
close during graduate school. He has seen me cry on multiple occasions after I stood strong in
front of our class or just broke down in life, but It was so hard to have him hold the weight of my
gear because I never let anyone help me. Together holding hands, we got me up the Pyramid of
the Sun. I was struggling and so vulnerable. I kept apologizing for slowing him down, but he
wouldn’t let me feel bad. He kept telling me “it’s okay, just go slow.” I was wheezing and
gasping for air as this skinny boy (an affectionate term my friend Noè and me call him) pulled

25

me up each step, but together we did it. At one point on the fourth level it was so steep I climbed
with hands and feet like a monkey to make it to the fifth level, and by the time, we made it to the
top I was shaking, and I sobbed and hugged Jake because I seriously would have failed this
dream I had been waiting to accomplish without his love and compassion toward me and
knowing this was a remarkable journey for me.
As I sat at the very top of the Pyramid of the Sun and meditated, I began to weep; a deep
sorrow. Something I had never experienced in my life. A pain deep in me that was mine but felt
intertwined with my mother, and grandmother, and many other maternal generations unlocked,
and I began to weep for this pain here at the top of the world. Gloria Anzaldua speaks of in
Borderlands/ La Frontera for [Aztec Women] wailing or mourning rites performed by women as
they bade their sons, brothers and husbands good-bye before they left to go to the "flowery
wars." Wailing is the Indian, Mexican and Chicana woman's feeble protest when she has no other
recourse. These collective wailing rites may have been a sign of resistance in a society which
glorified “the warrior and war and for whom the women of the conquered tribes were booty.”
23
I
have experienced immense pain and the women in my family for multiple generations have
carried and felt deep pain watching their husbands and son die in a domestic war in the streets of
East Los Angeles, yet I do not remember much weeping in my family. My grandmother always
told me we were descendants of the Aztec, yet somewhere down my family line we stopped
publicly weeping for our loss and pain. I remember when my mother was dying, a friend of my
mother’s who had never had children told me not to weep in front of my mother, rather to be
strong. Her husband heard and got angry and scolded her. He learned she was my light and I was

23
, Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. 2012) 51-56.

26

her world. I entered her room and she was awake, and I looked at her and began weeping, I wept
so hard I couldn’t talk. She soothed me and told me everything would be okay. Her last words to
me were “I am so proud of you and I love you very very much.” After I left, she slipped back
into her coma for a few more days, until the night she died. I never wept that hard again. As I sat
at the top of Teotihuacán, I wept for a long time, I cried for everyone I ever lost and all the
sadness I carry with me. I realized I was tired of carrying the weight of this intergenerational
mourning at that moment, as I slowly let out my weeping. Once I stopped crying, the clouds had
started to part, and Noè and Jake began to make me laugh. I remembered not everyone is gone I
have my brother Frank and my nephew Louie, and I started to plan future trips in my head of
bringing my little Louie here and how I needed to train before I come next time. My sorrow
shifted. When it was time, I left the Pyramid of the Sun, knowing I would return with my family
one day. Mexico, Sunrise, Sunset.

27

BIBILOGRAPHY

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute
Books, 2012.

Cram, Justin. “Los Angeles Flood of 1938: Cementing the River's Future.” KCET. February 28,
2012. https://www.kcet.org/history-society/los-angeles-flood-of-1938-cementing-the-rivers-
future.
Google Maps. “Historic Smelter Town” December 1, 2018.”
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Smeltertown+Historical+Site/@31.7862215,-
106.5267558,15z/data=!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x0:0x2ab708ff4b30b685!2sSmeltertown+Historical
+Site!8m2!3d31.7862215!4d-
106.5267558!3m4!1s0x0:0x2ab708ff4b30b685!8m2!3d31.7862215!4d-106.5267558.
Histor.com Editors. “War on Drugs.” History.com. Last modified August 21, 2018.
https://www.history.com/topics/crime/the-war-on-drugs.
Lewin, Tamar. “USAir Agrees to Lift Rules on the Weight of Attendants.” The New York Times.
April 8, 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/08/us/usair-agrees-to-lift-rules-on-the-weight-
of-attendants.html.
Licon, Gerardo. “Pachucas, Pachucos, and Their Culture: Mexican American Youth Culture of
the Southwest, 1910-1955.” PhD diss., University of Southern California. 2009
Lobianco, Tom. “Report: Aide says Nixon's War on Drugs Targeted Blacks, Hippies.” CNN
Politics. March 24, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-
nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html.
Perales, Monica. Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community. North
Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press 2010.
Romano, Andrew. “A New Generation of Anti-Gentrification Radicals Are on The March in Los
Angeles And Around the Country.” Huffington Post. March 05, 2018.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-new-generation-of-anti-gentrification-radicals-are-on-
the-march-in-los-angeles-and-around-the-country_us_5a9d6c45e4b0479c0255adec.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Colonizing Knowledge in Decolonizing Methodologies Research and
Indigenous Peoples. London: ZED Books: 2012.
Tyler Putnam, Shana Thrasher, and Tori O’Campo. “Doing the Impossible: Los Angeles River
Revival”. Medium. April 15, 2018. https://medium.com/green-horizons/doing-the-impossible-
the-restoration-of-the-la-river-167f5abd0d6f.

28

BIBILOGRAPHY

“United States Census, 1920.” Database and digital images. FamilySearch.org
(http://www.familysearch.org: accessed 1 December 2018.) Search for Gilberto Minjares Born
1905. Father Ohenio Minjares.
Villagran, Lauren. 2016. “Before Flint, Before East Chicago, There Was Smeltertown.” Natural
Resources Defense Council. November 29, 2016. https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/flint-east-
chicago-there-was-smeltertown.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract I am standing next to the riverbanks of the Rio Grande on the border of El Paso, Texas, and Sunland, New Mexico in this dreamlike state. I try to take off my sandals for my self-portrait, but my feet get pricked badly. The marshland next to the Rio Grande is not soft marshy grass like I thought it would be, it is instead coarse desert grass. The pain I feel from stepping on it centers me back to reality, a thought that I need to protect myself from the world instead of forcing pain on myself for the sake of obtaining a self-portrait. Today is August 12th, 2018 and it starts the eighth-year anniversary of my mother’s passing in a hospital, a long process that began when I was ten years old. After years of systematic oppression and failures through the healthcare system, we watched my mother Louise M. Silva die at 49 years old on August 13th, 2010. She was not the only mother to die young in our family. This is an ongoing, destructive cycle. My great-grandmother Elena, who crossed this Rio Grande from Mapimí, Durango during the Mexican Civil War for a better life, died at 55 years old in El Paso while she was visiting from Boyle Heights, California. Her daughters never forgave the river, the town, and no one from the Minjares family returned to El Paso after her death. Before I take this photograph on the bank of the Rio Grande, let me tell you of my mother and me, about the river I grew up on, and the town my family lived in after we migrated from El Paso, Texas 73 years ago.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Montana, Star (author)

Core Title By the rivers, I stood and stared into the Sun

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 07/29/2019

Defense Date 08/15/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Aztlan,Boyle Heights,Chicana,Chicano,Chicanx,Chihuahua,Chola descent,Cholas,diaspora,East Los Angeles,El Chuco,El Paso, Texas,Latinx,Mexican,Mexican migration,Mexican punks,Mexican-American,Mexico City,Nahuatl,OAI-PMH Harvest,Pachucas,Pachuchxs,Pachucos,photographer,Pochas,Star Montana,Xicana

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Advisor Campbell, Andrew (committee chair), Bustamante, Nao (committee member), West, Jennifer (committee member)

Creator Email smontana@usc.edu,starpmontana@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-199784

Unique identifier UC11663113

Identifier etd-MontanaSta-7680.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-199784 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MontanaSta-7680.pdf

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