Art in a gangster’s paradise

Culiacan, Mexico —  Judging by the sweaty young patrons, the Tecate beer cans rolling in the gutter outside and the nervous-looking cops standing by with loaded shotguns, you might not guess that Las Flores was one of the most glamorous nightclubs in this gritty drug-trafficking capital.

But as Rene Arturo Rubio Mendoza drank in the scene at Las Flores one recent Saturday night, his eyes filled with gleeful admiration. The unemployed 20-year-old had come to hear one of Mexico’s best-known narcocorridistas, pop balladeers who lionize the region’s ruthless and powerful drug lords. And although Rubio didn’t actually have a ticket to the show, he seemed content simply to be among the worshipful revelers hanging out along the sidewalk.

“We are here, all the young people are here, because we want to be like the narcos [drug dealers], we want to have all the money and never pay taxes,” Rubio said as he chatted with a group of friends. It is possible to become successful in Mexico through honest means, he continued, but “it is very, very difficult. I want to do things the honest way, but if the hunger grabs me, I could reconsider.”

Next day, in the shady backyard garden of his parents’ home, artist Oscar M. Garcia tried to explain the imaginative spell that drugs and violence have cast over his native city and the surrounding state of Sinaloa -- and why over time those subjects have burrowed so deeply into his own art.

“I work in the imagery of the narco because that is what I have lived,” says Garcia, 32, a darkly funny, unpretentious man whose paintings and mixed-media constructions have been shown in Mexico City, Brazil and the United States. “I wouldn’t be able to paint about other things that happened in other places that I don’t know. I wouldn’t be able to paint about the conflict in Chiapas.”

For the past half-century, this Pacific Coast city’s reputation as a haven for high-living gangsters has been mainly a source of shame and fear to its inhabitants. Conversely, it also arouses intense hero worship and a kind of perverse pride, particularly among young people made cynical by bleak economic prospects and the corruption and apathy of Mexico’s ruling classes.

But lately these troubling realities have inspired a handful of young visual artists and writers to grapple with the complex, almost mythic legacy of Mexico’s narcotraficante barons, many of whom live and conduct business here. Resisting facile moralizing, painters like Garcia, Lenin Marquez Salazar and Ismael Bojorquez, photographer Roberto Bernal and novelist Elmer Mendoza are applying a sophisticated critical and aesthetic eye, not only to the drug trade but also to the regional narcocultura that idolizes drug lords and apes their tastes in music, fashion and architecture.

Garcia says that his work seeks neither to praise nor to bury the local narcocultura, but to probe its metaphors and meanings, delve into its folkloric past and trace the tangled threads that connect drug producers in places like Culiacan with drug dependents in places like L.A.

“It is not the function of art to be moralistic,” says Garcia. “The moral judgments are made by the spectators.” In fact, the majority of these artists favor legalization of drugs as a possible way of stemming the endless cycles of bloodshed.

“The problem can be summarized as, ‘Drugs yes, narcos no,’ ” says Julio Bernal, the chain-smoking, wary-eyed former director of the Frida Kahlo Gallery at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, which once staged a photography exhibition on narco-related subjects.

While sharing an interest in regional themes, artists here are quick to point out that they don’t constitute any formal group or “narco art” school. Leery of being typecast, they acknowledge that the narcotraficantes cast a long shadow over their work. But so does the pulpy lyricism of Raymond Chandler’s detective fiction, the sinewy social realism of John Dos Passos, the lowlife excavations of Charles Bukowski, Andy Warhol’s fey pranksterism and Jackson Pollock’s bravura individualism.

Not to mention the films of Luis Bunuel and Quentin Tarantino, the molten palette of the late Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo and the neo-indigenous symbolism of contemporary Mexican painter Francisco Toledo.

In fact, some artists here say, Culiacan’s peculiar history and relative isolation -- it’s a two-hour flight from both Mexico City and Los Angeles -- make it a good place to follow the human drama. “Culiacan doesn’t exist in the world. We exist only for the FBI or the Drug Enforcement Agency,” says Julio Bernal. A network of supportive family and friends, and a streak of fatalistic humor help, too, if you’re going to make art in Culiacan. “People here read the newspaper from the bottom to the top,” painter Marquez observes, “because that’s where the death notices are.”

NO ONE IS IMMUNE

In Culiacan, the natives will tell you, everyone has been touched in some way or other by the narcotraficantes: a cousin who married an underworld capo. A neighbor who went to prison. An acquaintance who turned up dead along the highway.

For decades, most Sinaloans tolerated the drug trade as long as the traffickers kept to themselves and only killed each other. But as profits and risk levels soared during the 1970s and ‘80s, attracting a more violent and organized criminal breed, the murder rate tripled to an average of 650 per year, where it stands today.

Worse still, locals say, is that no one -- lawyers, human rights activists, innocent bystanders, children -- is now immune from the violence. “Before, the narcos had an ethic. Now they finish off entire families,” says Roberto Bernal, 34, whose work includes photojournalism as well as art photography.

Hemmed in by mountains, Culiacan sits 40 miles inland from the beach, a world away from the gringo sun ‘n’ surf playgrounds to the south. Guidebooks, if they mention the city at all, advise tourists to stay away.

Yet despite the area’s unsavory image, its people are known for their warmth and down-to-earth qualities. And though Culiacan is no architectural gem, its leafy boulevards and modest adobe homes aren’t without charm.

Incongruous details catch the visitor’s eye: a spiffy new airport packed with small private planes but few commercial flights; dusty unpaved roads petering out into clumps of unfinished tract homes. Such visual cues underscore Culiacan’s uneasy evolution over the last 50 years from bucolic rural outpost to bustling global drug mart.

They also suggest the compelling paradoxes that make the region a fertile terrain for creative minds. Though Culiacan artists have exhibited throughout Mexico, the United States and Europe, and one or two keep Mexico City apartments, most remain spiritually grounded here. And if they concede that no corner of life remains untainted by the drug trade, they insist on addressing that existential fact on their own private terms.

Roberto Bernal’s raw black-and-white close-ups of drug-crime victims’ appendages have shocked local viewers. But his body of work also includes delicately composed images of church bell towers and moving but unsentimental pictures of Culiacan street children.

Oscar Garcia incorporates regional folk symbols, double-edged Latin phrases and sly references to underworld figures in his paintings, photographs and mixed-media works. One painting was triggered by an infamous incident in which a drug lord received his wife’s head in a shoebox after she was murdered by a rival gang. A photo-diptych balances a blue-lit prison cell (execution chamber?) with a boldly graphic image of a pistol pointing toward a labyrinth. This multilayered symbol could represent the Minotaur’s lair from ancient Greek mythology, a twisting drug trade route toward el norte, or perhaps the “labyrinth of solitude” that writer Octavio Paz posited as the pathway of the Mexican soul.

“It is difficult to insert our works into art history. You could classify it maybe as post-post-abstractionism or post-post-expressionism,” says Garcia, laying out a selection of his work beneath the family clothesline.

Culiacan boasts no trendy art “scene,” few galleries and no prominent critics. Artists here tend to lead quiet, private lives, often better known to dealers and collectors thousands of miles away than among the local populace. Some, like Marquez and novelist Mendoza, augment their income through teaching.

“I paint to say something, to communicate. I use it like a catharsis, or maybe to exorcise my fears that [drug-related violence] could happen to me,” says Marquez, 35, an art instructor at the Sinaloa state cultural office, whose work received a solo show at L.A.’s Iturralde Gallery a few years ago. “There are people that paint about narco because it is fashionable, that paint a painting and that’s all. I have dealt with these subjects since the ‘80s.”

Though he lists Pollock and David Salle among his influences, Marquez seems unconcerned with artistic pedigrees or with what his counterparts in London, Berlin or New York are doing at a given moment. “In Europe, they see us as something more like artisans,” he says with a shrug, speaking of Mexican artists in general. “There, they fill a glass of water and this is their proposal. They are more conceptual. My work, it’s more figurative, more obvious.”

TENSION IN THE AIR

For several artists here, the dueling influences of folk art versus modern art parallel the tension between Sinaloa’s gentle pastoral heritage and its current Wild West persona. For example, in Marquez’s fable-like painting “Tres Animales,” the apparently innocuous figures of a parrot, a rooster and a ram allude to regional slang terms for, respectively, cocaine, marijuana and heroin.

Similarly, the paintings of Ismael Bojorquez, 33, can be scrutinized as contemporary Rosetta stones full of ominous symbolism, or simply enjoyed for their faux-naif whimsicality and characteristically Mexican love of strong colors. Among Bojorquez’s signature motifs are bullet holes and fish with hooked mouths, suggesting how the barbed world of the narcos can snag the incautious and the unsuspecting.

Marquez’s life embodies both sides of the regional culture. Raised in a rural area of Sinaloa, he was named after Russian communist revolutionary V.I. Lenin by his grandfather, a farmers’ rights advocate. His first contact with drugs came as a child when he saw houses filled with packages of marijuana seeds.

When he was 18, Marquez moved with his family to Culiacan, where he studied art in college. He remembers once getting caught in a cross-fire in which four people died. Dropping to the floor, he thought, “Where is the bullet going to come from?”

Metaphorically, in Marquez’s art, the bullet can come from practically anywhere. In one of his untitled works, three bodiless hands, two holding guns and the third pointing an index finger, gesture at a man dangling a smaller man from a rope around his neck. In another painting, “Casa de Panico” (Panic House), which is part of the series “Mi Casa Es Tu Casa,” a ghostly human face bordered by a house frame is overwhelmed by a spreading yellow tree.

The idea behind the series, Marquez explains, is that in the fluid, post-NAFTA universe, the problems of his house -- his world -- can’t be contained to Sinaloa. For better or worse, the provincial is now the universal: Drugs and violence, like art itself, have become transnational commodities.

Yet herein lies another type of danger for a Sinaloan artist: the risk that outsiders may perceive only the most superficial and sensational aspects of the local culture. Novelist Mendoza says he fears that many readers of his prizewinning 2001 novel “El Amante de Janis Joplin” (The Lover of Janis Joplin) couldn’t get past the violence in the book to grasp its deeper social and philosophical layers.

Mendoza’s roman-a-clef focuses on a slingshot-toting, modern-day David from Sinaloa, who flees Mexico for the United States in the 1960s, with a jealous drug lord’s son in hot pursuit. In the U.S., his powerful arm briefly propels him into stardom as a Los Angeles Dodger pitcher. He also has a one-night stand with rock star Janis Joplin, whose charismatic celebrity (and insatiable sexuality) is both a lure and a snare. Though the book has not yet been translated into English, Mendoza hopes it may be soon.

Born in Culiacan in 1949, Mendoza remembers crossing paths in school and at parties with the children of narcos. In their youth, he says, these gangster-wannabes “were normal guys with humanistic aspirations.” But as they grew older and realized the authority their fathers commanded, they began to crave power themselves.

It’s this sense of transformation and “emotional crisis” within individuals that Mendoza has tried to capture in “El Amante de Janis Joplin” and earlier novels like “Un Asesino Solitario” (The Solitary Assassin) -- which local police scanned for covert drug references, Mendoza says with a laugh.

Though translating complex ideas into foreign idioms is always difficult, some themes, he believes, have an international currency. “Drugs travel fast,” Mendoza says with a wry smile, “and there is no mystery in their acceptance.”

SAINT AND SINNERS

Without a doubt, the single most reverberant work of art in Culiacan is a squat one-story cinderblock-and-metal building on an inconspicuous side street south of the city center. Here sits the (in)famous shrine to legendary outlaw Jesus Malverde (1870-1909), a Mexican Robin Hood whose blunt methods of income redistribution turned him into a national folk saint.

Though the so-called Rider of the Divine Providence eventually met with a hangman’s knot, his black hair and mustache, offset by a gleaming white shirt, are instantly recognizable, and his putative powers widely revered. Over the decades, Sinaloa’s drug families have sought to identify themselves with the beloved saint, whose shrine is festooned with lighted candles, scraps of paper and family Polaroids testifying to his miraculous favors granted.

Aesthetically, the shrine is of a piece with the flamboyant, self-deifying style of some drug barons’ own palatial homes. “They are outlandish,” says multimedia artist Aurora Diaz, 33, “with cupolas, exaggerated doors and big pools. The decoration is excessive, baroque. They even use live animals like lions, crocodiles and peacocks.”

But though the narco aesthetic may be over-the-top, it demands to be taken seriously, Culiacan’s artists say. In one of Marquez’s paintings, for example, miniature Malverde heads float like cherubs, a haute-kitsch image that plays off the region’s hagiographic view of narco omnipotence.

The gradual process of reappropriating such symbols seems to be a key part of coming to terms with what it means to be not only a Sinaloan artist, but a citizen of a dangerous and increasingly interconnected world. In fact, the artists of Culiacan say they’re less concerned with their personal safety than with the possibility that Mexico’s rich neighbor to the north may find it easier, in the end, to continue lamenting south-of-the-border drug crimes than to curb its own voracious appetites for illegal substances.

In the United States, says gallery director Julio Bernal, polishing off the dregs of a cup of coffee at a local cafe, “they use a moral double standard in which the culpable countries are the poor countries of Latin America.”

“Let he who is without sin take the first drug test,” Bernal says, lighting up another Marlboro.