New Mexico’s vision, L.A.’s dream

ALBUQUERQUE —  The most remarkable thing about New Mexico’s Roy E. Disney Center for the Performing Arts, which opened with a festive inaugural concert here Saturday, is neither its architecture nor its varied first-year program of music, dance and theater. What’s so stunning about the venue is its location and its mission.

Though it has aspirations for national impact, the new building did not debut in the state capital of Santa Fe, the trendy art mecca for outsiders. And though it seeks to compete with established auditoriums in the state’s largest city, the new theater avoided the temptation to join Albuquerque’s drive to gentrify its generic downtown.

Instead, the $22.8-million Disney complex, which houses three theaters, graces a low-income barrio called Barelas, about a mile south of the city center. It’s a typical working-class neighborhood of humble homes, corner cafes and vacant lots. But now this unassuming barrio can boast what some consider the country’s premier venue devoted to showcasing Latinos in the performing arts.

High-powered politicians, business leaders, artists and art patrons converged Saturday night on this roomy site, located between the historic Camino Real and the gently winding banks of the Rio Grande. In an atmosphere of down-home friendliness, they paid $250 a seat to launch the hall with a fun-loving program of opera, pop, flamenco and jazz, featuring headliner Arturo Sandoval.

Many in the audience made the trip from Los Angeles, including the inaugural show’s producer, Dan Guerrero, son of the acclaimed godfather of Chicano music Lalo Guerrero. Standing outside the center’s carved wood doors, an exuberant Guerrero asked the question on the minds of many of his fellow Angelenos.

“How can we not have this in Los Angeles?” he exclaimed, his arms opened wide with pride. “Look at this! This is so magnificent. I don’t know the answer, yet this is proof it can be done.”

Even more impressive is the fact that the new Disney hall is only the latest addition to a larger, multifaceted complex called the National Hispanic Cultural Center. Opened four years ago, the 51-acre facility includes an art museum, a research library, a genealogy center, a restaurant and store, all created to celebrate Latino arts and culture.

The museum building is shaped like a Maya pyramid, its broad exterior steps used as bleachers for outdoor concerts on the large Plaza Mayor.

Some say Albuquerque’s cultural center, 20 years in the making, is the best-kept secret in the Latino arts world. But with the opening of the Disney addition, more people are taking notice.

For Southern California’s undernourished Latino cultural scene, New Mexico’s success has served as a model -- and an embarrassment.

How could the Land of Enchantment, one of the poorest states in the union with a fraction of California’s Latino population, be so far ahead on the Latino cultural front? More important, how could Los Angeles be so far behind Albuquerque, a fast-growing but still provincial town of about 500,000?

Los Angeles currently has no comparable facility. A plan to create a similar but much smaller Latino cultural center across from Olvera Street, spearheaded by county Supervisor Gloria Molina, was recently approved but is years away from being a reality. Meanwhile, existing Latino arts organizations in the region remain small, scattered and severely underfunded.

“Embarrassing? Absolutely,” said Molina, who previously toured the New Mexico center. “I think it’s a personal tragedy for us. Every place else I have been, people can’t believe we have nothing like this.”

So how did it happen in New Mexico, a state whose entire population is half that of the city of Los Angeles, located in an arid region easily bypassed by the mainstream, bicoastal Latino culture?

Paradoxically, said officials of the New Mexico center, the state’s size and relative isolation may have created just the right environment for the emergence of a strong cultural institution with broad public and private support.

The state is small enough, said the center’s executive director, Thomas E. Chavez, that he’s on a first-name basis with both its U.S. senators and three of its four congressional representatives. Those relationships came in handy when it came time to seek funding.

Although the center started as a grass-roots, nonprofit effort in 1983, it’s now a full-fledged state agency. It sits on land donated by the city and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy, a flood-control district. Construction of the first phase was started with a state grant of $18 million. The federal government kicked in another $18 million for the Disney building.

Disney, who donated $2 million mostly from his own pocket, says he was drawn to the project by an old friend and colleague, Frank Zuniga, former head of the state’s film office. The nephew of Walt Disney says he was impressed by the center’s vision.

The fact that the project has been so wholeheartedly embraced by public officials, supporters say, is a sign of the state’s unique social climate. Latinos here proudly trace their roots for generations to both Mexico and Spain, and they have been historically integrated and intertwined with other groups.

In New Mexico, Chavez notes, the governor is Latino, as well as a majority of the state Legislature and the Albuquerque City Council.

“Here’s the only state of the Union that is officially bilingual,” Chavez says. “The English-only movement had no play in this state. None.”.

During an afternoon tour of the new building, Katherine Archuleta, head of the center’s foundation, pointed out the facility’s state-of-the-art features -- the extra deep stage with a retractable front section that converts to an orchestra pit or extra rows of seating, and dressing rooms with full baths, granite counter tops and Internet connections for the performers.

It’s all possible in New Mexico, Archuleta says, “because it’s a historically generous place to celebrate all ethnic groups, without contention.” Well, almost without contention.

Despite its populist philosophy that art is for everyone, support in the surrounding neighborhood has not been unanimous. One woman, the late Adela Martinez, refused to move to make way for construction. So the center had to be built around her home, which now sits at the edge of a parking lot.

A wall along one side hides the broken-down cars in her family’s backyard and prevents visitors from reading an old protest sign that still hangs on a rickety fence: “The HCC will destroy, not preserve, our family’s Hispanic culture.” A woman who answered the door at the home identified herself as Martinez’s daughter, Josie Montoya. She said her mother died in 2000, the year the center opened.

“She would have lived longer if it hadn’t been built here,” said Montoya, adding her family had no plans to leave. “We’ll be here forever.”

No dissent was evident at the Disney debut, which kicked off two weeks of programming called “Maravilla,” featuring hip-hop, comedy and literature readings. The series climaxes Sept. 30 with the re-staging of “Zoot Suit,” the classic Chicano musical by Luis Valdez.

Aside from the arts, there are signs the center is affecting the lives of average New Mexicans. Nursing student Julie Sanchez, who was raised here speaking English, is taking Spanish lessons at the center’s Instituto Cervantes, a language program created by the Spanish government. (Albuquerque is one of only three U.S. cities, along with New York and Chicago, to offer the program.) Sanchez, who works as a bartender at a downtown hotel, said that she hopes to graduate to the institute’s medical terminology class.

Alex Griego, a slight man with a salt-and-pepper beard, grew up in the neighborhood around the center. He recalled swimming in the nearby river, lined by tall and graceful cottonwood trees. After high school, he went to work at a grocery store. For the next five years, he felt he had hit a dead end.

“I didn’t consider myself successful at anything,” said Griego during a reception at the center.

The aimless youth with an artistic inclination eventually became an architect. Griego is now being hailed by fellow New Mexicans as the native son who designed the new Disney hall.

Griego said he was working for a large Albuquerque firm when his bosses bid on the project. They turned to him, he said, because he was the only Latino architect on the staff.

Unlike the bold and dazzling Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Griego’s building had to be self-consciously self-effacing, designed to blend in with neighboring structures and the natural surrounding. Its interlocking geometric shapes are a contemporary -- and much more subtle -- take on the pyramid motif.

“I feel I have risen to the peak of my career, no question about it,” beamed Griego, who dedicated the work to his late wife of many years, Ann Marie.

“I never dreamed that it would come to this. It’s my biggest joy.”