Paul S. Flores: Poetry, Theater, and Word Descarga

An interview with the multi-hyphenate Latino performance artist

Paul S. Flores is one of the most influential Latino performance artists in the country and a nationally respected arts educator. He creates plays, oral narratives, and spoken word about transnationality and citizenship that spur and support societal movements that lead to change. His body of work touches on the immigrant story in all its complexities: from the violent—forced migration, gang life, war, incarceration, and separated families—to zooming in on intergenerational relationships and the struggle of preserving important cultural values. Flores’ work has played across the United States and internationally in Cuba, Mexico, and El Salvador. Flores teaches Theater and Spoken Word at the University of San Francisco. He is also the lead curator of Paseo Artistico Free Bilingual Community Art Stroll on 24th Street in the Mission District. He lives in San Francisco with his children.

Paul and I have known each other since the early 2000s, when we both were part of a reading at, believe it or not, a seafood restaurant out near Golden Gate Park. He’s always producing and creating, and his biography above merely skims the surface of all that he’s done and is still doing. We’ve worked together at the Litquake festival, including this Word/Jazz show I hosted in 2021. And he’s also co-founder of the incredible teen-poets Youth Speaks organization. This conversation took place in the rear patio of Acción Latina in San Francisco’s Mission District. 

So your job occupation reads like this: author, poet, playwright, performer, musician, arts organizer, spoken word artist, performance artist, and professor. That’s a lot, right?

Well, I didn’t become a professor without the arts. I teach theater, and I teach writing. So without the arts I’m not teaching. The organizing comes out of being exposed to the stories of the community that has been silent or ignored or discriminated. So I throw on arts events to bring awareness. I feel like convening people is one of the best things you can do to bring attention to any type of injustice. And if people are there to have some songs, and music and dancing and theater and poetry, I feel like it’s even better. I’ve done all of it. I’ve done every part you can do.

Chula Vista is where you were raised, down in southern California. Your parents are both American.

Yes, both of them were born in the United States. But I was raised by my mom. My mom's mom is from Cuba, my mom’s dad is from Mexico. 

So when you’re growing up, what were the cultural differences you saw between Cuba and Mexico?

My grandparents argued over the kitchen. It was like, who gets to cook today. My grandfather, being a macho Mexican man, he believed Mexican cuisine was superior to Cuban cuisine. That was his excuse. I think he just wanted to control shit. But I loved my grandfather, because I didn’t see too many men in the kitchen. My grandmother’s vibe was very sing-songy, dancing, chatter, she loved to talk with people. She never learned English, so it was Spanish and her funny pronunciations.

The musicality, the dancing, the exuberance, the extroverted personality, I get a lot of that from my mom’s family. My grandfather was very religious. he was a steelworker in Gary, Indiana. He was very devout, to the point where if the Pope was on TV he was on his knees.

Wow.

I mean, I was Catholic too, but not like that. As I got older, particularly when I was in college, I couldn't believe he would entertain my ideas, ’cause I was a communist, very freely talking about sex, and criticizing the Catholic church. I would write all these papers in Spanish, and ask him to edit them. And he would do it without commenting on my opinions.

So, he had no problem if you were writing things like, why the Pope should just fuck off?

Exactly! The Pope is responsible for genocide, ha ha ha! 

But there was a lot of Catholicism and ritual and tradition in the house. 

My first wife was Catholic. and she was from Mexico, so I would go to Tijuana and go to mass with her. Part of it was that I had to prove that I was worthy of marrying her and whatnot. I didn’t really believe in a lot of the Catholic bullshit, especially when 9-11 came around. The priest started his whole sermon with “Muslims are the devil.” And he says, “Here, I’m going to prove to you all.” So he projects a picture of a Muslim-looking face and beard, kind of looked like Osama bin Laden, in the smoke of 9-11. It was obviously a doctored photo. and he’s using this as proof that Muslims are the devil. A doctored-ass photo. I’m like, man. This was the type of stuff you can be brainwashed into believing, because you’ve been forced to go to this fucking church your whole life. It’s constantly in your brain, these prejudices that people grow up with, including hating Muslims. You don’t even know any Muslims! 

Do you have any siblings?

I’m an only child.

So it’s all about you, Paul!

That’s the thing that I try to remember, in disciplining my own children! Basically I was the golden child. I grew up in my mom’s parents’ house, in San Diego. My father would pop in for a couple years, and then just poof. So most of my upbringing was in my grandparents’ house. My mom was working all the time. so I had to entertain myself a lot. I got these Star Wars figures, Luke Skywalker, R2D2, I’m eight years old, playing with these things for hours, making ’em talk to each other, coming up with stories. I’d go outside, play baseball against the wall by myself.

That’s what you do. After fourth grade I was an only child. You don’t notice that you’re by yourself, in a way. There’s this awareness that I’ll just do whatever I do.

My dad lived in Denver. He did try to influence me from afar by sending me books.

Were they good books? Let the record show that was a side-eye.

He gave me a book when I was nine years old called Looking Out for Number One. I was nine. It was basically, no one is going to help you in the world, you better do shit for yourself. You are the most important thing in the world. It was a weird self-help, self-reliance thing. Total ’80s type of mentality. 

How can you comprehend that?

I didn’t. I didn’t understand any of that. And I would be writing, hey dad, I got two hits today in my baseball game. I’m playing soccer next week. “Did you read the book I sent you? Do you understand what it’s about? This is what it’s about, Paul. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and you have to be the biggest dog.” I’d be like, mom, I don’t understand what my dad is trying to tell me right now. Am I supposed to write him back about this stuff?

Like you’re supposed to start your own business, at age nine?

It was pretty weird. He would then send me other types of books, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

I know that book. Robert Pirsig.

You remember this?

Part of the book takes place in my small hometown in Montana. They get their motorcycles repaired at the bike shop where we used to go as little kids and stare at the mini-bikes. I read it years later, and realized, this is fucking boring. 

Ha ha ha!

Maybe I’m the only one. I’ve met two other people that I shared that opinion with, and both agreed, so it was like, okay, I’m not crazy. This was a million-seller. The father and son, this spiritual relationship while they’re driving motorcycles across the country. I couldn’t do it.

I was 12 when he sent that book to me. 

Did you like it?

No. It tortured me.

Ha! Okay, now I know three people who didn’t like that book.

He said to me, “I want to be responsible for building your mind.” And I’m thinking, I don’t really need that. I need you to send some money, and come watch me play baseball. He never did that. It was always some bullshit about some book. This strange, really offbeat internal monologue that my father was having with life. He was opening his resource library to me. And on top of it, he’s not present. and then the frustration and resentment starts to build. 

As I get older, I feel like my creativity needs to get more fueled by anger. I’m sublimating my anger at my father through creative expression. By 14 I was in a punk band. Whatever I was mad at, I was mad at my dad. I can say that now, being 50, where a lot of my emotional development comes from, and how it got manifested through the art that I’m doing.

So for a time you were a pro baseball player. What about that focus and control, helped prepared you for the rest of what you end up doing?

I was playing ball from five years old. By the time I get to 12, it’s year-round. And I’m good at it. I’m playing all the time. What it takes to be a pro ball player, on top of talent, is the commitment to practice. To me, practice was routine. The idea of repeating, repeating, repeating, until it becomes natural muscle memory. I had a couple friends who were really serious about playing, who pushed me. Being a pro at anything takes about 10% talent, and 90% effort, and work. I think that’s what I learned out of playing baseball. 

How many years did you play pro?

Only a couple. This was for the Chicago Cubs organization. which is a big deal. I never played in Wrigley though, only the minor leagues. 

So you were on the road, seeing America?

I traveled to places that you’ve never heard of. Bumfuck little towns in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee. I saw a bunch of shit. Going through the hillbilly country near West Virginia. I got to see the Adirondacks. Going up into Canada. Real small, working-class, no-nothing towns. I started reading on my own again. Started reading classic literature, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, On the Road. I think I read eight novels in a season, because you’re on the bus the whole fucking time. My teammates would literally make fun of me. “I thought you played ball so you didn’t have to read.” They called me Professor. 

I didn’t advance all the way through. I hurt my shoulder. And I started going to college. I was really invested in writing. But I didn’t know where I was going to end up. When I was at U.C. San Diego I got involved in spoken-word. This was ’94.

What was going on in San Diego in spoken-word?

Um, not much. There was this place called the Campo Ruse, which was a downtown warehouse underground art scene where jazz was playing. They were doing open mikes. Downtown San Diego was changing. I think everything was changing in the ’90s. A great decade for creativity. 

Here in SF in the ’90s, it seemed like every person you met was a writer, journalist, poet, musician, stripper, actor, photographer, zine-maker, painter. A lot of crazy momentum, right before the internet. So since we’re in this time period, let’s talk about the genesis of Youth Speaks. 

One of my teachers at UCSD, a beatnik fiction writer, said to me, the style of your writing, what you’re doing, you should go to New York or San Francisco. So I got into the MFA program at SF State. The first person I met was this cat named Darren de Leon. He was a Chicano poet from Riverside, and he was starting this movement within the creative writing program, to diversify it. It was huge—200, 300 people in the graduate program. There were very few Latinos, very few Black folks. So this guy James Kass was part of that group. We were called Coalition, and the idea was to pressure the administration at SF State to diversify their pool of applicants. We were trying to get a professor hired. Juvenal Acosta, ever heard of him?

Yes, totally. He is a novelist and a poet, he did Litquake in the early years. Really interesting guy. Also used to be the bullfighter correspondent for some newspaper in Mexico. Very cool, low-key.

Exactly. We wanted him to get hired, so we started advocating for him. Me, Darren, James, Karen, about six or seven of us in the program. We became friends. Out of that came Youth Speaks.

So can you talk about how the organization came to be?

James was a hip-hop head. Really into hip-hop. From New York. A lot of his friends were Black back home. He was a little pissed off that there was no African American representation around him when he’d go to class. “Man, this sucks. I don’t feel like I’m at home.” Well you’re not. You’re in San Francisco, not New York. But he wanted to bring a certain vibe to the workshop. He had an agenda.

He still does! [laughter]

He asked me and Darren, and a few people in the Coalition, he said, hey, I want to start this program where we do spoken-word in the high schools, and then offer them free workshops afterwards. We got a contact at one of these tech companies off of Bryant Street, in one of those warehouses, that were starting to get new computers. They’re gonna give us 20 or 30 old computers for free. We’re gonna use that to attract kids to come take workshops.

I’m one of the first writing mentors. I’ve never taught writing in my life. I’m barely in my first year of the MFA program. And it’s me, and James, and this guy Jason Mateo, and a bunch of teenagers who have just graduated high school. A lot of them are hip-hop heads. Many of them are queer. Several of them Filipino. We started putting flyers in all of the English teachers’ mailboxes. And going to the schools and performing.

We’re all in our early ’20s. We go to several schools, and students would show up for the workshops. I remember trying to make up writing prompts for people. When you’re in the MFA program, you’d get already existing literature to study. This wasn’t gonna work for these kids. These kids wanted rap. They wanted to meet other kids, be part of a social scene. As it evolved, spoken-word was going to reach kids who aren’t going to sit through a poem discussion.

Of something like T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.”

They won’t, no. If anything, play music for them to talk about. Or show a video. We started over at Southern Exposure, when it was still back at Theater Artaud. We were doing workshops there. Kids would come out. What I remember about it, we started to introduce the idea of a slam. We didn’t really know how to do that. 

Were there slams already going on around SF?

There were adult slams. Remember Justin Chin? 

Oh absolutely. Fantastic writer and performer.

Justin Chin was the slam dude, the slam master. San Francisco hosted the first national poetry slam in 1990. It was mixed in a little bit with the grunge scene at the time. Where Janeane Garofalo, Henry Rollins would do spoken-word sets at Lollapallooza.

Maggie Estep was another.

You know what I’m talking about. So that became kinda popular in the early ’90s as part of the alternative culture. There were definitely different scenes in SF then, and they were all really live. For instance, going to the readings at New College for Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian, were weird fucking readings. But they were interesting weird. And then you might go see Gomez-Peña at the Intersection for the Arts, or SOMArts, right? Weird shit. Or you’d see Michelle Tea over at Modern Times, that was fucking weird. So all of these different scenes were popping. 

The thing that we weren’t seeing was hip-hop. There wasn’t hip-hop in relationship to poetry and rap. Remember this was ’95, ’96. Tupac just got murdered. Biggie was about to be murdered. Saul Williams has just emerged. Which changes the whole fucking vibe of spoken word. Because up to then, it’s been alternative, grungey punk-rock weird shit. I was into that, honestly. But I was also into hip-hop. 

So we are then fully invested in spoken-word and hip-hop together. We’re having DJs at every show. We’re having hip-hop artists featured on the spoken-word scene. We’re having theater being made by hip-hop artists and dancers. 

All of this while you’re still going to school at SF State. 

Yeah. I’m there until 2000. James leaves one year before me.

Who came up with the name Youth Speaks, and the tagline?

That was James. We would say it every time we were on the mike, at the end of the night. We’d be like, “Youth Speaks!” And then all the kids offstage would go, “because the next generation can speak for itself.”

That’s powerful. Who were that first generation of Youth Speaks poets, who were the first stars? 

Jason Mateo, Mario Balcita, these were folks that were active the first couple years. They were the ones we put up front. They would do all the school visits. Those are the ones who inspired people who came around in ’99 and 2000, and that’s when you’re talking about Chinaka Hodge, Daveed Diggs, Nico Cary, Eli Marienthal, Rafael Casal, all the Berkeley kids. When Marc Bamuthi Joseph shows up, we just go, boom. 

What did he bring?

An aesthetic. He brought a hip-hop aesthetic that we were already doing, but he had the producer’s mind on top of it. He took over the SF Poetry Slam, and it became like an African market. It went from being a grungey-ass, everybody on drugs and smoking cigarettes, crazy Jamie DeWolf type of vibe, to knitted fucking hats, incense, and Marcus Shelby onstage, with touring poets from around the nation. San Francisco won the 1999 national poetry slam, so that made us the center of everybody.

My first exposure to Youth Speaks was in 1999 at Fort Mason, the final year of the San Francisco Book Festival. I was on a panel with Annie Sprinkle and Eddie Muller. As people walked into the exhibit hall, there was a little outdoor stage with teen poets from Youth Speaks, just going off. You could tell that this was something people hadn’t seen before. The traditional book industry doesn’t know any of this. And it was so dynamic. When we started Litquake, the first couple years we would invite Youth Speaks poets to come down and do a set. They haven’t lived their lives that long, but they’re really digging into the issues of their own lives.

Yeah, they’re very much about what’s happening right now. 

But you couldn’t put anyone after them. They were ferocious. Other novelists that were about to go onstage, it was like, sorry guys, nobody’s going to listen to you. We all realized, maybe we shouldn’t have Youth Speaks at Litquake anymore, because they just blow it up. And also, they don’t need Litquake. Because by that time, you guys are filling Davies Symphony Hall, and the Opera House.

2000 is when we hosted Brave New Voices here in San Francisco. That was massive. That’s when we realized we could fill 1000, 2000 seats. It was dope because they were all teenagers. 

And it’s like, how many things can attract that many teenagers into one room.

I remember going into the Opera House and people are stopping and looking at us like, “Who the hell are you people? What are you doing in here? Where’s your clothes at?” [laughter] This is a different cultural shift. You’re putting all these urban kids, many of whom have seen some shit, and are ready to talk about it right now, that’s why they’re there. It was most of our first times being inside the Opera House and feeling like, oh fuck, we really arrived. We’re a part of San Francisco now. Not that we weren’t before, but it was odd to be in that space with permission. 

The whole idea around Youth Speaks was that any teenager had a valuable thing to write or say. The first five or six years, anyone could come on the mike and say whatever. I feel like the aesthetic changed a little bit when we went to the bigger venues. There was now an expectation. All the things became about creating superstars after that. I don’t see anything being wrong with that, we were putting 2000, 3000 people in front of them, cameras, documentaries, HBO, all this shit is in front of these kids. And folks are going on tour, people are meeting Robert Redford, they’re going to Sundance. But if your aesthetic doesn’t fit that, you’re not participating anymore.

You created a monster.

We did. So then it was about how to out-do the one after that. What do we do next?

It reminds me of the pressure of a poetry slam. That element of it being a competition, and having to one-up the previous person. I judged a poetry slam once, back in the ’90s. It was a strange feeling, to cast votes and determine one person the winner, and another a loser. 

I worry about my role in some of that. I pushed for bigger stages, for expensive aesthetics. I realized, at some point, that spoken word is a step for something else. Spoken word is not the end, for a writing life. It can be a step towards addressing certain elements about who you are, in the moment. It can be developing confidence. It can be about making connections, to go to the next step. It can be about changing direction about where your writing style goes.

Like Chinaka Hodge. She writes for television now. And Daveed Diggs starred on Broadway in “Hamilton.”

Exactly. But what’s dope is that we started producing other things. So we started recording CDs, and publishing books. We started putting out plays. First by the mentors, me, Bamuthi, to show them this is the road. Because we all stopped slamming after a while. There are still people slamming in their ’50s, that’s cool. But if you spend ten years in it, there’s gotta be more, right? And some people didn’t know what was next. The idea was to keep pushing. How do you keep evolving the aesthetics? What chances do you take?

All of the other books and projects, it’s leading by example, so that young kids don’t just become the king of the slam.

I think it was smart of James to listen to Bamuthi in that sense, because Bamu was the one who said, we should be doing theater too. Bamu and I lived together for a long time, and the idea was to create a multi-disciplinary theater that spoke to our young students in Youth Speaks. We could not only create a theater that integrates spoken word, rap, dance, hip-hop beats, and sensibilities, but also give them a pathway to do it. So then we came up with the Living Word Festival. 

Instead of inviting just poets, we started inviting theater artists, and music producers. We started blowing up what you could do. Maybe you don’t even write later, maybe what you do is create music. And then people started making albums. Starting bands. Starting to produce beats. These were kids who were writing poems three years ago. 

And you started to see, oh, it’s not only about poetry. It’s about a voice that can be expressed and evolved and grown in different ways. Including film, including TV. Which is great. But I don’t think it happens without our relationship to Robert Redford and Sundance, and our relationship to HBO’s Def Poetry. I think those two helped our kids visualize a larger audience than 3000 people in a theater. They started to think, wow, I could do Hollywood. I could be on TV, regularly.  

So Youth Speaks just kept growing and growing, with all of these tentacles. You’re sitting on this giant engine of an incubator. It goes in so many different directions. How did you have the energy to admin all of that stuff?

It was a fucking mess! I remember in 2004, we’re doing Brave New Voices in New York. Everybody is staying at this converted public housing spot, that became a hostel, on 97th and Amsterdam. Uptown. It was right in the middle of the fucking hood. We got 400, 500 kids, they’re all coming back from the slams. And everybody’s hanging out, and it’s hot. It’s fucking July. All of a sudden these kids are running across the street, bam bam bam bam bam! Bam bam bam! This kid is chasing another one, shooting crazy into the street. And all of our kids are there. And I’m going, what the fuck are we doing here? Why? That same day, Joanie Osato had to put the whole fucking payroll on her American Express card, because we didn’t have enough money in the bank. We’re talking about 25 grand, she puts on her AMEX. We had to call Lemony Snicket to fund the damn thing, and he writes a check the next day.

It was like, oh wow, here we are sitting with Russell Simmons, in the Def Jam studios, talking to him, and he’s like, Alright, I’m gonna give you guys some money to do this gig. It’s that one day, and the next it’s kids getting shot at. And it’s us having no money. This is all at the height of it. Eventually, around 2007, 2008 I think the fiscal responsibility finally fell into place.  

Youth Speaks was Litquake’s first fiscal sponsor. We were so small as a nonprofit, back in the early days, that we were sponsored by Youth Speaks. I’d go to your office and ask Joanie, can you write us a check for $216? And she would write it out. So how did Youth Speaks turn into such a large national network of all these different cities?

Here’s what I would do. I would get invited to Minneapolis. I’d be at Macalester College doing a performance and a workshop. I would make them say, ok, there’s gotta be a youth organization out there that does youth arts. Do you know any? Ok, how many organizations are doing youth? Okay this many. Alright, as part of my residency, I want all of them to come, and I want to talk to them about Brave New Voices. I would perform for them, and I would say alright, this is why I’m really here. I want y’all to create your own spoken word scene, your own slam, and come join Brave New Voices. I did that in so many fucking cities. Bamu was doing the same thing. We were all doing that.

One time me and Bamuthi are on an NPR panel with Billy Collins, and we just give it to Billy Collins. About how boring he is. Nonstop. Billy Collins is actually a cool dude, but we give him the whole treatment. Talking shit to him, and he was just looking at us. Like, “I’m the Poet Laureate of the United States, who the fuck are you two?” [laughter] He had no idea who we were. And we are doing it half out of jest, and the other half out of, honestly y’all don’t know what’s coming now. But still a good guy. He didn’t get mad at us.

His poetry, he has a sense of humor.

Yeah, it’s down to earth, it’s not fucking academic. 

At what point do you say, I need to do my own stuff?

When my projects were competing with my organization. 

By that you mean, applying for your grants was starting to compete against Youth Speaks for the same grants?

Yeah. That was one of the major things that I realized. It also told me that I was more invested in doing what I wanted to do, more than I was invested in what Youth Speaks wanted to do. And I’m the program director. I needed to make a choice. Where was I going to direct my energies? I fucking loved Youth Speaks. It was just taking off, on track to rocket ahead. We’re Ford Foundation now, we’re Soros, we’re all New York investments, with Robert Redford.

I just have to say. All of us at Litquake were insanely, bitterly fucking jealous of your fundraising. 

Ha! Bamu and James are two very good salesmen. They can make anything sexy and attractive. Bamu especially. 

He’s now at the Kennedy Center in DC. So in 2006, you leave. It’s hard to walk away from something you start. So you thought, okay, I guess I’m doing my own stuff?

Yes. That’s exactly how it was. It was a big step. I was gonna be in New York. So I was already looking at where I wanted to be. I wanted to move into a bigger arena. 

Last year you published both a book, We Still Be, and produced a new play you wrote, “We Have Iré.” I found a quote from you in an interview. “I don’t write unless I have to say something. I’m an emotional person, so I need places to put those emotions which is how I initially came to writing. Still, writing is a mystery to me, a heroic mystery. It’s such a challenge every time I go to the page.” Is this part of becoming more mature? That you don’t want to start something if it’s not going anywhere?

I am compelled to write by internal instinct. I don’t have a routine. I’m not Hemingway, write four hours a day. I did that when I was writing a novel, and it made me force things.

It's like homework. A few years ago, Litquake hosted a panel of novelists, and one of them was proud to say that she wrote 1000 words every single day, and then emailed them to a friend, every single day.

Maybe that works for some people. Everyone has to find their own internal discipline. I don’t like that process of the traditional, write every day, x amount of words. It does not make me feel good. I’m going to pursue what my instincts tell me about writing. If I’m writing a play, and a poem pops in my head, I’m going to put the play over here, and write the poem. And if a song pops in my head, I’m gonna write the song. I’m gonna allow that to happen. There are times when I don’t have anything to say. I like to quote Camus on this.

Oh, let the record show that he’s quoting Camus.

Lived experience is more important than any type of writing. I’m paraphrasing. To me that means life, and the everyday elements of it, are more important than what you can put into a story or a poem. So if life that is happening right now, it’s consuming you, then live that life. You can write it if you want. So some part of me has been trying to listen to that. 

Let’s talk about Los Delicados, the performance troupe you were a part of, along with Norman Zelaya and Darren de Leon. This group started about the same time as Youth Speaks. Somewhere around the mid-2000s, I saw you at Galeria de la Raza. The gallery was packed out. And it was such a joyful thing. So many different elements—comedy, poetry, music, physicality, rap, theater. 

We called it Word Descarga. The idea of a descarga is a Latin jazz jam. so you could throw all kinds of stuff into it. You would have solos, with one artist, playing a conga solo. Or it could be a whole chorus and a riff. It could be danceable. Or it could be more abstract shit. The idea was we were going to do our best to entertain. 

Every single thing in that performance was entertaining.

That was the idea. We would get together and come up with our stuff, in the living room of my house on 23rd and Bryant. And it would be rum, cigars, music, a computer, and one chair. And this might go all day and night, right? Sometimes there’d be some drugs. It would be like, alright we’re gonna have a session. Whatever came out of that session is what we’d end up putting onstage. That joy would go into our shows, the sarcasm, the shit-talking. Norman taking his clothes off, or Norman wrestling somebody in the middle of the show. Or breaking into song out of nothing. Or us having Howard Wylie come and play “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and we’d pretend that we were preachers from down South. We’d have a movie playing. We improvised half the show. We just wanted to jam. 

Was Culture Clash an inspiration?

One of them. I remember seeing them when I was in college. There was one bit about being, “I’m confused...and full of rage!” and it was hilarious, but I didn’t know they were quoting Teatro Campesino. So that’s when I realized Culture Clash was our Teatro Campesino, for people who grew up in the ’90s. 

Herbert Siguenza, his facial, physical comedy is fuckin’ hilarious. And then you’ve got Richard Montoya with his writing and his weird voices. And then Ric Salinas, who’s also very physical.

I was lucky enough to see a few Culture Clash shows in San Francisco. They loved pushing things to the edge. Absolutely no problem being blasphemous. One show I saw at the Julia Morgan theater in Berkeley, they were doing a sketch with a Catholic priest, and the other two members ran up and down the aisles holding these absurdly large collection baskets with really long handles, assaulting the crowd for donations. The energy was insane.

They took a lot of chances. I once went to the Galeria de la Raza for Herbert’s visual art show, Kitty Che, which was a bunch of Che Guevara images, and he’s changed them to a kitty cat. Che Guevara as a kitty cat. Everybody’s sitting there from the neighborhood, all the artists, laughing, drinking wine. This motherfucker walks in, he’s got two pit bulls, he walks into Galeria and says, “Who the fuck did that to Che Guevara? Who the fuck did that?” And he’s got two pit bulls. Richard Montoya ran out the back of that gallery! Nobody would say who did it. This dude was fucking serious. Didn’t see the humor, the sarcasm. He came in there and shoved it in their face, that they were full of shit. “That’s what I thought! A bunch of pussies!” And walked out. 

I’m sure that people were freaked, thinking he’s going to let these pit bulls loose.

On an art gallery with wine and cheese! It was crazy. That was the ’90s, bro. It was still such a different, risky vibe. That’s why 24th Street is still real.