At ELAC’s Vincent Price Art Museum, an exhibition pays tribute to 30 years of Latina lesbian activism

Now through August, East Los Angeles College’s Vincent Price Art Museum will host an exhibition that spans three decades of local Latina lesbian activism, from the 1980s to the late 2000s.

Housed on the museum’s third floor, the exhibition features photos, posters, letters and other ephemera that highlight the work of those who fought to put an end to anti-gay hate crimes. The activists also took on other issues, including LGBTQ+ healthcare, affordable housing, fair wages for janitors and immigrants’ rights.

The show is a collaboration between the museum and the Latina Futures 2050 Lab, a research initiative led by UCLA. Jocelyne Sanchez is a project archivist at the university’s Chicano Studies Research Center library and co-curator of the exhibition. In a conversation with LAist, she reflected on what the show might mean for Angelenos, who are bearing witness to immigration detentions across the region.

“It is quite terrifying to see the violence,” she said. “But here, in this room, there's a serenity in knowing that people have always loved each other, and people will always fight for each other.”

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Fighting for justice, building community 

The small but mighty exhibition pays homage to activists who have passed and who remain in the fold. This includes civil rights advocate Laura Esquivel, as well as tenant rights attorney Elena Popp. Both of them attended the show’s opening in June.

Vanessa Esperanza Quintero, who co-curated the show and serves as exhibitions coordinator of the Latina Futures 2050 Lab, said she was glad to hear they felt their story has been captured with care.

Co-curator Jocelyne Sanchez, UCLA CSRC director Veronica Terriquez, co-curator Vanessa Esperanza Quintero, Laura Esquivel, Elena Popp, Ridge Gonzalez, and UCLA CSRC assistant director Celia Lacayo.

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Monica Orozco

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Courtesy of Gloria Ortega, Vincent Price Art Museum Foundation

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About halfway through the exhibition, visitors encounter a photo titled “Lesbians of Color- LA, 1980." It features a group of women (and a child in sunglasses) smiling and dancing in a living room. The photo was shot by historian, author and activist Lydia Otero, but the people in the image are unnamed.

The co-curators said they chose to include a large-scale version of the photo because it speaks to a crucial, but rarely acknowledged, aspect of organizing: the joy of finding community. The show also aims to honor unknown people who’ve helped make change.

"Our mission is to share with the public as much history as possible, including highlighting historical moments — and people — who tend to not receive all the attention or credit for their important work,” said Veronica Terriquez, director of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and cofounder of Latina Futures 2050 Lab.

Next to the photo, Quintero decided to affix a QR code. Should visitors feel called to be part of the women’s legacy, their phones will pull up organizations doing social justice work today.

The co-curators also aim to illustrate that the activists’ work was “not confined by borders,” Sanchez said. Toward the end of the exhibition, several materials — including a giant poster of a 2009 lesbian march in Mexico City — show that the L.A. County organizers were in dialogue with people across the country and the world.

Parts of the exhibition are bathed in lavender. VPAM curatorial assistant Gloria Ortega said the color was chosen because of its "long history with the [LGBTQ+] community."

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Monica Orozco

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Courtesy of Gloria Ortega, Vincent Price Art Museum Foundation

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Ode to an “oppositional child”

Above all, the exhibition is a tribute to the late archivist, “herstorian” and former Chicano Studies Research Center librarian Yolanda Retter Vargas.

During her tenure, she expanded the center’s archives to include the papers of Esquivel, Popp and other local activists. Retter Vargas also led the Latina Lesbian Oral Histories project and, in the early years of the internet, created a website that housed a wealth of information on L.A. County’s lesbian history.

But when Retter Vargas died in 2007, her website domain was lost, and everything she’d posted vanished into the ether. The Latina Futures 2050 Lab digital projects librarian managed to retrieve that work. Now, Retter Vargas’ website is at the museum. Visitors can navigate it by clicking through the pages on a vintage neon green Mac desktop.

For the exhibition, the co-curators also decided to flip the camera on Retter Vargas. Instead of one of the interviews she conducted, Quintero and Sanchez opted to project an interview conducted by Popp, in which Retter Vargas recounts her life and work. In it, viewers can catch glimpses of rare vulnerability.

The tough as nails archivist opens up about her youth, including the pushback she experienced when attempting to live outside prescribed gender norms. In the video, Retter Vargas describes herself as an “oppositional child” — a label she “really took on throughout her life,” Sanchez said.

The name of the exhibition is itself a nod to Retter Vargas’s work. She titled her dissertation “On the Side of Angels: Lesbian Activism in Los Angeles, 1970-1990.” When Quintero came across it, she knew she wanted it to be the name of the exhibition.

At the show, the co-curators placed the toolbelt Retter Vargas wore while making her rounds at UCLA under a glass display case, along with other belongings. More than museum pieces, they seem to function as part of a room-sized altar.

On one of the exhibition’s walls, Quintero and Sanchez quoted the dedication in Retter Vargas’ academic work.

The first line reads: “To the butch and femme lesbian resisters, who were ‘out’ and about when it was not safe.”