The Artist and the City

For thirty years, when she wasn’t writing books or winning genius grants, Sandra Cisneros has been pushing and prodding San Antonio to become a more sophisticated (and more Mexican) city. Now she’s leaving town. did she succeed?

by Jake Silverstein

February 2013

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This called to mind a passage I’d read in Have You Seen Marie? It’s an unusual book for a writer whose work has been at turns bawdy, avant-garde, and politically trenchant. Entirely autobiographical, Marie is a short, illustrated story with a childlike tone about Cisneros searching the streets of King William for a friend’s lost cat while mourning the loss of her mother, who died in 2010. I read Cisneros the passage I’d thought of: “ ‘King William has the off-beat beauty of a rasquache, and this is what’s uniquely gorgeous about San Antonio as a whole.’ ” 

She smiled. “Rasquache is when you make or repair things with whatever you have at hand. You don’t go to Home Depot. If you have a hole in your roof, you put a hubcap on there. Or you fix your fence with some rope. That’s rasquache. And then there’s ‘high rasquache,’ which is a term the art critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto coined. He lives here. Danny Lozano knew high rasquache. He’d serve you Church’s fried chicken on beautiful porcelain and use Lalique crystal for flowers he’d cut from an empty lot.” 

“And that was one of the qualities that drew you to King William?”

“Not just King William but San Antonio. A kind of elegance of found things. San Antonio has that soul. It’s not, ‘We gotta copy what we saw in New York.’ No! It’s going to come out of our own idea of what we think is beautiful.” She stared at me as if to make sure I understood. “But that’s also what’s getting lost. People feel like the city’s got to look like someplace else. Our mayor needs a stylist. He thinks he has to dress like a Republican. Pues, he’s Chicano! He’s got this gorgeous indigenous look, and he would look so cool if Agosto Cuellar, one of our local designers, dressed him, or someone like Franco, or Danny, or John Phillip Santos—he dresses totally San Antonio cool. He should do a style column for Texas Monthly.”

I allowed that Santos, who is a regular contributor to this magazine, does have singular style (the last time I saw him, in December, he was wearing a horsehair charro tie and ringneck python boots) but joked that there might be a preponderance of leather pants in his fashion advice. Cisneros waved the joke aside.

“Our problem is that we can’t recognize or celebrate what we have. We have this inferiority complex in Texas that we have to look elsewhere. Well, who knows more about inferiority than Chicanos? We grew up being ashamed because the history that is taught to us makes us ashamed. The whole colonial experience surrounding the Alamo is meant to make you feel ashamed.” 

I asked her about the infamous incident involving the color of her house. In 1997 she wanted to paint her Victorian cottage on East Guenther Street a bright shade of purple, a color the city ruled out of bounds for the historic district. She had gone ahead and painted it anyway, and a massive furor erupted. 

“I did it because I love Mexico and the light here is Mexican. And so I thought everybody would love it. But I got crucified. People thought I was flaunting some power I didn’t even know I had. I love Mexico and I thought this was a place that would embrace everything Mexican. But that’s not true. San Antonio looks like Mexico, but it’s ashamed of being Mexican.”

“You don’t think that’s changing?”

“No.”

I told her that one of the things Mondini-Ruiz had said, emphatically, was that Cisneros had helped his generation reclaim its Mexican identity and wear it proudly.

She shrugged. But the mention of her old friend gave her an idea. “Have you been to his house?” she asked. “We call it the Versailles of the West Side.” I told her I had not. “We must go!” she said, whipping out her phone and dialing his number. Within a few minutes we were in my truck, bouncing over the bridge to the West Side and heading down Commerce Street, pointing out examples of rasquache, of which there were many. Soon we arrived at Mondini-Ruiz’s house, which was itself a perfect embodiment of the concept. At the end of a modest cul-de-sac, behind a phalanx of tiki torches, he has transformed an old family bungalow into a sprawling complex of living and work spaces that resembles nothing so much as the interior of his own frenzied and creative mind. 

“This is my house!” he shouted with glee, as we entered a dark front hall crammed with art. “There is a constant dialogue of objects in here,” he said. He began moving so quickly I could barely keep up. “This is my piñata museum. This is something Sandra bought for me twenty years ago. I bought this in Laredo.” He turned at the door to the kitchen. “It’s the Virgen de Guadalupe day. We must have champagne. Don’t say no!”

Outside, workers buzzed everywhere, hammering and sawing, building art and sculpture or simply maintaining the grounds. Peacocks wandered around and birdsong from the aviary mixed with the sounds of Mexican music. We inspected a large gazebo-like structure made of salvaged wood and masonry from old buildings by the Texas architect O’Neil Ford. Mondini-Ruiz, who is known for giving his pieces whimsical titles, had named it Another Mexican With an Old Ford in His Yard.

We spent the next hour or so wandering through his world, finally arriving at the top of a circular iron staircase, on a kind of sleeping porch. He and Cisneros threw themselves on the bed and fell to reminiscing. 

“The world was our cupcake,” she said. “Life was so glamorous.”

“It really was,” Mondini-Ruiz sighed. “Even the skeptics of the time are saying now that that was a golden age. Like Dwight [Hobart, owner of Liberty Bar]. Remember how Dwight just rolled his eyes at us, threw me out of the restaurant when I said, ‘Sandra Cisneros deserves tablecloths!’ ” I laughed. “What? It was a snub! She had just won the MacArthur grant!” They both sat up a little bit and began talking animatedly over each other. 

“Franco taught me how to live high rasquache,” she said.

“And an older gay generation taught me. My dad was an immigrant, my mom was working-class. They were scared, they were strict, and I really didn’t know you were allowed to enjoy your life until I was about twenty-seven. And then . . .”

“Franco used to dare everyone to flash their tits at passing cars.”

“I had all this pent-up happiness. You know, you asked what is going to happen next? Well, my fantasy would be that more artists would prosper and we’d find each other and regroup and give San Antonio a chance again. This is a baroque city, as opposed to Dallas or Houston. It’s seventeenth century. And it’s very polite, very self-congratulatory.”

“Franco once said it’s like Gilligan’s Island.” 

“Yeah, like, you know, ‘Mary Ann’s performing tonight!’ ” 

“But you know, one of the things that gives San Antonio soul that Austin doesn’t have is la gente mas humilde de San Antonio.” 

“Yes! And it’s like Nights of Cabiria: just when I’m about to give up, something magical happens. Just when you think it’s the most unsophisticated place, you go get tacos and you see a working-class Mexican family with their drag queen son with them. And it’s like, ‘Wow, that’s cosmopolitan!’ ”

The sun was getting lower in the sky, and Cisneros and I began to leave, a process that took an hour or so and involved more champagne and an abbreviated drag performance by Mondini-Ruiz. “Goodbye, my love!” he shouted to Cisneros as we climbed into the truck.

She was quiet on the way back, happy, it seemed, to have drifted into the dreamtime of days gone by. She suggested we drive along the route she used to take home from her job at the Guadalupe, on her bike. We turned up South Frio and cut under the interstate on El Paso and crossed the river on Arsenal over a beautiful iron bridge. 

“This is one of my favorite spots in San Antonio,” she said. “When I hated my job and felt like crying every day, I used to go down under this bridge and just get nourished by these trees.” She pointed upstream. “Look at that postcard view of town.” We began rolling through the wide streets of King William. “I lived all over this neighborhood, in apartments on Madison and on Adams and on Mission. Cheap apartments. And I really enjoyed this neighborhood. Make a right up here.” We turned a corner and stopped in front of a yellow Victorian. “My last apartment before I bought my house was behind this house. And next door was Danny Lozano.” We passed Liberty Bar, crossed Alamo, and headed down Adams. She pointed out another landmark. “I lived here when I wrote Woman Hollering Creek. I never believed that I would be able to own a house. So I have great gratitude for San Antonio for allowing me to dream beyond my dreams and buy a house. Because I didn’t just buy a house. I bought a house.” We came to the T where Barbe hits Guenther. Directly ahead of us was a light pink Victorian (she repainted it in 2001) with a charming yard of plants and sculpture. The tin roof shone in the late afternoon sun. She smiled. “And there it is.”

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