Flor y Canto: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Melinda Palacio -- August 24, 2010
What started 37 years ago as a photography assignment for the Daily Trojan has turned into a reunion and second conference for the Flor y Canto Festival of Poetry.
© Magu 2009
Michael Sedano is fulfilling a dream with a little help from anyone who was there. Few realized what a historic event took place 37 years ago when an English graduate student, Mary Ann Pacheco, invited renowned Chicano poet, Alurista, to read USC. Their idea was to hold a festival to promote every published Chicano/Chicana author. In 1973 at USC's Doheny Memorial Library the Flor y Canto was born.
At the time, Sedano's role was mainly that of spectator and photographer. As a then graduate student in Speech and Communications and a photographer with the Daily Trojan, Sedano assigned himself the task of documenting the Flor y Canto, using the camera he purchased while in the army, a Topcon RE, along with Tri-X black and white film. In the pre-digital, phone and video camera days, black and white photography was the medium. Also, many of the performances were recorded on obsolete U-matic 3/4 cassette tapes, a project sedano helped update.
Testament to the artistic staying power of Sedano's black and white images will be the art show, featuring Sedano's photographs which will hang for several months in the library's gallery space.
During the 1973 festival, an important moment happened during Oscar Zeta Acosta's reading. Zeta, author of The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and whose life and writings are a significant contribution to Mexican-American literature and 1960's counter culture and the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's Dr. Gonzo, was about to take the Flor y Canto stage and read from his latest book, Revolt of the Cockroach People, when he noticed something unpleasant. He saw that there were video cameras present. The lawyer and author was not being camera shy. The production crew read Tom Reddins Productions . Reddin was the former chief of the LAPD and Zeta refused to read for any benefit of Reddin's camera crews. Sedano has great photos of Zeta looking straight into the camera and telling the crews to "turn off the fucking cameras."
<The man behind the photos,
Michael Sedano
Sedano developed all the film himself and says his negatives are in superb condition. "I had poor temperature control so the slides have a bit of a color cast. But I use a Nikon scanner and software that does a great job of repairing the frames and color. Adobe Photoshop tools help spot out the dust and obscure some of the scratches. Because many of the readers were lighted for television, image quality sparkles. Frames exposed with available light, are pretty good."
What Zeta and Sedano didn't know during the 1973 Flor y Canto was that the cameras kept rolling. Reddins crew was pretty sneaky about turning off a camera and moving the television people out. Sedano believed his black and white images would be the sole records of the literary readings. He was pleasantly surprised when, decades later, someone sent him a link to a Google video of the late Zeta reading. View Sedano's article on La Bloga and see more of his vivid images, including the famous Zeta photos and Sedano's recollections of that scene.
Several of Sedano's photographs have no identification. He's launched a campaign on La Bloga and his own website to help identify those faces. Sedano was happy to identity this photo at the National Latino Writers Conference. Pictured are Tomas Ybarra- Frausto and Tomas Rivera. At the conference, Sedano asked Rolando Hinojosa to identify the third man, and Rolando said, "That's me." The photos also figured into Sedano's dissertation thesis. Throughout the past three decades, the photos have had a special place in Sedano's heart.
photo by Michael Sedano
"The pleasure of taking those photos remained with me through all the years I worked in private industry. When the link opened I immediately recognized the scene as Flor y Canto 73 and my heart stopped with joy. Thus began the two year project that culminated in getting USC's copyright clearance to make the digital copies of the existing videos that were at UCR's Tomas Rivera Memorial Library. The actual digitization took exactly six weeks from start to finish."
This year a reunion of some of the original 1973 Flor y Canto poets, along with newer poets and fiction writers will take place again at USC's Doheny Memorial Library, September 15, 16, 17. The thirteen original Flor y Canto readers include: Alurista, Vibiana Aparicio-Chamberlin, Estevan Arellano, Ron Arias, Juan A Contreras, Veronica Cunningham, Juan Felipe Herrera, R Rolando Hinojosa, Enrique Lamadrid, Ernest Mares, Jose Montoya, Alejandro Murguia, and Roberto Vargas. See a complete schedule of performers. A long list of hands, including several USC departments and El Centro Chicano have helped move this project forward on a bare-bones budget.