Juan Pablo Angel Marcos

“Ser joven y no ser revolucionario es una contradicción hasta biológica”   -       Salvador Allende   Thanks to photography, I’ve been able to piece together lines and paragraphs of my family's story in Los Angeles. Everytime I sort through old family photos from California on the kitchen table, Mom watches. I ask lots of questions and Mom answers them.   ¿Dónde trabajaste?   Fragments of times scattered on the table offer a call and response.   En un Hotel   Mom tells me about her back injury she got while working as a housekeeper for a hotel, Dad working with my Tío at a factory, our stand at the Paramount Swap Meet, the bikes that were stolen from our porch and which one of my siblings cried the most as a baby.   I remember very little about Los Angeles. We moved to Michigan when I was four years old, but what I remember the most were my toys, Norms, the warmth of the sun and the snow capped mountains in the distance that provide the backdrop to the cityscape’s stage.   I may not have the clearest memories of Los Angeles, but I do have feelings, and every time I visit, I feel at home. There’s almost an instinctive familiarity and comfortability I have with the streets and people.   As I listen to Moms stories and revisit the city, I learn more and more about the inequality that forced us to leave our home — inequality that follows us wherever we go.   The segregated neighborhoods of cities like Paramount that stress families and force relocation. Conditions that exist due to racist and exclusionary planning efforts from city, state and federal policies.   From the concrete neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles to the gated residential rolling hills of Hollywood, Los Angeles doesn’t hide itself from the tourists that walk along Griffith Observatory at night.   Mom and Dad came to the United States from Mexico with some kind of dream: a dream that even to this day is changing and evolving —having escaped hardship and violence and once here, knowing that those issues have not gone away.   I wish we were able to stay in Los Angeles…   Art is revolutionary. It’s essential. It shifts our perspectives through messages and thoughts.   Through photography, I’ve begun to understand myself and the world around me, setting me up for the long journey of activism that lay ahead of me.   For this Miseducation exhibition, I’ve submitted a collection of new and old photographs from my time in Los Angeles. Respiration gives us life, allowing us to breathe and be human. I’m hoping to capture the beauty and complexity of it all.