In mid-July, Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art premiered Asco: Without Permission, a feature-length documentary directed by Mexican American filmmaker Travis Gutiérrez Senger. Inevitably, in making a film about Asco, the Los Angeles based avant-garde group, Gutiérrez was also telling a part of his own story. The documentary was also screened at other independent and art-house cinemas across the country.
The documentary portrays ways of understanding art and its meanings through the perspectives of Patssi Valdez, Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, and Willie Herrón, the founders of Asco.
This collective of young Mexican American artists emerged in a Los Angeles profoundly transformed by the Chicano civil rights movement of the late 1960s and by an explosion of art and youthful rebellion that took over major streets and universities across the world during the 1970s.
“Asco” means disgust or nausea in Spanish—a name that precisely expresses these young artists’ rejection of the unjust social and political landscape of the United States. The collective developed a deeply stylized body of work that reflected both their avant-garde sensibility and their activist impulse. Among their most emblematic interventions were guerrilla actions and performances in public spaces—conceived as forms of protest against established institutions of power—including the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Catholic Church, and the Hollywood film industry.
The collective developed a deeply stylized body of work that reflected both their avant-garde sensibility and their activist impulse.
With intelligence and fidelity to his own Chicano identity, Gutiérrez Senger pushes beyond the familiar rhetoric surrounding the post-1968 generation of creative geniuses and examines the particular challenges that being a Chicana or Chicano artist entailed at the time. He places Patssi Valdez at the center of the documentary. She emerges as a pioneering figure for the generations of Mexican American women artists who followed her. This is where the political significance of a documentary such as this one resides.
Asco: Without Permission is not merely the story of four young people who decided to form an art collective. Asco is the story of four young people who, despite having the American system bearing down on them, decided to pick up a camera, paint a picture, glue themselves to a wall, graffiti a museum, and lie down in the middle of a street in order to change the narrative that Mexican American youth did not belong in prestigious art schools. It sought to challenge the rhetoric that young Chicanos belonged only to the streets and to gangs. In a context in which simply speaking Spanish could make someone the target of ridicule, Gutiérrez frames the faces of Patssi, Harry, Gronk, and Willie and allows them to tell, directly to the camera, how art saved them.
As the documentary unfolds, Mexican, Mexican-American, and Latino viewers also encounter fragments of themselves within it.
Visually, Gutiérrez Senger creates a compelling and beautiful documentary by combining multiple archival sources that allow the viewer to imagine and empathize with each member of Asco. There are one-on-one interviews, archival footage of Asco’s performances, photographs from magazines published by the collective, newspaper clippings, and a series of contemporary artistic recreations of some of their most famous performances. These recreations function as a kind of living memory, bringing a new generation of artists into the story to reinterpret specific moments in Asco’s history. In one such scene, Patssi encounters a future interpretation of herself, portrayed by another local Los Angeles artist, a performance that moves Patssi deeply.
As the documentary unfolds, Mexican, Mexican American, and Latino viewers also encounter fragments of themselves within it. Gutiérrez Senger places particular emphasis on the hate directed toward Mexican immigrant communities: the criminalization of our skin color, of where we come from, and of the neighborhoods in which we live. What happened to Asco between 1972 and 1987—the years in which the collective was active—is presented by the director as a story that has not remained in the past.
The documentary closes with a brief account of the lives of Asco’s members: four artists who continue to teach in classrooms, create from different spaces, and, from time to time, inspire other artists. In this way, the film ultimately brings a collective of Chicano performance artists who, continued to create in the face of repression, back into the conversation.
Katalyn Solís is a historian from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She was born in Actopan, Hidalgo, and lived for many years in Mexico City. She currently resides in Chicago, where she is in charge of digital content for Contratiempo magazine and works as Communications and Media Coordinator at an organization advocating for the labor rights of undocumented migrants. Her favorite film is Taxi Driver, and she believes that “another world is possible.”