Photographer unknown, Mind Crime Hookers party crew on 6th Street Bridge, Boyle Heights, 1993. Courtesy Guadalupe Rosales.
“The word legend means to create stories we have to tell,” observes Chicanx artist Guadalupe Rosales. “When I think about my ancestors, this is something that has passed on as someone who is Mexican. We keep these people and loved ones close to us through their stories and legends.”
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Passing down stories, traditions, and hard-won lessons from one generation to the next, Rosales has built a vernacular archive of ’90s Chicanx culture and history – selections of which are currently on view in Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory at Aperture Gallery, New York, as well as in Los Angeles (Aperture Magazine, Fall 2018).
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Her story begins when, at the age of eight, Rosales and her family moved to a home in East Los Angeles that faced The Boulevard, a historic street where teens had been linking up since the ’60s. Rosales fondly recalls, “hanging out, watching from the window when I was 11 or 12 before I was allowed to do these things – and seeing the beautiful cars, the men and women getting to know each other, exchanging phone numbers. As I got older and was able to go out that was something that got passed down to me and my sisters.”
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Photographer unknown, Guadalupe Rosales’s cousin, Ever Sanchez (right), and unidentified woman, East Los Angeles, 1995
Shrine to Ever Sanchez, Guadalupe Rosales’s studio, 2018; Photograph by Mike Slack for Aperture