"I was brought in to develop the Hecho en Califas festival 3 years ago. And what that originally was a group of local Latino arts, artists, you know, theater, music, spoken word, that was the foundation of what we were doing with Hecho en Califas, and they needed somebody to coordinate it all, and so they hired me to do that. That connected me to a lot of people, a lot of Latinos and Chicanos in the Bay Area who saw they had somebody from their own generation and their own race, their own interests who was booking here at La Peņa. So basically through my responsibilities coordinating Hecho en Califas, I met all these other people who wanted to get involved in the festival. I couldn't involve everybody of course, but I tried to make it as diverse as possible when it came to what is Latino art, so we included visual stuff, we included rock en espaņol, we included punk mariachi, we included teatro, we included performance art. And so really the idea was, we wanted to show young artists in all their diversity, in all the different things that they're doing, even if some of the art forms they're engaged in aren't defined yet."

"What we're able to do with a lot of these artists who just want to be able to perform their work, we find ways for them to plug into the community otherwise. We find projects that we can use their talents for. So what we do is we try to take the artists who simply think all they want to do is perform, we try to connect them to a larger artist network that also includes studying their form. And then hopefully they'll take what they learn at La Peņa and then share it back out into the community. La Peņa not only helps cultivate artists, but gives them inspiration to go out and work with other artists to help other young artists, so the generations keep helping each other."

"The spoken word movement [in the Bay Area] has been beautiful. I think that the good thing about spoken word is that it's easy to produce. It's relatively easy to create, and because it's so democratic and you can say anything you want, anyone can do it. Spoken word has made poetry almost universal, so that spoken word artists can come to almost any venue, in the academia, in the local bar, in the cultural center, at the rally. Spoken word has totally revolutionized poetry ­ it's no longer an academic pursuit, it is something for the people, and that's why I love spoken word so much."

"The next steps for youth art programming is to develop new mediums, and to advance a lot of what the traditional arts have laid down, and the artists who bring the traditional arts here at La Peņa. What we want to do is begin integrating the new mediums and new technology and new forms that are there, and showing artists, Latinos, African Americans, Asians, progressive whites, show casing these young people from these communities using new arts. We want to get over the stereotype that all black people listen to hip-hop. We want to see some black artists who are working in experimental forms of soul and jazz. And in rock, too. We want to give them a chance, those conscious artists out there to work with new media and at the same time to continue the message of social justice."

Photo by Hugh Lovell