Suburban RED
Part of my goal was also to portray the breadth of the Chicano experience and style. When searching images on the internet for Chicanos, my concern was that the offerings were too narrow and rarely reflected what was my own experience as a Chicano growing up in Sunnyvale. The characters that I created were derived from aspects of myself and those around me as I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. I told myself that all the characters within this project reflected the Chicano experience merely because I was Chicano.
Top photographs feature some of the wardrobe and color and design motifs for Suburban RED. The bottom photograph is of myself as a young adult when I first moved to San Francisco. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I was influenced in part by the punk scene which played a big part in the lives of my circle of friends.