Big X

A Habit of Hope - Issue 19

Welcome to A Habit of Hope — a weekly practice of optimism and joy. We get inspired, there’s music, and use a set of tools for community and accountability.

Larger Than Life

I’m thinking a lot this week about the power of art. We just finished the first readthrough with music of my new play This is Water, which grapples (in song!) with how to push back against a looming dictatorship. I’ve seen it said that art and music are in and of themselves countermeasures to fascism. I do believe it.

I’ve also been thinking about artists I know, and it occurred to me that there’s one in particular I want to tell you about: the great X Montes.

Not many people are immortalized on a mural in their hometown.

But Xavier Montes had the charisma and influence of two men, so it fits. And when they pass from this Earth, not many people are awarded a full page obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

But X was.

The LA Times summed up his career this way: “He was the founder of the De Colores Art Show, an annual showcase of music, dance and art held in his hometown of Santa Paula. The swirling arpeggios Montes plucked out of his harp provided soundtracks to fundraisers and community nights from Ojai to Oxnard; his paintings, usually ruminations on Mexican themes or farmworkers, hung in the home of the region’s Latino intelligentsia.”

“Big X” cut a striking silhouette. He was larger than life, both physically and by reputation. He figured out long before TikTok the power of personal branding, and was rarely seen without his trademark guayabera and Panama hat, building a reputation as an important local painter and traditional musician. He enjoyed the spotlight and people and parties. He was always getting something going. Several times we talked about doing a project together, but it never quite happened.

X also gleefully brought music to hundreds of kids. I remember one time parking in the alley behind Main Street in Santa Paula to run into one of the businesses there, and hearing this beautiful music from somewhere nearby. I peered over and it was X and a group of kids with guitars, practicing under some trees outside.

If you’re on Facebook, you can watch this sweet video of him egging his young students on. He was determined to fill his community with color and song, and to instill respect for art, and music, and culture.

His paintings were mystical and reverent.

He played at my wedding! There was a good reason for that, besides the lilting tones of his folk harp and the beautiful harmonies. He was my husband’s protector in high school in Santa Paula. Billy would mouth off to someone at a party and then go run and hide behind X, the gentle giant whom one could definitely push too far. I guess Xavier found Bill amusing enough that the plan worked: “Ehh, leave Slaughter alone.”

I remember doing a concert at the Ojai Art Center, not long after Billy and I were engaged. X came over the hill from Santa Paula to hear me. After the show, he pulled Bill aside and said, “Slaughter? She’s a beautiful flower. You take care of her.” I’m pretty sure that was Billy’s plan anyway but what could he say except “I will, X.”

There are many reasons to know about Xavier Montes, but I want to draw attention to a couple of things he said.

Accepting an award from the Latino Town Hall in 2004, Xavier dedicated the honor to Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. “My father picked lemons, my mother and her family migrated all over California following the season crops, my Aunt Carmen pitted apricots throughout Ventura County and they all experienced first hand the many issues related to human rights that Cesar and Dolores worked so hard to bring to light.”

And then, in an interview with the Ventura County Star in 2015 he spoke about Chicano activism:

“I wanted to be part of this movement, but I wasn’t a public speaker, or a real radical protester. This was one way of participating and promoting my culture: through music.”

Whether by highlighting inequities or bringing to our awareness untold stories, as James Baldwin famously said: “Artists are here to disturb the peace.” Art educates, enlightens, transports, instigates, elevates — everything that dictators, with their lack of moral imagination, fear the most.

Art can respond directly to fascism, but it can also undermine it by sparking curiosity, calling us to dig deeper into and commit more fully to our world. Xavier Montes’ beautiful speech to the Latino Town Hall (worth reading in full), elaborates:

“Art can act as a spring board to other disciplines, for example when drawing landscapes some topics discussed are trees, shrubbery, the geography of the area; when drawing people, we talk about the anatomy, psychology (who the person is) if he is a hero, what drove him to heroic acts, the same can be applied to music and dance.”

Dictators want us to believe the world is threatening, and want us to make ourselves small within it. Art tells us the world is infinite, and calls us to be big within it. Maybe we can’t be as big as Big X, but we can come close.

In 2005 and 2007, Xavier Montes documented the lives of dozens of elderly musicians who had helped to make Santa Paula a hotbed of Mexican music before World War II. Here he is playing “Tequila” with legends Nene Hernandez and Henry Nava. Enjoy.

And finally, I gotta share this sweet picture of X and me with one of his beautiful “Virgincitas.” I bought it for my hubby’s birthday.

A Habit of Hope

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xo Rain

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