UXMAL / Episode 1 / Everyone Calls Him Chávez

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are products of the imagination or have been misremembered beyond recognition. If you recognize someone, that’s on you.

This story is about a lot of things, and a lot of people.
I’m in it too, but we’ll get to me later.

For now—Chávez.

Chávez.
I don’t even know his first name.
Everyone just calls him Chávez—the people at the archive, the people he shoots, the people who drift in and out of his orbit. I call him that too.

He’s a creative type—one of the real ones—the kind who doesn’t ask for permission and doesn’t apologize for still caring. Some people say he’s a dinosaur, a leftover from another era. Maybe they’re right. Maybe he is a relic. But if he is, he’s the kind that refuses to crumble just because the world sped ahead without him.

Like I said: he’s an artist.

A filmmaker, a photographer, sometimes a comic-book maker. He went to the Arroyo School of Art & Design—yes, that one—though he never did much with the degrees. He’s not built for networking, or self-promotion, or any of the performances that pass as ambition now.

He just makes the work and releases it. Uploads a video, prints a zine, drops off indie comics at the few bookstores that still tolerate them. He’s content with his eighty views and the occasional email from a stranger who stumbled across something he made. Maybe ten emails total. If that.

Money doesn’t seem to motivate him whatsoever. He lives in his own world, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. His work is quietly furious—political without announcing itself, emotional without explaining anything. He’s not angry, but he’s not happy either. He feels everything deeply, just not in ways he wants people to see.

If he doesn’t like you, he won’t pretend.
He’ll ignore you outright.
He can be cold—detached, even—but sometimes that’s what it takes to care intensely about art, about the world, about family, and still be expected to talk about it as if it all makes sense. He doesn’t care about his day job, but he does it well. Sometimes that’s all you can expect from someone who’s given the best parts of himself to work the world barely notices.

What else?

He’s in his late forties, Mexican American—“of Mexican descent,” as he puts it, depending on who’s asking. Born in South Gate to a working-class family. Now living in Highland Park in a house he bought before the market surge—before the Bohemian Bourgeois, as he calls them, took over. The house is charming in a collapsing kind of way: cracked clapboard exterior, leaking pipes, warped floors. He always says the house is an extension of himself—weathered, stubborn, falling apart in places no one sees. Major repairs are out of reach.

As I mentioned, he attended the Arroyo School of Art & Technology—ASAT—an institution with considerable symbolic weight in certain circles. For Chávez, the experience is unresolved. Not a triumph or a failure, more like an uneven terrain he’s still interpreting—productive at times, alienating at others, shaped as much by institutional expectations as by his refusal to submit to them.

He jokes that ASAT taught him two things: that institutions love the language of subversion, and that they’ll domesticate anything if you give them long enough—including the avant-garde. He talks about the place with a mix of affection and mild contempt, the way Stuart Hall wrote about identity: formed inside contradictions, shaped by forces you didn’t choose.

For every inspiring moment, there was a seminar where someone tried to explain his work to him through Foucault, as if power only circulates through footnotes and not through the way a working-class kid walks into a room full of people who’ve never worried about rent.

There was the Haraway crowd—students obsessed with cyborg politics while sidestepping actual machinery: class, race, debt. And the Moten readers, who adored rupture and fugitivity but couldn’t see the fugitive labor happening right beside them—students like Chávez, building films out of leftover grants and sleep deprivation.

He learned a lot there, but he also learned what institutions can’t metabolize: people like him. They can celebrate you in theory, cite you in a paper, place you on a panel about “emergent voices”—and still have no idea what to do with the art itself. ASAT wanted him legible. Predictable. Categorizable.

Chávez is none of those.

Watching him move through that world—or crash against it—you start to see the gap between knowing the theory and being permitted to belong inside it. He read everything assigned: Foucault on power, Hall on representation, Haraway on situated knowledge, Moten on fugitivity and the break. He understood them, maybe too well. But theory hit him like weather—something he walked through, not a badge he could wear.

ASAT preferred students who could cite cleanly, who could metabolize critique into professional polish. Chávez didn’t metabolize; he absorbed. Slowly. Painfully. Like someone trying to swallow a landscape.

From what I can tell, ASAT was too small for him and too large at the same time. Too small because the discourse was narrow, confined to what certain circles deemed radical. Too large because, like all institutions, it didn’t know what to do with someone who wouldn’t perform its mythology back at itself.

I wasn’t there, but I’ve seen how he talks about those years—half shrug, half recoil. Not bitterness. Recognition.

He once said reading Foucault helped him understand ASAT better than ASAT helped him understand Foucault. Another time he joked that Haraway would have laughed at the way the school turned her into a checklist. And when Moten visited, Chávez sat in the back, half-hidden, listening to someone finally articulate the kind of escape route he’d been building instinctively.

ASAT stays with him—not as trauma (though there’s some of that), but as an unfinished argument he’s still having with authority. He learned that institutions love theory more than people. But theory itself—ideas, frameworks—he carries gently, like tools for later.

If ASAT taught him anything, it’s that he was never meant to be shaped by a school. Only sharpened by it. And he was. Just not in the way the school intended.

He told me this story after I insisted—not for confession’s sake, but to map the institutional conditions he moved through back then. 

When he screened his thesis film, the committee looked underwhelmed—like they’d hoped he’d deliver a safer, more respectable experimental mode. Maybe they wanted to see him repackage something already made—Lemon by Hollis Frampton, or a derivative essay film meant for the Marker faithful.

One bright spot was Nina Vex—that Nina Vex—L.A. legend of late-70s feminist art, DIY punk, and community media. She said his film was one of the few truly experimental works the school had seen in years—original, idiosyncratic, not another formalist homage to the white male high-art canon.

Even the experimental world has its conventions. “Conventions of the experimental, experimental conventions,” as he jokes.

Then there was Harlan Guage—the slow-time filmmaker of grain silos, rail lines, and Midwestern weather. After the critique, Guage told him he hoped he’d keep making films—that he saw the world differently than anyone else.

Chávez thought about that for years. He still does. He metabolizes ideas the way coral grows—patiently, invisibly.

Was Guage suggesting that sustaining an artistic practice is structurally difficult for everyone? Or that the experimental art world demands a particular kind of person—and Chávez wasn’t that person? That he would meet resistance? For people like him, grad school isn’t a springboard; it’s a stop sign. ASAT was never a threshold but a terminus. What earlier generations named the “glass ceiling” now circulates under a different term: gatekeeping.

Anyway. Resistance. That reminds me. 

He once sent me an old interview with Orrin Vale, the American essay-filmmaker and ASAT professor. Vale talked about revealing the “obvious yet unrecognized”—the everyday truths no one films. He said most depictions of Los Angeles come from people who only know other writers or industry people—a tiny circle defining an enormous city and ignoring everyone else.

Vale said a new L.A. cinema was emerging from the eastern and southeastern suburbs—from the people actually born here.

He mentioned two ASAT graduates—Tomás Navarro and “some guy everyone calls Chávez”—making films about ordinary, unromantic things. Work the mainstream and even the experimental community resisted because it refused to spectacularize its own world.

Chávez felt that resistance.
Every bit of it.

If a new cinema was born then, he jokes he must have died at birth—stillborn—because networking was never in his DNA, not even in the self-mythologizing experimental art world of Los Angeles.

His Job

Chávez splits his time between three departments inside a single bureaucratic organism:
—The Memory Extraction & Preservation Lab (MEPL)
—The Department of Discontinued Technologies (DDT)
—The Early Internet Preservation Program (EIPP)

Three precarious, underfunded departments inside the larger, barely-functional Center for Media Archaeology, all fighting—failing heroically, really—to preserve disappearing memory.

His job description, as he recites it without emotion:

recover corrupted media
extract code from obsolete formats
salvage images from Hi-8, miniDV, U-Matic
reverse-engineer dead memory cards
reconstruct broken hard drives
rescue forgotten archives:
MySpace music pages
Friendster profiles
Photobucket albums
YouTube videos pulled for copyright
LiveJournal posts in obsolete encryption
Geocities pages
Vines that end mid-motion
dead Flash games
AIM chat logs
Nokia phone videos with timestamps in the corner

They operate somewhere between a junkyard, an editing bay, and a crime lab for dead technology and eroding digital memory.

He doesn’t love it, but after years of short-term production jobs for companies making knockoffs of knockoffs—and a Spanish-language station making knockoffs of those knockoffs—he’d had enough.

He applied to the Center for Media Archaeology and got a temp job. Two months later, a full-time position—mostly because, according to him, compared to the bozos and losers working there, he looked like a rising star. He’s been there ever since.

A steady job. Healthcare. Benefits. Enough to buy a house before the neighborhood exploded.

He never cared about Hollywood.
Only his work.
And this mind-numbing job gave him just enough stability to keep making it.

Judge if you want.

He grew up working-class in L.A. and accepted—more rationally than he’d admit—that someone like him might end up in a dead-end job orbiting the semi-legitimized entertainment world.

Fuck that.

I respect him. His work matters. It kills me that almost no one sees it. Still, he keeps going—each video, each zine, each fragment—trusting that the future will find what the present can’t.

That’s all I have for now. I’m sure I’ve forgotten something—I usually do—but we’ll fill the gaps later, or someone else will. Memory works that way. Time too. Ideas bleeding into each other, an abandoned thought resurfacing somewhere unexpected.

My name, if you’re wondering, is Amina. Amina Brooks.
I’m a Master’s student in my final year at ASAT, Film & Video Department. Born right here in L.A., raised in Arlington Heights. But like I said—we’ll get to me later.

Los Angeles, California.
November 15, 2025.
Saturday.
A rainy day.