Harry Gamboa, Jr.

Harry Gamboa Jr. (born 1951) is a Chicano essayist, photographer, director and performance artist. He was a founding member of the influential Chicano performance art collective ASCO.

Biography

The first of five children born to a working-class Mexican American couple, Gamboa grew up in East Los Angeles, California, "an urban area tormented by poverty, violence, and racial conflict". Despite the "inadequacy of the East L.A. public schools", Gamboa was encouraged to value education and did fairly well in school, and he was active in community organizations and politics as a teenager. As a high-school student (graduated 1969), Gamboa was active in student government and an organizer of various student-initiated reforms, most significantly the 1968 "East L.A. Blowouts"—a series of protests against the inferior conditions of public schools in poor, non-white areas.

Gamboa's extracurricular activities were not, however, limited to politics. Already a developing artist, it was at Garfield High that Gamboa met Gronk (Glugio Nicandro), Patssi Valdez (then known as Patsy), and Willie Herrón, three of his closest associates in his later career. After the "Blowouts" of his senior year, Gamboa dropped out of the political scene to dedicate himself to his education. Thanks to these efforts and with the help of the Equal Opportunities Program (EOP) for disadvantaged minority students, Gamboa was able to attend California State University, Los Angeles.