Music Credits;

“El Canelo” performed by Los Lobos from the album La Pistola y El Corazón.

“La Bamba”, “Will the Wolf Survive” and “Chucos Cumbia” performed live by Los Lobos in August 2021.

 “La Guacamaya and “El Canelo” from the album La Pistola Y El Corazon, performed by Los Lobos.

“NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the album Soul Sand, used courtesy of Free Music Archive

Louie Pérez: You might not think about it, but there’s no question about it that in the summer of 1987 there was a little band from East LA, that had a number one record of a traditional Mexican song. The name of the band was Los Lobos. That’s quite a statement.  And quite an overview of what we had been doing in so many years.  Another snapshot of Chicano culture as it moves forward.

Jo Reed: That is Louie Pérez the guitarist, percussionist jarana player and songwriter in the band Los Lobos which has been named a 2021 National Heritage Fellow and this is Art Works—the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Los Lobos is a groundbreaking band from East Los Angeles—They had been rock and rollers and then they discovered or rediscovered the musicality of traditional Mexican songs and they approached it with a rock and roll sensibility. But Los Lobos never stands still:  They move from electric instruments to acoustic, English to Spanish, traditional music to rock, with forays into r and b, zydeco, Tex-Mex, and soul, with ease and passion. They’ve been together—the same core four—for almost 50 years—Steve Berlin—the new kid—came to the band in 1984. They had been together for 15 years when they performed some of the music for the film about Richie Valens and “La Bamba” became the number 1 song. And suddenly the band was discovered. But Los Lobos being Los Lobos just kept on making music—extraordinary, unexpected music their way—always coming back to their Chicano roots and East LA.  Given the breadth and depth of their music and their commitment to bringtraditional music to the world and their continuing celebration of Chicano music and culture that the band a named a National Heritage Fellow. I spoke with band member Louie Perez recently—and since he tells such vivid stories with his songwriting, I asked him to tell me the story of Los Lobos.

Louie Pérez: We all grew up in East Los Angeles in the barrios of East Los Angeles. So we all met up at James A. Garfield High School, which is really famous for the movie "Stand and Deliver." And, oh, how can I put it? We were friends before we ever became musicians together. But we were musicians. I had a band with David. Cesar had a band, like a soul band, and Conrad had one of these bands that, like a three-piece power trio that wanted to be louder than everybody else.

<laughter>

And we were just friends in high school. Once we graduated. we still hung out as friends together but we didn't play music together. We had our own bands. But, you know, like the story goes, we were hanging around together and they say if you hang around at a barber shop long enough you'll eventually get a haircut.

<laughter>

Louie Pérez: Well, we eventually started a band. And the motivation to start this band actually came from not really a fluke but we decided we wanted to serenade one of our moms on their birthdays. You know, it's Mañanitas, which is the traditional thing to do early in the morning for the person whose birthday it is. So we said, "Let's learn an old Mexican song." At this point, Mexican music was background music. For us young kids, it was all about rock and roll. You know, as soon as we got tall enough to reach the knob on the radio, we changed the dial. Let's listen to rock and roll. So we found some old records and we put them on. By this point, we were already rock and rollers. And we attempted to learn one of the songs and we were really, wow. We were kind of dumbfounded by how complicated the music was. And we thought, like, there was five great guitar players in the entire world. You know, Jimi Hendricks, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton. But we were listening to this one guy play and we said, "Wow, this guy's blowing them <laughs> all away." So we were smitten. We dove right into the music. We wanted to learn more about it. Of course the birthday serenade went pretty good. <laughs> And we got so involved with it that we gave up our bands and we decided to just do this full-time, starting in about 1973. We're just now, we're just shy of 50 years.

(Music Up)

Jo Reed: Amazing. Let me ask you this, because this is a whole new style of music. You have to learn new instruments. What was that process like? And also wondering if it felt different to play this music.

Louie Pérez: That is a good question. We’d started going to local record stores and picking up records just because we saw “wow, look at this crazy instrument. We like this” so we literally when we went looking for instruments, we'd go to pawn shops and we'd hold the record up and say, "Hey, there's one." <laughs> We'd have the record in our hand and we'd be looking in the window of the pawn shop. And we were buying these instruments like vihuelas and jaranas for like $15, $20 bucks. We didn't have any idea how to tune them or how to play them. But we were fortunate enough to find some local musicians that knew how to play those instruments and one of those was Candelario Delgado who had a guitar shop in East L.A. called Candelas Guitars. And he made instruments and fixed instruments and did everything for all the local mariachis and other musicians. So he was instrumental in showing us how they're tuned and more or less how they're played. But we were pretty much on our own. And it sounded different but one thing we did do that was slightly different from the traditional was that we applied our own rock and roll sort of instincts and energy to it and we gravitated towards jarocho music because it's kind of like the rock and roll of traditional music meaning that it's really an intense music and we enjoyed playing that. But were off and running. We were listening to music because all the music is different from region to region, instrumentation and vocal approach, everything's different. So we had a lot of stuff to learn.

Jo Reed: I was just going to ask you that, because it's new musical languages and I'm just wondering when you began to really feel fluent in it.

Louie Pérez: Oh. It's endless. We'll listen to like an old record and we'll think, hey, man, we're almost there. <laughs> And this is-- this is 45 years later. It's intense, complicated music and it's always something to learn. But we got pretty good at it in a few years and of course that's all we did for 10, 11 years before we went back to rock and roll.

Jo Reed: Yeah, exactly. And it was an interesting time, well, throughout the country but certainly in Los Angeles because there was a growing Chicano movement.

Louie Pérez: That's right.

Jo Reed: Greater sensibility of Chicano contributions to the culture I think. Certainly the Farm Workers Union finally was gaining some attention led by Cesar Chavez. Were you a part of this movement or did it affect you in some way? I know you did an album for Chavez or contributed to one.

Louie Pérez: Yeah, we did that in 1975. At the very beginning, we were attracted by the music. The Chicano movement was already on the move. So the interesting thing that happened with us was that we were concentrated on the music but at the same time people were coming to us because -- I mean, this is unusual for young musicians to be playing music of our parents to begin with. So innately, that was a big statement for us as young people. But we got more involved as the whole cultural renaissance, as you mentioned, began to bloom in East Los Angeles and surrounding areas. And so there was a politicizing of young Chicanos and Chicanas all over Los Angeles and we became part of that. Our intention was to play and  to expose Mexican music and again, it turned out to be part of this renaissance of music, dance, art, Mexican culture in general.

Jo Reed: I'm curious just because I always am. We all have to support ourselves and pay the rent. How were you guys able to support yourself through your music during this time?

Louie Pérez: We were kids right out of high school when we started the band, so we were still getting, you know, three squares a day <laughs> and living at Mom's house. But as life gets complicated, you know, I got married in 1975. Then the rest of the boys had girlfriends and eventually got married. Children showed up. And yes, life got a little complicated. But at the time there was still this burgeoning movement of Chicanos in higher education and colleges and they would have functions and they'd hire us and there was all-- You know, there was kind of money going around at that time to support culture. That all kind of disappeared you know when.  We kept the lights on. We supported each other and then when things got really tough, we'd all pitch in and help out each other. You know, there was always food on the table and a roof over our heads, so we managed to do pretty okay. We got by.

Jo Reed: Yeah.

Louie Pérez: But then as your life got really complicated later, we ended up playing in a Mexican restaurant, <laughs> like what exactly what we didn't want to do: play the typical music. We wanted to expose the rich heritage of and legacy of Mexican music that is throughout all the regions. But we had to do it and we had to support that. At the same time, we were playing weddings and I always say, tell the story that if you got married between 1973 and 1980, we probably played at your wedding.

<laughter>

Louie Pérez: So we were busy. We were just trying to keep going and then we eventually made our move across the L.A. River into Hollywood and attracted some attention and we met a band called the Blasters and we met a band called X and the Blasters gave us the opportunity to open for them at the Whisky a Go Go. And it went over huge. People were talking. The papers were writing about where did this band come from playing this revved up Tex-Mex music and old rock and roll?

Jo Reed: And you got a record contract from that.

Louie Pérez: Yeah. Yeah. Slash Records, Bob Biggs who just recently passed away, rest his soul, came out to see the band. He liked what he heard and he decided, "Well, let's make a record." But he wasn't altogether sure. So they put up just very little money for us to do an EP and then we got a booking agent and at that point we had been playing the Hollywood clubs for about a year and doing pretty well and getting a lot of attention. So we hit the road and first time ever that this band ever went touring around the United States. That was unusual. But from that little record, we won a Grammy. And so the record company said, "Oh, okay. Yeah." You know, when does a punk rock label one of their bands win a Grammy?

Jo Reed: I have a question which is you have been, you had played acoustically with very different instruments for over a decade. And then you went back to incorporating, you know, rock sounds, R&B, blues as well as the traditional music in your work. And I'm just curious about if what you learned musically transferred when you began to play electric instruments again?

Louie Pérez: Well, there's this, a very particular sensibility from playing traditional Mexican music and playing from all these different acoustic instruments. But what really brought us back into rock and roll was that we had explored all these regions throughout Mexico. Again, all of these have different instruments and different styles, rhythms. The one that we hadn't got to yet was the border music that had developed around the Texas-Mexico border and that was Tex-Mex Norteño music to Mexicanos that stuff was having on Northern Mexico. And so we decided to explore that. Now when you think about a Tex-Mex band or a Norteño band, it's an electric bajo sexton, which plays kind of bass and rhythm at the same time, an accordion, a bass and percussion. That kind of sounds like a rock and roll band, doesn't it, Jo?

Jo Reed: It sure does, yeah.

Louie Pérez: So that kind of made us, you know, pave the way for us to get back into rock and roll. As a matter of fact, we started to incorporate rock and roll in our shows even before we made it to Hollywood. We were doing a kind of electric-acoustic thing and it was pretty good because, you know, we could play traditional music for the reception at a wedding and then for the dance afterward, we could be the rock and roll band.

Jo Reed: <laughs> Yeah.

Louie Pérez: So we had the market cornered. <laughs>

Jo Reed: Yeah, you sure did.

Louie Pérez: So that's what brought us back into that and that's what we brought over to across the river to the Los Angeles and Hollywood clubs is this stew of old rock and roll and revved up Tex-Mex with an accordion.

Jo Reed: You know, when I think about Los Lobos, I always feel as though you guys are just immersed in this wide swathe of music, you're so opened musically. You don't close musical doors. And I wonder if you could talk about the importance of that openness in music or in any creative enterprise.

Louie Pérez: Absolutely, we brought in rock and roll along with the Tex-Mex music. Our background was originally rock and roll. We left that to explore traditional Mexican music. For us it didn't seem like a difference between all this. This is of course during the time in the seventies and early eighties and the punk movement was rebelling against putting things in compartments. So that kind of was a rebellion. We were kind of rebelling before that by mixing everything up and listening to music from all over. We didn't just spend 10 years just listening to Mexican music. There was all this very cool music that was happening. That's when Marvin Gaye had revolutionized soul music with "What's Going On." That was an incredible record. And a lot of things were going on at the moment. But it was important for us to bring this music. And when we started playing traditional Mexican music because we'd show up at a tardeada at a park and they would see us with our long hair and beat up jeans and flannel shirts and we'd start playing Mexican music. And it kind of confused them a little bit. When we played East L.A. College for the first time playing traditional Mexican music, the kids didn't know what to make of it. They weren't sure if they were supposed to clap or not, because isn't this the music we're supposed to leave behind and move forward and like this whole process of homogenization and that this country does so well? <laughs> But no, we dug in and people and we opened up these doors, as you mentioned.  We didn't close any, we just kept it opened. And to this day, we still play music that is a mix of traditions. No matter where we do, we never censor ourselves whether it be Helsinki, Minneapolis or Osaka. This is what we are.

Jo Reed:  When you were playing electric music in Hollywood, you always had songs that you sung in Spanish as well as in English.

Louie Pérez: That's right. And as well as we played, we had Ritchie Valens songs. We played "La Bamba." We played, "Come On, Let's Go." And that was a tribute to Ritchie Valens who was the first one to become the Chicano rock star.

Jo Reed: Well in 1987, you had been together for 15 years and you provided a lot of the music for the film La Bamba the biopic about Ritchie Valens. And how did this come to be, Louie?

Louie Pérez: Can I preface this with just with something real short?

Jo Reed: Please.

Louie Pérez: We made our first full-length record, How Will the Wolf Survive? and at that point, we could have easily gone to this taken the road to just being a good time party band. Or we can take another road. And that's the one we chose to do. We took some responsibility of the attention we were getting. We wanted to write songs that expressed the things that we saw and the things that we learned and the stories that we were told. And that's where that started. And we had done really well with that first record. The next record was 1986 we went to the studio. That was By the Light of the Moon. And at that point, we were touring and we were up in Northern California when we got a note from someone in the audience saying, "Ritchie Valens's mom is here. She'd like to meet you after the show." And we were just like, "What? Okay." <laughs> And so we were, you know, rubber legs up on the stage. And afterwards, we met her. We went to her house the next day. Had the typical, you had a Chicano meal. We had Col. Sanders southern fried chicken with rice and beans.

<laughter>

Louie Pérez: And we sat there and she, just a wonderful woman. And she told us “they're making a movie on Ritchie's life. We would like you to do the music." We were just like, we were honored by that. As a matter of fact, you know, she was bringing out things like memorabilia and things that, Ritchie's stuff, and it was just incredible. It was unbelievable what was happening. So we said, "Yes, yes and yes. Yeah, of course we will." It was an incredible opportunity.  We're paying tribute to Ritchie Valens. We'd had no clue, really no clue at all that that record would do what it did.

Jo Reed: Which was extraordinary. So after 15 years, Los Lobos became the overnight success.

Louie Pérez: Yes. Yes. Yeah. We were touring in Europe, and we came back to the United States, and this was right at the beginning of summer of 1987. And we are jet-lagged and tired. And everybody was patting us on the back and congratulating us. I said, what's going on? They said, “You’ve got the number one record in the country.” And we said, wow, that's great. Can we take a nap first? Yeah. It was amazing that that record just went through the roof. The movie did well. And suddenly Los Lobos were on the map.

Jo Reed:  And the song, “La Bamba”, was one, of course, that you knew well because it's a very traditional song. And if I have my facts, right, it's a wedding song. I mean, I've heard at weddings.

Louie Pérez: Yeah. Yeah. It's a traditional song that goes back for 200 years.  They play it at weddings. We had played it in the traditional way for a long time. We played it the rock and roll way when we started electrifying again after 10 years. But what we did for the single, the one that became the huge hit. And so we did something really interesting.  At the very end of the song we did a coda that was us playing it in the traditional way. So as you hear the song fade, the rock and roll version, you hear the traditional son jarocho version of “La Bamba”. So we had to do that. We had to kind of make sure that we gave a nod to the traditional music.

Jo Reed: Which is so beautiful. I love “La Bamba” in all its iterations. It's one of those songs. It's a great song. It makes you smile.

Louie Pérez: Yeah, it does.  It does. And there's a lot of smiles all over the world. And it was incredible. It went I think double-platinum, triple-platinum, I don't know, whatever, it is. But it was huge. And then we started touring on a larger scale. That was the first tour we did was opening for U2 on the Joshua Tree which was a gigantic record for them.

Jo Reed: Well, you following the success of “La Bamba” chose to do an acoustic album of Mexican folk music. It was a very bold move.

Louie Pérez: It was.

Jo Reed: And I would love to know you're thinking.  It's a great album and very unexpected.

Louie Pérez: That's right.  I don't know if I want to go as far as to say that we were experiencing a little bit of identity crisis. Maybe. I think so, a little bit. After this huge, huge hit eclipsed everything we had done prior to that. Notice there had been no hard feelings, but it was something we were aware of. And we just felt that we'd wanted to get back on track again. The obvious thing for us to do is La Bamba number two, but we weren’t going to do that. So instead, we decided, let's take the attention we’re getting and focus it on traditional music, on the culture, on exposing that. This was our mission to begin with. We went over to Warner Brothers Records and we had an appointment with Lenny Waronker president of the company. And we sat there, and we gave him a cassette. Check this out. It was us playing traditional music which no one had heard at that point. He put it on, and he says, “Wow. This is incredible music. This is you?  We said, yeah. That's us. We'd like for this to be our next record.  And he looked at us, eye got kind of wide.  And this is back when record people were record people. They were the people that are involved in music, considered artist-driven back then, and he was one of those. He was an artist guy. So he looked at us and he said, “You really want to make this record?” I said we do. And he said, “Okay. Go and make your record. Let me figure out the rest.” What he meant, Jo, by figuring out the rest that he was going to walk over to the connecting door that his office with the chairman of the board, Mo Ostin, walk in there and explain to him that Los Lobos were going to commit commercial suicide.  And I’ll tell you, I have to give him so much credit for allowing us to do that, because it was a bold move. People wrote about, everyone wondering what's going on here? No one had heard this music.  But it did well. People were-- loved the record. To this day it's still one of the favorites. It tickled us because it was people going to be listening to son jarocho, huapango, in Kyoto and Europe and Helsinki, Finland. It was just incredible that we were able to expose the music that way. And we won a Grammy for that one.

Jo Reed: There you go. There’s a lesson.

Louie Pérez: Yes!

Jo Reed: You and David have been writing music together for over 40 years. And I'm curious how the process of songwriting has changed over the years.

Louie Pérez: Well, when we first got together and we were kids, you know, we started writing songs when we were just out of high school. And it was just a frivolous kind of songs, you know, just fun songs, but whatever. And we left that to explore Mexican music for many years. And when we made our way back to rock and roll we felt, well, obviously, it was time to write songs again. So that's when about that same time like you said we kind of went a different direction and we wrote a song called Matter of Time which is a song about a Mexican immigrant crossing the border leaving his family behind. It’s a conversation he has with his wife as he's leaving. And that sort of thing that became really important for us as songwriters to experience and write it in a way that was more universal, that people could anywhere in the United States could find something they could relate to in it. And the hardships and next, the joys, the disillusionments, the triumphs. All of that stuff it's all mixed up in to the music. The song is very, very hopeful but we wanted to play and write songs that were about the things that we knew about. Again, like I mentioned to you before about who we are, and the stories that were told to us. And the things that we saw growing up. We're the sons of Mexican immigrants. So we knew that we had to pay tribute to the legacy of our fathers and mothers.

Jo Reed: You know, you're a painter as well as a musician. And I'm wondering, do you see your songs as you write them? Is it a visual thing for you?

Louie Pérez: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I see the characters walking across the room. I see their faces. I see what they're doing. It's-- the visual thing is very strong. I don't think I'm alone really just because I have an art background. It informs what I do. The way I put it is that David Hidalgo, you know, he’s my songwriting partner, he thinks like a painter and I'm a painter who thinks he's a musician.

Jo Reed: And that's why it works so well.

Louie Pérez: It works good.

Jo Reed: It does work good. East LA, it's a part of you. You're a part of it. And how do you see that manifesting itself in the music itself?

Louie Pérez: Well, we’re carrying on-- and as far as rock and roll goes it’s a tradition that started in the late 50s and early 60s with what eventually became known as the East LA sound. We're talking about bands from the early 60s like The Midniters and Cannibal & the Headhunters, and The Premiers. All these bands what they were doing is that they were taking black R&B and through their own filters, Chicano filters, creating without even knowing-- I think it’s a natural progression to create a new sound of R&B that was very identifiably Chicano. And so us, we took Mexican music. And then we took rock and roll. And then we started writing original songs. And all of this really started to really reflect, you know, where we came from. You might not think about it, but there’s no question about it that in the summer of 1987 there was a little band from East LA, that had a number one record of a traditional Mexican song. The name of the band was Los Lobos. That’s quite a statement.  And quite an overview of what we had been doing in so many years.  Another snapshot of Chicano culture as it moves forward.

Jo Reed: Well, I have to, you know, just give a shout out to Kiko which is such a masterpiece that really just tells the story. And you did it again in The Town and The City that album just takes you through a story that's astounding.

Louie Pérez: Those are my favorite records. Kiko is absolutely my favorite record.  We have done La Bamba. We La Pistola y El Corazon collection of traditional Mexican music. After that we did a big rock and roll record with The Neighborhood.  And we all found ourselves, well, we've had all the success. Now, what do we do with it? And we went to the studio, and we threw care to the wind. We just said let's just make a record. Let's just make some art. And this record at that point took a life of its.  It started to make itself. We gave it a name.  We named it Kiko like it was a living thing which it was. And it was a record, like, again I just sat back and watched it kind of make itself. It’s a wonderful thing when that happens when you're a writer. It confused the heck out of everybody, I'll tell you. People hadn't heard anything like that, and coming from us.  I think part of what we do is we've been doing things that people don't expect to hear. This is a record nobody would expect from a Chicano band from East LA. So we're always doing something that was a little bit different and not for the sake of it. It was just something that we just-- we got the call. And when we just had responded to that calling.

Jo Reed: And your latest album Native Sons all covers but the title song. And it's all covers of California musicians.

Louie Pérez: That's right. We had this idea of doing a covers record.  So we said let's talk about Southern California. Let’s talk about LA. And it was great because it was a tribute to where we're from The Beach, Boys and Jackson Browne from Highland Park. And, of course, War. The Midniters, of course, some of the wonderful black R&B.  And at one point, we just said, wow, we’ve got to quit.  We’ve got like 15 songs here.  And then I had this idea and I talked to David about it. I said why don't we write an original song.  And Dave, of course, in his classic humor looks at me and he says, “You want to write a cover?”  I said, no, let’s write a song that puts a bow on it, holds it all together. A song that's a tribute to LA. He goes, “Yeah, it sounds good.” So I sat down and figured, okay, wow, What do I do? And then I just decided to this could be like the returning son, like the prodigal son coming back after leaving and coming back to LA and asking for Los Angeles to open its arms and welcome him back. That’s what it was about. And in a way it tells about us, you know, that we've been everywhere in the world. But still, you know, East Los Angeles will always be our home.

Jo Reed: And if you had to think of a through line for Los Lobos as its approaching its half century mark, what do you think that through line would be?

Louie Pérez: I can hear the music of Jeopardy playing in the background. Wow, the through line.

Louie Pérez:  I would say-- not in a complete sentence-- I think there's community. There's family. There's love. There’s tradition. There's culture. And suddenly I'm listing to everything that this country stands for. And the thing that we need to preserve, you know, everything that we believe in. And I think that's the through line. This band has always sung what they believed in and nothing less. It's funny, Jo because, you know, so much of what we do is tradition and that is all history. And that's all about looking where we've been, but just keeping moving forward. The purest definition of tradition is to do something that maintains the tradition but moving forward, making something new.  That's what we've done.

Jo Reed: Right. Not like an ethnomusicologist, but as an artist looking at something that's traditional and bringing it into the present.

Louie Pérez: Yeah. We’ve done that our every move we made from the very beginning. It was slightly against the grain, but we were better for it. And I hope that people will be inspired. Hopefully, that they're better for it too.  We're at a point now where before we thought of ourselves as the accidental rock stars because we never really planned on any of this. We did it because we believed in the music. And the music itself was enough for us to sustain us.  Every time we get an accolade like this one or a Grammy or anything else, and this is not through mock humility. I mean, in a way we're still looking over our shoulders wondering who they're talking about. But I think it's time now for us to feel comfortable with saying that we are artists. And we have done this for a long time. And that our story has validity. And that people now I think need to hear our story because if there's anything we can leave behind is what we've done. Just when you think of anybody from Patsy Cline to Miguel Aceves Mejía They left behind this musical legacy that everybody can enrich our lives. And I hope that we can do that, too.

Jo Reed: I think it's a safe bet to say you have. Louie, thank you. I mean thank you for your time today. But thank you for music that has filled my life.

Louie Pérez: Jo, thank you very much. And thank you for all the really insightful questions. And I appreciate it. And, of course, thank you to everybody at the committee and everybody who has bestowed this honor on us as being NEA Fellows. And, of course, we didn't do it alone. We did it because we did it along with everybody who inspired us from our mothers and fathers to the musicians, to East LA which still is a rich community and has wonderful incredible music coming out of it. I’d like to thank everybody and yourself, Jo, too for spending time with me today.

Jo Reed: My pleasure—thank you Louie.  That was songwriter, guitarist, percussionist and jarana player in Los Lobos Louie Perez.  Los Lobos is one of the nine 2021 National Heritage Fellows. All the fellows are being celebrated in a film called The Culture of America. Actor Jimmy Smits hosts the virtual event which takes viewers on a virtual trip across the country where this year’s National Heritage Fellows live and work. The film streams on November 17 at 8 pm eastern at arts.gov.  It’s a joyous moment you won’t want to miss. That’s November 17 at 8 pm eastern at arts.gov. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Stay Safe and thanks for listening.

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Louie Perez: Our background was originally rock and roll. We left that to explore traditional Mexican music. It was important for us to bring this music. We built a cultural bridge across from East L.A. into Hollywood. And that was an important thing for us. So it was this scene that was really incredible. And when we started playing traditional Mexican music because we'd show up at a tardeada at a park and they would see us with our long hair and beat up jeans and flannel shirts and we'd start playing Mexican music. And it kind of confused them a little bit. When we played East L.A. College for the first time playing traditional Mexican music, the kids didn't know what to make of it. They weren't sure if they were supposed to clap or not, because isn't this the music we're supposed to leave behind and move forward and like this whole process of homogenization and that this country does so well? But no, we dug in and people and we opened up these doors. We didn't close any, we just kept it opened. And to this day, we still play music that is a mix of traditions. No matter where we do, we never censor ourselves whether it be Helsinki, Minneapolis or Osaka. This is what we are.

Music Credit:  “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Josh Halstead:  When you center accessibility, when you center disabled bodies and disability justice, and disability as a culture, you build new knowledge, and new knowledge springs forth new ideas.  So that's one of the really wonderful and exciting things, and why I'm so engaged in this space because this really means rewriting a lot of what we know about design,

Jo Reed:  That is designer and disability advocate Joshua Halstead talking about the promise of disability design and this is Art Works the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts—I’m Josephine Reed.

Today, the National Endowment for the Arts is publishing its Disability Design Report—Two years in the making—it’s a collaboration of the NEA’s Office of Accessibility and Design program. Simply put, disability design is the creation of spaces, objects, and garments designed by, with, and for people with disabilities.  The purpose of the report is to get a better understanding of how designers in the U.S. are responding to the needs of people with disabilities.  The report also wanted to see how people with disabilities are included in the design process as designers, leaders, and decision-makers. The NEA wanted to assess the current trends, challenges, needs and opportunities of the disability design field. Later on in the show, we speak to Grace Jun—a designer who has developed wearables for, and in process with, people with a variety of disabilities. But first a conversation with the researcher of the Disability Design Report Joshua Halstead. And yes, those are birds that you’ll hear in the background!  I began by asking Josh to tell me a little more about what the NEA wanted him to explore.

Josh Halstead:  They asked me to look at the design space at large, so everything from architecture to landscape architecture to graphic design, industrial design, fashion design, over the last five years, and look at how the space has been developing to meet the needs of disabled people.

Jo Reed:  And before we go further than that, tell us a little bit about your background, and how you became interested and invested in this.

Josh Halstead:  So I first and foremost was born with a disability, so how my body relates to environments has been ingrained in my lived experience since day one.  I also went to design school, was and am a practicing designer and also a design professor.  So I have the combined experience of living with a disability, and also being someone who is making and unmaking the world through design, whether it's through my own design or through the educational vector.  So that kind of primed me for being a researcher on the project and knowing the space-- both spaces-- through and through.

Jo Reed:  Before we begin with some of your findings, I think that we should talk about the two primary models of disability, there's the medical model and the social model, and I'd like you to talk about both and their significance.

Josh Halstead:  So there are these two different models that I talk about in the report, the medical model and the social model.  The medical model typically is positioning disability in the body, so looking at how bodies deviate one way or another from biophysical norms.  The social model says that well actually disability isn't just created by bodies that move to the left or the right of maybe a standard deviation, but it's when bodies, again, meet space and environments that are designed without disabled body in mind where disability is produced.  So social model is looking at that interaction between environments and bodies, and the medical model excludes environments in it's kind of proclaiming of disability.

Jo Reed:  So you looked across the fields of design which are quite considerable.  What were the key findings or trends that you really could see across all the design fields?

Josh Halstead:  That's a big question.  The first thing that I realize is that everyone is looking into it much more now than they were say five, ten years ago.  So this idea of wanting to design with disabled people in mind is there.  A big trend that I saw is folks adopting inclusive or universal design methodologies, so if someone in a design group says, "We need to build things with disabled people in mind, or accessibly," quote unquote, then the next question is how do we do that, and that's where the inclusive and universal design methodologies that have been around for years come in.  So we see graphic design, industrial design, fashion design, taking in the lessons of universal and inclusive design, and rewiring so to speak the design process.  So those are some big structural changes that are happening.  And I could speak a little bit more granularly with respect to each different design discipline.

Jo Reed:  Why don't we talk about public spaces and architecture and spatial design, and get a little granular about that.  What are you seeing there?

Josh Halstead:  Yeah.  So one thing is that spatial design is following suit with considering the need to design things through this universal design lens, but the thing is that in the 80's Ronald Mayes who is a disabled architect himself started the universal design principle, so universal design and architecture has been linked for a while.  So spatial design has moved forward fairly considerably and is one of the most visible so to speak spaces where disability is being seen not just as a physical reality but as a cultural phenomenon.so one example of that is DeafSpace which has been a project, again, since the early 2000's coming out of Gallaudet University architects have created new design principles around how to build public spaces specifically for the constituency of Gallaudet but they expandable across architecture writ large. DeafSpace is recognizing something like sign language as a cultural way of communicating and how design often is at odds with that language.  Typically, for example, we have really narrow hallways and a classroom and a library and a laboratory, and DeafSpace widens those hallways to make sure that folks can both walk safely down a hallway but also look at one another and communicate.  So it's making spaces not just safer, but it's kind of considering the cultural use of language within a disability constituency as a primary design consideration. So DeafSpace is continuing to be influential in public space, so a lot of really exciting things are brewing in the spatial design category.

Jo Reed:  One thing that the report indicates is that a challenge and an opportunity, in fact, for designers is to stop thinking of disability as a design problem, and I'd like you to speak a little bit more to that and what the implications of that are and how to work through it.

Josh Halstead:   So it gets back to the question of are we understanding disability through a medical or a social lens?  Through the medical lens which is the most common if we're coming into disability without much exposure to disability communities or disability culture is to think about disabled bodies as problematic, bodies that are in need of fixing. So oftentimes with design groups that are thinking about disability-related design projects through a medical lens, the design projects seek to kind of remedy or fix someone's body, and that's not necessarily a good or bad thing, but it is a specific direction.  It’s because the cultural understanding of disability has been highly and historically medicalized that folks-- even if they're well intentioned-- default to disabled bodies are themselves problematic. But moving away from that means that we're recognizing disabled bodies as just part of human diversity, and if disability isn't located in the body but is instead located at the intersection of bodies and spaces it really gives a lot of agency to designers to unmake and remake environments.

Jo Reed:  Let me ask you, in your experience are designers or deign students being introduced to any kind of disability theory? Is part of their training to be introduced to this?

Josh Halstead:  I'd say generally in this space, no.  Generally it's we need to think about how to design more inclusively, and there's a really, really light introduction to disability but it's often something like okay, how would this product work for blind folks, how would this work for deaf folks, and the questions are how can we consider different ways of using products for bodies that have typically been excluded from our design processes or just our design imagination.  There have, however, been a few, kind of a small group of scholars and designers mostly with disabilities and from a background in either disability studies or critical disability studies who have been slowly introducing disability theory into their work with their students, and into their work as consultants into that kind of professional landscape.

Jo Reed: What are the key recommendations does this report have to support disability design?

Josh Halstead: There are plenty of recommendations in the report, some that bubble to the surface for me in this moment are there is a big need after talking to a diverse set of folks involved in this space to have consistent spaces where they can meet.  So whether that's a conference, that's a Zoom meeting now, right?  Whether that's a Listserve, a place where we can all share ideas and then specifically share resources.  So, having a space for folks to get together is a big takeaway.  A second takeaway is really the need to consider disability from a cultural perspective, and also as a creatively generative force.  So I go back to the example of DeafSpace just because it's I think a clear illustration of how thinking about disability and needs that exist within the people group can be cultural or are already cultural, and if we think about it as cultural it can be incredibly generative and the research supports this need to kind of shift into a cultural perspective to kind of mirror really the social justice landscape that's being talked about and experienced, frankly for all of us here in the States.  So recognizing disability as a social justice thing as well.

Jo Reed:   As I was reading the report, Josh, what I was wondering whether if this is an opportunity also and, again, I'm thinking about architecture and space-based design, whereas we have to factor in global warming and the environment, and really rethinking the way we use resources, it actually presents such a great opportunity to rethink everything with the way we approach space.

Josh Halstead:  Right, right, yeah.  I'll go back to something-- and I forget where I heard it but Sarah Hendren was giving a talk, where she says, "Well, we hear this popular thing around well every idea has been conceived already, so we're just copying." And she says that's frankly untrue because we really haven't considered historically what it means to design accessibly.  So what you find when you center accessibility, when you center disabled bodies and disability justice, and disability as a culture, you build new knowledge, and new knowledge springs forth new ideas.  So that's one of the really wonderful and exciting things, and why I'm so engaged in this space because this really means rewriting a lot of what we know about design, and just by virtue of centering bodies who have been historically marginalized if not excluded.  So it's a really exciting space, and it has broad implications for everything that follows, in my opinion.

Jo Reed:  And in putting this report together, what surprised you?

Josh Halstead:  So what surprised me was actually the amount of disabled entrepreneurs out there, and I guess this should not have surprised me because in my lived experience, I always tell people I'm probably better suited to be a lawyer or an accountant because I see everything really rigidly in black and white so to speak, but I'm a designer because I was put into a world that wasn't necessarily planning on me being around. <laughs> So I've had to make and remake a bunch of environments, and I became a designer by virtue of my body, and so I saw a lot of disability entrepreneurship happening coming specifically from disabled designers and disabled business owners.  So another big takeaway really is that there needs to be funding and more publicity really for disabled entrepreneurs who are making their own access, and by virtue are then making experiences much better for tons of people, disabled or not.

Jo Reed:  Josh, any final thoughts about this? Anything you'd like to add?

Josh Halstead:  Yeah.  So my last note would be that  if we want to change the issue of inaccessibility and really move the needle forward we need to take a hard look, frankly, at the spaces where design happens, and start making these places accessible, welcoming disabled people in, and inviting their lived experience as expertise into design processes.  All of disability theory comes from the lived experience of disabled people, it's how disability studies started.  So if we get disabled people in the door then over time the places that we experience will change because we have a more diverse constituency thinking about what it means for something to be "good" design.

Jo Reed:  Okay.  That's a good place to leave it Josh.  Thank you.

Josh Halstead:  Thank you so much.

Jo Reed:  That was designer and disability advocate Joshua Halstead—he’s the researcher of the Disability Design Report commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts. You can find the report at arts.gov This is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed….Next up, we’ll take a look at disability design in action with Grace Jun.  As a designer, professor and social entrepreneur, Grace Jun develops clothing and graphic interfaces for people with disabilities. And just as importantly, she’s also developed a collaborative interactive process of design that puts disabled people in the room and at the table. An assistant professor at the University of Georgia's Department of Graphic Design, Grace Jun is also the CEO of Open Style Lab an innovative design hub and that’s where we began our conversation.

Grace Jun:  Open Style Lab started in 2014 at MIT as a public service project, and at the moment we incorporated as a 501c3, and being part of one out of three board members we really look at how to make style accessible through design and technology for people of all.  So most of the last few years of research has been looking at how could design leverage more accessibility and have that conversation as a more equitable playing field.

Jo Reed:  So accessible clothing is still a barrier for people with diverse abilities, and that also includes a rapidly aging population.

Grace Jun:  Oh yes, absolutely.  I think for the first four or three years we worked on bespoke clothing that we partnered with people with disabilities and collaborators with disabilities to make I would say adaptive but also accessible clothing just in general.  It's almost like, you know, we're all becoming disabled at some point whether people like to admit that or not, and our surroundings especially even the clothes we wear are not designed to be more accessible for our needs.  So it's just really starting that conversation in a tangible way and also in an educational way where we could be more I think mindful of the way we get dressed, but how that's so much impacting the quality of life and our way to have independence.

Jo Reed:  There's the way to have independence, and that also goes into the issues that people with diverse abilities often have around employment, and we know the way you present yourself is crucially important, and how clothing when it actually can be helpful is wonderful when it's not constraining us.

Grace Jun:  Yeah, absolutely.  I mean I think just personally I've had a few injuries and experiences with temporary disability, and one of our board members has ALS, and so we talk about this a lot that whenever we have a client meeting or we're public speaking, the last thing you want is clothing that you won't have any difficulty wearing, right?  So if it takes you an hour to button your cardigan and your dress shirt, and you're trying to fit in with the staples of professional looks or professionalism, it shouldn't be a barrier, it shouldn't be an issue at this point, but it is for many people.  Same thing goes for employment for I think uniform wear, so if you have a certain dress code that you need to meet as a uniform whether you're in public service, or if you're in the medical field for example, there aren't many clothes that I think address a lot of the paralysis, dexterity, and of course invisible disabilities that are very personalized for each body.

Jo Reed:  Now at Open Style Labs you work with designers, engineers, physical therapists, and people with disabilities, and you all work together on this.  Explain this process and how it works.

Grace Jun:  Oh.  Oh my goodness, this process <laughs> has been a huge eye-opening experience for me just because I think to be out of your comfort zone outside of, for me, the design or artistic field, and working with someone who has experience in physical therapy or someone who's in material sciences is, so I think relieving and also insightful.  So the last four years we've definitely had more programs that did partnerships with these various groups and people with various disciplines, and currently we employ at least half of our people who are parttime or freelancing have disabilities.  So I think it's essential to even talk about accessible clothing or design from diverse perspectives because, for example, I remember we had a team project and we were learning about a rain jacket where we were thinking about having a seam on the back, and immediately I think one of the occupational therapists was like, "That's going to cause a pressure sore.  You can't have the seam there, it's not going to be good for the person who's sitting who has this type of range of motion," and so we never thought of those factors when we were designing, and it influences of course the materials you use, the design choices you make, and of course I think considering that the body isn't static, that it's continually moving.

Jo Reed:  <laughs> You’re a teacher as well as designer. Do you teach inclusive design?

Grace Jun:  Yeah.  So I had taught at the Department of Fashion at Parsons School of Design, and I just joined the University of Georgia's Department of Graphic Design, and it's because my research really centers on use cases for wearable experiences it's kind of like a bridge where fashion meets user experience, and the way we look at I think the clothing that's close to our bodies as like an extension of ourselves, and I hear this a lot because I talk to a lot of my friends who use assistive devices, or even like wheelchairs, prosthetics, and a lot of it is personalized.  So it makes me imagine that it's no longer just about looking at a piece of clothing or cloth or material but how that experience is translated with meaning.

Jo Reed:  I'm curious about the students you teach.  Do you find that you have people with diverse abilities in your classroom?  That's part A of the question, and part B is how much experience do these students have in thinking about people with diverse abilities, your students?

Grace Jun:  Oh, that's great questions.  First question is unfortunately I don't have too many students who have disabilities, and if I do many of them have invisible disabilities, cognitive disabilities, but mostly I think it's really a big change we've got to make in higher ed to have more accessible spaces and classrooms that are inviting, and also probably financially affordable <laughs>, but I won't get into that.  The second I think is really many of them have not been exposed to working in such a collaborative, direct way around accessibility or disability, and I think it's because students, they're great, and a lot of the students I've had are really mindful, and this generation is quite aware <laughs> of a lot of social issues that I don't think I was aware of, and so they're mindful, they have the thoughtfulness, and they have the intent, but they haven't been exposed to working with, for example, someone who may be in a creative field but has spinal cord injury, and making those environments within the classroom as well as outside is something I have enjoyed doing.

Jo Reed:  So when your students are exposed to this, it opens their minds up, they respond positively.

Grace Jun:  Oh, of course.  I think there are some struggles here and there.  I think it's because you don't want to prescribe a certain ability as a main characteristic to a person, and so that's like the first thing I think they start learning is to see disability as a holistic human experience rather than just like a state that's predetermined, or a medical statistic.  So I think just having that mindset itself definitely is a big change, but I wouldn't say it's easy. <laughs> It's almost taking apart a lot of I think preconceptions about what disability is without having experienced it.

Jo Reed:  It seems to me also, Grace, that as we're thinking about inclusive design, taking that and as we think about where fabric comes from and who is creating that fabric it really fits into this piece of a large conversation, an important piece, but it's also perfect timing to be having this conversation.

Grace Jun:  Yeah, and I think the first thing people think when they hear about Open Style it's fashion and clothes, and we make clothes, but we really kind of see fabric as one of the many components that we use through design, and the reason why is because we've been successful enough to manifest it as a team on like something that's visual, right?  Like a beautiful bespoke clothing for someone who has spinal cord injury and someone who doesn't, and I think those factors are really coming to play in inclusive design, and making that more commonplace, is some of the challenges that I think we face.

Jo Reed:  How can we increase people who have diverse abilities, how can we increase access to fashion and not just to accessible clothing but to the actual process of designing and creating it?

Grace Jun:  I think definitely education, and that's why I've stayed in higher ed <laughs> with my mixed feelings about it because there's so much we can learn from each other rather than thinking about the end product always or solely something to sell and scale, there's still so much to be learned, and I see this also in industry when they approach us for special projects or consulting, these are big companies that are like, "Oh we want some sort of HR training, or a lecture on inclusive design," and learning doesn't stop at college, nor does it stop at a master's program or high school.  So it's really clear to me that it's more like lifelong learning, and how we could incorporate that throughout beyond school is something that I'm thrilled and interested in.

Jo Reed:  Can you give me an example of a design or two from Open Style Lab that you really think speaks to this?

Grace Jun:  Yes. Since the pandemic, let's be real, we all had to stay inside and think about creative ways to bridge and merge all of our opinions, perspectives, and skillsets through something.  So we created a series of journals this you're to interview every month a group of people with disabilities that we've gotten to know and be friends with, as well as creatives in various industries, and try to really just ask the question, “is it necessary to have style accessible?”  What about personal expression is so important for people, and how does that manifest beyond just clothing but maybe the whole dressing experience, the shopping experience, or just I think the human rights factor that we don't really talk about and how that relates to design, and so finding that I think through research and just taking the time to talk to people and to document that and to share their stories this year was really something that I'm very proud of.

Jo Reed:  I'm wondering with those journals if there were any answers to that question that really stuck with you?

Grace Jun:  Oh yes.  I think many of them correlated that style has a direct impact on self-esteem, and when I mean many, the people that we interviewed primarily this year were women identified.  We're trying to bridge out to more male identified, queer, of course LGBTQ and nonbinary, but we started with a select group because we did have a heavy subscriber use for women identified people, disability and non-disability participants, but many of them had said that style really directly correlates to their self-esteem, and that it's essential for personal expression and therefore vital for the workplace and social place when, you know, say you go to a wedding like I just had <laughs> and you are a bridesmaid, and you don't have the right outfit to wear, do you either stand out or do you find something, and where do you find it, how do you get access to this?  And so, instead of like thinking of it as products I've been trying to shift this mindset that it's about the skillsets that we're trying to transfer.  So a good example of it you might have seen or I hope people have seen on Hulu, the Design for All documentary it was sponsored by Target, and it covered a 2019 summer program that Open Style Lab did in collaboration with NYU Langone's Initiative for Women with Disabilities. And so we really try to incorporate some of the skillsets of how to hack your own clothing, how to design and make and become a hacker yourself, because we realized the girls that we worked with at NYU who had various disabilities, you know, it wasn't about giving them a nice, adaptive dress, it was about empowering yourself, and being able to speak about your own body, and to express about yourself in a way that you wanted to, so that I think just really ties into education as a whole.

Jo Reed:  And what are the challenges do you think with bringing this thinking of inclusivity, of thinking about all of us, what are the challenges to bringing that more into the general public, to the market certainly, but to simply our ways of thinking?

Grace Jun:  Oh, it's a lot about just spreading the word and, you know, you're doing this for us quite well <laughs> today, and I'm so grateful for these opportunities because it really helps bring more attention, and I hope it empowers more people to either start their own businesses or have a class on adaptive fashion, you know, on their own if they're professors or educators or instructors, and so for me it's more about trying to spread as much as possible in scale this type of thinking and learning, and publishing, and one big thing I think I found difficult was really publishing this type of information.  I've had some backlash on, you know, this isn't a good fit for something in design or I don't know if this really fits in this category or it's not academic enough, and to be honest it's something that is kind of lived, and the big difference with I think Open Style Lab is that we actually put inclusive design in action, and to capture that into writing or a podcast or imagery is so hard to explain at times, but it's so necessary.

Jo Reed:  Mm-hmm.  Yeah, I hear that, and people love their categories. <laughs> And Grace, finally, what have you learned by doing this work?

Grace Jun:  Oh, I've learned a great deal.  First I think just personally balancing work-life, <laughs> really not martyring myself over for exciting design projects or people, because it's a huge undertaking, and then second I think having learned a lot about intersectionality, that you can be identified as Asian-American but also someone who has a disability for example.  You can be many things, and that complexity of being human is still something I'm learning to translate through design, and hopefully with Open Style Lab.

Jo Reed:  Grace, thank you first of all for giving me your time, and thank you for this work that you're doing.

Grace Jun:  Oh, thank you so much.

Jo Reed:  That’s designer and CEO of Open Style Lab Grace Jun—you can find out more about their work at OpenStyleLab.org. And don’t forget, you can access the Disability Design Report at arts.gov. You’ve been listening to Art Works the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed—Stay safe and thanks for listening