The New Americana

David Gonzales says he didn’t want any trouble, but it sure did help.

The creator of Homies — first as a comic strip in Lowrider magazine, then as a T-shirt line for the Hot Topic chain and later as ubiquitous two-inch plastic toys sold in grocery store gumball machines — Gonzales tapped the experience of his youth to create characters that helped propel California barrio culture into the nation’s popular consciousness.

Not that he was trying.

“It’s a toy, not a social movement, not a political movement. It was meant to entertain, to make people smile and laugh,” said Gonzales, who on Sunday will come to the Pasadena Museum of Art to discuss his work, on display there as part of the “Beyond Ultraman: Seven Artists Explore the Vinyl Frontier” exhibit that examines toys as art.

But not everyone appreciated these images of Latinos in baggy clothes, bandannas and knit caps, some of them tough-looking men with visible tattoos. In May 1999, the Los Angeles Times published a story in which the toys were criticized by a Los Angeles police detective and a county juvenile court prosecutor as glorifying gang culture. Also in that story, some in the Latino community criticized the toys as reinforcing negative stereotypes.

At that point, more than a million tiny Homies figures had been sold through vending machines. Shortly after the story ran, that figure climbed to 4 million, and this year broke 120 million worldwide and inspired “Homie Rollerz,” a video car-racing game. “You tell a teenager not to buy something,” said Gonzalez, 47, “and it’s sold.”

Soon adults began collecting the toys as well, and Homies products made the hot lists in magazines such as Rolling Stone and Vibe.

Although happy for the boost in sales the controversy generated, Gonzales, a Richmond native and Bay Area resident, said he was frustrated because he felt criticism was based on preconceptions about working-class Latinos he was actually trying to break down.

All of the Homies characters, which now number more than 100 and include urban figures of other races, has a profile online that explains them as complex human beings. Big Loco, the original tough-guy Homie, is actually an anti-gang youth counselor with a degree in social work, and other characters have personality traits and talents that play against appearance-based assumptions.

“This is Americana. This is the world that — what’s that guy from the Saturday Evening Post, that painter? Norman Rockwell. He painted his world. The people he saw were farmers, little country kids at the pop shop. I’m painting the world I saw, this part of Americana. I really believe this is folk art; this is Latino, Hispanic, Mexican-American, barrio folk art, whatever you want to call it, and that’s all it is. No one can deny these characters exist in Latino communities,” said Gonzales.

“If you want to see where this came from, go to one of those lowrider supercar shows like they have at the fairgrounds in Pomona. You can’t tell me all 20,000 people who attend one of those shows are out there looking for trouble. They’re not. It’s just a lifestyle.”

But is it art?

The “Beyond Ultraman” exhibit, assembled by the Los Angeles Toy, Doll and Amusement Museum (LATDA, pronounced lah-tee-dah) and closing Sunday after Gonzales’ talk, argues that some toys really are works of art — the same way changing attitudes toward comic books overcame ideas that art cannot include mass-produced objects in popular culture.

“I think toys as being sort of your first exposure to art, to experience an object that really exists in and of itself. You have a visceral connection to it, and you may not know where it comes from but it creates this desire in you,” said Maria Kwon, founder of LATDA and a former toymaker who began to design and sell dolls at age

13. Kwon is retail director for

downtown’s Japanese American National Museum.

Because LATDA does not occupy its own physical space, Kwon has partnered with other museums, recently organizing an exhibit at the Museum of Neon Art. Crafting this show specifically to California artists, she said, “was kind of easy because the whole vinyl culture has such a strong presence here.”

Artists featured in “Beyond Ultraman” include Gary Baseman (also a painter and television producer), Uglydolls creators David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim, illustrator Mark Nagata, photographer Brian McCarty and La Cañada-Flintridge resident Tim Biskup.

Ultraman is a Japanese science-fiction television superhero from the 1960s and one of the first programs to feature the style of comic-book robots, monsters and heroes that made a comeback in the 1990s with specialty toymakers in Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Much of the art on display in Pasadena appears inspired by Asian predecessors, said Kwong, who recalls that many artists would become enamored with such toys without knowing much about their background and purchase them from vendors in Little Tokyo.

Gonzales’ experience is much different. Although some of the Hong Kong toy makers at the time had begun to feature personas that reflected urban characters there, Gonzales wasn’t aware of it. Nor does he take credit for the idea to turn Homies from comic strip characters into toys — the vending machine company contacted him, he said.

“He doesn’t consider himself a part of that [Asian-based toy] culture,” said Kwong of Gonzales. “He was putting into expression a lot of his cultural background that hadn’t found a voice yet, taking the culture he knew and translating it for popular culture. I wanted to put him in because it shows the breadth of how these vinyl toys have spread across cultural and social lines.”

Gonzales, who is deeply Catholic and also paints religious themes, will be unveiling his latest Homies creation this weekend in Pasadena: fine art oil paintings of Homies scenes. Some he says, are just of Homies having fun, and others are political in nature, portraying Homies on the march for immigrant rights.

Still, Gonzales prefers to talk about the meaning of Homies using other people’s words, but acknowledges that Homies have evolved from their initial entertainment-only mission because of their popularity with youth.

“I’ve heard commentary where this shows a disenfranchised subculture of the Hispanic population that people disregard or want to sweep under the table. These people are here, and they do have voices,” he said.

“So, people say I have an agenda, and I do have an agenda — but that’s life affirmation; spirituality, whatever it may be; and education. One of our most successful products right now is back-to-school folders, books, notebooks. I’ve got Homies in a classroom setting. I’ve got a guy holding a diploma that says ‘Si Se Puede.’ So now Homies make school cool.”