What Gets Buried

Santa Barbara’s young art scene emphasizes identity, voice, and change. All three can be found in the work of 21-year-old Isa Saldivar.

Working their way out of the foster care system, Isa came to Santa Barbara as a queer, Chican@ outsider – a perspective that continues to inform their art. In our conversation, Isa reflects on the parts of our society that are pushed to the side and the role of art in social justice dialogues. 

Q. Tell me about your life before you got into art.

A. I grew up in San Fernando in Los Ángeles. I was placed in a foster home when I was six years old. I was in foster care for several years before being adopted by my aunt and moving to different places – learning how to have a secure home. We moved to Santa Barbara, and I felt like I had been uprooted from where my home was, but eventually I made some family in town. Family indigenous to here. They’ve really helped me regrow my roots and keep looking for my identity, which helped me create my art. 

What would you say changed when you got to Santa Barbara?

I stuck out. I think I came from somewhere that was so accepting and so diverse – we all had our own stories – but when I came to Santa Barbara, I realized a lot of the stories sound the same here. A lot of them don’t reflect anything I’d grown up with. So when I came here, I really felt alone, like there weren’t a lot of people who understood me or who accepted me. I would clutch onto tiny bits of my identity, try to quiet down, and let everyone assume whatever they wanted about me.

How was queerness a part of your life at that time?

My queerness was always there. But I wasn’t the first person to see it, and I think it made me an easy target for bullying. When I was in Los Ángeles, it felt like there was just so much more you could talk about, so much else to do other than bully each other for your sexuality. But when I came to Santa Barbara, many times I was called a dyke or had my sexuality dismissed because I wasn’t attractive to many. 

It was embarrassing because I didn’t know. I didn’t notice what was going on until much later. It wasn’t until high school that I really started to recognize my own identity as a queer person. And as I started to understand my culture better, I was able to decolonize my idea of what gender is, what identity is. In western culture, gender has always been defined by how others perceive you. To us, it’s how we perceive ourselves. It’s an internal power, not an external one.

Can you tell me more about your cultural background?

Before I lived in Santa Barbara, I knew my family was from Mexico, we spoke Spanish at home, but being separated from my family didn’t help me pick it up. On my mom’s side, her father’s generation is the most Americanized generation. He was born into a world that so aggressively hated brown people, so that side of my family mostly assimilated, or adapted into being Chicano. Learning our language wasn’t really that important, and the parts of my culture that I did get was through Chicano culture. Chicano culture is a whole different way of understanding Mexican culture, because it’s within the context that we exist in a whole other country, separate from our ancestors. From my dad’s side, my tía, my grandparents, and great-grandparents really held up the foundation of my identity. Former danzantes, Spanish fluent, and stable, they uplifted me a lot in my life after foster care, because that separated me entirely. I truly felt like no one before I got my family back.

I grew up in Los Ángeles with a lot of lowriders, a lot of aunties, a lot of curanderas, and a lot of cooking. Once I moved out here, I realized that simply being Mexican in my blood wasn’t enough. Because you get steamrolled so easily and so fast. They assimilate you so fast. As a kid, you get caught up in trying to be the Lululemon, the two-parent home, the money, the whole supremacy of it all. But I didn’t have any of that. I’ve realized that you’ve gotta be loud, you’ve gotta be vocal. You’ve got to find it. You’ve got to find those connections, and you really have to hold on to your identity, because throughout all of our history people have tried to erase it. In my experience, I felt the shame used to erase us, to make sure we don’t want any more connections to our family, any more connection to our roots, or any more unity to organize. 

It’s important. It’s so important. It’ll shape what you do and who you are, if you find it out. If you look for it. You’ll see yourself in a different way and the world in a different way. 

How would you say social concerns around queerness and around cultural identity have influenced your desire to make art?

At times it can feel crippling, the thought of all that is wrong. All the fights that people are having right now just to stay in their homes, just to live. It can make creating art feel silly, it can make it feel useless and unhelpful. Like it has no point here, ’cause it’s not changing anything policy-wise, it’s not changing any laws. But it is changing minds. That is the part that encourages me to create – at least it puts these ideas in front of people’s faces, so they can’t look away.

It screams because really that’s what you need. You need people screaming: What’s wrong with you? What is wrong with this city? Why is everybody OK with this? Why are the only people that can pursue happiness wealthy?

As someone who has had to uproot myself many, many times through foster care, through homelessness, through all these different things, I don’t wish these burdens on anyone. 

Can you tell me more about your experience with homelessness?

I have been homeless a few times in my life. When I was little, before I’d entered foster care, my mom had gotten in a fight with her parents, and I lived in a car with her and my brother. It was very difficult, and I don’t remember most of it. I remember the feeling. I remember the fear. I remember being cold. But that’s about it.

I considered myself homeless when I was in foster care, because I didn’t feel like I had a home, I didn’t feel like there was anywhere that I could go to rest – I had to be on high alert everywhere. My life had been reduced to a trash bag and a stuffed pig.

The final time I was homeless was in (my) senior year of high school. My tía decided she wanted to leave the country and travel, and I was on my own. It was difficult. And also just so embarrassing and so hard, finishing high school, having to rely on the kindness of others’ parents. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find a safe place to sleep in my car. I thought the hardest thing would be finding a place to shower or finding somewhere to cook my meals, but it was finding a safe place where the police wouldn’t roll up on me and flash their lights. It’s so creepy to have someone be able to look inside your vehicle like that. I was 17 years old.

I was afraid of being towed. I was afraid of being arrested. All these ways in which Santa Barbara makes it illegal to be homeless. It’s illegal to be homeless but you can’t afford to live here. I don’t know what they want us to do. But going through and destroying encampments, forcing people to leave through the fear of being arrested; that’s how Santa Barbara does it. For many, it’s easy to ignore injustice when it’s against a beautiful sunset.

What would you say is the role of art in these social justice conversations?

I think art is a tool. Audre Lorde said: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And I think art is not an oppressor’s tool. Propaganda can, of course, be used as a tool for oppression, yes, but arts and literature are tools for learning and expression. When you ban those things, you refuse our humanity and disrespect knowledge as a human right.

I’d say art is a tool for self-care, to be able to reflect yourself in an abstract way that doesn’t have to be tangible to anybody but you. And I think that in these social justice conversations, it’s important for activists and for people who are feeling the effects of these injustices to practice self-care. It’s important for them to have their messages on paper, and it’s important for them to have those messages heard. I feel like art is the perfect thing for that, because it looks like so many different things and can be accessible to everyone.