Origin Stories: My Parents

All of my work is an attempt to understand and express the relationship of the subject to the collective. I am invested in collaboration and co-authorship, and have founded multiple art collectives with different groups of people. My interest in the potential of pedagogy can be traced back to my formative years.

My parents were teachers. My father, Gustavo, was the first chair of the Chicano Studies Department at San Diego State University. My mother, Irina, a former model who was in a Roger Corman-produced film called Journey to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women, was in college when I was born, and became a high school history teacher. My mother’s parents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Her father owned a newsstand in West LA and her mother, Rae, was a former ballet teacher. My father’s mother, Luisa, the daughter of a painter who taught her how to paint, was from Ponce, Puerto Rico, and his father, a janitor and amateur boxer, was from Havana, Cuba. My dad grew up in the Bronx. That my dad joined the Chicano movement had everything to do with the context of the San Diego /Tijuana border. He was very active in politics and poetry of the region.

My dad mostly spends his time drawing now. I mounted an exhibition of his drawings in LA a few years ago. My mother, retired, has since become an activist working with the Gay and Lesbian Student Education Network, and now retired from that. I tell you all this because it sheds some light on my own complex relationship to cultural affinity, and identification across difference, and teaching. And also, because they are in San Diego and I am in NYC as I write this, with quarantined, I am thinking a lot about them right now.

A drawing by Gustavo Segade, ink on paper, 2020. My mom at a rally in San Diego, CA, 2016.