Raquel “Rocky” Rivera, the protagonist of this month’s California Book Club selection, The Gangster of Love, by Jessica Hagedorn, careers through a freewheeling adolescence and young adulthood in the wild art and performance scenes of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York to motherhood and a return to her roots in the Philippines.
Hagedorn structures the book almost as a life cycle, from the expansive flowering of Rocky’s radical artistic potential and being parented through that to the slightly more subdued, moderate self-expression many mother-artists face after starting to raise children themselves. As Rocky’s poet friend puts it, “motherhood’s the ultimate self-censorship.”
The throughline of The Gangster of Love, however, is its remarkable expressiveness, how unabashed it is. The voices in it are alive with a high-voltage excitability that’s a joy to read. The personalities are large and the dreams are bold—while the novel follows Rocky’s coming-of-age as an individual artist, it also paints the collective that gathers around the music. Some of the most vibrant scenes depict the coming together and coming apart of people of color deeply engaged in making art, in being fans, in generating community with one another.
San Francisco has been in the news for other reasons of late, but it continues to be an exhilarating creative mecca for writers, artists, performers, and communities of color. This is a city where you make art for yourself and your buddies and your comrades, not just for consumption by a distant, anonymous, capitalistic marketplace.
We couldn’t be more pleased to introduce the exceptionally prolific and engaged writer, director, and actor Sean San José as our special guest to discuss this month’s California Book Club selection with author Hagedorn and host John Freeman. San José’s accomplishments are too many to lay out in their entirety. He was named the artistic director of the Magic Theater in 2021 and is the first person of color to hold that title. In 2023, he received one of four prestigious Rainin Fellowships as part of an initiative to support visionary artists who work across disciplines. A few years into San José’s tenure, the Magic Theater is developing and producing new shows with more resident companies of color than any other Bay Area theater.
Notably, in 2018, prior to becoming artistic director, he acted in the lush, rhythmic, and passionate adaptation of The Gangster of Love, directed by Loretta Greco and performed at the famed theater. He played Uncle Marlon and the Carabao Kid, “a Pinoy poet from Watsonville,” a character who was based on the legendary poet Al Robles, who worked to stop the eviction of elderly and low-income Filipino Americans at the real-life I-Hotel and brought the injustice to the attention of artists and activists.
The Carabao Kid is one of the most memorable and funny characters in The Gangster of Love and the “spiritual leader of a fast-growing, chaotic and exuberant Pinoy arts movement in San Francisco.” If you read Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel I Hotel with us two years ago, you may remember that Robles appears in that book as a poet who misses his reading at City Lights to go fishing for sturgeon. In The Gangster of Love, the Carabao Kid is a kind of idealized father figure to Rocky and her brother, who are without their own. Rocky says that the Carabao Kid taught them “how to be a F(P)ilipino,” describing him like so: “sleepy, wise face of a water buffalo, a man totally obsessed with the Philippines who’d never been there.”
San José regards himself as “made by San Francisco.” His commitment to Bay Area artists, writers, and performers of color is striking and feels like a gorgeous extension of some of the best of this region’s past. Back in 1996, San José cofounded Campo Santo, a performance group for people of color in San Francisco. The organization has dedicated itself to developing and presenting new performances and to nurturing the work of artists of color, along with their audiences, including the communities they come up in. Campo Santo has premiered more than 100 new pieces. Before his current role at the Magic Theater, San José served for 15 years as the program director of performance at Intersection for the Arts.
This is a can’t-miss event. We anticipate that San José and Hagedorn will have much to say about the adaptation of The Gangster of Love, the experience of making and acting in the play, and the nature of making art that centers communities of color.
In his video for the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, San José said of San Francisco, “We’ve always been this beacon call for this otherness, whether it’s your sexuality, your culture, your immigrant status, the race you is—this is the place. And then out of that, all this culture comes out of it. And out of that culture comes this creativity. But the thing that we want to value is the people that are out there, in the community, creating that work and carrying on that spirit.” Hear, hear!•
Join us on April 18 at 5 p.m., when Hagedorn will appear in conversation with San José and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss The Gangster of Love. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
GETTING BOOKS TO READERS
In the wake of the devastating SPD closure, read a Q&A with Joshua Rothes, the Seattle-based publisher of Sublunary Editions, who has been co-pioneering a new distribution model for use by small presses and micropresses. —Alta
AFRO-ASIAN SOLIDARITY
Author and playwright Ishmael Reed writes about San Francisco in the ’70s, when Hagedorn and her fellow Satin Sisters worked on plays and other projects with one another. Check out performances of Reed’s latest play, The Shine Challenge, 2024, which is available to view virtually. —Alta
ORDERING POETRY
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin reviews Arthur Sze’s The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry, writing that Sze draws “meaning not only from the language of the poem but also from its form.” —Alta
READING UNDERGROUND
Los Angeles author Victoria Patterson writes about an unlikely friendship forged in the basement of the Huntington Library. —Alta
STORYTELLING STRUGGLES
CBC editor Anita Felicelli reviews Julia Alvarez’s warm and graceful novel The Cemetery of Untold Stories. —Los Angeles Times
ESPIONAGE THRILLER
Alta contributor Gary Singh writes about watching the first episode of the HBO adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer at the only advance screening of the series, which Nguyen helped to set up at AMC Eastridge in San Jose. —Metro Silicon Valley
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Anita Felicelli, Alta Journal’s California Book Club editor, is the author of the novel Chimerica and Love Songs for a Lost Continent, a short story collection.
