Chicanx Latinx Art and Artists: Week 7 - Ofelia Esparza

Ofelia Esparza is a longtime East L.A. resident with a lifetime of experience to impart upon us all, Chicanas and Chicanos. Born in 1932 and becoming a teacher by 1975, she taught science and always introduced art into her classrooms. By the time she retired from LAUSD in 1999, she became known throughout the community for her public altar building, since making her first public altar for Self-Help Graphics beginning in 1979 and showing in 1980. Since that time Ofelia Esparza’s reputation grew, just as her own mother’s, where community members sought her talents from cooking, to sewing, embroidery, crochet, and altar building. Ofelia described her mother as an artisan, although her mother would never have identified as such. Nevertheless, her multi-talented mother was a community resource for her community.

As for Ofelia, she grew to observe her mother’s altar building for many years before she began participating, at first, painting the backgrounds to the home altars. Eventually, she understood all the necessary elements needed to observe and build the multilayered altars in an act of remembering, or in other words to never forget our past loved ones. Her reputation like her mother’s grew throughout the community, and in particular, within the last decade immensely throughout the United States and internationally. An incredible feat for someone who proclaims to have been a self-taught artist. I plan to write about her permanent altar at the Los Angeles natural History Museum, called, “el Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles” the Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels (2018); La de Los Milagros (2004); and if not Chiapaneca (2008); I will write about her walking altar in 2010 that recalled one of the biggest influences in her life, her great grandmother, Mama Pola.