A Bruised San Bernardino Shows Cultural Stirrings

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — When Juan Delgado, a poet and professor here, thinks about his beloved and beleaguered city, he often turns to the image of a dandelion, the much-maligned flower known for its deep roots and its ability to thrive under adverse circumstances. “The dandelion is not easily uprooted,” he observes. “Its beauty is persistence.”

Three years before the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino that took the lives of 14 people and wounded more than 20, Mr. Delgado, who teaches at California State University, San Bernardino, began collaborating with a photographer and fellow professor, Thomas McGovern, to document this city’s scrappy allure. Their work, which has included exhibitions, a book and a public art project, is leading an effort outside traditional cultural institutions to reinvigorate and redefine the city through the arts — a movement that has drawn support from many quarters: from longtime residents, from political, cultural and religious leaders and from young art activists.

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In “Vital Signs,” a collection of poems and photographs published by Heyday Books in 2013, Mr. Delgado, now 55, and Mr. McGovern, 58, made their first joint effort to “validate that our community is worth knowing,” Mr. McGovern said in an interview. Even before the news media descended, the city was bankrupt, a poster child for urban ills — the poorest city of its size in California and a haven for gang violence, drug addiction, foreclosures and political dysfunction. San Bernardino has long been known for nightmarish air pollution in which asthmatic children from low-income families breathe diesel fumes from cargo trains and trucks — what Mr. Delgado describes in a poem as “the forklift air.”

The poet, who was born in Mexico, and Mr. McGovern, a onetime photo editor for The Village Voice, use artwork to chronicle an alternative San Berdoo, as the city is frequently called. It is the San Bernardino of exuberant Sunday morning swap meets, the one filled with hand-painted signs for butcher shops, groceries or western wear. Its commercial street murals, largely adorning Latino businesses, extend the Mexican muralist tradition to urban precincts in a county that has the third largest percentage of Latino residents in the United States.

“We think of successful cities as makers of beauty,” Mr. Delgado noted in a car ride through town with Mr. McGovern recently. “But it takes the ingenuity of people in hardship to bring art to our streets.”

Last year the two teamed up for a six-week public art project called “This Is San Bernardino,” held in one of the dozens of abandoned storefronts downtown, where subjects included shrines erected after drive-by shootings. Funding came with help from a city arts commission grant. Mr. McGovern has recently turned his photographic focus to vendors at the swap meet, exhibiting the work on site. He has also done a series on the sun canopies above the dealers’ booths, “abstract sculptures floating in a parking lot,” he said.

The pair’s stubborn regard for their city — and their decision to stay, a message they give to their students — has encouraged artists like Michael Segura, 24, of Generation Now, a group of activists under the age of 30 who grew up here.

The group started in 2013 in a get-out-the-vote drive in response to the city’s bankruptcy. “We were miffed and wondering why the city was on a decline,” Mr. Segura said. He and his young colleagues began taking on civic improvement projects, sprucing up parks and other neglected public spaces with murals and brightly painted fences. Mr. Segura now sits on the city’s Fine Arts Commission, which is considering a Dec. 2 memorial to the fallen of their city.

The group also provided elbow grease for the San Bernardino cultural center, which recently opened in a vintage adobe building and will house glass and pottery studios and a resident mariachi band.

Much of the power of Mr. Delgado and Mr. McGovern’s “photo-poetics,” as they call it, is “a straight, plain-spoken, handmade quality, which is very much like the city itself,” said Jim Sweeters, the gallery director for California State University, Northridge, which recently exhibited their work.

Referring to Mr. Delgado and Mr. McGovern, Patrick Morris, San Bernardino’s mayor from 2006 to 2014, said: “This is a city that has some image issues, where people are suffering a lot. The two of them have done a brain-lift on us by celebrating the beauty in the landscape. It makes people begin to say, ‘We have some special assets here.’”

In the poem “Winds: For the People of San Bernardino,” written shortly after the Dec. 2 massacre, Mr. Delgado describes a campus vigil, where five alumni were among those remembered:

We live in a valley of tragedies
where we mourned in a steady wind,
holding candles in our hands,
each flame dancing and no flame
having the same body. We
were in rows, a flickering of lights,
a makeshift constellation of faces.

His poems address the immigrant experience and the needs that so often accompany it. “She is behind your shoulder, a blind spot, your city’s poverty,” he writes in one poem.

Born in Guadalajara, Mr. Delgado moved to California at age 5. He recalls the stigma of wearing “junk store outfits” as a boy. Now director of the creative writing program at the university and its interim provost, Mr. Delgado and his wife, Jean Douglas Delgado, raised three children here. “My daughter would come home from school and say, ‘Dad, we had another pepper spray day’ — meaning fights,” he explained.

From the mountains, where he now lives, the city fans out in perfect symmetry along Baseline, a street named for the original survey line back when this was a Mormon settlement.

It is an illusory perspective, he knows: In the San Bernardino of his poetry, a woman dies on a park bench, her death recorded by the cameras mounted on streetlights. Trash bins breed fruit flies that “hovered among the tossed-away produce boxes.”

Yet even amid the overturned grocery carts and wind-tossed plastic bags, Mr. Delgado and Mr. McGovern find much to admire, including telephone poles plastered with notices for boxing matches and lost dogs. “They’re the first Internet,” Mr. Delgado said.

But the charming signs, like a pair of scissors and a comb painted on the side of a beauty salon, are frequently accompanied by graffiti, chain-link fencing and signs of vandalism. Desolation is not nostalgic.

Throughout the Inland Empire, as this region of Southern California is known, the country’s e-commerce culture has given rise to an eerie, increasingly anonymous landscape of strip malls and distribution warehouses for Amazon and other companies.

Challenging economic times have led to the demise of local establishments like Irene’s Market, where an anonymous street artist recently painted onto a boarded-up window a woman kneeling in prayer. Mr. McGovern is motivate by the disappearance of these hand-painted emblems.

In New York, where he lived for 15 years, he produced an early book on AIDS and met his wife, Renate Bongiorno. When an artist at Fineline Tattoo in the East Village showed Mr. McGovern photographs of Ms. Bongiorno’s tattoos, their ensuing romance became the subject of a Stan Mack cartoon in The Village Voice.

Defining the nature of a place is the first step in making it home, Mr. Delgado observed in “Winds.”

We live in a valley of great winds
that quicken our steps to each other,
winds that strengthen in a canyon
like we do when gathered to sing.

We begin again with a view of our city.

“We’re trying to find a new civic identity,” Mr. Delgado said, “rather than someone from CNN telling us who we are.”