The collection documents Latino cultural and entertainment history of recent years, focusing on Dan Guerrero's professional life in the world of entertainment as well as his personal family life. It includes video and audio tapes of selected programming, scripts, publicity items, programs, and posters relating to the Latino community. There are photographs relative to Mexican American art and culture, transcripts of interviews with various members of the Latino entertainment industry. A significant amount of correspondence, audio tapes, video tapes, color slides and other items concern his close friend, the late Carlos Almaraz, a veteran Chicano artist. Other notable celebrities represented are Vikki Carr, Lorenzo Lamas, Cheech Marin, Ricardo Montalban, Kenny Ortega, Paul Rodriguez, Cesar Romero, Lalo Schifrin, Edward James Olmos and Jimmy Smits. The collection is of great value to the study and understanding of Latino entertainment and the arts in the last decades of the 20th Century.
Guerrero’s life narrative draws on his dual identities as both a Mexican-American and gay man. Through his personal evolution, Guerrero has come to embrace these complex identities as a source of empowerment and an inspiration to others.
This exhibition includes documentary images of Guerrero’s youth in East Los Angeles, his years in the New York theater, his return to Los Angeles as a Hollywood producer, and his work as an outspoken activist for both the Latino and LGBTQ communities. His lifelong friendship with Carlos Almaraz, the late celebrated Chicano visual artist, is also depicted.
That’s Entertainment coincides with Dan Guerrero’s Spring 2014 UCSB residency and the performance on campus of his autobiographical solo show, ¡Gaytino!. In ¡Gaytino!, Guerrero re-creates through story and song his remarkable journey of discovery across the lines of ethnicity and gender while chronicling the impact on his life of political and cultural icons—including his father, his boyhood friend Almaraz, Cesar Chávez, and Stephen Sondheim. The show has been praised for its portrayal of the interconnected lives of artists and activists who have fueled the civil rights struggles of the past five decades.
The materials for this exhibition are taken from the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) within UCSB Library’s Department of Special Collections. In 2004, Dan Guerrero established the Dan Guerrero Collection on Latino Entertainment and the Arts to document Latino cultural and entertainment history.