Cultural Writing. Multimedia. Latino/Latina Studies. Art. Harry Gamboa Jr. is an internationally recognized writer and visual artist. As co-founder of the Chicano art group ASCO (1971-1987), he developed such multi-media forms as the "no-movie" and "fotonovela," which drew attention to the workings of mass culture. In the mid-1980s, working through cable access, Gamboa produced a series of "conceptual dramas" that explored both stereotypical and traditional notions about the Latino family. In these works, collected here for the first time, Gamboa combined the political influences of the Chicano Movement with the narrative excess of film noir, Bmovies, and Mexican telenovelas. The films inlcuded on this DVD are Imperfecto, Insultan, Vaporz, Blanx, Baby Kake, Agent X, and No Supper. Gamboa's writings and image-text art are published in Urban Exile: The Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr.(Minnesota, 1998).

Harry Gamboa Jr. (born 1951) is a Chicano essayist, photographer, director and performance artist. He was a founding member of the influential Chicano performance art collective ASCO. The first of five children born to a working-class Mexican American couple, Gamboa grew up in East Los Angeles, California, "an urban area tormented by poverty, violence, and racial conflict" Despite the "inadequacy of the East L.A. public schools, Gamboa was encouraged to value education and did fairly well in school, and he was active in community organizations and politics as a teenager. As a high-school student (graduated 1969), Gamboa was active in student government and an organizer of various student-initiated reforms, most significantly the 1968 "East L.A. Blowouts"-a series of protests against the inferior conditions of public schools in poor, non-white areas. Gamboa's extracurricular activities were not, however, limited to politics. Already a developing artist, it was at Garfield High that Gamboa met Gronk (Glugio Nicondra), Patsi Valdez (then known as Patsy), and Willie Herrón, three of his closest associates in his later career. After the "Blowouts" of his senior year, Gamboa dropped out of the political scene to dedicate himself to his education. Thanks to these efforts and with the help of the Equal Opportunities Program (EOP) for disadvantaged minority students, Gamboa was able to attend California State University at Los Angeles. From this point, his career as an artist-both solo and with Gronk, Valdez, and Herrón in the art collective ASCO (Spanish for nausea)-"took off". Among other "urban interventions," Asco sprayed their names on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gamboa's work as a writer, photographer, film-maker, performance artist and multimedia creator of "things" is diverse, but in all his efforts (including those as a member of ASCO) his focus has been to reveal the absurdity of urban life and to confront both the dominant white culture and various perspectives within