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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
For editorial matters:
Editor: Mark Wood
Phone: (909) 621-8158
Fax: (909) 621-8203
PCM Editorial Guidelines
Contact Alumni Records for changes of address, class notes, or notice
of births or deaths.
Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
Email: alumni@pomona.edu
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Old House, New Home
As a child, Rose Portillo '75 learned a
lot from living in her grandparents' home in Los Angeles. As a grown-up
decorating the same home, she's learning even more.
By Rosanne Welch
The life of Rose Portillo ’75 is all about work and challenge and
effecting change, so it’s odd that she started out as an actress,
especially in Hollywood, where everything is about celebrity and fame
and not ruffling feathers. Portillo wouldn’t put up with that so she
taught herself another medium to move her message forward—and she did it
all in the comfort of her own home. Make that her grandparents’ home,
the one she moved into when Jose and Mercedes Portillo passed away.
Little did she know the house where she learned to read and write and
make a mean martini still had so much to teach.
 Visiting the home in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake district, on a perch once
known as Pill Hill because of all the doctors in the neighborhood, the
first thing you notice is the riot of 10-year-old bougainvillea covering
an entire exterior wall. All the colors elsewhere seem to be competing
with it for attention. Red flames dance on the patio door outside and
deep blue, hand-broken tiles surround the archway into the kitchen,
drawing you inside as they race across the counter toward the sink. The
intense colors and complex designs are so engaging that you can easily
ignore the boring, modern appliances tucked in the midst of it all.
Samples of Portillo’s early work on vases and tabletops are scattered
everywhere.
Portillo credits this marvelous mixture of melancholy and whimsy to the
battle between her new craft and her grandmother’s lingering spirit.
“This was her castle,” Portillo says sadly. “Here, in this house, my
grandmother was a Godzilla of power, but the minute she left it she was
just this tiny immigrant who took the bus to her sweatshop job.” Only in
her own adulthood has Portillo been able to understand why her
grandmother was such a tyrant. Though Jose was the head scenic painter
at Columbia Studios, he was not a doctor. Mercedes worked to help with
the finances. “It must have killed her to know that all the other
doctors’ wives in the neighborhood were watching as she walked to and
from the bus stop on her way to work sewing draperies for Bullocks.”
Some of her handiwork might even have hung in their homes. So Portillo
now understands that within the walls of her own home Mercedes had
to reign supreme. That still doesn’t mean that her grandchildren had to
like it.
“My brother didn’t want me to live in the house because if I lived here
I would become her. But I knew if I didn’t deal with that and transform
that house, it would haunt me.”
And transform it she did, transforming her own life along the way.
Portillo started here as a baby when her parents moved in so her father
could afford medical school—and stayed until she was six years old.
Eventually, her father bought his own house on the hill. Performance
took center stage early on in her life. First she learned it from the
nuns at Immaculate Heart, then from her professors at Pomona. “When my
father sent me to Catholic school he thought it would be like finishing
school, but it was really Revolution 101.” The sisters of the Immaculate
Heart were the first order to kick the habit, literally, and they did it
in Portillo’s freshman year. “That taught me to question everything,”
she says. “And by teaching us the history of the Bible and its many
incarnations, the nuns taught us that context is everything.”
From that point on Portillo was interested in effecting change in the
world, too. For that, her high school counselor suggested she apply to
Pomona College, where Portillo majored in theatre and was mentored in
the right way, as she says, by department chair Andrew Doe. “He was a
remarkable artist and an incredibly ethical human being,” according to
Portillo. She also admired Theatre Professor Leonard Pronko, who
introduced her to Kabuki theatre, passing on his sense of constant
wonder, his discipline and his ability to teach without intimidation.
Portillo credits both men with teaching her the craft that landed her a
role in the Broadway play Zoot Suit shortly after graduation.
 The film version followed but many of the other roles that were offered
to Portillo began to blend into one bad cliché. Making art as an actor
typecast by ethnicity is never easy in Hollywood. “I got too many sides
[pages from scripts from which she would audition] that involved comedy
based on the stupid accent of the Latina nurse/secretary/clerk,
whatever. I asked a director once, since the piece was based on someone
with a dumb accent, why couldn’t a Swedish woman be hired. He didn’t
have an answer so I decided not to take those kinds of roles anymore.”
Portillo began writing plays with better parts for actors of color.
Imbued with the spirit of her family, an early work, By the Hand of the
Father, was an immigrant story about the legacy of several
Mexican-American fathers that Portillo co-wrote with Theresa Chavez and
Eric Gutierrez. Her latest piece, They Shoot Mexicans, Don’t They?,
opened at the Gene Autry Museum Theatre in September.
In the midst of all this acting, writing and directing, Portillo moved
back into to her grandparents’ home and found in it an even truer form
of artistic expression—mosaics, particularly the picasette style, which
she aptly describes as “work that emerges out of the rubble of war.”
This self-taught skill that began as a way to claim the house as her own
has become a new career challenge—passing on the lessons of mosaics to
another generation of young Angelenos. “Everything you are and all the
things that come easily to you will hit you in the face when you work on
a mosaic.”
Portillo designed a summer program to help stem the violence caused by
the fact that children from relatively homogenous neighborhood
elementary schools often take the bias and bigotry they learn there into
the more diverse population of their middle schools. In the Encompass
Bridge Program, children from Monrovia feeder elementary schools are
brought together to work on mosaic art before they meet for the first
time in the halls of their new school. Why? “Because once the visual art
is taught and they are in the doing stage, working, with their hands
busy and their minds free, the talking starts.”
 It was something Portillo had noticed in staging plays with children as
the associate artistic and educational director of the interdisciplinary
theatre company About Productions—except that in doing theatre, kids
could sometimes hide behind their characters’ words and ideas. In
working with mosaics, they have only their own words to share. And if
they don’t choose to share them, it’s still a no-lose situation
according to Portillo. “Mosaics teach them that every broken thing still
has a place in this world. And, perhaps most importantly, that what we
think comes out in our hands.”
This is a lesson Portillo herself learned as she set about transforming
her grandparents’ home, determined not to dishonor their memory, merely
to come to terms with it. That’s why now, suspended within the mosaic
designs that appear in each and every room of the house—from the
bathroom to the reading nook that once served as a bar—are bits and
pieces of the past, such as her grandfather’s watch or her grandmother’s
dishes. With each piece she places carefully into the grout, Portillo
continues to bring the disparate parts of her world together. And by
teaching a new generation to do so she is, indeed, changing the world. |
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