Double Vision

As a musician, painter, and black-and-white photographer, Chicana Elsa Flores embraced her Los Angeles communities’ live music and performing arts scenes. She gravitated towards depicting the Chicanx punk and rockabilly music scenes, with groups like Los Lobos and The Plugz. The backstage and intimate dressing areas were personal favorites of the artist to photograph as raucous and distinctive spaces.  

Flores’s photos are a candid reflection of the overlapping cultural themes among Chicanx musicians, artists, and dancers that intermix Mexican heritage, the L.A. party scene, and her friends and families. While working at the Plaza de la Raza Cultural Center for the Arts & Education, a multidisciplinary community arts venue in East Los Angeles, she encountered this pair of ballet folklórico dancers in a moment of repose backstage. The ballet folklórico specializes in Mexican regional folk dances and music from different states across that country. Women dancers are the spectacle’s focal point, wearing ornate costumes, makeup, and jewelry. These twin dancers allowed Flores to capture them bare and in a vulnerable space, sharing the intimate beginnings of their elaborate process of donning Mexican cultural vestments before performing for a public audience. Flores’ candid depiction of Chicanx performance and entertainment showcases the range of L.A.’s artistic vibrancy of which she had firsthand experience.