Simon Silva’s paintings depict stylized portraits of farm workers bending to harvest crops, suns radiating heat, and picturesque fields and valleys. Silva says this isn’t exactly an idealized portrait of farm working—as he says, there’s nothing romantic about field work. The reality is long, sweaty and painful, destroying knees and knuckles, backs and bones. But the portraits do portray farm workers as those who are worthy of respect, those who do their jobs with dignity and pride. “My images are simplistic, powerful, beautiful, and about the Chicano culture,” Silva says. “I have used these images—scenes I used to be ashamed of—to empower myself and other Chicanos.”

In fact, Silva said he grew up, like many from farm working families, with a tremendous lack of self-esteem. “At a certain point, I realized my lifestyle wasn’t normal,” he recalls. “I longed to join sports teams like other kids and to have new clothes and to start school on the very first day and to do something besides work on the weekends. But I’d come back to school a week or two late because we were working the harvest, and I’d come back with purple hands. There were other kids that came back with purple hands like me, but it was always demoralizing. Sometimes the other kids would talk about how they went to Disneyland over the summer or stayed in a hotel with a pool. People don’t realize that such innocent comments can hurt so bad.”

During his childhood, from the age of 8 on, Silva worked every Saturday and Sunday, every holiday, and every day of the summer doing fieldwork. (The legal age to work in the fields is now 12.) A typical working day was to get up at 5 a.m. and be in the fields by 6 a.m. “We’d work the whole day with a 15-20 minute break for lunch. We’d work until 4 or 5 in the afternoon. Sometimes we’d only work a half day. Those days were a blessing.” Born the sixth of 11 children in 1961 in the border town of Mexicali, Mexico, Silva’s family moved permanently to the United States in 1962 to nearby Holtville, California, a small town in California’s sweltering southern desert which was transformed by irrigation into agricultural land. His father had been working in the United States as an undocumented worker, but with the help of a California farmer who agreed to sponsor the whole family, the Silvas were able to become citizens.

Even before the Silva children were allowed to work in the fields, they were expected to help out the family. Young children, for instance, could fetch water for working members of the family. “When I first started school, it was like an oasis for me,” he said. “I craved love and attention, and I could get it at school.” From the very first, teachers noted his artistic abilities and often asked him to draw. “I used art as a means of escape from my home life and as a way to be recognized in a positive manner in school. Art was very special for me because it nurtured by selfesteem. It was basically all I had.” As far as Silva’s family was concerned, his attraction to art was irrelevant—something of a hobby rather than a gift. Even when he was in the fields, he would draw whenever he could, scratching a mural into the ground with a stick on an “endless earth pad.” “I had such a different mentality than everyone else in my family,” he says. “My imagination did a number on me, and it forced me to think I was adopted. I even searched the house for adoption papers.”

While he was working with the family, all of the money he made went to the family’s communal needs. Half was used for bills, clothes, food and other day-to-day expenses. The other half was set aside in the bank to live on for the rest of the year. In high school, Silva realized he needed a college education. “I talked to my mother and asked her to discuss with my father the possibility of me going to college. His response was to want to kick me out of the house. My father saw a very physical and concrete relationship between work and money.” Although his mother and a few aunts were eventually able to temper Silva’s father’s rage, even his mother drew the line at Silva’s next proposal—that he be allowed to keep a portion of the money he earned in the fields to pay for his college. So, Silva had to leave home, at least for the summer harvest. When he returned home, he attended nearby Imperial Valley College and majored in art. “To make this decision to go to college was scary,” he recalls. “I was made to feel it was a waste of time. On top of that, I chose art as a profession. That was really pushing the envelope.”

At first, Silva had a generic artistic style. He painted horses and landscapes that he thought people might be interested in buying. But literature changed his life. “I had never been a reader,” he says. “The only thing read in our house growing up was the Bible and the yellow pages. Then, my brother-in-law loaned me a copy of Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya. There was so much material that was familiar in terms of characters, story lines, and some of the things I had gone through. It was a real revelation and it opened up a whole new world for me.” Silva says the book set him on the right path to look at the experiences in his life and to find value in them. “Literature saved me,” he says. “I had tried to run away from these experiences—I was carrying shame about them.

“Through Chicano literature, I was able to focus on Chicano culture in my art work. It’s what I needed to paint—not only for myself but for those out there who have no selfesteem. It’s an opportunity for me to tell a campesino, ‘You’re important enough for me to paint about and you’re also important enough to write about.’” Silva compares it to the feeling of being lost and then finding a familiar landmark. “It gives you a sense of peace,” he said. Silva expanded this exploration of his farm working past in 1998 with the publication of his first book, Small-Town Browny, a collection of autobiographical short stories of his childhood. “I started writing because I found myself talking about my background a lot in order to explain my art,” he said. “The more I talked about my past, the more I realized how interesting the stories were.”

For instance, there’s the time Silva’s family lived in a labor camp in Washington state in a shack built out of quarter-inch plywood walls, tin roofs, and makeshift beds. The mattresses were old, stained, smelly and infested with lice. Silva’s father devised a clever—though unpleasant and stinging—home remedy to rid the children of lice: spraying their heads with Raid.

“Through my paintings and writings, I’m able to make a powerful situation out of what I had been ashamed of,” he says. “The same can be said for ethnicity. It carries a lot of baggage which can either tear you down or lift you up. For instance, a lot of people I went to school with were pigeonholed into thinking that they were throw aways. If you’ve been told all your life that you are inferior and can’t do it, you won’t. I was fortunate in that I had my art work to keep me going. “That’s what my dad and people like him fail to understand,” Silva says. “It’s not about money. It’s about how you feel about yourself as a person—to feel good about what you do and the life you live.”

Despite his deprivations as a child, Silva appreciates what his parents were able to give him. “Everything I do now is 100 times easier than when I worked out in the fields,” he says. “My parents taught me how to work really hard, and I respect them for that. This is something a lot of people don’t have.” Silva also spends his time traveling around the country speaking about his experiences and the importance of art and literature.

“Art is still looked upon in our society as unimportant,” he says. “In reality, it is very important. There are so many visual and textual references in our everyday world. It gives people a way to express themselves and to share that expression. It gives meaning to what we do here in this life. It allows us to form bonds—really deep bonds—with our fellow human beings. It pushes our society onward. It changes lives.”


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