Just up the Claremont hills from Pomona College sits Padua Hills Theatre. While the space helped transform Claremont into a hub for artists and performers of Mexican heritage, the theatre is unknown to many 5C students. Including, initially, me.
Upon arriving at Pomona, I knew nothing about Claremont or the 5Cs. I had no idea there was even a consortium until I stepped on campus, and Claremont seemed far different than my hometown of Memphis.
Struggling to feel that I belonged, one day, I decided to attend the office hours of my art history professor Rosalía Romero. She introduced me to Padua Hills Theatre and its long history. Founded by Bess and Herman Garner in 1930, the theatre turned Claremont into a center for Mexican American creatives.
In discovering the theatre, I was discovering a Claremont that reminded me of home, one connected to so much cultural history waiting to be uncovered.
I spent this summer researching the theatre, sifting through hundreds of photos, documents, and playbills. One notable photograph featured a postcard from the artist Francisco Sánchez Flores stating that he would accompany the Garners to the United States. In 1934, Bess Garner came across Sánchez Flores’ paintings at the University of Guadalajara and was so impressed with his work that she invited him back to the theater the following year for an artist residency.
As I continued to sift through the archives, I was fascinated by how Sánchez Flores’ legacy had seemingly gone entirely unnoticed.
A renowned Mexican artist, Sánchez Flores spent his life dedicated to the visual arts, as well as dancing and writing. He spent his early life studying painting at the Escuela al Aire Libre del Museo del Estado and worked with artists like Diego Rivera, Gerardo Murillo Coronado and José Clemente Orozco, who painted the “Prometheus” mural in Frary Dining Hall.
Standing in front of Padua Hills Theatre, I was unaware of just how deep its history ran. During the Great Depression, it was just one of many creative spaces struggling to stay afloat. With theaters lacking workers, the Garners turned to local communities to fill these empty roles: namely, the Mexican Barrios.
At a time when Mexican and Mexican Americans were facing mass deportations, Padua Hills Theatre did something almost unheard of: They hired Mexican Americans to fill the roles of servers, cooks and hosts, but most importantly, actors and actresses. These performers skyrocketed into popularity and became known as the Mexican Players.
This popularity came with costs. The theater often used the terminology “Old Mexico” to describe their plays, a phrase derived from Spanish heritage myths that downplayed the roles of Mexican and Indigenous people. Although Padua Hills Theatre was a unique opportunity for a marginalized community, it also played into Western colonial portrayals of Mexico.
I was blown away by how the theater’s history had been lost right under our own noses. It was hidden nearby within hundreds of boxes of archival materials I parsed through for hours.
In June 1935, Sánchez Flores arrived as a guest director of Padua Hills Institute, an education program that invited artists from Mexico. He spent the next six months envisioning Mexico, the place he called home, right here in Claremont.
I knew only four of his paintings, found through private collections and those at the Benton Museum at Pomona, and was shocked to find that he worked in multiple mediums at the theater, delving into dance, music, and playwriting. Within just six months, he had created six paintings, wrote two plays and starred in two other plays. As a painter myself, I was impressed by his versatility and output, considering how long even one oil painting can take (the last oil painting I worked on still sits unfinished in my bedroom years later).
His paintings possess a smooth quality that leads my eyes around each work. He paints Indigenous figures in moments of tranquility, dance, music and offering. Hints of changes brought by the Spanish Inquisition come in religious and metaphorical imagery, small yet significant. This subtlety is what draws me into Sánchez Flores’s work: our different approaches to art. His paintings become puzzles I try to piece together.
One of my favorite paintings of his is “Ofrenda,” which depicts a woman kneeling and offering a sphere pricked with papel picado flags in front of a tomb. Behind her are stylized rolling hills lined with fences that are decorated with crosses, a hint to Catholicism as the figure still performs her Indigenous practice.
From our view, we are the recipients of the offering. We are all a part of Sánchez Flores’ work, a part of his home, even if we might be the dead honored in this painting.
“When I started my research on Sánchez Flores, I had no idea where it would take me. I thought it would distract me from my homesickness, but it instead reminded me of home in a new light, within the formerly unknown.”
When I started my research on Sánchez Flores, I had no idea where it would take me. I thought it would distract me from my homesickness, but it instead reminded me of home in a new light, within the formerly unknown.
Sánchez Flores himself brought his home to Claremont through his art, as I did through this research uncovering his lost legacy.
Meiya Rollins PO ’29 believes, like Michelangelo, that art takes time — most of that time being Trader Joe’s snack breaks and watching “Slushynoobz.”