Sofa Issues Spring 2025
Place-making
A conversation between Chariti Montez and Adela Cardona Puerta
“Here’s the ideal of what we want and over here’s the bureaucratic process to get there and I had the skills to walk between the two. Going back to being the interpreter or the translator of the two worlds: I can build this house by hand, but if it’s not legal in the place where I live, it’s vulnerable. I think that’s when I realized that I could live in both and help people navigate this bureaucracy”
I met Chariti Montez for the first time with my cohort to figure out if we (the Art + Social Practice Program) could work together to make Assembly, our event of experiential projects, workshops, and performances, with the Portland Office of Arts and Culture.
Chariti was sweet and passionate in sharing her hopes for placemaking through art in Portland in her current role as the Director of the Arts and Culture Office. That excitement and the fact that she is a Latina in a position of power in government cultural spaces made me curious to know more.
When we met for this interview, we walked to the park together and as we did, I asked her what language she would feel most comfortable speaking in: English or Spanish. The fact that she felt more comfortable speaking English prompted a personal and vulnerable conversation around the wound and baggage that language carries when you have mixed backgrounds or come from a family that has been forced to immigrate from one culture to another.
Language, therefore, became the thread to unravel just a speck of the brilliance of this woman that inhabits the borders between the US and México, and between Art and Government. I hope you too enjoy this chat with a fellow translator of worlds.
Adela: As a Colombian, who is also a descendant of Syrian-Lebanese people, that does not speak Arabic, I too understand that the feeling of inhabiting a language is a wound, a scar that sits in the place of war, displacement, and resilience. Could you tell me more about what your experience with language has been like as the daughter of Mexican and American parents?
Chariti: Absolutely. In my case, it has to do with the fact that my dad was deported when I was a kid. My mom is white: she’s an English and Scandinavian descendant, from Danish Mormon pioneers. My dad is a Mexican immigrant from Tierra Huichol, in Jalisco, in the mountains. And like everybody from his village, he came to the United States to work because that was what my grandma had done. He did so as an undocumented person, like a lot of other migrant farm workers.
When he was working on Mount St. Helens, planting pine trees, Mount St Helen started blowing ash, and they realized the trees weren’t gonna live because the ash was coming down on them. So the company stopped planting them. As his whole crew leftWashington on a Bus, crossing back over into Portland, they were detained. My dad said he was detained for a week before he was deported, and they didn’t tell us anything.
Adela: So your dad fucking disappeared for a week?
Chariti: Yeah. And then he was gone. And this is before there were cell phones; he’s from a village, a ranchería that doesn’t have running water, electricity, or roads. He’d never been to a big city, he’s never even been to Mexico City to this day.
My mom looked for him. She couldn’t find him. We just didn’t know what happened and we moved back to Portland. He came back, years later, to look for us at the house that we lived in in Salem, and nobody was there.
He had no other way of reaching us because he is from an indigenous village, he doesn’t read or write. And so he wasn’t able to find us. And we weren’t able to find him.
Adela: That is really fucked up.
Chariti: Yeah, it is. My mom speaks Spanish well. But after my dad was deported, I didn’t grow up around Spanish for a while. Until my mom remarried my stepdad who is Afro-Mexican, and who I feel I was raised by. I have two little brothers who were two and three when our parents got married, they mostly grew up in Acapulco. And they tell me that I sound like I learned Spanish in a textbook.
Adela: Oh my God. That must be like a dagger to your heart.
Chariti: Yes! So, they think that I’m fresa and I’m not.
So because of my history, I just feel that language is so confusing.
For example, I have friends who are white and don’t have any identity tied up in it, and they learn Spanish so easily. I think it’s because they don’t feel the same pressure of practicing it, hence they feel comfortable making mistakes. For them, it’s just a cool thing to get to learn. It doesn’t reflect on them and their core identity, or this part of it they are missing. And that’s just Spanish. My dad’s from an indigenous town, and we don’t speak that language. So it just keeps going. It’s a sort of wounding around language.
The one other thing that I think is fascinating is that, because I was born on this side of the border, I have a very different privilege than my siblings. Because, even though I was raised very poor, I was raised very poor in the United States. Which means I have access to things that my siblings who were born in Mexico don’t.
I eventually reunited with my dad because he got amnesty and had a new family, and I have five half-siblings from that side who all live in Nevada. To my ear, my siblings speak perfect Spanish.. But most people think ‘they sound like country bumpkins, have poor grammar and bad Spanish’.
The other difference lies in the fact that since they left as children, they haven’t been back to Mexico. I, on the other hand, because my stepfamily is also Mexican, have been traveling to Mexico for the last 20 years or more. So we have a different relationship with Mexico.
We had this moment of meeting each other as adults and trying to understand what my life was like on this side of the border and their side of the border. And since my dad was still working in the United States, they didn’t feel like they had their dad either. The border just divided everything.
Then to think that because my parents have switched countries, my mom has lived in Mexico for 20 years and my dad’s been in Nevada, our relationship with Mexico and with the United States is like two sides of the same coin. It’s messy.
Adela: It’s really convoluted. And that experience is what I got from when we first met when you were talking about placemaking. It’s clear what you have been doing all your life, because you have been put in a space where you didn’t grow up having an actual place, both spiritually and physically. Which means that you’re inhabiting the in-between,
And even though that is a very hardcore experience, it’s also something that makes you a translator of worlds in a way that is an essential part of your career in between art and government. Isn’t it?
Chariti: Exactly, I feel like that’s the part that I have leaned into from my identity: I am bisexual, I am Biracial, I am bicultural, I am only kind of bilingual, not really (laughs). In fact, until recently, I was the only biracial person in my family. Because I have half-siblings who are white, I have half-siblings who are Afro-Mexican, but both of their parents are Mexican, so they don’t feel mixed in their identity in the same way.
So whether I choose it or not, I lean into that bi-experience with my identity: I am an artist and a musician, but I’m also a bureaucrat. I represent the government, I work for the “Man”. It is an interesting place, the place of an interpreter.
Adela: Yeah, that is something that I wanted to ask you about since you are this person that inhabits different places and that creates their own third space constantly: What are the places, not just physical, but also metaphorical in terms of music, people, and food that you find belonging in?
Chariti: One thing I’ve noticed in the United States, in college, is that I felt really comfortable with other mixed-race, bicultural people, even though they didn’t have the same mix as me. And that is more intense because I grew up in Oregon and Washington, which means I did not meet a lot of folks who had one American parent and one Mexican parent who were my age.
I had a lot of friends who were Mexican nationals or Mexican immigrants. And now I see younger people, who are mixed race or have a parent from each country. But back then, I felt very isolated. When I was in elementary school, there were only two Mexican families besides my half-family in an entire elementary school. Can you imagine that?
Adela: That’s intense. I mean, you grew up in one of the most white places.
Chariti: Yeah. So I learned early on that I was really comfortable with the other kids whose families were different from the American dominant culture norm. And I felt that even more so in college, a place to finally experience our identities and meet people who were not from the same towns and cities.
Something that also makes me feel a sense of belonging is music. For me, music is not about performing or being the center of the stage. It’s about building community. I love being in a group, and playing music with other people because you are creating something outside of yourself, even though it’s ephemeral.
When you play, you learn a non-verbal language with your bandmates; you’re communicating without talking, while you are playing together. But then there’s also that mix of creating community through that music.
I first did that with the Brazilian music community in Portland. I just fell in love with Brazilian music when I was like 12 years old because I played the tenor saxophone and one of my parents’ friends gave me that album of Stan Getz.
Adela: The black and orange one? I love that one.
Chariti: Yes. And that’s how I found out what you could do with the saxophone, and it turned into a gateway for Brazilian music and these rhythms. I ended up in a Forro band, with Brazilian bandmates. Forro is from Northeastern Brazil. We started playing out and people came.
There was such a community around it, that I would see people in our audience singing, swaying, and singing along to the songs. We had folks who would tell us that they hadn’t danced like that since they left home. This is why having that third place, even though it’s in a nightclub, transcends that through culture and sharing musical knowledge.
Because I am mixed-race and ethnically ambiguous-looking, though, and I was on stage singing in Portuguese, people would be like, oh, are you Brazilian? And I kept saying, no, I’m Mexican.
Which finally led me to learning Mexican music. I started studying the Mexican Son Jarocho and working with a whole group of people in Portland to bring teachers up from Mexico to do a cultural exchange. Those became talleres and Fandango.
And even though I’m not from Veracruz (where the Son Jarocho is from), I am not Jarocha. That music has become a really important way for me and for many communities in the United States to have a connection with their culture.
Adela: Was there any specific workshop or Fandango that you remember as being especially impactful to you?
Chariti: Yeah, a few. There’s an event that’s been going on for years. It’s called the Fandango Fronterizo, there have been stories in the New York Times about it. It’s at Friendship Park at the border wall, south of San Diego and Tijuana.
And the organizers do an incredible job, they would get a permit to be in Friendship Park, which is a militarized zone on the US side, it’s so wild. With the permits, you can just be in this one area where we would put the tarimas up against the border wall, that it’s like mesh, layers of malla that you can kind of see through.
Then on the Mexico side, in Tijuana, they would do the same thing and people would be barely able to see each other through the wire but the sound traveled. So we’d be singing and playing music across the border to each other. And that in itself was so impactful. Full stop.
It would be a daytime event, but afterward, folks who could cross the border would go over to Tijuana and have a Fandango all night.
One of the things that was moving was that on the US side, a lot of the roads washed out and we had to get rides to drive back with the tarimas on the back of a border patrol vehicle. And I was talking to the border patrol agent, and he was Latino, asking ‘What is it like for you to be Latino and a border patrol agent?’ And he was like,’ No, it’s great. I get to use my skills and my community connections, and I’m able to help these people. And in my head, I was like wow, ‘how is it that that’s what you think you’re doing?’ That was fascinating to me.
And then I think that another moment that really broke my heart was on the Tijuana side. That side was just incredible, there was so much life, a stark difference: on the US side, you’re surrounded by barbed wire and there’s border patrol going up and down as well as all these lights. You have to get a permit to exist in that US space between these two countries for just a few hours.
And on exactly on the other side of the wall, in Mexico, people were painting a mural on the border wall with all the names of Mexican Americans who had fought in US wars. And then there were people doing their Quinceañera photos and having a book festival on the boardwalk. There was so much life, beachgoers, and lowriders, people were just right against the border as if the border didn’t matter. As if saying ‘We’re still living our life right up to the edge’. It was just so interesting.
I cherish that and I think about that space a lot. I mean we’re sitting in a park right now, I work for the government, for Portland. I used to work in parks. And now that I work in arts and culture, I keep that image in my head about what it looks like on the US side versus what it looks like on the Mexico side.
Later that night on the Mexico side, I wandered off down towards the water and there was a young Mexican man who had a very rural accent and had been swimming out in the middle of the night trying to get out past the wall to the US. It was heartbreaking.
And there’s border patrol right on the other side of that wall, and they were patrolling with lights and he was just getting tossed by the waves in all of his clothes. And I was like, are you okay? And he was not wanting to be seen, just trying to hide in the shadows, trying to get the strength to swim out into the ocean. Far enough to get past the wall.
Adela: Oh God.
Chariti: And I just… there are no words for it, you know?
Moments like that make me think a lot about what I look like: I’m a light-skinned person and you would never think that that border has any impact on my life. But my stepbrother and his wife tried to cross last year and got detained and I had to find them and figure out where they were and send money. They had all their documentation taken away when they were released on the Mexico side and I had to help get back home in Mexico City.
It just feels like the pain of that border doesn’t end. It hasn’t ended.
Adela: First of all, thank you for everything that you just shared. It is very vulnerable and I hold it in my heart. And secondly, I feel like you are one of those people for whom where it hurts is where you end up working your butt off to make it better.
Do you feel like this way in which you inhabit the world in the in-between made it so that you could code-switch and jester your way into change and placemaking for underrepresented people in the government from the inside?
Chariti: Yeah, actually, I decided right after college, that I was gonna have more access to power if I was on the inside, to affect change that way.
Adela: How did you come to that conclusion? It is interesting to me where people who want to make change decide to stand from and why.
Chariti: I did Sustainability Studies for my major. My focus was Earthen Architecture and natural building. I studied with a Welsh architect and with a Mexican architect in Mexico. I was ready to change the world and thought we were all gonna live in Earthen buildings, and a lot of us do in the world, and they’re beautiful.
But at some point, I realized that we have a different seismic situation in Portland and that’s not necessarily the right thing for here. I thought that just by knowledge I was gonna change how architecture and our relationship to built-in environments work; but whilst working with some of my mentors, I realized that we had codes to follow: seismic codes, engineering codes, and building codes. And I also understood that you can work through the permitting system for those codes to make what you imagine legal.
And because of that, we were able to build a straw bale house. I drew the plans for a couple with compromised immune systems in Thurston County (WA), outside of Olympia and it was permitted. I was able to work with the government people at the permit counter to have it exist legally in that space.
So that made me come to terms with the reality that here’s the ideal of what we want and over here’s the bureaucratic process to get there and I had the skills to walk between the two. Going back to being the interpreter or the translator of the two worlds: I can build this house by hand, but if it’s not legal in the place where I live, it’s vulnerable. I think that’s when I realized that I could live in both of these worlds and I could help people navigate this bureaucracy.
No wonder my first full-time job with the city of Portland was in the permitting department, where I was able to use my background in architecture to help people navigate this complex regulatory permitting system. And I never stop playing on the side.
I would be at the permit counter, during the day, and then my coworkers would see me working the door at a Club on the weekend or see my band playing at the summer concert at Sellwood Park. I kept inhabiting both places.
One of my mentors, when I first got a job in the city said: ‘Be careful Chariti, it’s like being in golden handcuffs, make sure this is really what you want and like, check in with yourself every couple of years’.
And I took that really seriously. But also that mentor came from a place of privilege that I didn’t come from. So I was, like ‘golden handcuffs to you. You have the choice not to work in a job like this, but I don’t necessarily have that choice. This is an amazing job for a poor kid who used to be unhoused…look at what I’m doing here. That feels pretty amazing’.
Adela: It does sound dreamy! How did you transition to working in parks programming and arts engagement then?
Chariti: The thread was music. My band played at the outdoor Summer Free for All Parks concerts, and I realized it was somebody’s job in the city to produce those events. And I was like, let me have thissss.
It took a few years, but I did move over to the parks department. A lot of what we do we’re producing events, but a lot of it was also helping people who wanted to produce their own events outside understand how to do it, how to navigate that process. So there’s always been this layer in my work of making awesome ephemeral places and also helping people navigate through the system.
In the events we were doing, I saw them reflected on what I experienced as a young person in Portland because the summer is beautiful here. And I was always at every outdoor free concert I could be at when I was a kid. So when I stepped into that role, I could see that community happening around the movies, the concerts, and the cultural festivals that we were creating as part of Summer Free for All.
I remember we did a concert in the park near my house and I walked out of my door towards the park and other people were walking out of their doors and they were walking towards it too. I was like, ‘These are my neighbors, and even though we don’t even talk to each other, we are all headed to the same place right now to go do this thing that it doesn’t matter if we know each other or not, or if we have the same politics or not, we are in the community right now experiencing this’. I was doing ephemeral placemaking, simply by providing the infrastructure.
We had to bring in the stage, the sound, the band and the tarima. And by making that container something really special happens and then it’s gone. And that’s part of the beauty of it. It’s a ritual that happens every year. It comes with the seasons, but it’s part of this larger cycle and I just find that so beautiful.
Adela: It’s amazing, the power of holding space for togetherness, identification, and catharsis through music is something I also hold dearly. And When you were talking about that ephemeral placemaking, I was thinking that you’re both making containers for these transient places of belonging, but you’re also being a Wayfinder because you’re helping people navigate the grants and governmental system in order to get with them where they need to be
Reading about the Summer Free World and how back in 2015 you saw that the people that attended these events were of the dominant culture. I am curious about how you have worked to make it so that people from different communities of Portland can both have a place, but also learn to navigate to become the place makers themselves. Both before and now as the Director of Arts and Culture.
Chariti: With Summer Free for All, at the movies and concerts, we slowly shifted who we partnered with. We made sure that we were partnering with culturally specific community groups so that they had a say in when, where, and what movie in the band was shown.
We also started doing movies in languages other than English. And the first movie that we did in Spanish with English subtitles, I got hate mail because people were so offended that we did that movie in their park in Spanish, even though we made sure that we played that same movie in another park in English. But the team at the city stood behind us a hundred percent. And I went to the event that night, and there were 300 smiling brown faces watching the movie.
So, we kept doing more movies in more languages, translating our schedules into 16 languages when I was working there. And we made sure that there were community members who spoke those languages to write them.
On the other hand, I’m interested in the fact that you called what I do wayfinding. I’ve never thought of it that way. But I do remember sitting with a leader in the Tongan community, helping them navigate the event production process, sitting in my office together, because we were in our second or third year of doing the Tonga Festival. That’s an immigrant community that’s been here for decades and still feels marginalized. It was so valuable to be able to provide access and help people navigate those systems.
Adela: And how have you been doing that wayfinding and place-making in the Office of Arts and Culture?
Chariti: At the Office of Arts and Culture, it’s all very new, and there’s so much change at the city government level. But, the work we’re trying to do is making sure that we’re supporting arts organizations, and cultural organizations, and not letting things fall through the cracks while we are all undergoing all of this transition that is happening.
Specifically, we have a cultural plan called Our Creative Future, and we’re working on the Portland implementation plan for that, called the Portland Action Plan. And I think that there are ways that we’re going to be engaging with the community more around that plan.
Adela: And how does that actually look at the government level? When you say that you are gonna engage with the community to make that program happen, what does that look like? Do you go to neighborhoods and town meetings? Do you make surveys?
Chariti: There are a lot of ways that we do community engagement and government. Sometimes we hold meetings in community spaces. For some of that specifically our community is also arts organizations and arts leaders. And I do my best to go to them and to see their programming and to build a relationship that way first, to understand their work. We also do lots of one-on-one conversations.
When the transition to being districts was happening, we did arts talks in each district in the community space, oftentimes the community center (parks have lots of community centers, so that’s awesome). We have been doing that combo where we are going to people’s events just to build a relationship with the community and also inviting people downtown to be with us in the Portland Building. Now that we have hybrid meetings, on Zoom, that also makes it possible for people to participate from other spaces, which wasn’t accessible before the pandemic.
My team is now building out a community engagement plan specifically for the Portland Action Plan with the cultural plan that exists with seven different jurisdictions, and multiple governments participating. The plan was led by a 21-person community steering committee that did around 50 focus groups, as well as surveys, and town halls.
And even though I don’t think we have caught our breath enough yet, there are a couple of examples that we have done with the whole team. One is that the city arts program manager who was in the program before we expanded it to the Office of Arts and Culture, worked with these federal funds and made a contract with the NAYA(Native American Youth and Family Center) because they looked at the lack of Indigenous representation in public art and wanted to do something about it.
So it contracted with the NAYA to work directly with indigenous artists to commission the pieces, which are now going off on the 42nd. There’s a piece: Raven’s Welcome that’s already unveiled and then there’s another piece on the PCC campus; those pieces will be part of the city’s permanent public art collection.
Adela: Did the NAYA choose them or did you choose them collaboratively with the Office of Arts and Culture?
Chariti: The NAYA made that selection. On the other hand, there are the pieces you all saw that are in the Portland Building. Generally, all of our public pieces are selected by a community panel of artists. And our partners at RACC (the Regional Culture Council) are the ones that invited the Indigenous artists that are on the first and second floors.
As the Arts and Culture Office, we are being intentional about public art specifically by encouraging representation of all Portland communities, with a focus on commissioning and purchasing artworks from BIPOC artists for our permanent collection.
However, we don’t just think about it as a public, physical art, we also work with school districts across the city. They receive funds from the Arts Access fund, from the arts tax, so that every elementary school in Portland has an arts teacher or music teacher.
And there is a wonderful event that Portland Public Schools has been doing for like 10 years, called the Heart of Portland that just wrapped up which showcases part of that work. They had it at the Portland Art Museum (PAM) with a visual art component, an exhibition in the gallery space, and performances.
In the past, those performances have always been in the Portland Public Schools. This year, the Office of Arts and Culture and the Arts Education Coordinator worked to bring in this idea of doing student art in our gallery on the second floor of the Portland Building. We also did student art in the Literary Arts in their bookstore, as well as an exhibition in the Goat Blocks, in a vacant building. The kids that get to exhibit are of all ages, from different school districts. So, Reynolds and David Douglas are represented.
Finally, at the Heart of Portland closing event, there are performances from youth from Park Rose and from other school districts that are a little farther away from the central city, who we’ve been working to bring into the larger Portland City arts scene, experience, and education.
I think that’s something my team –and especially the Arts Education Coordinator– has been really great at: centering youth and kids, seeing them as creative people, as artists, and as an important part of our civic community in Portland. And I’m so proud of my team for that and so happy to see those kids react to it too.
Adela: That must be amazing, to go back to the experience of you not feeling like you were being seen in art within Oregon itself. What a wonderful effect it must have on a kid to have their own fucking art on the wall.
And, speaking of youth and education, nobody teaches you how to be a living artist. I am still super intimidated by applying for grants, for example. Is that something that the Office has thought about? Making more educational opportunities to make those processes more accessible the way you have made it for people one-on-one in the past?
Chariti: We do that a lot with our partners because we can’t do everything, we are 8 people (laughs). So we work with the Regional Arts and Culture Council and the friends of IFCC and Music Oregon to do grants to individual artists. Everyone who runs a grant program for us helps people get through the process of applying for the grant.
And because we are hearing that professional development is something people want, what we are asking ourselves is: how can we find existing organizations that already work on that to invest in?
Adela: Absolutely. It’s the question of: how can you assemble with other people who have the educational capability of doing that with you since you are 8 people? I feel like that’s something that I’m hearing you’re very good at: assembling, which is also translating. Because in order to bring people together you have to use the language of one and then the language of the other, to create a common one.
This is why it is so exciting to work with you and the Office of Arts and Culture to bring forth Assembly 2025, our event of experiential projects, workshops, and performances. I can’t wait to keep finding new ways to place-make together.
Chariti: Yeah! Excited to see what we can do!