Armando De La Torre has been working in and around Barrio Logan for over 15 years. This contested community has a complicated political and ecological footprint. The long history of political and environmental activism has formed a specific Chicano Identity. With its proximity to downtown and the San Diego Bay, Barrio Logan is enticing to urbanites who seek to develop, consume, or appropriate the existing culture. Barrio Logan is a microcosm of so many other places in the world that are experiencing the same rapid social transformation. Identity is a fleeting bundle of subjective matter that keeps transforming and can be difficult to trace; history becomes mythology or is all together forgotten. Armando De La Torre seeks to communicate through found objects, audio and video recordings, and harvested materials washed ashore in the bay. Through the process of developing the installation, De La Torre will be informed by the materials to express “Who Are We Anyways.”

Armando De La Torre was born in Tijuana Baja California and raised in Chula Vista. He enlisted in the Army and served with the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg NC, with one year assignments in Germany and Korea. He then attended the New York School of Visual Arts, Santa Monica school of Design and Architecture, and Otis school of art and design. During his studies in Los Angeles he was also Project manager for Alternate Routes, an outreach program for Side Street Projects where he taught woodworking to kids on a school bus that was transformed into a mobile woodshop. Currently he is producing art in San Diego and teaching art, theater, and puppetry through the San Diego Guild of puppetry.