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Kite Personalities - Jose Sainz |
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Jose Sainz is the Horatio Alger of American kite making. Just three years after taking up the sport, he won the difficult "triple" at the American Kitefliers Association's annual festival-only the second person ever to have done so. The "triple" is first prize in class, the grand championship and the people's choice award. It was a doubly sweet victory. The man he matched, Randy Tom, is his mentor and one of the world's premier kite makers. For the first time, in 1990 at Seaside, California, Tom had pulled off the "triple" at an AKA convention with his "Seven Sisters." It was a great coup. "I wanted to do the same thing, follow in his footsteps," says Sainz. As a boy Sainz had immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico; he earned a university degree in San Diego, where he now lives. His degree was in drafting, but his love has been the fine arts—sketching and photography. Working his way upward in the local utilities company, he took a training course in 1989 and discovered stunt kites from a colleague. After buying a hot stunt kite, he practiced and became so adept he was invited to join Randy Tom's Hyperkites Elite precision flying team. "Randy's background is Chinese, mine Mexican and the other two on the team—Eric Olaes and Jiggs Rodrigues—are Filipino and Hawaiian," says Sainz. "We had a good combination." The West Coasters flew successfully for a period, but are not now competing, partly because Tom and Sainz branched out from the two-line stunters to single-liners. "Randy is so talented he motivated me to join in and try my luck making kites as well as flying them," says Sainz. "I just started sewing, with Randy coaching me." Helped by having watched his seamstress mother create bridal gowns during his childhood, Sainz practiced sewing circles and squares under Randy Tom's watchful eye. Then he made his first kite, a small Japanese hata fighter with an appliquéd bird on the sail; he named it "Ave" (Spanish for "bird"). It won first place in category in the first competition Sainz entered, the 1991 Berkeley kite festival. Not bad for a beginner. Living close to the Mexican border, and of Mexican heritage, Sainz hit upon using bold, brightly colored Aztec Indian motifs for his kites. He made a rokkaku honoring the Aztec god of fertility, "Quetzalcoatl." With it, he took first place in category at the AKA's festival in Jacksonville in 1991. Again, not bad. Realizing he had to find his own motifs to make his mark, Sainz continued to look to his heritage and decided to recreate the Aztec calendar for his 1992 AKA kite. Because the design is complex, he needed to make a large kite. "Azteca," as he called his creation, ended up as a ten-by-ten-foot hexagon with fifty-foot tail. The image came from a twenty-six-ton stone monolith dug up in Mexico City in 1790 and now on exhibit at the anthropology museum there. The site of the find was the fifteenth-century Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. Sainz found the image in a book, traced it, projected the drawing onto his garage wall to scale it up. He then set to work cutting and sewing forty yards of ripstop, spending 250 hours all told. (A precise man, Sainz keeps a daily log of his activities.) Since the stone itself is monochrome, Sainz had to create the color pattern for the kite. Sainz used green as a predominant color. "It's a color not much used in kites," he says, "but it was a predominant color for the Aztecs." There were reds, yellows, and oranges too, plus purple "which gives the kite a cooling effect," says Sainz, "and ties all the colors together." Finished just in time for the AKA's autumn festival in Lubbock, Texas, in 1992, Sainz entered "Azteca" in the flat and bowed kite class, which he won. The kite was also awarded the grand championship by the judges and received the people's choice award as well. It was the "triple" Randy Tom had won two years before, and only the second time this had ever been accomplished. Because Sainz entered a number of smaller kites in other categories, all of which won prizes, he was called to take bows repeatedly at the post-competition awards banquet. Kite maker Stan Swanson, making the announcements, soon came up with the admiring line, "And here's another award for the man with too much time on his hands—Jose Sainz." How did he win the "triple?" Other kite makers told him it was a combination of his intricate detail, lovely color and dramatic size. "My biggest reward," says Sainz, "was in being able to explain to people the beliefs of the Aztecs." In 1994, Sainz took his second Grand National Championship with a twelve-foot-tall Shirone-style kite. Featuring Chuactemoc, a legendary warrior from Mexico's Aztec civilization, he called his kite the "Aztec Warrior." A third kite took the Championship in 2002. The "New Zealand Star" is an eight-point star with a fifty-five-foot tail. Recently, Sainz has been introduced to school children: in McDougal Littel's 1998 geometry text book, Sainz's kites are used to illustrate the principles of parallel lines. The text includes a short profile of Sainz and a very basic introduction to kites and kite flying; the chapter emphasizes the geometric forms that kites take, their symmetry, and their variety—all educating children across the country about how interesting kites can be. Sainz has continued to build show-stopping kites and has established himself as a master kite builder. Over the years, he has conducted kite making workshops around the nation and is on the board of directors of the Drachen Foundation. Gracious and well spoken, Sainz sums up simply: "I just want to be recognized as someone who likes to build kites."
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