Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology 1478003006, 9781478003007

Citation preview

Chicano and Chicana Art

Chicano and

Chicana Art

A C R I T I C A L A N T H O LO G Y jennifer a. gonz ález, c. o nd ine ch a v o ya, cho n no r iega, and ter ezit a r omo , ed it o rs

Duke University Press · Durham and London · 2019

© 2019 DU KE U N I VE R SIT Y PRESS

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞. Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker. Typeset in Minion Pro and Myriad Pro by Westchester Publishing Ser­vices Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: González, Jennifer A., editor. | Chavoya, C. Ondine, editor. | Noriega, Chon A., [date] editor. | Romo, Terecita, editor. Title: Chicano and Chicana art : a critical anthology / Jennifer A. González, C. Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega, Terezita Romo, editors. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. IdentiĀers: l c cn 2018026167 (print) l c cn 2018029607 (ebook)

is bn 9781478003403 (ebook) is bn 9781478001874 (hardcover : alk. paper) is bn 9781478003007 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: l c sh : Mexican American art. | Mexican American artists. | Art—­Political aspects—­United States. | Art and society. ClassiĀcation: l c c n 6538.m4 (ebook) | l c c n 6538.m4 c 44 2019 (print) | dd c 704.03/6872073—­dc23 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2018026167

Fr o ntis piece: Ester Hernández, Libertad, 1976. Etching. Image courtesy of the artist. Cover ar t : Richard A. Lou, Border Door, 1988. Photo by James Elliot. Courtesy of the artist.

PART I. DEFINITIONS AND DEBATES

Introduction · 13 cho n no r iega

1. Looking for Alternatives: Notes on Chicano Art, 1960–1990 · 19 philip br o o kman

2. Con Safo (C/S) Artists: A Contingency ­Factor · 30 mel ca sa s

Contents

3. El Arte del Chicano: “The Spirit of the Experience” · 32 gilber t sanchez l uj án

List of Illustrations · ix Preface · xiii Acknowl­edgments · xv Introduction · 1 jennifer a. gonz ález

4. Notes on an Aesthetic Alternative · 35 car l os almaraz

5. A Critical Perspective on the State of Chicano Art · 37 mal a q uí a s mo nt o ya and lezlie salk o witz- ­mo nt o ya

6. Response: Another Opinion on the State of Chicano Art · 45 shifra m. goldman

7. Post-­Chicano · 54 r it a go nz alez

8. The New Chicano Movement · 58 jos h kun

9. Post-­movimiento: The Con­temporary (Re)Generation of Chicana/o Art · 66 t omá s ybar ra- ­f ra us t o

Further Reading · 72

PART II. CULTURAL RECLAMATION AND VERNACULAR TRADITIONS

PART III. BODILY AESTHETICS AND ICONOLOGIES

Introduction · 75

Introduction · 177

ter ezit a r omo

jennifer a. gonz ález

10. The Politics of Popu­lar Art · 81

20. Mel Casas: RedeĀning Amer­i­ca · 183

r uper t gar cí a

nancy kelker

11.Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility · 85

21. Drawing Offensive/Offensive Drawing: ­Toward a Theory of Mariconógraphy · 194

t omá s ybar ra- ­f ra us t o

12. Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquachismo · 91 amali a mesa- ­bains

13. Chicano Humor in Art: For Whom the Taco Bell Tolls · 100 r ubén tr ejo

14. Points of Convergence: The Iconography of the Chicano Poster · 104 ter ezit a r omo

15. Graffiti Is Art: Any Drawn Line That Speaks about Identity, Dignity, and Unity . . . ​ That Line Is Art · 117 ch ar les “ch az” b o jó r q uez

16. Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism: Chicano/a Art and the Pre-­Columbian Past · 123 vict o r z amud io- ­t a yl o r

17. Negotiated Frontiers: Con­temporary Chicano Photography · 135 jennifer a. gonz ález

18. Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez · 146 ca ther ine s. ramírez

19. Celia Alvarez Muñoz: “Civic Studies” · 165 r o ber t o tej ad a

Further Reading · 174

r o bb her nánd ez

22. The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide: Mobility, Identity, and Buenas Garras · 208 mar c os sánchez- ­t ranq uilino and jo hn t a gg

23. Writing on the Social Body: Dresses and Body Ornamentation in Con­temporary Chicana Art · 219 l a ura e. pér ez

24. Ojo de la Diosa: Becoming Divine in Delilah Montoya’s Photography · 237 a st a kuus inen

25. Art Comes for the Archbishop: The Semiotics of Con­temporary Chicana Feminism and the Work of Alma López · 250 l uz cal v o

Further Reading · 263

PART IV. PUBLIC PRACTICES AND ENACTED LANDSCAPES

PART V. BORDER VISIONS AND IMMIGRATION POLITICS

Introduction · 267

Introduction · 335

c. o nd ine ch av o ya

jennifer a. gonz ález

26. The Enacted Environment of East Los Angeles · 271

33. Border Arte: Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera · 341

james t. r o ja s

gl o r ia anz ald úa

27. Space, Power, and Youth Culture: Mexican American Graffiti and Chicano Murals in East Los Angeles, 1972–1978 · 278

34. The Spaces of Home in Chicano and Latino Repre­sen­ta­tions of the San Diego–­ Tijuana Borderlands (1968–2002) · 351

mar c os sánchez- ­t ranq uilino

jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

28. Pseudographic Cinema: Asco’s No-­Movies · 292

35. Straddling la otra frontera: Inserting MiChicana/o Visual Culture into Chicana/o Art History · 374

c. o nd ine ch av o ya

29. Whose Monument Where? Public Art in a Many-­Cultured Society · 304 jud ith f. ba ca

30. La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra: Colorado · 310 jud ith f. ba ca

31. The Donkey Cart Caper: Some Thoughts on Socially Conscious Art in Antisocial Public Space · 314 david a val os

32. Public Audit: An Interview with Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos · 319 cylen a s imo nds

Further Reading · 331

dyl an miner

36. Borders, Border Crossing, and Po­liti­cal Art in North Carolina · 394 gabr iel a v ald ivi a, jos eph palis, and ma t the w r eill y

37. Excerpts from Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol · 402 enr iq ue ch a go ya, guillerm o gómez- p ­ eñ a, and felici a r ice

38. 187 Reasons Why Mexicanos C ­ an’t Cross the Border (Remix) · 406 juan felip e her r era

Further Reading · 410

PART VI. INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORKS AND CRITICAL RECEPTION

49. From car a to ca ca : The Multiple Anatomies of Chicano/a Art at the Turn of the New ­Century · 455

Introduction · 413

alici a ga spar d e alb a

c. o nd ine ch av o ya

39. Los Four · 417

50. On Museum Row: Aesthetics and the Politics of Exhibition · 470

peter p l a gens

cho n no r iega

40. MARCHto an Aesthetic of Revolution · 420

51. Strangeways ­Here We Come · 484

ra ye bemis

r it a go nz alez

41. Resisting Modernism: Chicano Art: Retro Progressive or Progressive Retro? · 423

Further Reading · 495

ralp h r ugo ff

42. Our Amer­i­ca at the Smithsonian · 427 philip kennic o t t

Glossary · 497

43. Alex Rivera, Philip Kennicott Debate Washington Post Review of Our Amer­i­ca · 430

Contributors · 501

philip kennic o t t

Acknowl­edgment of Copyrights · 531

44. What Do We Mean When We Talk about “Latino Art”? · 434 eliz abe th bl air

45. Chicano Art: Looking Backward · 436 shifra m. goldman

46. Readers’ Forum Letter to the Editor in Response to Shifra Goldman’s Exhibition Review · 440 jud ithe elen a her nánd ez d e neikr ug

47. Readers’ Forum Response to Judithe Hernández’s Letter to the Editor · 442 shifra m. goldman

48. “All Roads Lead to East L.A.,” Goez Art Studios and Gallery · 444 kar en mar y d aval os

Index · 509

Illustrations Fig. Intr o.1  Yreina Cervántez, Big Baby Balam, 1991–2017 · 2

Fig. 8.1  Mario Ybarra Jr., Go Tell It #1, 2001 · 59

Fig. Intr o.2  Malaquías Montoya, Undocumented, 1981 · 2

Fig. II.1  Carmen Lomas Garza, Nopalitos para ti, 1989 · 74

Fig. Intr o.3  Patssi Valdez, LA/TJ, 1987 · 2

Fig. 10.1  José Montoya, Untitled, from the Pachuco series, 1977 · 83

Fig. I.1  Gilbert “Magu” Sanchez Luján, Aztlán Rifa, 1977 · 12 Fig. 1.1  Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos, Welcome to Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation, 1988 · 28 Fig. 3.1  Gilbert Sanchez Luján, “El Arte del Chicano: ‘The Spirit of the Experience,’ ” Con/Safos 7 (1971) · 33 Fig. 4.1  Carlos Almaraz, Mechicano Art Center exhibition invitation with manifesto “Notes on an Aesthetic Alternative,” Los Angeles, Mechicano Art Center, 1973 · 36

Fig. 11.1  Luis Jiménez, Vaquero, modeled 1980, cast 1990 · 87 Fig. 12.1  Amalia Mesa-­Bains, An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio, 1984 · 97 Fig. 13.1  Rubén Trejo, Birth of the Jalapeño, 1981 · 101 Fig. 14.1  Judithe Hernández, Reina de la Primavera, 1974 · 110 Fig. 15.1  Chaz Bojórquez, Por Dios y Oro, 1992 · 119

Fig. 5.1  Malaquías Montoya, Hombre Sin País, 1988 · 38

Fig. 16.1  Yolanda López, Nuestra Madre, 1981–88 · 131

Fig. 6.1  Rupert García, Assassination of Striking Mexican Worker, 1979 · 49

Fig. 17.1  Kathy Vargas, My Alamo (Order of the Alamo), 1995 · 142

Fig. 7.1  Salomón Huerta, Untitled (Back of Head), 1998 · 56

Fig. 17.2  Kathy Vargas, My Alamo (Order of the Alamo), 1995 · 143

Fig. 17.3  Robert Buitrón, Identity Surfing, 1995 · 144

Fig. 24.1  Delilah Montoya, El Guadalupano, 1998 · 239

Fig. 18.1  Marion C. Martinez, Oratorio a la Virgencita, 2000 · 148

Fig. 24.2  Delilah Montoya, La Guadalupana, 1998 · 240

Fig. 19.1  Celia Alvarez Muñoz, El Limite (detail), 1991 · 167

Fig. 25.1  Alma López, Our Lady, 1999 · 252

Fig. 19.2  Celia Alvarez Muñoz, El Limite (detail), 1991 · 169 Fig. III.1  Rupert García, El Grito de Rebelde, 1975 · 176 Fig. 20.1  Mel Casas, Humanscape 62: Brownies of the Southwest, 1970 · 184 Fig. 20.2  Mel Casas, Humanscape 63: Show of Hands, 1970 · 189 Fig. 20.3  Mel Casas, Humanscape 70: Comic Whitewash, 1973 · 191 Fig. 21.1  Teddy Sandoval with Joey Terrill, Portrait from the Maricón series (photo­graph of Joey Terrill), 1975 · 201 Fig. 21.2  Teddy Sandoval with Joey Terrill, Portrait from the Maricón series (photo­graph of Joey Terrill), 1975 · 202 Fig. 21.3  Joey Terrill, Maricón/Malflora Group Portrait, 1976 · 204

Fig. IV.1  William F. Herrón III, The Wall That Cracked Open, 1972 · 266 Fig. 26.1  Lady of Guadalupe Shrine painted on a freeway wall at the end of a dead-­end street in Boyle Heights · 273 Fig. 26.2  Personalized front yard lawn decorations reflect the creators’ talents and create pedestrian-friendly streets · 275 Fig. 27.1  vne placas, Olympic Boulevard, Estrada Courts Housing Proj­ect, East Los Angeles, 1973 · 280 Fig. 27.2  Willie Herrón and Gronk, The Black and White/Moratorium Mural, 1974–78. Estrada Courts Housing Proj­ect, East Los Angeles · 282 Fig. 27.3  Los Niños del Mundo and Charles W. Felix, Give Me Life, 1973. Estrada Courts Housing Proj­ect · 285 Fig. 27.4  Schematic drawing by author of left side of walkway mural · 285

Fig. 22.1  Ignacio Gomez, Zoot Suit, 1980 · 213

Fig. 28.1  Harry Gamboa Jr., No Movie: Chicano Cinema, 1976 · 295

Fig. 22.2  Juan Fuentes, Cholo Live, 1980 · 215

Fig. 28.2  Asco, Decoy Gang War Victim (detail), 1974 · 295

Fig. 23.1  Yolanda López, The Nanny, from ­Women’s Work Is Never Done series, 1994 · 221

Fig. 28.3  Asco, Ascozilla/Asshole Mural, 1975 · 297

Fig. 23.2  Ester Hernández, Immigrant ­ Woman’s Dress, 1997 · 224

Fig. 29.1  Judith F. Baca, ­Great Wall of Los Angeles: Zoot Suit Riots (detail), begun in 1976 · 306

Fig. 23.3  Amalia Mesa-­Bains, “Vestiture . . . ​ Emplumada” in Venus Envy III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the ­Giant ­Women, 1997 · 227

Fig. 29.2  Judith F. Baca, ­Great Wall of Los Angeles: Division of the Barrios and Chavez Ravine (detail), begun in 1976 · 307

x  ·  List o f Ill ustra tio ns

Fig. 30.1  Judith F. Baca, La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra: Colorado, 2001 · 312 Fig. 31.1  David Avalos, Donkey Cart Altar, 1985 · 315 Fig. 31.2  Coverage of Donkey Cart Altar in La Prensa (San Diego), a bilingual newspaper, published January 10, 1986 · 317 Fig. 32.1  Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos, Art Rebate, 1993 · 320 Fig. 32.2  Deborah Small, Scott Kessler, Elizabeth Sisco, and Louis Hock, Amer­i­ca’s Finest?, 1990 · 321 Fig. V.1  Yolanda López, Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim?, 1978 · 334 Fig. 33.1  Santa Barraza, Nepantla, 1995 · 343 Fig. 33.2  Carmen Lomas Garza, Camas Para Sueños (Beds for Dreaming), 1985 · 345 Fig. 34.1  Richard A. Lou, Border Door, 1988 · 361 Fig. 35.1  George Vargas and Martín Moreno, CitySpirit, 1979 · 375 Fig. 35.2  Nora Chapa Mendoza, Employment Agency, 1990 · 378 Fig. 35.3  Nora Chapa Mendoza, Los Repatriados, 2001 · 380 Fig. 36.1  Cornelio Campos, Libre Comercio, 2004 · 397

Fig. VI.1  Asco, Spray Paint l acma , 1972 · 412 Fig. 39.1  Gilbert Luján, installation view, 1974 · 418 Fig. 41.1  Celia Alvarez Muñoz, “Which Came First?” Enlightenment #4, 1982 · 424 Fig. 41.2  Ester Hernández, Sun Mad, 1982 · 425 Fig. 45.1  Murals by (left to right) Judithe Hernández, East Los Streetscapers, and Carlos Almaraz, 1981. Murals of Aztlán in pro­gress at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles · 438 Fig. 48.1  Map from the Goez Art Studios and Gallery brochure, ca. 1975 · 445 Fig. 48.2  José Luis González, David Botello, Robert Arenivar, and Don Juan/ Johnny D. González at Goez, ca. 1975 · 446 Fig. 48.3  The Birth of Our Art mural (detail), designed in 1970 by Don Juan a.k.a. Johnny D. González and completed in 1971 · 447 Fig. 51.1  Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History, Operation Invisible Monument, 2002 · 488 Fig. 51.2  Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History, Operation Invisible Monument, 2002 · 489 Fig. 51.3  Slanguage (Juan Capistran and Mario Ybarra Jr.), Sublime, 1998 · 491

Fig. 37.1  Enrique Chagoya, Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis (detail from artists’ book), 2001 · 403 Fig. 37.2  Enrique Chagoya, Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis (detail from artists’ book), 2001 · 404

List o f Ill ustra tio ns  ·  xi

This page intentionally left blank

Preface My ­father, Crispin González Jr. (1936–2017), the oldest of fourteen c­ hildren, was born in C laremont, California. His m ­ other’s ­family was from Juárez, Mexico, and his f­ ather’s ­family from Lagos de Moreno, Mexico. His early life was difĀcult. His ­family was poor; he was punished in elementary school for speaking Spanish; he was punished at home for not milking the goats on time. He and his relatives worked in the orange groves that used to blanket the rolling hills of Southern California that are now called the ­“Inland Empire.” Like many of his generation, he served in the U.S. military in his twenties but was lucky to get out before the Vietnam War. He went to college, planning to study po­liti­cal science, but ended up becoming a cera mic artist. He received his master of Āne arts degree from the Claremont Gradu­ate School and was a professor of Āne arts at Chaffey Community College for thirty-­Āve years. His works are now in several

museums and impor­tant private collections. He never took an active part in t he protests of the Chicano civil rights movement, though I have a distinct memory of our ­family boycotting grapes in the 1970s. He once remarked, “When ­people asked me what I wa s ­doing for the movement, I would say: ‘I am the movement.’ ” As a y oung girl, I never quite understood what he was talking about, but I l­ater realized how radical his transition—­his movement—­from Āeld laborer to college art professor had been, and how daunting. He always had a s ense of humor, and he never complained. His life ultimately inspired me to be curious about art history, ­labor, politics, racism, and the Mexican American experience in the United States. I wish to thank my f­ ather and his generation for their courage and their commitment to the creative life and to social justice, against all odds. I dedicate this volume to him. —­J ennifer A. Gonz ález

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowl­edgments First and foremost, I wish to express my gratitude to all of the authors and the artists who agreed to have their works and images reprinted h ­ ere. Their scholarship, artistic practice, insight, and creativity inspired this anthology, and I wish to acknowledge their contributions with my deepest admiration and re­spect. Many years ago I p roposed this proj­ect to my three coeditors, C. On dine Chavoya, Chon Noriega, and Terezita Romo. They all agreed to join me in this endeavor, though none of us was entirely sure what would result. I have served as the anthology’s chief editor, but all decisions about the content, organ­ization, and recommended reading lists have been shared. I cannot thank my colleagues enough for their critical acumen, their balanced approach, their po­liti­cal commitment, and their intellectual l­abor as the anthology has taken shape. I also want to thank them for their inspiration and their example; it is r­ eally they who have devoted their lives, energy, insight, and scholarship to the Chicano and Chicana art that appears in t his anthology. Time unfolds in un predictable ways, interruptions and life events always intervene, and we have all been patient with each other at dif­fer­ent moments in the editorial pro­cess. For this, and for the camaraderie that comes from thinking through pedagogical and conceptual issues together, I a m deeply grateful to each of them.

Although the editorial team is responsible for the content of the book, it is also the hard work and dedication of numerous student research assistants that have brought this proj­ect to fruition. In the early days, when we w ­ ere still gathering articles and trying to develop comprehensive lit­ er­a­ture reviews, Silvia J. Mantilla Ortiz, as part of the Williams College Class of 1957 Summer Research Program, worked with C. Ondine Chavoya at Williams College to help compile digital Āles of many lesser-­known articles and manifestos. Chon Noriega kindly offered his home for several of our meetings, and we also received helpful assistance from Darling Sianez and Connie Heskett at the Chicano Studies Research Center at ucl a . Nearly all of the early articles and essays required transcription into a n ew digital format. Some essays ­were transcribed for the Ārst time since their initial publication in the 1970s. This painstaking ­labor required keyboard speed, accuracy, and familiarity with Spanish, and was beautifully accomplished by two undergraduate assistants at uc Santa Cruz, Marco Suarez and Maya Deleon. I was also lucky to work with Cinthya Mendoza Gomez and M. Toro Castaño, both undergraduate research assistants who helped to summarize, or­ ga­nize, and compile articles and digital copies of images for the anthology. Requesting and securing permissions for both images and articles for an anthology of this size is

an arduous job, requiring excellent rec­ord keeping and responsive communication. My gradu­ ate student assistant, Raissa DeSemet, initiated this pro­cess with diplomacy, rigor, and grace. Her work was then inherited and enhanced by my second gradu­ate research assistant, Lucian ­Gomoll, who assisted with permissions for several additional sections of the book. He also helped to proofread numerous articles, and developed a system for organ­izing digital images and image permissions. His enthusiasm for the proj­ect was such that even ­after graduating with his Ph.D., he was happy to continue to consult with me as I began to bring the proj­ect to a close. ­These two gradu­ate students made the initial pro­cess of permissions and organ­ization not only pos­si­ble but also wonderfully pleasant and effective. My greatest thanks must go, however, to Mary Thomas, my current research assistant, who has not only wrapped up the article and image permissions requests but has also skillfully assisted in the Ānal production of the anthology. She has rectiĀed and uniĀed citations and endnotes, tracked down remaining copyright requests, produced image captions, helped to create the art inventory, and offered critical feedback and intelligent suggestions—­all with determination, focus, and good humor. For her truly outstanding work, she

xvi  ·  Ackno wl ­ed gment s

has my profound appreciation—­this book would have been impossible to complete without her. I would also like to express my thanks to the Chicano/Latino Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz for their funding of one of my undergraduate research assistantships. The Arts Research Institute in t he Division of the Arts and the Gradu­ate Division at the University of California, Santa Cruz also supported the ­proj­ect through individual grants and gradu­ ate research assistance. My colleagues in the Latino Literary Cultures Proj­ect at ucsc kindly gave their feedback on early drafts of our t­ able of contents. Numerous arts and cultural institutions kindly granted permission to reprint images, frequently for ­little or no cost. I would especially like to mention the ucl a Chicano Studies Research Center; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Fi­nally, I w ould like to thank the numerous friends, colleagues, and f­ amily members who offered encouragement, sustenance, enlightenment, and love throughout the long preparation of this manuscript, especially Kirsten  A. Consuelo González, Warren Sack, and Kinán Leif Felix González-­Sack.

jennifer a. gonz ález

Introduction As an aesthetic credo, Chicano art sought to link lived real­ity to the imag ination; to reflect and documen t the multiple realities of being Chicano in the urban barrios and the rur al colonias throughout the United States. —­T OMÁS YBARRA-­F RAUSTO Chicano art comes from the creation of community. . . . ​ Chicano art represents a par ­tic­u­lar stance, which always engages with the issues of its time . —­J UDITH BACA

­Until we live in a societ y where all p ­ eople are more or less equal and no labels ar e necessary, we need them to resist the pr essure to assimilate. —­G LORIA ANZALDÚA

The “Chicano” was famously deĀned by Los Angeles newspaper reporter Ruben Salazar as “a Mexican-­American with a n on-­Anglo image of himself.”1 The term has a distinct po­liti­cal inflection that is inseparable from the Chicano civil rights movement—­el movimiento—of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Once used in a der ogatory way to imply a w orking-­class, uneducated Mexican, the words “Chicano” and “Chicana” became a s elf-­deĀning moniker of pride for ­those who worked to improve farm ­labor laws, public schooling, and access to housing for an other­wise subaltern population ranging from recent Mexican immigrants to long-­standing landowners

dispossessed by the U.S.-­Mexican War of 1848. By rejecting the more assimilationist term “Mexican American” or the Eurocentric term “Hispanic,” Chicanos and Chicanas allied themselves with a speciĀcally activist proj­ect that included a cele­bration of Mexican Indigenous cultural traditions, a nationalist return to territorial claims, a general critique of racism, and a rejection of unfair l­ abor conditions for the working poor. For Chicanas, ­there was also a strong commitment to ­women’s rights and a feminist effort to resist the unequal power relations of both Mexican and U.S. patriarchy. This complex intersection of interests, to which individuals allied themselves to greater or lesser degrees, offered both the condition and the desire for a parallel creative artistic practice. Early Chicano movement documents, such as “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” called on writers, poets, musicians, and artists to “produce lit­er­a­ ture and art that is appealing to our p ­ eople and 2 relates to our revolutionary cause.” From about 1965 to the late 1970s an efflorescence of activist posters, murals, theatrical productions, and lit­er­ a­ture rejected mainstream distinctions between folk and Āne arts, and emphasized instead a s et of familiar and popularly accessible themes designed to inspire cultural pride and recruit members to la causa. Grassroots exhibition and event centers across the country, such as Movimiento

FIG. INTRO.1. Yreina Cervántez, Big Baby Balam, 1991–2017. Watercolor, 24 × 18 in. © Yreina Cervántez. Image courtesy of the artist. FIG. INTRO.2. Malaquías Montoya, Undocumented, 1981. Silkscreen. Image courtesy of the artist. FIG. INTRO.3. Patssi Valdez, LA/TJ, 1987. Screen print. Framed: 29 1/2 × 23 × 1 1/2 in. Sheet: 26 1/4 × 19 15/16  in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Museum Council Fund (M.2005.67.8) © Patssi Valdez. Photo­graph © Museum Associates/LACMA .

Artístico del Río Salado in Phoenix, Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, Self Help Graphics & Art in Los Angeles, El Centro de la Cruzada para la Justica in Denver, El Centro Cultural de Aztlán in San Antonio, Casa Aztlán in Chicago, and scores of other venues offered a platform for the voices and visions of the movement’s emerging generation of artistic talent. Few mainstream museums, galleries, or theatrical venues showed the work of Chicano artists, or, for that ­matter, their ­Mexican ­American forebears, due to long-­standing racism, po­liti­cal hostility, and general ignorance. Thus, as scholar Philip Brookman observes, “the artists created their own institutions rather than accept exclusion.”3 Beginning in t he late 1970s and early 1980s, a concerted effort was made to articulate how Chicana/o art deviated from the U.S. mainstream, while nevertheless remaining an impor­ tant “American” art form with its own aesthetic criteria and regional speciĀcities. Cata­logs for exhibitions, manifestos, and artists’ writings started to appear in print, setting out critical frameworks and relevant vocabulary for understanding and analyzing this quickly expanding visual arts discourse.4 Many if not most Chicano and Chicana artists ­were formally trained, with degrees from respected art schools, yet they purposefully devoted their efforts to a b roader activist engagement with the Chicano po­liti­cal movement rather than trying to assimilate to a Euro-­American art world. Nevertheless, some of the artists playfully employed the tropes of pop art, conceptual art, minimalism, or installation art, while si­mul­ta­ neously working to invent alternative vocabularies and cultural references. For this reason, it is impor­tant to see the emergence of Chicana/o visual art not only as an example of public activism, but also as an innovative response to aesthetic traditions and con­ temporary art practices of its time. As with other artists in the 1970s and 1980s, many Chicana/o artists rejected the modernist princi­ples of abstraction that had dominated the Āne art of the mid-­twentieth c­ entury, joining a general movement ­toward narrative forms, decoration, Āgura-

tion, and allegory.5 Along with other art movements of the earlier twentieth c­ entury (dadaism, surrealism, futurism, arte povera, ­etc.), each with its own manifesto, ideological and material proclivities, and national and linguistic inflections, Chicana/o artists purposefully integrated their works with discourses and practices of everyday life. At the same time, it would be a signiĀcant ­mistake to see Chicana/o art as simply an “ethnic” or “identity-­based” art movement from the barrio; rather, it is an experimental, socially oriented art practice, produced from speciĀc regional and historical standpoints (including the barrio) but in direct conversation with other art movements of its era. Unfortunately, ­because Chicana and Chicano artists remained institutionally marginalized in the early years, due to differences of class and ethnicity, the iconographic nuances and transcultural references in their works ­were often ignored or misunderstood by mainstream art critics when, and if, their work was reviewed.6 In response to this enforced outsider condition, Chicanos and Chicanas curated their own exhibits, wrote their own cata­log essays, and began to attract a de voted following. Eventually, sympathetic scholars and critics outside the community also started to take an interest in the work, and began to enthusiastically develop an analy­sis of its multivalent forms.7 Initially, the stakes ­were high for deĀning the contours and par­ameters of Chicana/o art discourse, precisely b ­ ecause ­there is an inherent difĀculty in writing about art that adheres to a social movement or that has activist goals. Formal qualities of the artworks, their relation to historical pre­ce­dents, and aesthetic questions of style ­were not the only considerations for critics and scholars; a certain po­liti­cal vision and social engagement were also assessed and articulated. Some conservative critics and scholars read activist art as inevitably inferior to other visual art produced without an overt po­liti­cal message. Their argument that it may be less beautiful, less formally developed, or “contaminated” by a message entirely misses the point. This perspective relies Intr o d uctio n  ·  3

on a misguided idea that art can be “neutral” or that it can exist in the world ­free of the economic, social, and po­liti­cal conditions of its making, exhibition, and circulation. All art is po­liti­cal to the degree that it joins in social systems of repre­ sen­ta­tion that are tied to power; all art delivers a message, even if i ts message is not about “politics” per se. Moreover, this perspective risks overlooking the incredible visual richness, layered complexity, ironic sophistication, and remarkable skill evident in numerous activist artworks. In effectively understanding the contribution of Chicana/o artists, both aesthetics and po­liti­cal tactics became impor­tant criteria for analy­sis. Writing about Chicana/o art, scholars and critics started to develop a vocabulary linking formal and aesthetic criteria to broader conceptual and activist goals of the movement. Concepts such as “cultural reclamation” identiĀed a turn to Spanish-­language references, Mexican art history, folk life, and popu­lar imagery; the recycling and investment in traditional religious icons, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe; as well as references to Aztec or Mayan sources. The cultural blending but also duality of Mexican and U.S. symbols, the coupling of two ele­ments to create a third meaning, ­were celebrated in co ncepts such as mestizaje or difrasismo.8 Similarly, a transborder consciousness, a neither-­here-­nor-­there feeling of the hyphen in “Mexican-­American,” a gender ambiguity in queer communities, were likened to the Indigenous Nahuatl concept of nepantla.9 The turn to vernacular traditions of fabrication, to graffiti art, or to working-­class strategies of making do w ith what is at hand w ­ ere valorized and celebrated as a rasquachimo, or underdog aesthetic.10 Objects and artifacts of everyday life, domestic spaces, home altars and yard shrines, and the fences and porches of the barrio w ­ ere employed as the medium of a larger “social sculpture” in which community participants ­were also active components of the Ānal artwork, directed ­toward social change.11In short, for Chicana/o art to be properly understood, a new linguistic and conceptual discourse was necessary. For outsiders, without Spanish or Nahuatl language proĀ4  ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

ciency, this eclectic, multilingual mix of references would at Ārst appear purposefully alien and potentially arcane. In some ways, this was the intended effect, insofar as it constituted a s elf-­ conscious effort, to create a counterdiscourse or intellectual re­sis­tance to the English-­dominant mainstream or, particularly with reference to Indigenous terms, a Eu­ro­pean history of colonization. At the same time, this borrowed and in­ven­ted vocabulary held the excitement and promise of new ways of thinking about the world, and about art. Although ­there ­were a number of group and solo exhibitions of Chicana/o art throughout the 1980s, 12 the watershed exhibition Chicano Art:­ ­Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (car a) (1990) brought many previously marginalized artists into the U.S. spotlight. The exhibit traveled from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Fresno, Denver, Albuquerque, Tucson, El Paso, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C., thus covering a broad territory in the Southwest and the nation’s capital. A commitment to the original Chicano po­liti­cal movement was evident in the works selected, and the collaborative ­labor of the organizers revealed an inclusive approach. In her book Chicano Art: Inside/Outside the Master’s House (1998), Alicia Gaspar de Alba addressed the degree to which the car a exhibition posed an institutional and psychological challenge to mainstream museum discourses and si­mul­ta­neously produced polarized responses from the press, from high praise to outright condemnation.13 Chicana/o and Latino/a audience responses w ­ ere generally positive, but not without some ambivalence about terminology and inclusivity. Both the car a exhibition and Gaspar de Alba’s book revealed that the idea of “Chicana/o art” would continue to be debated and contested, its meaning inevitably changing across geo­graph­i­cal regions and generations, each with their own po­liti­cal allegiances and stories to tell. In the mid-1990s, artists’ writings, exhibition cata­logs, and scholarly publications continued to develop an increasingly intertextual reading of Chicana/o art, while also changing

the terms of debate. For example, The Chicano ­Codices: Encountering Art of the Amer­i­cas (1992), From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography (1996), and Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa  Jr. (1998) articulated formal and historical relationships between Chicano art and broader con­temporary art practices by emphasizing intersections with, as well as deviations from, dominant cultural forms. A second generation of scholars and writers started citing Ārst-­generation texts, and began incorporating interpretations that moved beyond the frame of movement politics, much to the dismay of some prac­ti­tion­ers and activists whose anti-­ institutional stance chaffed at what seemed like commercial co-­optation. This productive tension continues to influence the now burgeoning Āeld of Chicana/o art studies. Since 2000 ­there has been rapid growth in both traveling exhibitions and cata­logs in t he Āeld, including, for example, The Road to Aztlán: Art from a Mythic Homeland (2001); Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California (2001); Chicano Visions: American Paint­ers on the Verge (2002); Con­temporary Chicano and Chicana Art: Artists, Works, Culture, and Education (2002); Chicano Art for Our Millennium : Collected Works from the Arizona State University Community (2004); Phantom Sightings: Art a­ fter the Chicano Movement (2008); and Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 (2011). Solo exhibitions of Chicana/o artists have steadily increased, as has scholarly attention in the form of targeted proj­ects such as the impor­tant feminist studies Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities by Laura E. Pérez (2007) and Our Lady of Controversy: Alma Lopez’s Irreverent Apparition (2011) by Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Carlos Francisco Jackson’s excellent Chicana and Chicano Art: Protest Arte (2009) was the Ārst single-­ authored book to offer a general overview of the artistic movement with a sig niĀcant emphasis on public art forms such as posters and murals, as well as a close attention to art collectives, community art centers, and workshops. The more recent Born of Re­sis­tance: Cara a Cara ­Encounters

with Chicana/o Visual Culture (2015) by Scott L. Baugh and Victor  A. Sorell takes a m ore intimate, focused approach by selecting nine key artworks around which groups of short essays are clustered. Our anthology is designed to complement ­these previous publications by compiling critical and historical writings about Chicana/o art spanning several de­cades. We have not tried to produce a comprehensive history of Chicana/o art, nor a g lobal repre­sen­ ta­tion of all the impor­tant movements, themes, groups, or works—­ours is not an encyclopedic proj­ect, nor a co mprehensive bibliography. Its goal is rather to offer a provocative sampling of essays and ideas that w ­ ill hopefully spark discussion and debate. Anthologies are always imperfect and incomplete; like any compendia they are marked by their omissions and deĀned by their limits. When I a pproached my coeditors about the need for a t eachable collection of texts that could offer a g eneral introduction to the nonspecialist, we deci­ded to focus on key themes and historical benchmarks that have s­ haped the emergence and current status of Chicana/o art. Many of the artists, critics, and scholars who played a sig niĀcant role in t he initial discourse about Chicana/o art are now respected elders, and some have passed on. It is partially out of a desire to map this legacy of thought, but also to tie it to an active and growing body of scholarship, that this proj­ect came about. All of the editors participated in the research and se­lection of articles and images for each section of the book, and we are collectively responsible for the Ānal result. We worked in teams of two on each section, but approval of the overall document and Ānal form was a collective effort of all the editors. Individual editors wrote short introductions for sections they helped to prepare in order to offer readers a conceptual map and intellectual rationale for the se­lection and ­ordering of the essays. Although ­there are a few minor exceptions, the emphasis throughout the anthology is on the visual arts, rather than the performing arts. This was a q uestion of editorial areas of Intr o d uctio n  ·  5

e­ xpertise, as well as the sense that we could not do justice to the broad domain of theater, Ālm, and per­for­mance art while also providing an in-­depth analy­sis of the visual arts. We hope that other scholars ­will pursue similar efforts in ­these Āelds. One goal of the anthology is to demonstrate how vocabularies and conceptual frameworks for understanding Chicana/o art develop and change over time; it also tries to bring par­tic­u­lar thematic concerns to the fore for closer scrutiny. Articles ­were selected ­because of their resonance, or sometimes their conflict, with ­others in the same thematic section. Each section can therefore be read as an integrated set of arguments and observations from diverse perspectives that coalesce around a given issue or topic. Occasionally, repetitions within sections or echoes across sections occur, though we have worked to reduce redundancy wherever pos­si­ble. For this reason, several of the articles in the anthology are presented in excerpted form. As editors, we recognize the importance of the conceptual integrity of authors’ written texts, and therefore requested excerpts only when clear overlaps appeared, or when a given section began to exceed projected page limits. We are extremely grateful to the authors for allowing us to publish t­ hese shorter versions, and encourage our readers to explore the full-­ length essays when they can. We are also grateful to the artists and their generous willingness to have their works reproduced in t he volume. To make the book affordable for classroom use, images are printed in black-­and-­white. However, we strongly encourage students and teachers to look for the artworks online, and explore online databases to enrich their visual experience of this art.14 Inevitably, we w ­ ere unable to publish as many articles as we would have liked. Faced with this dilemma, we developed a “ further reading” list at the end of each section that we hope w ­ ill inspire ­future scholars and students to delve more deeply. Again, this is by no means comprehensive, but ­these ­were articles we felt ­were particularly pertinent to the themes of each section, or could be productively paired with ­those we have 6  ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

included. It is impor­tant to mention that in the research pro­cess for this volume we encountered an in­ter­est­ing editorial hurdle: a signiĀcant majority of critical and scholarly publications on Chicana/o art focus on works produced in California. From a historical standpoint this is prob­ ably predictable, since many Mexican ­Americans in the Southwest, including t­ hose sympathetic to the Chicano movement, lived in co mmunities where the word “Chicano” was not commonly used; in New Mexico and Arizona, for example, the term “Hispanic,” “Hispano,” or even “Spanish” is still in frequent use to describe p ­ eople of Mexican and Spanish descent. Even in California, not all art made by Mexican Americans can be called “Chicana/o” art—­only that which is made by self-­identiĀed Chicana/os and in s upport of the larger Chicana/o po­liti­cal proj­ect. Determined not to limit the scope of the book to the California region, however, we made a special effort to broaden the geo­graph­i­cal frame. Several scholars, including Holly Barnet-­Sánchez, Andrew Connors, and Victor Sorell, w ­ ere solicited for their expertise and suggestions on authors and artists working in other regions across the United States. Each section represents, therefore, at least two or more geo­graph­i­cal regions. We ­were also committed to gender diversity, queer and feminist voices, and intergenerational juxtaposition between older and younger writers so that the harmony and dissonance of dif­fer­ent positions could be heard. Given this commitment, why use the terms “Chicana” and “Chicano” to describe the work in this book, rather than the recently coined and importantly gender-­neutral term “Chicanx”? A ­ fter a thorough discussion, the editors concluded that we fully support the term “Chicanx,” along with its social and semiotic goals, but Ānd it more consistent and historically accurate to use ­“Chicano” and “Chicana” in the title of this book and throughout the anthology out of re­spect for the authors and artists who deploy ­these terms. Moreover, the deĀnitions, legacy, and usage of “Chicana” and “Chicano” remain impor­tant to the period in w hich they ­were created. As ­historians we agreed this

was the most appropriate choice for this par­tic­u­lar publication. However, we enthusiastically support the use of “Chicanx” going forward. A question that frequently arises concerning Chicana/o art is ­whether or how it is dif­fer­ent from “Latino” art. One approach to this question is to address differences between “Chicanos” and “Latinos”: the former are U.S. citizens of Mexican descent identiĀed with the Chicano movement, and the latter are U.S. citizens of Latin American descent. “Latino” is an exceptionally broad term that encompasses a w idely diverse population of ­people who live and are born in t he U.S. but whose families come from countries as far apart as Chile and Guatemala, or Brazil and the Dominican Republic. As Mexico is part of Latin Amer­ i­ca, Mexican Americans and Chicanos are also technically “Latinos.” The comparison becomes more complex in t he arts, where the two terms are frequently used together. As early as 2005, Chon Noriega called for a n eed to “safeguard the history of Chicano and Latino participation in the arts.” He argues, “This history is fragile, ephemeral and—in terms of the archive—­largely neglected, making the Latino arts something on the order of what [Harry] Gamboa calls the ‘orphans of modernism.’ ”15 For Noriega, the term “Latino” is used to encompass both Chicano and Latino art practices, and to signal the importance of their mutual relation but nonequivalence. Put simply, Chicana/o art can be understood as one culturally and ideologically speciĀc kind of Latino art. Over the past de­cade the broader term “Latino art” has become more commonly used by scholars and museums, resulting in cata­logs and exhibitions that include works by Chicana/o artists, such as Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino Art? (2012), and Our Amer­i­ca: The Latino Presence in American Art (2013). Chicana/o artists and scholars are thus faced with a subtle paradox. On the one hand, we want to articulate the characteristic and distinctive qualities that deĀne Chicana/o aesthetic and po­ liti­cal paradigms, to demonstrate their uniqueness and difference from other Latino arts; on the other hand, we want to acknowledge that

Chicana/o art emphasizes the condition of cultural mixing and celebrates a m estizo hybridity wherein all forms of ethnic and national purity are suspect. This delicate categorical dance reveals what it means to emerge from the cultural margins in s earch of self-­deĀnition: one must have an honest sense of the past, yet be open to transformation and change. Our goal is to show the complexity and intersectionality of this practice. For this reason, part I of the book, “DeĀnitions and Debates,” introduces the idea of Chicana/o art practice and its shifting conceptual frameworks. Early manifestos use persuasive language to situate Chicana/o art squarely in the tradition of radical art groups across the twentieth ­century and up to our pres­ent moment. They call for an art that is “off-­the-­wall,” an art that is a provocation, a “visual abrasion,” an “iconic friction”; they demand an art with a barrio aesthetic, with a “psychic harmony” and a “ new world-­view”; they want art to exist in the Āeld, in the factory, and in the home. It is an art that cries out from the “stomach of the monster,” that is a ­free art, without restrictions or limitations. What then becomes of this art if it is collected, reproduced, or shown in a museum? Is it dead? Has it already lost the Āght? What becomes of radical acts when they are anthologized and historicized? ­These critical questions emerge through an impor­tant exchange between artists and scholars, and serve as a f ulcrum for exploring the way the deĀnition of Chicana/o art has shifted and changed over time. What might a “new” Chicano movement look like? What might it mean to be “post-­ Chicano” or “post-­movimiento”? Is it pos­si­ble to ask ­these questions without losing the impor­tant po­liti­cal commitments of the past? Part II, “Cultural Reclamation and Vernacular Traditions,” examines the efforts of Chicana/o artists, particularly the Ārst generation, to recuperate Mexican and Indigenous aesthetic forms and conceptual vocabularies that w ­ ere effectively repressed or non­ex­is­tent in a Eurocentric, American art context and pedagogical curriculum. Aztec and Mayan iconic forms, particularly Intr o d uctio n  ·  7

a­ ncient deities that had been carved in s tone, or images found in fifteenth-­century codices, are also reproduced in murals and paintings, on posters and clothing. Reaching into the ancient past to light one’s way out of a pres­ent impasse might appear to outsiders as superĀcial anachronism, but for many Indigenous-­identiĀed ­peoples, temporality is not linear—­the past and the pres­ent exist together. The maintenance of a co nnection to the symbols of the past is a sign of continuity in the face of what has been a brutal and long-­term colonial rupture (see Yreina Cervántez, Big Baby Balam; Āg. Intro. 1). By recuperating what was already presented by a dominant culture as “myth,” Chicana/o artists seek to change the terms of analy­sis and the terms of critique as much as the aesthetic frameworks of con­temporary mainstream art. Folk art, skilled craftsmanship, regional traditions, and local neighborhood rituals are also valued for the role they play in shaping the aesthetics of everyday life. Common practices such as graffiti become celebrated forms; photog­raphers document working-­class and Indigenous communities and histories; familiar icons are reworked with new materials. Feminist interventions result in novel revisions, and popu­ lar culture becomes a source for witty rebuttals. Throughout this section, articles investigate how Chicana/o artists valorize personal narrative, economic real­ity, colonial history, and cultural heritage through a s et of vernacular strategies and tactics. Part III, “Bodily Aesthetics and Iconologies,” tracks the Chicano and Chicana body as a recurring trope in the exploration of gender, religion, sexuality, and the prison industrial complex. How do corporality and embodiment articulate par­tic­u­lar conditions of Chicano masculinity? In what ways have Chicanas engaged a feminist remapping of the ­woman as sacred and secular Āgure? How does racism ­factor into the positioning and repression of ­those with “brown” skin? What are the ways queer politics enter the picture to complicate and transform it? Authors in this section write about how bodies are kept invisible or are forced to signify, the ways they 8  ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

are deiĀed and demonized, categorized and codiĀed. Figuration is the central concern, especially in relation to a long history of iconic forms that speak to the pres­ent. Surface and texture become epidermal layers to excavate: the tattooed skin of a prisoner trou­bles the semiotics of innocence; garments and textiles enable or hinder the w ­ omen who wear them; queer subjects are named and unnamed through contested visual lexicons. Through centuries of colonization, the mestizo body that has hovered at the margins of power ­will not dis­appear, and ­will no longer submit to domination, to abjection. How w ­ ill it shed this snakeskin that it has outgrown, while keeping an ancient and precious vitality? The essays in this section pursue ­these questions through studies of ste­reo­types, sacred icons, and sexual subversions. Part IV, “Public Practices  and Enacted Landscapes,” explores key works that engage the logic and materiality of urban spaces, social landscapes, and spatial experimentation through public art, street per­for­mance, and transitory monuments. Who explores the transcultural spaces of Los Angeles and Tijuana? (See Patssi Valdez, LA/TJ; Āg. Intro. 3.) Who gets to walk ­there freely? How does a neighborhood transform into a kind of “social sculpture”? Recognizing their condition as not only culturally but also geo­graph­i­cally marginalized, many Chicana/o artists have intervened in public space as a way of unraveling the per­sis­tent territoriality of hegemonic systems and architectural normalcy. In places like Southern California, where redlining to restrict ethnic groups to speciĀc neighborhoods was a co mmon practice well into the 1960s, the involuntary ghettoization of Mexican ­Americans is part of a “dark,” largely unknown history in that sunshiny place. Making home in a h ostile environment is an act of bravery, not merely an act of survival; it is a creative act requiring invention, collaboration, and maintenance. Sanctioned and unsanctioned street murals interrupt the rectilinear status quo of buildings and win­dows, concrete and steel; they “occupy” a m eaningful visual domain by insisting on a m ore colorful, complex, and po­liti­cally

inflected environment. Temporary “instant” murals, costumed promenades, billboards, and countermonuments erupt into the spatial imaginary to render it unfamiliar, uncanny. A double deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the part of the artists operates in parallel to a generalized condition of dispossession. Part V, “Border Visions and Immigration Politics,” is devoted to artworks that unearth the meta­phors and realities of U.S.-­Mexico border life. Articles in t his section address the double consciousness of cross-­border identiĀcations and provide an unflinching view of the daily tragedies that accompany the unequal distribution of wealth between the two nations, so poignantly portrayed in Malaquías Montoya’s Undocumented (Āg. Intro. 2). B ­ ecause migration deĀnes the ­family histories of so many Chicana/o artists working in the United States ­today, the border as site of memory, fear, pain, and nostalgia sets up a condition of ambivalence ­toward the idea of national belonging. What are the “borderlands”? How have visual artists worked through the bifurcation of forms that bleed across the frontier? Where is “home”? Two of the authors in t his section cite Gloria Anzaldúa’s famous line “This is my home / this thin edge / of barbwire.” In order to decenter a familiar terrain, the articles in this section also reach beyond the Southwest to include Michigan and North Carolina, where the “border” extends to other latitudes, including ­those not registered on a map. Lines demarcating borders are artiĀcial but not arbitrary; they divide the land and its resources, they deĀne a nation and its p ­ eople, they are in­ven­ted by politicians, but then made manifest by police. La migra, el norte, la frontera—­these are the hard edges where “xenophobias converge.” Living in the balance of two paradigms, two nations, two languages, requires nimble resourcefulness and the deployment of multiple sign systems. Humor laced with dynamite infects a “border consciousness,” or inflects a turn of phrase. The essays and poetry in this section move across linguistic, geo­graph­i­cal, and psychological territory to map creative negotiations of this si­mul­ta­ neously fertile and oppressive liminal zone.

Part VI, “Institutional Frameworks and Critical Reception,” surveys the public response to Chicano art, its ac­cep­tance and rejection by mainstream museum institutions, and the language of criticism that circulates and continues to deĀne its contours. Although most Chicana/o art was not originally intended for museums, as with many other radical art movements it seems inevitable that the work eventually arrives ­there. In our current moment, art institutions become platforms for public or radical speech, in p art ­because ­there are so few places to speak po­liti­ cally ­today. One complication that arises when artwork changes context—­from the barrio to the Smithsonian—is that it can become illegible to its audience. It subtleties and insider jokes, its ­par­tic­u­lar aesthetic proclivities, its intertextual references, remain opaque to mainstream art audiences. This can produce alienation in art critics, but it can also produce a productive discourse or debate about questions of quality, taste, and cultural hierarchy. How can one judge a work of art by criteria to which it never aspired? How soon ­will the inherent racisms of U.S. arts institutions make way for a broader picture of American art? What role can museums play, and when must this effort take place elsewhere? Essays in this section closely examine museum practices, critical debates, and controversies associated with exhibitions featuring Chicana/o art. We hope this anthology ­will draw the interest of students of Chicana/o history and culture, as well as art theorists and visual studies scholars who practice in a Āe ld that has, ­until relatively recently, generally ignored the contribution of Chicana/o art to American and con­temporary art history. Fortunately, this is starting to change. Small mentions of the movement and its artists have appeared, for example, in F rancis Pohl’s Framing Amer­i­ca: A S ocial History of American Art (2008), and one Chicana/o art collective is mentioned in Nato Thompson’s Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (2012), but ­these are rare exceptions. As the immigrant populations from Mexico and Latin Amer­i­ca grow throughout the U.S., and as artists bring Intr o d uctio n  ·  9

their regional and synthetic artistic practices to the public arena, t­ here ­will be a higher demand for knowledgeable scholarship on Latina/o and Chicana/o art practice and traditions. What does the f­ uture hold for globally mobile citizens, refugees, Indigenous populations, and noncitizens? Are the terms “Chicano” and “Chicana” irretrievably historical and dated, or w ­ ill they be taken up again, in a n ew way? How w ­ ill marginalized populations respond creatively to ongoing, systematic economic and racial injustice? ­These are impor­tant concerns of our pres­ ent time; they have changed ­little in the past fifty years since the Chicano movement was launched. Developing a response to ­these questions nevertheless remains one of the goals t­ oward which Chicana/o art is directed, and to which this collection hopes to contribute. Notes 1. Ruben Salazar, “Who Is a Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?,” Los Angeles Times (1886–­Current File), February 6, 1970, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Los Angeles Times (1881–1986),B 7. 2. Rodolfo Gonzales and Alberto Urista [Alaurista], “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” El Grito del Norte (Alburquerque, New Mexico) 2, no. 9 (July 6, 1969): 5. 3. Philip Brookman, “Looking for Alternatives: Notes on Chicano Art, 1960–1990,” Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, ed. R. Griswold del Castillo, T. McKenna, and Y. Yarbro-­Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, UCLA , 1991), 182. 4. See, for example, Raymond Barrio, Mexico’s Art and Chicano Artists (Guerneville, CA: Ventura Press, 1978); Max Benavidez and Kate Vozoff, “The Wall: Image and Boundary, Chicano Art in the 1970s,” in Mexican Art of the 1970s: Images of Displacement (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1984), 45–54;Chicano and Latino Artists in the Pacific Northwest, exhibition cata­log (Olympia, WA: Evergreen State College, 1984); Dalé Gas/Give It Gas, exhibition cata­log (Houston, TX: Con­temporary Art Museum, 1977); Manuel Martinez, “The Art of the Chicano Movement and the Movement of Chicano Art,” in Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Vintage Books,

10  ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

1972), 349–53; and ySbil Venegas, “Conditions for Producing Chicana Art,” Chismearte 1, no. 4 (1977–78): 2–4. 5. See Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art: Inside/Outside the Master’s House (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 9. 6. See a discussion of this ongoing issue in part VI of this volume, “Institutional Frameworks and Critical Reception.” 7. See, for example, the work of Shifra Goldman, Philip Brookman, and Eva Cockroft and James Cockroft. 8. See analy­sis of difrasismo in Alfred Arteaga, Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 6; and in Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Alterities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 14. 9. See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987). 10. Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” in Chicano Aesthetics: Rasquachismo (Phoenix, AZ: MARS Artspace, 1989), 5–8. 11. n I the 1970s, the German artist Joseph Beuys defined “social sculpture” as an art practice that takes place in the social realm, requires social engagement, and leads to a transformation of society through the release of popu­lar creativity. See Alan W. Moore, “A Brief Genealogy of Social Sculpture,” Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Web Only Articles, accessed July 17, 2018, http://­www​ .­joaap​.­org​/­webonly​/­moore​.­htm. 12. See, for example, The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970(1988); Chicano Expressions (1986); Lo del corazón: Heartbeat of a Culture (1986); and Sin Fronteras, Crossing Borders: Mexican American Artists in the Southwest (1989). 13. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, “ ‘Between the Ghetto and the Melting Pot’: Popu­lar Hegemony,” in Chicano Art: Inside/Outside the Master’s House (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 14. See, for example, “Documents of Twentieth ­Century Latin American and Latino Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston,” ICAA Digital Archive, accessed July 17, 2018,http://­icaadocs​.­mfah​.­org​/­icaadocs​/; and ImagineArte Chicano/Latino database, University of California, Santa Barbara, accessed July 17, 2018, http://­cemaweb​.­library​ .­ucsb​.­edu​/­calisphere​.­html. 15. Chon Noriega, “Preservation ­Matters,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 30, no. 1 (April 1, 2005): 9.

Part I. Definitions and Debates

FIG. I.1. Gilbert “Magu” Sanchez Luján, Aztlán Rifa, 1977. Silkscreen print, 22.5 × 17.5 in. Galería de la Raza Archives, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, University of California, Santa Barbara. Image courtesy of the artist’s estate.

cho n no r iega

Part I. Introduction One only has t o examine the bar rio to see tha t the ele­ments to choose from are as infinite as any culture allows. —­G ILBERT SANCHEZ LUJÁN A pro­cess of cultur al secession (social in ternalization pro­cess) must be initiated in order to allow us to begin to view ourselves with our own eyes and arrive at our o wn definition about our state of e xistence and express the nature of our c oncern for this state. —­C ON SAFO I propose an ar t that is not pr ivate property; an ar t that ­will make other artists aware of their real duty as ­human beings. —­C ARLOS ALMARAZ Artists ­were seen as an impor ­tant part of the M ovement. Artists had to become the producers of visual education. . . . ​A definition of “Chicano Art” was never intended ­because to have done so w ould have restricted the artist. —­M ALAQUÍAS MONTOYA AND LEZLIE SALKOWITZ-­M ONTOYA

The deĀnition of Chicano art has always been the subject of intense debate, especially among the artists, but also among the curators, critics, and historians who have engaged with and supported Chicano art. Who is a Chicano artist? What are his or her responsibilities as an artist? What is Chicano art? Does this art entail a di stinct aesthetic, mode, or practice? What is its relationship

to other artistic traditions, but also to mainstream museums and the art market? While ­these questions focused on art, the writers did not see art as a more or less autonomous “world” set apart from socioeconomic and po­liti­cal concerns. Instead, they explored the relationship between art and society. What is the function of Chicano art? Where do w e locate it in t he contexts of social history, po­liti­cal strug­gles, ethnic identity, national culture, and h ­ uman expression? In this part, we explore the vari­ous deĀnitions and debates that have been part of the vibrant discussion about Chicano art since the 1960s. It is impor­tant to note at the start that ­these writings often take the form of a manifesto—­that is, a written declaration of beliefs, goals, and actions intended to bring about change. As a form of public statement, manifestoes tend to be e­ ither po­liti­cal or artistic in nature, which suggests how ­these two distinct arenas overlap in their reliance on rhe­toric (the language of persuasion) in order to change policy or practice (rules of conduct). With re­spect to Chicano art, ­these manifestoes are in lin e with other manifestoes from avant-­ garde art groups, movements, and artists across the twentieth ­century, and in p ar­tic­u­lar ­those that sought to blur the boundary between art and politics (such as futurism, dada, situationist international, happenings, destructivism). In their manifestoes, Chicano artists and critics have

i­ nsisted on placing Chicano art within the context of a deep history of the Mexican ­peoples. That history starts before the Conquest of the Amer­i­ cas and proceeds through Mexican in­de­pen­dence, the U.S.-­Mexican War, the Mexican Revolution, the twentieth-­century migration that established a major Mexican presence in the Southwest, and the emergence of a broad-­based Chicano civil rights movement in t he 1960s. In that regard, ­these writings are similar to more po­liti­cal manifestoes coming out of the Chicano movement. Consider the movement’s most well known manifesto, I Am Joaquin. It is a history lesson, a personal declaration of cultural identity, and a plan of action. But above all, it is a poem that was read out loud before an assembled “public” of Chicanos seeking equality. In this way, po­liti­cal history, cultural identity, and artistic expression reinforce each other in a common goal of social change. But they are not the same. Paying close attention to t­ hese manifestoes can provide insight into the pro­cess by which Chicano artists debated over and deĀned a Āeld of action in which they could try to realize a social and artistic vision. We start with a s e­lection from the exhibition cata­log for Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation (car a), the Ārst major exhibition to explore ­these questions and their historical context. Philip Brookman’s essay outlines the broad historical framework and social movement activities within which ­these debates have unfolded. This essay takes stock of an artistic movement ­after some two de­cades and on the eve of car a bringing national attention to Chicano art as the exhibition traveled to ten public, university, and nonproĀt museums across the United States between 1990 and 1993. In d ­ oing so, it provides a u seful introduction to earlier artist statements (by Gilbert Sanchez Luján, Carlos Almaraz, Malaquías Montoya, and Mel Casas) and critical response (by Shifra M. Goldman). While ­there has been a consensus about the under­lying historical framework found in B rookman’s essay, artists, critics, and curators have debated the precise place of Chicano art within that framework and also in relation to the art world (market), U.S. national 14  ·  cho n no r iega

culture, and the Amer­i­cas. The terms and intensity of that debate can be seen in t he classic exchange between artist Malaquías Montoya and Lezlie Salkowitz-­Montoya and art historian Shifra  M. Goldman. The location of the debate itself is telling: Metamorfosis, a n ew academic journal published by El Centro de Estudios Chicanos (Center for Chicano Studies) at the University of Washington. Indeed, the role of higher education—in which both Malaquías Montoya and Goldman taught, and also where the car a exhibition originated—is a ­little noted ­factor in Chicano art. While art and art history departments remain highly exclusionary even ­today, Chicano studies programs, not to mention exceptional and per­sis­tent advocates such as ­Montoya and Goldman, established a platform for scholarship, courses, exhibitions, and, above all, critical debate. Debates over Chicano art have often moved between two conceptual spaces (and discourses): the “community” and the art world. While it would be easy to read ­these statements as a r ejection of the art world in f­ avor of community self-­determination, something much more complicated is actually taking place. ­These writers are engaged in a di alogue with art history, one in which they often side with and quote from an international avant-­garde even as they dismiss “Western Eu­ro­pean art” and the arts establishment and marketplace. Carlos Almaraz—in writing about painting for the United Farm Workers of Amer­i­ca—­brings together a heady mixture of class-­based social critique and observation, po­liti­cal theory, and nuanced engagement with European-­origin romantic and avant-­garde ideas about art. As with Mel Casas, Gilbert Sanchez Luján, and Malaquías Montoya, he is deeply aware of an art history that remains unaware of the Chicano ­people; and rather than simply reject this history, tit for tat, he engages with it as he then turns attention elsewhere. The artists also turn to Mexico, both as a cultural source and as a model for avant-­garde or revolutionary art. Montoya quotes from the 1922 manifesto by the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Paint­ers, and

Sculptors that called for a “Āghting, educative art for all” rather than one predicated on the individual. For ­these artists, the avant-­garde provides a critical language with which they can critique the exclusion, discrimination, and alienation of the art world. In effect, the artists are situating themselves within an art historical genealogy that opens up to social and po­liti­cal contexts—in Almaraz’s case, starting with Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828), a p ivotal Āgure in t he transition from old masters to modern artists. This dialogue with art history is an impor­tant, but often overlooked, aspect of the writers’ efforts to challenge societal stereotyping of the Chicano community. For all their rhetorical focus on a possessive sense of “Chicano art” and “Chicano artists” as belonging to our culture, community, and need for self-­ determination, ­these artists nonetheless align with Montoya’s statement above that “a deĀnition of ‘Chicano Art’ was never intended” to the extent that it would then limit the artist-­as-­artist, even one dedicated to using art for social change. As Casas notes, the po­liti­cal need for Chicano art is clear—­“to resuscitate and regenerate a wounded culture”—­but the concluding declaration of his manifesto on behalf of the Con Safo group is “We are artists.” In the artist statements, one notes a recurring call for Chicano artists to draw inspiration from the expressive culture of the barrio itself, often as a source for a direct challenge and alternative to societal discrimination and mass media ste­reo­types. By way of example, the writers point to cultural practices rooted in M exican heritage, but they also look to the working class and con­temporary urban existence. ­These statements could be taken as a call for an artistic practice that merely illustrates a p o­liti­cal agenda or reifies a t raditional sense of culture, space, and identity (as a static heritage). But ­these writers purposefully disarticulate the instrumental ends of such art from their aesthetic means. Thus, while the Chicano artist is directed to play a role in bringing about social change, the writers demand a certain aesthetic autonomy for the artists. Consider the above quotation by Montoya and Salkowitz-­Montoya. ­Here,

in one of the most deĀantly po­liti­cal manifestoes about Chicano art, the writers counterbalance contending visions of art as ­either instrumental or autonomous: the artist has a clear-­cut social role to play, as an educator, but the art itself must remain undeĀned, unrestricted. What t­ hese writers are pointing ­toward is an aesthetic dimension that is distinct from, if not quite autonomous from, the social and po­ liti­cal function for Chicano art. One need look no further than the passage from Carlos Almaraz’s manifesto “The Artist as Revolutionary” in which he argues, “It is the artist’s function to act like a c amera for society.” While the statement suggests a social realist agenda for Chicano artists, Almaraz’s own expressionistic painting and drawing immediately challenge such a reading. How, we might ask, is his own artwork functioning as a p hoto­graph of society? It is, but not in a literal sense. Indeed, when mea­sured against ­actual Chicano art production, the notion of the artist-­as-­camera—­that is, of Chicano art as somehow indexical of social real­ity—is clearly a meta­ phorical one that requires further investigation. It is useful to explore how ­these writers are trying to open up a space between social function and aesthetics, without ­going so far as to claim that they have nothing to do with each other. It is also useful to read the artists’ statements against their own artwork, not for the limited purpose of determining if one is an accurate mea­sure of the other, but in order to appreciate the ways in which both function as “texts” or “discursive acts” that are in dialogue with each other. A manifesto can make one claim (as a public statement), while the artwork makes another very dif­fer­ent demand or set of demands (as a private experience), and both can be part of a larger truth or insight. That dialogue—or dialectic, if y ou ­will—­has often been motivated through vari­ous binary oppositions, between which the artist statements oscillate: establishment and barrio, art world and community, bourgeoisie and working class, personal expression and social message, universal versus speciĀc themes. At one level the writers have taken sides, effecting a rhetorical turn away Intr o d uctio n t o Par t I  ·  15

from the dominant society in o rder to make a space for Chicano art. But in a ll instances, the artists also seek a “universal” framework for their artwork, one that is engaged with art history and seeking a broader audience. We should look to Chicano artist statements not for a deĀnition but for the ongoing engagement of a di alectic deĀned by societal exclusion and discrimination. In claiming a space and a reason for their work, ­these artists must offer both a s ocietal critique and an alternative social vision. They must establish a counterdiscourse for difference (moving from society’s “other” to an autochthonous “self ”), but they must also seek a “synthesis” that would bring them into the framework from which they have been excluded, and that would do so on their own terms. In “Urban Exile” (see “Further Reading”), Harry Gamboa Jr. captures the complexities and paradoxes of t­ hese maneuvers when he outlines the role of the Chicano artist at the end of his essay: “­There is a social responsibility which the artist is confronted with: it is the responsibility for creating beauty, controversy, real and surreal visions, absurd versions of ­actual events, symbolic interpretations of his/her environment, and also to express the universality of our culture’s uniqueness and our culture’s interdependence on cross-­cultural understanding.” As with the artist statements collected in this part, Gamboa insists on both a “social responsibility” and artistic freedom. He then cleverly threads the needle between the speciĀc and the universal in pointing to “the universality of our culture’s uniqueness” and in gesturing ­toward the “interdependence” of all cultures. In effect, Gamboa is challenging the worldview that has made Chicano art a categorical impossibility. In creating a space for Chicano art, he also decenters, or particularizes, the canonical art that has claimed a universal status. This part ends with three recent critical assessments from the last fifteen years that examine the critical paradigms at work within debates over Chicano art. Rita Gonzalez considers a new generation of artists whose “meta-­ambivalence” leads them to “interrogate the previous tropes of 16  ·  cho n no r iega

Chicano art: historical revisionism, the naming and illustration of regional identities, and the pre­ sen­ta­tion of both power­ful and positive images.” ­These tropes are precisely the ones that modernism challenged in t he nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the terms by which the art world then dismissed Chicano art as anachronistic. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Josh Kun extends this line of thought as well as its reach (into a mainstream readership). He focuses on a cohort largely born ­after the Chicano movement as they navigate the shifting social and aesthetic dynamics for con­temporary art—­and also the continued institutional exclusion—­facing a n ew generation of Chicanos and Latinos turning to the arts. Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto takes Kun’s article (in w hich he is also quoted) and offers some deĀning characteristics of this “millennial generation” as indicative of shifting paradigms ­toward more global and fluid approaches to art, culture, politics, and identity. As the éminence grise of Chicano art, Ybarra-­Frausto at once acknowledges a generational “rupture” and situates it within a larger cultural dialectic for the visual culture of the hemi­sphere. His critical maneuver reflects a r ecuperative tactic that expands rather than contracts or redirects the framework for Chicano art, thereby opening up a s pace for new generations, while keeping them in cr itical dialogue with earlier generations, and, for all of the above, insistently shifting the sense of identity so that it is also grounded in gender, sexuality, and even American consumer culture (rather than just Mexican traditional culture). In that regard, Gonzalez’s use of “meta-­ambivalence” has a broader application. It describes not a par­ tic­u­lar generation but its orientation t­ oward the conservative po­liti­cal climate and digital communications infrastructure in which it came of age. ­These artists also grapple with art history, both the canonical one still taught at universities, and the Chicano art of their parent’s generation that redeĀned the visual culture of and for Chicano communities before they ­were born. Looking at the earlier manifestoes in this way, we can see that artists participating in t he Chicano movement

also maintained their own “meta-­ambivalence” as the condition for taking up what would be seen as antimodernist tropes. That ambivalence opened up a s pace between their manifestoes and their artwork, but it also explains how their turn to cultural identity correlates to a s ubtle demand for equality as Chicanos and for autonomy as artists.

Herein lie the new terms for continued debate over the deĀnition of “Chicano art,” as well as its po­liti­cal and artistic necessity. In the complex dynamics between po­liti­cal strug­gle and artistic vision lies a common denominator, the manifesto, which asks, how can art bring about change, and who gets to represent the ­human condition?

Intr o d uctio n t o Par t I  ·  17

This page intentionally left blank

philip br o o kman

1. Looking for Alternatives  ·  1991 Notes on Chicano Art, 1960–1990

I Somehow I had this idea that ­people who ­were in two cultures and ­people who ­were creative ­were the same ­people. And that if you knew something about one, you’d know something about the other. . . . ​I felt that [artists] ­were the ­people closer to the heartbeat of culture, that they are the p ­ eople who monitor it in some way, ­either ­because they express it, or reflect it, or study it. —­A MALIA MESA-­B AINS

When we speak of Chicano artists, we refer to the creative ­people of Mexican ancestry living in the United States who have sought to develop, often in collaboration with their communities, culturally relevant aesthetic alternatives to current mainstream deĀnitions. Artists have been instrumental in developing programs to serve Chicano communities and to help provide an aesthetic, cultural, and educational focus for many ­people. Chicano art is both the pro­cess and the work created to accomplish t­ hese goals. As an art form it posits a social and cultural experience within an

aesthetic system developed from layers of tradition, imagination, and strug­gle. Social engagement forms the meaning of this work. Chicano artists have often come together in structured groups to achieve their goals. ­These groups are multifaceted, fluid organ­izations—­ sometimes formed as collectives—­that seek to empower the development of the alternative structures deemed necessary to fulĀll community needs and aesthetic goals. Such groups often have been created ­because mainstream cultural institutions are inaccessible to the Chicano community. Some alternative organ­izations founded by Chicano artists have created umbrella facilities and networks within which to work. Th ­ ese include cultural centers (centros), community theaters (teatros), and cooperative—­though often loose-­knit—­groups of artists working on common themes or ­toward common goals. Artists have worked collectively as teams on large-­scale community proj­ects such as murals, print production and distribution, and educational workshops. Such innovations, taken as a ­whole, have served as models for many artists and educators throughout

the country, helping break down rigid barriers between cultural production and the public. The interplay of Chicano artists and community structures helped build the foundation of the socioaesthetic movement now called Chicano art, which paralleled the civil rights movement and the escalating war in Vietnam during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Chicano artists reacted to a po­ liti­cal, social, and educational matrix in which the princi­ples of colonialism ­were the dominant credo and their artistic expressions ­were marginalized; the result was an evolving Chicano art movement. II Throughout the world indigenous populations have had to reckon with the forces of pro­gress and national unification. Many traditions, languages, cosmologies, and values are lost, some literally murdered; but much has si­mul­ta­neously been in­ven­ted and revived in complex, oppositional contexts. —­J AMES CLIFFORD

Washington, D.C., late twentieth ­century, end of another de­cade. I live ­here now, where the homeless sleep on the street in full view of lawmakers and lawbreakers, hoping for an equal opportunity that never comes. The papers are full of news. Freedom is fought, freedom is won in E astern Eu­rope. The media report an invasion of another kind, from de­cades past to pres­ent: a colonial border crossing seen in M exico, in t he Dominican Republic, in Chile, in El Salvador, in Nicaragua, in Grenada, in Panama, in Latin Amer­i­ca as a ­whole. I began working with Chicano artists in California ten years ago as a curator, writer, archivist, Ālmmaker, construction worker, strawberry picker, and collaborator, from Santa Cruz to San Diego and beyond. I helped develop permanent exhibition space in t he Centro Cultural de l a Raza and became an early member of the Border Art Workshop. I worked side by side with artists from divergent cultures who had a common goal, and I tried to listen to what was ­going on. This is what I learned.

20  ·  philip br o o kman

To liberate the border between San Diego and Tijuana, with culture as a weapon, would meta­ phor­ically transport this transnational community from its perpetual state of war. If modernism is colonialist in nature, then postmodernism may be postcolonial. When artists set out to amplify ­these issues, they changed the forms in w hich they worked. Such changes included relearning, expanding, and reworking cultural traditions and deconstructing ste­reo­types that exist throughout the culture, media, and politics of the United States. A new time, new forms, looking for alternatives and freedom of another sort. I have heard time and again that for many Chicano artists freedom is about creation. It has been won by seizing and maintaining the ability to create culture and communities from traditions that ­were born in the myth of Aztlán, percolated in East  L.A., brought stateside by the so-­called immigrants from the homeland, and born again in t he U.S.A. Many Chicano artists resisted the modernist agenda that isolates ideas and creative methodologies from po­liti­cal and social pro­cesses. They worked to redeĀne their relative engagement with society and with the hegemony of mainstream cultural practices and institutions. They created their own institutions rather than accept exclusion. The concept of self-­deĀnition is paramount to discussions of Chicano art. To create art means to create oneself. Cultural repre­sen­ta­tion is the manifestation of one’s life or the illustration of a community bound by the symbols that delineate a g roup of beliefs. DeĀning one’s own culture is both a personal and a public action. It is personal, since the input necessary to develop a sense of culture comes from private sources, such as f­ amily and Indigenous traditions. DeĀnitions become social when they are expressed through art or acts of creation, left in the open for public interaction and interpretation. In approaching the idea of self-­determination, Chicano artists redeĀned their traditions and produced a new worldview that presented alternative mechanisms for affirming their history and experience. This meant throwing away the colonial past and creating new ideas to serve educational, po­liti­cal, and

aesthetic goals for their communities. Some of ­these ideas ­were rekindled and retooled hybrids from Mexican, American, and Eu­ro­pean cultural systems. ­Others ­were homegrown developments created to posit community needs. III Appropriation is a postmodern continuation of Picasso’s first use of motifs derived from African sculpture. The birth of modernism is tied up with colonialism. —­J OHN YAU

A new axis of communication has opened between Mexican and U.S. artists and has helped provide access to Indigenous resources unique to the Amer­i­cas. Since the 1960s, some Chicano artists have gained a renewed comprehension of their mestizo heritage and redeĀned their relationship to American history. Mestizo means “mixed” in Spanish. Many p ­ eople of Mexican ancestry are mestizos, the progeny of American Indian and Eu­ro­pean cultures, as well as other Asian or African groups. Such understanding has widened the multicultural bound­aries that Āx the gaze of con­ temporary artists. Indian features are e­ tched on the f­ aces of the undocumented who move north, of the agents with the Immigration and Naturalization Ser­vice (ins ) Border Patrol who maintain the checkpoints, and of the binational cholos and the urban mestizos who watch the parade. “We feel that we have to develop something that is indigenous to this soil, something that springs from the experience, from the real­ity that we live e­ very day,” says San Diego artist David Avalos. “We understand that we are native to this part of the world. ­We’re also mestizos, a mixture of the Eu­ro­pean and the native. . . . ​What we are in the pro­cess of creating is a consciousness that is of the Amer­i­cas.”1 Ongoing critical debate over the validity of appropriating aesthetic material and ideas from outside cultures to create new art forms is one key to understanding the marginalization of Chicano art in the United States. Some critics, such as John

Yau or James Clifford, argue that cross-­pollination is dif­fer­ent from appropriation and that taking or borrowing concepts from another dif­fer­ent culture for one’s own use is akin to taking the land. Yau’s statement, which links the modernist practice in the arts of borrowing dif­fer­ent or outside cultural viewpoints with the politics of colonialism, reveals an oppressive context relevant to the creative lives of Chicanos. This methodology sets the stage of re­sis­tance for Chicano artists from diverse cultural backgrounds whose work developed within a modernist tradition. For Chicanos, the roots of contention in the United States grow deep. They form a co mplex web that is woven within the matrix from which our po­liti­cal and social history develops, and provide the context in which con­temporary art evolves t­ oday. History also provides social traditions and the means to differentiate between mainstream American art and alternatives fostered in the margins. War is the original form of appropriation, and the U.S.-­Mexico border as it exists t­ oday was ­created through the institution of war. A ­ fter marching on Mexico City, the United States forced Mexico to sign the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in w hich Mexico ceded to the United States the land that now forms Arizona, California, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and part of Colorado. Mexico gave up this land in exchange for $15 million. The essential relationship between the United States and Mexico was established by the Mexican-­American War, continuing the historical pattern of colonialism—­the colonist versus the colonized—in a l and that once was Mexico. This association continues t­ oday, albeit mediated by time, by progressive periods of immigration from Mexico to the United States, and by the discovery of oil off the Mexican shore. Many ­people maintain that a b order consciousness exists that evolved both ­because of and in spite of this history. This is a multinational, bilingual stance that nests within a t ransmuted, stateless society, a h omeland for ideas that are common to many cultures, yet bound by none. The writing of Gloria Anzaldúa and the poetry of Gina Valdez describe the U.S.-­Mexico border as a Lo o king fo r Alter na tives  ·  21

place of mingling thoughts that transcend po­liti­cal states. This is a new awareness, an alternative to the notion that the border is a division between ­people and ideas. Such cognizance has led artists from the region to create a binational art about the border and the issues it engenders. It is neither American nor Mexican; it is a border art that provides a footing for new forms of culture. The border itself is now seen by some as a cruel hoax, a scar, a po­liti­cal invective that separates parents from their c­ hildren and workers from their land. Sin fronteras (without borders) is graffiti on the wall between two nations. “Our relationship is based on the institution of vio­lence,” says Avalos. “So it’s not surprising that ­today the situation of ­people of Mexican ancestry in t his country is a si tuation of a co nquered p ­ eople, a colonized p ­ eople. It’s a si tuation where we do not have entry into the institutions of society. We exist as a community outside of the law.”2 For Chicanos, whose creative lives have evolved from a f usion of multiple histories (revolution, capitalism, and Hollywood Ālms), the scar is deeper, since ancestral Indian cultures still hold claim to the land. Such reminders of history are painted on rocks on both sides of the border. ­Today anthropologists study an early form of border art along the fenced buffer between California and Mexico: rock paintings reveal pre-­Columbian artists roaming the region without passports or papers or coyotes (smugglers) as guides. IV Orale! ’Scuse me Hey, it’s you Where you been Jelly bean Sorry, man, I ­didn’t mean I ­didn’t mean To get you all upset It’s only me —­J OSÉ MONTOYA

22  ·  philip br o o kman

Chicano art evolved in o pposition to the predominant cultural matrix of museums, galleries, universities, and publications. Artists working within or parallel to the Chicano movement developed an ideology of cultural realism, reflecting the social, rather than the perceptual, nature of art. “As an aesthetic credo, Chicano art sought to link lived real­ity to the imagination; to reflect and document the multiple realities of being Chicano in the urban barrios and the rural colonias throughout the United States,” writes historian Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto.3 The Āght for farmworkers’ rights, coupled with profound questions about owner­ship of the land, led Chicanos to enter the civil rights strug­gle and a c ultural movement searching for social equality and identity. If land is culture, then the theft of land and inherited civil rights leads to the theft of culture. ­These concerns helped conĀgure the ideology of the Chicano movement and, consequently, the methodologies of Chicano artists associated with that movement. Chicano strug­gles, like ­those of the black power movement, w ­ ere intended to return economic control to the community.4 The strongest and most symbolic protests to emerge from the Chicano movement during the 1960s ­were based on grievances over owner­ship of land and the rights of farmworkers as they worked la tierra. In 1963, Reies López Tijerina or­ga­nized La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) to investigate owner­ship of New Mexico’s ejido (communal) lands, which w ­ ere granted to the United States by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Artists produced posters for La Alianza, declaring “Tierra o Muerte,” a slogan recycled from the Mexican Revolution. In 1965, Cesar Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association struck the grape growing industry in Delano, a small agricultural town in California’s Central Valley. The huelga (strike) drew national support and media attention, leading Chavez to form a strengthened farmworkers’ u ­ nion, the United Farm Workers Organ­izing Committee (ufw o c ), in 1966. Chavez used dramatic symbols, including the now famous black, stylized

ea­gle on a red flag and the Virgen de Guadalupe, in marches during the six-­year farmworkers’ strike and grape boycott. Artists w ­ ere directly involved in organ­izing the ufw o c , which helped crystalize a c ultural component of the Chicano movement. Chicano artists came together during this time to embody the strug­gle of a disenfranchised ­people and to make it the subject of their work. “The heart of it, the spirit of an artistic movement, springs from the earth and from the p ­ eople,” says playwright and Ālm director Luis Valdez. “But then it gets channeled. It gets channeled by a knowledge of history.”5 Valdez developed El Teatro Campesino as a cultural arm of the farm­workers’ strike in the fall of 1965: “Mainly what I was trying to do was to work through the spirit of the strug­gle, to draw from it and also to feed it, to give inspiration.”6 El Teatro Campesino worked for years, both in the Āelds and on the roads of Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope, to convey information about the farmworkers’ movement. Artists joined the Teatro Campesino in t he Āelds. From the mid1960s through the early 1970s, Andy Zermeño ­designed cartoons for the ­union newspaper El Malcriado; Carlos Almaraz painted sets for El Teatro Campesino; and members of the Royal Chicano Air Force (r caf ), including Ricardo Favela, José Montoya, Juanishi Orosco, and Esteban Villa, made posters and demonstrated in s upport of the boycotts. The form of this work evolved from both its subject and its context. Posters, murals, and bilingual public theater could easily communicate with agrarian and inner-­city communities throughout the Southwest. ­These forms could be reproduced and moved from place to place, taking with them strong graphic convictions in the tradition of the Mexican murals, the prints of José Guadalupe Posada, or the documentary photo­graphs of Agustín Víctor Casasola. The Chicano movement throughout the United States developed networks for promoting its goals. In March 1969, over fifteen hundred ­people from almost one hundred organ­izations attended the Ārst Chicano Liberation Youth Conference in Den-

ver, or­ga­nized by the Crusade for Justice u ­ nder the leadership of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales. An enterprising manifesto, “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” was drawn up at the conference and called for social, po­liti­cal, and cultural organ­izing at the grassroots level. An ideology of cultural nationalism evolved from the concept of Aztlán, a new Chicano nation named for the ancient Nahuatl term for the territory now encompassing the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Aztlán, the legendary birthplace of the Aztecs, was a m eta­phor intended to unify the Chicano movement and establish a new cultural identity in the national consciousness. “However romantic it may appear ­today,” writes Jorge Klor de Alva, “the ‘Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,’ a­ dopted by hundreds of young Chicanos and Chicanas . . . ​responded to the material conditions of the time, and although not class based, it articulated a program for the ‘liberation’ of a national minority.”7 El Plan asserted that Chicanos ­were a nation historically, spiritually, and culturally. By 1968 artists in vari­ous communities w ­ ere meeting to discuss new possibilities. The Mexican American Liberation Art Front (mal af ) grew out of informal weekly meetings in O akland that included artists Manuel Hernandez Trujillo, José Montoya, Malaquías Montoya, Esteban Villa, René Yañez, and Vietnam veteran Rupert García. García, who began silk-­screening prints and joined in the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War at San Francisco State College, remembers mal af as “a cultural statement of the need to create a space to exhibit our perception, ­because other galleries ­weren’t ­going to do it and so we had to develop other options.”8 One result of ­these meetings was the creation in 1970 of the Galería de la Raza in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. The Galería was one of the Ārst and most impor­tant exhibition spaces for Chicano and Latino art. “It was an alternative to the system that existed at the time,” says René Yañez. “Museums w ­ ere not exhibiting Chicanos, galleries ­were not exhibiting Chicanos, so we felt we had to take our destiny into

Lo o king fo r Alter na tives  ·  23

our own hands.”9 Artists began creating centros in Chicano communities across the United States. ­These included the Mechicano Art Center (1969) in L os Angeles, the Centro Cultural de la Raza (1970) in Sa n Diego, the Centro de Artistes Chicanos (1972) in Sacramento, and the Movimiento Artístico del Río Salado (1976) in Phoenix, among many ­others. Major cultural components of the Chicano movement emerged on several fronts, including teatros, poster workshops, poetry, dance, and mural painting groups. Centros evolved into or­ ga­nized nonproĀt funding agencies that provided space for workshops, galleries, and per­for­mances. Some, like the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego, ­were decorated with murals depicting narrative cultural histories of the movement and its relation to communities. Murals ­were also integral to community organ­izing. For example, San Diego’s Chicano Park became a rallying point for the neighborhood of Logan Heights in 1970 when residents occupied land ­under the Coronado Bridge. They w ­ ere protesting an interstate freeway, including the bridge approach, which cut through the neighborhood and displaced over Āve thousand families. ­After negotiations to build a park on the site failed, residents manning bulldozers arrived to build their own park. The Chicano community and the city Ā­nally reached an agreement: the city agreed to purchase the site from the state and develop a community park. In 1973 artists initiated work on a long-­term proj­ect to paint murals covering the massive pillars holding up the bridge and the concrete abutments of the freeway approaches. Hundreds of artists from across California and beyond worked on huge paintings that depict a w ide variety of images relevant to the Logan Heights community and to the Chicano movement. “The takeover of that land under­neath the bridge in the barrio, that was a po­liti­cal expression,” says arts administrator Verónica Enríque. “That was an expression of the community saying ‘Hey, w ­ e’re not g­ oing to take it anymore. ­We’re ­going to decide what’s ­going to happen with this land.’ And out of that po­liti­cal expression came cultural expression.”10 24  ·  philip br o o kman

Neighborhood residents reclaimed the land for a community park, while murals celebrated and marked their action. V “La Batalla Está Aquí!” —­C HICANO MOVEMENT RALLYING CRY

The 1960s are primarily remembered for two overwhelming passages in American history that remain with us ­today: the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. President Lyndon Johnson’s G ­ reat Society Āzzled as its money went to pay for a co lonial war halfway around the world. Like a wraith, Vietnam is recalled t­ oday in a litany of visual art, poetry, dramatic lit­er­a­ture, novels, and Ālms that paved new ave­nues on the road to remembrance. Chicano art is an art of protest, in part ­because it developed from a po­liti­cal movement and in part ­because its roots stem from histories that tell of exile to the margins. Yet during the 1960s and 1970s Chicano artists began to rethink their relationship to history and their potential role in reshaping the ­future. In the wake of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War they began to question the politics, vio­lence, and psychological racism that created the ever-­present border separating them from Mexico and from their cultural roots. From New Year’s Day to Christmas 1965, the United States doubled its commitment in Vietnam from 200,000 t o 400,000 troops. Two and one-­ half years before the Tet Offensive, which helped turn public opinion against the war, Vietnam became Amer­i­ca’s primary foreign policy obligation. An abnormally skewed percentage of soldiers ­were minorities—­blacks, American Indians, and Chicanos. According to Ralph Guzmán’s classic study “Mexican American Casualties in Vietnam,” 20  ­percent of American casualties in V ietnam between 1961 and 1969 ­were Chicanos or other Latinos, who at the time accounted for only 10 to 12 ­percent of the population of the southwestern states and a much smaller percentage of the

country as a w ­ hole.11 Chicanos w ­ ere ­dying in the war at a far greater rate than was the general population. Additionally, Chicanos found that racism was as prevalent in the military as on the home front.12 Vietnam politicized Chicano communities throughout the United States, prompting them to or­ga­nize in protest of the war. Colonial in nature, Amer­i­ca’s invasion of Vietnam was like the invasion of Mexico in 1848, an idea that turned many Chicanos against the war. The issue of self-­determination was impor­tant in Vietnam, as it was in Los Angeles. United States involvement in t he Vietnam War helped spearhead and motivate the ­later development of the Chicano movement. In December 1969, a small group of Chicanos at the University of California, Los Angeles, or­ga­nized one of the Ārst Chicano antiwar demonstrations. In March 1970, ideas for calling a National Chicano Moratorium crystalized at the Second Annual Chicano Youth Conference in Denver. In addition to antiwar strategies, Chicanos at the conference discussed the implementation of “El Plan Espiritual de Azt lán” and clariĀed the signiĀcance of art to the Chicano movement. The plan stated, “Raza art must reflect our heart and . . . ​our ancient heart has its own symbols.”13 Local moratoria ­were scheduled throughout the country, and a major national demonstration was planned for August  29, 1970, in Laguna Park, Los Angeles. According to Rodolfo Acuña, “On the morning of the 29th, contingents from all over the United States arrived at the staging area in E ast Los Angeles. By noon, the participants numbered between 20,000 and 30,000.  . . . ​Placards read: ‘¡Raza sí, guerra no!’ ‘Aztlán: Love It or Leave It!’ ”14 Los Angeles Police Department (l a pd) officers and Los Angeles County sheriff ’s deputies attacked the peaceful demonstration, spraying crowds with tear gas, arresting p ­ eople, and chaining them together. One of the most contentious events occurred when police Āred tear gas canisters point-­blank into the Silver Dollar Bar, killing kmex- ­t v reporter Ruben Salazar, who was covering the moratorium and who had been scrutinized by the l a pd for his investigation into

the deaths of two Mexican ­brothers at the hands of l a pd officers. The Chicano antiwar movement emerged contiguous to the civil rights and student movements. On college campuses, may o (the Mexican American Youth Organ­ization) and MEChA (El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Azt lán, the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán) w ­ ere at the forefront of organ­izing against the war. Many Chicano organ­izations continued to demonstrate, including La Raza Unida party, a po­liti­cal voting rights group developed in Texas by José Angel Gutiérrez to help Chicanos gain po­liti­ cal, social, and economic power during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Vietnam War and the antiwar movement helped Chicanos realize that their Āght was indeed at home, in their own communities, rather than ten thousand miles away in a steamy, foreign jungle. Their Āght was for civil rights and education, as well as for social equality. VI In 1492, an Aztec sailor named Noctli Europzin Tezpoca departed from the port of Minatitlán with a small flotilla of wooden rafts. 3 months ­later, he accidentally discovered a new continent & named it “Europzin” ­after himself. In November 1512, the omnipotent Aztecs began the conquest of “Europzin” in the name of thy ­father Tezcatlipoca lord of bloody misconceptions. —­G UILLERMO GÓMEZ-­P EÑA

The role of language and semantics is impor­ tant for developing any paradigm with which to understand the contradiction between images and ste­reo­types in di verse cultural viewpoints. Prob­lems of intercultural communication arise in the interaction between disparate cultures. When statements or languages differ from the

Lo o king fo r Alter na tives  ·  25

actions they describe, institutions that wield power gain or maintain that power and control over the repre­sen­ta­tion of ­those actions. It is difĀcult to understand this paradox on a conscious level ­because the cultural references are often unconscious. Chicano artists, in developing new cultural structures, have worked to make ­these references conscious. They have subverted the original meaning of much American my­thol­ogy, superimposing a n ew language on conflicting images of popu­lar culture. Many early Chicano murals inserted images of pre-­Columbian my­ thol­ogy next to Christian iconography and repre­ sen­ta­tions of con­temporary social realities. For example, in the early 1970s Artes Guadalupanos de Aztlán in Sa nta Fe and Los Toltecas en Azt lán in San Diego combined ancient and modern depictions of Indian cosmology, workers, and social injustice in t heir murals. In the tradition of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, t­ hese works w ­ ere painted in highly vis­i­ble public spaces such as schools, community centers, and streets. If dif­fer­ent cultures speak dif­fer­ent languages and embrace divergent views of the world, the layers of understanding between them become stratiĀed and open to multiple interpretations. The language or discourse used to clarify such illusions can be a s ubjective illusion in i tself. The symbols and signiĀers of culture, embedded in both language and images, are developed through the common understanding of a subject or object. Without common references, subjectivity breaks down. This dichotomy of symbolism is used in ad vertising, news media, and politics to persuade or mislead a c hosen audience for private or public gain. To ­counter the illusionism found in m ediated images that confront p ­ eople daily, poets such as Alurista, José Montoya, and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and playwrights such as Luis Valdez combined two or more languages and hallucinatory images from the past and pres­ ent to emphasize the bilingual, bicultural nature of the Chicano experience. Valdez personiĀed archetypes to stand in f or power­ful, threatening po­liti­cal structures. El Draft conspires with 26  ·  philip br o o kman

General Defense to target Chicano communities in Valdez’s play Vietnam Campesino (1970). The general asks satirically, “What’s the ­matter with you, Draft? ­Haven’t I t old you to stick to the minorities? ”15 Visual artists such as David Avalos subverted traditional folk symbolism to ­counter con­temporary media images. When Avalos painted a Border Patrol agent frisking an undocumented worker in p lace of a t raditional almanaque on his Donkey Cart Altar, he subverted cultural ste­reo­types to emphasize a co n­ temporary social prob­lem. Such confrontational strategies have provoked encounters between artists and viewers. When Avalos’s Donkey Cart was publicly exhibited in t he courtyard of the San Diego County Court­house, a f ederal judge ordered it conĀscated as a potential hiding place for terrorists. An ensuing court case and media coverage thrust the mixed messages embedded in the work into newspapers and onto tele­vi­sion screens across the country. Symbols that maintain the truth are encoded with multiple meanings. When altered, turned upside down, or merged with additional multicultural signiĀers, the symbolism of public discourse can strike the nerves of a mindful, mediated audience. It may incite action or propose new ways of thinking. The work of many Chicano poets, playwrights, and visual artists evolved the wry ability to combine signs, symbols, and language culled from pre-­Columbian my­thol­ogy, Mexican history, and the streets of Amer­i­ca’s multicultural cities. Peppered with a bilingual understanding of what it means to exist in two cultures, they created alternative, dissonant voices in the mainstream chorus. VII The ideals of democracy and individuality are tenuous in our world. They are associated with risky social experiments that have a short history and heritage. The crucial issue of our time is ­whether this history and heritage can be extended and strengthened. —­C ORNEL WEST

Chicano art, like the work of other Third World artists, helped establish a context in w hich anyone could create ideas from their surroundings and therefore illustrate their lives. Chicano artists are still seeking new deĀnitions with which to push the bound­aries of ­these forms of social interaction in t heir work. Their creative voices have been heard in a n umber of unique ways: through visual works that speak about social ­issues and are exhibited in community galleries, centros, universities, and now major museums throughout the United States, Latin Amer­i­ca, and Eu­rope; in h omegrown theaters that speak several languages, presented Ārst on rural picket lines, then carried through the Āelds on flatbed trucks, and now Ālmed for tele­vi­sion and transmitted by satellite across international borders; in murals painted on neighborhood walls, for community centers, schools, clinics, and centros, and now photographed and reproduced in newspapers, weekly news magazines, and Holly­ wood Ālms; in individual forms of expression such as customized cars, home altars, gardens, and devotional imagery that still Āll the personal domain yet are sometimes transformed to rest in the marble halls of museums. Some of the art created in a community context, symbolized by the creation of centros and teatros, has now captured the popu­lar imagination of the international art world. The self-­deĀned roots of the Chicano art movement created a f oundation on which to build new and broader deĀnitions. Once Chicano artists penetrated the layers of cultural hierarchy previously denied them, this platform helped support the creation of new multidisciplinary collaborations between artists. In the mid-1970s, the Los Angeles artist group Asco (whose original members included Harry Gamboa Jr., Patssi Valdez, Gronk, and Willie Herrón) combined murals, graphics, writing, per­for­mance, photography, Ālm, and video to redeĀne their relationship to cultural repre­sen­ta­tion and production. Expressionist murals, Ārst painted on neighborhood walls and in community centers, came to life as their unique concept of “painting as the-

ater” transformed the streets into sets for narrative tableaux. Traditional forms w ­ ere freed from the constraints of gallery and theater space, as living murals emerged from walls and paraded the streets, animating ideas in a co mmunity setting. “The border is not a C hicano issue,” says David Avalos. “It’s not a Mexican issue. . . . ​If you believe it’s one region then every­body is making that culture, and we ­shouldn’t be making it in isolation.”16 In 1984, Avalos brought together a group of Chicano, Mexican, and other artists to form the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo. baw/t af was created to initiate an ongoing cross-­cultural dialogue on border-­ related issues. Sponsored by the Centro Cultural de la Raza, the original members w ­ ere Avalos, Isaac Artenstein, Sara-­Jo Berman, Jude Eberhard, Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, and Michael Schnorr. Their multidisciplinary strategies ranged from theater and per­for­mance to journalism, video, and site-­speciĀc installation, all motivated by a common concern for the politics, my­thol­ogy, and prevalent ste­reo­types of the U.S.-­Mexico border region. Their work reflects the concept of creatively reinventing the ­future of the border, effectively erasing its status as a po­liti­cal division. baw/t af has integrated a uniq ue, shifting mix of artists who, in creating their work, point to a new diversity of cultures evolving at the intersection of old ones. Their work deconstructs racial ste­reo­types and subverts the notion of cultural and po­liti­cal pluralism, eliminating the concept of boundary. For example, End of the Line (1986) was performed in California on Columbus Day at the beach where the chain-­link border runs into the PaciĀc Ocean. Performers ­were elaborately costumed as ste­reo­typical border characters such as la migra, el nopal, and the surfer. Mirrors on both sides of the fence w ­ ere shattered, breaking reflected ste­reo­types and meta­phor­ically erasing the border. Silhouettes of the three ships that brought Columbus to the “New World” went up in smoke, and corn was shared by beachgoers on both sides of the border, a ritual that brought ­people together. Lo o king fo r Alter na tives  ·  27

FIG. 1.1. Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos, Welcome to Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation, 1988. Photo­graph by Elizabeth Sisco. Image courtesy of the artists.

The self-­reflexive nature of much American art during the late 1980s is deĀned not by creative artists or communities but by business and media interests in ser­vice of commodiĀcation. As artist Jeff Koons states, “It’s basically the medium that deĀnes p ­ eople’s perceptions of the world. . . . ​The media deĀnes real­ity.”17 Art from the Third World is becoming another resource to be exploited, like South African gold or Mexican oil. To turn this pro­cess around means reversing and redeĀning the media images and ste­reo­types that hold artists in their ser­vice. This inversion, it turns out, was precisely the meaning of the strug­gle carried out by many Chicano artists between 1960 and 1990. If ­today’s postmodern versions of appropriation in the arts still maintain the colonialist structures of the past, then artists must work to break down and subvert this pro­cess and its attendant theoretical framework. Chicano artists may provide a model. “The current Latino and Asian immigration to the U.S. is the direct result of international conflicts between the so-­called ‘First’ and ‘Third Worlds,’ ” writes Guillermo Gómez-­Peña. “The colonized cultures are sliding into the space of the colonizer, and in d ­ oing so, they are redeĀning its borders and its culture.”18 In the late 1980s, artists David Avalos, James Luna, Elizabeth Sisco, Deborah Small, and Louis Hock came together in dif­fer­ent combinations to collaborate on a variety of proj­ects in San Diego. They formed intercultural co­ali­tions that promptly took on issues of racism and immigration in the 28  ·  philip br o o kman

city, using advertising as a model, as well as per­ for­mance and installation techniques, to create their work in public spaces (Āg. 1.1).19 In New York City, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. began working with inner-­city kids in collaborations that taught intellectual and creative skills. In 1989, New York media artist Shu Lea Cheang brought together another multicultural group to confront racial stereotyping humorously at a “last supper” cabaret in her video installation Color Schemes. Collaboration among artists from dif­fer­ent cultures has become a p redominant theme. “The value of cultural forms foreign to one par­tic­u­lar culture lies in their ability to foster and provide a language for the restlessness of individuals or groups existing within that culture,” writes Timothy Maliqualim Simone. “Exposure to this diversity provides the momentum necessary for the culture to continue being itself by exceeding itself.”20 In the 1990s, the collaborative prototype of artists from dif­fer­ent cultures working together in the creative process—­forming and discussing an understanding of commonalities and differences—­ may well be the principal means of reversing existing colonial models in American art. Notes This chapter was originally published in Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castilo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­ Bejarano, exhibition cata­log (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991), 181–93.

Section epigraphs: (1) Amalia Mesa-­Bains, interview with Philip Brookman, Amy Brookman, and Juventino Esparza, San Francisco, October 29, 1962, Califas: Chicano Art and Culture in California, Califas Archival Collection, Colección Tloque Nahuaque, University of California, Santa Barbara, book 2. The Califas Archival Collection contains interviews and videotape documentation compiled by Amy Brookman and Philip Brookman during their production of Mi Otro Yo, a video documentary about Chicano art in California, distributed by Cinewest Productions, San Diego, 1988. (2) James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 16. (3) JohnYau, “Official Policy: ­Toward the 1990s with the Whitney Biennial,” Arts Magazine, September 1989, 51. (4) José Montoya, “Lulac Cadillac,” performed by the Trío Casindio and the Royal Chicano Air Force on the ­album Chicano ­Music All Day, at the Centro de Artistas Chicanos, Sacramento, 1985. (5)“The ­Battle Is ­Here” was a rallying cry for persons in the Chicano movement who opposed the Vietnam War. See Lea Ybarra, “Perceptions of Race and Class among Chicano Vietnam Veterans,” Vietnam Generation 1, no. 2 (spring 1989): 69–92. (6) Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, “Califas,” Mi Otro Yo. (7) Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments (­Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 135. 1. David Avalos, interview with the author, October 12, 1983,Mi Otro Yo. 2. David Avalos, interview with the author, August 13, 1983,Mi Otro Yo, and Califas: Chicano Art and Culture, book 5. 3. Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “Califas, California Chicano Art and Its Social Background,” unpublished manuscript (Santa Cruz: Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, University of California, 1982), 2. 4. For example, Malcolm X or­ga­nized the Organ­ ization of Afro-­American Unity in 1964 to aid black communities in gaining economic in­de­pen­dence. 5. Luis Valdez, interview with the author, October 19, 1982,Mi Otro Yo. 6. Luis Valdez, interview with the author, October 19, 1982, Califas: Chicano Art and Culure, book 2. 7. J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “Aztlán, Borinquen, and Hispanic Nationalism in the United States,” in Aztlán:

Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rodolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomeli (Albuquerque, NM: El Norte Publications, 1989), 150–51. 8. Rupert García, interview with the author, O ­ ctober 14, 1983, Califas: Chicano Art and Culture, book 5. 9. René Yañez, interview with the author, October 29, 1982, Califas: Chicano Art and Culture, book 2. 10. Verónica Enríque, interview with the author, ­August 12, 1983, Califas: Chicano Art and Culture, book 4. 11. Ralph Guzmán, “Mexican American Casualties in Vietnam,” La Raza 1, no. 1 (1971): 12. 12.Ybarra, “Perceptions of Race and Class,” 74. 13.“¿Que Pasó en Denver?,” La Verdad (San Diego), April 1970, 6. 14. Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied Amer­i­ca: The Chicano’s Strug­gle ­toward Liberation (San Francisco, CA: Canfield Press, 1972), 258. 15. Luis Valdez, “Vietnam Campesino,” Actos (Fresno, CA: Cucaracha Press 1971), 117. 16. David Avalos, interview with Margarita Nieto, June 16 and July 7, 1988, Archives of American Art, Southern California Research Center, Los Angeles, 44. 17. Jeff Koons, quoted in Thomas Crow, “Versions of Pastoral in Some Recent American Art,” in American Art ­of the Late 1980s: The Binational, ed. Trevor Fairbrother, David Joselit, and Elizabeth Sussman (Boston: Institute of Con­temporary Art / Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1988), 29. 18. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, “The Multicultural ­Paradigm,” Hi Per­for­mance 12, no. 3 (fall 1989): 20. 19. From 1987 to 1990, David Avalos, James Luna, Deborah Small, and William Weeks collaborated on a proj­ect and publication titled California Mission Days; in April 1989, David Avalos, Louis Hock, Elizabeth Sisco, and Deborah Small collaborated on the Martin Luther King Billboard proj­ect; in November 1989, David Avalos, Louis Hock, Elizabeth Sisco, Deborah Small, William Weeks, Scott Kessler, Carla Kirkwood, and Bart Sher collaborated on Red Emma Returns. 20. Timothy Maliqualim Simone, About Face: Race in Postmodern Amer­ic­ a (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1989), 195.

Lo o king fo r Alter na tives  ·  29

mel ca sa s

2. Con Safo (C/S) Artists  ·  1971 A Contingency ­Factor

* We are an act of provocation * We are a point of contention * We are visual abrasion * We are iconic friction * We are visual projections for the Chicanos * We are the primordial engrams of Chicanismo * We are artists. . . . ​C/S

Invariably we are asked: Are you Chicano artists? This question is but the proof of the melting pot fallacy. Thus, how can we be other­wise but Chicanos. Physically, psychologically, and philosophically we are viewed as outsiders and programmed to consider ourselves as such. The outcome has been disassociation through introspection and forced personal evaluation. The C/S (C on Safo) approach is based on the concept of establishing an identity through visual means. The hope is that visual congruity ­will in turn give us psychic harmony—­a statement of our evolving condition and position as Chicanos. Artists are bound to the obligation of interpreting their environment and reacting to it. Chicano artists are duty bound to act as spokesmen and give visual real­ity to the Chicano vision. We are iconoclasts, not by

choice but by circumstances—­out to destroy ste­ reo­types and demolish visual clichés. We hope, in the pro­cess, to encounter new pure forms that ­will act as a c atalyst for a v isual nascence and awaken the dormant Chicano potential. ­Because we are ­Chicanos we are not anti-­Anglo or anti-­ Mexicano. We are very cognizant of how they have failed us. We are prohuman and ­because of it we are chicanos . For this reason we feel the images produced by Chicano artists, to have any validity, must offer more than physical real­ity. The Chicano artist must be on guard against the proclivity to search for easy iconographic solutions. Chicano art must continue to engage itself with the profound experiences of its age—­this is the chicano a ge —­and man’s commitment to them. As Chicano artists we must edit out con­ temporary visual and psychological reactions to Chicanismo, and remember that how we h ­ andle visual space in our paintings w ­ ill reflect our concept of environmental freedom. ­There is a r e­sis­tance, from the Chicanos, against assimilation into a “pure” Mexican society and Anglo-­American society. Chicanismo is

the pro­cess of synthesis of t­ hese cultures in varying dosages as suits personal and group tastes. A pro­cess of cultural secession (social internalization pro­cess) must be initiated in order to allow us to begin to view ourselves with our own eyes and arrive at our own deĀnition about our state of existence and express the nature of our concern for this state. Cultural genocide (aggression) has been inflicted upon the Chicano, however t­ here is now

a nascent awareness that has spawned a flurry of cultural activity in an attempt to resuscitate and regenerate a wounded culture. Note This chapter was originally published as Mel Casas, “Artist: A Contingency ­Factor,” in Brown Paper Report (San Antonio, TX: Con Safo Group, 1971).

Co n Safo (C/S) Ar tis t s  ·  31

gilber t sanchez l uj án

3. El Arte del Chicano  ·  1971 “The Spirit of the Experience”

The public has had difficulties in grasping the essence of Chicano artists who have their roots in the Chicano experience. Chicano art is a label for an art concept with a common culture. ­People have been unable to accept that Chicano art is the reflection of the entire Chicano experience ­because they have projected certain ste­reo­typed notions into the concept, and in s o ­doing, denied it intrinsic value and validity. The prob­lems inherent in the development of Chicano art and the Chicano artist are largely that of overcoming (1) the destruction pro­cess that the U.S.A. institutions have placed on the Chicano identity, and (2) the inability to affirm a unique culture as is manifest in t he ­great reluctance of most Chicanos to say “Soy Chicano” with pride and with conviction. Very few Chicanos who have grown up in the barrios and disciplined themselves as artists have used their Chicano experience to make personal or universal visual statements. They have been taught to mistrust and to place no value on the unique lifestyle of the barrio, and have instead modeled their art expression ­after other world

art concepts that institutions, schools, and critics consider to be within the accepted code. What is overlooked is that Chicano art only substantiates universal art princi­ples via the par­tic­u­lar Chicano worldview. The development of Chicano art has been additionally hampered by the notion that the life experiences of Chicanos are ­either Mexican or U.S.A. Anglo. It is not perceived that the ­actual Chicano experience has its own vitality and dynamics. This polarity that ­people have assigned to the Chicano identity has also caused the public incorrectly to perceive Chicano art as being ­either Mexican influenced or Anglo influenced and has thus negated the cultural diversity that the Chicano is experiencing. The Chicano and his visual order has historical roots and does not exist encapsuled from the influence of the mass media that reaches deeply into the lives of all ­those who live in any industrialized society. ­There are some who would say that the Chicano experience is lacking in ­those ele­ments that lend themselves to universal artistic expressions. This is a narrow and shortsighted view. One has

FIG. 3.1. Gilbert Sanchez Luján, “El Arte del Chicano: ‘The Spirit of the Experience,’ ” Con/Safos 7 (1971): 11.

only to examine the barrio to see that the ele­ ments to choose from are as inĀnite as any culture allows. The Chicano has always been involved in a cultural pro­cess that can be properly looked upon as art. Some Chicano artists are already reevaluating ­these common cultural ele­ments and transforming them into vis­i­ble and tangible images and art forms. Examine Chicano folk art such as sculptured ranflas, the calligraphy of wall writings (graffiti), and the gardens of our abuelos. More reĀned examples of Chicano art would be sculptured menudo bones, drawings on tortillas, vato loco portraits, woodcuts of famous Chicanos, and so on.

34  ·  gilber t sanchez l uj án

Figure 3.1 depicts some examples of the Chicano visual experience. Th ­ ese may be considered valid artistic sources on which the Chicano artist should elaborate. Note This chapter was originally published as Gilbert Sanchez Luján, “El Arte del Chicano: ‘The Spirit of the Experience,’ ” Con/Safos 7 (1971): 11. “El Arte del Chicano” was made available by the Magu Legacy Proj­ect in the interest of research and scholarship on Chicano arts and culture. For more information on Gilbert “Magu” Luján’s lasting legacy, please visit www​.­magulandia​.­org.

car l os almaraz

4. Notes on an Aesthetic Alternative  ·  1973

I propose an art that is not private property, an art that ­will make other artists aware of their real duty as ­human beings. I p ropose an art that is not only an inspiration and an education but also an art form that is aggressive and hostile ­toward pres­ent bourgeois standards. I do n ot believe in “quality” b ­ ecause it’s only a monstrous device by which ­those who can afford “quality” rule ­those who cannot. “Quality” beneĀts collectors and museums, not artists. It enslaves artists. I would like to see “quality” replaced with quantity—in a true, dialectical fashion. This ­will devalue the art object and make masterpieces obsolete; t­ here ­will thus be nothing ­really unique in art and, hopefully, no art history as we know it presently. For Chicanos, and all working-­class ­people, art must be more than just a m ­ atter of cultural identity. It must be destructive! (Better ­here than on the street.) El Grito must be heard around the world. It must be loud and con mucha fuerza. El enemigo no es el gabacho, mas bien es su bankamericard, su swimming pools, su arte, y sus guerras que esclavizan el mundo. Pero se le está acabando su fuel y como dice la cancion, la cucaracha ya no puede

caminar porque no tiene marijuana que fumar. Nosotros, los Chicanos, live in t he stomach of el monstruo y aquí le vamos a dar mucho gas para que cuando eche su pedo se le rompa su fundio. ¿Qué no? (. . . ​with ­great force. The ­enemy is not the gringo, but his Bank of Amer­i­ca card, his swimming pools, his art, and his wars that enslave the world. But he is r­ unning out of fuel, and like the song says, the cockroach cannot walk anymore ­because he ­doesn’t have any marijuana to smoke. We, the Chicanos, live in the stomach of the monster and ­here we are ­going to give it a lot of gas b ­ ecause when he farts he breaks his asshole. Why not?) I used to believe that intellectuals had it together, and that workers and campesinos w ­ ere dirty, but now I’m beginning to see, as I’m beginning to know workers and campesinos, that in real­ity it is ­really bourgeois intellectuals who are dirty. They do n ot like our way and make it seem shabby, but it is r­ eally their way, their system that is hopelessly in error. They have enslaved us with

FIG. 4.1. Carlos Almaraz, Mechicano Art Center exhibition invitation with manifesto “Notes on an Aesthetic Alternative,” Los Angeles, Mechicano Art Center, 1973.

tele­vi­sion, the En­glish language, and their credit system, and we continue to support it. ¡Basta! ¡Que se vayan a l a Chingada! El movimiento is our only hope. The movement is in t he factories, in t he Āelds, and in o ur homes. The artist must be part of it. He must make an art that is cheap, ­simple, but alive and relevant. An art for gente who ­can’t afford art—­like a corrida. An artist should not need a studio; his studio should be in his pocket, on the sidewalk, and in his mind. Let’s make an art that is only for ourselves, not for museums, not for posterity, and certainly not

36  ·  car l os almaraz

for art’s sake, but for mankind. Let’s make art that ­will cause a disturbance, a row, and maybe even a small revolution! Note This chapter was originally published as Carlos Almaraz, “Notes on an Aesthetic Alternative,” manifesto printed on a Mechicano Art Center exhibition invitation (Los Angeles: Mechicano Art Center, 1973). Reprinted with permission from the author’s estate.

mal a q uí a s mo nt o ya and lezlie salk

o witz- m ­ o nt o ya

5. A Critical Perspective on the State of Chicano Art  ·  1980

The course of the Chicano art movement over the last de­cade stemmed from an awareness that was taking place throughout the United States. The upheaval of the late 1960s, the dissatisfaction and revolt of the farmworkers, and the antiwar student movement made it pos­si­ble for many oppressed ­people to deĀne themselves in o pposition to a dominant culture. The term “Chicano” (and “Chicano art”) as it has come to be known ­today developed out of this social and po­liti­cal movement. In a capitalistic class system, with its economic and po­liti­cal conditions, art cannot be anything but a protest. Conquerors must surmount by m ­ ental, moral, or physical power the p ­ eople whom they desire to overcome. The American-­born Mexican in this imperialist country has been denied a language (by the school system) and an identity (by the portrayals of ste­reo­types), and has been made to feel ashamed and inferior (by psychological impositions). This has resulted in the suppression of a culture. The movement in the late 1960s made it pos­si­ble for Chicanos to look in another direction, away from the required

assimilation pro­cess that was to have enabled them to become “something better.” Along with this newfound liberation, art began to surface. It became an “art of liberation,” an “art of protest,” a “po­liti­cal art.” By the use of Indigenous symbols of the Chicano heritage, artists began to explain the strug­gle and necessity to unite ­behind it (see Āg. 5.1). Talleres (workshops) and centros (centers) started to form throughout the Southwest. They soon became meeting places for discussions on the far-­reaching effects of the po­liti­cal upheaval that was taking place within la raza. In Oakland, California, for example, the Mexican American Liberation Art Front (mal af ) was formed. mal af was a group of artists who attempted to analyze the social movement and po­liti­cal awareness that was taking place, the strug­gle, and the role of artists within that strug­gle. Up to this point ­there had been a t endency to form traditional, individualistic relationships within the mainstream art world. Artists aspired to become known and validated in museums and galleries. By coming to realize the po­liti­cal signiĀcance of

FIG. 5.1. Malaquías Montoya, Hombre Sin País, 1988. Lithograph. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chicano art and its unifying power, the Chicano artist awakened, perhaps for the Ārst time. The terms “Chicano,” raza, and la raza de bronce ­were seen as po­liti­cal identiĀcations of which to be proud. The solidarity resulting from the Chicano art movement gave an understanding of an identity and a belonging. In the past, Chicanos had felt alienated from the traditional study of Western Eu­ro­pean art. It now became clear why Chicanos w ­ ere inclined to feel so dissatisĀed. Chicano artists became aware that o ­ thers felt the same way and that art stemmed from similar experiences and common traditions. It was felt that la raza should be recognized by its uniqueness and that the differences should be separated from the dominant culture. Chicano pride, and the right to express it, became impor­tant. Throughout the course of ­these discussions, artists ­were seen as an impor­tant part of the movement. Artists had to become the producers of visual education. In order to decentralize the arts from the universities, artists had to move their studios out into the communities. Further discussions expressed the necessity of working in the barrios and the importance of using art as a social tool, as a weapon (although at times crude) to combat the circumstances that up to this point in time had made Chicanos feel so alienated from mainstream society. A deĀnition of Chicano art was never intended ­because this would have restricted the artist. It was felt that through the discussions that took place, with their po­liti­cal content, beliefs, and direction, an understanding would result, a frame of reference for strug­gle and commitment to all oppressed ­people. As long as this could be identiĀed and clearly understood, only a ­people’s art, an art of strug­gle, could surface. Chicano art began to have a p ower­ful impact. Posters, murals, exhibitions, and conferences emerged in t he communities, depicting unacceptable conditions and the strug­gle to improve them. Many ­people, by identiĀcation and implementation, embraced ­these philosophies. Middle-­class-­oriented Chicanos in t he art realm, however, without speciĀc guidelines or set deĀnitions to follow, started to conflict with what

was being pursued. Though they w ­ ere able to identify with Chicano art culturally as well as nationally, they did not fully realize the po­liti­cal implications of Chicano art as a “­people’s art,” an “art of protest.” The expression of the strug­gle of nuestra raza began to dissolve. Instead of experiencing a pro­cess of individual change and expressing that personal transformation, many Chicanos started to emulate Anglo society and thus started to divert the movement and what was basic to it. Furthermore, works by artists with very l­ittle knowledge of the craft or lacking technical skill ­were often accepted as valid simply b ­ ecause they ­were produced by Chicanos. Due to the lack of po­liti­cal sophistication and structure, mal af and other art groups w ­ ere not in a p osition to overrule or censure what was negative. Having come from the academies and universities where talk of “artistic freedom” took place, artists ­were not likely to be in conflict with this philosophy. Since they assumed this attitude was correct and did not foresee the conflict that would arise when the members of the dif­fer­ent generations began to communicate, the younger artists ­were provided with no guidelines. Attempts ­were made by communities and colleges to bring the two closer together by conducting workshops and ongoing dialogues in the barrios. The Chicano art movement continued on its own momentum, opening up to a series of conflicts and eventual dissipation. Artists worked hard for long hours within the community with ­little or no glory. Since they received l­ittle or no pay as well, the ever-­existing real­ity of subsistence for all artists in this country became increasingly hard to bear. The already diminishing romanticism of the earlier years began to fade. A ­ fter two or three years of protesting against the institutions that controlled art—­museums and galleries, colleges, government agencies, and publishers—­ because they perpetuated a p hilosophy that Chicano artists w ­ ere struggling against, t­ hese same artists agreed to become involved with them. When the doors of museums and galleries opened and invitations ­were extended, artists went ­running in, despite the fact that raza communities, which A Critical

Pers pective  ·  39

had been the original emphasis for the Chicano art movement, rarely frequented museums. The magnitude of the monster that had been the oppressor was not understood, and capitalism once again was able to conquer and reduce the ascending power that the Chicano artist had begun to acquire to an aesthetic and academic viewpoint. Chicano art became anything created by a person with a Spanish surname. For example, much of the artwork of the traveling show El Arte del Barrio was no dif­fer­ent from other art being produced in institutions by Anglos, including pop and funk art. Presented in t he name of Chicanismo, ­these forms w ­ ere given legitimacy. “Chican-­Anglo” became the rage, galleries became galerías, museums became museos, theaters became teatros and in all but a few cases became brown façades, puppets for the ruling class feeding the newly rising brown bourgeoisie. For reasons of personal advancement many p ­ eople became involved in t his rising brown class. ­These Chicanos, unable to make it in an Anglo-­American society and assigned to the status of second-­class citizens, felt it was necessary. As a result of ­these actions, ­people realized that o ­ thers ­were protesting simply b ­ ecause of being excluded, and that when change was talked about, a purely personal one was meant. The system, recognizing the strength as well as the weaknesses of the movement, put into operation the necessary mechanisms to conquer and control it. The pro­cess of attempting to weave the movement into the system’s capitalistic fabric implied the pro­cess of unraveling as well. Although many of the topics, themes, and images of Chicano artists are still coming from a Chicano perspective, they no longer have the same meaning as they did when Chicanismo was Ārst on the rise. Now interpreted by someone ­else or looked at for its academic prominence, much of the work has ­little or no impact and has lost its po­liti­cal signiĀcance and strength. Though the current trend of popularizing Chicano art has robbed it of its original impact, ­those individuals and a few centros still exist that continue to hold on to the primary goals. Among 40  ·  mo nt o ya and salk o witz- ­mo nt o ya

t­ hese are two distinct groups whose work is characterized by the original aspirations of the movement: elevating the consciousness of the communities. But due to the nature of the paths taken by each to achieve t­ hese ideals, ­these two groups are in conflict. One group, ­because of the lack of po­liti­cal apperception, tends to play with the system and what it has to offer. Through the traditional means of recognition (galleries, museums, tele­vi­sion, magazines), dedicated Chicano artists whose ­intentions are not opportunistic are recognized alongside Chicano artists who have t­ hese inclinations. Unlike the opportunists, whose goal is obviously personal recognition, ­there is a group of artists who believe that their art ­will beneĀt a wider scope of viewers by this participation in the traditional media. In most if not all cases, this ingenuous approach has caused their work to be consumed and its effectiveness is minimal according to the original goals. Many have been affected by the last fifteen years of struggling for survival and Ānd it difĀcult to understand a system that throws p ­ eople into competition with each other. Thus, the original goal of raising the level of consciousness is constantly sabotaged. Despite this real­ ity, ­after a mere fifteen years ­people are leaning ­toward the belief that Chicanos are ready for another stage in their development as artists: that of trying to achieve change through t­ hese power­ful institutions. It is at this par­tic­u­lar, impor­tant point that the two groups are divided. The strug­gle that is being waged should not be a ­matter of a few years but a lifelong commitment to a better humanity. At this point in history, the participatory approach is unrealistic. Though t­ here may be a degree of understanding and concern in the liberal sector of the ruling class, when the realities of “the concerns of Chicanos” pres­ent themselves, “the concerns of the ruling class” surface as well. Except for a few exceptions and minor f­ avors, they are unwilling to consider a truly just society in which every­one beneĀts from what it has to offer. When it means giving up some of the wealth in

order to establish a reasonable balance, an interchange cannot even be considered. The other group, which continues to work in a positive direction, understands the system and its dangers and minimizes its participation within it. This group functions as the intermediary between the po­liti­cal action organ­izations and the ideals of the Chicano movement. It creates art responsible to this purpose. Th ­ ese artists acknowledge the importance of lending art to the po­liti­cal strug­ gle that is taking place, from announcements on posters and in leaflets to widespread illustrations and exhibits in educational and cultural institutions, community centers, and agencies, hoping to reach the apo­liti­cal population as well as ­those who realize the need for change within society. ­These Chicano artists continue to live up to the original intentions of the movement as artists and community leaders. As living examples or role models exemplifying the original aspirations of Chicano ­people, ­these artists may accomplish many dif­fer­ent ­things besides their art. It is still apparent that the barrios (workers, church groups, schools) have not been educated enough. Many are still unaware that community artists and exhibitions exist. It remains the purpose of this group of artists to continue to work ­toward this end. The plastic arts, theater, poetry, and dance have helped propel the strug­gle and have brought the Chicano movement into international focus. They have created uniĀcation speciĀcally with Latin Amer­i­ca and other nations of the Third World. Through increased understanding of domestic issues, Chicanos have been able to empathize with the p ­ eople of Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, South Africa, and other countries. Artwork, especially the poster, began to serve as a bridge between ­those strug­gles. Chicano p ­ eople who view t­ hese visual expressions began to recognize that within this perspective Chicanos w ­ ere not an isolated culture that had failed within this imperialist society but one in unity with ­others, who, in varying degrees, w ­ ere also oppressed. The movement came to mean the strug­gle of all Third World and oppressed ­people.

Art that is produced in conscious opposition to the art of the ruling class and ­those who control it has, in most cases, been co-opted. It has lost its effectiveness as visual education working in re­sis­tance to cultural imperialism and the cap­i­ tal­ist use of art for its market value. It is not easy to contest an all-­powerful system that pres­ents an image of the Chicano-­Mexicano as having assimilated through the mass media that reaches the homes of most of the population. Chicano artists who allow themselves to become involved in ­these media, often unconsciously, end up cutting the throats of other Chicanos. As Chicanos become more and more sucked into the system, which is pos­si­ble only through assimilation, it ­will eventually convince them, by giving them more and more recognition, that to reach millions through its media is the better course. Though the two groups discussed above work side by side in our communities and in our colleges and universities as educators of young Chicanos, the division centering on methods of exposure has become particularly dangerous. Many young Chicanos have not experienced the trajectory of the past. The young receive messages/propaganda through the educational system as well as the mass media. Communities have already been bombarded with and influenced by mainstream mass media propaganda. If participation through the same channels occurs, then of course the more power­ful, having the money for greater exposure, ­will dominate. The danger brought on by this participation is that it validates ­these channels, a situation that results in contradiction if the ideal is still that of opposition. Though some feel that the exposure has been successful and has helped to create a better ac­cep­tance, to open up jobs, and so on, in real­ity it has given the system another tool for paciĀcation, another vehicle by which to “keep Chicanos in their place.” Chicanos who are unable to consider this dichotomy and do not wish to listen to ­those who do not participate have already begun to be recognized by the system and are beneĀting from it. This conflict can only make it very hard for new artists. As the two models are in A Critical

Pers pective  ·  41

opposition, it is very difficult for the educational pro­cess to gain momentum. Chicanos cannot claim to be oppressed by a system and yet want validation by its critics as well as by the communities. Chicanos who open up art, poetry, and theater to criticism are attacked by the critics as producing “folk art or craft,” “lacking sophistication,” and “having meaning only among Chicanos.” Th ­ ese slanderous comments again succeed in m aking Chicanos feel inferior and at the same time cause some to react with anger by attempting to gain that “sophisticated recognition” and very ac­cep­tance of a ruling class against which the strug­gle is waged. It ­will be a v ictory when Chicano communities Ānd Chicano artists a success ­because they are viewed as spokespersons and citizens of humanity, and their visual expressions viewed as an ­extension of themselves. Also presently affecting the arts is the establishment of art centers and murals within the barrios that often stem from ­those institutional sources such as government and corporate grants that control the neighborhood art proj­ects by providing funds for their encouragement. The pretense is to reduce racial and social tensions by providing a centro where ­people can work together in “bettering and servicing the barrio” or by funding a mural to enable artists to “decorate the barrio.” In real­ity what is happening is that the Ānancial powers have succeeded in diverting ­people’s attention from real issues and prob­lems in the barrios and in society. Instead of continuing to explain through their art the existing conditions and how to change them, as a r esult of ­these power­ful institutions Chicano artists are competing among themselves for the diminutive funds made available. Once again they are allowing themselves to become subservient to the dominant culture. The power structure cannot only afford it but continues to maintain its control by ­these paciĀcation methods. A movement whose base was to break the yoke of the evils of imperialism has again been seized by capitalism, now ­under the guise of “equal opportunity.” In most cases, in o rder to obtain 42  ·  mo nt o ya and salk o witz- ­mo nt o ya

and maintain ­these grants, artists must produce according to the “guidelines” set within t­ hose “agreements.” It is absurd to consider that a program is ­going to give an artist money to deface or destroy it. Inherent in the capitalistic system is the condition that u ­ nless a person has “made it” within the art world, it is necessary to strug­gle and compete with o ­ thers ­until that so-­called goal has been accomplished. ­There is no support for artists in any form other than by individual recognition and gain by climbing the economic ladder by what­ever means pos­si­ble. For the Chicano or Third World person in t his system still plagued by racism, this is a p articularly difficult task. If “success” is desired, the Chicano artist must take steps inherent in the capital ladder and climb. For many Chicanos who wish to make a living with their art, both the forces of commercialism (­those who buy, sell, and grant monies) as well as the attempts to cash in on what Chicanos are d ­ oing end up undermining what is being produced. The centros end up operating ­under that control. As early as 1974, the same ­thing started to happen within the mural movement: it also started to be co-opted by the system. The system realized the importance of murals and their tremendous potential to bring about a raising of consciousness within a community. The system, in order to protect itself, must control anything gaining power. Inbred into capitalism is the mechanism to “buy” into that which it desires to control. An example of this is the large amount of money spent by the Rocke­fel­lers on purchasing and funding minority art in Third World communities. By attempting to remove that art from the receptive audience for whom it was originally intended, they caused much of it to lose its power and impact. Many murals that are g­ oing up in co mmunities t­ oday are mere decorations contracted by a system that would like to see them remain that way. It wants the walls in the communities to be used for “therapeutic art” to hide the ugliness of the conditions, appearing to make the barrios nice places to live, covering up the evidence of a c lass society and, again, pacifying Chicano ­people.

The tradition of murals in Mexico is that the mural should be a voice, a voice of the p ­ eople, a protest. This sentiment was stated in t he manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Paint­ers and Sculptors, and quoted in Art and Revolution by David Alfaro Siqueiros: “We proclaim that at this time of social change from a decrepit order to a new one, the creators of beauty must use their best efforts to produce ideological works of art for the ­people; art must no longer be the expression of individual satisfaction which it is ­today, but should aim to become a Āghting, educative art for all.”1 Though this idea was and still is looked upon with ill ­favor by many artists, in order to rend the shackles of imperialism the artist must attempt to use the walls as a vehicle to raise the consciousness of the ­people. As previously established within the ideals of Chicano artists, the community must never forget that they live in a b arrio and what conditions create them. Chicanos are in the midst of a strug­gle. The walls, posters, and all art must be used for propaganda. The public steadily absorbs the propaganda of the “American Dream” through the media. Chicano art must be used to ­counter what is presented by this system. “In our times, to refrain from mentioning genocide, racism, cultural schizo­phre­nia, sexual exploitation, and the systematic starvation of entire populations is itself a po­liti­cal act. . . . ​As this situation becomes exacerbated, to refrain from mentioning it becomes more and more clearly a po­liti­cal act, an act of censorship or cowardice.”2 It is the responsibility of Chicano artists to show the importance of aspiring not for that material accumulation that is so unrealistic for most of la raza and keeps so many crippled and enslaved, but for a system that truly provides the necessary ­things for every­one. In conclusion, it must be stated that the Chicano movement has come a long way in the last fifteen years. It has come a lo ng way from the excitement of the early moments of the movement, when young Chicano artists started to rediscover an identity and o ­ thers, more mature, began to share with them t­ hose ­things that had

never been forgotten but had been suppressed. Headlines reported that farmworkers ­were walking out of the grape Āelds and ­later that ­those same farmworkers w ­ ere marching to Sacramento to protest the unjust conditions in w hich they existed. And ­later still news told about young Chicanos walking out of high schools in L os Angeles, protesting against racism in t he educational institutions. And sketchbooks became daily logs of ­those new phenomena. Canvas became the recipient of new images: Zapata, Villa, Chávez, and Dolores. And then one day Chicano artists said ¡Basta! (Enough!) and became committed to a movement. Before the commitment was made, Chicano artists felt the necessity to be redeĀned within a new context. First they attempted to deĀne capitalism and found that ­under capitalism ­there must be poor and unemployed, and that raza supplied ­those ingredients. Artists vowed to assist in t he strug­gle by becoming involved using pens, pencils, and brushes—­the tools that would be the weapons to Āght against the degradation of la raza. What became of t­ hose commitments, and what caused their modiĀcation? Could it be that the same system that was opening its museum doors and at the same time planning the overthrow of Allende in C hile had changed? Or was it the artists who had started to change? Had Chicano artists ­really not understood that the system that supported apartheid in S outh Africa and at the same time provided funds for the advancement of Chicano liberation had something up its sleeve? A system that feeds with one hand and strangles with the other? Chicanos must, to avoid the shortcomings of the 1960s and 1970s, seriously analyze the system that Chicano artists have ­adopted as their patron. As products of society, they must guard against the temptations inherent within that society. Art must be used to facilitate and redevelop that artistic sensitivity within all ­people. The same system that now gives Chicano artists positions and funds is the same system that formed the values that must be reexamined. It is impor­tant to A Critical

Pers pective  ·  43

maintain the commitment to negate the perpetuation of the values of the same system whose tentacles reach out and slowly squeeze the life out of ­those it oppresses. Through Chicano art, by the visual education pro­cess, a transformation of individuals can take place and make pos­si­ble a rededication to original commitments and to working together. All over the world ­people are ­going to have to unite in order to stop the inhumanities of the pres­ent. Chicano artists must reaffirm original goals, and  values must be seriously examined. Once that investigation and reaffirmation have taken place, Chicano artists must prepare for a lifelong

44  ·  mo nt o ya and salk o witz- ­mo nt o ya

strug­gle along the painful road called change, advancing ­toward a better humanity. Notes This chapter was originally published as Malaquías Montoya and Lezlie Salkowitz-­Montoya, “A Critical Perspective on the State of Chicano Art,” Metamorfosis 3, no. 1 (spring/summer 1980): 3–7. 1. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Art and Revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 25. 2. Meredith Tax, “Culture Is Not Neutral, Whom Does It Serve?,” in Radical Perspectives in the Arts, ed. Lee Baxandall (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1972), 16.

shifra m. goldman

6. Response  ·  1980/1981 Another Opinion on the State of Chicano Art

The ­enemy is not abstract art but imperialism. —­F IDEL CASTRO

Los compañeros Malaquías Montoya and Lezlie Salkowitz-­Montoya, in t heir article “A Critical Perspective on the State of Chicano Art,” have raised for consideration one of the most difficult prob­lems confronting the radical (or reformist) artist functioning within a c ap­i­tal­ist context—­ that of co-optation—­a prob­lem that is neither new nor necessarily solvable in that context except by degrees. Final solutions depend on basic structural changes in the society itself. To begin, I would like to state that I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on the article, and that I a gree with many of its general premises. My purpose ­here is one of clarifying certain deĀnitions, refuting what I p erceive as some unwarranted assumptions, and pointing out certain contradictions. What­ever conclusions w ­ ill be advanced are of a tentative character, since the prob­lem is part of a much larger, ongoing debate.

The main argument of the Salkowitz/­Montoya article seems to be that separatism from the dominant culture is desirable since the dominant culture (a) es pouses a h armful philosophy that Chicanos oppose, and (b) is all-­powerful and capable of totally co-opting any artist who unwisely participates in any of its facets. The article further states that such participation consists of exhibiting in museums, galleries, colleges, and universities (and waging in the Āght to do so), and being exposed in the mass media as Chicano artists. It concludes that “art that is produced in conscious opposition to the art of the ruling class and ­those who control it has, in most cases, been co-opted [by ­these means]. It has lost its effectiveness as visual education working in re­sis­tance to cultural imperialism and the cap­i­tal­ist use of art for its market value.”1 Among the subsidiary issues raised by the article are variously phrased statements to the effect that Chicanos embracing only the cultural nationalist aspects of the movement (not its po­liti­ cal aspects) w ­ ere middle-­class-­oriented, and that the Chicano movement was based on deĀning its

status ­under capitalism, breaking the yoke of imperialism, and making common cause with Third World nations. An alternative method for Chicano artists to proceed, according to the article, was that of participating minimally in the system, limiting production to posters, leaflets, and street murals, and exhibiting only in community centers and agencies. In other words, severe restrictions on both the productive forms and consumption of visual arts produced by Chicanos. Leaving aside for the moment the main argument concerning the pres­ent danger of Chicano artists’ co-optation, I would like to point up some of the fallacies of the subsidiary issues. Since the original article considered the Chicano art movement and its ideas over a period of time, it should not leave the mistaken impression that the movement from its inception was based on a conscious opposition to capitalism and/or imperialism. This may have been the net result of its strug­ gles and the reason why vari­ous Latin American cultural workers welcomed the Chicano artistic movement to their ranks, while reserving the right to criticize its romanticism, mysticism, and lack of theoretical rigor in regard to the internal and international class strug­gle. This was true in the early 1970s, when theater groups such as Teatro Campesino participated in L atin American encounters, and it was still true in 1979, when Chicano Ālmmakers w ­ ere honored during the First International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana, Cuba. However, not only have participants within the Chicano po­liti­cal and artistic movement been notable for a range of ideologies, but the predominant thrust of the movement has been basically reformist (seeking changes within the structure instead of structural changes), not revolutionary. Th ­ ose who have been anti-imperialist ­were decidedly a small minority, and they ­were more manifest in the po­liti­cal than in the artistic arena. By the same token, it is inaccurate and unhistorical to characterize the adherents of cultural nationalism (expressed by the uncritical immersion in t he Mesoamerican pre-­Columbian cul46  ·  shifra m. go ldman

ture, Catholic belief, and the gloriĀcation of every­thing Hispanic or Chicano regardless of merit) as middle-­class-­oriented. Cultural nationalism was the single issue that united very diverse ele­ments in the artistic sphere in the early years of the movement. It was a common rallying point that brought together the urban and the rural, the big city and the small, the student and the worker, the artist and the po­liti­cal activist. For a period of time, ­until its inadequacies became apparent, it dominated the slogans of the movement. However, as occurred earlier in Mexico, where cultural nationalism was appropriated from the Revolution and converted into a governmental rhetorical tool to impose a fa lse national unity across class bound­aries, Chicano cultural nationalism became a respectable motif for middle-­class aspirants at the expense of its po­liti­cal implications. Is Separatism Pos­si­ble or Desirable?

To return to the main argument, I would like to engage the issue of separatism from the dominant culture. Let me start by stating that separatism (unlike re­sis­tance) is an illusion, and to preface that statement with the following modiĀcation: that the recent history of minority and oppressed groups within the racist and sexist United States has required an initiatory period of separatism from the majority culture for self-­articulation (knowledge of history and heritage, awareness of unique culture, challenging imposed doctrines of inferiority); po­liti­cal formulation (isolating the speciĀcs of economic, racist, and sexist oppression and determining a platform of opposition); and organ­izing a constituency. By 1980, the Chicano movement has attained many of t­ hese objectives, and can confront the mainstream from a position of strength and self-­awareness. Its vanguard—­political militants, artists, intellectuals, self-­educated workers, students—­now have the twin obligation of disseminating and testing constantly evolving new ideas within the U.S. Mexican community, and among potential allies outside that community. To accomplish

that means moving away from separatism and functioning within the mainstream, including the media, always bearing in mind the difficulties and dangers in so ­doing. Let me further suggest that for Chicano artists, as for o ­ thers, separatism in t he production and consumption of art has never been pos­si­ble even if it ­were desirable. To develop this point, I would like to clarify certain deĀnitions, and outline some conditions that pertain to art produced within a cap­i­tal­ist context. Characteristics of Art Production

The several properties of art production include (1) the technology of art, (2) its formal expression, and (3) its ideology. Th ­ ese three properties can be controlled by the individual artist (or even an artistic collective) to a limi ted extent since neither the individual nor the collective can function completely outside the social/economic structure of the society in which they live and its dominant ideology. The artist can legitimately assume a stance of re­sis­tance, but not of separation, and this stance is most operational in a rt production within the territory of the “ideology” of the work of art. Technology of ar t. Technology of art includes ­under its rubric such ­things as canvas, paint, brushes, paper, presses, inks, sculptural materials, tools, kilns, cameras, Ālm, projectors, photocopiers, chemicals, and so on. ­These materials are controlled at some point in their manufacturing pro­cess by large national or international corporations who determine quality, availability, and price. It was brought to my attention while traveling that artists in Latin American countries suffer the same prob­lems with artistic materials that affect them when importing other manufactured goods from the developed industrial nations: limited access, insufficient supply, higher prices than ­those paid in t he metropolis. In addition, protective tariffs in their own countries raise prices even further, sometimes double or ­triple what is paid in the United States. This is particularly true,

for example, with Ālm and related products dominated by U.S.-­based multinational Kodak corporation. In Argentina, certain types of Ālm can be developed only in t he United States, making them inaccessible to professional photog­raphers with time deadlines. In Peru, the cost of a roll of 35-­millimeter Ālm is three to four times higher than in the United States. In Mexico, the costs of lithographic inks and presses are so much higher relative to Mexican income that artists are limited in their production; they have met the prob­lem by experimenting with producing their own. And so forth. It is a well-­known fact that economic imperialism draws its proĀts from the production of raw materials and the merchandizing of goods in (neo)colonized countries, a pro­cess that enriches the ruling classes and cushions the exploitation of workers in the dominant economy. If we extend this to artistic materials (an aspect of cultural imperialism), it is obvious that Chicano artists, though part of an oppressed and eco­nom­ ically exploited group by U.S. standards, function with a favored domestic price structure for their materials, and greater personal income, actually or potentially. Thus, willingly or not, Chicano artists cannot be separatist in t his sphere of art production over which they have no control. They are subject to the same economic rules as all U.S. artists. Style and technique of ar t. The other two categories, the formal means and the ideology of art, are more subjectively determined, though they also are subject to the ubiquitous pressures of the dominant culture. My position, however, is that not every­thing produced by the dominant culture is necessarily negative; a g­ reat deal depends on what is utilized, and ­toward what ends. Since the “ends” of art production fall into the category of art consumption, I would like to return to that aspect ­later, and deal Ārst with formal means. Formal means refer to style (the “isms” of art), and to technique (procedural methods and skills), and the two are interdependent. Likewise, both style and technique are based on ideological determinants. In other words, the techniques and styles chosen are ­those that best serve the burden Res po ns e: Another Opinio n  ·  47

of the message or statement the artist wishes to make. This is further deĀned by the audience the artist wishes to address.2 Within this framework, artists who w ­ ere consciously Chicano from the midsixties on overwhelmingly opted for some type of repre­sen­ta­tional visual art to best convey objective messages. The self-­taught artists or the art students having, as the Salkowitz/Montoya article pointed out, “very ­little knowledge of the craft or lacking technical skill” often opted for a n aïve naturalism, or an “arty” art-­school semiabstraction.3 They also indiscriminately copied the Mexican masters, folk art, or the works of pre-­Columbian Amer­i­ca, mixing them with U.S. commercial, illustrative, and mass media visual sources and blending the pastiche together with g­ reat conviction and sincerity, if n ot always with aesthetic success. This aspect is not to be despised; it is an impor­tant part of the creative explosion of p ­ eople’s art that formed a uniq ue part of the early Chicano cultural movement. It had its counter­parts in t heater, dance, and lit­er­a­ture. Two ­factors have to be understood about this aspect: (1) a g­ reat deal of it, particularly in street murals, was understood and appreciated by its mass audience in the barrios whose aesthetic tastes had been formed, in part, by many of the same sources, and (2) the true range of Chicano artistic ideology can be determined only by considering this outpouring. It is elitist to think other­wise. Without detailing the subject m ­ atter covered in this phase of visual art, it is clear that the bulk of expression was neither anticapitalist nor antiimperialist, though it overwhelmingly contained ele­ments of cultural nationalism. Its producers ­were generally of working-­class origins. Along with self-­taught and student artists ­were also mature and maturing artists who made conscious choices about technology, technique, and style from the multiplicity of such choices available to them as a result of education and exposure to Euro-­American as well as world art. ­There was (and is) a range of means, from traditional mural and easel painting and print technique to avant-­ garde photo-­silkscreen, photocopy, conceptual, 48  ·  shifra m. go ldman

and per­for­mance methods, to be found in t he Chicano art community. ­There are also varied uses of vernacular materials (folk and popu­lar) such as altars, calaveras, papel picado, Mexican foodstuffs, Chicano costume and personal ornament, items of car culture, and so on that have been integrated into the material resources. The Salkowitz/Montoya article argued, using the 1970 traveling show El Arte del Barrio as an example, that Chicano artists using con­temporary styles such as pop and funk have given t­ hese styles, institutionalized by Anglos, legitimacy (in the barrio? ).4 I w ould argue that Chicano artists should feel ­free to utilize any of the con­ temporary formal discoveries of Euro-­American art—­abstract expressionism, pop, op, funk, photorealism, and so on, as long as they do not permit themselves to be drawn into experimentation for its own sake (art for art’s sake) or into the sterility of endless variations of the formal means. In the course of seeking a visual and plastic language to contain and express a w ­ hole set of new ideas and formulations, Chicano artists who wish to draw on aesthetic products of their own country should certainly do so without qualms. It is not a q uestion of giving such forms legitimacy but of using what­ever is available in exi sting technology, technique, and style to evolve a new content. For all of us who admire the outstanding example of Cuban poster art, this point has already been made. The Cubans freely appropriated most con­temporary artistic modes of the cap­i­tal­ist world and placed them at the ser­vice of revolutionary content. The Mexican masters, especially Rivera and Siqueiros, drew upon the aesthetic experimentation of their time (cubism, futurism, neoclassicism, photomontage, photo­ documentation, Ālmic technique, e­ tc.) to express the imperatives of the Mexican Revolution and to criticize national and international capitalism. Siqueiros sought out a DuPont product (Duco) in the United States that led to the use of pyroxylins, vinylites, and other synthetic paints that made outdoor murals pos­si­ble. The only valid conclusion pos­si­ble is that t­ here is no betrayal to the Chicano movement involved

FIG. 6.1. Rupert García, Assassination of Striking Mexican Worker, 1979. Pastel on board, 40 × 60 in. Image courtesy of the artist, Mexican Museum, San Francisco; Rena Bransten Proj­ects, San Francisco; Magnolia Editions, Oakland, California. Mexican Museum, San Francisco, permanent collection.

in the flexible and experimental use of technology and style if it is infused with a Chicano vision and worldview. It is also to be remembered that the so-­called Euro-­American styles owe a g­ reat debt to the Third World from the nineteenth c­ entury to the pres­ent. The Far East, Africa, the South PaciĀc, and pre-­Columbian Latin Amer­i­ca ­were all mined by Eu­ro­pean artists to evolve the styles of postimpressionism, cubism, German expressionism, and so forth, while some op and pop artists have wrought variations on Indigenous materials of the Southwest and Mexico. Third World artists need feel no reluctance in reclaiming ­these forms. Ideology of ar t. Of w hat is a C hicano vision and worldview composed? This is a most difficult question to answer, partly ­because the Chicano ­people are so heterogeneous, and also ­because the Chicano is a p roduct of two cultural structures, ­those of Mexico and the United States, but not fully a p roduct of ­either. Chicano identity and consciousness is in a co nstant pro­cess of formation, evaluation, and re-­formation. The present-­day Chicano is heir not only to Mexican po­liti­cal/cultural lore but also that of a 150-­year history of re­sis­tance to Anglo domination, racism, and economic exploitation that has left its imprint on culture (see Āg. 6.1). To seek and know

­these two histories, to understand their twin impress on personality, thought, manner of life, customs, and po­liti­cal strug­gle, has been the content of Chicano art. It may express itself with equal validity in t he production of a t raditional blanket, a geometric abstraction playing variations on pre-­Columbian motifs, a p oster on atrocities in Vietnam or Iran, or a per­for­mance piece questioning general con­temporary values, to name but a f ew. It may be positive and life affirming, starkly critical, humorous, macabre, agonizing, fantastic, or realistic. In other words, it ­will express the multiplicity of Chicano experiences and reaction in an extremely complex modern world in which all corners are tied together by means of the mass media. Artistic Survival and Art Consumption

We must Ā­nally address the extremely impor­tant question of artistic consumption in w hich lies one of the major prob­lems raised by the Salkowitz/Montoya article: that of co-optation through assimilation into the cap­i­tal­ist art market. The article seems to argue that the only valid outlet for Chicano art is the Chicano community; in fact Res po ns e: Another Opinio n  ·  49

they go beyond this to argue that a valid work of Chicano art viewed and interpreted outside the community has l­ittle impact and loses its po­liti­cal signiĀcance and strength. ­There is no question that the United States has developed an all-­encompassing art ­market structure comparable to Eisenhower’s military-­industrial complex: the art critic–­art ­historian–­museum ­gallery–­collector complex, the taste makers, validators, and consumers of elite cultural products. The strug­gle of mainline reformist artists who have tried to change some aspect of this structure while remaining within its conĀnes and reaping its material beneĀts is well documented in national art magazines and other periodicals. The Chicano art movement, both as a result of its exclusion from mainline art institutions (it did knock violently on the doors to be accepted on its own terms), and by attempting to bypass the alienating aspect of art as a co nsumer product within a co nsumer society, sought diffusion for its art through an alternative community-­based cultural structure: centros, talleres, storefront galleries, small presses, street murals, and so on (though Rupert García has pointed out elsewhere the contradiction of public art on nonpublic walls). Everywhere the movement encountered an insoluble prob­lem: the working-­class communities it wished to address did not have the economic resources to support an artistic constituency. In addition, the communities w ­ ere frequently not conversant with the kind of art being brought to them, and sometimes—­being caught up with primary prob­lems of survival—­did not welcome it, or w ­ ere indifferent to it. To solve the second prob­lem, educational programs ­were or­ga­nized. To solve the Ārst (since artists must have materials, space, walls, rent, transportation, and living expenses), the artists sought support for their endeavors from small businesses, government on all levels, educational institutions, and corporate agencies, in addition to community fundraising. It very early became apparent that the former alternatives to the commercial art market ­were not only of small quantity and limited duration but also engaged in direct or indirect pressure on 50  ·  shifra m. go ldman

art content, if not outright censorship. The area of greatest pressure was on ­those Chicanos in mass media, since the means of production (cameras, projectors, studios) w ­ ere completely in the hands of major corporations or government-­funded institutions, and ­these ­will not lightly yield their most costly yet most ubiquitous and persuasive medium of ideological communication to “subversive” producers. Part of the answer has been alternative Ālm production, in­de­pen­ dently Ānanced when pos­si­ble, but the consumption end of this pro­cess ­will remain an arena for ­battle.5 Co-optation. Means and methods of co-­optation are many and they do not begin when an artist enters the public arena. Colleges and universities are purveyors of ideology as well as producers of artists. They educate not only artists but also the art critics and the art historians, and thus play their role by creating the components that feed the art market complex. As Che Guevara pointed out, The law of value  is not simply a n aked reflection of productive relations: the mono­poly cap­i­tal­ists—­ even while employing purely empirical methods—­ weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in w hich the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed. A school of artistic “freedom” is created, but its values also have limits even if they are imperceptible ­until we come into conflict with them—­that is to say, u ­ ntil the real prob­lem of man and his alienation arises.6

The key inducement to co-optation is “success,” which may be translated as Ānancial rewards, middle-­class amenities, and prestige accruing to the artist who has “made it” in the system. Its side products are individualism, competitiveness, and insistence on an illusory creative “freedom.” This is invariably accompanied by a change in artistic ideology reflected directly in t he work of art. Technology, technique, or style become ends in themselves, resulting in “slick” products; content

becomes vapid or empty; the exploration of new ideas and new forms to express them declines or ceases. The tendency of the art market, which is very contradictory, is to “freeze” the successful consumer product at its point of greatest salability. However, due to the throwaway nature of pres­ent consumerism, it also demands constant novelty and change, but change on a superĀcial stylistic, formal level. Chicano artists, like ­others, are subject to the temptations of this system. SacriĀces that many undertook in the early years to contribute to po­ liti­cal and artistic strug­gles ­were, ­after prolonged periods of time, found increasingly unpalatable having been predicated on the notion of short-­term victories. Some ­were overextended in their dual role as artists and activists and tired of their roles; ­others, achieving a new level of professionalism, felt the newly emerging Chicano m ­ iddle class should now be willing to be private patrons. Still ­others opted for the usual commercial road to success and abandoned what­ever critical and po­ liti­cal content their earlier work contained though they maintained “ethnic” forms. Given all ­these ­factors, we still have to ask if it is necessarily true that any Chicano artist who exhibits in a museum or gallery, or is featured in the mass media, or pursues a di alogue with the mainline is therefore automatically co-opted. Is it necessarily true that artists who express complex ideas, not easily comprehensible to the lowest common denominator, or who use avant-­garde methods are also co-opted? Is it even true, as expressed in C he’s too black-­and-­white analy­ sis quoted above, that cap­i­tal­ist society (in t he United States) allows for only three categories: subdued or crushed rebels, shameless hacks, or “rare talents” who may produce their own work? Putting aside the “rare talents” category as too exclusive for a general discussion, would we agree that all other artists fall into the two other categories? This would suggest that our society is monolithic and impregnable, that t­ here are no divisions or power strug­gles within it, and no chinks in the armor. It would suggest that artists, and p ­ eople in general, completely accept and internalize what­

ever ideological frameworks are set forth by the dominant culture. Experience would suggest that this is an incorrect formulation; if i t w ­ ere not, any kind of ideological strug­gle could be deemed useless, and nihilism would triumph. I am aware that some ­people ­will argue that this is an assimilationist position, a ra tionalization for participation. To that argument I would ­counter that I have proposed a model above: a set of criteria for determining if an artwork has been co-opted that, while subjective, can still provide a guide for judgment. Slickness, emptiness, static ideas and forms, repetitiousness, and superĀcial novelty are some of the mea­sur­ing devices, to which many more could be added. Let us, however, make no m ­ istakes about the nature of the system. The U.S. ruling class is able through manipulation and co-optation to catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. This means that the façade of bourgeois democracy is still in place and considered preferable to a naked display of ideological control through repression such as occurred during the McCarthy period, or as regularly occurs in dictatorial Latin American countries where the po­liti­cal power structure is insecure. In the United States, certain urgent black and Chicano demands (such as Affirmative Action or recognition of the Farm Worker’s Union) ­were won (despite ­later dismantling) so that the fabric of society would not be further exposed or torn asunder, in a p eriod of liberal reform, by escalated class strug­gle. Some aspirations ­were satisĀed, including limited access to the ­middle class. Confrontational challenges, however, such as t­ hose of the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, or the militant phases of Chicano activism (farmworkers’ picketing, the Chicano Moratorium) ­were ruthlessly repressed. Despite the defacement of street murals, the diminution or denial of funding, the obstructionism, the censorship, and the operation of co-­optive methods, Chicano protest art has, by and large, been permitted to exist ­under pres­ent permissive methods. However, constant activism is necessary to maintain and enlarge what­ever gains ­were achieved during the last fifteen years. Res po ns e: Another Opinio n  ·  51

Artists’ options ­today. Th ­ ere still remains the

pragmatic question of the economic survival of the artist, and the ultimate consumption of his/her product. In a cap­i­tal­ist society ­there are two, perhaps three economic options for the artist. First, for the chosen few who are carriers of cap­i­tal­ist artistic ideology, the art market complex provides ample rewards based on a hig hly competitive system. Second, ­there are artists who earn their primary living outside of, or in addition to, sales of their work but remain in t heir artistic discipline as educators, administrators, illustrators, designers, technicians, commercial artists, and so on. Fi­nally, ­there are ­those who practice their art part-­time and are primarily employed outside their Āeld. Traditionally the ­great majority of opposition artists are of the last two categories, both Chicano and non-­Chicano. The degree to which artists maintain and aesthetically express their oppositional stance depends on their perception and evaluation of their position. No single, perfect model exists for balancing economic necessity with artistic integrity. The key question, it would seem to me—­since none can be “pure” within any given society—is not ­whether an artist exhibits in a m useum or commercial gallery or chooses to do easel paintings rather than posters and public murals. (Not ­every painter, ­after all, can be a successful muralist.) It lies with the ideological stance assumed by the artist in reference to the production and consumption of art, to the uncompromising quality and content of the work, and the refusal to capitulate on ­either aspect in exchange for prestige or Ānancial rewards. For ­those artists who opt to work in the direct ser­vice of grassroots organ­izations, appropriate forms would be posters, public murals, handbills, local magazines, comic strips, and fotonovelas with new content, community art classes, artmobiles, traveling exhibitions, inexpensive reproductions of paintings and prints, and so on. Dangers to be avoided are oversimpliĀcation (­either assuming that all art must be understood by every­ one, or that working ­people are obtuse), folklorism, pop­u­lism, and parochialism. Not every­thing 52  ·  shifra m. go ldman

produced by the “folk” is valid and progressive culture; it is often impregnated with regressive values or with cap­i­tal­ist ideology. Chicano artists should be selective about what they exhibit and what they integrate into their own art forms. ­Others ­will function within established par­ ameters (though the two roles are not mutually exclusive) where, correctly, Chicanos have e­ very right to be: museums, funding agencies, colleges and universities, and the media, where mass ideologies are ­shaped and disseminated. They ­will have a difficult task: not to be dislodged but also not to be seduced, to maintain ties with community and Third World strug­gles but also to learn and use the sophisticated methods of the establishment on behalf of their own conceptions. They should be situated so as to educate younger generations to their ideals by precept and example, not leaving the Āeld to the opposition. It is not technology, style, or even the art structure that is at fault—we are not opposed to the existence of galleries, museums, schools, or art criticism—­but to the philosophies and practices that inform them. They must be adapted to the needs of the ­people, in small ways and in large. Notes This chapter was originally published as Shifra M. Goldman, “Response: Another Opinion on the State of Chicano Art,” Metamorfosis: Northwest Chicano Magazine of Lit­er­a­ture Art and Culture 4, no. 1 (1980/1981): 2–7. Reprinted with permission from the author’s estate. 1. Malaquías Montoya and Lezlie Salkowitz-­Montoya, “A Critical Perspective on the State of Chicano Art,” Metamorphosis 1, no. 1 (spring/summer 1980): 6. 2. Let us not be deterred in this line of reasoning by the argument of some that they produce only for themselves and are not concerned with any audience. A work of art consumed by the artist alone does not exist as a social act and need not concern us. This does not gainsay the fact that the act of production may (and perhaps should) be individual and the content not weighted down by the need for pleasing a specified audience, as a critical work may not, as long as some audience is a given.

3. Montoya and Salkowitz-­Montoya, “Critical Perspective,” 4. 4. Montoya and Salkowitz-­Montoya, “Critical Perspective,” 5. 5. Unlike painting and printmaking, voluntary separation from the mainline art consumption structure is not only very difficult but also self-­defeating ­because of

film’s vast viewing potential. In this re­spect, the story of involuntary “separation” (blacklisting) of the 1953 film Salt of the Earth is very instructive. 6. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, letter to Carlos Quijano, March 12, 1965, “From Algiers, for Marcha: The Cuban Revolution ­Today,” in The Che Reader (Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press, 2005).

Res po ns e: Another Opinio n  ·  53

r it a go nz alez

7. Post-­Chicano  ·  1999

As painting resurfaces on the scene in vari­ous apparitions, from the “girl abstract paint­ers” of the West Coast to the airbrushed soft-­porn fantasies of Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin, we Ānd new practices based on mediated dialogues with old schools (from the sacred cows of abstract expressionism to the big-­eye aesthetics of Keane). Similarly, for the Los Angeles–­based visual artists Salomón Huerta and Victor Estrada, this dialogic impulse arises not so much in a direct correspondence with the old school of Chicano art but in its reappraisal. In both artists’ ­careers, the model seems to be less that of re­sis­tance and affirmation, the structuring logic of past generations of Chicano art, than of reckoning and sublimation. This model is enacted in the works of Estrada and Huerta, not through confrontation but through select disclosures, suspect absences, and insidious suggestions. Salomón Huerta is a Los Angeles–­based painter whose work of the early nineties evolved according to his strong connection to Chicano visual culture, notably the portraits of John Valadez from the early eighties. Valadez’s hyperrealistic

and larger-­than-­life renderings of barrio realities ­were part of a “picturing us” strategy, a move to make grandiose and vis­i­ble that which had not been allowed in “ official” aesthetic consideration. Huerta’s early work used prison ­house tattoo stylistics, cholo letterings, and portraiture to render his personal experiences with Chicano working-­class cultures. Valadez has continued to work with “cholo logic” but has in his work of the last de­cade added layers of abjection and self-­ interrogation into his painting. As Valadez has stretched to encompass the outer limits of urban symbolism, the work of Huerta has shape-­shifted ­toward minimalism, or what might be considered a phantom Chicano stylistic emptied of recognizable icons. Huerta’s recent paintings network the artist’s reevaluations of self-­fashioning, (sub)suburban space, and the position of Chicano painting at the end of the twentieth c­ entury. While a g radu­ate student in the hypertrendy visual arts program at ucl a , Huerta met many paint­ers in the program, a majority working variations on the theme of meta-abstraction, and had contact with faculty

members such as Lari Pittman and Charles Ray. Huerta began to recognize the refusals of the ­visual arts community in Los Angeles to respond to his background and influences. Partially in reaction to the tepid reception of his work, Huerta began a s eries of paintings that seems to reflect the dynamics at play in the debate around identity politics in co n­temporary arts in t he United States. ­Whether standing upright, sitting in an industrial steel-­frame chair, or in i solated headshot, the Āgures of Huerta’s portraiture series all refuse (or are refused) face (Āg. 7.1). W ­ hether an effort to ironically comment on the enforced flattening of Chicano art’s iconic register (a mandate from within and without the Chicano art community), or a m eans of critiquing the vari­ous attempts to neutralize cultural politics in and out of art school, Huerta’s Āgures constitute an impor­ tant shift in reinterrogating repre­sen­ta­tion. The artist chooses background monochromes used in fashion shoots and video palettes. As constituted absence, the video blue or green is a projection screen whose neutrality allows the insertion of any number of fantasy spaces. The back stance of the subjects suggests a standardized and enforced framing, recalling the positioning of criminals and patients in crime and medical photography. Characteristic of a younger generation’s mediated dialogue with Chicano art, the framing of ­these Āgures seems diametrically opposed to the faceon renderings of not only Valadez but also muralists such as Judy Baca. Moving from the hermetic spaces of the portraiture series, Huerta made a Āeld trip to South Central Los Angeles with initial intentions of sketching prison structures. Instead of the jail architecture, Huerta wound up Āxating on the grid of homes of the (sub)suburban spaces of Los Angeles. Th ­ ese post–­World War II, t wo-­ to three-­bedroom box homes dominate middle-­class communities in t he southland, from Santa Ana at the southern tip all the way up to Ventura. Details speciĀc to t­ hese communities, dominated by Chicano and Latino populations, such as cosmetic augmentations, lawn ornamentation, and

ample gardening, are noticeably removed by the artist. Huerta seeks and achieves a flatness in the application of his paint, as well as a le veling of the detail surrounding each architectural subject. Administered in pastel tones and registering the sharpness of a Āerce, unrepentant sunshine (without the ambers and browns of smog colorations), ­these paintings recall David Hockney’s depictions of Los Angeles as slightly spoiled paradise. Although Huerta seems to share Hockney’s fascination with the surface, his paintings are equally invested in what wiggles under­neath. Huerta cites as an influence Ālmmaker David Lynch, whose Ālms have shown an attention to suburban façade and to the unearthing of the molten core of small-­town Americana. The ­house portraits start with drive-by snapshots, photo­graphs taken by the artists on car trips throughout the southland. ­These discrete serial portraits share with the snapshot a miniaturization of scale and detail, and, like the quickly realized small format photo, rec­ord the outlines of inhabited structures and produce the rough hues of memory. Huerta’s ­house paintings share with his past portraits the distanciation and murky accountability of the mug shot. Through his positioning of subjects in n eutralized environments and his repre­sen­ta­tions of a muted urban space, the artist comments on the complex networks of institutional power that attempt to Āx identity and place. Details absent from the paintings, as well as speciĀc inclusions of seemingly banal or slight ele­ments, are meant to provoke mutual or “drive-by” recognitions. While Huerta’s monstrosities lie do rmant ­under the surface of Angeleno façades, Victor Estrada’s grotesqueries spring through the frame, like cartoon characters unhinged from their animations. His mutated iconography comes out of the San Fernando Valley in L os Angeles, a zapping zone full of movie studio back lots, Disney detritus, and a dominant Latino population. Estrada once suggested in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that his work reflected the anxiety over uncontrolled change in his community. With the overgrown Siamese twins (joined at the Pos t- C ­ hicano  ·  55

FIG. 7.1. Salomón Huerta, Untitled (Back of Head), 1998. Oil on wood, 12 × 11 3/4 in. Private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.

groin) of his 1992 work Baby/Baby, Estrada conflated ge­ne­tic mis­haps, gigantism, and Los Angeles as infantilized city, too big and power­ful for its own good. In the 1992 exhibition at the Museum of Con­ temporary Art in L os Angeles, Helter Skelter, ­Estrada’s sculptures and paintings seemed the perfect visual component to the writing of Harry 56  ·  r it a go nz alez

Gamboa Jr. (contained in the exhibition’s cata­log). Gamboa’s twisted tales read as part crónica, part surrealist exquisite corpse. His offhand depictions of vio­lence and nihilism mix with quotidian L.A. realities—­for example, waiting in line at fast-­food drive-­throughs, the buzz of power lines, and getting lost on the freeway. Estrada mutates urban narratives in a similar way, as his sculptural

growths illustrate the constant trafficking of desire and dementia. Identity and place are protrusions that burst out of his monstrous creations. As critics have suggested, interior and exterior spaces, as well as intra-­ and extrabodily spaces, are dismantled in his work. Psychic, biological, and geo­graph­i­cal sites are undone, in exchange for a fluid realm in which mutants, cross-­pollination, and syncretism are the stabilizing forces. Soy Natu­ral (1992) starts out with the canvas, and seeps out into the gallery. Estrada’s painting and sculptural installations are not porous spaces but rather sticky surfaces. The forms, done quite often in Hydrocal, utilize ­bubble gum’s malleability, colors, and protocol. And like this chewy substance, Estrada’s surfaces are easily contaminated. Estrada has frequently made free-­form appropriations of cholo iconography, and paid homage to its textual interventions as well. In a s eries of paintings from the mid-1990s, the artist used the velvety strains of big-­eyed love as counterpoint to his phantasmagoric landscapes. In Mr.  Casper (1995), he depicts a d ark-­eyed tristeza, while in River (1995), he paints the Chicana Birth of Venus. In Thirteen (1994), a mutant big-­eyed pinup stares out of an oval that is placed gingerly within the stirrings alongside floor-­bound sculptures that resemble the kinetic sculptures of Jean Tinguely done in Play-­Doh. If ­there seems any crucial lesson that has not been reconciled by con­temporary art’s refusals of Chicano art, it is Chicano art’s syncretism. Urban mixtures of the sacred and profane (al arma magazine and the Virgen of Guadalupe, Cantinflas, and César Chávez . . .) function too much in the same way as Estrada’s cross-­pollinations. Although Estrada has never openly categorized himself as a C hicano artist, his rasquache sensibility, the internal rumblings of urban anxiety, and the ultrabaroque register all seem to connect him. The hyperplasticity, ugly-­beauty, and tentacle sexuality of Estrada’s pen-­and-­ink drawings ­mistake the body’s limbs for machine components in some strange East L.A. variation on H. R. Giger. This cross-­circuiting of cholo aesthetics and science Āction imagery has a strong connection to

lowrider customizers. As everyday Dr. Frankensteins, lowrider artists combine gold-­flaked ornamentation with monstrous appendages. The lowrider’s combination of ultrabaroque splendor with machinic hypermodiĀcations concoct a strange mixture of sensuality and awkward pumped-up libido. Estrada’s more perverse amorphological mappings of urban identity also owe a ­great deal to the white trash comic culture of Robert Williams. In this gesture, Estrada perhaps acknowledges the strong presence of white working-­class cultures in t he San Fernando Valley, and their own curious history of customization (hot rods and monster trucks). In his discussion of the pachuco aesthetics of several Chicano/Latino artists, Michael Cohen used the term “metaambivalence” to characterize the artist’s stylistic and po­liti­cal stance.1 The term serves Chicano—or post-­Chicano—­artists well, as they interrogate the previous tropes of Chicano art: historical revisionism, the naming and illustration of regional identities, and the pre­sen­ta­tion of both power­ful and positive images. Huerta and Estrada attempt to dislocate identity, or to fancifully and broadly integrate the myriad forces of urban life (overdevelopment, boredom, chaos, and fantasy, to name a few). ­These artists are attempting to address regional repre­sen­ta­tion, as well as Āgure, in an increasingly global-­oriented art discourse. Huerta’s minimalism and Estrada’s maximalism are two modes of a troubling history, new moments of disquietude and ambivalence for life in L.A. at the end of the ­century. Notes This chapter was originally published as Rita Gonzalez, “Post-­Chicano,” Poliéster 25 (spring/summer 1999): 40–47. The essay was originally submitted to Kurt Hollander, the editor of Poliéster magazine, ­under the title “The Afterlife of Chicano Aesthetics.” Hollander changed the title to “Post-­Chicano” in part to keep with the magazine’s ­house style. 1. Michael Cohen, “Pachuco Style: The Strategic Ambiguity of Bi-­Nationalism,” Flash Art 27, no. 176 (May/ June 1994): 88.

Pos t- C ­ hicano  ·  57

Jos h Kun

8. The New Chicano Movement  ·  2005

On the roof of a single-­story ­house, a man is yelling into a megaphone. His hair is long, his white tube socks are pulled up to his knees, and his Āst is in the air. He appears to be protesting. But ­because this is a p hoto­graph, an image from Mario Ybarra Jr.’s Go Tell It series, we hear nothing, not a sin gle slogan or plea for justice (Āg. 8.1). ­There is no caption, no context, no clues as to where he is—­just a man shouting on a roof in the midst of empty sky. He is protesting alone, to no one, from nowhere, in silence. ­Because Ybarra is thirty-­one years old and Chicano, it’s hard not to read the image as a next-­ generation commentary on the artistic legacy of the 1960s–’70s Chicano movement. The empty skies could represent empty protest. The solitude of the protester in an unidentiĀed neighborhood is perhaps a sy mbol of fading collectivity. For Chicano artists of Ybarra’s generation, the title of his series carries an implied question mark: Go tell what? To whom? And is it even worth telling? It’s been more than thirty-­Āve years since Chicano art grew out of the po­liti­cal urgency of

the Chicano civil rights movement. The earliest examples of the work ­were aesthetically raw posters and banners inspired by the farmworkers’ strug­gle and by protests over social issues in cities throughout the Southwest. It quickly grew into a more reĀned body of work that often was marked by familiar religious and cultural images—­La Virgen de Guadalupe, Day of the Dead skeletons, pre-­Columbian Āgures, lowriders. The genre, dominated by narrative painting executed with lush palettes, took its place as a di stinct movement in t he American art scene. Los Angeles— by virtue of its role as one of Mexican Amer­i­ca’s most impor­tant capitals, and the sheer number of artists working h ­ ere—­became the center of the Chicano art universe. ­Today, a ra pidly expanding pool of young Southern California artists is actively redeĀning what it means to make Chicano art in t he new millennium. Where the social movements of the past once supplied muralists and paint­ers with a rich iconography to choose from and social ­causes to speak to, the new school wants icons for the events and experiences of its own time.

FIG. 8.1. Mario Ybarra Jr., Go Tell It #1, 2001. Color lightjet print, 49 × 14 ft. Image courtesy of the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery.

The far-­ranging diversity of ­these events and experiences has caused a shift in Chicano artistic consciousness. What once was a n ecessary and useful catchall category now represents a m ore complicated set of choices and consequences for young artists who know their history from art school and mt v as well as Chicano studies classes. This new generation of artists also reflects the larger transformation of L.A.’s Chicano community, which continues to grow and assimilate in new and unpredictable ways. “­There’s the old avant-­garde idea that ­you’re better off if you rupture antecedent traditions and forge something new,” says veteran Chicano art critic Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto. “But con­temporary

Chicano expression is not just about rupture, it’s a real negotiation between tradition and change. ­There is rupture, but ­there is also continuity. ­There are still murals, but the murals are being done through digital media. Th ­ ere is still Āgurative art, but it is more conceptual and abstract.” The artists Ybarra-­Frausto dubs “the millennial generation” are disciples of digital technology and fans of hip-­hop and Japa­nese anime. They include known Āgures such as Ybarra, Salomón Huerta, and Artemio Rodriguez, and newcomers such as Marissa Rangel and Shizu Saldamando. They have the cata­log to the landmark 1990 Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation exhibition on their bookshelves, but it’s right next to Helter The New Chicano M o vement  ·  59

Skelter: L.A. Art in the ’90s, the Museum of Con­ temporary Art’s 1992 show that featured provocateurs such as Charles Ray and Chris Burden. “You ­can’t say ­there is one rite of passage the way you could 30 or 40  years ago,” says Chon Noriega, director of ucl a ’s Chicano Studies Research Center. “They are coming up with dif­fer­ent ­things and you think, ‘Well, is it Chicano?’ How do you label this? The category is still useful, but it’s not entirely accurate. Sometimes it’s the only category by which ­these artists ­will get some sort of recognition, but they are reaching out to other ­people as well.” Perhaps no young artist better exempliĀes the new rubric than Camille Rose Garcia, thirty-­four, who grew up in the suburban hinterlands of Huntington Beach and is the ­daughter of a F ranco German muralist ­mother and a C hicano Ālmmaker ­father from Lincoln Heights. Her experiences and work perfectly reflect the crossroads at which this new generation of artists has arrived. “I was always made aware that I was a ‘beaner’ by other kids, but I d ­ on’t have the same viewpoint of someone who grew up in East L.A.,” says Garcia, wearing an a c/d c T-­shirt at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in West Hollywood, where she recently had her Ārst major solo show. “I ­don’t feel like I Āt into a totally Chicano scene. I’m one foot in and one foot out.” Garcia’s work looks nothing like how Chicano art is supposed to look. ­There are no traces of earlier iconography, no signs of cultural cele­bration. Instead, ­there are demonic princesses who froth at the mouth and spit profanities, wielding machetes dripping with blood. ­There are swarming armies of blood-­sucking parasites that topple ­castles full of jewels. For her Karnowsky show, Garcia turned the entire gallery into a gothic pop netherworld she calls Ultraviolenceland, full of cartoonish paintings and fantastical sculptures. Yet Garcia also was part of a g roup show at Self-­Help Graphics, East  L.A.’s venerable art space, and she counts the prominent single-­named Chicano artist Gronk as a p rimary influence. Garcia sees her toppled ­castles and murderous princesses as critiques of wealth and power in 60  ·  Jos h Kun

general, with roots in Chicano art’s history of social protest. Her Ālmmaker ­father was active in the movimiento, and she grew up around artists committed to social and po­liti­cal change. “The Chicano tradition of activism and social commentary is so impor­tant to me,” she says. “But if y our work is only about identity, a lo t of ­people ­can’t relate to it. I want p ­ eople to care about my work b ­ ecause I want them to care about the world, about the Earth, about extinction.” Twenty-­nine-­year-­old conceptual artist Ruben Ochoa adds, “Sometimes I feel like w ­ e’re carry­ ing this baggage on our shoulders, like w ­ e’ve been born into it. But if we just keep repeating the same iconography, it defeats the purpose of art: to grow and create and explore. Chicano art is so young. We c­ an’t start repeating ourselves. We need to mix and blend and make art from where ­we’re from.” The story of Chicano art in Los Angeles is the story of Chicanos in Los Angeles. It’s the story of a community in the midst of a massive transition, from a civil rights past to a multicultural pres­ent, from being a geo­graph­i­cally bound vocal minority with focused po­liti­cal and social aims in the ’60s to an amorphous demographic dispersed across a city that now has no majority ethnic population. (According to the 2000 cen sus, Latinos make up nearly 45 ­percent of the L.A. County population, and 70  ­percent of ­those Latinos are of Mexican origin.) For Chicano artists in Los Angeles, the transition has led to a difficult question that often leads to multiple answers: Do you make Chicano art, or do you make art? “Why just ­because of my name should I b e put in a show based on color, when all the white students I g raduated with from Art Center and ucl a are being put in s hows based on their work?” asks painter Salomón Huerta, whose pastel portraits of the backs of male Chicano heads caused a s tir among collectors in t he 1990s and earned him acclaim in m ainstream museums and galleries. L ­ ater this year, he w ­ ill show alongside Cindy Sherman and Gabriel Orozco at New York’s Robert Miller Gallery. “It is very ­impor­tant

to me that I be recognized as an artist who is part of the world like every­one ­else,” he says. “But I was inspired by the Chicano movement. When the old Chicanos recognize my work, it still means more to me than getting recognition from John Baldessari.” But as Chicano artists move away from strictly identity-­based work, museums and galleries continue to move ­toward it. “Museums are still trying to get Chicano art in their collections, but the artists have moved beyond that with their own work,” says Rita Gonzalez, who has become the Chicano new wave’s leading critical and curatorial voice. “So how can we Ānd a common language? I think a lot of p ­ eople are tired of being curated by ethnic category. Artists ­will be supportive of galleries or museums that want to show Chicano artists, but they also want to be expanding the par­ameters of their identity as well.” In many ways, t­ hese debates started taking shape in t he late 1980s, when Chicano art was introduced to widespread national audiences through two major touring exhibitions: the 1987 Hispanic Art in the United States show or­ga­nized by Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, and, three years ­later, the ucl a Wight Gallery’s Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985. The exhibits presented competing tendencies that continue to divide con­temporary Chicano art. The Corcoran show, which included Latino artists of vari­ous ethnicities and was or­ga­nized by white curators, lobbied for Chicano artists to be included as part of a larger con­temporary art scene, albeit as exotic, primitive outsiders. The ucl a show, or­ga­nized by Chicano curators, lobbied for Chicano art to remain a s trictly delineated identity-­based genre, a singular entity with deĀned bound­aries rooted in t he strug­gle for civil rights and visibility. When the genre went international in 1989 as part of what many observers hyped as a “Chicano art boom,” French curators managed to have it both ways, casting L.A. C hicanos as visionary prophets of the urban ­future. “It is now a must for

Beverly Hills collectors to own their ‘Chicano!,” declared an essay in the cata­log for Le Demon des Anges (Angels’ Demon), a show that was seen in France, Spain, and Sweden. “For the Ārst time, Latinos have gained entry to the largest Los Angeles museums.” Back home, the real­ity was a bit more sobering. ­Until the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (l a cma ) hosted the Corcoran show in 1989, its recognition of Chicano artists ­hadn’t gone far beyond 1974, when it exhibited the work of the Los Four collective—­Carlos Almaraz, Frank Romero, Gilbert “Magu” Luján, and Beto de l a Rocha. Chicano artists might have been in vogue, especially abroad, but at home they remained on the fringes of the art establishment. ­Little has changed t­ oday. The number of commercial galleries showing Chicano work has not grown since the ’80s (t he Patricia Correia and Robert Berman Galleries remain constants), though long-­established cultural centers such as Self-­Help Graphics, the Mexican Cultural Institute, and Plaza de la Raza continue as mainstays of the scene. The latest effort to address this cultural void comes from L.A. County supervisor Gloria Molina, who is spearheading the $70 million Plaza de Cultura y A rtes, which is scheduled to open across from Olvera Street in 2007. And l a cma has just inked a Āve-­year strategic partnership with ucl a ’s Chicano Studies Research Center to develop art exhibitions, publications, and programming. The partnership already has led to the hiring of Rita Gonzalez as an assistant curator and to a new acquisition for the museum’s permanent collection, The ­Great Blind Huron, a print by Camille Rose Garcia. “The Chicano art scene has always been h ­ ere,” says Correia, whose Santa Monica gallery shows only Mexican American artists. “The art world is still waking up to it. Th ­ ere is still so l­ittle exposure on a local and national level. Are we still living in an era with that much bigotry? I ­can’t think of any other answer. It’s still about exclusion.” That is precisely why actor and art collector Cheech Marin deci­ded to or­ga­nize Chicano Visions: The New Chicano M o vement  ·  61

American Paint­ers on the Verge, the Ārst nationally touring exhibition devoted to Chicano paint­ ers. The show, which has support from media conglomerate Clear Channel, features major Āgures such as Frank Romero, John Valadez, Patssi Valdez, and Gronk and is slated for l a cma in 2006. “Ninety-­nine ­percent of the country ­doesn’t know what a Chicano is, let alone what their art looks like,” Marin says. “The w ­ hole purpose of this ­thing is to give access to Chicano cultures in the mainstream. W ­ e’re done preaching to ourselves.” Many worry that the show’s emphasis on painting, the scant attention it pays to younger artists, and its tendency t­ oward the recognizable imagery of de­cades past misrepresents the diversity of Chicano art. But Marin disagrees. “The Chicano school of art is ­every generation’s interpretation of what the Chicano experience is about,” he says. “To ­every generation, it’s a ­little bit dif­fer­ent. They each have as much right to say what is or ­isn’t Chicano art than anyone who went before them.” Mario Ybarra Jr. grew up in Wilmington, one of Mexican  L.A.’s more unsuspected suburban capitals. Slanguage, the gallery/store/studio he and fellow artist Juan Capistran opened in 2002, is squeezed into Wilmington’s industrial row, across the street from a body shop and a block down from a pool hall. Slanguage used to be La Guadalupana Bakery. It now serves as Ybarra and Capistran’s artistic home base, and it sells custom airbrushed Vans, thong underwear bearing portraits of rappers Notorious  B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, and classic hip-­hop Ālms such as Style Wars and Breakin’. The work of Ybarra and Capistran’s friends covers the walls, and on weekends, neighborhood kids flood Slanguage for art workshops that include hat customizing, toy design, and paper puppetry. “­These kids grow up in a homogenized space with freeways that close them in,” Ybarra says. “We try to bring in a s many dif­fer­ent kinds of ­people to interface with them . . . ​so that they ­don’t think the only p ­ eople they can commu62  ·  Jos h Kun

nicate with look just like them, speak just like them.” It’s an attitude of openness and cultural contact that pervades Ybarra’s own work. Although he re­spects earlier Chicano artists’ po­liti­cal need to create a visual language for ethnic identity, he is more interested in how identities intersect and open up, creating new urban hybrids in w hich cholo action Āgures meet futuristic sci-Ā lowriders and Pablo Escobar is dressed in a Columbia space shut­tle suit. “I ­don’t think I make Chicano art,” says Ybarra, standing in Slanguage’s backroom, which is cluttered with Mac computers, crates of rec­ords, an Osama bin Laden piñata, and a s pray-­painted portrait of reggae singer Jimmy Cliff. “It’s something I have learned as a history and acquired as a Ālter. But right now, I ­don’t think I could say I’m making it. It’s like saying I make abstract expressionist painting. I’m not an ab-ex painter. I ­can’t go back and make that art. I make con­temporary art that is Āltered from a Mexican American experience in Los Angeles.” Ybarra thinks of it as the Edward James Olmos theory of Chicano art. He wants to be less like the actor in American Me and Zoot Suit—in which Olmos was prison tough and pachuco savvy—­ and more like Olmos’s character in Blade Runner. In the Ālm’s dystopian 2029  L.A. ­future, Olmos is Gaff—­a digital urban polyglot, a Chinese Chicano detective who speaks a street patois of En­ glish, Spanish, French, Chinese, Hungarian, and German. “My main drive,” says Ybarra, “is not to learn Nahuatl but to learn Mandarin or Cantonese.” Like many of his peers, part of Ybarra’s interest in j uggling multiple cultural realities comes from his experiences in a rt school. In the ’70s and ’80s, a rt school was less common for Chicano artists—­a luxury that distracted from the po­liti­cal urgency of the movement. Now it’s the norm. Ybarra graduated from Otis Art Institute and then pursued an M.F.A. at University of California, Irvine. He studied with Chicanos and non-­Chicanos alike, including renowned L.A. artist Martin Kersels and Daniel Martinez, an

acclaimed conceptual artist who often has kept his distance from identity politics. “I needed my degrees,” Ybarra says. “I needed to be official. I’m not ­going to operate from a handicap position.” Ybarra’s art school training taught him how to get gallery shows (he’s exhibited, often alongside Capistran, in London, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Berlin), but he insists that the early Chicano muralists and per­for­mance artists taught him the importance of carry­ing on public art traditions. He’s painted the message “sublime” over signs advertising plumbers in South Los Angeles, installed a g raffiti-­viewing bench in do wntown L.A.’s Belmont Tunnel, and is now designing a series of harbor-­view benches for the Port of Los Angeles. “Chicano art is not a de ad history,” Ybarra says. “It informs my artistic sensibility. How could it not? They are the ­little voices in my head that help me pro­cess my own work. What I take from them most is the idea of producing art ­under extreme circumstances with an imaginative and critical stance.” Ybarra cites the influence of Asco, the edgy, pioneering Chicano per­for­mance art collective whose name is Spanish for “nausea.” The group became known for its conceptual, iconoclastic per­for­mance art pieces. But it was Asco’s 1972 Proj­ect Pie in de/Face piece that had the greatest impact on Ybarra. In response to a l a cma curator who said he was not exhibiting Chicano work ­because it was all “folk art” (code for “naïve” or “unschooled”), Asco members Harry Gamboa, Willie Herrón, and Gronk spray-­painted their names on l a cma ’s entrances, making the museum itself the Ārst piece of Chicano art to be exhibited ­there. They returned the next day and took a photo­graph of Asco’s fourth founding member, Patssi Valdez, posing with their handi­work hours before it was whitewashed. Ybarra beams and says, “That was the most relevant act of graffiti I c an think of, as both a Chicano and an artist in Los Angeles. I feel proud that I carry that with me.”

Gamboa was twenty-­one when he tagged l a cma ; now fifty-­two, he’s still proud of Proj­ect Pie in de/Face. “I sprayed that museum only ­because I ­couldn’t lift it and toss it into the tar pits,” he says. Gamboa, who has taught at several local universities and whose groundbreaking video art from the ’70s and ’80s is newly available on dv d s released by ucl a ’s Chicano Studies Center, ­hasn’t stopped making work since he began in the late ’60s. Nor has he stopped thinking about his art through the politicized eyes of a t eenager who participated in the student walkouts at GarĀeld High School in East L.A. “When I became involved with Asco,” he recalls, “we ­were developing artwork within the concept of ‘Chicano.’ It was particularly impor­ tant to utilize that term at that point. Now I Ānd an even more pressing need to utilize it, ­because since that time our numbers have expanded while our repre­sen­ta­tion everywhere has dwindled.” Yet when Asco began in the ’70s, it was Gamboa and his colleagues who ­were often told by other Chicano artists that their work—­which played with concepts of glamour and sexual convention—­wasn’t “Chicano enough.” “­There was the preconceived idea of what Chicano art was supposed to be,” says Diane Gamboa, Harry’s ­sister, who joined Asco in t he ’80s a nd works as a p hotographer, painter, and designer. “The real­ity was our lives—­every­thing from cross-­dressing to the Marx B ­ rothers and Soupy Sales. We ­were part of the unpop­u­lar culture.” Eschewing the more overt po­liti­cal messages of many of their contemporaries, Asco experimented with punk barrio existentialism—­sending out mail art, taping each other to walls, and throwing dinner parties in the ­middle of traffic islands. As a result, they w ­ ere often criticized for being too conceptual, too ideologically slippery, too arty. In the ’80s, G ronk’s solo ­career as a p ainter began to take off, and he soon became the Chicano art world’s Ārst star, showing his work nationally and internationally. His more recent work has The New Chicano M o vement  ·  63

found him collaborating with the ­Kronos Quartet and Peter Sellars. Gronk’s willingness to move across genres and defy expectations has made him one of the more frequently cited role models for younger Chicano artists looking to develop their own aesthetic. “I think a lo t of young artists approach me ­because I’m one of the ­people that came out of that ­whole ­thing without ­doing the lowrider or the cholo,” Gronk says. “That ­wasn’t in my vocabulary. It would have been dishonest of me to say, ‘Yes, I’m Chicano and ­here are the images.’ It was more like ­doing a mural in East L.A. and making a reference to a French Ālm. The possibilities are wide open.” ­There is a white 1985 Chevy van parked at the end of Chung King Road in C hinatown. It is a cold fall night, and instead of taking refuge in one of the nearby galleries, a crowd of ­people is trying to glimpse the image that dominates the van’s interior—­a panoramic black-­and-­white photo­graph of Los Angeles by Sandra de la Loza. Titled View From the East, the image is less striking for the city landscape it depicts than for its perspective—­from an Eastside hilltop that is a favorite Chicano hangout. “I wanted to force ­people to reflect on L.A. f rom another vantage point,” she says. Asking p ­ eople to see the city, and the art that’s inspired by it, through dif­fer­ent eyes is also the point of the van itself, which doubles as a m obile art gallery complete with white walls, fake wood floors, and track lighting. Its creator and director, Ruben Ochoa, dubbed the van Class:C, a reference to the common driver’s license code, ­because it was once the tortilla delivery truck for his parents’ restaurant. The van now delivers art. Ochoa curates exhibits on or inside the van, then drives it around Southern California for public viewings in neighborhoods and locales—­parks, banks, parking lots—­where cutting-­edge con­temporary art is typically not shown. The Chinatown venue was on the itinerary for Ochoa’s contribution to the Orange County Museum of Art’s 2004 California Biennial. 64  ·  Jos h Kun

“A major concern of artists of my generation is to create our own space instead of waiting around for exhibits,” explains Ochoa, who recently ­imagined car seats as customized coffins for his show with Marco Rios at the Laguna Art Museum. “Where most of my work is headed now is less about any singular ethnic identity and [more ­toward] where dif­fer­ent identities intersect and mix us up. I hope that you ­don’t see my work and all you get from it is that I’m Chicano.” Ochoa is quick to flash his influences as proof: lurid Mexican tabloids and British sci-Ā novelist J.  G. Ballard, seminal L.A. a ssemblage artist Ed Kienholz, pop m ­ usic parodist Weird Al Yankovic, Asco, and the toy characters the Garbage Pail Kids. “I d ­ on’t just go to Día de L os Muertos events,” quips Ochoa, who, like Ybarra, studied ­under Daniel Martinez at uc Irvine. At Chung King Road, Ochoa’s van also features The  O.C., a b umper sticker show about Orange County that de la Loza cocurated. The commissioned stickers, displayed on the van’s back doors, include Rios’s appropriation of the Irvine zip code 92697, and Capistran putting Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez in Mickey Mouse ears. Though most of the artists are Chicano, the show makes no mention of ethnicity. “My work is about L.A., a p lace that is constantly changing,” de l a Loza says. “The earlier generation, their essential question was deĀning the Chicano aspect of their work. I ­don’t think I need to do that all the time. It’s more about my interaction with this place.” This last point echoes the loudest among ­these artists: they may be Chicanos, but more impor­ tant, they are Chicanos in Los Angeles, and they want more than anything to make art in dialogue with their city—­with traffic and freeways, globalization and immigration, police brutality and, yes, even Richard Ramirez. Of course, the artists in M arin’s Chicano ­Visions show also ­were making art about place. John Valadez’s Getting Them Out of the Car said as much about the strug­gle for everyday Chicano survival as it did about the border between the barrio and the beach and the failed promises of

L.A. sunshine. Carlos Almaraz’s Flipover and Sunset Crash found toxic beauty in freeway death and the twisted metal of crushed cars. And Patssi Valdez’s paintings of ­house interiors are inverted dreams of the exterior world—­the East  L.A. neighborhood she was born and raised in, separated from the rest of Los Angeles by bridges and off-­ramps. The difference is that the place, and the role of Chicanos in that place, has changed. Populations have come and gone. Koreatown is also Oaxacatown. ­Little Tokyo is hip. Echo Park is expensive. Surburbia is Latino. Hip-­hop is the dominant force in pop culture. The shift is perhaps best registered in de l a Loza’s 2002 sound installation at the African American Museum, Whatcha talkin’ ‘bout—­ originally part of her master’s thesis at Cal State Long Beach. De la Loza interviewed her friends, all from her generation, collected their stories,

and then chopped them into phrases. In an empty gallery room, their voices poured out of numerous stereo speakers. ­There was the “punk rock dyke Salvadoran MacArthur Park crazy g irl,” the environmental activist from Commerce, and her friend from uc Berkeley who studied acu­punc­ture. Their stories moved in and out of one another, layered on top of a lo oped recording of a t raditional corrido mixed with hip-­hop beats. “It’s my way of not rehashing what’s been done,” she says. “We live in a very dif­fer­ent moment than thirty years ago. I want to Ānd dif­fer­ent ways to tell the stories of what I live.” Note This chapter was originally published as Josh Kun, “The New Chicano Movement,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, January 9, 2005.

The New Chicano M o vement  ·  65

t omá s ybar ra- ­f ra us t o

9. Post-­movimiento  ·  2007 The Con­temporary (Re)Generation of Chicana/o Art

­Today, several de­cades ­after the years of el movimiento, a “millennium” cohort of Chicana/o artists continues to expand and revise the artistic inheritance of the movimiento generation. Breaching the past in a constant search for new forms and content is an exigency of modernist art practices. The avant-­garde princi­ple of “rupture” underlines con­temporary critical discourse proclaiming the pres­ent moment as postfeminist, postethnic, and post-­Chicana/o. Many of the millennial generation of Chicana/o artists reject this totalizing rubric that accords value and prestige to artists making a total break with antecedent cultural traditions. Instead, one dominant strategy is a co mplex negotiation between continuity and change. Some established and midcareer artists continue to redeĀne and extend central tenets of “Chicano movimiento” art, such as strong narrative content, realist and expressionist styles, symbolic vocabularies drawn from pre-­Columbian and living Indigenous cultures, and urban barrio iconographies.

Younger Chicana/o artists born ­after the movimiento and trained in art schools within the critical discourse of postmodernity and globalization engage eclectic sources of inspiration and experiment with global aesthetic traditions. The millennial generation is technologically a­ dept and deeply conversant with global vernacular cultural forms such as hip-­hop and Japa­nese anime. Fashion, media, and Ālm are other referents. Social concerns, if pres­ent, are muted and more individualized. Urban vio­lence, sexuality, immigration, and dystopic, apocalyptic social visions are common. The avant-­garde tradition of “rupture” with antecedent artistic traditions is si­mul­ta­neously pres­ent with mobilizations to continue and expand previous legacies of engaged art. The current moment is one of intense experimentation and transition with no deĀning aesthetic paradigm. As cultural critic Chon Noriega notes, “The community is too large and too diverse to Āt ­under one aesthetic ­rubric, ­we’ve got too many generations.” The consistencies, differentiations, and rear­ ticulations of aesthetic options in t he liminal

social environment of Los Angeles are well captured in Josh Kun’s Los Angeles Times Magazine article “The New Chicano Movement.”1 From this article I have drawn out and rearranged a collage of intergenerational artists’ reflections about negotiating continuity and change. r it a go nz Alez (cura t o r) “So how can we Ānd a common language? I think a lot of ­people are tired of being curated by ethnic category. Artists ­will be supportive of galleries or museums that want to show Chicano artists, but they also want to be expanding the par­ameters of their identity as well.” h ar r y gamb oa jr. (vid eo ar tis t) “When I became involved with Asco, we ­were developing artwork within the concept of ‘Chicano.’ It was particularly impor­tant to utilize that term at that point. Now I Ānd an even more pressing need to utilize it, ­because since that time our numbers have expanded while our repre­sen­ta­tion everywhere has dwindled.” r uben o cho a (c o ncep tu al ar tis t) “Where most of my work is headed now is less about any singular ethnic identity and [more ­toward] where dif­fer­ent identities intersect and mix us up. I hope that you d ­ on’t see my work and all you get from it is that I’m Chicano. . . . ​Sometimes I feel like ­we’re carry­ing this baggage on our shoulders, like ­we’ve been born into it. But if we just keep repeating the same iconography, it defeats the purpose of art: to grow and create and explore. Chicano art is so young. We ­can’t start repeating ourselves. We need to mix a nd blend and make art from where ­we’re from.” mar io yb ar ra jr. (ar tis t , galler is t) “Chicano art is not dead history. It informs my artistic sensibility. How could it not? They are the ­little voices in m y head that help me pro­cess my own work. What I take from them most is the idea of producing art ­under extreme circumstances with an imaginative and critical stance.”

Clearly the pres­ent moment is a time of shifting paradigms. Some Chicano/a artists continue to preserve, extend, and rearticulate antecedent

traditions of engaged art (digital murals, for example), while o ­ thers are moving beyond bounced notions of identity and culture, drawing inspiration from global vernacular and hybrid cultures (for example, Japa­nese anime or hip-­hop). Traversing multiple modernities, the millennial generation explores all media: painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, sound, and digital art. Multimedia works, per­for­mance, and installations expand frames of reference from Eu­ro­pean modernist traditions, non-­Western cultures, and popu­lar cultures of North and South Amer­i­ca. Freed from an encompassing po­liti­cal proj­ect, Latina/o artists of the millennium make art that is a personal response to globalized realities. The tone and character of much current expression is personal and experimental. Some deĀning characteristics of the millennial generation: the attitude and stance ­toward national cultural iconography and cultural traditions is less reverential, looser, even playful and ironic. ­There is increased Āliation with international mass culture: fashion, media, and Ālm. Gender, sexuality, and desire expand theoretical frameworks. Performative practices and events such as Día de los Muertos cele­brations, festivals, and rituals continue to transmit social memory and sustain local knowledge. Digital technologies expand public art forms such as computerized image murals and billboards, as well as more personal web-­based proj­ects. Repre­sen­ta­ tional strategies become more nuanced. Millennial Chicana/o artists are impatient with national narratives of culture and belonging, and more involved with global artistic practices of fusion, exchange, and negotiation. Overall ­there is a conĀdent sense of maturity and intergenerational negotiation. The Chicano movimiento artists linked to the millennial generation continue to produce power­ful expressions that rouse both conscience and consciousness. Rather than a post-­Chicana/o moment, the pres­ ent sustains a c ultural dialectic si­mul­ta­neously affirming rupture as well as continuity and change.

Pos t- m ­ o vimient o  ·  67

An Emergent Latina/o Cultural Proj­ect

At the turn of the millennium, it is difficult to conceive of the United States as hermetically sealed, territorially contained, or internally undifferentiated. In the places where we live and work we are conscious of evolving translocal economic and social pro­cesses. Worldwide circular immigration patterns are a fac t of daily life. Having long boasted of being Mexico’s second city, Los Angeles now also has a Sa lvadoran population equal to or greater than that of San Salvador. New York City, meanwhile, has as many Puerto Ricans as San Juan and as many Dominicans as Santo Domingo, while New Orleans is the second city of Hondurans.2 Through continual immigrations, Latin Amer­i­ca has seeped into the United States. South-­North immigration pathways are also cultural corridors enunciating a new geography, new cartographies of the imagination, and nascent cultural proj­ects further redeĀning what Americanness means in the twenty-­Ārst ­century. Seeking to catch the pulse and assess the state of current Latina/o art production nationwide, New York’s Exit Art presented a multidisciplinary arts proj­ect designated The L ­Factor from November 22, 2003, to February 21, 2004. Included ­were video, ­music, and lit­er­a­ture programs. An art exhibition also titled The L F ­ actor was conceptualized and cocurated by Papo Colo, Janet lngberman, and Jodi Hanel. For the proj­ect, Exit Art invited thirty Latina/o artists who live and work in the United States to create a conceptual portrait of the Latina/o Āgure of their choice who has entered into the popu­lar imagination of this country or into culture history. Movie star Jennifer López, sports star Sammy Sosa, fashion designer Carolina Herrera, hip-­hop master Big Pun, artists Frida Kahlo and Ana Mendieta, musician Tito Puente, environmental activist Chico Mendes, farmworkers’ leader César Chávez, educator Eugenio María de Hostos, and even, somehow, Speedy Gonzalez, are among ­those portrayed in the resulting twenty-­seven commissioned works.3

68  ·  t omá s ybar ra- ­f ra us t o

While dealing with symbols of Latina/o heritage, the icons selected by the artists as points of departure for their artworks ­were mainly from the fashion, media, sports, and popu­lar culture Āelds. Po­liti­cal and historical Āgures w ­ ere secondary. Traditional paintings and sculptures ­were scarce in the exhibition, with a heavy concentration on installation, videos, photography, and sound collages. The selected artists in The L F ­ actor exhibit all grew up in t he United States but ­were born in Mexico, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Chile, Argentina, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil. ­Others ­were born in t he United States. Irony, whimsy, and a p layful antiheroic attitude ­were prevalent stances in a rtworks responding to such Latina/o cultural icons as Celia Cruz, Frida Kahlo, and Carolina Herrera. Xavier Tavera, in his inkjet on canvas photographic triptych of Celia Cruz, titled Celia 1, Celia 2, and Celia 3, captures a female impersonator evoking the stylized poses and mannerisms of the legendary Queen of Salsa. His artist statement encourages the viewer to ruminate on the evanescent and the ephemeral—­“Celia Cruz meets Celia Cruz, they look at each other, they approach each other, they recognize each other. She then embraces the mirror image which reflects the legend.” Andrea Arroyo presented a witty conceptual rendition of Frida Kahlo’s famous eyebrows. As a stand-in for the usual renditions of Kahlo, weighted down by Mexican regional costumes and jewelry, this minimal synthesis of the persona had instant impact. Two structures ­shaped in t he form of Kahlo’s eyebrows ­were covered in Mexican rebozos. Hung from the ceiling, the graceful arched forms resembled birds in flight. Among the legendary Latina/o icons from the Āelds of art, m ­ usic, and Ālm, the most popu­lar personality with this set of artists was Jennifer López, who inspired three dif­fer­ent conceptual portraits in the exhibition. Of the three, the most subtle and evocative piece was by Milton Rosa-­ Ortiz, titled La Aparición de la Fama. Riffing on the religious connotation of saintly apparitions,

Rosa-Ortiz created a sculpture in the shape of a shimmering eve­ning gown, evoking the much-­ commented-­upon Versace-­designed creation worn by Jennifer López to the 2000 Grammy Awards. Rosa-Ortiz’s vision is a s himmering glass gown composed of shards of broken glass collected from the streets of the ­Castle Hills neighborhood in the Bronx where López grew up and from beaches in Ponce, Puerto Rico, the hometown of her parents. Each piece of glass was suspended with monoĀlament from a s upport structure in the ceiling, lit from below. In the gallery space, the sculptural form was placed at the end of a pro­cessional aisle and the object was placed high up, very much like religious statuary in church. The viewer walked ­toward the dazzling and shimmering object much like a pilgrim approaching a venerated reliquary. The L F ­ actor was an eclectic, gritty, and power­ ful exhibition featuring an emergent cohort of artists who continue to explore, expand, and redeĀne the meanings of a shared, very heterogeneous culture. New York Times art critic Holland Cotter comments on this cultural complexity, “Exit Art advertises ‘L ­Factor’ as a showcase for a generation of emerging artists who are redeĀning what ‘Latina/o’ means, in p art by being at a distance from it. Most of the artists ­were born in Latin Amer­i­ca but raised in the United States. Some speak no Spanish, or have names like Joskowicx, Kostianovsky, and Schneider. Although they deal with symbols of Latina/o identity in their work, they themselves wear their identity loosely and lightly, as a p ersonal choice rather than as an imperative.”4 The wide-­ranging aesthetic options investigated by artists in The L ­Factor exhibit mirror the massive demographic transition currently changing the face of Amer­i­ca. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, “The US Latina/o population increased 58 ­percent between 1990 and 2000, and this group, the largest minority in t he country, now accounts for more than one of e­ very eight Americans. The Census Bureau conservatively estimates that by 2020 Latina/os ­will number 17 ­percent of the country.”5

Responsive to shifting social hierarchies, U.S. Latina/o arts organ­izations are re­orienting their visions and programs, seeking an embracing collective ethos that si­mul­ta­neously re­spects the diversity among national groups while also searching for cultural connections among them. The very concept of communidad (community) is relative to the perspectives and positions of each national group: Juntas pero no revueltos. Scholar Juan Flores articulates the point: “Communidad: the Spanish word, even more clearly than the En­glish, calls to mind two of the key terms—­ común and unidad—in the conceptualization of this notoriously elusive idea. What do we have in ‘common,’ and what makes for our unity? It is impor­tant to note that though the two terms point in the same semantic direction they are not synonymous, and their apparent coupling in the same word, communidad, is not a r edundancy. For while común refers to sharing—­that is, ­those aspects in the cultures of the vari­ous constitutive groups that overlap—­the sense of unidad is that which bonds the groups above and beyond the diverse par­tic­u­lar commonalities.”6 This deeper affiliation across groups is activating an emergent Latina/o cultural proj­ect. Associations such as na l a c (National Association of Latina/o Arts and Culture) that are composed of artists, scholars, and arts administrators are fomenting inter-­Latina/o proj­ects and programs articulating expressive forms of a new Latinidad. Through networks of regional meetings and a biannual national conference, focused on emerging Latina/o talent in t he performing and visual arts, na l a c brings together arts prac­ ti­tion­ers and theorists to reflect upon, deĀne, and promote new Latina/o expressive forms in con­ temporary U.S. culture. This entanglement with mainline cultural paradigms and institutions, moving them beyond recognition to cultural parity, is a foremost current priority. Another primary concern is the necessity for theoretical intersection and intellectual collaboration between the two Amer­i­cas. Historically, hemispheric relations have been restrained by “differing” institutional and po­liti­cal histories, Pos t- m ­ o vimient o  ·  69

enduring inequalities, and uneven flows of knowledge and power among and between U.S. Latina/o scholars and Latin American academics. North-­ South intersections must delicately balance the fantasy of mutuality with the real­ity of antagonisms in conceptual, theoretical, and even epistemological terrains.7 Currently, Latin American art has achieved some penetration in the U.S. market, yet Latin American art history remains a peripheral discipline in the acad­emy. To date, nineteen universities (among them New York University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of New Mexico in A lbuquerque; Florida State University; and the University of Texas at Austin) offer undergraduate or gradu­ate degrees in Latin American art. This at a moment when a national demographic transition positions Latina/os as the largest minoritized ethnic group in American society. From the vantage point of the United States, if Latin American art remains a p eripheral academic discipline, then U.S. Latina/o art can be seen as la periferia de la periferia.8 Even in t­ hose institutions teaching and researching Latin American art, ­there are only occasional courses on U.S. Latina/o art, often promoted by ethnic studies divisions. Within a rising tide of exhibitions, publications, and research, U.S. Latina/o art remains a ci pher, a t erra incognita of the American imagination, both South and North.9 Perhaps the “marginalized” position that Latin American and U.S. Latina/o art share in the American acad­emy spurs us in the necessary task of advancing new affiliations and networks of support, cooperation, and knowledge creation. The “Latinization” of the United States and the simultaneous “North Americanization” of Latin Amer­i­ca calls for a deeper and franker dialogue between Southern and Northern scholars seeking to comprehend and negotiate global pro­cesses that reposition economics, communications, and culture. Collaboration must extend to articulating cultural exchanges such as symposia, exhibitions, and collective research and writing proj­ects that ­will deepen and broaden the reciprocity of 70  ·  t omá s ybar ra- ­f ra us t o

North-­South agendas. Cultural negotiations built on candor, sincerity, and a shared vision propel networks for two-­way communication, creating copresence and mutuality. In the current social arena, migratory flows and the constant movement of ­people and ideas across hemispheric borders position con­temporary Latina/o experience and cultural expression as part of an incipient transnational imaginary. ­Today’s Latina/o culture is nurtured within translocal spaces and is vibrant in the formation of new mobile identities, incipient co­ali­tions and solidarities, and pos­si­ble social formations of connection, communication, and conciliation within national groups and across borders. This continental space, nuestra Amer­i­ca, is what literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt calls a “contact zone.”10 Pratt explains, “Contact zones are not geographic places with stable signiĀcations . . . ​ but are si­mul­ta­neously sites of multi-­vocality, of negotiation, borrowing and exchange.”11 Latin Amer­i­ca and the Latina/o United States form a d ynamic contact zone with intellectual goods flowing along multiple “cultural corridors” from “­here” to “­there” and back again. Artists are able to si­mul­ta­neously go back and forth between dif­fer­ent landscapes of symbols, values, traditions, and styles and/or operate within a l andscape that encompasses both concurrently. Latina/o American arts and culture reflect the outside real­ity of continental Amer­i­ca. A contact zone deĀned by ongoing pro­cesses of racial-­cultural transculturations, a p lace where the rational and the historical coexist with the mystical and the mythical. The incandescent art and culture of Latinoamerica (both inside and outside our borders) continues to delight and astonish us. As the Latina/o American imagination gains security and ac­cep­tance, it envisions new horizons of ­human possibility. As we revise conceptual frameworks, articulate new paradigms, and establish new research priorities for visual culture in the hemi­sphere, we must sustain intellectual platforms of complex translations, honest disagreement, and shared common ground. The nurturing of communication encourages

conviviality, while also acknowledging bound­ aries of mutual re­spect. The task remains open, encouraging our participation. Notes This chapter was originally published as Tomás ­Ybarra-­Frausto, “Post-­movimiento: The Con­temporary (Re)Generation of Chicana/o Art,” A Companion to Latina/o Studies, ed. Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 289–96. Copyright © 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., except for editorial material and organ­ization © 2007 by Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo. The right of Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 1. Josh Kun, “The New Chicano Movement,” Los A ­ ngeles Times, January 9, 2005. See Gustavo Buntinx, “Communities of Sense/Communities of Sentiment: ­Globalization and the Museum Void in an Extreme Periphery,” in Ivan Karp et al., Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 219–46. 2. See Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City (New York: Verso, 2000). 3. See the Exit Art press release, “Next Generation of Latino Artists Takes Center Stage at Exit Art’s New Hell’s Kitchen Space,” [2003?]. 4. Holland Cotter, “A New Latino Essence, Remixed and Redistilled,” New York Times, Friday, November 28, 2003, E 4l.

5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Hispanic Population: Census 2000 Brief (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2001), 2. 6. Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 193. 7. See Sonia E. Alvarez, “On Temporalities: ­Trans-­Locations and Translation,” paper presented at the seminar “Intellectual Agendas and Localities of Knowledge: A Hemispheric Dialogue,” Casa Lamm ­Cultural Center, Mexico City, Mexico, October 5–6, 2001. 8. See Buntinx, “Communities of Sense.” (The periphery of the periphery.) 9. One current scholarly proj­ect situated at the International Center for the Arts of the Amer­i­cas (ICAA ) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in cooperation with the University of California, Los Angeles, Chicano ­Studies Research Center, is “Recovering the Critical Sources for Latin American Latino Art.” Research teams in the United States and Latin Amer­i­ca ­will identify the primary sources, such as manifestos, articles, lectures, unpublished manuscripts, and other documents by artists, critics, and curators who have played a major role in the development of U.S. Latina/o and Latin American art. A digital archive ­will permit researchers from all over the world to access the bulk of the recovered materials. 10. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6–7. See also James Clifford, “Diasporas,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth ­Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 11. Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

Pos t- m ­ o vimient o  ·  71

Further Reading

Almaraz, C. S. [Carlos]. “The Artist as Revolutionary.” ChismeArte 1, no. 1 (fall 1976): 47–55. Gamboa Jr., Harry. “Urban Exile (or, The Chicano Artist as a Lie of Omission).” Metamorfosis 5, nos. 2 and 6, no. 1 (1984–85): 105–8. Latorre, Guisela. “Chicana Art and Scholarship on the Interstices of Our Disciplines.” Chicana/Latina Studies 6, no. 2 (spring 2007): 10–21. Martinez, César. “Arte Chicano I.” Caracol: La Revista de la Raza 1, no. 4 (December 1974): 8. Martinez, César. “Arte Chicano II.” Caracol: La Revista de la Raza 1, no. 6 (February 1975): 3. Monteverde, Mildred. “Con­temporary Chicano Art.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 2, no. 2 (fall 1971): 51–61.

Noriega, Chon A. “From Beats to Borders: An Alternative History of Chicano Art in California.” In Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000, edited by Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bern­stein, and Ilene Susan Fort, 353–71. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Quirarte, Jacinto. “Introduction: The Beginning of Chicano Art.” In Chicano Art History: A Book of Selected Readings, edited by Jacinto Quirarte, 13–15. San Antonio: University of Texas at San Antonio, 1984. Rodriguez, Pedro. “Arte Como Expresión del Pueblo.” Metamorfosis 3, no. 2 (1980/1981): 59–62. Venegas, Sybil. “Conditions for Producing Chicana Art.” ChismeArte 1, no. 4 (fall/winter 1977): 2, 4.

Part II. Cultural Reclamation and Vernacular Traditions

FIG. II.1. Carmen Lomas Garza, Nopalitos para ti, 1989. Gouache on cotton paper, 15 × 13 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

ter ezit a r omo

Part II. Introduction One of the major tenets of the Chicano movement was the formation and affirmation of a “Chicano” cultural identity. According to “El Plan Espíritual de Aztlán,” the seminal manifesto drafted at the 1969 Chicano National Liberation Youth Conference in D enver, Colorado, artists ­were key contributors within the sociopo­liti­cal movement: “We must ensure that our writers, poets, musicians, and artists produce lit­er­a­ture and art that is appealing to our p ­ eople and relates to our revolutionary culture.”1 For Chicanos, it was not an agenda to protect a t ransplanted culture and heritage but an education pro­cess to counteract the multiple layers of “internal colonization” inflicted Ārst by the Spanish in Mexico and ­later by the American occupation a­ fter the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Chicano/a artists embarked on a co ncerted effort to re­ introduce Mexican history and its relationship to the U.S. Southwest, revitalize artistic expressions, and support community activities as a means to protect an ethnic identity within the conĀnes of the larger Euroamerican society. In visualizing this new identity, artists became part of a cultural reclamation pro­cess that drew from myriad sources, including Mexican art, history, arte popu­lar, and community cultural activities. Graphic images of calaveras (skeletons), the mestizo tri-­face, the Virgen de Guadalupe, magueys (agave cactus), and eagle-­devouring-­

serpent-­on-­cactus transmitted a decidedly Mexican identiĀcation. ­There was a conscious use of Spanish words, bold colors, pre-­Conquest glyphs, and Mexican Revolution po­liti­cal icons, such as Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa. This recuperation also included the affirmation of a mestizo (mixed-­race) identity, one that brought greater affirmation and attention to Indigenous ­family roots, physical features, and artistic expressions. The result of this pro­cess was a validation of the Chicano’s historical presence on this continent and the oppositional stance warranted by living in an “occupied Amer­i­ca.” This initial iconography of easily identiĀable heroic Āgures from a glorious past, spiritual images, and cultural arts from Mexico formed the basis for an early artistic practice that would be transformed into an aesthetically complex Chicano art. Within this cultural reclamation pro­cess, Chicano artists expanded the deĀnition of “art” to encompass all artistic activities that affirmed and celebrated their Mexican culturally mixed heritage. However, as a result of their Western Eu­ro­pean art training and the real­ity of their lived experiences in the United States, they succeeded in creating a hybrid art that incorporated and transformed multiple influences from a bicultural, and at times tricultural, real­ity. In expanding both the deĀnition and scope of what constituted “Art,” Chicano/a artists also paved the way for a scholarship that would develop a ­critical

assessment of and generate continuous debate regarding Chicano art, initially led by the artists themselves. Part II contains essays by artists, curators, and cultural critics that explore vari­ous manifestations of the development of Chicano art’s hybridity, its porous deĀnitions, and its conscious blurring of the lines between “low” and “high” art. Beginning with Rupert García’s essay from 1978 that positions “popu­lar art” within the context of a C hicano liberation art, the chapter continues with two key aesthetic frameworks, Tomás Ybarra-­ Frausto’s rasquachismo and Amalia Mesa-­Bains’s domesticana, which established the foundation for a nascent theoretical discourse on Chicano art as a unique artistic style. The subsequent essays chart the multiple relevant cultural and artistic influences that ­shaped an evolving Chicano art, ranging from Mexican pre-­Conquest spirit­uality and popu­lar art to con­temporary U.S. graffiti, pop art, and modernism, with a frequent emphasis on humor and irony. More recently, Chicano art has expanded to include rapidly changing technologies and a wide range of social issues beyond the original civil rights movements of the last ­century. Mexican arte popu­lar was an early nutrient in the development of Chicano art. Formally trained artists appreciated the work of traditional artisans that reflected the social class of many Chicanos, as well as provided culturally relevant imagery and media. In the Ārst essay, “The Politics of Popu­lar Art,” Rupert García challenges the ubiquitous use of the term “popu­lar art,” especially by professional art critics and art historians, to discount art made by non-­academy-­trained artists. Within the hierarchy of the art world, “popu­lar art,” much like the culturally bound term “folk art,” is relegated to a lower status and its artists not taken seriously. García notes that the term is also used to encompass art created in the Third World and by working-­class artists. In the United States, the term has often been applied to Chicano art ­because of its vernacular cultural references. García argues that the use of “popu­lar art” in all of ­these situations allows elitist institutions to 76  ·  ter ezit a r omo

control the production of what constitutes “real art.” In deĀance, García concludes that while the elite art world believes “popu­lar art” to be culturally bound, its aesthetics and resonance with all oppressed ­people make it truly universal. García’s essay is also an early example of Chicano artists’ attempt to provide a theoretical context for C ­ hicano art as “universal” due to its populist roots. Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto integrates the manifestations of popu­lar art expressions in the Chicano community into an encompassing theory of Chicano art in hi s essay “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility.” He begins by deĀning and exploring the Mexican concept of rasquache, ultimately utilizing it (with some humor) to codify all Chicano cultural production, including theater, lit­er­a­ture, and visual art. DeĀning “rasquache” as the perspective of the “underdog,” Ybarra-­Frausto redeĀnes Chicano rasquachismo as a f orm of cultural and po­liti­cal re­sis­tance incorporating strategies of appropriation, reversal, and inversion. At the heart of rasquachismo is the artistic pro­cess of se­lection and combination of materials—­many of them found in t he home and community—to create objects imbued with new meaning. Within this expanded aesthetic framework, Ybarra-­Frausto declares that while Mexican vernacular rasquache traditions may inform Chicano art, Chicano rasquachismo evolved as a “ bicultural sensibility.” Equally impor­tant, the theory delineates how this sensibility and the resultant ­artworks consciously blur the lines between “high” and “low” art, thereby enacting a stance of aesthetic re­sis­tance to subvert a mainstream art hierarchy. Due to her academic training in psy­chol­ogy, commitment to artistic practice, and po­liti­cal activism within the Chicano movement, Amalia Mesa-­Bains has successfully navigated the worlds of installation artist, education administrator, cultural activist, and art critic. Building upon Ybarra-­Frausto’s theorization of rasquachismo as a set of aesthetic practices ­adopted in opposition to dominant culture, Mesa-­Bains proposes a speciĀcally Chicana variation, which she outlines in “Domesticana: The Sensibility of ­Chicana

Rasquachismo.” Whereas Ybarra-­Frausto’s theory invoked bicultural influences as central to the survival mode of Chicanos, Mesa-­Bains’s domesticana countered with her version of culture as a t wo-­edged sword for Chicanas that generated a distinct artistic production. Her theory of domesticana constitutes both a r e­sis­tance to postcolonial domination and a critique of restrictive gender roles within Chicano culture. While creating a theoretical approach to understanding Chicana art, Mesa-­Bains provides a preliminary critical framework for its evaluation by adapting feminist theory and molding it to the speciĀc Chicana experience. As a cr itical reworking of the aesthetic interventions of ­women in the domestic sphere, including the accumulative and organic construction of home altars and capillas (outdoor religious shrines), the theory provides an articulation of the multiple sensibilities and strategies affecting Chicana artists’ choice of media and subject m ­ atter and emphasizes the home as a s pace of female power rather than only subordination. Through a b rief analy­sis of her own artwork and that of California artists Patricia Rodriguez and Patssi Valdez, Mesa-­Bains utilizes her theory of domesticana to challenge the bound­aries between public and private space, along with validating the overlooked historical and aesthetic contributions of Chicanas. The coalescing of cultural and aesthetic influences into a singular Chicano art form is represented well in t he work of Rubén Trejo. Born in a railroad car in Minnesota, Trejo spent the majority of his professional life in t he state of Washington and is best known for his “nail text” wall installations and mixed-­media sculptures. In his essay “Chicano Humor in Art: For Whom the Taco Bell Tolls,” Trejo focuses on how humor is utilized within his artistic practice, and how it informs Chicano art in general. He proposes that the major sources of humor for Chicano artists include pre-­Conquest art, Mexican folk/pop­u­lar art and lit­er­a­ture, and the artistic and social critique legacy of the Mexican printer José Guadalupe Posada. In addition to explaining his use of sexually suggestive food-­related references to in-

ject humor into his art and exploring the concept of clothing-­as-­mask in Amer­i­ca, Trejo discusses the larger cultural role of masks, especially ­those worn on the Day of the Dead in Mexico and on Halloween in t he United States. Trejo believes the mask’s power is derived from its ability to transform the wearers, allowing them to escape or enter dif­fer­ent realities. For him, t his dual conception of masks mimics the bicultural condition of Chicano artists, in par­tic­u­lar their ability to choose from ele­ments of both Mexican and American socie­ties to create satirical, dynamic, and compelling art. In her essay “Points of Convergence: The Iconography of the Chicano Poster,” Terezita Romo also approaches the development of Chicano poster art within a historical continuum. Delineating three distinct periods of poster production, she traces the ­factors that ­shaped the development of iconography and visual styles, and the varying degrees to which artists negotiated between prints created for a collective po­liti­cal agenda and/or personal aesthetics. According to Romo, during the Ārst period of Chicano art (1965–72), poster production occurred primarily at college and university campuses, and was linked directly to sociopo­liti­cal activism. From 1972 to 1982, poster production shifted to cultural centers and nonproĀt organ­izations, where artists often produced works that promoted events in t he community. In addition to their role within po­liti­cal activism, Romo argues that posters of this period also contributed to the formation and affirmation of a Chicano identity, drawing upon a diversity of cultural and vernacular sources, including Mexican history, calendar art, urban youth culture, and indigenism. She concludes that from 1983 to 2000, the discourse of “multiculturalism” facilitated the entrance of Chicano artists into mainstream art institutions, while the establishment of professional printing facilities at places such as Los Angeles’ Self Help Graphics & A rt and Aztlán Multiples allowed poster artists new opportunities to explore personal content and experiment on an aesthetic level. Besides providing a historical timeline for this key medium of Chicano art Intr o d uctio n t o Par t II  ·  77

production, Romo emphasizes the importance of Chicano poster artist’s aesthetic and technical experimentation and their contributions to a redeĀnition of “Chicano art.” In the search for the seamless incorporation of myriad influences and experience, the con­ temporary Chicano artist has also mined urban aesthetics and street art practices for inspiration. In “Graffiti Is Art,” Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez discusses his development from graffiti wall artist to museum canvas painter. The essay serves an invaluable history of L.A. ga ng writing, its importance in deĀning and defending territory, and its transformation by Bojórquez into his own personal aesthetic language. In his reworking of neighborhood placas (barrio graffiti), experimentation with Asian calligraphy, and U.S. pop art, Bojórquez transformed the classic barrio “cholo” style of Old En­glish writing into a minimalist art that has found its place not only on street walls and in American popu­lar culture but also within mainstream art galleries and museums. One of the earliest manifestations of Chicano art’s hybridity was its incorporation and reinterpretation of Mexico’s Indigenous heritage. Victor Zamudio-­Taylor explores the valorization of Mexico’s pre-­Conquest roots as a key ele­ment in the development of cultural identity within the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His essay, “Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism: Chicano/a Art and the Pre-­Columbian Past,” draws connections between the ideology of mexicanidad, which highlighted the role of Indigenous cultures in t he making of the Mexican nation, and the Chicano movement’s adoption of Mayan and Aztec iconography to develop a hi storical identity and to establish an imaginary homeland (Aztlán as the U.S. Southwest). Zamudio-­Taylor further delineates the relationship between modern art and Chicano art, beginning with the strong link between pre-­Conquest imagery and Mexican muralism of the early twentieth ­century, which had a dir ect impact on Chicano murals and artist collectives. Zamudio-­Taylor brings his analy­sis up to the con­temporary moment 78  ·  ter ezit a r omo

and offers his deĀnition of “post-­Chican@” art, which he argues continues to reference Mexican and Chicano movement historical sources within a wider context of recent global influences and wide-­ranging artistic practices. While receiving less attention than posters, murals, and paintings, photography has functioned as a medium for Chicano artists to reclaim and negotiate a cultural identity. Jennifer A. González’s essay for a group exhibition, “Negotiated Frontiers: Con­ temporary Chicano Photography,” positions six Chicano photog­raphers in relationship not only to each other but also to other con­temporary photog­ raphers. In her discussion of the work of Miguel Gandert, Delilah Montoya, Christina Fernandez, Harry Gamboa, Kathy Vargas, and Roberto Bui­ trón, González argues that while all are concerned with vari­ous aspects of a c ultural narrative, it is their interest in the role of the camera, the viewer, and their visual dialogue with con­temporary photography that have allowed ­these artists to transform “the bound­aries of photographic repre­ sen­ta­tion.” In the range of their work, from neo­ documentary photos and text-­based montages to humorous recuperation of Hollywood-­derived ste­ reo­types, the staged format of each narrative series expands notions of “authenticity” within photographed images. Equally impor­tant, González posits that Chicano narrative photog­raphers, with their distinctive combination of culturally speciĀc interpretations of historical events and an activist vision for the f­ uture, have the potential to undermine endemic racisms in the Āeld of visual culture. Even within isolated and artistically traditional regions, artists have found ave­nues for the experimentation and creation of new hybrid forms that are redeĀning Chicano art. In “Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion  C. Martinez,” Catherine  S. Ramírez proĀles a N ew Mexican artist who has aesthetically expanded and transgressed the practice of religious carvings, known as santos. Like many other santeras/os (saint carvers), Martinez is honoring the distinctive artistic practice handed down since the 1500s, when the Spanish established their occupation of what is

now northern New Mexico. Along with being one of the few w ­ omen drawing from this still relevant tradition, Martinez represents a radic al aesthetic departure with her incorporation of remnants of con­temporary technologies. Instead of regional wood, gesso, and paints, her pieces consist of wire, cables, cir­cuit boards, and other components of e-­waste. With her blurring of science and technology with the sublime and the cultural, Martinez questions what constitutes tradition, preservation, and authenticity, while also calling into question the beneĀts of technology and their detrimental effects on the environment and on h ­ umans. In her essay, Ramírez applies the concept of the Chicanafuturist to describe Martinez’s ability to draw from tradition, transform the pres­ent through her technology-­based art, and point t­ oward a f­ uture that incorporates a Chicana cultural identity within a larger humanist worldview. Many Chicano artists in r ecent years have been inspired to construct multimedia installations that incorporate drawing, photography, video, found objects, and wall text. ­These new immersive forms reference personal and cultural histories of the past as environments to be inhabited in t he pres­ent. Roberto Tejada’s essay “Celia Alvarez Muñoz: ‘Civic Studies’” from his monograph on Celia Alvarez Muñoz, explores the myriad influences that have ­shaped her work. Focusing on one of Alvarez Muñoz’s installations, El Limite, Tejada unfolds the layers of meaning in the expansive installation, including Aztec imagery, references to the adelitas (­women who participated in the Mexican Revolution), Mexican folk wisdom, Alvarez Muñoz’s personal connections to the U.S.-­Mexican border, and her f­ ather’s

tenure as a ra ilroad worker. What emerges is a complex commentary on individual movement, transnational migration, and border vio­lence woven into “a story about object relations, ­family lore, storytelling and the transposition of history.” Tejada’s essay is a Ātting closure to this section and its articulation of the multivalent sources that have informed Chicana/o art practice. The essays in t his section emphasize the integration of vernacular and historical sources, as well as bicultural aesthetic influences into an iconographically rich Chicano art. While the primary sources for Chicano artists ­were initially from Mexico and their Mexican American communities, many scholars have begun to uncover the modernist aesthetics and U.S. popu­lar influences that have informed more recent artistic production. All of the essays ­here touch on some aspect of what Tejada describes as “features of culture often neglected by histories of art founded only on articulations of aesthetic form.” Instead we Ānd Chicana and Chicano artists who subverted the hyphen in the “Mexican-­American” experience and in the pro­cess forged their cultural reclamation and vernacular traditions into a new American art. Notes 1. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles and Alberto Urista, “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” in Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 405.This manifesto was first presented at the Chicano National Liberation Youth Conference in Denver, Colorado, on March 23, 1969, and published in El Grito del Norte 2, no. 9 (July 6, 1969). The conference was or­ga­nized by Mr. Gonzáles’s Crusade for Justice.

Intr o d uctio n t o Par t II  ·  79

This page intentionally left blank

r uper t gar cí a

10. The Politics of Popu­lar Art  ·  1978

­ ere is confusion between “popu­lar art” and Th “mass art.” The Ārst truly supports the ­people, while the second is against the ­people. ­These two tendencies of art are, in fac t, diametrically opposed to each other. Nevertheless, many ­people incorrectly use t­ hese terms interchangeably. This special issue of ChismeArte is devoted to “popu­ lar art” of the Chicano-­Latino. A clariĀcation of what “popu­lar art” is and what it is not, therefore, is in order. What follows is a brief critical look at two mistaken uses of the term “popu­lar art.” In everyday usage, “popu­lar art” often refers to a style or subject ­matter commonly used by many artists or that is widely appreciated by a large public. On the other hand, professional art critics and art historians, who are mainly white males, use “pop art” or “popu­lar art” to identify the noncommitted, internationally acclaimed, and principally North American mainstream art movement of the 1960s. “Pop art” sought inspiration from the material objects found in the everyday commercial world, for example, the Campbell’s soup can paintings and prints by Andy Warhol or the comic book Āgures Mickey Mouse, Superman,

and so forth found in the work of Roy Lichtenstein. Th ­ ese same critics and historians of culture often use “popu­lar art” to mean art of Third World p ­ eople and the working class, and go further to say that this p ­ eople’s art is inauthentic and “low-­brow art.” For example, we are often confronted by the writings of white critics (especially during the late 1960s and earlier 1970s) who say that art by progressive artists of color is preoccupied with their ­people’s “ethnicity” and that this art is, therefore, culturally bound, not universal. What ­these critics are basically telling us is that they do not identify their humanity with our struggling humanity. Racist and elite theories like t­ hose mentioned above help perpetuate and widen the existing class and racial divisions of our society and continue the repressive myth that only the “cultured” or t­ hose from the dominant society can produce “real art.” Conversely, ­these theories claim that the ­people or the “unschooled” can make only “second class works of art,” and that only when ­these ­people assimilate or are educated to elite values can they create “bona Āde art.” In a word, elite cultural theories

are created to continue the rule of “real culture” by the dominant class so that “true art” is a domain of the culturally privileged. Popu­lar art also is frequently but erroneously identiĀed with the “folk art” made strictly for tourist consumption. The Mexican “folk art” sold at the many colorful booths found on ­Olvera Street in L os Angeles is an example of what I mean. This is not truly “folk art.” It is, instead, corrupted “folk art,” alienated from its original context and use value. The true meaning of “popu­lar art” is art that genuinely and biasedly reflects, in a n open and sincere way and in a par­tic­u­lar historical phase of its development, the hopes, interests, spirit, and ­will of a ­people to continue to strug­gle against the social forces of exploitation. I’m not suggesting that “popu­lar art” is or should be retrogressive in that it must follow a par­tic­u­lar ideology or that it needs to realistically depict the social real­ity of a ­people in utopian illustrations (as adversely experienced in the socialist realism painting of many Soviet artists ­under Stalin’s leadership). A r igid approach to art like this would only frustrate the ­human need to create. Even though art and politics overlap, they are not identical. While the rules and regulations of politics are temporal, ­those of art are not. For example, the ­music of la raza and black ­people created ­under the racist and class divided cap­i­tal­ist society of the United States of North Amer­i­ca ­will outlive the exploitive social context in which the ­music was produced. Given this repressive milieu, much of the sounds, techniques, and lyr­ics of black and raza ­music germinate from and express the necessity of a ­people to be ­free. It is, in a s ense, and relatively speaking, freedom. By extension, this m ­ usic is, therefore, concerned with the freedom of all oppressed ­people. History has shown, moreover, that this ­music has profoundly influenced other ­people’s ­music and has been deeply appreciated by ­people from all races, classes, and ethnic heritages. Black and raza ­music is, beyond doubt, universal. Popu­lar art is a form of expression that profoundly speaks to the creative ability, resistivity, communicability, and sociability of a p ­ eople. This 82  ·  r uper t gar cí a

art, when including a ­people’s historical symbols, designs, events, and notable Āgures in its form and/or content, negates, in effect, the one-­sided view of history as written by elite, racist, and sexist historians. In other words, a p ­ eople are more likely to see themselves portrayed in popu­lar art as real p ­ eople with real needs and prob­lems; as a ­people who are not ­things but ­people who are indeed ­whole ­human beings. Popu­lar art is, therefore, necessarily partial; it is in support of the ­people and in deĀance of the ruling class forces of sociocultural, po­liti­cal, and economic repression, disruption, and control. Unlike popu­lar art, “mass art,” although it employs a demo­cratizing technology, is the e­ nemy of the ­people. Mass art works in ­favor of and is manufactured by the ruling class. It is real and is concretely and integrally connected to a complex and very power­ful cap­i­tal­ist cultural-­machine of manipulation (i.e., the mass media, commercial advertisement, magazines, theater ­houses, and so on). This pseudo art, this mass art, desires and fabricates an image of real­ity in w hich a ­people are misrepresented as being flat and hollow, a homogenized public. It must continuously produce ­these empty caricatures of a ­people to secure and maintain social control over them, to further guarantee mass consumption, and, in t he end, to perpetuate the welfare of the ruling class. Furthermore, mass art paints p ­ eople as being non-­ creative and nonthinking. It boxes you in, isolates and freezes your humanity, and thus attempts to deprive you of your right to criticize and rebel. This paralyzing is done by “transforming real­ity into a series of myths by structuring the message in a way that suggests that it responds to public opinion rather than ruling class interests.” Thus demo­cratizing technology in the context of a cap­i­tal­ist society and in t he hands of the ruling class ­will continue trying to dupe the p ­ eople into believing that “truly popu­lar art is not ‘popu­lar,’ not accepted by the majority, while an art that is actually antipop­u­lar, mass art[,] is ‘popu­lar.’ ”1 We must not over simplify nor overly romanticize popu­lar art. This art, as all progressive art produced in the United States of North Amer­i­ca,

FIG. 10.1. José Montoya, Untitled, from the Pachuco series, 1977. n I k on paper, 8.5 × 11 in. Image courtesy of Richard Montoya.

exists in a hostile social, po­liti­cal context of numerous devastating contradictions and is therefore relatively liberating. Moreover, popu­lar art is a developing, living art and ­will change as the conditions surrounding its creation change. For example, the rebellious and creative popu­lar art of the pachuco/pachuca (their language, values, dress, hairstyle, tattoos, makeup, and so forth) during World War II was formed by speciĀc historical conditions of repression and strug­gle and ­will not be identically repeated. True, la raza i s still very much oppressed, but we have since the pachuco come to our pres­ent situation in 1978 ­after having experienced many dif­fer­ent aspects of material and psychological transformation. ­Today’s concern for pachuco/pachuca popu­lar art is dif­fer­ent from that of the original experience. The pachuco art exhibits this year by José Montoya and other manifestations of pachuco consciousness are cases in point. Montoya’s show documented the pachuco in t wo ways. On t he one hand, he objectively offered sociohistorical information such as old news clippings. On t he other hand, José Montoya displayed his subjective view of the pachuco as seen in his paintings and drawings (Āg. 10.1). In conjunction with two of his openings, Montoya invited friends to take part in t he exhibition by coming dressed in pachuco and pachuca clothes and hairstyles of the 1940s. The con­temporary regard for the pachuco has led ­others to similar research. Of l ate, the Teatro Campesino created and performed the play Zoot Suit [which premiered April  1978 at the Mark Taper Forum in L os Angeles]. While Luis Valdez of the Teatro Campesino was working on the Zoot Suit script, he and the Ālmmaker Jesús Treviño discovered they w ­ ere both at work on the same theme, the pachuco. A ­ fter conferring with Valdez, Treviño deci­ded that Valdez’s script so superbly captured the essence of the pachuco

84  ·  r uper t gar cí a

that his own creative desire was satisĀed. Arturo Madrid-­Barela, scholar and critic of Chicano and Latin American lit­er­a­ture, published in 1973 a critical essay in the journal Aztlán on the depiction in lit­er­a­ture of the conflictive experience of the pachuco. This recent and flowering concern by raza a rtists and scholars is socioaesthetically stimulating and historically signiĀcant, but is this new interest in and approach to the pachuco experience a truly popu­lar advance or is it a nostalgic or academic response? It is too early to say for certain how ­these investigations might affect us. It is certain, however, that our past is of g­ reat importance to us now, and, as Arturo Madrid-­ Barela said of “our interpreters” in lit­er­a­ture, our pres­ent involvement with the pachuco should be critical of all interpreters and should “reveal the peculiar focus of the mythmakers and thus . . . ​ ­free ourselves from their distortions.”2 Popu­lar art must and ­will continue to be a vital and creative force in the rightful strug­gle of the ­people. However, the ruling class opposition to this courageous act of the ­people also ­will continue. This battleĀeld of culture is decisive. The makers and audience of popu­lar art are therefore mandated to be on guard and to continue their work ­toward the development of a s ociety and culture unbounded by racism, sexism, and poverty. Notes This chapter was originally published as Rupert García, “The Politics of Popu­lar Art,” ChismeArte 2, no. 1 (summer 1978): 2–4. 1. Adolfo Sánchez Vásquez, “Truly Popu­lar Art (1973),” in Quotations and Sources on Design and the Decorative Arts, ed. Paul Greenhalgh (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993), 54. 2. Arturo Madrid-­Barela, “In Search of the Au­then­tic Pachuco,” Aztlán 4 (spring 1973): 31–60.

t omá s ybar ra- ­f ra us t o

11.Rasquachismo  ·  1989 A Chicano Sensibility

One is never rasquache; it is always someone ­else of a lower status who is judged outside the demarcations of approved taste and decorum. Propriety and keeping up appearances—­el que diran—­are the codes shattered by the attitude of rasquachismo. This outsider viewpoint stems from a funky, irreverent stance that debunks convention and spoofs protocol. To be rasquache is to posit a bawdy, spunky consciousness seeking to subvert and turn ruling paradigms upside down—­a witty, irreverent, and impertinent posture that recodes and moves outside established bound­aries. Rasquachismo is neither an idea nor a style but more of an attitude or a taste. Taste cannot be codiĀed as a system with comparative proof. As Susan Sontag affirms, “­There is something like a log ic of taste. The consistent sensibility that underlines and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility that can be crammed into the mold of a system or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.”1

The stance of rasquachismo is alive within Chicano communities, but it is something of an insider private code. To name this sensibility, to draw its contours and suggest its historical continuity, is risking its betrayal. Rasquachismo is a v isceral response to lived real­ity, not an intellectual cognition. To encapsulate a s ensibility into words is already a s hort cir­cuit of its dynamism. What follows then is a nonlinear, exploratory, and unsolemn attempt at tracking this irrepressible spirit manifested in the art and life of the Chicano community. Rasquachismo is neither an idea nor a style but more of an attitude or a taste. 1 Very generally, rasquachismo is an underdog perspective—­a view from los de abajo. An attitude rooted in r esourcefulness and adaptability yet mindful of stance and style. 2 Rasquachismo presupposes the worldview of the have-­not, but is also a quality exempliĀed in objects and places (a rasquache car or restaurant), and in social comportment (a person can be or act rasquache).

3 Mexican vernacular traditions form the base of rasquachismo, but it has evolved as a b icultural sensibility among Mexican Americans. On both sides of the border, it retains an underclass perspective.

Both in Mexico and the United States rasquachismo retains connotations of vulgarity and bad taste, a s ense of being cursi. Such a v iew emanating from ­those in control proclaims and enforces their own aesthetic norms as standard and universal. Social class is a deĀnite indicator of being rasquache—it is a w orking-­class sensibility (a lived real­ity), only recently appropriated as an aesthetic program of the professional class (e.g., the Ālm Born in East L.A.). Rasquachismo is brash and hybrid, sending shudders through the ranks of the elite who seek solace in less exuberant, more muted, and “purer” traditions. ­Those newly anointed into the emerging ­Chicano ­middle class are the Ārst to deny connection with anything remotely rasquache. Hints of such association too readily evoke the rough-­ and-­tumble, slapdash vitality of barrio lifestyles recently left ­behind in the quest for social mobility. To be rasquache is to be down but not out (fregado pero no jodido). Responding to a direct relationship with the material level of existence or subsistence is what engenders a rasquache attitude of survival and inventiveness. In an environment always on the edge of coming apart (the car, the job, the toilet) t­ hings are held together with spit, grit, and movidas. Movidas are what­ever coping strategies you use to gain time, to make options to retain hope. Rasquachismo is a compendium of all the movidas deployed in immediate, day-­to-­day living. Resilience and resourcefulness spring from making do with what’s at hand (hacer rendir las cosas). This utilization of available resources makes for hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration. Rasquachismo is a sensibility attuned to mixtures and confluence. Communion is preferred over purity. Pulling through and making do are not guarantors of security, so ­things that are rasquache

86  ·  t omá s ybar ra- ­f ra us t o

possess an ephemeral quality, a sense of temporality and impermanence—­here ­today and gone tomorrow. While ­things might be created al troche y moche (slapdash) using what­ever is at hand, attention is always given to nuances and details. In the realm of taste, to be rasquache is to be unfettered and unrestrained, to ­favor the elaborate over the ­simple, the flamboyant over the severe. Bright colors (chillantes) are preferred to somber, high intensity to low, the shimmering and sparkling over the muted and subdued. The rasquache inclination piles pattern on pattern Ālling all available space with bold display. Ornamentation and elaboration prevail, joined to a delight for texture and sensuous surface (Āg. 11.1). Paradoxically, while elaboration is preferred to understatement, high value is placed on making do—­hacer rendir las cosas. Limited resources means mending, reĀxing, and reusing every­ thing. ­Things are not thrown away but saved and recycled, often in dif­fer­ent context (e.g., automobile tires used as plant containers, plastic bleach ­bottles becoming garden ornaments, or discarded coffee cans reelaborated as flower pots). This constant making do, the grit and obstinacy of survival played out against a relish for surface display and flash, creates a florid milieu of admixtures and recombinations. The visual distinctiveness of the barrio unites the improvisational attitude of “making do with what’s at hand” to a traditional and highly evolved decorative sense. In the barrio the environment is ­shaped and articulated in ways that express the community’s sense of itself, the aesthetic display projecting a sort of visual biculturalism. In yards and porches, for example, traditional items such as religious shrines (capillas) and pottery mingle with objects from mass culture such as pink plastic flamingos or plaster animal statuary. Throughout ­there is a p rofusion of textures, colors, and a j­umble of t­ hings weathering and discoloring. The visual interplay of all ­these accumulations evokes a “ funky,” rasquache milieu.

FIG. 11.1. Luis Jiménez, Vaquero, modeled 1980, cast 1990. Acrylic urethane, fiberglass, and steel armature, 199 × 144 × 67 in. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Historical Continuity

While the attitude of rasquachismo is best exempliĀed in e veryday life practices and forms of popu­lar culture, the sensibility was codiĀed by Daniel Veñegas in his novel Las aventuras de Don Chipote, or cuando los pericos mamen (The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When the Parakeets Suckle Their Young), published in 1928.2 This early Chicano novel chronicles the t­ rials and tribulations of a Mexican laborer as he maladapts to life in t he United States. Entangled in the economic and social predicaments of basic survival, Don Chipote fends for himself using his wits and a robust stoical humor as aids for learning and living. As an errant rogue (picaro), Don Chipote meets life head-on, slipping and sliding out of travels and adventures. The loosely episodic narration of Las aventuras de Don Chipote is a rich compendium of the dialect, customs, and worldview of the Chicano urban working class of the period. In his attitudes, Don Chipote epitomizes a rasquache stance. His tenacity and adaptability are laced with a certain locura, a devil-­may-­care sense that is serious enough about life to delight in it, and frivolous enough to scoff at it. During the 1930s and 1940s, popu­lar forms of theater such as the carpa (tent shows) and tandas de variedad (vaudev­ille) became the standard-­ bearers of the rasquache aesthetic. The raggle-­ taggle bands of itinerant actors traversing the Southwest presented bawdy sketches acted in a broad comedic style. Action was underscored by pratfalls, and robust dialogues ­were laced with sexual innuendo. In ensemble, the carpa sketches are some of the earliest artistic projections of the rasquache sensibility. Through the characters of the peladito and peladita (penniless urban roustabouts), one enters a li vely picaresque world of ruffians who scamper through life by the seat of their pants. Always scheming and carousing, the pelados personify the archetypal Chicano everyman and

88  ·  t omá s ybar ra- ­f ra us t o

everywoman who live out a lif e-­on-­the-­margin sustained by laughter and a cosmic ­will to be. In their grossness, the peladitos underscore elemental impulses such as eating, laughing, and fornicating as primordial sources of vitality and power. As purveyors of a rasquache sensibility, peladitos remind us to draw sustenance from fundamental life pro­cesses and to use them for surmounting adversity. The Chicano movement of the 1960s reinvigorated the stand and style of rasquachismo. The very word “Chicano,” with its undertow of rough vitality, became a cipher repudiating the whiteness of experience. If some deemed it a t erm of denigration and coarseness, many ­others gave it the authority of authenticity and self-­referentiality. Turning inward to explore, decipher, and interpret ele­ments from the Chicano cultural matrix, artists and intellectuals found strength and recovered meaning sedimented in l ayers of everyday life practices. The very essence of a bicultural lived real­ity was scorned as un-­American by the dominant culture. A necessary response was to disown imposed categories of culture and identity and to create a C hicano self-­vision of ­wholeness and completion. Signs and symbols that ­those in p ower manipulated to signal unworthiness and deĀciencies w ­ ere mobilized and turned about as markers of pride and affirmation. Cucaracha Press, El Teatro Del Piojo, El Malcriado, and many other titles and names of groups and organ­izations reflect this pro­cess of molding worthiness out of perceived deĀciencies. Rasquachismo, as a sensibility of the downtrodden, mirrored the social real­ity of the majority of Chicanos who w ­ ere poor, disenfranchised, and mired in elemental daily strug­gles for survival. ra sq ua chis mo A Random List Mario Moreno Cantinflas the Royal Chicano Air Force the early actos of El Teatro Campesino the “No Movies” of as c o paintings on velvet

the calaveras of José Guadalupe Posada Born in East L.A. (the movie) ­etc. Medio (L o w) Rasq uache Tin-­Tan shopping at Kmart pretending ­you’re “Spanish” tortillas de harina made with vegetable oil chanclas Muy (High) Rasq uache Cantinflas Shopping at J. C. Penney being bilingual and speaking with an accent in both languages tortillas de harina made with lard chanclas

Luis Valdez and his Teatro Campesino w ­ ere among the Ārst to recognize and give universal signiĀcance to the multifaceted bittersweet experiences of la plebe (working classes). Achingly beautiful theatrical actos captured the tragicomic spirit of barrio life. In a di alectical interplay of social fact and mythic-­religious overtones, actos became scenarios of ethnic redemption and social resurrection. Articulating and validating the rasquache sensibility in dramatic form, El Teatro Campesino bared the Chicano soul and touched the hearts of international audiences. Throughout the country in the ’60s a nd ’70s, sustained by a g rassroots sociopo­liti­cal movement, an alternative cir­cuit for the creation and dissemination of Chicano cultural production was articulated and maintained by Chicano cultural workers. Especially signiĀcant in the visual arts ­were the experiments with public art forms such as murals and posters. The rasquache sensibility informed and gave impetus to diverse aspects of the Chicano cultural proj­ect articulated in p oetry, m ­ usic, and the visual arts. The title of Zeta Acosta’s novel The Revolt of the Cockroach P ­ eople captures the mood exactly.3 It was a l usty, eruptive coming-­ to-­political-­consciousness of the dispossessed. The very titles of some Chicano art exhibitions—­ Quemadas y Curadas (Burned and cured), ¡Dale

Gas! (Let’s go!), Capirotada (Bread pudding), and so on—­reflect the revindication of ­humble, everyday traditions as anchoring sources for artistic production. This recuperation and recontextualization of vernacular sensibilities and art forms extends to the pres­ent. A work of art may be rasquache in multiple and complex ways. It can be sincere and pay homage to the sensibility by restating its premises (e.g., the plebe worldview actualized in ideas and be­hav­ior in the dramatic pre­ sen­ta­tion Las carpa de los Rasquachis by Luis Valdez). Another strategy is for the artwork to evoke a rasquache sensibility through self-­conscious manipulation of materials or iconography. One can think of the combination of found materials and the use of satiric wit in the sculptures of Rubén Trejo or the manipulation of rasquache artifacts, codes, and sensibilities from both sides of the border in t he per­for­mance pieces of Guillermo Gómez-­Peña. Many Chicano artists continue to investigate and interpret facets of rasquachismo as a conceptual lifestyle or aesthetic strategy. Rasquachismo is a s ensibility that is not elevated and serious but playful and elemental. It Ānds delight and reĀnement in w hat many consider banal, and proj­ects an alternative aesthetic—­a sort of good taste of bad taste. It is witty and ironic but not mean-­spirited (­there is sincerity in its artiĀce).4 Apropos of this ongoing investigation, an artist recently remarked to the author, “Sometimes I think that all Chicanos are rasquache except you and me, and sometimes I won­der about you!” Notes This chapter was originally published as Tomás Ybarra-­ Frausto, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” in Chicano Aesthetics: Rasquachismo, exhibition cata­log (Phoenix, AZ: MARS Artspace, 1989), 5–8. 1. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 276.

Rasq uachis mo  ·  89

2. Daniel Veñegas, Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o cuando los pericos mamen (México City: Secretaría de Educación Publíca, 1984). 3. Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Revolt of the Cockroach P ­ eople (San Francisco, CA: Straight Arrow Books, 1973).

90  ·  t omá s ybar ra- ­f ra us t o

4. Many friends have helped me to focus and expand my understanding of the rasquache sensibility. Thanks to Peter Rodriguez, Miguel Mendez, Victoria Díaz, Armando Valdéz, Antonia Castañeda, Rudy Guglielmo, María Sandoval, and Jose Antonio Burciaga.

amali a mesa- ­bains

12.Domesticana  ·  1999 The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquachismo

In trying to establish a co ntext for understanding the work of Chicana artists I have responded as both an artist and a s cholar, attempting to develop theory from the understanding of practice. This dialect of knowledge began in the early 1980s when I used oral histories as a tool within research in psy­chol­ogy to examine the issues of identity, culture, and gender.1 ­After this foundational work, establishing the regional, familial, and sociopo­liti­cal perspectives on Chicana artists, it became impor­tant to situate the forms of Chicana art making within the already developing theories of aesthetic production. Throughout the years of relationship and community building among Chicana artists I h ad begun to observe and also create artwork rooted in the everyday or vernacular so much a part of our shared working-­class backgrounds. The pioneering work of Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto on the sensibility of rasquachismo2 delineated the vernacular of the downtrodden in the theater tradition of carpa and its relationship to con­temporary Chicano/a art. It had already become clear early in the Chicano art movement that serious differences and

distinctions ­were being made among men and ­women of the movement. In my artwork and as an artist and cultural worker I b egan to draw references to domestic material in attempt to theorize the critical nature of t­ hese nutrient sources. It seemed impor­tant to distinguish the cultural influences relevant to the work of Chicana artists related to the home, the community, and the church. It seemed equally critical to anchor ­these examinations in a n emerging theory of feminism and art history. I began theorizing on feminist aspects of rasquachismo that seemed evident in t he work on the Chicana artists as a Ārst step in distinguishing the sensibilities, strategies, and forms of art par­tic­u­ lar to ­women. The following essay was a response to the oversimpliĀcation of Chicana art, related to popu­lar culture, as a form of kitsch, a critique that had begun to collapse together the work of Cuban and Chicano/a artists in a rt historical writings of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Terms such as vernacular, vulgar, inferior, tasteless, and insensible are associated with kitsch. The discourse on kitsch in t he postmodern

avant-­garde has been marked by multiple deĀnitions when applied to both con­temporary North American and Latin American art. The critical application of kitsch has been most notable in Latin American art in re­spect to the work of Cuban artists. The writing of Gerardo Mosquera3 in par­tic­u­lar has placed kitsch in a r ecuperative setting in which the Cuban artist who stands outside the everyday embellishments of kitsch can employ the “inferior” to speak of the arbitrary deĀnitions of the “superior.” The examination is expanded to make distinctions between mass-­ produced objects and the intimate expressions of sincere decoration in t he domestic space. As Mosquera points out, ­there is a need for greater classiĀcatory information and a more speciĀc deĀnition of ­these phenomena. Within this pro­cess of clariĀcation, meaning and usage become even more crucial. When is kitsch recuperated, by whom, and for what aesthetic intention? Many of ­these same concerns for meaning and usage can be brought to bear on the Chicano phenomenon of rasquachismo, or the view of the downtrodden. Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto elaborates, “Very generally, rasquachismo is an underdog perspective—­ los de abajo . . . ​it presupposes a world view of the have not, but it is a quality exempliĀed in objects and places and social comportment . . . ​it has evolved as a bicultural sensibility.”4 In rasquachismo the irreverent and spontaneous are employed to make the most from the least. In rasquachismo one has a s tance that is both deĀant and inventive. Aesthetic expression comes from discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials such as tires, broken plates, and plastic containers, which are recombined with elaborate and bold display in ya rd shrines (capillas), domestic decor (altares), and even embellishment of the car. In its broadest sense it is a combination of resistant and resilient attitudes devised to allow the Chicano to survive and persevere with a s ense of dignity. The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo.

92  ·  amali a mesa- ­bains

The po­liti­cal positioning of Chicanos emerging from a working-­class sensibility called for just such a deĀ ant stance. Raised in b arrios, many Chicano artists have lived through and from a rasquache consciousness. Even the term “Chicano” with all its vernacular connotations, is rasquache. Consequently, the sensibility of rasquachismo is an obvious and internally deĀned tool of artist-­activists. The intention was to provoke the accepted “superior” norms of the Anglo-­ American with the everyday real­ity of Chicano cultural practices. ­Whether through extensions and reinterpretations of the domestic settings, the car, or the personal pose, rasquachismo is a worldview that provides an oppositional identity. Unlike the Cuban recuperation of kitsch, rasquachismo is for the Chicano artist a facet of internal exploration that acknowledges the meaning imbedded in popu­lar culture and practices. Rasquachismo then becomes for Chicano artists and intellectuals a vehicle for both culture and identity. This dual function of re­sis­tance and affirmation are essential to the sensibility of rasquachismo. In the counterpoint between kitsch and rasquachismo two major differences are apparent. First, kitsch serves as a m aterial phenomenon of taste through mass-­produced objects or style of personal expression in de coration, while rasquachismo contains both the material expressions and, more importantly, a s tance or attitudinal position. Consequently, the meaning of each is inherently dif­fer­ent. Secondly, their usage reflects a radically distinct instrumentality for the artists. Artists who stand outside the lived real­ity of its genesis recuperate kitsch as a material expression. Conversely, rasquachismo for Chicano artists is instrumental from within a shared barrio sensibility. One can say that kitsch is appropriated, while rasquachismo is acclaimed or affirmed. Rasquachismo is consequently an integral worldview that serves as a basis for cultural identity and a sociopo­liti­cal movement. As such, rasquachismo has not been limited to the visual arts but in fact has been used as a major sensibility in theater, ­music, and poetry. The tragicomic

spirit of barrio life, as Ybarra-­Frausto details, has been a p res­ent form in t he early actos of Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino, in the poetry of José Montoya, in the works of the Royal Chicano Air Force (a conceptual artists collective), in the urban street pageantry of Asco in Los Angeles, and in the border spectacle of Guillermo Gómez-­Peña. Rasquachismo can thus be seen as a redemptive sensibility linked to a broad-­based cultural movement among Chicanos. As the Ārst generation of their community to be educated in universities (­after hard-­fought ­battles in t he civil rights period), t­ hese artists employed a bicultural sensibility. Operating as an internally colonized community within the borders of the United States, Chicanos forged a new cultural vocabulary composed of sustaining ele­ments of Mexican tradition and lived encounters in a hostile environment. Fragmentation and recombination brought together disparate ele­ments such as corridos (Mexican historical ballads), images of Walt Disney, Mexican cinema and mass media advertising, and even Mexican calendario graphics and American pop art. This encounter of two worlds could be negotiated only through the sensibility of rasquachismo, a survivalist irreverence that functioned as a vehicle of cultural continuity. In many re­spects, the rasquache deĀance of Chicano art production has served as an anecdotal history for a community repudiated and denied in in stitutional history within the nation as a ­whole. In so ­doing, rasquachismo provides the anecdote that critical theorist Walter Benjamin refers to when he writes, “Anecdote brings ­things closer to us in space, allows them to enter our lives. Anecdote represents the extreme opposite of History . . . ​the true method of making ­things pres­ent is to image them in our own space.” 5 Within the visual arts, rasquachismo as a s ensibility has been a m ajor force. The regional discourse in C hicano rasquache has been both rural and urban. For example, the hubcap assemblage of David Avalos has fused the amulets of Catholicism with urban car art in a new icon, the Milagro Hubcap. The rural ethos

has also been essential to the rasquache sculpture series Chiles in Traction by Chicano artist Rubén Trejo. Domesticana

To look within the rasquache production of Chicano art and to locate the work of w ­ omen requires a description of both the barrio and ­family experience as well as the examination of its repre­sen­ta­ tion. This examination necessitates the application of feminist theory to this repre­sen­ta­tion. The day-­to-­day experience of working-­class Chicanas is replete with practices of domestic space. The sphere of the domestic includes home embellishments, home altar maintenance, healing traditions, and personal feminine pose or style. The phenomenon of the home altar is perhaps the most proliĀc. Established through continuities of spiritual belief—­pre-­Hispanic in nature—­the ­family altar functions for ­women as a counterpoint to male-­dominated rituals within Catholicism. Often located in t he bedroom, the home altar locates ­family history and cultural belief systems. W ­ omen who exercise a fa milial aesthetic create arrangements of bric-­a-­brac, memorabilia, devotional icons, and decorative ele­ments. Certain formal and continuing ele­ments include saints, flowers (natu­ral and synthetic), ­family photos, mementos, historic objects (military medals, flags, ­etc.), candles, and ­offerings. Characterized by accumulation, display, and abundance, the altars allow a commingling of history, faith, and the personal. Formal structures often seen are nichos (niche shelves), retablo (boxlike containers highlighting special icons), and innovative uses of Christmas lights, reflective materials, and miniaturization. As an extension of this sacred home space, the capilla (­little chapel) is a larger-­scale, more public pre­sen­ta­tion of the ­family spiritual aesthetic. Capilla elaboration can include cement structures with mosaic mirror decoration, makeshift use of tires, garden sanctuary, fountains, lighting, and

Do mestican a  ·  93

plastic flowers. In both the home altar and the capilla, the transĀguration relies on an almost organic accruing of found objects and differences in scale that imply lived history over time. For many Chicanas the development of home shrines is the focus for the reĀnement of domestic skills such as embroidery, crochet, flower making, and hand painting. Related to the creative functioning of the domestic sacred space is the ongoing practice of healing skills. Special herbs, talismans, religious imagery, and photos of historic faith healers are essential to this cultural tradition. Young w ­ omen learn from older ­women practices such as limpias with burned herbs and the application of homeopathic cures. Regional context contributes to the healing discipline, particularly in the Southwest. In the larger area of domestic decoration the use of artesanias such as paper cutting, carving, and hand painting are prevalent. Added to the use of folk objects is the widespread popularity of almenaques, or Mexican calendars and movie posters. The centrality of ­family life directs the sensibility of domesticana, and Chicanas are frequently raised in hierarchical roles of male over female, old over young. The emphasis on gender stratiĀcation creates bound­aries within ­family roles in which ­women gain responsibility for child rearing, healing and health, home embellishment, and personal glamorization. This traditional picture is enlarged in families within urban centers but nonetheless remains relatively consistent. Chicana rasquache (domesticana), like its male counterpart, has grown not only out of re­ sis­tance to majority culture and affirmation of cultural values but also from ­women’s restrictions with the culture. A deĀance of an imposed Anglo-­American cultural identity and the deĀance of restrictive gender identity within Chicano culture have inspired a female rasquachismo. Domesticana comes as a spirit of Chicana emancipation grounded in advanced education and to some degree Anglo-­American expectations in a more open society. With new experiences of opportunity, Chicanas w ­ ere able to challenge exist94  ·  amali a mesa- ­bains

ing community restrictions regarding the role of ­women. Techniques of subversion through play with traditional imagery and cultural material are characteristic of domesticana. Within this body of work we can begin to apply critical viewpoints of feminist theory. Feminist Theory

To understand domesticana Chicana it is necessary to impose a criticality that places art production as more than reflective of ideology but rather an art production that is constructive of ideology. Art then becomes a s ocial real­ity, through which essential worldviews and identities, individually lived, are constructed, reproduced, and even redeĀned. The construction of the feminine through patriarchy relies on a n etwork of psychosocial relationships that produce meaning. Such meanings are created by the ways in which patriarchy positions us as wives, d ­ aughters, ­sisters, and m ­ others. Theorist Griselda Pollock elaborates, “The meaning of the term w ­ oman is effectively installed in s ocial and economic positions and it is constantly produced in language, in repre­sen­ta­ tions made to t­ hose ­people in t­ hose social and economic positions—­Āxing an identity, social place and sexual position and disallowing any other.”6 In this way the domestic sphere, with all its social roles and practices lived culturally, remains Āxed in patriarchy ­unless repre­sen­ta­tions of that world call into question such practices and thereby contribute to its change. In par­tic­u­lar, the feminine is charged with this potential for emancipation. The bedroom and the kitchen convey a centrality but also an imprisonment. In the modern metropolis, the polarity of public (male) space and private (female) space has taken on a splitting intensiĀed by urbanization. In addition, the rural traditions within the Chicano community have encapsulated the private restricted domain of ­women in a unique fashion, while strong kinship patterns in extended families have deepened the psychosocial network of female roles. The domestic chamber, then, has become a space imbued

with a sense of both saliency and isolation. Once again, Pollock’s work on feminine space in repre­ sen­ta­tion becomes a cr itical frame: “The spaces of femininity operate not only at the level of what is represented in t he drawing room or sewing room. The spaces of femininity are ­those from which femininity is lived as positionality in discourse and social practice. They are a product of a lived sense of social relatedness, mobility and visibility. ­Shaped within sexual politics of looking they demarcate a par­tic­u­lar social organ­ization of gaze which itself works back to secure a par­tic­u­lar ordering of sexual difference. Femininity is both the condition and the effect.”7 This condition and effect remain in p lace ­unless the repre­sen­ta­tion, such as language, relocates or repositions the feminine. Spatial ambiguities and meta­phors can function to shake the foundational patriarchy in a rt through challenging works. Domesticana begins to reposition the Chicana through the working of feminine space. Chicana Domesticana

The work of Chicana artists has long been concerned with the roles of w ­ omen, the questioning of gender relations, and the opening of domestic space. Devices of paradox, irony, and subversion are signs of the conflicting and contradictory nature of the domestic and familial world within the work of the Chicana artists. In domesticana Chicana, the creation of a familial site serves as a site for personal deĀnition for the artist. For Chicana artists using the rasquache stance, their work takes on a deeper meaning of domestic tension, as the signs of making do a re both an afĀrmation of the domestic life and a re­sis­tance to the subjugation of the w ­ omen in t he domestic sphere. The domestic tension signiĀes the contradiction between the supportive aspects of the feminine and the strug­gle to redeĀne restrictive roles. Cherished moments stand side by side with examinations of self, culture, and history in v isions of a domestic chamber that is both paradise and prison.

Characteristics of domesticana include an emphasis on ephemeral site-­speciĀc works. The emphasis arises from Chicano survivalist responses to the dilemmas of migration, dislocation, and the impermanence of community cele­brations. Most of the work innovates on traditional forms such as the reliquary, capilla, domestic memories of bedroom altars, vanity dressers, ofrendas (offerings for the Mexican Day of the Dead), and everyday reflections of femininity and glamour. The extension of ­these forms through domesticana serves as a retrieval of memory, capturing in permanent imagery the remembrance of t­ hings past. Chicanas make use of assemblage, bricolage, miniaturization and small box works, photography and text, and memorabilia to create a mimetic worldview that retells the feminine past from a n ew position. Narratives of domesticity and ruin are presented in a redemptive enunciation in the language of domesticana. Artists use pop culture discards, remnants of party materials, jewelry, kitchenware, toiletries, saints, holy cards, and milagros in combined and recombined arrangements that reflect a s hattered glamour. Chicana artists working in domesticana may use hyperfeminization juxtaposed with destruction and loss in a per­sis­tent reevaluation of the domestic site. The works act as devices of intimate storytelling through an aesthetic of accumulation of experience, reference, memory, and transĀguration. Artists whose work embodies domesticana Chicana include Santa Barraza, Carmen Lomas Garza, Celia Muñoz, Patricia Rodriguez, and Patssi Valdez. The rasquache works of Patricia Rodriquez, Patssi Valdez, and Amalia Mesa-­Bains posit an approach to feminine space in the con­temporary that reconstructs aspects of the domestic, the sacred, and the personal. In response to what is sometimes called the master narrative, t­ hese artists enunciate in their own voice a rasquachismo that, unlike kitsch, seeks not an appropriation of low over high but in fact a flux state from within Chicano and Puerto Rican culture. Moving past the Āxation of a domineering patriarchal Do mestican a  ·  95

language, their domesticana is an emancipatory gesture of repre­sen­ta­tional space and personal pose. Patricia Rodriguez

The repre­sen­ta­tion of private space in p ublic discourse is manifested in P atricia Rodriguez’s small box work. The retelling of childhood festivities, rural cele­bration, and patterns of kinship and community are elaborated in s atirical staging within the small box tableau. Memory as a device of emancipation is a per­sis­tent characteristic. Using pre­sen­ta­tion containers, Rodriguez’s Sewing Box mixes the predictable ele­ments of feminine portraiture such as threads, bits of fabric, and milagros. Compartmentalized in their distinct enclosures, with drawers partially open, the Sewing Box offers in j uxtaposition the dominating patriarchy of small plastic soldier Āgurines. We are reminded of ­those segregated roles of girl and boy, of nurturing and aggression, through the phenomena of discarded experience. Tokens of love, narratives of domesticity and ruin, are all aspects presented as a secret directed by a gaze, which we are offered and from which we are ultimately excluded. The tradition of “box” art has been a s trong genre among both Chicano and Chicana artists, where earlier pre-­Hispanic and Catholic traditions of venerated reliquaries persist. As Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto describes, “­These sacred objects ­were venerated religious items such as a s upposed thorn from the crown of the cruciĀxion, a piece of the true cross or vials of blood or mummiĀed anatomical parts of a h oly personage displayed ­behind glass in e laborate containers. As worshipers touched or venerated them, their aura or power was transferred to the supplicant.”8 The extension and innovation of t­ hese reliquaries through domesticana serves as a retrieval of memory, capturing in p ermanent imagery the ephemeral and temporal remembrances of t­ hings past. In assemblage, bricolage, miniaturization, and small sculpture, Rodriguez has created a mi96  ·  amali a mesa- ­bains

metic worldview that retells her feminine past with new positionality. The artist’s self-­portrait piece consists of a small dresser of domestic chambers, the bedroom. A f orm of self-­reliquary, the miniature dresser positions the ­woman as a domestic space herself, as receptacle, protector, safe-­keeper of the domestic experience; drawers partially open, drawers shut, a sm all mirror, and memorabilia constitute a s atire of desire, privacy, exposure, and self-­containment. The satire does not obscure the anguish of a space never safe from unwanted intrusions and demanding responsibilities. The box work of Patricia Rodriguez occupies a par­tic­u­lar place among Chicana domesticana as one of the earliest prac­ti­tion­ers within the greater Chicano/a movement. Amalia Mesa-­Bains

To write of my own work requires a distance not always pos­si­ble but necessary in the context of continuity as an artist. Childhood experiences in capilla tending with my madrina and home altar work with both my grand­mother and my m ­ other ­were signiĀcant. The emphasis on the ephemeral solely in site-­speciĀc shrine work arises from the survivalist position of shifting locations and community cele­bration, impermanent and changing. The Día de los M uertos tradition provided a foundational model for my sustained effort to respond to ceremonial needs. But, like Patricia Rodriguez, my work has centered on duality and flux between private and public space as allegorical ambiguities of meta­phor between the carnal and the spiritual. As a result of the established themes of life and death, my altars have mediated a pantheon of female Āgures. The stance of repre­sen­ta­tion I have utilized has had functions of rehistoricization of ­women through works on Frida Kahlo, Dolores del Río, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Santa Teresa de Ávila, and my grand­mother, Mariana Escobedo. This canonization of icons ­counters the powers of the Church and makes use of popularization

FIG. 12.1. Amalia Mesa-­Bains, An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio, 1984, revised 1991. Mixed-­media installation, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.

through acclamation. Using accumulation, fragmentation, and dispersal, the shrines have created the dislocation of bound­aries within space through their allegorical devices. The viewer as such is drawn against limitations of the temporal and the spatial. Interior and exterior are challenged in t he use of organic materials such as earth, leaves, twigs, and waste. Mirrors, broken and fragmented, act upon the viewer to Āssure illusion and create states of receptivity. Aspects of feminine glamorization and the Catholic baroque in t urn augment the works, reposition spectacle and dazzlement within the marking off of ceremonial space. Much like the capilla, An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio (Āg. 12.1) in Grotto of the Virgins serves as

both a familial space and an interstice for a personal deĀnition. The installations serve as devices of intimate storytelling through an aesthetic of accumulation; accumulation of experience, reference, memory, and transĀguration. Historical works such as the Dolores del Río altar contextualize a domestic icon of the cinema within the Hollywood/Mexicana dual worlds and act as well as my personal narrative of life events. Patssi Valdez

The early work of Patssi Valdez was integrally tied to the work of the urban conceptual art group Asco. Raised in the inner city of Los Angeles, Do mestican a  ·  97

Patssi Valdez faced many of the prob­lems common to the urban condition: poverty, vio­lence, sexual trauma, alienation, and f­ amily fragmentation. Like other members of Asco she sought to deĀne a domestic and personal space in the impoverished and sometimes dangerous section of Los Angeles. As Valdez was the only w ­ oman in the conceptual group, her image became a material real­ity in an objectiĀed image of glamour within the influential cinema landscape of Hollywood. Valdez’s emancipation from object to subject required a development of her own visual language beyond Asco. While her previous collaboration in A sco resulted in living street murals, pageantry, and urban spectacle, it has been her own installation work that has contributed to domesticana. Valdez’s sensibility has been influenced by phenomena such as store display, Chicano theater, dress-up, domestic residue, pop art, and surrealism situated with the strug­gle for identity. Her themes of ruin and glamour can be interpreted through the accumulation and dispersal of make believe and illusion: party supplies, discarded movie sets, the detritus from the edges of downtown Los Angeles, and bits and pieces from the bazaar and the mercado. Utilizing the Ave/Eva polarities of purity and debasement in h er site-­speciĀc homage to the “Black Virgin,” Valdez establishes a hyperfeminization through gestures of the glamorous. ­Jewelry, kitchenware, toiletries, saints, holy cards, and milagros are combined and recombined to create the spectacle of the modern metropolis. Domesticana in Valdez’s work pres­ents a w orld of sincere and innocent longing for beauty and festivity that is beset by ruin, destruction, and loss. The temporary quality of the work gives it a fragile power as she contests the illusion of stability and permanency. The juxtaposing of patriarchal polarities of the good and bad w ­ oman transgresses the control of the masculine gaze t hat brings a r edemptive enunciation to the language of domesticana. Her domesticana is both product and pose in t he attitudinal stance of rasquachismo.

98  ·  amali a mesa- ­bains

Summary

The expansion of a feminine rasquachismo as domesticana has been an attempt both to elaborate intercultural differences between Cuban kitsch and Chicano rasquachismo, as well as to establish the sensibility arising from the strug­gle for identity, sexuality, and power within Chicana domesticana. Like all explorations, terminologies must remain porous, sensibilities are never completely named, and categories are shattered. As Victor Zamudio-­Taylor reminds us, Chicana art and domesticana “shatters the reiĀed universe and breaks the mono­poly of the established discourse to deĀne what is real and true.”9 The redeĀning of the feminine must come from the repre­sen­ta­ tional vocabularies of ­women if we are to undo the wounds of patriarchy and colonization. That is the challenge of new views of space, of the new domesticana deĀance. Notes This chapter was originally published as Amalia Mesa-­Bains, “‘Domesticana’: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 24, no. 2 (fall 1999): 155–67.tI was reprinted as “Domesticana: The Sensibility of a Chicana Rasquachismo,” in Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Post-­contemporary Interventions), ed. Patricia Zavella, Gabriela F. Arredondo, Aida Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Najera-­Ramirez, and Stanley Fish (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 298–315. 1. See Amalia Mesa-­Bains, “A Study of the Influence of Culture on the Development of Identity among a Group of Chicana Artists” (Ph.D. diss., Wright Institute, Gradu­ate School of Psy­chol­ogy, 1983). 2. Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” in Chicano Aesthetics: Rasquachismo ­exhibition cata­log at Movimiento Artistico del Río Saldado (Phoenix: MARS Artspace, 1989). 3. Gerardo Mosquera, “Bad Taste in Good Form” ­(Havana, Cuba: Union, 1985). 4. Ybarra-­Frausto, “Rasquachismo,” 7. 5. Walter Benjamin, “Epilogue,” in The Arcades Proj­ect, ed. Kevin McLaughlin, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 1014.

6. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art (New York: Routledge Press, 1998), 31. 7. Pollock, Vision and Difference. 8. Ybarra-­Frausto, “Rasquachismo,” 11.

9. Victor Zamudio-­Taylor, “Con­temporary Commentary,” in Ceremony of Memory: New Expressions in Spirituality among Con­temporary Hispanic Artists, exhibition cata­log (Santa Fe, NM: Center for Con­temporary Art, 1988), 18.

Do mestican a  ·  99

r ubén tr ejo

13.Chicano Humor in Art  ·  1989 For Whom the Taco Bell Tolls

The roots of Chicano humor are found in pre-­ Columbian art, Mexican folk art, and lit­er­a­ture, as well as in the prints and posters of José Guadalupe Posada. In the United States, traditional Mexican/Chicano humor comes into contact with American technological society, and the results can be very funny. The recent popularity of Mexican foods in U.S. supermarkets and fast food chains has made the jalapeño pepper a hero (Āg.  13.1). The jalapeño, I suggest, is a cultural symbol, which means dif­ fer­ent ­things to Anglos and to Chicanos. For the Anglo it can flavor, it can burn, it can sizzle your hemorrhoids, or it can serve as a phallic symbol. I Ānd it humorous, as an example, that it is only in the United States that La Victoria makes a salsa with a thermometer on the side of the jar. The thermometer indicates the degree of hotness from the turista level up to the aĀcionado of salsa, the “barn burner.” Now, in M exico you would never Ānd this temperature gauge or in fact this kind of humor. Obviously, the American public needs to know ahead of time how hot something is before they taste it.

The jalapeño as a motif has been used by several Chicano artists, so I cannot lay claim to the birth of the pepper idea. In Chicano art, peppers are considered humorous ele­ments and are somewhat analogous to the bananas used in Andy Warhol’s work. Now, for the Chicano audience, the banana is not funny, but a jalapeño is, and I enjoy juxtaposing the two food items in my own creations. First let’s consider the banana. Intrinsically, ­there’s nothing funny about a banana. But in neo-­Freudian terms it takes on the connotation of a phallic symbol. In Chicano art, the jalapeño is not a sex symbol; it is something you eat. To a good portion of the Mexican/Chicano population, in fact, the jalapeño is an everyday food, a good source of vitamins, particularly when it takes on the privileges of a p op symbol. The humor of peppers in Chicano art then revolves around their edibility. Americans ­will assume that the pepper, like the banana, is a p hallic object, and I h ave exploited this misconception in a s eries of works titled A Jalapeño Impersonating a Sex Symbol. Obviously,

FIG. 13.1. Rubén Trejo, Birth of the Jalapeño, 1981. Mixed-media sculpture, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Tanya Trejo.

the title is intended to be humorous and to inflict guilt on the Anglo viewer—­Freudian guilt. Several of my pieces, particularly ­those cast in bronze, play with this bicultural pun in order to bring Chicano and Anglo audiences closer together. In a sense, I try to translate a b ilingual joke into visual form, and in translating it, it becomes very funny. My infatuation with food as humor goes back to the late 1960s, when I was a student at the University of Minnesota. I established international, national, and regional chapters of the I-­Ata-­Taco fraternity, with myself as president and only member. Fraternity members ­were pinned, of course, with a jalapeño. Obviously, the concept of food and Chicano art was already entrenched in my consciousness. In my series A Jalapeño Impersonating a S ex Symbol I h ave also explored another duality or contradiction that I Ānd fascinating, and that is the use of clothing as “mask” in American culture. In ­today’s society, looking from the American point of view, we come from dif­fer­ent tribes. Our clothing denotes our par­tic­u­lar tribal affinity. We participate in the social/tribal game of J. C. Penney or Yves Saint Laurent, or we hail from the 100  ­percent wool or cotton as opposed to the

100  ­percent polyester moiety. The make of the shirt or jeans, Calvin or Anne, gives us a clue as to where we belong in American society. Take a look at the kinds of shoes we wear: Reeboks or alligator Florsheims. They indicate our connections and our status in s ociety. They reflect our economic status and the lifestyle with which we deal. Clothes in our society deĀnitely “make the man.” It’s obvious that a suit allows ­people to look at you in a dif­fer­ent way than if you wear overalls. I’ve noticed that if I’m lecturing and I walk into a room dressed in a suit and tie, I get the kind of re­spect and attention that that kind of uniform commands. On the other hand, if I wa lked into a lecture with paint or dust or what have you, my credentials would be questioned. So in a s ense, the suit or tie opens social vistas and is a symbol of a co n­temporary mask that commands attention from tribal members. In the past, in folk art, as an example, the mask itself gave an indication of what we w ­ ere up to. Particularly in some Mexican masks, it was clear what the impersonator was attempting to portray, ­whether an alligator, a Āsh, a tiger, a skull, and so on. ­There was a reference and a connection to nature. Chicano H umo r in Ar t  ·  101

In our society, bow ties or ties and shoes, suits or jeans, Florsheims or Reeboks, indicate a materialistic mask of our tribe: of what we wear, what we do, what we are about. Drawing on an example from Chicano culture, beginning in the early 1940s, the zoot suit, the long sport coat, tie, and real narrow shoes, ­were fash­ion­able among Chicano males. ­These items of clothing gave us a sense of belonging ­behind which we could hide, as with a mask. We could be a part of society and hide ­behind society as identiĀed by our clothing. I have utilized that idea, the symbol of clothing to mask ourselves, in my work. I h ave used the symbol of the tie, or suit, or chonies (underwear) and have made a sort of joke of it that combines both Chicano and American ideas. Another humorous ele­ment in this complex of the American clothing mask is men’s underwear. As kids we used to listen to a Mexican tune, “Allá en el Rancho Grande.” In this song, the ­woman states that she is g­ oing to make her husband some underwear of wool: “Te voy a hacer tus calzones, como los usa el ranchero . . .” (I am ­going to make your underwear, like the ones the rancher wears . . .) ­Every time we heard this, we laughed. The idea seemed terribly funny to me. L ­ ater on, this same comic ele­ment popped up in an American tv commercial for Hanes, in w hich underwear is “stretched to the limit” by Inspector 38. ­Here is this matronly lady playing with men’s underwear, and she seems to be enjoying it. Then she calls her ­mother and other cohorts to come over and stretch with her. Now, it’s in­ter­est­ing that it’s a ­woman d ­ oing the stretching and not a man. Obviously if a man w ­ ere playing with his underwear it would have sexual implications that are taboo in our society. When I began to play with this idea in my art, I assumed that it might be rather embarrassing. As a male, I had a kind of paranoid feeling in creating ­these forms, and I wondered, “What are my male confrères ­going to think when I cast underwear in bronze?” And my paranoia was borne out. Most of the Anglo males looked at t­ hese pieces and questioned, “What is he up to?,” while the Anglo w ­ omen and Chicanos r­ eally enjoyed 102 ·  r ubén tr ejo

them and laughed. It was, in a s ense, their response that encouraged me to continue making the chonies. Female students, ­women members of the art department, kept joking and adding new ideas to explore, just like the ­woman stretching the underwear. In other words, the humor the chonies suggest became a kind of motif or fetish that I co ntinued in a s eries in b ronze and in wood that exhibits a “pop” sense of humor. I have also utilized the idea of matching shirts and underwear, socks and underwear, suit coats and underwear, so that the humor bounces back and forth within the mask game; a kind of gentlemen’s mask from gq . If you are g­ oing to belong to the Gentlemen’s Quarterly tribe, you need the masks that identify you as one of the “gentle men.” All ­these ­little details are like the mask itself. Shoes, ties, coats, and underwear all create a feeling from the skin out. Masks became particularly well developed in the 1960s and 1970s, when men became more concerned with their appearance. Creams and potions appeared on the market to Ārm the skin, tan the skin, grow hair, eliminate hair, dye hair, and defy nature. All used modern technology and chemicals to mask age and perpetuate youth. And yet, although we defy nature, death is inevitable; we all ultimately return to the earth. This brings us to another major theme in both my own work and Chicano art in general, which is the Mexican attitude ­toward death as expressed in el Día de los Muertos. The Day of the Dead in Mexico is a very religious holiday, which turns on the concept of cultural memory. Altares to celebrate one’s ancestors are constructed, and clothes and food are brought to the altars or to the cemeteries. It is through ­these rituals (rather than through library research, for example) that the Latino discovers a sense of identity and being. The under­lying concept is that you ­will never die as long as your memory is kept alive. Therefore we bring to the altar or gravesite a favorite shirt, food, or sweet, and the ­family loved one lives on again in our memories. ­Here again is an impor­tant idea. The mask that you wore in your life as you walked around the

earth, was it a gun, was it your shoes, was it your favorite shirt or tie? What fetish did you identify with? What was the food you liked? ­These special ­things, ­these favorite ­things, are brought to the altar in cele­bration, to renew the memory of your existence, to acknowledge your existence and give you life ­today. Contrast this idea with the concept of Halloween, where kids dress up and go out begging for candy or adults themselves enjoy a day consecrated to masks. On Halloween, we can put on paint, put on a dev­il’s mask, put on a witch’s mask or what­ever we want. We can wear anything in order to act silly or stupid. We are allowed to do it on that day. We can act out our craziest fantasies by wearing ­these masks and by being somebody ­else. Yet when we look back to traditional Mexican masks and rituals, a p erson could wear a m ask pretending he was a deer, an alligator, or a skeleton ­either to escape real­ity or to portray real­ity. Through ­these rituals of reversal, a dancer could celebrate life by masking as death. By donning a skull, life and not death is ensured and upheld. As ­humans, we leave ­behind only our skull and bones. La muerte or calavera is the only t­ hing that remains, while the rest of it—­money or belongings or whatever—is thrown to the four winds or left for avaricious relatives to Āght over. This life-­and-­death duality is perhaps the essence of both Mexican folk art and the prints and posters of José Guadalupe Posada. The inheritance that is utilized in my sculpture is an entity born of being a Chicano, and being a Chicano crosses Mexican, as well as American and Eu­ro­pean, traditions. Multiple backgrounds can form such two-­and three-­dimensional ideas that they can take you to the brink of lunacy, but I have used this rich background and ethnic landscape for creating art. As a student at the University of Minnesota, I often wondered what the study of Rus­sian history, Shakespeare and En­glish lit­er­a­ture, Freud, and baroque art all had to do with cleaning onions in Hollandale, Minnesota; picking potatoes in Hoople, North Dakota; or visiting relatives in

Michoacán. Of course, this diversity of ideas can produce a three-­headed monster or an artist, and I chose to become the latter. In retrospect, I Ā­nally came to the conclusion that I’m struggling with a third world inheritance caught fornicating with imperialist American society. How to survive in t his “art context” was at Ārst difficult for me. I ­couldn’t Ānd solutions in Main Street American art, or in American mainstream psy­chol­ogy, or in C ésar Chávez’s United Farm Workers or in Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude. All ­these visions ­were too myopic for me to accept. Sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the idea of being a C hicano Ā­nally hit me like a Red River Valley potato. I began looking at Orozco, Rivera, and Tamayo, along with Mexican folk art, in j uxtaposition to Eu­ro­pean and American art traditions, in order to try and Ānd an answer. Such insanity is like trying to formulate a s tyle somewhat between Caravaggio and Schultz. Faced with a no-­win proposition, I Ā­nally settled for a tongue-­in-­cheek attitude. I was exhausted with all the “isms” and ideas that had been formulated for me in American art or American-­European art, and I deci­ded to deal with the ele­ment of humor that was my survival. Again, I began to translate bilingual concepts into visual form. This became very impor­tant ­because my constituents ­were multidimensional groups of p ­ eople: some that spoke Spanish, some that spoke En­glish, and some that ­were clearly rooted in both cultures. This duality of culture has made a b eautiful context for creating art. Selecting from both socie­ties allows a h ybrid art Ālled with humor, symbols, masks, and dualities. I consider my art to be a continuity of folk art as well as a new contribution to Amer­i­ca’s ethnically diverse society. Note This chapter was originally published as Rubén Trejo, “Chicano Humor in Art: For Whom the Taco Bell Tolls,” in From the Inside Out: Perspectives on Mexican and Mexican-­ American Folk Art, exhibition cata­log (San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum, 1989), 86–90. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the Mexican Museum.

Chicano H umo r in Ar t  ·  103

ter ezit a r omo

14. Points of Convergence  ·  2001 The Iconography of the Chicano Poster

The concept of national identity refers loosely to a field of social repre­sen­ta­tion in which the ­battles and symbolic synthesis between dif­fer­ent memories and collective proj­ects takes plac e. —­G ABRIEL PELUFFO LINARI

The Chicano movement of the late 1960s and 1970s marked the beginning of Chicano art. It was within this larger movement for civil and cultural rights that many Chicano/a artists chose to utilize their art making to further the formation of cultural identity and po­liti­cal unity, as reflected in their choice of content, symbols, and media. As expressed in the seminal “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” (Spiritual Plan of Aztlán), drafted at the 1969 Chicano National Liberation Youth Conference in Denver, Colorado, “We must ensure that our writers, poets, musicians, and artists produce lit­er­a­ture and art that is appealing to our ­people and relates to our revolutionary culture.”1 This very power­ful doctrine was a­ dopted and practiced by many Chicano/a artists who abandoned individual ­careers to produce art not only for but

also with the community. The movement’s call to cultural and po­liti­cal activism on behalf of Chicano self-­determination led to the proliferation of two public art forms that became synonymous with Chicano art: murals and posters. Evolving from the Chicano sociopo­liti­cal agenda, murals and posters shared many of the same socioaesthetic goals and iconography. However, over the course of the movement, the poster became the prominent voice for many Chicano/a artists due to its accessible technology, portability, and cost-­effectiveness. The poster format also allowed for a wider dissemination of Chicano cultural and po­liti­cal ideology nationally and, in some cases, even internationally. According to one of its prominent proponents, Malaquías Montoya, “The poster was something that we could go out and mass produce, and not only hang it up in our local communities, but send throughout the Southwest. . . . ​Now instead of traditional Mexican images, or the Mexican flag . . . ​they had imagery that still had a reflection of the past, but tied into con­temporary ­things that ­were happening ­today.”2 In addition to serving as visual

rec­ords of community issues, concerns, and responses, posters also afforded Chicano artists greater freedom with personal imagery. ­Whether as propaganda, advertising, or individual artistic expressions, posters functioned as points of convergence for the myriad forms, signs, and symbols available to the Chicano/a artist. Over the course of the Chicano art movement, the visual uniĀcation of Mexican American po­liti­ cal activism, Mexican cultural identity, and individual artistic exploration produced iconography that was distinctly Chicano, albeit with regional differences. The evolution of Chicano poster art began in 1965 with the production of graphic work for the United Farm Workers’ organ­izing and boycotting efforts, both within and outside the ­union. During the 1970s, the artistic pro­cess and iconography developed further with the advent of artist-­led collectives throughout California. ­These orga­nizational entities created artwork and community cultural activities that expanded the Chicano movement agenda further into cultural and historical reclamation. In the early 1980s, the Chicano poster entered an era of commodiĀcation. As Chicano art and artists entered the mainstream art world of galleries and museums, the Chicano “art” poster was created and gained value as collectable artwork. Within each of ­these phases, Chicano poster production was marked by distinct changes in intent and iconography. To Seize the Moment: The Chicano Poster, Politics, and Protest, 1965–1972 It was like a call went out to all Chicanos. Artists had their mandate—to pictorialize the strug­gle . . . ​and the posters ­were our newsletters. —­J OSÉ MONTOYA

The Chicano movement arose in co ncert with the larger civil rights activism for po­liti­cal and social justice by many marginalized groups throughout the world. In the United States, the black power, American Indian, w ­ omen’s libera-

tion, and gay and lesbian movements changed this country’s po­liti­cal history. The black power movement, with its emphasis on po­liti­cal autonomy, economic self-­sufficiency, and cultural affirmation, influenced the Chicano movement greatly. In fact, the Brown Berets followed many of the orga­nizational tactics of the Black Panthers. The value placed on the Chicanos’ Indigenous history on this continent also provided an impor­tant link to the strug­gles of the American Indian movement: “Self-­representation was foremost in that [Chicano movement] phenomenon, since self-­deĀnition and self-­determination ­were the guiding princi­ples . . . ​of a n egotiated nationalism.”3 This antiassimilationist tenet, which formed an impor­tant foundation of the movement, was based on the integration of culture, art, and politics. Chicano art emerged as an integral component of the sociopo­liti­cal Chicano movement. El movimiento, or la causa, had a p rofound impact on Mexican American artists who had been “forced to attend art schools and art departments which ­were insensitive to their ethnic backgrounds, made to cast off their ethnic background, and forced to produce from a worldview that was totally alien to them.”4 However, such a commitment required artists to become community activists, and not just practicing artists. The po­liti­cal climate was such that “art for art’s sake had become a l udicrous fantasy.”5 Chicano artists w ­ ere expected to respond to the brutal living conditions of Mexican Americans in this country: inadequate education, lack of po­liti­cal power, a high fatality rate in the Vietnam War, farmworkers’ economic servitude, and institutional racism. Many artists, like Malaquías Montoya, believed that “the rhe­ toric that was taking place had to be transformed into imagery so that other ­people could relate to it in a di f­fer­ent way, rather than just a verbal understanding.”6 Given its technical simplicity and public accessibility, the poster offered a relatively easy, cost-­ effective means to reach a large public audience. The main intent was to create po­liti­cal posters that utilized ­simple text with a sin gle image to Po int s o f Co nver gence  ·  105

elicit a s peciĀc response. However, the public was a complex community that included recently arrived Spanish-­speaking Mexicans, bilingual Mexican Americans, and an increasing number of urban youth that did not identify with e­ ither designation nor speak Spanish. In addition, many members within the intended audience ­were illiterate in both languages. This made the Chicano artist’s se­lection of print media (silkscreen, linoleum, woodcut), visual design, text, and imagery extremely impor­tant. In 1965, artists got their Ārst major call to ser­ vice when César Chávez’s Farm Workers Association joined the Delano grape strike initiated by Filipino workers and became the United Farm Workers (ufw ). An unpre­ce­dented number of urban Mexican Americans supported the strike, thus accelerating the transition of a ­labor movement into what became the Chicano civil rights movement: “It had a startling effect on the Mexican Americans in the cities; they began to rethink their self-­deĀnition as second-­class citizens and to redeĀne themselves as Chicanos.”7 As with many other revolutionary ­causes, the poster became the primary tool for communication and mobilization. During the Ārst Āve years of the movement, a signiĀcant number of posters ­were created for ufw marches and boycotts, antiwar protest rallies, student strikes, and related local po­liti­cal events. According to Xavier Viramontes, “For making po­liti­cal statements, one can never underestimate the power of the poster. A strong well-­executed image with few chosen words can make a g­ reat impact and can outlive the memories of past rallies or po­liti­cal marches.”8 The Chicano artist’s initial strategy t­ oward ­po­liti­cal activism combined revolutionary and culturally affirming imagery. Images of raised Āsts, guns, and picket signs broadcast universal symbols of re­sis­tance: “The clenched Āst, as a cultural icon, signiĀed power and revolution as it shifted between art form and ­human form to challenge the incompleteness of democracy.”9 Graphic images of calaveras (skeletons), the mestizo tri-­face, the Virgen de Guadalupe, magueys (agave cactus), and the eagle-­devouring-­serpent-­ 106  ·  ter ezit a r omo

over-­cactus transmitted a decidedly Mexican identiĀcation. ­There was also a co nscious use of Spanish words (e.g., ¡Basta! [Enough!] and ¡Huelga! [Strike!]), bold colors, pre-­Conquest glyphs, and Mexican Revolution po­liti­cal icons, such as Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa. The early iconography pulled together easily identiĀable heroic Āgures and images from a glorious past and transformed them into relevant con­ temporary calls to action. A key artist in t he development of Chicano iconography was Andrew Zermeño, who worked as the ufw ’s staff cartoonist for their bilingual newspaper, El Malcriado. Zermeño created a number of characters based on a p o­liti­cal cartoon style of caricature popu­lar in t he United States and Mexico. By reproducing calavera images by the early twentieth-­century Mexican engraver José Guadalupe Posada and prints by the Taller de G ráĀca Popu­lar (Popu­lar Graphics Workshop), the newspaper pop­u­lar­ized the calavera within Chicano art and brought Mexican social protest art to the attention of Chicano artists.10 The u ­ nion’s graphic production department, El Taller GráĀco, produced banners, flyers, and posters that combined the work of Posada and Mexican photographer Agustín Casasola with Chicano slogans such as “¡Viva la raza!” During this early period of Chicano art, new Chicano symbols w ­ ere created, such as the ufw logo, in w hich a black stylized ea­gle with wings ­shaped like an inverted Aztec pyramid is enclosed by a w hite circle on a red background. César Chávez and his cousin, Manuel, conceived the logo as a wa y to “get some color into the movement, to give ­people something they could identify with.”11 They chose the Aztec ea­gle found on the Mexican flag as the main symbol and created a s tylized version that was easy for o ­ thers to reproduce.12 This symbol grew in prominence through its use as the primary or sole image on all official ufw graphics and its inclusion by many Chicano artists on unrelated posters in s upport of the ­union’s efforts. Posters ­were also produced for other developing cultural and po­liti­cal institutions of the

movement, including the Brown Berets, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán, MEChA), and La Raza Unida Party. Though the messages of t­ hese early recruitment posters are blunt, bold, and easy to read, the culturally affirming visual images ­were as impor­tant as the text. An excellent example of this is the Brown Beret poster, which declares, “­You’re Brown, Be Proud!” It depicts in brown ink the proĀles of two young members wearing the identifying brown berets. Though the artistic style and technique are rudimentary, the poster’s simplicity, choice of text, and brown color convey a power­ful message. Along with the ufw ea­gle, one of the most recognizable symbols to emerge from this period was the MEChA emblem. Though also based on the ea­gle, the MEChA logo is dif­fer­ent in symbolism and intent. The MEChA ea­gle is not stylized but rendered in a realist style reminiscent of that used in mi litary emblems. It carries a s tick of dynamite in o ne claw, with the lit fuse in i ts beak, and an Aztec atl (warrior’s club) in the other claw. Drawing on an impor­tant national symbol within the United States and Mexico, the MEChA ea­gle, with its implements of war, continued the bicultural referencing. Whereas the ufw ea­gle’s po­liti­cal association is derived from its identiĀcation with a l­abor ­union, the MEChA ea­gle declares the student organ­ization’s po­liti­cal agenda. Its confrontational stylization and threatening accoutrements are meant to convey a s ense of power and resolve. Many Chicano artists in t he San Francisco Bay Area participated in t he 1968 Third World Student Strike at University of California, Berkeley, and in student strikes at San Francisco State College, San Jose City College, and San Jose State College. As part of the student and faculty poster workshops, they produced posters that promoted the strug­gles of all Indigenous ­peoples and other civil rights movements, including the black, Asian American, and American Indian strug­gles. Following the example of the Cuban poster makers of the post-­revolutionary period, other Chicano artists incorporated international

strug­gles for freedom and self-­determination, such as t­ hose in A ngola, Chile, and South Africa. In Los Angeles, ten thousand Chicano high school students left classrooms and protested the institutional racism and resultant lack of quality education. Statewide, t­ here developed a uniĀed effort to protest the Vietnam War and the high number of casualties among Mexican American soldiers, culminating in t he Chicano Moratorium of 1970  in East Los Angeles. For some Chicano artists, their early engagement with po­ liti­cal strug­gles pushed them into a lifelong commitment to posters that functioned as a source of indictment and provocation. During the tumultuous Ārst de­cade of the movement, Chicano artists drew on a m ultitude of influences for their imagery. Although ­there ­were key influences by way of American pop and psychedelic poster art, the emphasis was on a radic al art derived from other revolutionary movements. An impor­tant and immediate impact on California’s Chicano poster artists came by way of the Cuban posters of the post-­revolutionary period. During the late 1960s, many Chicano artists, including Rupert García, Ralph Maradiaga, Malaquías Montoya, Linda Lucero, Carlos Almaraz, and Rudy Cuellar, ­were influenced by the posters of Ñiko (Antonio Pérez), René Mederos, Alfredo Rostgaard, and Raúl Martínez. Aside from their attraction to the sophisticated graphic techniques utilized by the Cuban artists, many Chicanos ­were sympathetic to their socialist agenda. Cuban posters also brought a s ense of Third World internationalism to the Chicano liberation strug­gle: “The revolutionary poster calls for collective participation, cultural growth, and international solidarity.”13 Especially potent was the image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, which became a Chicano icon denoting the spirit of the idealist, selfless revolutionary martyr. Many of t­ hese depictions of Che ­were reproduced directly from Cuban posters, such as Rupert García’s Che Guevara of 1968, which is reminiscent of Ñiko’s untitled poster and Rostgaard’s Hasta la Victoria Siempre of the Po int s o f Co nver gence  ·  107

same year. Che’s close-­cropped face rendered in half tones, emphasizing his strong features and famous beret with a s tar, had its origins in t he famous photo­graph by Alberto Korda. In Cuba, Che’s image became the key symbol of the revolution’s foreign policy.14 For Chicanos, Che was the epitome of the handsome warrior who had strug­ gled and died for his revolutionary ideals. During the course of the Chicano movement, Che’s face on posters promoted solidarity with Cuba, local health care programs, and even Cinco de Mayo cele­brations. As part of the collective po­liti­cal activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the majority of the posters ­were created on California college and university campuses. Yet as the call to cultural and po­liti­cal activism on behalf of a C hicano agenda proved harder to realize within an institutional setting, ­these production workshops (talleres) moved to community sites. Along with the belief that the true work of chicanismo was in the community, the talleres ­were based on the collective, socialist agenda of Mexico’s Taller de GráĀca Popu­lar, and most often operated ­under the guidance of master poster artist(s) such as Malaquías Montoya and Manuel Hernandez (Berkeley and Oakland), Ramses Noriega (Los Angeles), and Esteban Villa and José Montoya (Sacramento). This move to the community sparked the development of many artist collectives into nonproĀt organ­izations, including the Galería de la Raza and La Raza Silkscreen Center/La Raza Graphics (San Francisco, 1970, 1971); Centro de Artistas Chicanos/r caf (Sacramento, 1972); La Brocha del Valle (Fresno, 1974), Mechicano and Self ­Help Graphics (Los Angeles, 1969, 1972); and the Centro Cultural de l a Raza (San Diego, 1970). Though posters continued to be produced by some individual artists, such as Rupert García and Malaquías Montoya, ­these centro culturales (cultural centers) became the focal point of poster production in California and ushered in a dynamic era of artistic exploration and cultural reclamation reflected in a C hicano iconography re­nais­sance.

108  ·  ter ezit a r omo

Synthesis: The Chicano Poster and Cultural Reclamation, 1972–1982 As cultural-­political strategy, artists assumed that the undermining of entrenched artistic hierarchies would create apertures for questioning equally rooted social structures. —­T OMÁS YBARRA-­F RAUSTO

Though Chicano art had begun by visually articulating the Chicano movement’s po­liti­cal stance, it also had as a central goal the formation and affirmation of a Chicano cultural identity. In visualizing this new identity, artists became part of a cultural reclamation pro­cess to reintroduce Mexican art and history, revitalize popu­lar artistic expressions, and support community cultural activities. The deĀnition of “art” was expanded by Chicano/a artists to include all artistic activities that affirmed and celebrated their Mexican cultural heritage, including pre-­Conquest symbols, popu­lar art manifestations, murals, and graphic arts.15 As expressed by Manuel Hernandez, a founding member of the Bay Area’s Mexican American Liberation Art Front (mal af ), “The ‘new’ vocabulary is not only words, but it is symbols and attitudes which have become tools for the Chicano, inclusive of the artist speaking to the rest of the world; what Chicanos want to say for themselves and about themselves.”16 The result was a new set of images and symbols derived from a Mexican heritage and Āltered through an American lived experience. Crucial to the development of this new visual vocabulary ­were the artist collectives that became the central promoters and laboratories for this cultural reclamation. Several of them, such as the Centro de Artistas Chicanos/r caf and the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, received funding from the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (ce t a) , a federal government job training program, to hire and train graphic artists to provide the community with ­free posters and workshops. They also became the focal point for artistic experimentation in print techniques and media. H ­ ere artists received access to higher-­quality paper stock, inks,

and equipment, such as the vacuum ­table crucial to the photo-­silkscreen pro­cess. During this period, Galería de l a Raza artists created art prints and cards utilizing a color Xerox machine and launched Frida Kahlo as an impor­tant Chicana icon. La Raza Silkscreen Center/La Raza Graphics brought together artists who reflected the Bay Area’s growing Latin American presence. At the Centro de Artistas Chicanos, r caf poet Luis C. Gonzalez (“Louie-­the-­ Foot”) began his lifelong experimentation with the silkscreen pro­cess by creating prints based on his concrete poems. In Los Angeles, Self Help Graphics and Mechicano offered artists a place to collaborate and experiment with the silkscreen printing pro­cess. Though po­liti­cal posters continued to be created by Chicano/a artists, the iconography changed: “The po­liti­cal poster abandoned the Āsts, the screaming mouths, the tentacles, the fat-­ bellied cap­i­tal­ists for the symbol, the graphic idea, the expressive color, the power­ful slogan.”17 More signiĀcantly, now the majority of the posters ­were created to publicize community events or centro activities. Posters promoted neighborhood issues and agencies, as well as the centro’s own literary festivals, gallery exhibitions, theater workshops, and/or spiritual ceremonies. Within a co llective atmosphere, Chicano poster artists drew on vernacular and cultural traditions, reconstituted them into Chicano images and activities, then returned them to the community as posters. The imagery developed during this second de­cade reflected multiple influences and sources; much of it connected to its use or intended audience. The primary iconographical nutrient was Mexican art and culture. According to Rupert García, “Despite the fact that our umbilical cord with Mexico had been po­liti­cally severed, [its] icons gave us a multi-­faceted sense of continuity.”18 Chicano artists throughout the state incorporated Mexican pre-­Conquest glyphs, religious icons, historical heroes, and con­temporary popu­lar art forms, such as prints, calendars, lottery cards, and toys. Readily recognizable Mexican icons ­were preferred, such as the Virgen de Guadalupe,

Emiliano Zapata, and Francisco Villa. Posters used to announce Mexican historic events, such as the Cinco de M ayo and the 16 of September cele­brations, used other historical Āgures (Benito Juárez and ­Father Miguel Hidalgo, respectively). Yet, the Chicano/a artist often took artistic license and stretched historical accuracy in t he name of cultural education. An example is the 1978 Celebración de independencia de 1810poster by Rudy Cuellar of the r caf , which features the Californio rebel Tiburcio Vásquez, and Mexican Revolutionary intellectual Ricardo Flores Magón, along with Mexican In­de­pen­dence leaders Hidalgo and José María Morelos floating above a map of North and South Amer­i­ca. In combining heroes from the Mexican In­de­pen­dence of 1810, the Californio re­sis­tance of the 1860s, and the Mexican Revolution of 1910, with maps of both American continents, Cuellar brings historical continuity, geographic unity, and regional relevance to a local cele­bration of “Mexican In­de­ pen­dence Day.” One of the most potent influences came by way of the Mexican calendars, which many Mexican American businesses ordered and gave to their loyal customers annually. Chicano/a artists gravitated t­ oward them for cultural and personal reasons. The calendars w ­ ere found in almost ­every home, and many Chicano/a artists learned about Mexican history and culture from them. For many p ­ eople, ­these prints became “art works” ­after the calendar dates ­were cut off and the image was framed. The calendar prints introduced the majority of artists to a wealth of images illustrating Mexico’s Indigenous heritage, cultural traditions, and regional diversity. Chicano/a artists ­were especially drawn to the depiction of pre-­Conquest history and myths. The impact was so ­great that Mexican calendar images provided some of the most memorable icons in C hicano art. In 1972, Jesús Helguera’s Amor indio appeared on the debut a­ lbum cover for the California rock group Malo that was distributed internationally. In addition to the calendar’s artwork, its educational format also inspired many California

Po int s o f Co nver gence  ·  109

FIG. 14.1. Judithe Hernández, Reina de la Primavera, 1974. Serigraph. © Judithe Hernández. Image courtesy of the artist. www​ .­judithehernandez​.­com.

Chicano artist collectives to produce a s eries of silkscreen calendars promoting Chicano culture and history, among them Mechicano, Galería de la Raza, r caf , and La Brocha del Valle (Āg. 14.1). Unlike the Mexican versions, ­these calendars consisted of a suite of six to twelve prints, with a dif­fer­ent artist for each print. Some ­were based on an overall theme, such as the History of California (1977) calendar produced jointly by the Galería de la Raza and the Centro de Artistas Chicanos/ r caf . The Mechicano calendar produced the same year reflected the sociopo­liti­cal interests and artistic styles of each participating artist. Noteworthy is the greater importance given the design ele­ments in t­ hese Chicano calendars, often to the intentional detriment of the calen110 ·  ter ezit a r omo

dar’s function. An example is Carlos Almaraz’s El ­corazon del pueblo (The heart of the ­people) in which his stylized February dates are jammed into the top portion of the print. The main focus is the central heart image with thorns and flaming top, referencing the Catholic Sacred Heart of Jesus and sacriĀcial heart of the Aztecs. Almaraz’s heart also draws on Chicano urban culture, especially the popularity of ­these “flaming” hearts among barrio males as tattoos for protection, and within pinto (prison) drawings as expressions of eternal love/passion. The syncretism of this Chicano “sacred heart” renders it “a cultural icon which makes tangible our mestizo heritage, while at the same time it expresses the passion, faith, sorrow, and love of the culture.”19 Almaraz’s

heart also holds the red star of the Communist Party, signifying Almaraz’s Marxist affiliations. At the bottom left and right the ufw ea­gle emblem declares his solidarity with the u ­ nion and, by extension, chicanismo. It is a perfect example of the seamless juncture of po­liti­cal, popu­lar, and individual iconography that marked this period of poster production. Many Los Angeles artists chose to focus on urban imagery from barrio youth culture. John Valadez produced several posters on cholo dress and stance. Using photo­graphs, Valadez re-­created photorealist, full-­length versions of neighborhood cholos; one poster incorporated labels of identifying clothing (Cholo, 1978). By trying to teach ­people the dif­fer­ent aspects of the cholo outĀt and how they ­were tied to his identity, Valadez intended to render the cholo in a p ositive light. Cholo dress also became a means of countering the perceived image of the pachuco as a zoot suit–­ wearing dandy. “In this [cholo] society, the khakis become traditional clothing; a wa y of resisting assimilation, of affirming a di f­fer­ent history and experience.”20 Valadez also incorporated the distinctive writing style of the cholos. Known as placas, this graffiti art was largely drawn from the wall writings that proclaimed the objects of their love or functioned as “pledges of allegiance” to their neighborhood. Rendered in an Old En­glish type style, the “squarish, prestigious typeface was meant to pres­ent to the public a formal document, encouraging gang strength, and creating an aura of exclusivity.”21 Some poster artists asserted their individual barrio pride and exposed sociopo­liti­cal issues utilizing graffiti. Thus, t­ hese posters functioned within barrios as portable extensions of neighborhood pride and cultural re­sis­tance. The pachuco also emerged during this time as an impor­tant Chicano urban icon in its own right. Pachucos ­were urban youth who rejected assimilation into the American mainstream yet did not identify with their Mexican parents’ cultural standards. Originating in E l Paso, Texas, and spreading throughout the urban areas of the Southwest, ­these young p ­ eople developed their own distinctive outĀts and Caló lexicon. r caf

artist José Montoya re-­created the pachucos of his 1940s childhood in s everal posters. He believes the pachucos to be the original “freedom Āghters” of the Chicano experience and precursors to the con­temporary cholo youth culture.22 In Recuerdos del Palomar (Memories of the palomar [ballroom]), a p oster promoting a t heater production based on the ­music and dances from the 1940s, Montoya depicted a ­couple in zo ot suits dancing the boogie-­woogie. However, the pachuco announcing his one-­person exhibition José Montoya’s Pachuco Art: A Historical Update is a combination of José Guadalupe Posada’s calavera and a p achuco dandy. Montoya’s unique renditions not only pay homage to this enigmatic Āgure but also exemplify the trademark humor of the r caf artists. At the same time that poster artists w ­ ere using more “traditional” barrio sensibilities and imagery, fellow Angeleno Richard Duardo was exploring imagery based on alternative Chicano youth culture. Duardo created his own unique poster aesthetics by drawing from the thriving underground new wave/punk scene and the slick, pervasive advertisement world of Los Angeles. The Screamers, produced in 1978, is self-­designated as the Ārst punk poster.23 Rendered in pastel tones, featuring a p hoto­graph of The Screamers rock band members, this poster belies any association with Chicano aesthetics; it even incorporates Japa­ nese lettering as its text. Duardo became recognized internationally as one of the unchallenged masters of the silkscreen medium and foremost aesthetic innovators within Chicano art. One of the most prevalent influences on the iconography of the Chicano poster was indigenismo, which sought to reestablish linkages between Chicanos and their pre-­Conquest Mexican ancestors and to reintroduce Indigenous knowledge through its ancient philosophy, lit­er­a­ture, and ceremonies. According to scholar Tomás Ybarra-­ Frausto, “Ancient and surviving Indian cultures ­were valued as root sources from which to extract lasting values that would bring unity and cohesion to the heterogeneous Chicano community.”24 Indigenismo was practiced to some extent Po int s o f Co nver gence  ·  111

throughout the state, especially within Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) observances, but it was most prevalent in the San Diego area (Toltecas en Aztlán/Centro Cultural de la Raza) and the Central Valley (r caf /Centro de Artistas Chicanos). Iconography ranged from s­ imple Aztec or Mayan glyphs to elaborate re-creations of pre-­ Conquest deities such as Tlaloc (God of Rain) for the Fiesta de Colores poster in Sacra mento, Mictlantehcuhtli (God of Death) for vari­ous Día de los Muertos, or Xilonen (Goddess of Corn) for the Fiesta de Maiz. As an extension of indigenismo, the Virgen de Guadalupe was merged with the Aztec goddess Tonantzin and depicted with both names in posters announcing many El Día de la Virgen (December 12) activities throughout the state. Another impor­tant iconic ele­ment within the Chicano po­liti­cal and artistic movement was the concept of Aztlán. DeĀned as the mythic homeland of the Aztecs before they set off to found Tenochtitlan (pres­ent Mexico City), during the Chicano movement, Aztlán became synonymous with the U.S. southwest and Chicano nationalism. As a unifying concept, it proved to be more binding than language, birthplace, or cultural traits, especially since ­these ­were not all shared attributes. Aztlán and its Indigenous imagery represented the unifying force of an ancient heritage based on spiritual principals and a physical entity (the Southwest). More importantly, Aztlán also came to embody the affirmation of Chicanos’ mestizo origins as the product of Spanish and Indigenous ­peoples of this continent. “Although this idealization of the Toltec, Aztec, and Mayan cultures was based on limited anthropological knowledge,” observed cultural critic Amalia Mesa-­Bains, “at the time it served the strategic spiritual and po­liti­cal needs of a generation hungry for a link to a glorious past.”25 By far the most ubiquitous of t­ hese images derived from an Indigenous heritage was the calavera. The skeleton had as its source the ancient death rites of the pre-­Conquest civilizations, which regarded death as part of the natu­ral life cycle and placed a high value on sacriĀce in their religious practices. In José Guadalupe Posada’s 112 ·  ter ezit a r omo

humorous and po­liti­cal applications, calaveras acted out the daily t­ rials and successes of the everyday ­people of Mexico City, often as a t heater of the absurd. Posada’s calaveras also served to remind viewers of their transitory nature on earth, and of death as the g­ reat equalizer among rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, young and old. Chicano artists incorporated aspects of this Indigenous legacy in posters that promoted Día de los Muertos cele­brations, art exhibitions, theater productions, and vari­ous center activities. It was also during this period that speciĀc centros developed distinct iconography. In the San Diego border area, artists associated with the Centro Cultural de la Raza, including David Avalos and Victor Ochoa, produced posters regarding regional issues of immigration and border politics. The Royal Chicano Air Force association generated a unique combination of aviation imagery and humor using military flight jargon. The group’s identifying acronym, r caf , was printed in U.S. Army typeface and often sprouted wings. Several of the posters featured members dressed in flight jackets and goggles while promoting ufw boycott activities. La Raza Silkscreen Center/La Raza Graphics became known for their commitment to Third World issues and strug­gles, especially ­those of the Amer­i­cas. By the ­middle of the 1980s, Chicano artists within ­these collective centros functioned on multiple artistic levels. Many remained true to the ideology of a co llective effort while at the same time experimenting with personal imagery. While some artists continued “validating the vernacular,” many more began to seek entry into the mainstream “Āne art” world. Facilitated by the rise of multiculturalism in the 1980s, Chicano art (and artists) began to receive greater ac­cep­tance and visibility within galleries and museums. Though the aesthetic ramiĀcations on American art and culture are still being assessed and deĀned, the immediate results ­were national exhibitions, including Hispanic Art in the United States (1987) and The Latin American Spirit (1989). The trend reached its peak in t he 1990s with car a: Chicano Art and Re­sis­tance, which traveled for

three years and featured Chicano poster artists prominently. More signiĀcantly, Self ­Help Graphics in Los Angeles established the Experimental Silkscreen Atelier in 1983. The Chicano poster entered the era o f the Āne art print and would undergo commensurable changes in aes thetics and iconography. Selling the Vision: The Chicano Poster as Art, 1983–P ­ res­ent The poster aims to seduce, to exhort, to sell, to advocate, to convince, to appeal. —­S USAN SONTAG

The Chicano poster’s transition from po­liti­cal tool to art product was a s low and gradual pro­ cess fueled by multiple f­ actors. In the beginning, Chicano posters had been produced as po­liti­ cal propaganda, and l­ater served as community announcements. Within both ­these capacities, they had been produced and distributed f­ ree to the public. With the demise of c eta and the decrease in g overnment arts funds, the centros began to seek alternative funding sources, including poster sales income and production fees. In addition, as artists experimented with the silkscreen medium and personal imagery, the importance of the aesthetics began to supersede any message. Personal iconography also increased as artists utilized posters as their primary artistic medium. As early as 1975, Luis C. Gonzalez of the r caf had produced and sold a series of limited edition silkscreen prints that featured his concrete poetry. Devoid of po­liti­cal content, many of ­these poems ­were personal, bilingual accounts of love found and lost, printed against colorful backgrounds. Initially sold at low prices to make them affordable to community members, t­ hese posters ultimately gained popularity. However, in the 1980s, Chicano art was propelled into a mainstream art world fueled by the related market’s co-­optation of multiculturalism. The opportunity to push posters into the realm of “art prints” was fully realized in L os Angeles by two impor­tant

proponents of the Chicano art poster: Richard Duardo and Self H ­ elp Graphics. Already a veteran screen-­print artist, Duardo cofounded the Centro de Arte Publico with Carlos Almaraz and Guillermo Bejarano in 1977, and ­there he began his experimentation with punk imagery. In 1979, he set up the Ārst silkscreen print shop at Self Help Graphics.26 The following year, Duardo established his own print business, Aztlán Multiples, and three years ­later a private gallery he named ­Future Perfect. ­Here, he created hundreds of posters for international advertisers and art galleries, “with the intent of providing decorators with Āne posters that, for the Ārst time, would include ­those of Chicano artists.”27 Duardo’s posters expanded beyond their primary role as a po­liti­cal tool and strove to derive their status from an aesthetics-­based content. Aside from creating imagery from the young, hip Los Angeles new wave scene and pop culture, such as Boy George and The Plugs, Duardo also updated icons of the Chicano movement, including the pachuco. In 1982, Self ­Help Graphics invited Gronk to produce a series of limited edition screen prints.28 Aside from two posters commissioned for its Day of the Dead tenth anniversary, the suite of prints featured Gronk’s imagery derived from his canvas and mural work. With titles such as Molotov Cocktail and Exploding Coffee Cup, Gronk’s prints drew on his experiences as an urban artist and his sense of displacement.29 Like his fellow artists within Asco, his iconography reflected the influences of Mexican/Latino art, but also of Hollywood B movies. Gronk’s prints marked a turning point in the purpose and production of Chicano posters, which accelerated the iconographic impact initiated in t he 1970s by individual artists such as Richard Duardo, Rupert García, and Luis  C. Gonzalez. The combination of a w ell-­ known artist, a master printer, and a mechanism by which to market the prints to Chicano and mainstream collectors proved successful. The following year, with funds from the sale of Gronk’s prints, nine artists w ­ ere invited to participate in the Ārst annual Atelier Program. Po int s o f Co nver gence  ·  113

Based on the princi­ple of artistic excellence within a co llective pro­cess, Self H ­ elp Graphics’ Atelier Program provided the luxury of a technical printer and the opportunity for artistic experimentation. No longer bound by publicity requirements or po­liti­cal agendas, the imagery began to reflect individual aesthetics and/or personal interpretations. As example is Ester Hernández’s La Ofrenda (The offering, 1988), which portrays the Virgin of Guadalupe on the back of a w ­ oman. A hand in the lower left corner is “offering” a r­ ose. The Virgin’s image within this personal statement is multileveled, invoking meanings at the po­liti­ cal, social, and gender-­identity levels. As part of a farmworker ­family in a rural central California town without a c hurch, Hernández participated as a Guadalupana, a member of a society devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe. In Dinuba, it was the older Mexican men and w ­ omen who or­ga­nized prayer events and social activities that brought ­people together to honor La Virgen.30 However, Hernández’s relationship to La Virgen is also based on her identiĀcation as a C hicana artist. Po­liti­cally, Hernández has declared her right to represent the symbol in a manner meaningful to her. Her Virgen graces the back of a ­woman instead of a man, yet it draws on a very traditional religious repre­sen­ta­tion of the Virgin as its primary image. This very personal tribute exempliĀes the pull between aesthetic concerns and cultural referencing that was (and continues to be) prevalent in Chicano prints ­after the mid-1980s. Conclusion Chicanos with both a critical eye on the “outside world” of influence and domination and the “inside world” of Chicano culture . . . ​can produce singular [and] culturally specific visions. —­R UPERT GARCÍA

Chicano posters formed an impor­tant component within the Chicano movement. They functioned in the manner of poster art within other social-­ political movements: as propaganda, proponents

114 ·  ter ezit a r omo

of a speciĀc ideology, and vis­i­ble po­liti­cal stances. In fact, aside from murals, posters ­were the only art form to serve such an integral role within the Chicano movement. According to Ybarra-­Frausto, “Artists functioned as visual educators, with the impor­tant task of reĀning and transmitting through plastic expression the ideology of a community striving for self-­determination.”31 The Chicano poster’s immediacy and portability, which had made it invaluable as a po­liti­cal tool, also made it a perfect vehicle for imaging the cultural reclamation pro­cess of the 1970s. As reflected in the iconography, posters expanded beyond po­liti­cal imagery and slowly Ālled other functions, such as cultural affirmation, literary publishing, and community building. ­Today’s Chicano print artists work side by side with poster makers of the Chicano movement who continue promoting a po­liti­cal agenda. Activists such as Malaquías Montoya and Victor Ochoa have been joined by a new generation of artists, including Lalo Alcaraz, Mark Vallen, and Rollo Castillo, who are also committed to an aesthetics of the message. The Chicano poster, precisely ­because of its syncretism, also contributed to the development of the Chicano art movement’s unique course. The early poster workshops at vari­ous universities attracted participants from other disciplines; some of them became practicing artists. The posters created within centros also solidiĀed the community-­building aspects of the movement—­ something not achieved by Mexico’s Taller de GráĀca Popu­lar, which was established by artists and remained artist-­centered. Through on-­ the-­job graphic art training and a well-­equipped space to perfect their effective cultural imagery, many centro artists developed skills and aesthetics that served them well as individual artists. However, it was multiculturalism and the art market of the 1980s and 1990s that forever changed the role of the poster and fueled an ­explosion of imagery. Though initiated by the individual efforts of such artists as Rupert García, Luis  C. Gonzalez, and Richard Duardo in the  1970s, it was not ­until the establishment of Self H ­ elp Graphics’ Atelier Program that the

trend was formalized and nourished. Chicano poster makers moved from being the anonymous producers of po­liti­cal materials to internationally renowned artists creating commissioned art prints. The poster format also offered artists the freedom to transmit messages solely by aesthetics means—to intentionally create poster art. Even Chicano artists who chose to produce strong po­liti­cal messages required from their viewers a m ore complex reading. An example of this is Liz Rodriguez’s untitled diptych from 1986 in which shadowy Āgures rendered in dark, muted colors are depicted in va ri­ous stages of torture. The almost abstract quality of the images alludes to their clandestine nature yet adds to their aesthetic appeal. It is only upon closer inspection that the viewer discovers the power­ ful po­liti­cal content. More importantly, the greater artistic freedom claimed by Chicano poster artists in recent years has not only expanded the study of Chicano iconography but has also contributed to the continuing redeĀnition of “Chicano art.” ­Today, Chicano iconography includes a w ide range of imagery from the po­liti­cal to the personal, from the po­liti­ cally charged Zapatista posters of Malaquías Montoya to the intensely feminine Dressing ­Table print by Patssi Valdez. The development of the Chicano poster has echoed the tension within Chicano art in general, especially the pull between individualism and the collective agenda; a “ ­people’s art” versus an “art of validation.” Within this creative tension has emerged a Chicano art that removes Mexican cultural referencing and is based on ­personal imagery derived from the American experience. In Ralph Maradiaga’s Lost Childhood (1984), the lawn, toys, and En­glish “Keep Off ” sign do not identify this print as “Chicano Art.” However, in its subtle allusions to land, displacement, loss, and maybe even broken dreams, it becomes a po­liti­cal statement with direct connections to the earlier Chicano poster movement. Thus, even as such work departs from Chicano-­speciĀc iconography, it draws on its foundation in the Chicano poster movement to remain experimental, syncretic, and continually evolving.

Notes This chapter was originally published as Tere Romo, “Points of Convergence: The Iconography of the Chicano Poster,” in Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California, exhibition cata­log (Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara / Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 91–115. Reprinted by permission of the University Art Museum. Chapter epigraph: Gabriel Peluffo Linari, “Crisis of Inventory,” in Beyond the Fantastic: Con­temporary Art Criticism for Latin Amer­i­ca, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 289.Section epigraphs: José Montoya, quoted in Victoria Dalkey, “Call to La Causa,” Sacramento Bee, April 1, 1992, scene 1;Tomás Ybarra-­ Frausto, “Califas: California Chicano Art and Its Social Background,” unpublished manuscript, 43, prepared for Califas Seminar at Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, University of California, Santa Cruz, April 16–18, 1982; Susan Sontag, “Posters: Advertisement, Art, Po­liti­cal Artifact, Commodity,” in The Art of Revolution, Castro’s Cuba: 1959–1970, ed. Dugald Stermer (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1970), n.p.; Rupert García, “Turning It Around: A Conversation between Rupert García and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña,” in Aspects of Re­sis­tance: Rupert García (New York: Alternative Museum, 1993), 1. 1. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles and Alberto Urista, “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” in Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 405.This manifesto was first presented at the Chicano National Liberation Youth Conference in Denver, Colorado, March 23, 1969, and published in El Grito del Norte 2, no. 9 (July 6, 1969): 5.The conference was or­ga­nized by Mr. Gonzáles’s Crusade for Justice. 2. Malaquías Montoya, quoted in Ybarra-­Frausto, “Califas,” 20–21. 3. Freida High, “Chiasmus—­Art in Politics/Politics in Art: Chicano/a and African American Image, Text and Activism of the 1960s and 1970s,” in Voices of Color: Art and Society in the Amer­i­cas, ed. Phoebe Farris-­ Dufrene (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 121. 4. José Montoya and Juan M. Carrillo, “Posada: The Man and His Art: A Comparative Analy­sis of José Guadalupe Posada and the Current Chicano Art Movement as They Apply ­toward Social and Cultural Change: A Visual Resource Unit for Chicano Education” (unpublished master’s thesis, California State University, 1975), 36. 5. Montoya and Carrillo, “Posada,” 39.

Po int s o f Co nver gence  ·  115

6. Malaquías Montoya, interview transcript, “Califas: Chicano Art and Culture in California,” Transcript Book #6 (1983), 10, prepared in conjunction with Califas Seminar, University of California, Santa Cruz, April 16–18, 1982. 7. “Walkout in Albuquerque,” Carta Editorial 3, no. 12 (April 8, 1966). Reprinted as “Walkout in Albuquerque: The Chicano Movement Becomes Nationwide,” in Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 211. 8. Xavier Viramontes, quoted in Therese Thau Heyman, Posters American Style (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1998), 175. 9. High, “Chiasmus,” 150. 10. Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto and Shifra Goldman, “Outline of a Theoretical Model for the Study of Chicano Art,” in Arte Chicano (Berkeley: University of California Chicano Studies Library Publications Unit, 1985), 34. 11. César Chávez, “The Or­ga­niz­er’s Tale,” in Chicano: The Beginnings of Bronze Power, ed. Renato Rosaldo (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1974), 60. 12.Chávez, “Or­ga­niz­er’s Tale,” 60. 13. Edmundo Desnoes, “From Consumerism to Social Conscience: The Poster in the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1970, ” Cubaanse affiches (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1971), 30. 14. Desnoes, “From Consumerism to Social Conscience.” 15. Ramón Favela, Chicano Art: A Resource Guide, Proyecto CARIDAD (Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives/CEMA, 1991), 2. 16. Manuel Hernandez, quoted in Ybarra-­Frausto, Califas, 44.

116 ·  ter ezit a r omo

17. Desnoes, “From Consumerism to Social Conscience,” 18. 18. García, “Turning It Around,” 15. 19. Delilah Montoya, “Corazon Sagrado, Sacred Heart” (unpublished master’s thesis, University of New Mexico, 1993), 10. 20. Victor M. Valle, “L.A. Parks and Wreck Exhibit,” Somos (July/August 1979): 30. 21. Chaz Bojórquez, “Los Angeles ‘Cholo’ Style Graffiti Art,” On the Go 14 (1996): n.p. 22. José Montoya, introduction to Pachuco Art: A Historical Update (Sacramento, CA: RCAF , 1977). 23. Steven Durland, “Richard Duardo,” High Per­for­ mance 35 (1986): 49. 24. Ybarra-­Frausto, Califas, 58. 25. Amalia Mesa-­Bains, “Redeeming Our Dead: Homenaje a Tenochtitlan,” exhibition brochure (Northampton, MA: Smith College Museum of Art, 1992), n.p. 26. Margarita Nieto, “Across the Street: Self-­Help Graphics and Chicano Art in Los Angeles,” in Across the Street: Self-­Help Graphics and Chicano Art in Los Angeles (Laguna Beach, CA: Laguna Art Museum, 1995), 30. 27. Shifra Goldman, “ 15 Years of Poster Production,” Art Journal (spring 1984): 57. 28. Nieto, “Across the Street,” 31. 29. Steven Durland and Linda Burnham, “Gronk,” High Per­for­mance 35 (1986): 57. 30. Ester Hernández, interview with author, May 4, 1998, San Francisco. 31.Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “The Chicano Movement/ The Movement of Chicano Art,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display , ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 140.

ch ar les “ ch az ” bo jó r q uez

15.Graffiti Is Art  ·  2000 Any Drawn Line That Speaks about Identity, Dignity, and Unity . . . ​That Line Is Art

Culture and ­people are deĀned by their language. The way you speak and what you say can deĀne your generation and cultural priorities, moral values, and ultimately your wants or needs. Your voice describes who you ­really are; it creates your identity. To an artist, your voice (identity) is your artwork. By creating art you are also expressing a vision of your own world. Graffiti is a language to express your voice and vision (imagery). It’s when you personally engage the spirit of your vision that you can discover the soul of art. I live in a h eavi­ly multicultural city (Los Angeles) with many languages. Language is a main social ingredient. So, it’s not surprising that a conflict on language is taking place h ­ ere and grafĀti is but one of its players. For example, we still hear the mainstream news media ask, “What is graffiti?” Graffiti is too often related to such acts of vandalism, destructive be­hav­ior, and meaningless scribbles. We also hear about the enormous cost to property value caused by tagging. They say graffiti is about fear and a symbol of the loss of moral control in our society. This fear of graffiti has made society make war on all graffiti writers

and declare that their work is not art but, unfortunately, something worthless. But when you describe the ills of society, you also describe the reasons why modern graffiti exists. The public response has always been immediate and is divided into two polarized groups. ­There is a growing pro-­graffiti public that re­spects and supports it as a new ­free art form and an art that has its own history quite apart from the established art world. Graffiti is a new type of imagery irreverent to any rules. On t he other side, the anti-­ graffiti forces demonize the youth as the worst of society’s evils, and worthy of being sent to prison (­England, United States), whipping ­(Singapore, Malaysia), or being shot to death by anti-­graffiti vigilantes (Los Angeles). Their message speaks only about abatement and punishment, never about the intent and purpose or why writers paint graffiti in the Ārst place. ­Until recently ­these two extremes have been deĀning the graffiti art movement as we have known it. In my view the anti-­graffiti message has always and only been directed t­ oward the vandalistic side of graffiti. They have been in ­battle with

the youthful early rebellious side of graffiti “tagging,” which is a part of the graffiti movement of the last thirty years. Graffiti w ­ ill al ways have that wild uncontrollable adolescent beginning for ­every new generation of writers. For a young man (or ­woman!), graffiti is a personal voyage of trying to seek and/or manifest your self-­esteem and self-­expression. ­Every writer must experience his or her own rite of passage into adulthood. That is why I believe that tagging and graffiti ­will ne ver die. My own rite of passage with graffiti has been a long and committed one. I did n ot seek to do graffiti, but in real­ity it chose and confronted me. It forced me to understand who I am in Los Angeles and what my cultural Latino history is. Allow me to reminisce in o rder to describe the Los Angeles graffiti scene and its history. The graffiti that I started with in 1969 is our own, West Coast “cholo”-­style graffiti, and it’s still the same style of graffiti that I paint ­today, thirty-­one years ­later. I say “paint” ­because I almost always use a brush. The brush was the weapon of choice before spray cans ­were introduced in the early 1950s in Los Angeles. Our history and age of “cholo” Latino gang style have been documented in many books, American Me (Beatrice Griffith, 1948), Street Writers (Gusmano Cesaretti, 1975), Los Angeles Barrio Calligraphy (Jerry and Sally Romotsky, 1976), and recently Wallbangin’ (Susan Phillips, 1999). The Romotskys interviewed a sixty-­year-­old plumber who stated that graffiti was “in full bloom” when he started as a t eenager in t he 1930s. My own conversations with the seventy-­Āve-­year-­old ex-­ zootsuiter Salvador “El Chava” from Hoyo/Mara gang expressed a de eper understanding of why the Latino gangs started in the Ārst place. He said, “Racism and poverty created the gangs; we had to protect ourselves.” I b elieve, and have heard stories, that the practice goes back further than the 1930s. Some say that this style evidently goes back to the early part of this c­ entury when the shoeshine boys marked their names on the walls with their daubers to stake out their spots on the sidewalk. 118 ·  ch ar les “ch az” bo jó r q uez

The most impor­tant and influential time comes from the early 1940s. In Los Angeles, the Latino zootsuiters ­were deĀning their Americanism. The zooters w ­ ere ­shaped by forces such as nonac­ cep­tance by the Anglo-­Americans, the illegal mass deportation of Mexican American citizens back to Mexico, and, in Los Angeles, beatings by U.S. ser­vicemen during World War II. New York Harlem black zooters and, of course, jazz and swing ­music also had a b ig influence. Los Angeles zootsuiters felt and wanted to be dif­fer­ent. With their hair done in b ig pompadours, and “draped” in tailor-­made suits, they ­were swinging to their own styles. The spoke Caló, their own language, a co ol jive of half-­English, half-­ Spanish rhythms. The term applied loosely to echoes of the slang of gypsies and bullĀghters of Mexico and Spain used at that time. Out of this zootsuiter experience came lowrider cars and culture, clothes, ­music, tag names, and, again, its own graffiti language. Los Angeles graffiti has its own unique visual pre­sen­ta­tion, which is the foundation of my own graffiti artwork. L.A. gang wall writings are called placas (plaques, symbols of territorial street bound­aries), and are pledges of allegiance to your neighborhood. Its letter face h as always been called “Old En­glish” and is always printed in uppercase capital letters. This squarish, prestigious typeface was meant to pres­ent to the public a formal document, encouraging gang strength, and creating an aura of exclusivity. Placas are written with care to make them straight and clean. They are flushed left and right, or words are stacked and centered. Rarely are they ever done in lowercase type, and are always painted with black letters (Āg.  15.1). The placa is written in a con­temporary high advertising-­type format, with a headline, body copy, and a log o. ­These three major building blocks of corporate public advertising can also be found in the compositional type of ancient Sumerian clay tablets and the Constitution of the United States. The headline states the gang or street name, the body copy is your roll call list of every­one’s gang name, and the logo refers to the person who wrote it by adding his/her

FIG​. ­  15​. ­1​. ­ Chaz Bojórquez, Por Dios y Oro, 1992. Acrylic on balsa wood, 69 × 41 × 6.5 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

tag at the end of the placa. This tradition of type, names, and language rarely deviates drastically and is handed down from generation to generation. Cholo graffiti is a graffiti by the neighborhood and for the neighborhood. That is a major difference between cholo and hip-­hop. In cholo, usually one writer writes for the ­whole gang, and only writes within his/her own territory. In hip-­ hop graffiti ­there is an individual focus, where “getting up” all-­city or all-­state with your tag is more impor­tant. Also, generally speaking, the typeface of hip-­hop changes to a more personalized upper-­and lowercase ­free script. The Los Angeles walls are an unofficial albeit temporary history of the Mexican American presence in t he streets of East  L.A. This traditional form of Los Angeles graffiti is a g raffiti seeking r e­s pect , even some form of validation. They are markings by generations of rebellious youth announcing their pride and strength to all outsiders. The sense is that merely writing your name affirms you exist, how you write declares you strong, and writing on the wall makes you immortal. A strong influence h ­ ere in Los Angeles is the attraction of the PaciĀc Rim philosophies. GrafĀti script demonstrates the Oriental work ethic of one hour of preparation for one minute of execution. Some of Japan’s most famous war generals ­were poets. Before the ­battle, they would write their feelings through their calligraphy by writing a poem or image of solemn beauty or righ­teous strength. I t ook a c lass in Or iental calligraphy at the Pasadena PaciĀc Asia Museum with Yun Chung Chiang (himself a s tudent of Mr.  Pu Ju, ­brother of the last emperor of China). I needed a better understanding of the line, to better understand the calligraphy of graffiti. My own graffiti writing started at the end of 1969. I h ad created a sy mbol that represented me and my streets. It was the smiling Skull. I twisted cholo letters into an image, Señor Suerte (Mr. Lucky), with a super fly pimp hat, and a fur collared long coat, a skull with Ān­gers crossed for good luck, and a Dr. Sardonicus smile. To the Latino ­people, a skull’s repre­sen­ta­tion is not about 120 ·  ch ar les “ch az” bo jó r q uez

death but about rebirth. As a tradition from our Aztec heritage, ­these images are still manifested in our Latino festivals ­today. My skull is the gangster image of protection from death. ­Here in our local neighborhood, the “Ave­nues” are the old street gang. The Ave­nues have claimed the skull as their own. Many have the skull tattooed on their body), on the top of their skull to the sides o f their neck, arms, chest, and full backs. (Check out the movie American Me with my skull tattoo on some of the men.) The skull has become a lowrider gang icon. You have to earn it to have it tattooed on yourself. I was not a ga ng member. But in my neighborhood of northeast L.A. y ou live with the gang style next door your entire life; I still do. I took up stenciling my skull/tag and writing roll call names in the streets all through the 1970s, ­until 1986, when I t ook up painting more. I remember I would go tagging with a friend or my girlfriend, Blades, but at times I would go to the riverbed by myself. Th ­ ere ­were no crews then, only gangs. Also in 1975, in collaboration with an Italian photographer, Gusmano Cesaretti, I wrote a book called Street Writers (Acrobat Books). In this small photo book of L.A. graffiti I described the streets and the attitude of graffiti writing in the 1970s. Another major change in m y early life that influenced my art was when Blades and I traveled around the world for three years, visiting thirty-­Āve countries. I looked at customs, art, and tattoos in the South PaciĀc, Asia, and Eu­ rope. I came back having found a more common understanding of all languages and writings. We returned in 1980, and I was more determined to paint more and new graffiti art. I have also worked at many movie and product advertising agencies as my day job. I had the opportunity to design a few movie titles: The Warriors, Boulevard Nights, Turk 183, Caveman, The Cheap Detective, and parts from Star Wars, James Bond, and the Muppets. I h ave painted backgrounds for commercials and designed log­os for Reebok, Arco, ­music ­album covers, and rock band names, and line illustrations of stereos, food, tractors—­anything and every­thing. I desig ned

and built commercial art for fifteen years, ­until 1986. That experience made me understand the true nature and sheer power of mass advertising. Talk about “getting up”! The many issues that we dislike about advertising are the same issues we dislike about graffiti, issues like who “violates” or who “owns” the public space? Who has the right to speak or place billboards in your face? ever yon e does some form of graffiti. ­Today ­there is a n ew impor­tant change with the graffiti writers. ­There are many more writers who are older and much more sophisticated than before. Th ­ ere are writers who own their own property, and have added on the responsibility of a ­family. They do not have the same anger or identity prob­lems as in their youth. They are not as willing to serve jail time for illegal writing on walls, and still, they have never been willing to give up their graffiti as expression and art. The graffiti movement has changed, too. ­Today it has grown and inĀltrated many accepted aspects of everyday life. Graffiti is far from just the s­ imple tagging on the city walls. The head of the graffiti art movement is evolving. The front end of the movement is the part that is artistically changing. Th ­ ese older and more educated writers are asking themselves serious questions. Questions like “Why am I still addicted to painting graffiti?” and “What does all this mean to me personally?” And, most impor­tant, “I love to draw graffiti, and is t­ here any ­future in it for me?” ­These self-­imposed questions are the border crossings from a writer to an artist. ­These questions are issues of art, and they are the same questions a true professional artist asks of himself/herself ­every day. ­There are many graffiti writers graduating with B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from major Āne art universities, also with minor degrees in journalism and business, plus having a minimum of ten to twenty-­Āve years of street painting experience. This new legion of older writers and artists in the graffiti movement see t­ hings differently. They write with new styles, not just the traditional letter ­faces. They have been constantly reinventing their own styles to the absolute limit, then rein-

venting them again. Characters and background landscapes are more impor­tant ­today. Even young writers that w ­ ere not raised with the 1990s hip-­ hop are busting out with computer-­enhanced drawings. The new rules are that “­there are no rules”! Graffiti art cannot stay the same; even the graffiti movement ­can’t stop it. ­These new writers do not want to be anonymous; they are willing to deĀne their artwork and defend it. That can happen only on sanctioned walls, commercial print/products, or galleries/museums. This new branch of graffiti artists wants to participate in the material world. To them graffiti “is the Art” of modern materialism. Graffiti “is a product” of our con­temporary fast-­paced urban American lifestyle, and it reflects the “cable ready” mindset of a rebellious generation. ­These new artists are validating themselves. They ­don’t need or want the anointment of the established art institutions. By producing their own graffiti magazines, videos, ­music, and clothing, they are creating their own space, in a ­whole new world: a n ew space between l­egal and illegal, a third space answerable to no one, making images that not only speak but can bite! I believe that graffiti art now is the most cutting-­edge litmus test of con­temporary American art. Graffiti art has already been bought and sold in galleries, and has been collected by major art museums (the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Con­temporary Art in Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Laguna Beach Art Museum; and in museums in Eu­rope, South Amer­i­ca, and Australia). It is the ­future results and analy­sis that w ­ ill put graffiti into its proper historical art context. What is real graffiti? Is tagging, bombing, piecing, productions, painting freights, black books, canvas, L.A. c holo, or New York Wildstyle real graffiti? To me, it’s all graffiti. I believe that any drawn line that speaks about identity, dignity, and unity . . . ​that line is talking about graffiti and art. When you have graffiti in co ntact with art, it brings graffiti into the spiritual context of true creativity. Graffiti

Is Art  ·  121

Does taking graffiti from the streets and into the art galleries make it not real graffiti? I do agree that you do los e the raw integrity taking graffiti from the streets, especially if “getting up” is the only impor­tant part for you. Illegal street graffiti becomes less impor­tant to you as you become older, as it is replaced with “style” to claim your fame. Street graffiti is larger and visually on a more power­ful visual scale. But by placing the “same” imagery onto walls or canvas (away from the dialogue of illegality) where all the public can see, study, and admire it, t­ here is added a w ­ hole new layer of higher understanding. By showing graffiti on the “inside” walls, not only are you still tagging them but you are also laying claim to the “entire building.” You are spiritually tagging “all” the walls, but above all tagging the mind of the viewer. Also, on sanctioned walls you can create time to explore your intent, purpose, and motivations in your artwork. When you can spend three to four months on one painting you learn to create a two-­way dialogue with your imagery. ­These conversations not only help you solve the painting but also give you answers to deeper feelings about yourself. You become obsessed with wanting to create outrageous

122 ·  ch ar les “ch az” bo jó r q uez

art imagery, not just with the location. When you become serious about making art, you also want to learn to use the tools of art, like color, shape, form, texture, and, most importantly, new interpretations of the history of art and graffiti. Serious graffiti artists have for years continued to address and grapple with t­ hese kinds of issues in search of creating new art forms. Graffiti, more and more, is gaining greater ac­cep­tance ­because it expands traditional notions of art as well as incorporates con­temporary forms of an ever-­changing work and its imagery. In this way, it is breaking down walls while conquering unpre­ce­dented spaces and transforming them into previously unimagined visual experiences. Note This chapter was originally published as Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez, “Graffiti Is Art: Any Drawn Line That Speaks about Identity, Dignity and Unity . . . ​That Line Is Art,” in U.S. Latino Lit­er­a­tures and Cultures: Transnational P ­ erspectives, ed. Francisco Lomelí and Karen Ikas ­(Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag, 2000), 61–70. Essay and painting reprinted by permission of the author.

vict o r z amud io- ­t a yl o r

16. Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism  ·  2001 Chicano/a Art and the Pre-­Columbian Past

A deĀning feature of Chicano/a art from its very origins has been its engagement with cultural identity. Linked in its constitutive phase with the Chicano movement, or movimiento, of the 1960s and 1970s, Chicano/a art articulated and mirrored a broad range of themes that had social and po­liti­cal signiĀcance, particularly with re­spect to cultural affirmation. At the core of t­ hese meta­­ artistic concerns was the repre­sen­ta­tion of alternate narratives that had as their goal the development of a historical consciousness as well as a sense of place and belonging within Mexican, U.S., and Indigenous histories. The invention of a t radition centered on the myth of Aztlán provided the Chicano movement with a historical and geographic grounding that accounted for notions of re­sis­tance to the dominant culture as well as the engagement in practices highlighting cultural difference. With re­spect to art, intrinsic to upholding Aztlán—as myth and as the nucleus and matrix of an alternate history—­was the invention of a tradition rooted in t he pre-­Columbian past and drawing on its material, intellectual, and spiritual cultures.

To varying degrees, the pre-­Columbian past informed a broad range of artistic expressions that adapted and translated it to suit con­temporary po­liti­cal issues as well as the fashioning of diverse cultural identities that characterize the heterogeneity of the Chicano/a experience. The ideology of mexicanidad, or Mexican re­ nais­sance, which was informed by the proj­ect of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), served as the inspiration and model for the employment and articulation of the pre-­Columbian past in Chicano/a art. Mexican nationalism exalted the past in order to highlight the role that Indigenous cultures had played in the making of Mexico as a nation. As scholar Enrique Florescano has underlined, successive generations “have reconstructed, mythicized, hidden, deformed, in­ven­ted, ideologized, or explained that past.”1 In a parallel manner, Chicanismo, the ideology of the Chicano movement, also deployed the pre-­Columbian past to reconĀgure a sense of cultural identity and place. Mexicanidad, from the outset, was a p roblematic model for Chicanismo insofar as it was

linked to state politics and, by extension, to the mainstream and establishment in Mexico. In its initial phase, the challenge for Chicano/a art was to adapt this model to a q ualitatively dif­fer­ent context with very dif­fer­ent goals. The most illustrative example is a comparison between Mexican and Chicano/a muralism. Whereas the Mexican muralists painted images of the Mexican past primarily on the walls of government buildings, the Chicano/a artists represented alternate histories on the walls of the barrio and in public and contested spaces. The link of Chicano/a art to a real and in­ven­ ted pre-­Columbian past was paradoxical. This art had sources in C hicano/a vernacular culture, as well as established artistic movements and languages such as the Mexican school, social realism, expressionism, surrealism, pop art, and conceptualism. Nevertheless, the use of pre-­Columbian iconography, forms, and themes was perceived by the Mexican and U.S. artistic mainstream, as well as the cutting edge, as conservative, if not anachronistic. While artists such as Rupert García and Luis Jiménez deployed pre-­Columbian motifs and themes in a hybrid manner, combining them with other formal vocabularies, many Chicano/a artists—­particularly ­those from the Ārst generation who did not have a well-­rounded academic training—­engaged tradition in a m ore romantic fashion. This romanticism, coupled with the Ārst Chicano/a generation’s lack of formal rigor, contributed to the negative reception of Chicano/a art. At the crux of this reception was a prejudice ­toward art grounded in m etaartistic endeavors, particularly art that embodied an ideological or po­liti­cal agenda. Yet in many re­spects the real and in­ven­ted cultural identity of Chicano/a art anticipated formal and thematic concerns that ­were ­later articulated as postmodern. Th ­ ese formal concerns include but are not limited to strategies involving bricolage or pastiche, such as altar-­based installations and ready-­mades. Thematically as well as theoretically, a deĀning aspect of Chicano/a art has been its blurring and deĀance of hierarchical

124 ·  vict o r z amud io- ­t a yl o r

bound­aries with re­spect to “popu­lar,” “vernacular,” and “high” cultures. Its combination of both traditional and postmodern ele­ments may very well account for the conflicting and negative reception Chicano/a art has received. While its sociocultural value has been accepted, its artistic merit continues to be an issue in terms of exhibition and collecting practices, and in the Āeld of art history. At the core of its reception is the challenge that it poses for the body of Mexican, American, and Latin American art history insofar as its very existence and outlook require a critical revision of the canon and the body of knowledge that form the foundation of ­these histories.2 In more general and con­temporary terms, the relationship between Chicano/a art and pre-­Columbian culture needs to be considered within the framework of the larger issues surrounding modern art and non-­Western cultures. Like Chicano/a art, a Āe ld within its corpus, modern art sought answers to its metaartistic concerns, as well as its desire for new forms, in non-­Western artistic expressions and cultural practices. This contextualization of Chicano/a art within the tradition of modern art creates a place and genealogy for it in qualitatively dif­fer­ ent terms, opening the way for the fashioning of new art histories. “Primitivism” and Modern Art

Primitivism, and its complex relationship to the history of modern art, has been an area of research, criticism, and curatorial endeavor for the last two de­cades.3 The renewed interest in the subject was triggered by the controversial landmark exhibition “Primitivism” in Twentieth-­ Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art (moma ) in New York in 1984.4 Or­ga­nized by William Rubin, the exhibition highlighted the formal sources of modern art in non-­Western tribal cultures, focusing, for the most part, on the school of Paris

and German expressionism. Rubin and most of the cata­log essayists do n ot deal with impor­ tant metaartistic issues that drove modern artists to look to historically colonized cultures in their quest for themes, sources, and formal solutions. In the case of both “tribal” and “modern” works, scant attention was dedicated to the social and cultural frameworks from which the artistic expressions emerged. African masks and cubist paintings ­were displayed as autonomous objects equally charged with a fetishistic power. Key to the exhibition narrative was a curatorial precept linked to desire and the fetish as well as to the production of unconscious afĀnities between the “tribal” and the “modern,” as Hal Foster has underlined.5 Namely, Rubin argued that modern artists, without knowledge of or direct reference to the “primitive” object, arrived at formal solutions and repre­sen­ta­tions similar to t­ hose of their tribal counter­parts. He refers to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), whose négriste squatter Āgure purportedly had its source in a n African Pende sickness mask. According to Rubin, this is not the case, since the ritual object, which is in the collection of the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium, was carved a­ fter the execution of the painting.6 Absent from the exhibition was the discussion of pre-­Columbian cultures—­their place in t he construction of primitivism and their impact on modern art. Articulating the viewpoint that pre-­ Columbian cultures ­were more advanced than tribal socie­ties in the Eurocentric anthropological developmental scheme, but less so than a high civilization, Rubin justiĀed their exclusion on the basis of their character as “courts.” While Oceanic and African cultures w ­ ere considered relevant to the history of modernism, ancient American cultures ­were not. In this re­spect, Rubin continued and fostered the practice, in both exhibitions and scholarship, of overlooking or minimizing the influence of pre-­Columbian cultures on the development of modern art.7

Pre-­Columbian Culture and Modern Art

Categorically integral to the fashioning of primitivism, pre-­Columbian art has had an impor­tant impact on Eu­ro­pean and Latin American modernists such as Henry Moore, Diego Rivera, and Joaquín Torres-­García.8 The question remains as to why it has so often been displaced, unaccounted for, or forgotten in discursive and exhibition practices. Such a curatorial approach would necessarily entail a r evision of ideas regarding the evolution of diverse “modernisms” with dif­ fer­ent historical speciĀcities and sociocultural frameworks, which would ultimately challenge the privileged centers and canons. A key example of the erasure of the influence of pre-­Columbian art on the development of modernism is the case of Paul Gauguin. The offspring of a French ­father and a ­mother who was of French and Peruvian ancestry, Gauguin was the Ārst modern artist to link formal and broader cultural issues with primitivism; his proj­ect also involved taking a stance against what he considered the dehumanizing effects of modernity. While Egyptian, Maori, Balinese, and South PaciĀc influences on his work have received attention, the signiĀcance of pre-­ Columbian cultures for Gauguin—­particularly Incan, Moche, and Chimú—­have not. Barbara Braun has argued in h er treatment of Gauguin that his Peruvian heritage was a crucial influence on both his personal and his aesthetic development.9 Pre-­Columbian Andean expressions—­ architecture, textiles, and ceramics—­played a central role throughout his artistic trajectory, as evidenced by his long-­standing interest in design, pattern, and the use of clay to make an array of vessels and sculpture. Yet Gauguin, as a E uro-­American mestizo, was not exempt from the contradictions of romanticizing non-­Western cultures from the standpoint of his privileged metropolitan location. And like the vast majority of pioneering modern artists influenced by non-­Western cultures, he viewed them within the narratives and

Inventing Trad itio n  ·  125

discourses of the World’s Fairs that legitimized colonial proj­ects.10 Gauguin’s position, like that of so many other artists regarding primitivism, was never to be resolved. His retreat to the French territories of Martinique, Tahiti, and the Marquesas took advantage of the colonial system, which was the real cause under­lying the transformation of the premodern cultures he mythologized. Moreover, as he stated in vari­ous letters to fellow artists, Gauguin was most keen in anticipating the growing metropolitan market for paintings that depicted colonial exotica.11 Pre-­Columbian art as a formal source and style, theme, and conceptual reference for modern and con­temporary art has, to greater or lesser degrees, been linked to and framed by discourses and metaartistic proj­ects involving cultural identity and national narratives. In contrast to the deployment of primitivism as a response to the alienating and dehumanizing aspects of modernity, particularly in German expressionist art, in modern Mexican art the use of pre-­Columbian imagery coexists with the embrace of modernity. In Diego Rivera’s fresco cycles at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the repre­sen­ta­tion of Coatlicue, the foundational Mexica deity, fuses with that of the industrial turbines of the Red River Ford automotive plant.12 In the case of David Alfaro Siqueiros, it is emblematic that he experimented with industrial paints while rendering Indigenous themes. The Ārst proj­ects to seriously examine pre-­ Columbian cultures in terms of their signiĀcance for modernism ­were the impor­tant series of exhibitions at moma from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. The programs at moma w ­ ere linked to the Rockefeller-­supported program of Pan-­ Americanism and the official U.S. government embrace of a continental shared historical heritage.13 Of the exhibitions held at moma , several highlighted pre-­Columbian objects in a rchaeological and ethnographic contexts, such as Indian Art of the United States (1941) and Ancient Art of the Andes (1954). Several impor­tant exhibitions, such as the monumental survey Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (1940), had a historical narrative and beneĀted from the participation of key cul126 ·  vict o r z amud io- ­t a yl o r

tural Āgures such as Alfonso Caso (for the pre-­ Hispanic section) and Miguel Covarrubias (for the modern one).14 The landmark exhibition, as far as our topic is concerned, was moma’s American Sources of Modern Art (1933). As guest curator Holger Cahill stated in the cata­log, the exhibition’s raison d’être was “to show the high quality of ancient American art” and “to indicate that its influence is pres­ent in modern art in the work of paint­ers and sculptors, some of whom have been unconscious of its influence, while o ­ thers have accepted or sought it quite consciously.”15 The exhibition included pre-­ Columbian objects from key private and public U.S. collections as well as paintings and sculpture from such “contemporaries” as Jean Charlot, Carlos Mérida, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Max Weber, and William Zorach. Rivera, like Gauguin, is another impor­tant Āgure whose positioning remains contradictory and problematic. The scholarly rec­ord has highlighted Rivera’s precocious engagement with pre-­Columbian cultures and their monuments, paintings, codices, and other objects.16 Yet his stay in Eu­rope from 1910 to 1921, with the exception of its impact on his relationship to Cubism,17 has received scant attention with re­spect to the modernist vogue for primitivism. Most certainly, Rivera viewed non-­Western objects during his Pa­ri­sian and Italian séjours. The question remains, however, as to how viewing objects and painted manuscripts or codices in m etropolitan frameworks informed his aesthetic proj­ect regarding the pre-­Columbian past, particularly with re­spect to Mesoamerican cultures.18 What is clear in his mammoth artistic production and in the scholarly rec­ord is his idealization of the Mesoamerican past and its influence on his iconographic and formal approach. Pre-­Columbian History, Mexicanidad, and Art

Mexicanidad is a complex and contradictory set of discourses and repre­sen­ta­tions that formed the ideological and cultural focus of Mexican

nationalism ­after the revolution. Art, from the outset, played a crucial role in the fashioning, nurturing, and ongoing trajectory of the national cultural proj­ect. Rivera’s idealization of the pre-­ Columbian past had a po­liti­cal and social function that was absent from the primitivist endeavors of his Eu­ro­pean counter­parts. Fashioning a mythic past to promote the ideas, values, and programs of the Mexican Revolution, he reaffirmed a history that had been devalued in co lonial and postcolonial Mexico. Bringing together Italian Re­nais­sance precepts and formal devices such as the predella, cubist use of space, and Mesoamerican iconography, styles, and sources, Rivera conceived his murals as modern-­day visual histories for the masses. This approach imbued his mural production, as well as his works on canvas and paper, with an avant-­garde character. In one of the Ārst paintings in his ongoing series depicting calla lily vendors, Flower Day (1925), the composition and stylistic rendering of the Āgures are inspired by pre-­Columbian sculpture, yet the theme emphasizes the vitality of Indigenous culture in con­temporary Mexico. Well informed by his dialogues with scholars in the Āeld, Rivera was a prime supporter of the rewriting of Mexican history. Like the Rus­ sian Revolution—­which linked the arts, culture, and the new society—­the Mexican Revolution triggered a p arallel pro­cess, with a simi lar proj­ ect linking art to education and the vision of the new society. The call and imperative for the revalorization of tradition and the past was stated by Siqueiros in his 1921 Barcelona manifesto: “Let us observe the work of our ancient ­people, the Indian paint­ers and sculptors (Mayas, Aztecs, Incas, ­etc.). Our nearness to them ­will enable us to assimilate the constructive vigor of their work. We can possess their synthetic energy without falling into la­men­ta­ble archeological reconstruction.”19 The leftist Syndicate of Technical Workers, Paint­ ers, and Sculptors—­which included among its members Charlot, Mérida, and Rivera—­played a signiĀcant role in carry­ing out Siqueiros’s dictum through diverse styles and conceptual under­ pinnings. Mexico, like the Soviet Union, became

an avant-­garde magnet for artists, cultural producers, po­liti­cal Āgures, and bohemians, attracting Sergei Eisenstein, Tina Modotti, John Reed, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston, among ­others. Mexicanidad, Aztlán, and Chicanismo

Inspired by mexicanidad and the work of such key Āgures as Rivera and Siqueiros, Chicano/a artists accorded a cen tral role to the pre-­ Columbian past, linking it to a cultural and po­ liti­cal discourse and the fashioning of a national identity. While Siqueiros’s influence was formal and ideological, Rivera’s was key regarding the use of the pre-­Columbian past as a s ource for iconography, themes, and narratives. Articulated as a v ital component of the Chicano/a proj­ect of cultural reclamation and affirmation,20 artistic expressions from the 1960s to the mid-1980s served as a vehicle for Chicanismo, the ideology of Chicano/a nationalism. Privileging neoindigenism, the exaltation of Mexico’s Indian past, Chicanismo articulated and upheld a hi story that Anglo-­American culture underestimated or denied. Chicanismo was a c ultural marker, an assertion of difference and of the right of self-­determination, and a historical claim to the Southwest. Like the Mexica, who created their own sense of historicity and in­ven­ted traditions to justify their cultural and po­liti­cal claim to Mesoamerica, Chicanismo also reinvented history by inscribing the pres­ent into a cultural corpus of long-­standing legends, traditions, and cosmologies derived from pre-­Columbian civilizations. Chicanismo upheld Aztlán as the mythic homeland or place of origin.21 As symbol, meta­phor, and allegory for the movimiento, it represented the vitality of the past, its relevance to con­temporary artistic, cultural, and po­liti­cal proj­ects. Aztlán brought together the remote past and a p recise pres­ent, linking Chicano/a strug­gles to liberation strug­ gles, particularly ­those of Native Americans.22 While many activists who upheld neoindigenism did s o romantically, many movimiento Inventing Trad itio n  ·  127

participants made an effort to study pre-­ Columbian cultures, using historical sources as well as impor­tant publications by such scholars as Ángel Garibay and Miguel León-­Portilla. In the late 1960s painter Carlos Almaraz studied key  texts on pre-­Columbian art and lit­er­a­ture as well as Mexica philosophy,23 and artist Gilbert “Magu” Luján incorporated the study of pre-­Columbian cultures into his Chicano studies courses.24 This research led activists to read key texts of mexicanidad and become acquainted with philosophical proj­ects grounded in the interpretation of the past in lig ht of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath.

parallel t o r ivera and Siqueiros, who played an essential role in the mexicanidad proj­ ect, Chicano/a artists and collectives recast, in­ ven­ted, and negotiated a tradition and a history centered on pre-­Columbian cultures. Alongside the mythologizing of history, Chicano/a artists also romanticized the Mexican school and established a broad pantheon of Mexican cultural and artistic Āgures linked to popu­lar culture and spirituality and to the Mexican Revolution. The Virgin of Guadalupe, the Casasola ­brothers, the Flores Magón ­brothers, Miguel Hidalgo, José Guadalupe Posada, Francisco Villa, and Emiliano Zapata Āgure prominently in works in vari­ ous media: mural programs, broadsides, posters, and paintings. Myth, the Invention of Tradition, and Chicano/a Art

Pre-­Columbian symbols, iconography, themes, and narratives form part of an active lexicon and cultural inventory on which Chicano/a artists drew. A r eal and in­ven­ted pre-­Columbian past instilled pride, empowerment, and difference as well as asserting a sense of place and historicity. Cast in co n­temporary registers, pre-­Columbian heritage, along with providing Chicano/as with a direct connection to an ancient civilization, 128 ·  vict o r z amud io- ­t a yl o r

also provided a n ormative cultural consciousness. Alurista’s Floricanto en A ztlán addresses the Chicano/a experience, fashioning a s ocial imaginary embedded with pre-­Columbian symbols and po­liti­cal references.25 The centrality of pre-­Columbian culture in C hicano/a art is an operation that Walter Benjamin has described as “telescoping the past through the pres­ent,” a procedure that may potentially “place the pres­ ent in a critical condition.”26 Public artworks such as murals and graphics, particularly the works of Rupert García and Amado Peña, w ­ ere the expressions of this Ārst period that propelled the Chicano/a art of the movement and the movement of Chicano/a art.27 The second period of Chicano/a art, which scholars bracket between 1975 and the mid1980s, actually extends to the early 1990s. 28 It is characterized by artistic expressions that are no longer directly linked to a p o­liti­cal or ideological agenda, reflecting the evolution of po­liti­cal practices and countercultural movements. Dif­ fer­ent issues around repre­sen­ta­tion, power, and cultural identity became central in the mid-1970s and 1980s, and ­these ­were articulated from perspectives highlighting gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism. Particularly relevant are Chicano/a artistic and cultural links to individuals, movements, and trends in Mexico, Latin Amer­i­ca, and the Third World. Collaborations, exhibitions, and publications such as ChismeArte, the journal of the Los Angeles–­based Concilio de Arte Popu­lar, edited by Carlos Almaraz, fostered cultural issues in broader ideological contexts. Cultural Identity and Art: Chicano/a Art ­after the Movimiento

The deployment of pre-­Columbian symbols, themes, and forms in Chicano/a art from the second period became more hybrid and complex in character, both thematically and formally. This shift is related to postmodernist pluralism as well as the recognition of Chicano/a art.29 Artists who came of age in the mid-1970s are also character-

ized by a m ore heterogeneous formation and trajectory.30 Artistic production from the mid-1970s onward incorporates the pre-­Columbian past with the same dedication seen in the work of the Ārst generation of Chicano/a artists. The fundamental difference is that the second generation has a more thorough knowledge of pre-­Columbian cultures that does not supersede the romance with it. Another impor­tant difference lies in formal artistic training; most artists of the second generation have had a Āne art education, and many hold master’s degrees in Āne art. Exemplary of this more sophisticated use of pre-­Columbian imagery is the work of Luis Jiménez, who has developed an artistic lexicon that combines aspects of pop art and realism with the vernacular culture of his native El Paso and the Southwest. Jiménez was a pioneer in the use of industrial materials such as Āberglass and resin, and in t he vari­ous versions of his sculpture Southwest Pieta (1984), as well as in related drawings and prints, a traditional theme is adapted to con­temporary real­ity. The allegorical Āgures of the two volcanoes, the male Popocatepetl and the sleeping female Ixtaccihuatl, inspired by popu­lar Mexican calendar art, are set in a S outhwest visual context that fuses Mexica myth with Michelangelo’s Pietá. Iconographically Jiménez’s work draws on symbols such as the cactus, the maguey plant, and the ea­gle, which are key to the myth and history of the Southwest, the borderlands, and Mesoamerica. In his Border Crossing series, Jiménez layered religious and con­temporary references in a simi lar fashion, conflating a M exican f­ amily’s flight across the border with the flight of Joseph and Mary with the infant Jesus. In both her artwork and her writing, Amalia Mesa-­Bains has conducted ongoing research into the formation of the Chicana universe, positing the concept of domesticana as the feminine counterpart to male-­dominated rasquachismo.31 Chicana artists such as Judith  F. Baca, Santa  C. Barraza, Yolanda  M. López, Patssi Valdez, and Mesa-­Bains draw from a va riety of sources and

languages to redeĀne a f eminine universe by means of alternate chronicles or narratives. In an artistic trajectory that has moved from altar making to more complex installation, Mesa-­ Bains has addressed themes of memory and the notion of place, which are central to the Chicano/a experience. ­These themes are articulated through the use of diverse symbols and languages that she draws from an inventory of pre-­Columbian, Catholic, mass-­media, and historical references, deploying them in an allegorical manner. Combining a sense of the sacred, spirituality, and history, works such as Private Landscapes, Public Territories (1996) deal with geography not only as topos but also as a cartography charged with the per­sis­tence of Chicano/a culture over time. The range of styles, forms, and proposals of Chicana artists is broad and represents diverse aesthetic endeavors as well as the heterogeneity of Chicano/a culture. Born and raised in r ural southern Texas, Santa C. Barraza has developed an artistic language that revitalizes such traditions as the pre-­Columbian codex, or painted manuscript, as well as popu­lar ex-­voto and retablo traditions of Mexico and the Southwest. By means of ­these genres, which represent a mestiza genealogy and are an index of Chicano/a reinvention of tradition, Barraza articulates lyrically infused narratives. Dealing with aspects of her own experience and incorporating it into a discourse that combines con­temporary imagery with tradition and myth, Barraza’s works deal with the tenacity of the Chicana universe. Her references to the Virgen de los R emedios, who appeared to her followers sprouting from a maguey plant, have a transcultural importance given the life-­sustaining symbolism of the plant and its multiple uses in pre-­Columbian cultures. In Barraza’s oeuvre, a diverse pantheon of Chicano/ as take the place of the Virgen de los R emedios, casting the past into con­temporary registers. Yolanda M. López, who was born and raised in San Diego and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, has produced a diverse body of work that is conceptually based and informed by per­ for­mance. In her videos and installations, she has Inventing Trad itio n  ·  129

researched and dealt with the repre­sen­ta­tion of Chicano/a cultures by mainstream cultures in the mass media. López recasts foundational feminine religious icons, linking them to the con­temporary life of Chicanas such as the artist, her m ­ other, and her grand­mother. Her ongoing series on the Virgin of Guadalupe, for example, conflates myth and history with con­temporary concerns. The symbolic and meta­phorical matrix of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s association with Mexica female deities such as Tonantzin and Coatlicue exempliĀesthe layering of cultures as a hybrid pro­ cess. López’s painting Nuestra Madre (1981–88) depicts the Mexica deity (excavated in Coxcatlán, Puebla) with all the attributes of the Virgin of Guadalupe, thereby fusing the two Āgures and calling attention to their centrality in the Mexica-­ Mexican-­Chicano/a social imaginary (Āg.  16.1). In her portrait series depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe in dif­fer­ent apparitions and guises—as well as in h er per­for­mances representing her as the “brown Virgin,” or la morenita—­López deals speciĀcally with the construction of Chicano/a identity, agency, and empowerment. Yreina Cervántez uses a similar conceptual operation in h er Nepantla Triptych (1995), which highlights a Chicana view of Mexica cosmology from an engendered perspective. In Mi Nepantla Cervántez achieves this by means of casting Coyolxauhqui in her own persona as the context of a spiritual and cultural nepantla, the in-­between state.32 Like Mesa-­Bains, Cervántez collapses personal and epic histories as well as mythic and spiritual references, thereby underlining the ability of the imaginative and aesthetic dimensions of art to represent a universe that is qualitatively dif­fer­ent from the established real­ity. Among the artists who have investigated diverse in-­between states in t erms of border cultures and the dynamic relationship across time between Chicano/a and Mexican cultures are Mexican-­born Rubén Ortiz-­Torres and Enrique Chagoya. Both artists, despite their distinct trajectories, call attention to and rework in a h umorous manner ste­reo­typical images of Mexican and Chicano/a cultures. Ortiz-­Torres draws from 130 ·  vict o r z amud io- ­t a yl o r

a variety of sources—­historical materials, comic books, Ālms, and popu­lar ­music—to highlight and critique the allure and power of urban culture in s uch megalopolises as Los Angeles and Mexico City. In a Duchampian spin, he uses pre-­ Columbian culture to play with the use and abuse of the past for the production of hegemonic as well as critical discourses. In works as distinct as his collaborative video with Jesse Lerner, Frontierland/Fronterilandia (1995), and his series of customized baseball caps, ­there is a simi lar use of transcultural references and linguistic puns to create a hall-­of-­mirrors effect, reflecting both past and pres­ent. Chagoya also works in postmodern pastiche. His proposals focusing on pre-­Columbian culture deal directly with its visual repre­sen­ta­tion in early colonial sources, juxtaposing historical images with comic book Āgures in pop art–­like operations. In Chagoya’s aesthetic strategy, the importance of image in p re-­Columbian cultures dialogues and merges with the centrality accorded to the icon in pop art and in postindustrial mass culture. The dialogism that he articulates calls attention to the multiplicity of narratives and epistemologies in postmodernism. Art historically, Chicano/a art may be approached as well as deĀned by its rich and conflicting relationship to the pre-­Columbian past. As we have seen, Shifra M. Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto established two well-­deĀned periods of Chicano/a art, which saw a transition from the militant cultural nationalism of the late 1960s to mid-1970s to the multiculturalism that was dominant from the mid-1970s to early 1990s. The art produced in ­these two brief, proliĀc, and deĀning periods was linked to frameworks of cultural identity and the exaltation of difference for ideological and po­liti­cal reasons. From the perspective of the generation of Chicano/a artists who emerged ­after the early 1990s (who might be described as “post-­Chicano/a”), the Chicano/a art of the Ārst two periods served a valuable and necessary function as a did actic vehicle that forged traditions and reinvented a mythic past.33 ­Today, however, such practices

FIG. 16.1. Yolanda López, Nuestra Madre, 1981–88. Acrylic on Masonite, 96 × 48 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

appear clichéd and restrictive. That is not to say that, from a post-­Chicano/a perspective, themes and formal endeavors that address and refer to the pre-­Columbian past are obsolete. To the degree that post-­Chicano/a practices articulate con­ temporary and global concerns with a consciousness of modernism and postmodernism, they establish a m ore layered and complex relationship to the past and its traditions. As an alternate practice, Chicano/a art has exalted its speciĀcity and, to a certain degree, its autonomy from the mainstream as proof of its critique of the establishment. ­Today, however, this appears as a mixed blessing insofar as it has led to the marginalization of Chicano/a expressions. Chicano/a essentializing discourses, combined with the prejudice of the mainstream ­toward art informed by po­liti­cal or ideological concerns, set into motion a k ind of complicity, encouraging the exclusion of Chicano/a art from wider collecting and exhibiting contexts and frameworks of interpretation and analy­sis. The challenge that ­faces us ­today is to Ānd ways to exhibit, collect, research, and teach Chicano/a art in qualitatively dif­fer­ent terms. From the outset this requires a reconsideration of the very status it has flaunted as a so-­called orphan of modernism.34 To be sure, the relationship of Chicano/a art to modernism, and to primitivism in par­tic­u­ lar, has been contradictory, yet to inscribe it into the tradition of modernism and postmodernism is not to neutralize its potential as a s ource of empowerment, as a si te of recollection and memory, and as a g round for cultural differentiation. On the contrary, the work of Chicano/a artists continues to challenge art historians and museum professionals to reconsider their ideas and practices. Such a r econsideration of Chicano/a art in wider contexts and in dialogue with “art in general” allows Chicano/a artists to participate in a larger arena, one in which their work may be apprehended in a ll of its complexity. Post-­ Chicano/a practices by deĀnition retain a concern with speciĀc cultural narratives but are marked by a heterogeneity of contexts and dis132 ·  vict o r z amud io- ­t a yl o r

courses. Ironically, post-­Chicano/a art revives and renews the critical impulse of prior periods, not by asserting its autonomy from modernism and postmodernism but through its willingness to engage with diverse bodies of knowledge and artistic practices. Notes This chapter was originally published as Victor Zamudio-­ Taylor, “Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism: Chicano/a Art and the Pre-­Columbian Past,” in The Road to Aztlán: Art from a Mythic Homeland, exhibition cata­log (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001), 342–57. 1. Enrique Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to In­de­pen­dence, trans. Albert A. Bork with the assistance of Kathryn R. Bork (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 228. 2. See Victor Zamudio-­Taylor, “Chicano Art,” in Latin American Art in the Twentieth ­Century, ed. Edward J. ­Sullivan (London: Phaidon Press, 1996). 3. See Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1985); James Clifford, ­Virginia Dominguez, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Of Other ­Peoples: Beyond the ‘Savage’ Paradigm,” in Discussions in Con­temporary Culture, no. 1, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1987); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); the cata­log of the impor­tant exhibition or­ga­nized by Jean-­Hubert Martin for the Centre Georges Pompidou, Les magiciens de la terre (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1989); Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993); Gill Perry, “Primitivism and the ‘Modern,’ ” in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth ­Century, ed. Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry (London: Open University and Yale ­University Press, 1993); and Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, Prehistories of the F­ uture: The Primitivist Proj­ect and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). 4. William Rubin, “Primitivism,” in Twentieth-­Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: ­Museum of Modern Art, 1984). 5. Foster, Recodings, 181–210. 6. William Rubin, Les desmoiselles d’Avignon, Studies in Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 115–17.

7. Barbara Braun, Pre-­Columbian Art and the Post-­ Columbian World (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992). 8. See Braun, Pre-­Columbian Art; Cynthia Newman Helms, ed., Diego Rivera: A Retrospective (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1986); Valerie Fletcher, Crosscurrents of Modernism: Four Latin American Pioneers: Diego Rivera, Joaquin Torres-­Garcia, Wifredo Lam, and Matta (Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1992); Mari-­Carmen Ramírez, ed., El Taller Tones-­Garcia: The School of the South and Its Legacy (Austin: University of Texas Press for the Archer at Huntington Art Gallery, College of Fine Arts, University of Texas, 1992). 9. Braun, Pre-­Columbian Art. 10. Of note are the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878, within which the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadero opened its doors, and the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889. 11. See Nancy Perloff, “Gauguin’s French Baggage: De­ cadence and Colonialism in Tahiti,” in Barkan and Bush, Prehistories of the ­Future. 12. See Betty Ann Brown, “The Past Idealized: Diego Rivera’s Use of Pre-­Columbian Imagery,” in Helms, Diego Rivera, 139–55. 13. See Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-­ Sánchez, Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993). 14. See Frederic H. Douglas and Rene d’Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States (New York: Museum of Modern Art / Simon and Schuster, 1941);Wendell C. Bennett, Ancient Art of the Andes (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1954); Antonio Castro Leal, Alfonso Caso, Manuel Toussaint, Roberto Montenegro, and Miguel Covarrubias, Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art/120 Siglos de arte mexicano (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1940); Holger Cahill, American Sources of Modern Art (1933; reprint, New York: Museum of Modern Art and Arno Press, 1969). 15. Cahill, American Sources of Modern Art, 5. 16. See Braun, Pre-­Columbian Art; and Brown, “The Past Idealized.” 17. See Raman Favela, Diego Rivera: The Cubist Years (Phoenix, AZ: Phoenix Museum of Art, 1984). 18. Betty Ann Brown mentions in passing Rivera’s viewing of pre-­Columbian and early colonial manuscripts in Italy in “The Past Idealized.” 19. David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Barcelona Manifesto 1921,” cited and translated in Anita Brenner, Idols ­behind Altars (New York: Payson and Claike, 1929). 20. See Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano, eds., Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance

and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991). 21. See Rudolfo A. Anaya and Francisco A. Lomeli, Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). For a more ­con­temporary assessment, see Ignacio M. Garcia, Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997); and Daniel Cooper Alarcón, The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). 22. Emblematic of Chicano and Indian alliances was Deganawidah-­Quetzalcoatl University in Davis, California, which took its name from Deganawidah, the founder of the Iroquois Confederacy, and Quetzalcoatl; see Shifra M. Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “The Po­liti­cal and Social Contexts of Chicano Art,” in Griswold del Castillo, McKenna, and Yarbro-­Bejarano, Chicano Art, 88. 23. Carlos Almaraz Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 24. Gilbert Luján course syllabus, California State University, Los Angeles, 1970, in Carlos Almaraz Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 25. Alurista, Floricanto en Aztlán, poetry by Alurista, art by Judith Hernández (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center, University of California, 1971). 26. Walter Benjamin, “N [Re: The Theory of Knowledge: Theory of Pro­gress],” in Walter Benjamin: Philosophy, History, and Aesthetics, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 60. 27. See Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art,” in Beyond the Fantastic Con­temporary Art Criticism from Latin Amer­i­ca, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (London: Institute of Visual Arts, 1995), 165–82. 28. Regarding periodization of Chicano/a art, I would utilize the framework from Griswold del Castillo, McKenna, and Yarbro-­Bejarano, Chicano Art, which ends the second period in 1985. From 1985 to the pres­ent, Chicano/a artists have begun to articulate issues and themes that go beyond frameworks of identity and deal with more hybrid global concerns. 29. Impor­tant traveling exhibitions dedicated to Chicano/a art or including Chicano/a artists include Hispanic Art in the United States (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1987);Les demons des anges (Centre d’Art Contemporain, Nantes, 1989); Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo: Colon Colonizado, tutto e mio de quien? (Venice Biennale, 1990); El corazón sangrante/The Bleed-

Inventing Trad itio n  ·  133

ing Heart (Institute of Con­temporary Art, Boston, 1991); and Art of the Other Mexico (Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago, 1993). 30. The only Chicano artists from the first generation to engage with other currents such as pop art, minimalism, and new figuration ­were Carlos Almaraz, Luis Jiménez, Mel Casas, and Rupert García. 31. See Amalia Mesa-­Bains, “El Mundo Femenino: Chicana Artists of the Movement: A Commentary on Development and Production,” in Griswold del Castillo, McKenna, and Yarbro-­Bejarano, Chicano Art, 131–40; and “Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache,” in Distant Relations: Chicano Irish Mexican Art and Critical Writing (Los Angeles: Smart Art Press, 1995), 156–63. On rasquachismo, see Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” in Griswold del Castillo, McKenna, and Yarbro-­Bejarano, Chicano Art, 155–62. 32. See Miguel León-­Portilla, “Conceptual Framework and Case Identification” and “Cultural Trauma, Mestizaje, and Indianism in Mesoamerica,” in Endangered Cultures, ed. Miguel Leon-­Portilla, trans. Julie Goodson-­Lawes (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990); for a Chicana feminist perspective on nepantla, see Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Spinsters / Aunt Lute Books, 1987).

134 ·  vict o r z amud io- ­t a yl o r

33.The Los Angeles–­based conceptual per­for­mance collective Asco and cross-­media artists Daniel Joseph Martinez and Armando Rascón, as well as the painter Roberto Juarez, may be described as post-­Chicano/a artists avant la lettre. This heterogeneous grouping distanced themselves from dominant Chicano/a positions, critiquing them at times with bittersweet humor and parody. The collective Border Arts Workshop/ Taller de Arte Fronterizo and artists Jesse Amado, David Avalos, Alejandro Diaz, Celia Alvarez Muñoz, and Franco Mondini Ruiz emerged ­after the Chicano movement. Their work is characterized by an array of thematic concerns—­personal, cultural, and political—­and by the use of formal languages and aesthetic strategies such as postminimalism, conceptualism, per­for­mance, ­ser­vice art, new genre public art, and new media. Younger artists such as Rita Gonzalez, Salomon Huerta, Chuck Ramirez, and Dario Robleto may be described as second-­ generation post-­Chicano/a. 34. For the phrase “orphans of modernism,” see Chon Noriega, “From Beats to Borders: An Alternative History of Chicano Art in California,” in Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art / Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 361.

jennifer a. gonz ález

17.Negotiated Frontiers  ·  1995 Con­temporary Chicano Photography

A Chicano is a M exican-­American with a Non- ­Anglo image of himself. —­R UBEN SALAZAR

What does it mean to have, or indeed to be with, an image of oneself? How is that image constructed? How is that image controlled? To have an image implies the rights of owner­ship. To be with an image implies a relation of cooperation, community. Each of the artists in t his exhibition reflects on this problematic duality of being with and having an image of self or community. To this degree, they participate in the larger questions circulating in con­temporary art of the late twentieth ­century—­questions raised particularly within the realm of photography. At the same time, as “Chicano/a” photog­raphers, ­these artists confront issues that are culturally speciĀc and unique. The pro­cess of locating Chicano photography within a larger discourse on con­temporary photography, then, is not unlike searching for an elusive document. My purpose in this brief overview is to draw loose parallels between the work in this exhibition

and the work of other con­temporary photog­ raphers. I do n ot, however, seek to privilege one context over another through an exercise in in clusive canonization. Rather, my goal is to set up a series of resonances that suggest the negotiated space through which photographic images are formally and conceptually constructed. The work in t his exhibition offers a do uble challenge to the viewer: Ārst, to grasp the historical, po­liti­cal, and cultural narratives that are being told; and second, to reflect upon the formal concerns that determine how ­these narratives can be read. ­Because one necessarily relies upon the other—­that is, the meaning of historical and cultural narratives is determined by the way in which they are told, and the formal mode of telling is ­shaped by the ele­ments of the narrative—it is impossible to reduce ­these works of art to a s­ imple one-­to-­one correspondence with the works of other con­temporary photog­raphers. Insofar as the stories presented by ­these Chicano/a photog­raphers are unique and culturally speciĀc, so too ­will be the form of telling. Through this series of formal and conceptual comparisons, I wish to

show how and where the artists in this exhibition engage in a visual dialogue within con­temporary photography and, as a r esult, transform the bound­aries of photographic repre­sen­ta­tion. Telling Histories

It is prob­ably best to begin with a short historical account of the relations between Chicano art and narrative photography. Narrative (as storytelling) has no doubt been linked with photography for as long as the medium has served to illustrate momentous events and ordinary ­people. In the Āne arts, however, the link between narrative and photography—­following a signiĀcant break in the mid-­twentieth ­century when modernist aesthetics prevailed1—­was revived in t he 1960s when artists in other media started to incorporate more repre­sen­ta­tional and Āgurative ele­ments in their work. Photography, with its apparently endless possibilities of “real life” storytelling, seemed the ideal medium to represent a new visual agenda that emphasized repre­sen­ta­tion over abstraction.2 It was also during this period (1965–70), when the Āne arts began the slow shift from modernist concerns to the narrative forms and po­liti­ cal commentary current in much con­temporary work, that Chicano art blossomed in the United States. This was not mere coincidence, since it is clear that the formal shifts in artistic paradigms and the demands made by the social movements of this period w ­ ere in a tight symbiosis. Changing conceptions of the role of art, especially as a revived domain for po­liti­cal action, can be directly traced to the effects of criticisms raised by feminists and civil rights activists who sought to reveal the dangers of patriarchal and ethnocentric ways of seeing and evaluating art. Included in this critical analy­sis was a demand for the production and pre­sen­ta­tion of new, untold narratives. The art of the Chicano movimiento developed in parallel with this paradigm shift in visual repre­sen­ta­tion.3 Perhaps most powerfully pres­ent in large-­scale murals and theatrical productions, 136 ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

the early recuperation and reinvention of history through the narrative arts played a cen tral role in galvanizing support for community activism. During this early consciousness-­raising period, the photo­graph primarily functioned as documentary evidence of economic hardship and po­liti­cal strug­gle or, alternatively, as a memento of Mexican or Indigenous ancestry and practices.4 In the last fifteen years, however, many Chicano/a artists have transformed this legacy of documentary photography into a power­ful tool for the formation of a new visual language, one that is self-­conscious of its own production. Still interested in t he proj­ects of memory, history, and narrative that have been the base of efforts to build community identity and solidarity, the artists ­here have also begun a v isual dialogue with the formal concerns of other con­temporary photog­raphers. Redefining the Documentary Gaze

Miguel Gandert’s Los Comanches, which documents the dances performed by Comanche socie­ties in northern New Mexico, functions, to a certain degree, in t he tradition that uses the photo­graph as an au­then­tic trace of what was photographed. But Gandert has also made this tradition of authentication the underlining subject of his work, dividing his series into three parts to highlight the semantic differences among portrait, landscape, and social documentary. Intentionally shot and mounted to resemble portrait photo­graphs by Edward  S. Curtis (famous for his “stoic” images of Indigenous p ­ eoples taken between 1907 and 1930), Gandert’s portraiture also references the fashion aesthetic of Richard Avedon’s In the American West (1985). In the case of both photog­raphers, the content of the image is removed from any social or historical context not directly vis­i­ble on the subject’s body. The body itself becomes the sign of culture. Community, activity, and volition are erased in order to reveal the “pure” identity of the individual, and, as a consequence, the West becomes deĀned by

the solitude of its inhabitants. Avedon, according to one critic, portrays the West “as a blighted culture that spews out casualties by the bucket.”5 In his work, the inhabitants are isolated by the camera from their daily habitat and have l­ittle to provide but conĀrmations of already circulating ste­reo­types. A cr itique of this mode of viewing can be found in David Avalos’s Wilderness (1989), in which “wilderness” is literally written over a series of anonymous portraits of Indigenous ­people. In contrast, the Ārst images in Gandert’s series emphasize the quiet beauty of his subjects, thereby reproducing the solitary portraiture of Curtis and Avedon. To this degree, the photo­ graphs send ste­reo­types recirculating—­and, at the same time, they emphasize the formal means through which such ste­reo­types are originally constructed. Gandert’s critical exploration of documentary becomes more explicit as the viewer is led along a sequence of images that becomes both decreasingly romantic and increasingly prosaic. By replacing the portrait with the landscape—­quoting the tradition of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, and their many con­temporary followers, which continues to see the West as a frontier of wide open spaces occupied by heroic Āgures—­ Gandert nevertheless allows small bits of technological contamination to enter into the image. Sweeping pa­noramas replace cropped close-­ups, but perceptions of the Comanche as distanced from the viewer by time and culture are subtly undermined by the presence of con­temporary material signs such as automobiles parked in the background and power lines that cut across an other­wise expansive sky. The images reveal that both kinds of distance—­the emptiness of the close-up and the anonymity of the landscape—­ produce a visual argument for an “au­then­tic” subject. To subvert this reading, details within the photo­graph indicate the inherent contradictions and necessary mendacity that have characterized the framing pro­cess of traditional Western photography. Gandert ends the series with his own documentary style, which relies on a sn apshot aes-

thetic of contextual placement and medium range that is common in t ourist photography and photojournalism. Unlike ­those tourists, however, who tirelessly strive to remove all of what they believe to be the inauthentic or extraneous information from the margins of their images, Gandert is more concerned to produce a clear indication of the relationship between the artist and his con­temporary subject. In each formal mode, the photo­graphs in t he series quote a photographic style in order to point to the socially constructed nature of its form. Martha Rosler writes, “In general, it is through irony that the quotation gains its critical force. One speaks with two voices establishing a kind of triangulation—(the source of) the quotation is placed ­here, the quoter over ­here, and the hearer/spectator ­there—­and, by inflection, one saps the authority of the quote. Irony, however, is not universally accessible, for the audience must know enough to recognize what is at stake.”6 The meaning of any photographic quotation, as Rosler also notes, is heavi­ly weighted by the pro­cess of framing the image. The authority of vision dictated by a photographer such as Edward S. Curtis is usurped in Gandert’s series through framing and juxtaposition. Gandert necessarily takes a r isk in u sing quotation to produce a critical view of documentary photography ­because he risks encountering an audience that may or may not recognize what is at stake in the images. Unlike other con­temporary photography of quotation that emphasizes irony as a loss of meaning, however, Gandert’s series situates its subjects in a context of formative social encounters that move beyond surface effects of photographic style to reclaim a s elf-­critical, photographic presence. Delilah Montoya also takes part in this critical assessment of the cultural role of photography. Her goal is to document the view, and to return the gaze, of the tourist camera. Making a clear reference to such photo­graphs as Lee F ­ riedlander’s Mount Rushmore, South Dakota (1969), Montoya is in a long tradition of photog­raphers who have used the camera to reveal the voy­eur­is­tic nature Nego ti a ted Fr o ntiers  ·  137

of the tourist or, as Chon Noriega has observed in his essay in the exhibition cata­log, the touristic nature of the art viewer.7 To the degree that her work emphasizes this layered complicity of voyeurism, it can also be compared with British photographer Susan Trangmar’s Untitled Landscapes (1986), or German photographer Thomas Struth’s museum series (1989–94) in w hich one sees the backs of individuals as they contemplate cityscapes or Āne art. In the work of Trangmar and Struth, the viewer’s own role in a system of observation or surveillance is made manifest— as duplicated in t he photographer’s gaze—­and thereby foregrounds the context of museum or gallery where the work is exhibited. A s ense of static distance pervades the work of both artists, in part ­because of the large-­format negatives or wide-­angle lenses they use, but also ­because the camera is located away from the action of the image, safe and aloof. In contrast, Montoya’s framing tends to be looser and is set in the ­middle of the action it depicts. As a result, it is not only more in keeping with a tourist sensibility, but it also removes the viewer from a meta­ phorical position of physical or institutional dominance. Montoya succeeds, as do Trangmar and Struth, in making her audience aware of its role in a system of looking both by emphasizing its position as audience and by locating it as the object of the gaze. By inserting herself in the line of sight of other tourist photog­raphers, Montoya reproduces the visual sensation of having one’s picture taken. In her photo­graphs, the viewer is put not in the position of tourist but rather in the position of a consumable cultural artifact. This is made more concrete by Montoya’s use of postcard series rather than conventional exhibition prints. Montoya thus reflects upon the ways in which the ­peoples of the West—­both native and nonnative—­construct their relations of identity around being an image for, or having an image of, each other. In so ­doing, Montoya demonstrates an interest in the construction of cultural identity as well as the role of the camera in this pro­cess.

138 ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

Textual Traces

­ ere are two distinct kinds of narrative photo­ Th graphs: ­those with an accompanying text and ­those without. This distinction applies to single, multiple, and sequential photo­graphs. In narrative photography, t­ here is always an implied directional reading of events, although sometimes the viewer is initially not aware of it. As Max Kozloff remarks, “The job of the narrative photographer is to suspend our sense of the irreversible lateness of our arrival at the scene depicted, and to try to resituate viewers within an apparently emergent pro­cess, still unconsummated at the moment of perception.”8 When a n arrative is constructed from visual fragments alone, as in the work of Gandert and Montoya, the formal tropes of the image (its framing, its depth of Āeld, its choice of tone and aspect) nevertheless constrain the way it w ­ ill be read. Chains of associations ­will follow from each individual ele­ ment in the photographic image u ­ ntil a sequencing or sense is constructed. As artist and theorist Victor Burgin points out, this reading might be accomplished “not in a lin ear manner, but in a repetition of ‘vertical’ readings, in stillness, in a-­ temporality.”9 However, when text accompanies the photographic image, a lin ear or prescribed reading is set in motion as the eye swings slowly like a pendulum, or flits quickly like a fly, between image and text. Many con­temporary photog­raphers, from the 1970s onward, have made use of the anchoring possibilities of text in their work, some to create po­liti­cal or meta­phorical juxtapositions with an image, ­others to produce a narrative context.10 In this exhibition, the use of text in Harry Gamboa Jr.’s Social Unwest, Kathy Vargas’s My Alamo, and the biographical materials that accompany Maria’s ­Great Expedition by Christina Fernandez can be read through and against this body of work. I do n ot wish to suggest that t­ hese works can be reduced to their use of textual materials; only that, in each case, the written word ­functions

differently in the construction of a skeletal framework through which a visual narrative can be read. In Social Unwest, Gamboa’s use of text deĀnes not a plot structure but a cast of characters. Rather than telling a story, the brief statements printed on the back of nine portrait photo­graphs, and made available to each audience member in stacks of xeroxed flyers, reveal Ārst-­person accounts of what might be a Chicano life in a city of unrest. When ­these actors take on melodramatic roles in t he highly staged series of per­for­mance events Gamboa photo­graphs, the work formally recalls Robert Longo’s large-­scale black-­and-­white drawings known as the Men in the Cities series (­ 1981–87). Both share a t one of theatricality and create a playful caricature of ste­reo­types; yet Gamboa’s community of Āgures in Social Unwest exhibits a greater range and sense of humor than Longo’s solitary, homogeneous, and anonymous Āgures, who appear to waver between a late-­capitalist plea­ sure and angst. It is precisely b ­ ecause they are not anonymous, but rather identiĀable through a textual mapping of character effects, that Gamboa’s Āgures also function more powerfully as sources for viewer identiĀcation. The audience in this case can both literally have an image of a “real” Chicano and also be with this image in the sequence of ­imagined cityscapes that Gamboa pres­ents. This sequential pre­sen­ta­tion of images in Gamboa’s piece shares aspects of cryptic narrative and accumulation of evidence found in the early work of Duane Michals and in more recent work by artists such as John Baldessari, Eve Sonneman, or Carrie Mae Weems, who use careful staging or provocative juxtapositions to produce the feeling of an ­actual event. Gamboa’s work is also built upon the staging of events, but it is differently inflected by the cross-­genre appropriation of visual tropes from tele­vi­sion, Ālm, and theater—­a multimedia genre chat he began to identify as the fotonovela in the 1970s. The term “fotonovela” originally described a p opu­lar Mexican comic book genre that replaces drawn images with photo­graphs. While other artists have used the

fotonovela as an inspirational source—­for example, Puerto Rican artists Merián Soto and Pepón Osorio in No Regrets (1988)—­Gamboa uniquely interprets the term to deĀne his own narrative manipulation of photographic prints and slides, recorded sound, and spoken and written texts. In sequencing photo­graphs, Gamboa marks a p assage of time; but as with any chronology, t­ here are gaps in the story. It is Gamboa’s almost aphoristic textual commentary—­the voices of his community—­that functions to guide t he viewer across and through the narrative expanse of this urban un-­West. Christina Fernandez uses descriptive text even more explic­itly as a guiding device in Maria’s G ­ reat Expedition. ­Here the artist maps out an extraordinary ­woman’s everyday life history. In providing the visual traces of a private life through the formal structure of a museum-­style exhibition, complete with wall text and cartographic information, Fernandez can be seen to participate in a current wave of what one scholar has called museumism.11 While less explic­itly concerned with the critique of institutions that informs work by such artists as James Luna and Fred Wilson, Fernandez nevertheless uses the formal devices of a m useum exhibition to raise questions concerning the authority of evidence in determining the history of any given community. A set of visual contradictions within the work marks it as the site of semantic ambivalence concerning the difficult task of recuperating an undocumented history. While the written text and installation format make reference to an au­then­ tic history and biographical narrative, the photographic images si­mul­ta­neously undermine the literalness of any purely historical interpretation. The oddly still and stylized portraits can be formally compared with works by photographer Cindy Sherman, particularly her early Untitled Film Still series (1977–80). In both artists’ work ­there is an emphasis on a staged event or moment in which a single female protagonist, in each case played by the photographer, poses in the midst of action or contemplation. Neither accidental nor

Nego ti a ted Fr o ntiers  ·  139

documentary, ­these images do not take part in a realist aesthetic. Instead, both artists emphasize the artiĀcial formalism of the constructed photographic space while gesturing ­toward the historical period the staged context implies. In Sherman’s photo­graphs, however, the Āgure of the w ­ oman is in each case constructed as a di f­fer­ent character caught in the dramatic unfolding of Ālmic events. Indeed, part of Sherman’s strength is found in the variety of types she is able to construct; whereas, for Fernandez, the “factual” identity of the protagonist is central to her proj­ect. The story that grounds Fernandez’s work is the life story of her great-­grandmother, a ­woman who survived in many dif­fer­ent contexts during the Ārst half of this c­ entury, but who always retained an individual identity. ­Whether or not the audience is aware that Fernandez herself stands in for this ancestral Āgure, the placement of a young ­woman in this role implies that ­there is an overlapping of identiĀcation between generations. The protagonist, María, does not age over time, but always retains the same youthful form; only her context, costume, and photographic format change. Fernandez thus highlights, as does Gandert, the con­temporary use of photography as an evocative meta­phor, rather than an au­then­ tic trace, in the construction of historical narration. To be with an image is in this case to be in an image, taking on the meta­phorical form, if not the literal content, of history. In the case of Kathy Vargas’s My Alamo, the form of the photo­graph dictates that the content ­will be read as a series of depth relations (Āgs. 17.1 and 17.2). Similar to Tomie Arai’s photo-­silkscreen series Memory in Pro­gress: A M other/Daughter Proj­ect (1988) and Lorie Novak’s Past Lives, Fragments (1987), the use of photomontage, or in this case multiple exposure, in My Alamo produces a poignant sense of shifting temporality. In the way one might imagine the juxtapositions that take place in wa ndering through a l andscape of memory, Vargas superimposes objects, bodies, and texts in such a way as to evoke a narrative reading. Each layer can be read as informing the next, bleeding through to structure the pos­si­ble signiĀ140  ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

cance of each subsequent ele­ment. The written commentary in the work does not act to anchor the images as much as it appears as one fragment among ­others in an open system of associations. The decision to pair each of her photo­graphs with a memorial shrine links the work of Vargas with that of other con­temporary installation artists such as Christian Boltanski (Leçon des Tenebres, 1987), Amalia Mesa-­Bains (Venus Envy, 1993), and Jenni Lukac (Votive Shrine, 1992). Each of t­ hese artists, in very dif­fer­ent ways, seeks to emphasize the role of photography in a system of repre­sen­ta­ tion that transforms historical events into sacred memories for a given community. For Vargas, the shrine functions as the site through which the image is deĀned and located within the context of individual relations and cultural institutions. Albert Chong (The Two Generations, 1990) and Adolfo Paniño (Ele­ments of Navigation, 1991–92) also have in common Vargas’s interest in the use of material traces, objects, and photo­graphs to map the complex negotiations of cultural identity; but in the case of ­these two artists, the photo­graph retains a k ind of authenticity and still functions as an indexical trace of a “ real” historical moment. In using multiple exposures, Vargas purposefully embraces a p hotographic pro­cess that has been, and, in some schools of thought, is still considered taboo for its lack of purity, but it is this very notion of purity that Vargas actively wants to subvert in My Alamo. Her ambivalent relation to this South Texas monument can be traced back to the experience of being asked to take sides in relation to the history of U.S.-­Mexico antagonism. What Vargas makes clear is the impossibility of taking one side or another, of locating a pure identity. Her work maps the complexity of having an image of the past that is always situated within a larger context of historical monuments and social institutions. Reviewing Hollywood

Among con­temporary artists working with photography and the question of the West, David Levinthal is perhaps one of the better known

for his glamorous, monumental, Hollywood-­ style cowboy-­and-­Indian images. His series The Wild West (1993) revives a ps eudonostalgia for the West-­as-­frontier through close-up, shallow-­ focus photo­graphs of toy Āgurines. Cowboys are seen roping h ­ orses and ­cattle, Indians are seen attacking covered wagons and Āghting with cowboys, and w ­ omen are seen waving to trains or looking off into the distance and holding a child. In short, the West according to Hollywood. The irony of Levinthal’s proj­ect is that it is not ironic; it is sincerely nostalgic.12 Robert  C. Buitrón’s proj­ect El Corrido de Happy Trails (Starring Pancho y Tonto) can be read as a critical response to, and Ālmic elaboration of, this nostalgia. While Levinthal places the Euro-­American cowboy at the center of his work, Buitrón examines the role of the Indian (Tonto), which in many instances also translated into the Mexican (Pancho). Consistent with a recuperative reading of genre, Buitrón revises the Hollywood western to Ānd his own place in the narrative. At the same time, as Chon Noriega points out, Buitrón proj­ects his own nostalgia for this genre and his desire to be part of a cer tain neoindigenist fantasy. The images he produces are decidedly ironic in t heir repre­sen­ta­tion of multiple sign systems (computer screen, poster, costumed characters) that set up a context for pos­si­ble sites of identiĀcation (Āg. 17.3) But just as “Pancho y Tonto” must look for their own place in the Ālm industry through the casting agency, so too must the audience deĀne their own relation to t­ hese iconic Āgures of the Hollywood western. Unlike Levinthal’s literal resuscitation of celluloid fantasies, Buitrón’s images pres­ent his audience with new historical possibilities. Negotiated Frontiers

I would like to conclude this brief discussion of how the six a rtists in t he exhibition work within a g eneral framework of con­temporary visual culture, and in conversation with other con­ temporary artists/photographers, by addressing

two questions. The Ārst is, How do ­these artists, as speciĀcally Chicano/a photog­raphers, form a unique visual culture within the world of con­ temporary photography? The second is the question I began with—­What does it mean for ­these artists to be with or to have an image of one’s self or community? Robert C. Buitrón and Kathy Vargas point out in their essay “Para un recuerdo: Photography by Chicanas and Chicanos,” that Chicano photography has yet to deĀne itself as a s chool or style, ­whether as a historical form or con­temporary visual practice.13 As the artworks in this exhibition are formally eclectic, the threads that tie them together are therefore their shared ideological concerns. What distinguishes this work as a separate domain within the context of con­temporary photography is its culturally speciĀc reading of historical events in combination with an activist vision of the ­future, a ­future in which racism does not predominate in the Āeld of visual culture. While working with themes that can be found in much late twentieth-­century photography—­the ­family, the city, tourism, narrative Āgures—­this work creates a new set of visual icons that inhabit a contested terrain in which distinctions between the marginal and mainstream are no longer clear. It is signiĀcant that Fernandez represents a ­woman with Spanish-­style curls by the railroad tracks, or that Gamboa includes “gang” Āgures in his Los Angeles territorial tug-­of-­war, or that Vargas pictures the Alamo in her layered images. ­These details are legible icons within a community that has shared in the cultural moments they represent, a community in this case identiĀed as Chicano. Yet ­these discrete material details, ­these overdetermined signs, can also be seen to circulate in the culture at large—­a visual culture that includes Hollywood westerns, tele­vi­sion soap operas, tourist postcards, and romantic documentary. The space in which t­ hese artists’ images are meaningful is thus the frontier between domains (for example, the “au­then­tic ethnic” and the “self-­ critical avant-­garde”) that have been artiĀcially created and then kept purposefully separate in the discourse of Āne arts. Nego ti a ted Fr o ntiers  ·  141

FIG. 17.1. Kathy Vargas, My Alamo (Order of the Alamo), 1995. Hand-­colored silver gelatin print, 20 × 16 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

FIG. 17.2. Kathy Vargas, My Alamo (Order of the Alamo), 1995. Mixed media with hand-­colored silver gelatin print, 20 × 16 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

FIG. 17.3. Robert Buitrón, Identity Surfing, 1995. Chromogenic print. Image courtesy of the artist. © Robert Buitrón.

In the context of an exhibition, it is not only the artist but also the viewer who inhabits this frontier space; for a p hoto­graph is deĀned not only by its material form but also, and more importantly, by its audience. In narrative photography, this is always the case. Max Kozloff succinctly remarks, “As the writer solicits the reader, so does the camera eye solicit the viewer, insinuating itself as an alter ego of the viewer. Narrative greatly depends on this primitive transference, so that, case by case, the story formulates a p ersonality for its spectator.”14 The photography in this exhibition postulates an audience whose “personality” is determined in p art by speciĀc memories and identities that are generalizable to Chicano communities across the West, and in part by a literacy for the formal devices and popular-­culture 144  ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

references the artists skillfully manipulate. As a result, what emerges in this exhibition is an emphasis not on the identity of the individual or the community but on relations between individuals and communities. The photographic image is used as part of the pro­cess of redeĀning t­ hese relations. Each artist in From the West puts the difficulty of having or being with an image into a n ew conceptual framework. Questions of owner­ship—­the right to assign meaning and the privilege of commodiĀcation and distribution, as well as the liability of authenticity—­are raised in t he work of Buitrón, Gandert, and Montoya as they explore what it means to have an image. Questions of existential relations—­territorial alliances, shifting social roles, pro­cesses of identiĀcation—­can be found

in the works of Fernandez, Gamboa, and Vargas as they delimit what it means to be with an image. For ­these Chicano/a photog­raphers, having or being with an image is thus part of negotiating the visual, historic, and cultural frontiers of a new American West. Notes This chapter was originally published as Jennifer A. González, “Negotiated Frontiers: Con­temporary Chicano Photography,” in From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography, ed. Chon Noriega, exhibition cata­log (San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum, 1995), 17–22. eRprinted by permission of the author and the Mexican Museum. Epigraph: Ruben Salazar, “Who Is a Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?,” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1970, B 7; reprinted in Ruben Salazar, Border Correspondent: Selected Writings, 1955–1970, ed. Mario T. Garcia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 1. Max Kozloff notes, “The serious Modernist could make signs and evoke symbolic meanings, but was prohibited from regressing so far as to tell a story.” Max Kozloff, “Through the Narrative Portal,” Artforum (April 1986): 86. 2. See Jon Thompson, “The Spectral Image,” in Ghost Photography: The Illusion of the Vis­i­ble (Milan, Italy: MystFest and Idea Books, 1989). 3. For an overview of Chicano art, see Shifra Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, Arte Chicano: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of Chicano Art, 1965–1981 (Berkeley: Chicano Studies Library Publications Unit, University of California, 1985); and Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano, eds., Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, exhibition cata­log (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991).

4. See Elizabeth Martinez, ed., 500 Anos del Pueblo Chicano/500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures (Albuquerque, NM: SouthWest Organ­izing Proj­ect, 1991); and Robert C. Buitrón and Kathy Vargas, “Para un recuerdo: Photography by Chicanas and Chicanos,” curatorial statement for the exhibition American Voices: Latino/ Chicano/Hispanic Photography in the U.S., Fotofest ’94, Houston, Texas, November 10–30, 1994. 5. See Max Kozloff, “Through Eastern Eyes,” Art in Amer­i­ca (January 1987): 90–97. 6. Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afrerthoughts (on Documentary Photography),” in The Contest of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 326. 7. For examples of art about tourism, see SlTEseeing: Travel and Tourism in Con­temporary Art, exhibition cata­log (New York: Whitney Museum Downtown, 1991). 8. Kozloff, “Through the Narrative Portal,” 88. 9. See Victor Burgin, “Seeing Sense,” The End of Art Theory (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986), 69–70. 10. Artists such as David Avalos, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, Christian Boltanski, Deborah Bright, Victor Burgin, Sophie Calle, George Legrady, Karen Knorr, Esther Parada, Lorna Simpson, Mitra Tabrizian, Carrie Mae Weems, and many o ­ thers have found unique uses for linguistic text in combination with the visual text of the photo­graph. 11. See Lisa G. Corrin, “Mining the Museum: Artists Look at Museums, Museums Look at Themselves,” in Mining the Museum, exhibition cata­log (Baltimore, MD: Con­temporary, 1994). 12. See the interview in The Wild West: Photo­graphs by David Levinthal, Photog­raphers at Work Series (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993). 13. Buitrón and Vargas, “Para un recuerdo.” 14. Kozloff, “Through Eastern Eyes,” 97.

Nego ti a ted Fr o ntiers  ·  145

ca ther ine s. ramírez

18. Deus ex Machina  ·  2002 Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez

­There can . . . ​be no ­simple “return” or “recovery” of the ancestral past which is not r e-­experienced through the categories of the pr es­ent: no base f or creative enunciation in a s­ imple reproduction of tr aditional forms which are not transformed by the technologies and identities of the pres­ent. —­S TUART HALL

In February  2001, the Museum of International Folk Art (mo ifa ) in Sa nta Fe, New Mexico, launched Cyber Arte, an exhibition of visual art fusing “ele­ments traditionally deĀned as ‘folk’ with state of the art computer technology.”1 The show, which was ­housed in t he Changing Gallery of the museum’s Hispanic Heritage Wing, consisted of works by four artists: Teresa Archuleta-­Sagel, Elena Baca, Alma López, and Marion C. Martinez.2 With its subtitle, Tradition Meets Technology, Cyber Arte si­mul­ta­neously counter-­posed and collapsed “tradition” and “technology” and, by extension, the old and the new. The artists used computers to create “traditional images,” such as ­those of religious Āgures.3 [. . .]

Like numerous other Chicana feminist artists, such as Ester Hernández and Yolanda López, Marion Martinez offers fresh visions of an old religious icon. But she does so using computer hardware, as opposed to computer software. For example, in Oratorio a l a Virgencita (2000), a 20" × 12" × 4" mixed-­media wall hanging, Martinez culls an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe from cir­cuit boards. Martinez’s work testiĀes to the dynamism and malleability of Chicana art and cultural identity (especially in, o f, and for New Mexico). A self-­described “Indio-­Hispanic,” Martinez was born and raised in northern New Mexico in the shadow of Los Alamos National Laboratory (l anl ), birthplace of the atomic bomb and one of the most impor­tant nuclear weapons research centers in t he United States and the world. Her mixed-­media sculptures and wall hangings of Catholic images, nine of which w ­ ere included in Cyber Arte, are fashioned from discarded computer components such as cir­cuit boards, disks, wires, and chips, some of which the artist acquired from a dump at l anl . Using the tech-

nology of the pres­ent, Martinez reproduces and transforms traditional Hispano art forms and, at the same time, underscores New Mexico’s history as a d umping ground for the remnants of twentieth-­century technology. In ­doing so, she challenges nostalgic and romantic visions of New Mexico as the “Land of Enchantment,” interrogates the par­ameters of Hispana and Chicana cultural identity, and offers work emblematic of what I term Chicanafuturism.4 Between Heaven and Earth

Oratorio a la Virgencita illustrates the prominence of the Virgin of Guadalupe (also known as Our Lady of Guadalupe) in con­temporary Chicana art (Āg. 18.1). This in part reflects the signiĀcance of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism: in the Catholic celestial hierarchy, she is second only to the Trinity (that is, God the ­Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit). While ­there is only one Christ and one Blessed Virgin, both have numerous appellations (names or titles). For instance, the former has appeared as the Holy Child of Atocha and Infant Jesus of Prague, the latter as the Virgin of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Lourdes. Saints also play a signiĀcant role in Catholicism. They are “holy individuals who once lived and worked on earth” and who have entered heaven.5 However, they still respond to “earthly needs,” and thus are generally considered more approachable than God.6 As a forgiving m ­ other, Mary is deemed one of the most approachable of the holy Āgures. Similarly, the infant Jesus is thought to be more approachable than Jesus in his adult form. Numerous Mexican and Mexican American Catholics revere and rely upon saints and the Virgin Mary, not as deities but as benefactors, protectors, and intercessors between earth and heaven. Many worship and petition them, along with vari­ous manifestations of Jesus Christ, in t he belief that t­ hese holy personages have “personalized functions or powers ordained by God that they [can] use at their own discretion.”7

The santo (image of a saint or other holy personage) is one of New Mexico’s most scrutinized and highly marketed art forms. New Mexican santos are generally classiĀed into two types: bultos, or Āgures in the round, and retablos, or panels. Traditionally they are carved from wood, such as aspen, cottonwood, or pine, coated with gesso, then painted with tempera or other water-­soluble, vegetable-­or mineral-­based pigments.8 Additionally, bultos are sometimes dressed in c lothing similar to that of a doll. The 1700s ­until the late nineteenth ­century is considered the “golden age” of santo production in New Mexico.9 During this period, bultos and retablos ­were used to decorate churches, chapels, and home altars throughout what was once the northern frontier of the Spanish empire and Mexican republic. ­Because of New Mexico’s relative isolation and resulting shortage of priests, santeros (producers of santos), along with the Penitentes (members of a l ay religious fraternity), played an impor­tant role in creating and maintaining religious devotions ­until the late nineteenth ­century.10 The arrival of the railroad in 1879–80, combined with church officials’ disapproval and removal of locally produced religious art from churches, allowed many New Mexicans to acquire santos from sources other than their local santero.11 ­Today, santos can still be found in numerous New Mexican homes, although they are usually made of plaster, tin, or plastic (including a glow-­in-­the-­dark variety). Beginning in the 1920s, members of Santa Fe’s Anglo intelligent­sia initiated what they perceived as a r evival of the santo tradition.12 Inspired in part by the arts and crafts and primitivist movements, they turned not only to resuscitating what they deemed the traditional arts of New Mexico’s “native cultures” but also to preserving them in the face of the drastic technological changes of the early twentieth ­century.13 As Tey Marianna Nunn notes, “The atrocities of World War I,” along with the rise of mass culture, helped facilitate a “burgeoning interest” in “folk” art—­ that is, cultural production regarded as ­simple, au­then­tic, unique, and rustic.14 According to Lucy Lippard, “Folk art has been deĀned as art that Deus ex Machin a  ·  147

FIG. 18.1. Marion C. Martinez, Oratorio a la Virgencita, 2000. Mixed-­media wall hanging, 60 × 30.5 × 10 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

reflects its ­surroundings.”15 However, “­those surroundings are understood to be ‘outside’ everyday modern urban life, and therefore the objects are valued as artiĀcial bonds to an idealized past.”16 To many art patrons in and beyond Santa Fe during the early twentieth c­ entury, the wood carvings, textiles, baskets, and metalwork of New Mexican Hispanos and Indians became emblematic of pre­industrial society, of a less complicated and more innocent time, place, and p ­ eople, and of a “ folk culture deemed to be in d anger of disappearing.”17 Charles Briggs’s 1980 study of the wood carvers of Córdova, New Mexico, and their customers illustrates that, well into the twentieth c­ entury, santos ­were still regarded as links to “an idealized past.” Since the revival period of the 1920s and 1930s, art patrons and aĀcionados have flocked to Córdova, approximately thirty-­Āve miles northeast of Santa Fe, for its wood carvings, including santos. Briggs’s study shows that numerous ­people who purchased Córdovan wood carvings in the 1970s claimed to do so ­because they found both the objects and their producers “primitive,” “­simple,” and “crude.”18 Briggs observes that Hispano communities in northern New Mexico are commonly ste­reo­typed as “remote,” “backward,” and “quaint,” and he says the carvings appeal to outsiders in p art ­because they are viewed as an encapsulation of an agrarian, pre­industrial, premodern society.19 For some, santos in p ar­tic­u­lar are emblematic of the “precivilized” b ­ ecause they appear pagan.20 According to art historian George Kubler, santos are of the past, for they constitute “an idiom of antiquated symbols and forms.”21 He maintains that santeros continued to produce “a corpus of ­simple and power­ful religious expressions long ­after the same impulse had dis­appeared in the originating centers of Eu­rope.”22 The Land of Poco Tiempo

Indeed, to some, New Mexico itself represents lag: it is of and in t he past. One scholar asserts that its Hispanic settlers “­were only lightly

touched by” the Re­nais­sance.23 In addition to appearing temporally distant, the inhabitants of what novelist Charles F. Lummis (1893) described in the late nineteenth ­century as “the land of slow time” have been regarded as spatially remote and physically isolated. Colonial New Mexico (1598– 1821) has been described as “a lonely outpost of Spanish settlement,” “the fringes of civilization,” and “the farthest and most ragged rim of Christendom.”24 Undeniably, the Spaniards who colonized the upper Rio Grande Valley beginning in the late sixteenth ­century and their descendants found themselves on the edge of empire and nation “with l­ittle help from and often ignored by a distant governmental authority.”25 Unlike Texas and California, New Mexico was not accessible by sea or any easy route. Trade and communication between it and Mexico w ­ ere slow and difficult. Nonetheless, New Mexico has acted as a contact zone for the empires, nations, and ­peoples who have claimed, settled, and traversed it for the past four hundred years at least. The Comanche raids, Santa Fe Trail, and extant Catholic missions are but a few examples that testify to this.26 Real and ­imagined isolation continue to play an impor­tant role in deĀning New Mexican history and culture. “Geographic isolation,” as Carey McWilliams has observed, “bred social and cultural isolation; isolated in space, New Mexico was also [isolated] in time.”27 Even in the postcolonial twenty-­Ārst ­century, the state continues to be regarded as both physically and temporally distant from the “forces of modernity,” as represented by capitalism and industrialization.28 In her study of Ganados del Valle, a community development group in rural northern New Mexico, Laura Pulido demonstrates how economic “development and disinvestment patterns create sociospatial categories . . . ​such as North and South, [and] Core and Periphery,” as well as par­tic­u­lar places considered marginalized, notably Appalachia, the rural South, and northern New Mexico.29 For better and for worse, such places have been “bypassed by the forces of development, leaving them to continue on in p re-­capitalist forms of production and social relations, often creating Deus ex Machin a  ·  149

regions of deep poverty. ­Because they have been relatively exempt from the homogenizing forces of modernity, such communities often carry the illusion of a traditional lifestyle, one that is considered quaint by outsiders. This is the case in northern New Mexico, where Hispano poverty is historically entrenched and due to uneven development (coupled with some maldevelopment) and racialized local economic activity.”30 Despite Los Alamos National Laboratory’s prominent role in establishing and maintaining the dominance of the so-­called ­free (that is, cap­i­tal­ist) world and its superpower champion, the United States of Amer­i­ca, New Mexico remains relatively underdeveloped eco­nom­ically. According to the 2000 census, it ranks thirty-­ninth in t he nation for gross state product and fortieth for average annual pay. Moreover, New Mexico has the fourth-­ highest unemployment rate in the country and 19.3  ­percent of its population lives in poverty (compared to 13.3 ­percent of the national population).31 Its physical distance from imperial, national, and global centers of commerce has stunted its economic growth. Meanwhile, external and internal forces have ­shaped it as an economic and social space, rendering it “remote,” “isolated,” and “on the fringe.” As vari­ous scholars have argued, the logic of colonialism and racism maintains the existence of a s patial-­temporal spectrum, with dark, “superstitious,” precapitalist p ­ eoples occupying one end (the primitive), and white, “enlightened,” cap­i­tal­ist nation-­states occupying the other (the modern).32 As denizens of the metropolis move to the periphery, they appear to move backward in time. By virtue of hailing from, occupying, and/or representing the periphery, Hispanos—­ especially poor, rural, Catholic Hispanos—­have been barred from the pres­ent and f­ uture and Āxed in a racialized past. They appear to have changed very ­little over the centuries and seem to occupy a world older than and separate from the white, cap­i­tal­ist, mechanized, and/or digitized world of modernity and postmodernity. In par­tic­u­lar, by virtue of being associated with the pre­industrial and predigital, they are often deemed incapable 150 ·  ca ther ine s. ramír ez

of understanding, mastering, or even living with science and technology, signiĀers of the pres­ ent and ­future. This image persists even though generations of rural and urban Hispanos have managed to irrigate the desert with acequias and have controlled the temperature of their homes with adobe bricks—­not to mention the fact that, since the last c­ entury, many have enjoyed indoor plumbing, swamp coolers, and, the digital divide notwithstanding, home internet access, among numerous other technological amenities. In short, Hispanos have been excluded from the world of science, technology, and reason, and conĀned to the domain of superstition, my­ thol­ogy, and intuition. One observer recently remarked that the community of Los Alamos is an “anomaly” in N ew Mexico not only ­because it is predominately wealthy and white (in a state that is mainly poor and brown), but ­because “its lifeblood is data—­the concrete, observable information that is science—­while it is surrounded by Indian cultural traditions whose roots are held in place by power­ful, intuitive mythologies.”33 Although New Mexico is largely rural, Hispanos, unlike Native Americans, generally are not closely linked with a “sacred land concept,” nor have they been ste­reo­typed to the same extent as having an essential, mystical connection to and harmonious relationship with nature or the land.34 Nonetheless, like Native Americans (as well as other ­people of color and ­women in g eneral), Hispanos, especially ­those in rural areas, are reputed to be closer to nature than white ­people, especially urban, middle-­ and upper-­class white men. That is, they are associated with the wilderness, as opposed to civilization; with the organic or crude, as opposed to the artiĀcial or reĀned; with the carnal rather than the ce­re­bral; with intuition rather than intellect; and with my­thol­ogy rather than data. Even though land has functioned as a power­ful ethnic symbol in Hispano strug­gles for social, economic, and environmental justice, the vari­ous racist, classist, and sexist assumptions that romanticize Hispanos’ relationship to their physical surroundings also serve to primitivize them, as well as obfuscate the history of ongoing,

often violent competition over natu­ral resources that has indelibly marked New Mexico and the U.S. Southwest.35 Welcome to the Machine

Without a do ubt, the tourism industry in N ew Mexico is responsible in ­great part for manufacturing many romantic myths about the state. ­These tout New Mexico’s putative temporal and physical distance from the hustle and bustle of the modern world while glossing over its demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental realities. For example, the state Department of Tourism proudly promotes “the spicy mix that is New Mexico”—­that is, its racial and ethnic diversity.36 In d ­ oing so, however, it practices what Sylvia Rodríguez has termed “selective ethnophilia” and perpetuates the myth of triculturalism, for this “spicy mix” consists of the Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American cultures exclusively.37 The Department of Tourism further asserts that the so-­called Land of Enchantment epitomizes multicultural harmony, for it is “a mosaic where vari­ous cultural ingredients intermingle and complement each other, while each retains its basic identity.” Tourism capitalizes on tradition as it produces, maintains, and markets ethnic identities in colonial or postcolonial situations, that is, in situations in w hich intergroup relations are asymmetrical and exploitative.38 Tourism boosters in New Mexico have emphasized a Hispano ethnic identity that is, by and large, “Spanish” (as opposed to “Mexican”), rural, and of the past.39 Glossy brochures and magazines at visitor information centers throughout the state seek to lure tourists to “Spanish villages,” assuring them that ­little has changed in such places over the past four centuries. For example, an online brochure about Santa Fe County promises that in t he “Spanish villages” just beyond the state capital, “traditions live on” and “you can Ānd artisans practicing their centuries-­old crafts.”40 Meanwhile, an advertisement in The New Mexico 2002 Vacation

Guide for Tierra Wools of Los Ojos in northern New Mexico features a Hispana working at a rustic spinning wheel. Surrounded by colorful rugs and balls of yarn, she wears what appears to be nineteenth-­century attire, including a lace mantilla on her head. In a s tudy of the community development cooperative Ganados del Valle, of which Tierra Wools is a subsidiary, Pulido points out that the cooperative’s members have strategically cultivated a “Hispano pastoral identity” as “a source of personal and group fulĀllment” and as a m eans of “achiev[ing] both po­liti­cal and economic power.”41 In short, cultivating such an identity has enabled the workers of Tierra Wools to foster economic growth in a r egion of g­ reat poverty and high unemployment and, thus, allowed them to challenge local asymmetrical and exploitative intergroup relations.42 Furthermore, by highlighting New Mexico’s “natu­ral won­ders” (also touted in t he Vacation Guide), the tourism industry accentuates the state’s alleged distance from the modern, urban, and artiĀcial, that is, the manufactured and technological, The Department of Tourism’s website and the magazines and brochures for visitors entice tourists with dramatic photo­graphs of deserts, mountains, and rivers as they market New Mexico as a site of leisure, serenity, and spiritual fulĀllment (“Put Yourself in a S tate of Enchantment,” the website suggests). In addition to glossing over the state’s socioeconomic woes, the image of New Mexico as a place of natu­ral beauty obscures its history and current role as a repository for radioactive waste. New Mexico became such a dumping ground at 5:29 a.m. on July  16, 1945, when scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory detonated the world’s Ārst atomic explosion at the Trinity Test Site. The blast in south central New Mexico left a depression on the desert floor 2.9 m eters deep and 335 meters wide. The heat it generated was so intense that it melted sand into a g reen glass now known as trinitite. Fifty years ­later, radiation levels at the test site ­were ten times ­those of the background radiation levels (derived from naturally radioactive rocks and cosmic rays). Although New Mexico Deus ex Machin a  ·  151

is internationally known for helping to usher in the nuclear age, and although its atomic history is celebrated at the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque and the Bradbury Science Museum in downtown Los Alamos, the Trinity Test Site is rarely featured in s tate-­sponsored tourist lit­er­a­ ture. In fact, it is open to the public only two days per year.43 New Mexico is also home to the nation’s Ārst subterranean store­house for defense-­generated, transuranic waste. Located near Carlsbad Caverns, a popu­lar tourist destination, the Waste Isolation Pi­lot Plant began operations on March  26, 1999, with a network of “disposal rooms” located 2,150 feet underground. Waste contaminated with trace amounts of manmade radioactive ele­ments, such as plutonium, is stored in ­these rooms. Radioactive and hazardous waste was also deposited from 1959 ­until the late 1980s at a landĀll at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s most populous city, and is still stored at Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico. The Los Alamos Study Group, a nonproĀt nuclear disarmament organ­ization based in Sa nta Fe, asserts that since 1944 l anl has disposed of at least 17.5 million cubic feet of radioactive and hazardous waste at its twenty-­ four on-­site material disposal areas. According to the watchdog group, many of the disposal areas are located on hills, close to canyons, and/ or in a reas of relatively high precipitation. Like the dump at Sandia National Laboratories, they threaten to contaminate groundwater and, ultimately, the Rio Grande. Already, the study group warns, flora and fauna on lab property exhibit abnormally high levels of radioactivity. ­Whether or not t­ hese claims can be veriĀed, science and technology have had an obvious and profound impact not only on l anl and its surroundings but also on New Mexico’s physical landscape in general. Thus, in addi tion to suppressing histories of colonial exploitation and racial and ethnic conflict, narratives of New Mexico as a place of unspoiled natu­ral beauty ignore the forty-­ seventh state’s legacy of environmental transformation and injustice.44 152 ·  ca ther ine s. ramír ez

Of Machines and Matachines

Challenging myths of and about the Land of Enchantment, Marion Martinez’s nine works in Cyber Arte underscore the effects of science and technology on New Mexico’s environment and ­people.45 ­These works are made with computer parts, although some also incorporate wood and other materials. Four of the pieces are inspired by the matachines, “a ritual drama performed on certain saint’s days in Pue blo Indian and Mexicano/Hispano communities along the upper Río Grande valley and elsewhere in the greater southwest.”46 ­These pieces evoke the cupiles, elaborate headdresses worn by male dancers (danzantes) of the matachines. The danzante’s cupil resembles a bishop’s miter, with numerous bright, multicolored ribbons typically hanging from its front and back. In Danza de la Matachine III, IV, V, and VI, Martinez has used cir­cuit boards for the miters and cleverly replaced the ribbons with wires. Beneath each “miter” and ­behind the “ribbons” lies a s econd cir­cuit board, which represents the dancer’s face, complete with eyes, nose, and mouth.47 For approximately the past fifteen years, Martinez has incorporated computer parts into her visual art. In an interview I conducted with her, she informed me that even as a c hild she was fascinated with machines, such as tele­vi­sion sets and radios, and was curious about how they ­were constructed and how they operated. During the mid-1980s, while making a v ideo that incorporated computer-­generated images, she pried open a co mputer. Martinez recalled that she was instantly struck by the “innate, almost architectural beauty and symmetry” of the cir­ cuit board. “From t­ here, I h ­ aven’t put it down,” 48 she remarked. Over the years, Martinez has collected an eclectic array of computer and machine parts. When gathering materials for her pieces, she has raided friends’ basements and garages. She has also acquired garbage from the so-­called Black Hole at l anl , “a repository for innumerable kinds

of discarded electronic parts.”49 Martinez refers to ­these castoffs as “discarded trea­sures.”50 “Among other ­things, my work makes a s tand about recycling technology,” she told a reporter from the Albuquerque Journal on the eve of the opening of Cyber Arte.51 Indeed, Martinez’s work points directly to New Mexico’s history as a d umping ground for high-­tech trash. Moreover, as the only artist in Cyber Arte to use computer hardware—as opposed to computer software, which three other artists used to create their pieces—­she raises difficult questions about the ways in which we throw away the tools of the information age, many of which are obsolete as soon as they are made available to us, but few (if a ny) of which decompose rapidly or safely. ­Because she draws inspiration and gathers materials from her surroundings, Martinez describes herself as a f olk artist. “In traditional folk art, ­people gather objects found around them in the world. I’m d ­ oing the same ­thing,” she explained. Martinez was born in Española, New Mexico, in the midst of the Cold War on January  24, 1954, and raised in L os Luceros, a sm all, primarily Hispano agricultural community approximately forty-­Āve miles from l anl . Before becoming a full-­time artist, she worked as a psychotherapist for nearly twenty years. Her f­ ather was employed by the U.S. Postal Ser­vice in E spañola and also farmed and raised c­ attle on ­family land in L os Luceros. Her m ­ other worked at a dry goods store and, for a while, in a do rmitory at l anl (at the time, it was called Los Alamos ScientiĀc Laboratory). As a college student, Martinez also worked at l anl , where she inserted tapes and punch cards into a computer. At the time of this writing, her ­sister was an employee of the lab. Another ­sister works at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.52 In addition to providing many residents of the Española Valley with steady jobs, l anl “broke the isolation,” Martinez observed. While such a remark may reinforce ste­reo­types of New Mexico as remote, it also offers a glimpse of the profound impact of l anl on the artist’s f­ amily and on the ­people of the Española Valley in general. Martinez

recalled that the lab proletarianized, urbanized, and anglicized many Hispanos by offering wage ­labor to replace the agrarian livelihood upon which previous generations had depended. This income enabled them to leave ­family land and move away from f­ amily, community, and language, while at the same time developing networks outside of Hispanic culture. Although it has offered them a m odicum of physical and socioeconomic mobility, working at l anl has also left many of the p ­ eople of Los Luceros with less time. “[­We’re] too busy,” Martinez explained. “[We] ­can’t make tortillas anymore.” For better and for worse, she concluded, l anl enabled “us . . . ​to move away from who we are.”53 Change is an impor­tant theme of much of Martinez’s work. ­Because folk artists’ surroundings have changed with time, folk art, she insists, is far from a s tatic category. Martinez’s surroundings are Ālled not only with computer entrails but with bultos and retablos as well. Like folk art in general, santo production in New Mexico has changed, and Martinez’s work is evidence of this. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Robin Farwell Gavin writes, New Mexican santeros drew inspiration from “the illustrated missals and bibles, individual broadsheets . . . ​ devotional cards . . . ​oil paintings, and sculptures brought up from Mexico on the supply caravans to adorn the churches and missions. ­These prints and paintings in turn ­were based upon works by northern Eu­ro­pean masters . . . ​and by Spanish artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”54 Additionally, the santeros of this period, some of whom ­were Native American (and many more of whom descended from Native Americans), borrowed materials, forms, and techniques from local Indians, who used pine for tablitas (panels) and cottonwood root for kachinas (spirits depicted as Āgures in the round).55 Furthermore, some, such as the Quill Pen Santero, incorporated patterns found in Pueblo pottery into their work.56 Centuries ­later, market pressures induced santeros to alter their techniques and the range of items they produced for sale. Briggs notes that ­until the late 1920s, the celebrated Córdovan Deus ex Machin a  ·  153

santero José Dolores López generally Ānished items that he produced for friends and neighbors with ­house paints, but the bright colors “proved to be rather too gaudy for the Santa Fe market.”57 López’s Anglo patrons suggested that he leave his work unpainted, which prob­ably gave it more of a rustic and, ironically, “traditional” appearance. At the same time, they urged him t o produce “non-­traditional pieces such as lazy susans, rec­ ord racks and, much ­later, screen doors, which he incorporated into his repertoire.”58 Clearly, santo production in New Mexico has never occurred in a c ultural vacuum. It has been s­ haped by non-­Hispanic and external forces—­most recently, t­ hose of the market and tourism—­and is thus very much a hybrid art form. Although Martinez does not consider herself a santera in the “purest sense,” her work falls into, draws from, and transforms the already dynamic New Mexican santo tradition.59 In terms of content, her pieces are clearly linked to this tradition: they depict holy personages, including el Santo Niño de Atocha and Our Lady of Guadalupe, both of whom are very popu­lar among Catholic Hispanos in New Mexico and Āgure prominently in santo production t­ here. Oratorio a la Virgencita, for instance, consists of an oratorio, a b ox containing an image of a religious Āgure, in this case the Virgin of Guadalupe. Martinez’s wooden oratorio, which dates back to the nineteenth ­century, is decorated with carved and painted lunette top and bottom pieces, a typical feature of many New Mexican retablos. Such retablos also often feature carved patterns and designs. In Oratorio a la Virgencita, the artist has replaced such carvings with two rows of embossed copper roses, one on the oratorio’s left side and the other on its right. Fi­nally, with its multiple layers of ribbon cable and circuitry, the image of the Virgin inside the oratorio resembles a gesso relief—­that is, a retablo in w hich “certain ele­ments, such as the head, hands . . . ​and folds in the garments are built up with gesso to proj­ect from the surface of the panel, adding a t hree dimensional effect.”60 While some of the materials that Martinez uses have been used by santeros for many generations 154 ·  ca ther ine s. ramír ez

(such as the nineteenth-­century oratorio of Oratorio a la Virgencita), many are novel, unique, and unconventional. Nonetheless, in terms of both its content and form, her work is clearly situated in the New Mexican santo tradition. Oratorio a la Virgencita shows how Martinez changes not only the materials she uses but also the subjects of her pieces. The Virgin of Guadalupe, a hallmark of social and cultural transition par excellence, appears not only in this work but in several o ­ thers as well.61 Moreover, Martinez’s matachines pieces signify change, for the matachines ritual itself is emblematic of social and cultural transformation and is located at the interface of the Old and New Worlds. While the ritual derives in part from medieval Spanish folk dramas symbolizing clashes between Christians and Moors, in M exico and the southwestern United States it portrays the advent of Chris­tian­ ity among Indians.62 Several scholars assert that the dance itself is of Native American origin, but that “Eu­ro­pean concepts and ele­ments ­were grafted onto” it.63 Thus, Rodríguez describes the matachines as “syncretic Iberian-­American” and notes that the dance as a w ­ hole is characterized by oppositions, as represented by the two rows that the danzantes form and the pairings of vari­ ous dancers, such as the monarca and malinche.64 Deidre Sklar points out that “embedded in t he dance names monarca and malinche is a s tory of confrontation and conversion. . . . ​Some call Malinche a b etrayer . . . ​­Others honor her for being the instrument of conversion.”65 Similarly, Our Lady of Guadalupe may be regarded as an instrument of conversion, for she si­mul­ta­neously transforms and supplants Tonantzín, the Aztec goddess of motherhood. Sklar proposes that, in Tortugas, New Mexico, the matachines dance tells the story of the appearance in 1531of the Virgin to the Christian Indian boy Juan Diego at T ­ epeyac Hill, site of a former ­temple to Tonantzín.66 She observes that the image of the Virgin is emblazoned on the front of the danzantes’ cupiles, as in Danza de la Matachine II, and on the large apron-­like scarves that hang from their waists. For each danzante, Sklar concludes, the portrait

seems to proclaim, “ ‘I do this for her. This is who leads me.’ ”67 Even though the Virgin of Guadalupe and the matachines ritual performed in her honor are reminders of Eu­ro­pean hegemony in the New World, they also signify flux and hybridity. That is, they underscore the dynamism and contestability of culture.68 Ghost in the Machine

Like numerous Mexican Americans, Martinez was born and raised Catholic. As a child, she attended Catholic school at San Juan Pueblo. ­Later, she taught catechism and directed the youth choir ­there. Spirituality was and still is an integral part of Martinez’s life and work, for she sees a close connection between ­human ­labor and the divine and maintains that her art is an expression of her love of God and life. ­Humans, she asserted, are conduits for the “divine spirit,” which she believes emerges in and through our work. “­We’re all gifted and God has given us our gifts,” she noted.69 In “Spirit Glyphs: Reimagining Art and Artist in the Work of Chicana Tlamatinime,” Laura  E. Pérez deĀnes the spiritual as the perception, belief, concept, and experience “that t­ here is an essential spiritual nature, and thus an interconnectedness, of all beings, ­human and non-­human.”70 Martinez seems to share a simi lar viewpoint: she maintains that “God” or the “divine spirit” links ­humans to one another, as well as to the nonhuman, and manifests itself in t he material world via the h ­ uman and nonhuman. According to Martinez, even a discarded cir­cuit board is “pure God energy, it’s spiritual energy” ­because of its beauty, order, and symmetry. When she salvages a cir­cuit board from a basement or garage, cleans, sands, buffs, and polishes it, then shapes it into a gleaming bulto of the Christ child or a retablo of the Virgin Mary, she believes that she transfers her “essence and spirit” to the object through her ­labor. In ­doing so, she infuses what ­others might see as a cold, sterile ­thing or ugly piece of junk with life and meaning. This pro­cess of ­labor, of

transference and transformation, she explained, is precisely what makes her work “spiritual.”71 Just as saints, according to Catholic doctrine, mediate between heaven and earth, Martinez’s work links science and spirituality, which have long been regarded and positioned as separate and mutually exclusive. Her remarks about spirit—­ about the intangible and unobservable manifesting itself in, cr eating, or becoming the tangible and observable—­bear a s trong resemblance to conversations among some scientists about the big bang (something that “made an entire cosmos out of nothing”) and about “the emerging theory of the multiverse.”72 Indeed, Martinez’s work reconciles putative opposites. It recognizes that the sacred and divine may be found in t he everyday, material world, even in o bjects dismissed as trash, and blurs the line between science and spirituality. Some of Martinez’s pieces, such as Oratorio a la Virgencita, Santo Niño de Atocha, Compassionate ­Mother, and Jesus con la Cruz, merge the sacred and quotidian, as well as the organic and inorganic and the low-­tech and high-­tech. ­These four works are made with a combination of wood and computer parts. In Jesus con la Cruz, Christ’s proĀle is fashioned from a cir­cuit board. His head is topped with barbed fence wire, which may represent the crown of thorns. As a symbol of Anglo-­ American encroachment upon and expropriation of land in New Mexico and the West, the fence wire may also be read as a t echnology of conquest. What’s more, it invokes a t echnology of New Mexico’s burgeoning prison-­industrial complex. A disc represents Christ’s halo and the two pieces of wood that constitute his cross are from an old toolbox—­appropriate in lig ht of the fact that Jesus was supposed to have been a carpenter. With its worn wood and shimmering computer parts, Jesus con la Cruz juxtaposes and bridges the low-­tech (that is, the material and manually assembled) and the high-­tech (that is, the cybernetic and digital), as well as the old and new and past and pres­ent. And just as Christ, who Catholics believe is God made flesh, links the divine and earthly, the Pentium chip at the top of his cross Deus ex Machin a  ·  155

merges the ethereal (qua cybernetic) and material and the local and global. Intel, maker of the Pentium chip, owns and operates a p lant in R ío Rancho, a s uburb of Albuquerque. The chip illustrates that the local is often left b ­ ehind by larger economic pro­cesses. Thus, in the case of New Mexico, the local is sometimes refuse—­that which is physically left ­behind. Like many Third World factories that manufacture computers or computer parts, Río Rancho’s Intel plant helps to sustain the country’s high-­tech economy by providing low-­tech manufacturing jobs in an eco­ nom­ically depressed and vulnerable region where wages are relatively low and environmental protection regulations are relatively lax.73 The Pentium chip in Jesus con la Cruz locates New Mexico in the global economy, linking it to distant and not-­so-­distant places where information technologies and, subsequently, e-­waste are produced. At the same time, it, along with the fence wire, speak of local histories of injustice and strug­gle. In addition to locating the divine in both the tangible and intangible, Martinez sees it in men and ­women and in the masculine and feminine. A self-­proclaimed feminist, she embraces what she describes as the “divine feminine within all of us.”74 Like numerous Mexican and Mexican American Catholics, she reveres Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and female saints, such as Joan of Arc and Thérèse of Lisieux. The latter is the subject of Blessings from the L ­ ittle Flower (1998), an 11.5" × 8" × 3.25" wall hanging. Although this work was not a part of Cyber Arte, I discuss it ­here ­because it provides us with a g limpse of Martinez’s universalist and feminist spirituality. Like the pieces included in t he show, Blessings from the ­Little Flower is made of computer parts: cir­cuit boards, fuses, and wire. It is faithful to photo­graphs of the nineteenth-­century French mystic in t hat it portrays her wearing the Carmelite habit. Furthermore, Saint Thérèse (also known as the “­Little Flower”) is associated with flowers, speciĀcally roses. In Blessings from the ­Little Flower, she holds a b ouquet of roses; additional roses appear amid the board’s electrical runs. However, one prominent feature that dis156 ·  ca ther ine s. ramír ez

tinguishes Martinez’s Saint Thérèse from more conventional depictions is the label reading “700 pcb m ­ o ther boar d ” that appears in the center of her habit, precisely over her womb. In addition to reminding the viewer that the work is composed of twentieth-­century cir­cuit boards, this con­spic­u­ous label identiĀes Saint Thérèse as a female source of power from which all information, knowledge, or wisdom emanates (that is, a motherboard) and as a sort of female deity (that is, the “divine feminine”). The roses in her arms and ­those interspersed throughout the piece further solidify her link to the Virgin of Guadalupe, another power­ful holy ­woman associated with the flower. Martinez uses the cir­cuit board to express her spiritual beliefs, and her spiritual beliefs to highlight the beauty of the cir­cuit board. At the same time, she demystiĀes this object. Like the Holy Eucharist, which is stored ­behind the protective walls of the tabernacle in a Catholic church, the cir­cuit board is usually hidden inside a computer’s shell and seems to function in co mplicated and mysterious ways. The majority of computer users prob­ably never see the cir­cuit boards that sit atop or under­neath their desks. Nor do many of us understand the ways in w hich they work or give much thought to where they go when we throw them away. In fact, the only ­people who usually see and h ­ andle cir­cuit boards are t­ hose who design, build, repair, or salvage them. With some exceptions, such as the w ­ omen who assem­ ble computers or sift through dumps in s earch of their parts, most of ­these ­people are prob­ably men. And even though many ­women, especially in the Third World, build and recover cir­cuit boards, t­ hose who truly understand how they function—­those who design or repair them—­ are often men.75 Thus, the cir­cuit board, like science, technology, and institutionalized religion in general, has been gendered masculine. Similarly, the santo tradition has been gendered masculine. As a santera—­that is, as a w ­ oman producer of santos—­Martinez transforms and disrupts this male-­dominated tradition.76 Likewise, as an Indio-­Hispana who actively works with computer

components and Ānds use value and beauty in e-­ waste, she challenges the myth of technophobia so often applied to ­women and ­people of color. Chicanafuturism

If “folk” art and practices are deĀned as “artiĀcial bonds to an idealized past,” then Martinez’s work also merges some of New Mexico’s ostensibly competing narratives: t­ hose that pertain to its past, represented by Indo-­Hispanic “folk” art such as santo production and the matachines ritual, and ­those that concern its pres­ent and ­future, represented by its role as a d umping ground for the detritus of twentieth-­ and twenty-­Ārst-­ century technologies. Additionally, Martinez’s art locates Hispanas in narratives of science and technology and, at the same time, inserts science and technology into narratives of and about Hispanas. In d ­ oing so, Martinez’s work challenges racist, classist, and sexist ste­reo­types that primitivize Hispanas and exclude them from the domain of science, technology, and reason as it reshapes the tools of the information age. In recent years, African American intellectuals and artists have examined the relationships of African Americans to science and technology using the concept of Afrofuturism. According to Alondra Nelson, Afrofuturism “reflect[s] African diasporic experience and at the same time attend[s] to the transformations that are the by-­product of new media and information technology. [It] excavate[s] and create[s] original narratives of identity, technology, and the f­ uture and offer[s] critiques of the promises of prevailing theories of technoculture.”77 Theorists of Afrofuturism stress a broad deĀnition of “technology,” one that includes technological waste. Rather than limiting their focus to computer hardware and software, they strive to examine the myriad ways “­people of color produce, transform, appropriate, and consume technologies in their everyday lives.”78 Such technologies include, but are not limited to, cellular phones, pagers, boom boxes, turntables, karaoke home systems, and lowrider cars and bikes.

In addition, Afrofuturism is concerned with humanism and posthumanism. It critiques theories of the liberal subject (that is, the “proprietor of his own person”) and proposes new deĀnitions of the h ­ uman and posthuman that engage the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and segregation and experiences of racism and sexism.79 While Afrofuturism reconĀgures subjectivity, some Afrofuturist texts—­for example, the bulk of Octavia E. Butler’s science Āction—do not abandon altogether the promises of liberalism and humanism, of which ­human and civil rights are a part.80 Like African Americans, Chicanos have been barred from Western deĀnitions of the h ­ uman and denigrated as, to use Paul Gilroy’s term, “infrahuman.”81 They, too, have been excluded from and objectiĀed by discourses of science. And they are also generally associated more with a primitive and racialized past than with the technologically enhanced ­future. Yet, new technologies have transformed Chicanos just as much as they have transformed African Americans, and they have enabled us to articulate (to enunciate and link) past, pres­ent, and ­future identities. This is evident not only in Martinez’s visual art but also in the work of numerous other Chicana and Chicano cultural workers, such as Teresa Archuleta-­ Sagel, Elena Baca, and Alma López (the three other cyberartistas); Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, whose collaborative “techno-­ rascuachi” per­for­mances as El Naftazteca and Cyber-­Vato incorporate electronic communication and a motley assortment of machine parts; and Joseph Julian González, whose hypnotic composition “Los Vendedores Ambulantes” utilizes a computer loop to fuse the sounds of Latino street vendors peddling produce with the ­music of a string quartet.82 Drawing from Nelson’s deĀnition of Afrofuturism, I deĀne “Chicanafuturism” as Chicano cultural production that attends to cultural transformations resulting from new and every­ day technologies (including their detritus); that excavates, creates, and alters narratives of identity, technology, and the ­future; that interrogates the promises of science and technology; Deus ex Machin a  ·  157

and that redeĀnes humanism and the ­human. Martinez’s work does not privilege science and reason over spirituality. Instead, it merges them and, thus, offers an ontological and epistemological alternative to that of the Enlightenment (or rational) subject. Moreover, while Afrofuturism reflects diasporic experience, Chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories. By linking New Mexico’s Indo-­Hispanic traditions (santo production and the matachines ritual) and its current role as a repository for high-­tech trash, Martinez’s work accomplishes this. Additionally, it comments on the ways in which technology—­ from Los Alamos National Laboratory in its entirety to a single Pentium chip—­has transformed Hispana cultural identity. In recounting the social, cultural, and economic changes that her ­family and community underwent as a result of the expansion of l anl during the second half of the twentieth ­century, Martinez remarked that technology forces a p ­ eople to alter its ways. At the same time, she pointed out, technology and its remnants can be the vehicle for “hold[ing] on to who we are.” “Change ­will happen. Change is constant,” she observed, but “we ­don’t have to lose every­thing.” Martinez hopes her work captures the richness of her culture—in par­tic­u­lar, its icons and rituals—­albeit via new media.83 Technology, as Thomas Foster has pointed out, possesses a dual function: it “preserves at the same time that it mediates (or distorts) ethnic identities and cultural traditions.”84 In many ways, Martinez’s work uses technology to preserve the santo tradition. If it deviated too far from this tradition—­that is, if M artinez produced pieces that ­were not identiĀable santos or ­were not sufficiently santo-­like—­she might not sell as many as she has.85 Furthermore, she might not be able to sell them at Santa Fe’s Spanish Market, which, as she informed me in my interview with her, is an impor­tant venue for her work. The Spanish Market was founded by the Spanish Colonial Arts Society (sca s), a “mostly Anglo preservationist organ­ization,” during the revival movement of the early twentieth ­century.86 It is one of the largest outlets for the buying and selling of “tra158 ·  ca ther ine s. ramír ez

ditional” Hispanic art in the United States.87 In fulĀlling its mission of encouraging, promoting, and maintaining “Hispano regional arts and culture,” it has played a salient role in shaping (or, as some might contend, rigidly deĀning) the santo tradition, in c ultivating New Mexico’s mystique as remote and exotic, and in perpetuating ste­reo­ types of the primitive Hispano.88 Meanwhile, the Spanish Market has also contributed to Martinez’s income as an artist. For some, Martinez’s work may offer nothing new: it preserves the santo tradition of which it is a part. ­Others may see her work as original and argue that it breaks from and challenges this tradition. I m aintain that it si­mul­ta­neously preserves, breaks from, and challenges the santo tradition precisely ­because it is a legible part of it. In ­doing so, it transforms and complicates Hispana and, more generally, Chicana cultural identity and traditions by enabling us to enunciate the “who we are” of the past—or who we i­ magined ourselves to be in the past—­using the tools of the pres­ent. Yet Martinez’s work and observations beg the questions: Where does the “who we are” of the past sever from or blend into the “who we are” of the pres­ent and ­future? When do the “we” of the pres­ent stop being the “we” of the past? And when do the “we” of the pres­ent become the “we” of the ­future? That is, when do “we” stop being “us” and become something or someone else—­perhaps “them”? In short, where do the bound­aries of culture and identity lie? Are we still Chicanas if we no longer make (or never made) tortillas by hand? If we work at a computer, rather than at a spinning wheel? If we alter, drift from, or repudiate Roman Catholicism to shape our own feminist and universalist spirituality? Such queries are difficult if not impossible to answer. Still, clues to their answers may be found in the hybrid cultural products and practices that men and ­women have actively created and enacted over time, such as santos and the matachines ritual. Th ­ ese syncretic products and practices underscore the resilience and malleability of culture and cultural identity and reveal the simultaneity (as opposed to linearity) of past, pres­ent, and f­ uture. Above

all, they pose new (and, in m y opinion, more valuable) questions, such as, What does change mean, and to whom? Who beneĀts and who loses with change? Which changes do we strug­gle against and mourn? Which do we embrace and celebrate? Just as the laborers of Tierra Wools have strategically cultivated a H ispano pastoral identity, Martinez strategically retains and redeĀnes aspects of the old and embraces the new to forge an affirming cultural identity. Her work preserves what she sees as the beauty of Catholic icons and rituals linked to an Indo-­Hispanic “ancestral past,” while at the same time offering new meanings for them.89 Moreover, it demonstrates that such icons and rituals cannot be reproduced or recovered without being transformed by “the technologies and identities of the pres­ent.”90 In ascribing new meanings to long-­standing forms and practices, Martinez inserts what is generally regarded as the archaic or primitive into pres­ ent and ­future technocultures. New Mexico’s Hispanos have not only been excluded from the state’s pres­ent by being viewed and described as backward “Spanish” villa­gers; they have been eliminated from its ­future as well. Nelson asserts that the “technologically enabled f­ uture is by its very nature unmoored from the past and from ­people of color.”91 That is, if science and technology have been racialized white, and if t hey are also associated with the ­future, then the ­future does not include ­people of color. Martinez’s work claims both the pres­ent and ­future for ­people of color, speciĀcally Hispanas, as it merges New Mexico’s narratives of ethnic identity and “folk” art with its history of scientiĀc research and environmental destruction. However, like the copper and nickel in h er wall hangings and sculptures, the pres­ent and ­future may sparkle, but they are far from unproblematic. Her luminous pieces ­illustrate the beauty of change, but they do n ot naïvely celebrate it, for they offer a cr itique of technology’s detrimental impact on the environment and h ­ uman bodies. In short, Martinez’s work reminds us that for someone somewhere, change comes at a cost and often with strug­gle.

[. . . .] Martinez’s Chicanafuturist art demonstrates the value, price, and necessity of change. It turns to the past by taking its inspiration from traditional forms and practices. At the same time, it distorts such forms and practices by locating them in t he technologies of the pres­ent. And it dares to imagine new ways of being for the ­future, at which it takes a good, hard look by confronting the growing prob­lem of e-­waste. In d ­ oing so, Martinez blurs New Mexico’s competing narratives, rejects hackneyed and nostalgic visions of the “Land of Enchantment” and its Hispano residents, expresses and transforms Indo-­Hispanic traditions and Hispana-­Chicana spirituality, and, Ā­nally, underscores the malleability, dynamism, width, and beauty of Hispana and Chicana cultural identity in the twenty-­Ārst ­century. Notes This chapter was originally published as Catherine S. Ramírez, “Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 29, no. 2 (spring 2002): 55–92. Epigraph: Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-­Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 448. 1.This description appears on a flyer distributed by the Museum of International Folk Art for Cyber Arte’s opening reception on February 25, 2001. 2. See chapter 25 of this volume for a discussion of Alma López’s work. 3. Emily Van Cleve, “Modern Art,” Albuquerque Journal, February 28, 2001, F 1. 4. For the most part, I use the terms “Chicana,” ­“Chicano,” and “Mexican American” interchangeably in this essay. However, like numerous other scholars of New Mexico, I use “Hispana” or “Hispano” to refer to the subgroup of Mexicans and Mexican Americans of the upper Rio Grande Valley and adjacent regions of ­northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. 5. Larry Frank, Religious Art of New Mexico, 1780–1907, vol. 1 of A Land So Remote (Santa Fe, NM: Red Crane Books, 2001), 19. 6. Frank, Religious Art of New Mexico, 19. 7. Frank, Religious Art of New Mexico, 17.

Deus ex Machin a  ·  159

8. E. Boyd, Saints and Saint Makers of New Mexico (Santa Fe, NM: Western Edge Press, 1998), 42; Charles L. Briggs, The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico: Social Dimensions of an Artistic “Revival” (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 10; José E. Espinosa, Saints in the Valleys: Christian Sacred Images in the History, Life, and Folk Art of Spanish New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1967), 51–52; rank, F Religious Art of New Mexico, 26; Thomas J. Steele, Santos and Saints: The Religious Folk Art of Hispanic New Mexico (Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City Press, 1994), 4–6. 9. Briggs, Wood Carvers of Córdova, 7. 10. For more information regarding the Penitentes, see David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest ­under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Marta Weigle, “Introduction: The Penitente Brotherhood in Northern New Mexico in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Images of Penance, Images of Mercy: ­Southwestern Santos in the Late Nineteenth ­Century, by William Wroth (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991);William Wroth, Images of Penance, Images of Mercy. 11. Frank, Religious Art of New Mexico, 36; Robin Farwell Gavin, Traditional Arts of Spanish New Mexico: The Hispanic Heritage Wing at the Museum of International Folk Art (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1994), 24, 50. Gavin attributes the decline of locally produced religious art in New Mexico in the late nineteenth ­century to “increasing pressure from church officials in Mexico—­ and ­later ­those in the United States—to replace handcrafted images considered unfit for use in the churches [in New Mexico] with ­those found in churches throughout central Mexico and the United States” (50). Steele asserts that “for more than two centuries priests born and educated outside the territory have been getting rid of the native santos from many of New Mexico’s churches, especially ­those in the larger towns, to replace them with plaster ‘bathrobe art’ from Mexico City, from Saint Louis, or from Eu­rope.” He notes an incident in 1869 in which Italian Jesuits at San Felipe de Neri Church in Albuquerque collected money from their parishioners to purchase imported religious art, “then gave the old bultos away to ­those donors who wanted them” (33). 12. Briggs, Wood Carvers of Córdova, 46–64; Tey Marianna Nunn, Sin Nombre: Hispana and Hispano Artists of the New Deal Era (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 28–39.

160  ·  ca ther ine s. ramír ez

13. Nunn,Sin Nombre, 28. 14. Nunn, Sin Nombre, 28. 15. Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural Amer­ic­ a (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 77. 16. Lippard, Mixed Blessings, 77. 17. Nunn,Sin Nombre, 28. 18. Briggs, Wood Carvers of Córdova, 146. 19. Briggs, Wood Carvers of Córdova, 146–47. 20. Briggs, Wood Carvers of Córdova, 147. 21. George Kubler, “Santos: An Exhibition of the Religious Folk Art of New Mexico,” in Studies in Ancient American and Eu­ro­pean Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler, ed. Thomas F. ­Reese (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 63. 22. Kubler, “Santos,” 63. Regarding ste­reo­types of santeros as primitive, ­simple, and childlike, also see Nunn, Sin Nombre, especially chapter 6. 23. Steele, Santos and Saints, 6. 24. Charles F. Lummis, The Land of Poco Tiempo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1893); Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-­ Speaking ­People of the United States (New York: Praeger, 1990), 63; Espinosa,Saints in the Valleys, 82; Steele, Santos and Saints, 6. 25. Espinosa, Saints in the Valleys, 82. 26. From the early 1700s to around 1875, Comanche Indians kidnapped, then ­adopted, enslaved, and/ or sold numerous Anglos, Native Americans, Mexicans, and Spaniards, most of whom ­were ­women and ­children from Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico (Curtis Marez, “Signifying Spain, Becoming Comanche, Making Mexicans: Indian Captivity and the History of Chicana/o Popu­lar Per­for­mance,” American Quarterly 53, no. 2 [June 2001]: 268). Many of the captives ­were bought and sold in Taos, New Mexico, site of an annual trade fair. The Santa Fe Trail, one of the West’s most famous trade routes, extended from New Mexico to Missouri from 1821 o t 1880. It fostered trade between Mexico, of which New Mexico was a part from 1821 o t 1846, and the United States. See Susan Calafate Boyle, Los Capitalistas: Hispano Merchants and the Santa Fe Trade (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); and Seymour V. Connor and Jimmy M. Skaggs, Broadcloth and Britches: The Santa Fe Trade (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997). 27. McWilliams, North from Mexico, 63. 28. Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Strug­gles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 35.

29. Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice, 36. 30. Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice, 35. 31. For census data on New Mexico, see http://­ quickfacts​.­census​.­gov​/­qfd​/­states​/­35000​.­html. 32. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Pro­gress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-­colonialism,’ ” in Colonial Discourse and Post-­colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 291–304. 33. Jo Ann Shroyer, Secret Mesa: Inside Los Alamos National Laboratory (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998), 2–3. 34. Sylvia Rodríguez, “Land, ­Water, and Ethnic Identity in Taos,” in Land, ­Water, and Culture: New Perspectives on Hispanic Land Grants, ed. Charles L. Briggs and John R. Van Ness (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 320. 35. Regarding the use of land as an ethnic symbol in Hispano strug­gles for social, economic, and environmental justice, see Patricia Bell Blawis, Tijerina and the Land Grants: Mexican Americans in Strug­gle for Their Heritage (New York: International Publishers, 1971); John R. Chávez, The Lost Land (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984); Richard Gardner, Grito! Reies Tijerina and the New Mexico Land Grant War of 1967 (New York: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1970); Michael Jenkins, Tijerina (Albuquerque: Paisano Press, 1968); Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice; and Rodríguez, “Land, ­Water, and Ethnic Identity.” Regarding competition over natu­ral resources in New Mexico and the Southwest, see Briggs and Van Ness, Land, ­Water, and Culture; William de Buys, Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985); Devon G. Peña, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecol­ogy on the U.S.-­Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas, Center for Mexican American Studies, 1997); Devon G. Peña, ed., Chicano Culture, Ecol­ogy, Politics: Subversive Kin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice; Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing ­Water (New York: Viking, 1986); SouthWest Organ­izing Proj­ect, Intel Inside New Mexico: A Case Study of Environmental and Economic Injustice (Albuquerque: SouthWest Organ­izing Proj­ ect, 1995); and Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: ­Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).

36. Quotes attributed to the New Mexico Department of Tourism come from the department’s website at http://­www​.­newmexico​.­org. 37. Rodríguez, “Land, ­Water, and Ethnic Identity,” 321. Members of ­these three groups do constitute the majority (96.3 ­percent) of the state’s population, yet it is impor­tant to keep in mind that they are not its only residents. The state Department of Tourism’s website acknowledges that “New Mexico’s cowboy culture also included many African Americans who ­wholeheartedly ­adopted the lifestyle ­after the Civil War,” but makes no mention of the black men and ­women who currently live ­there. While they make up only 1.9 ­percent of the population, we must ask ourselves where they and anyone ­else who is not Anglo, Hispanic (specifically Hispano), or Native American (in par­tic­u­lar, Pueblo, Dine, or Apache) fit into the tricultural model. For more information regarding New Mexico’s demographics, see http://­quickfacts​.­census​.­gov​/­qfd​/­states​/­35000​.­html. 38. Rodríguez, “Land, ­Water, and Ethnic Identity,” 324. 39. In fact, many Hispanos’ ancestors hailed from what is now Spain and settled in what is currently known as New Mexico long before Mexico was a nation. They self-­identify as “Spanish” or “Spanish American,” rather than “Mexican” or “Mexican American,” in order to highlight New Mexico’s history of isolation from the rest of the Southwest and Mexico as well as to distinguish themselves from Anglos (English-­speaking whites) and Native Americans. While the tourism industry in New Mexico did not fabricate the Spanish identity of the Hispanos, it has certainly promoted it. With their explicit connection to Spain, the labels “Spanish” and “Spanish American” are more palatable to some Americans, including some New Mexicans, b ­ ecause they connote a whiteness and exoticism not associated with “Mexican,” “Mexican American,” “Chicana,” or “Chicano.” For more information regarding ­these labels, see Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied Amer­i­ca: A History of Chicanos (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); and Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Pre­sen­ ta­tion in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 40. See http://­www​.­Seesantafe​.­org. 41. Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice, 128. 42. The New Mexico 2002 Vacation Guide is published yearly for the state Department of Tourism by New Mexico Magazine. Similar images also appear on the Tierra Wools website, www​.­handweavers​.­com. For more information about Tierra Wools and Ganados del Valle,

Deus ex Machin a  ·  161

see Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice, especially chapter 4. 43. For more information about the Trinity test and test site, see “Fifty Years from Trinity,” produced by the Seattle Times, at http://­seattletimes​.­nwsource​.­com​ /­trinity. 44. For more information on New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pi­lot Plant, see http://­www​.­wipp​.­carlsbad​.­nm​­ .­us/­. Regarding the Sandia landfill, see Jim Ludwick, “Mayor Wants Lab Dump Cleanup,” Albuquerque Journal, June 20, 2001, B 1. On the Los Alamos Study Group and material disposal areas at LANL , see http://­www​.­lasg​.­org. 45. Martinez’s nine works in Cyber Arte ­were ­Compassionate ­Mother (1999), a 15" × 9" × 1" wall hanging made of cir­cuit boards, wire, and wood; Danza de la Matachine III (1999), an 18" × 9" × 1" wall hanging made of cir­cuit boards and wire; Danza de la Matachine IV (2000), a 16" × 9" × 1" wall hanging made of cir­cuit boards and wire; Danza de la Matachine V (2001), a 19" × 9" × 1" wall hanging made of cir­cuit boards, wire, LEDs, and a l­ aser lens; Danza de la Matachine VI (2001), a 21" × 9" × 1" wall hanging made of cir­cuit boards, wire, ribbon cable, and a memory chip; Sacred Heart, Sacred Hands (1997), an 18" × 11" × 1" wall hanging made of cir­cuit boards and a holographic image; Oratorio a la Virgencita (2000), a 20" × 12" × 4" wall hanging made of cir­cuit boards and wood; Jesus Con la Cruz (2000), a 20" × 13" × 4" wall hanging made of cir­cuit boards, fence wire, wood, a disc, and a Pentium chip; and Santo Nino de Atocha (2001), a 15" × 9" × 9" sculpture made of cir­cuit boards, wire, ribbon cable, wood, and a CD. Martinez’s work may be viewed at http://­www​ .­marionmartinez​.­com​/­. 46. Sylvia Rodríguez, The Matachines Dance: Ritual Symbolism and Interethnic Relations in the Upper Río Grande Valley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 1. 47. Although it was not a part of Cyber Arte, I have included an illustration of Martinez’s Danza de la Matachine II (1998) in [the original version of ] this essay ­ ecause I do not possess a reproducible illustration of b any of her Matachine pieces that ­were a part of the show. 48. ­Unless other­wise indicated, all quotes from Martinez are from the interview I conducted with her on June 26, 2001, in Glorieta, New Mexico. 49. Van Cleve, “Modern Art,” F 2. 50. Marion C. Martinez, personal communication with the author, January 10, 2003. 51.Van Cleve, “Modern Art,” F 2.

162 ·  ca ther ine s. ramír ez

52. Martinez interview and personal communication. 53. Martinez interview. I stress that LANL has offered the ­people of Los Luceros a modicum of physical and social mobility ­because Río Arriba County, where Los Luceros is located, is one of the poorest counties in New Mexico, which is in turn one of the poorest states. For information regarding poverty and income levels in Río Arriba County, see http://­quickfacts​.­census​.­gov​/­qfd​ /­states​/­35​/­35039.​­html and http://­tier2​.­census​.­gov​/­cgi​-­win​ /­usac​/­table​/­exe. 54. Gavin, Traditional Arts, 40. Some art critics emphasize the influence of the baroque tradition in par­tic­u­lar on santo production in New Mexico during the eigh­teenth ­century. Steele, for example, enumerates its baroque characteristics, including the use of dark backgrounds, sgraffito (scraping away lines in moist paint to expose the different-­colored surface beneath), and cartouche. For more information about the impact of baroque art on New Mexican santo production, see Boyd, Saints and Saint Makers; Steele, Santos and Saints; and William Wroth, Christian Images in Hispanic New Mexico (Colorado Springs, CO: Taylor Museum of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1982). 55. Steele, Santos and Saints, 25. 56. Steele, Santos and Saints, 28. 57. Briggs, Wood Carvers of Córdova, 53. 58. Briggs, Wood Carvers of Córdova, 53. 59. Martinez interview. Works by Carlos Santistevan and David Avalos have a similar relationship to the santo tradition. Like Martinez, Santistevan and Avalos gather materials from their surroundings (for example, a hubcap, a saw blade, lipstick canisters, and shot glasses) and use them to create untraditional santos, but santos nonetheless. See Santistevan’s Santo Niño de Atocha (1979) and Avalos’s Hubcap Milagro #3 (1983) inChicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991). 60. Gavin, Traditional Arts, 81. 61. In addition to appearing in Oratorio a la Virgencita, the Virgin of Guadalupe is found in Compassionate M ­ other and Danza de la Matachine IV. She is also featured in Danza de la Matachine II (1998), Guadalupe Peep Show (2001), and La Virgen Morena (1997).­These three works ­were not included in Cyber Arte, but Guadalupe Peep Show was displayed at the show’s opening. It has been purchased by the Museum of International Folk Art for its permanent collection.

62. Rodríguez, Matachines Dance, 2; Deidre Sklar, Dancing with the Virgin: Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas New Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 58. 63. Sklar, Dancing with the Virgin, 202. 64. Rodríguez, Matachines Dance, 2, 35. 65. Sklar, Dancing with the Virgin, 59. 66. Sklar, Dancing with the Virgin, 61. 67. Sklar, Dancing with the Virgin, 39. 68. ­Here, I define “hegemony” as “the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the ­great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group” (Antonio Gramsci, Se­lections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith [New York: International Publishers, 1971], 12). or F more information regarding the matachines ritual, also see Wendell C. Bennett and Robert M. Zingg, The Tarahumara: An Indian Tribe of Northern Mexico (Glorieta, NM: Río Grande Press, 1976); Flavia Champe, The Matachines Dance of the Upper Rio Grande: History, ­Music, and Choreography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Gertrude Prokosch Kurath and Antonio Garcia, ­Music and Dance of the Tewa Pueblos, Museum of New Mexico Research Rec­ords 8 (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1970); Elsie Clews Parsons, Pueblo Indian Religion, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); and Edward H. Spicer, The Yaquis: A Cultural History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980). Regarding Malintzín (also called La Malinche) and Guadalupe, see Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 69. Martinez interview. 70. Laura E. Pérez, “Spirit Glyphs: Reimagining Art and Artist in the Work of Chicana Tlamatinime,” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 1 (spring 1998): 37. 71. Martinez interview. 72. Gregg Easterbrook, “The New Convergence,” Wired Magazine 10, no. 12 (December 2002): 166–67. According to Easterbrook, multiverse theory proposes that the big bang was not unique, that “universes bang into existence all the time, by the billions” (167). However, such bangs supposedly take place in faraway “dimensions” unobservable to ­those of us on earth. He compares the theory “to religion’s proposal of a single invisible plane of existence: the spirit” (167). In other words, multiverse theory posits the existence of unobservable phenomena that affect the par­ameters of the cosmos, in much the same way that certain religions imagine the existence

of an invisible spirit that has created and ­shaped life on earth. 73. On the environmental impact of the Río Rancho Intel plant, see SouthWest Organ­izing Proj­ect, Intel Inside New Mexico. Further information is available on the organ­ization’s website at http://­www​.­swop​.­net​/­intel​_­info​ .­htm. On the environmental impact of e-­waste (that is, discarded information technology tools, especially computers and computer parts) in the Third World and specifically China, see Karl Schoenberger, “Where ­Computers Go to Die,” San Jose Mercury News, November 24, 2002, 1A , 16A –18A ; Karl Schoenberger, “Cheap Products’ ­Human Cost,” San Jose Mercury News, November 25, 2002, 1A , 10A –11A ; Karl Schoenberger, “Smart Solutions in Short Supply,” San Jose Mercury News, November 26, 2002, 1A , 16A –17A . Also see the website for the Silicon Valley Toxics Co­ali­tion, http://­www​.­svtc​.­org​/­; and Peña, Terror of the Machine. 74. Martinez interview. 75. Regarding the salvaging of computer parts from Third World dumps, see Schoenberger’s articles. 76. Helen Lucero, “Art of the Santera,” in Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, ed. Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nájera-­Ramírez (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 35–36. 77. Alondra Nelson, “Introduction: ­Future Texts,” Social Text 71 20, no. 2 (summer 2002): 9. 78. Alicia Headlam Hines, Alondra Nelson, and Thuy Linh N. Tu, “Introduction: Hidden Cir­cuits,” in Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, ed. Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu, with Alicia Headlam Hines (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 5. 79. The phrase “proprietor of his own person” is from C. B. MacPherson’s A Theory of Possessive Individualism, which N. Katherine Hayles (1999) cites in her influential How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Lit­er­a­ture, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For an Afrofuturist critique of MacPherson’s liberal subject and Hayles’s theorization of the posthuman, see Alexander G. Weheliye, “ ‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Con­temporary Black Popu­lar ­Music,” Social Text 71 20, no. 2 (summer 2002): 21–47. 80. ­Here, I define “humanism” as a viewpoint espousing “an optimism about ­human possibilities and achievements” (Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, Key Concepts in Cultural Theory [New York: Routledge, 1999], 180). Although the concept dates back to the classical period, I am most interested in its Enlightenment-­era associations with liberalism—­that is, with the autonomy,

Deus ex Machin a  ·  163

agency, moral and po­liti­cal choice, and dignity of the subject, as articulated by ­human, civil, and po­liti­cal rights. Regarding Butler’s reconfigurations of subjectivity, see Catherine S. Ramírez, “Cyborg Feminism: The Science Fiction of Octavia E. Butler and Gloria Anzaldúa,” in Reload: Rethinking ­Women + Cyberculture, ed. Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 374–402. 81. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Po­liti­cal Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 82. For more information about Gómez-­Peña and Sifuentes’s collaborative per­for­mances as El Naftazteca and Cyber-­Vato, see Thomas Foster, “Cyber-­Aztecs and Cholo-­Punks: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña’s Five-­Worlds ­Theory,” PMLA 117, no. 1 (January 2002): 43–67. I was fortunate to see a per­for­mance of “Los Vendedores Ambulantes” by González and members of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque on November 11, 2000. I am grateful to Reeve Love, director of performing arts at the center, for providing me with information about this per­for­mance. 83. Martinez interview. 84. Foster, “Cyber-­Aztecs and Cholo Punks,” 59.

164  ·  ca ther ine s. ramír ez

85. Martinez successfully earns a living as a full-­time artist. In addition to selling to private individuals, her work is in several permanent collections, such as t­ hose of San Juan Community College in New Mexico, Northern New Mexico Community College, Fidelity Investments, and the Nokia Corporation. 86. Laurie Beth Kalb, Crafting Devotions: Tradition in Con­temporary New Mexican Santos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 17–18. 87. Nunn, Sin Nombre, 29. 88. Nunn, Sin Nombre, 29. Kalb asserts that, for SCAS board members, “making traditional crafts means adhering to the Spanish colonial style developed by SCAS, that is, replicating nineteenth-­century religious and domestic items found in museums, private collections, and some churches, and also perpetuating a revival style begun in the 1920s and in response to early Anglo patrons. . . . ​ For some con­temporary carvers, the SCAS notion of tradition . . . ​is too limited. It does not embrace ­today’s carvers’ innovative stylistic preferences” (Kalb, Crafting Devotions, 18). 89. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 448. 90. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 448. 91. Nelson,“Introduction,” 6.

r o ber t o tej ad a

19. Celia Alvarez Muñoz  ·  2009 “Civic Studies”

In the late 1960s, an art identity for Chicanos and Chicanas emerged in t andem with a number of social developments.1 In poetry, stage per­for­ mances, and visual depictions, Chicano artists radicalized expressive culture with galvanizing subject ­matter and identiĀable styles. The painter Antonio Bernal composed wall murals in 1968 for the Teatro Campesino headquarters in Del Rey, California. In an early manifestation of what ­later became canonic imagery, the triumphant Āgures shown marching in that untitled mural included César Chávez, a B lack Panther “with the features of Malcolm X,” and Martin Luther King  Jr.2 Heading the mural succession was the insurgent Emiliano Zapata and a soldadera, both Āgures from the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. The soldaderas, or military ­women, Āgured in novels that dramatized the civil conflict of ­those war-­torn years; they ­were also subjects in the penny-­press prints published by José Guadalupe Posada, in p aintings by José Clemente Orozco, and in t he archive of photo­graphs that Agustín Víctor Casasola (1874–1938) collected with his ­brother Miguel and sons Ismael and Gustavo.

Not unlike U.S. companies that included Underwood & U nderwood and Brown B ­ rothers, the Casasolas ­were a f­ amily Ārm of photog­raphers and news editors. As trade merchants, they amassed a wide-­ranging stock of prints and negatives portraying Ān de siècle life in Mexico, both elite culture and folkways, as well as the ravages wrought by the revolution. Even before the mid1970s, when the archive of over thirty thousand images became the photographic patrimony of the Mexican state, ­these pictures had circulated widely, especially portraits of insurgent leaders such as Zapata and Francisco Villa. It was in the 1970s that Chicano artist Rupert García incorporated archival images of Zapata in his silk-­screen posters; the images came from the Historia Gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana, 1900–1960, published by Gustavo Casasola in Mexico.3 ­Later, the murals painted in t he freeway underpass that became San Diego’s Chicano Park in S herman Heights included Victor Ochoa’s Servirlas (1984), featuring Mexican revolutionary soldiers—­men and ­women—­that ­were based on ­these archival photo­graphs.

If male revolutionary leaders saw Chicanismo as a brotherhood, a “gendered vision that rarely extend[ed] to ­women,” then soldadera images ­were critical in t he formation of Chicana self-­ sovereignty.4 In 1985, a year a­ fter Alvarez Muñoz had completed her Enlightenment series, Norma Cantú reckoned with what she called the “Adelita complex” to explain why Chicanas had been consigned to a “secondary status” in cultural studies: “The images of Adelitas and soldaderas—­from the Mexican revolution . . . ​connote a follower—­a ­woman following a man, a soldier, as in the case of the Adelita as a provider, nurturer, healer. . . . ​ [But often] donning a m an’s attire and Āghting along with the men . . . ​the Adelitas and soldaderas [­were] not merely followers—­they ­were often military strategists [and] po­liti­cal thinkers [within the] Mexican Revolution.”5 All this reflects on the task of an artist as researcher, tactician, and mediator, which was the subject of a 1991 installation by Alvarez Muñoz titled El Límite, a m ultilayered work whose ancillary wall drawings ­were critical to the camera-­ generated images that foregrounded the piece. An impor­tant hand-­drawn component of El Límite showed a Āgure perched on the boarding steps of a railroad coach, clenching the guardrails (Āg. 19.1). Her neck extends as she peers out from a rebozo, or head shawl, looking to the extreme edge of the pictorial Āeld, apparently at an incident beyond the narrative frame of the scene. The illustration was modeled on a fa mous picture of an alleged Adelita, or soldadera, in a Casasola archive photo­ graph, one that had already attained mythic status in altered form. It appeared in Gustavo Casasola’s sequel to the highly successful Historia Gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana, titled Historia Gráfica de México (1988).6 The Adelita photo­graph was dated 1910 and was attributed to Gustavo’s ­father, Agustín Víctor Casasola. John Mraz has claimed that the picture could not have been made that year “insofar as t­ here was very l­ittle mobilization of troops” at the time.7 It was far more likely that the image pertained to another set produced during the Victoriano Huerta rebellion and its mass enlistments of 1913. Furthermore, the photo­graph 166  ·  r o ber t o tej ad a

could have been taken by Casasola or by any other cameraman of the day—­now, like Adelita, anonymous. The published picture became “an emblem” of the revolution, even as it corresponded with the title of a famous insurgent ballad. Importantly, the image had been cropped to exclude more than half of its right-­hand area, where it had depicted other soldaderas acknowledging the presence of the camera from where they stood on the train. The hand-­drawn Adelita in El Límite, however, was rendered devoid of facial features, as though the Āgure w ­ ere a surrogate for the artist: the go-­between linking viewers to the installation on display. In this way the solitary Adelita made ambivalent the truth claims of photography when the medium was speciĀed to guarantee the historical rec­ord. Even though drawing the image allowed an economy of line that could produce visual command, immediate affinity, and psychological impact, the faceless soldadera in El Límite was a reference to the photographic image bank when—as the rough draft to knowledge and history—­photo­graphs ­were taken at face value, if not altogether overlooked. A f­ amily resemblance impelled Alvarez Muñoz to create the original version of Stories Your ­Mother Never Told You at Sailors’ Snug Harbor: an institutional community in the once-­upon-­a-­time was made pres­ent by memory affirmations in the here-­and-­now. Steam engines and photographic meanings assumed likeness in El Límite. ­Today vintage stereographs reveal the El Paso–­Juárez border zone in the late 1800s as being gradually transformed by the arrival of the locomotive.8 At the turn of the twentieth ­century, ­there ­were so many dif­fer­ent railroad Ārms in El Paso that locals petitioned for a central depot, despite opposition from the business sector. ­There ­were commercial advantages to keeping the terminals separated, in that passengers had time to shop or other­wise engage in proĀtable tourism when changing trains.9 Sightseeing in E l Paso included a p roscenium view of the Mexican Revolution, whose insurgent raids—­revolts that had led to the ousting of PorĀrio Díaz and his brazen oligarchy—­had begun in 1910. In the ensuing civil wars, Francisco Villa’s

FIG. 19.1. Celia Alvarez Muñoz, El Límite (detail), 1991. Mixed-­media installation, dimensions variable. Museum of ­Con­temporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, California. Photo­graph by Celia Alvarez Muñoz. Image courtesy of the artist.

splinter group made the El Paso–­Juárez region headquarters for its military forays, and a member of the Casasola clan established a photography studio ­there.10 In a brief history of the Mexican Revolution, Anita Brenner described how on May  10, 1911, “Americans climbed on top of freight cars outside El Paso to look across the Rio Grande and watch . . . ​rebel snipers attack the city of Juárez and capture it from the Díaz garrison.”11 In El Límite, another drawing made con­spic­u­ ous the lines that join history, image technology, and land dispossession as suggested by the mutual terms captured and shot. In black ink and shades of gold, a photojournalist with a tripod and large-­ format camera was flanked by two Native Americans who, clad in loincloths, took aim with ­rifles. All subjects looked out at the same unspeciĀed expanse in t ime and space. Documentary images at the Library of Congress by photog­raphers in Texas covering U.S. Army maneuvers in 1911 depict federal soldiers at Fort Bliss and Fort Sam Houston, military officers unloading supplies at the Presidio, and a troop making a visual display of the Maxim machine gun aimed at the unidentiĀed cameraman.12 Also enhancing the vari­ous wall drawings in El Límite ­were visual footnotes in reference to the history of typography, including Aztec-­inspired art deco borders, the design grid for a lowercase serif a, a single linotype s, and an f produced by a dot matrix printer: As If ­These Walls Could Speak . . . ​Together, the lettering and the Adelita Āgure pitted typeface against facelessness, an argument related to the conditional associations between survey photography and expansionism, and between technologies of war, camera culture, and transportation. Ambiguous peripheries marked the armed zone of confrontation between white settlement and Native American sovereignty, even as all ele­ments hinged upon the bold yellow walls featuring black-­and-­white photo­graphs of a child’s toy trains. If the material nature of communication and conflict ­were the subject ­matter of ­these parallel components—­the medium that is vehicle to the message—­El Límite

168  ·  r o ber t o tej ad a

also depicted borderlands in t he production of meaning—­that is, the realm that opens up between artist, institution, and the critical debate writ large. A train’s maximum cargo was yet another overtone in El Límite. Each of the two large-­scale photographic panels depicted in undeĀned space a toy train composed of assorted tins: the steam engine was conjured with a can of Carnation leche evaporada, and successive sardine tins stood in for railroad cars (Āg.  19.2). Alvarez Muñoz had petitioned her ­father to reconstruct the kind of toys that he put together with friends in his youth so that she could weave a story about object relations, ­family lore, storytelling, and the transposition of history. Photo­graphs document the artist and Madeleine Grynsztejn—­then a curator at the commissioning institution, the Museum of Con­ temporary Art San Diego—as they assembled the piece from ele­ments shipped by the now el­ derly ­father. Like the inhabitants of Snug Harbor who had searched back to their childhoods, he was happy to indulge this request to revisit the swagger of boyhood invention. His instructions to Celia ­were to “stuff the engine with paper and light it” as he had done in hi s youth. The artist complied, and a “place for the narrative was born.”13 Stories by Dad came from two sources; in­ven­ted and real life adventures. At times hard to separate or distinguish. En las arenas, near the railroad tracks, they played with toys made out of t­ hings that ­don’t belong together. Like combinations we w ­ ere warned against. Nunca, never, eat watermelon during a certain time of the month. Nunca, tome leche cuando coma pescado. Nunca, tome un helado cuando ajitado [sic].

A ­father’s account made unreliable an entire descriptive enterprise, stories that so hovered between fact and Āction as to be interchangeable. In this re­spect, the tales resembled folk wisdom and its prescriptive mea­sures against mismatched dietary items. ­Women ­ought never to taste water-

FIG. 19.2. Celia Alvarez Muñoz, El Límite (detail), 1991. Mixed-­media installation, dimensions variable. Museum of Con­temporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, California. Photo­graph by Celia Alvarez Muñoz. Image courtesy of the artist.

melon during menstruation, that “certain time of the month.” At all cost avoid ingesting Āsh with milk—­hence the can of Carnation and the sardine tins that journey back in oblique reference to Al Souza’s Packing a Can of Sardines of 1975. When upset, the words caution, never indulge in ice cr eam. Meaning and manufacture could run likewise into perils that correspond to the everyday dos and ­don’ts that shape the routines of self-­fashioning. In object relations, a p attern is mandatory for the pres­ent to connect with the past; the connection is made in such fleeting manner as to guarantee the advent of a potential ­future. Joined by ­house­hold string, the locomotive steam engine and cars ­were Ālled with makeshift items including cane bundles or ­little piles of dirt and pebbles, and the shape of the second-­ panel text doubled as a sm oke billow erupting from the locomotive: Some stories stemmed from trips to the Golden State on trains, he jumped on in El Paso,

during the depression years. My favorite stories dealt with The War when he was moved across the world and throughout Eu­ rope, again, mostly by train. ­Little do we know that colic couplings may well become the main ingredients required to survive.

As in Enlightenment #2, Alvarez Muñoz made reference to the impact of World War II on men, ­women, and ­children of Mexican descent. The U.S. armed ser­vices enlisted Mexican American recruits and volunteers, and the war created a severe demand for ­labor that Mexican immigrants Ālled in accord with the Bracero Program established by the two countries in 1942. In If Walls Could Speak, Alvarez Muñoz had told of JoseĀna Fierro de Bright, who, in her organ­izing efforts, united Latinos for the Spanish Speaking ­People’s Congress, a lobbying group that sought changes in immigration policy and citizenship status. . . .

Celi a Al var ez Muñoz: “ Civic S tud ies ”  ·  169

Celia’s ­father [had been] a child of the El Paso–­ Juárez borderland in the postrevolutionary period; ­later, at the onset of World War II, he was deployed in G ermany. Trains linked that past and ­future into a pres­ent tense, and the stories he told upon his return, it is suggested, w ­ ere offered in compensation for the period of f­ amily absence. Alvarez Muñoz relates art history to ­family legibility, as though to ask, What are the causal patterns that link an individual to kin, to culture, and to a community’s imperative? Is it the difference between recruitment as eventual homecoming and migration as leaving a lo cation despite the precarious chances of return? The artist remarked how the train, a v ehicle “that revolutionized socie­ties,” was proximate to her grandparents’ ultimate dwelling. The Santa Fe Depot was located a “stone’s throw from that ­house,” which was “next to the border, not far from the Casasola studio, on the next street over, El Paso St., almost catty-­corner from my maternal grand­father’s ­hotel, El ­Hotel PacíĀco.” The artist noted “that movement and travel [have been] an ele­ment frequently used in t he work, ­whether overtly or woven conceptually into the pieces and proj­ects.” Fi­nally, in w ildly suggestive syntax and a cadence that speaks of belated arrival to art making, the artist concludes, “The marriage of the techs in order to bridge or hinge. The overriding gear to the production has been, the won­der of the unpredictable. I mig ht blow the whistle to inform a new investigation is approaching, but my train has always come in a ­little late with a cargo of surprises, mainly to myself. But ultimately, the notion of validation is at the forefront. Complaints leave me stuck. All aboard! Muévele!”14 This persuasive prose style performs the crucial concept in El Límite—­that is, of “colic couplings.” Like a “marriage of the techs in order to bridge or hinge,” it is a theory that can be applied to nearly all works by Alvarez Muñoz. A co lic coupling can be the coming together, in a body, of sight and description, as though to undertake Walter Benjamin’s challenge that “half the art of storytelling [is] to keep a story f­ ree from expla170 ·  r o ber t o tej ad a

nation as one reproduces it.”15 A co lic coupling propels information into fantasy: a transposition of ordinary discourse into the uncanny language of won­der.16 For psychoanalysis, the uncanny is akin to a remote province that is forbidding at Ārst and yet “leads back to what is known and long familiar.”17 Freud tells us it is that which belongs to the ­house, tremendous and invaluable, even as it is also subject to eviction. It is the law of modern life that makes it necessary to renounce all embarrassing attachments to folk practices and beliefs and to adopt the “scientiĀc method.” “­Things that ­don’t belong together” is shorthand for the “unfulĀlled but pos­si­ble ­futures to which we still cling in phantasy”; it is that wishful thinking located in the faraway place of childhood stories.18 An effect that “coincides” with its opposite, the uncanny can make its appearance in the shape of a “double,” as ambivalent as the imaginary friend of Enlightenment #9, the disembodied doll La Yodo, whose features ­were “fair and light complexioned.” It is the omnipotence of thought that anticipates a memory, always repressed but ever bound to surface: the stories your m ­ other never told you. It is patrimonial anxiety about menses that conceives rules to ward off their alleged detrimental effects. An “archaic reaction,” the fact of the uncanny reminds us that our connection to the matrix of history is always a form of homesickness; in a sense, it is that which can no longer remain hidden in t he past if only b ­ ecause it was in plain view all along. The uncanny is a p rob­ lem that exposes a gap between one’s loyalty to ­family and to the alliances of social selfhood. It names unease at the prospect of knowledge loss for subjects who, b ­ ecause they occupy simultaneous social categories, feel as though they are poised to betray any one of them, be it national affiliation or ­those of class, sex, or ethnicity. The uncanny names, too, the enticement of ­those difficult spaces that prompt this per­for­mance: institutions, image environments, narratives, and other grids of self-­reflexive liability, with demands on the double identity of the insider looking out who is the outsider looking in.19

Home sweet home and homesickness: it’s no coincidence that the spatial desire to belong to a built environment has been so fundamental in the work of Alvarez Muñoz. But narrative routes and railways w ­ ere also revealed: to transit from a po­liti­cal geography back to inflections that inform a community’s structures of appearance, at once receding and in sight, is to travel with pictures and language over places transposed over the course of history. To look at the phenomenon of displaced or mobile ­peoples is to concern oneself with nations and communities, both real and ­imagined, in t he moments by which they are given a n arrative—­that is, “brought into being, made and unmade, in culture and politics, both on the land p ­ eople call their own” and in t­ hose places to which they migrate.20 Technologies of vision, like photography, activate t­ hese threshold moments. They obscure and magnify our part in the civic activities that delimit a society. Sight-­ speciĀc techniques are no guarantee of knowledge, however. In the tutorial of an art encounter is composed a history of how the vis­i­ble can be momentarily detained to demonstrate for a spectator the methods of cultural citizenship. Storytelling is no dif­fer­ent: episodes appear larger than life even as they often camouflage the diminishing returns of the depicted account. Alvarez Muñoz, impatient with the pieties of uplift and good consciousness, delights in t­ hese diffusions; her works are imbued with eccentricity, irreverence, overlapping historic layers, and contradictory details. In her practice she associates narrative unease with the framework of conceptually driven art produced in a g lobal context, and her uncanny lessons confound the diversity-­driven policy of arts educators and institutions. Alvarez Muñoz employs a grammar, one legible to the transnational art system, whose fondness for disarticulated meaning often reduces the signiĀcance of “speciĀc” cultural markers, sometimes just enough to reshape them into stand-­ins for national image economies. The 1990s had been the stage for a t echnological turn: digital communication networks transformed the flow of national and corporate wealth, creating global

art markets that blurred geographic identities and complicated the production of cultural meanings. Néstor García Canclini calls this a “market that . . . ​subordinates an artwork’s local connotations, converting them into secondary folkloric references of an international, homogenized discourse. The internal differences of the world market point less to national characteristics than to the aesthetic currents monopolized by the leading [institutions], whose headquarters in N ew York, London, Paris, Milan and Tokyo circulate work in a det erritorialized form and encourage the artists to adapt to dif­fer­ent ‘global’ publics.”21 Alvarez Muñoz perplexes this overarching museum vernacular with her own unmistakable but no less demanding allusions to life forms and history: Ān de siècle line drawings and print illustrations, readymade objects, camera-­generated images, and the museum space as a surrogate for the book as a legitimate critical medium. She did not overtly deploy the subject m ­ atter or style of 1970s feminist art, but it enabled her theoretically driven references to folklore, motherhood, ­house­hold display, and autobiography. In its own way her work sends furtive glances back to the imagery of the 1970s and its iconography of veiling, conĀnement, and enclosure.22 As global diasporas continue to narrow the divide between individual and society, her work increasingly understands migration as the cultural variable by which the world system, homeland, and nation can be critically engaged. She uses visual meta­ phors to make her points: moving out of bounds, in El Límite; making way for foundational differences, in Abriendo Tierra. The life writings of Walter Benjamin are inflected with an inconsolable melancholy about the disappearance of h ­ uman stories that can speak to alienation and the hard task of having to survive an age of instrumental reason—­the use of reason to determine the best means to achieve a certain end. Benjamin expressed the longing for the afterlife of material t­ hings in the era of abundant manmade technology, equating the pro­cess of language with the onrush of history—­that is, as so many stories our forebears never told us, or Celi a Al var ez Muñoz: “ Civic S tud ies ”  ·  171

could never have known. The ghost time of an afterlife could contain superstitions, ­children’s games, and other residues of a p ­ eople’s past. In her own arcade of images less fettered by a catastrophic sense of historic time, Alvarez Muñoz accounts for viewer testament, genealogical trees, ­family stories, and the borrowings of modernism from the manual arts and its techniques. Proliferated by the artist herself to account for the incommensurable geography of bicultural realism, ­these are features of culture often neglected by histories of art founded only on aesthetic form. Her practice, wonderstruck, trumps cynicism with its capacity to perpetuate complexity with charm: “All aboard! Muévele!” With poise and wit, disclosing elegance of execution and a grace of mind, conception advances not in colic Āts and starts but in a co upling that makes matrimony “of the techs in order to bridge or hinge.” It is herein that the toy trains in El Límite circle back to the place where ­these pages began, if hardly separated by months in the historical time of 1991—­that is, to Abriendo Tierra and the octagonal wooden structure made of timbers akin to ­those used in railroad construction. ­These ties and the structure they composed are stand-­ins now for the cultural location that comprises the scope of Alvarez Muñoz and her work: legible to history, like the Rio Grande “over riverbanks in two languages,” but waiting elsewhere, in s ome other world. Notes This chapter was originally published as Roberto Tejada, “Civic Studies,” in Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 75–94. Copyright © Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California, Los Angeles. 1. César Chávez had led farmworkers in California to or­ga­nize around peaceful demands for improved ­labor conditions. In solidarity with t­ hese working-­class strug­ gles, Mexican Americans articulated a shared po­liti­cal and civic consciousness made pos­si­ble through the student movement on campuses at vari­ous universities and in urban centers of the United States, especially in the Southwest. The result was a “spatial concept of

172 ·  r o ber t o tej ad a

community,” like that of Aztlán, which refuted the ethnic segregation and internal colonialism that Chicanos had experienced as psychological space within the dominant white Anglo-­Saxon culture. See Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “Community, Patriarchy, and Individualism: The Politics of Chicano History and the Dream of Equality,” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1993): 46. 2. Shifra M. Goldman, “The Iconography of Chicano Self-­Determination: Race, Ethnicity, and Class,” in “Depictions of the Dispossessed,” special issue, Art Journal 49, no. 2 (1990): 167. 3. Gustavo Casasola, Historia Gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana, 1900–1960, commemorative edition (Mexico City: Editorial F. Trillas, 1960). See also Agustín Víctor Casasola, The World of Agustín Víctor Casasola: Mexico, 1900–1938/El mundo de Agustín Víctor Casasola (Washington, DC: Fondo del Sol Visual Arts and Media Center, 1984); and Agustín Víctor Casasola and David King, eds., Tierra y Libertad! Photo­graphs of Mexico 1900–1935 from the Casasola Archive (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1985). 4. Gutiérrez, “Community, Patriarchy, and Individualism,” 46. 5. Norma Cantú, “­Women, Then and Now: An Analy­sis of the Adelita Image versus the Chicana as Po­liti­cal Writer and Phi­los­op ­ her,” in Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender, ed. Teresa Córdova (Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas, 1986), 9. 6. Gustavo Casasola, Historia Gráfica de México (Mexico City: Editorial Patria / Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1988), 720. 7. John Mraz, “Historia y mito del Archivo Casasola,” Jornada Semanal (Mexico City), December 31, 2000. 8. Miguel Angel Berumen, La cara del tiempo: La fotografía en Ciudad Juárez y El Paso (1870–1930)(Ciudad Juárez, Mexico: Berumen y Muñoz Editores, 2002). 9. Maribel Montes, Albert Romero, Michael Garcia, and Ruth Vise, “Union Depot Witnessed Growth of El Paso,” Borderlands (El Paso Community College, El Paso, Texas), http://­www​.­epcc​.­edu​/­nwlibrary​/­borderlands​/­22 ​ _­union​_­depot​.­htm. 10. Casasola Archive at the University of Texas, El Paso, accessed August 2018, https://­digitalcommons​.­utep​.­edu​ /­casasola​/­. 11. Anita Brenner and George R. Leighton, The Wind That Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution, 1901–1942(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), photo captions, 67, 68. 12. One such photo is “U.S. Army 1911 Maneuvers in Texas: Maxim Machine Gun & Crew,” call number: LOT 10909, reproduction number: LC-­USZ61–1798, Library of

Congress Prints and Photo­graphs Division, Washington, D.C. 13. Alvarez Muñoz, personal communication, March 30, 2008. 14. Celia Alvarez Muñoz, personal communication with the author, January 6, 2005; emphasis added. 15.Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 89. 16. Won­der is the capacity of mind to marvel at the fact that our workaday world is material fact or at least obviated at moments through some incontestable experience. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously described this phenomenon as such a “won­der at the existence of the world” that one is “inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist.’ ” The phi­los­ o­pher of ­family resemblance came to see that “­these nonsensical expressions ­were not nonsensical ­because [he] had not yet found the correct expressions.” What he sought in ­those terms was to “go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language.” Ethics was for Wittgenstein this “absolutely hopeless” inclination “to run against the bound­aries of language” or to brush up “against the walls of our cage.” He wrote, “Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Review 74, no. 1 (1965): 12.

17. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1962), 220. 18. Freud, “Uncanny,” 236. 19. Renato Rosaldo submits a line of critical questions that have even broader implications: “What are the analytical consequences of making ‘our’ cultural selves invisible? What cultural politics erase the ‘self’ only to highlight the ‘other’? What ideological conflicts inform the play of cultural visibility and invisibility? . . . ​Full citizenship and cultural visibility appear to be inversely related. When one increases, the other decreases. Full citizens lack culture, and t­ hose most culturally endowed lack full citizenship. . . . ​­Those ­people who have culture also occupy subordinate positions within the nation-­ state.” Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analy­sis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 198–99. For a discussion relevant to art making, see Crystal Parikh, “Ethnic Amer­i­ca Undercover: The Intellectual and Minority Discourse,” Con­temporary Lit­er­a­ture 43, no. 2 (2002): 249–84. 20. Khacha Tölölyan, quoted in Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 127. 21. Néstor García Canclini, “Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate on Multiculturalism,” Third Text, no. 28/29 (1994): 141. 22. Lucy Lippard, “Projecting a Feminist Criticism,” Art Journal 35, no. 4 (1976): 337–39.

Celi a Al var ez Muñoz: “ Civic S tud ies ”  ·  173

Further Reading

Austin, Kat, Carlos-­Urani Montiel, and Victoria J. Furio. “Codex Espangliensis: Neo-­Baroque Art of Re­sis­tance.” Latin American Perspectives 39, no. 3 (May 2012): 88–105. Barnet-­Sánchez, Holly. “Chicano/a Critical Practices: Reflections on Tomás Ybarra Frausto’s Concept of Rasquachismo.” In Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, edited by Kobena Mercer, 56–87. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Bojórquez, Charles “Chaz.” “Los Angeles ‘Cholo’ Style Graffiti Art.” Graffiti Verité, 2000. Accessed August 2018. http://­www​.­graffitiverite​.­com​/­cb​ -­cholowriting​.­htm. Bright, Brenda Jo. “ ‘Heart Like a Car’: Hispano/Chicano Culture in Northern New Mexico.” American Ethnologist 25, no. 4 (1998): 583–609. Kalb, Laurie Beth. “Chicano Art and Santos by Luis Tapia.” In Crafting Devotion: Traditions in Con­ temporary New Mexico Santos, 89–119. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Lou, Richard A. “The Secularization of the Chicano Visual Idiom: Diversifying the Iconography.” In Hecho en Califas: The Last De­cade, 1990–1999, 9–18. Los Angeles: Plaza de la Raza, 2000.

Malagamba, Amelia. “Mexicano/Chicano Altars: The Poetics and Politics of Space of Community Self-­ Fashioning.” In Proceedings: American Photography Institute National Gradu­ate Seminar, 97–107. New York: NYU American Photography Institute, 1997. Mesa-­Bains, Amalia. “Spiritual Geographies.” In The Road to Aztlán: Art from a Mythic Homeland, 332–341. o L s Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art / Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Romo, Tere. “Chicanos en Mictlan: A Curatorial Perspective.” In Chicanos en Mictlán: Dia de los Muertos in California, 6–8. Exhibition cata­log. San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum, 2000. Tweed, Thomas A. “Mary’s Rain and God’s Umbrella: Religion, Identity, and Modernity in the Visionary Art of a Chicana Painter.” Material Religion 6, no. 3 (2010): 274–303. Venegas, Sybil. “The Day of the Dead in Aztlán: Chicano Variations on the Theme of Life, Death and Self-­Preservation.” In Chicanos en Mictlán: Dia de los Muertos in California, 42–54. Exhibition cata­log. San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum, 2000.

Part III. Bodily Aesthetics and Iconologies

FIG. III.1. Rupert García, El Grito de Rebelde, 1975. Color silkscreen. Image courtesy of the artist.

jennifer a. gonz ález

Part III. Introduction What constitutes a C hicana/o body, and how does it become a site for po­liti­cal and social transformation? How has the Chicana/o body been forced to signify “difference” for a w hite mainstream? How does the body form a cr itical site for the decolonial proj­ect of dif­fer­ent communities?1 Pose and posture, bare skin or flayed hide, divine or profane, the body becomes the device for enunciating oppression as well as liberation in many forms of Chicana/o art. As the saturated locus of social and po­liti­cal meaning, embodiment emerges as a key site for the exploration of subjectivity, cultural heritage, and aesthetic invention. Neither inside nor outside of a s trict Chicano or U.S. nationalism, the body is a slippery semiotic device, and is frequently excessive on purpose. “We are a bronze ­people with a bronze culture,” claimed the “Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” implying that the mestizo—­or racially mixed subject of Indigenous and Eu­ro­pean descent—is a deĀning feature and a source of pride for Chicana/os. Frequently cited as a g rounding meta­ phor and recurring trope, the mestizo is also a site of exploration, a corpus of unknown origins, of scattered parts that make up an unpredictable ­whole. Within this expressly fluid ethnic framework, the bound­aries of masculinity and femininity are nevertheless heavi­ly policed. The early years of the Chicano movement ­were characterized by

a nationalist sentiment that supported heroic masculine Āgures such as Reies López Tijerina, who fought for land rights, and César Chávez, the United Farm Worker’s u ­ nion leader who fought for l­abor rights. The Aztec warrior and the countercultural pachuco ­were recuperated and valorized with pride.2 In the face of a pressure to assimilate, ­these cultural icons became a radical site of racial counteridentiĀcation that included a signiĀcant cultural and regional pride. Chicano masculinity was deĀned against an “Anglo” American paradigm, and the image of the Chicano body thus became an impor­tant site of competing differences. On the one hand, the “brown” body was already marginalized from the outside, marked as dif­fer­ent and debased by the racism in a “white” culture. On the other hand, the Chicano purposefully refused to assimilate, thus opening up the opportunity for creating his own version of that “difference” through choice of hairstyle, clothing, mannerisms, and speech; he purposefully cultivated an aesthetic difference that could be circulated in t he mainstream as a vis­i­ble po­ liti­cal response—­a kind of visual activism beyond the visual arts.3 Yet, despite ­these critical transformations, the male archetypes of the Chicano movement often remained patriarchal and heteronormative. Relations of gender and sexuality to the intersecting histories of a male-­dominated Catholicism

and a m ale-­dominated colonialism are complicated at best. Ritual, garments, be­hav­ior, and posture deĀne the way bodies occupy both public and private space, spaces fraught with negotiation, ripe for experimentation but also dangerous for ­those who deviate. Chicanas started to interrogate the roles to which ­women ­were assigned as ­mothers and ­daughters, as virginal icons, as working-­class and domestic laborers, and as sexual objects, rather than sexual subjects. They w ­ ere active participants in t he po­liti­cal movements, but w ­ ere less vis­i­ble as the agents of change, and ­were rarely considered equal partners. Pushing back against t­ hese gender divisions, Chicana artists applied their own feminist lens, while distinguishing their approach from what they saw as middle-­class “Anglo” feminism.4 Though they also wanted to allegorize Catholic, Mayan, and Aztec tropes, it was with a critical distance and a gendered difference. Queer artists ­were also looking for alternative ways to approach a speciĀcally Chicana/o articulation of sexual nonconformity and community belonging. Treating the signs of heteronormative discourse as source material for detournément or malversasión, a p layful yet biting repertoire of alternatives w ­ ere produced by artists willing to take risks, though the consequences w ­ ere—­and still are—­quite serious.5 Out of this variety of approaches to representing the Chicano and Chicana body, a counterhegemonic iconology developed, one that would begin to change the image-­scape of identiĀcations but also reveal the potential for unlimited ­future transformations. Assessing artworks in di verse media, from installation art and sculpture to painting and photography, each of the articles in this section broadens our understanding of what might constitute a Chicana/o “bodily aesthetic.” Mel Casas, a painter who was strongly influenced by the American pop art movement and who was instrumental in s upporting early Chicano art collectives such as Con Safo in San Antonio, Texas, is the focus of the Ārst essay. His canvases inspired by the Chicano movement ­were painted primarily between 1970 and 1973, and ­were often ­shaped to mimic t he screens of 178 ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

the cinema or the tele­vi­sion, the two primary sites of mass image consumption that have dominated the popu­lar U.S. imaginary since the 1960s. Strategic juxtaposition of classic iconic Āgures allows Casas to set up conceptual resonances across time and cultures, playfully punning on “Brownies” as something you can eat as well as someone you can see—­someone with brown skin. The Aztec god Xiuhcoatl meets Frito Bandito; Michelangelo’s hand of Adam meets the Black Power Āst. Purposefully working across iconographic paradigms, Casas invites us to read ste­reo­types through the context of circulation, invites us to see through the eyes of the farm laborer, or of the white employer who views her Mexican ­American maid as nothing more than a cartoon cutout of a person. Bodies become signs in a repertoire of limited theatrical roles, assigned by systems of commerce, systems of desire and of power. Nancy Kelker carefully considers how Casas’s recirculation of t­ hese iconic ­human ste­ reo­types underwrote his sardonic critique of the U.S. social imaginary. The 1970s witnessed other radical transformations in culture, emerging out of the revolutionary rejections of conformity across the spectrum. Gay liberation, marked by the Stonewall action in 1969, gave courage to a growing number of artists to explore sexuality in visual form. Robb Hernández surveys the concept of the maricón, a Spanish term used in a derogatory way to signal a “faggot” or “queen,” as it is recuperated and celebrated in a photographic collaboration between Joey Terrill and Teddy Sandoval. Following an etymological path, Hernández traces the appearance of the term in the literary and visual culture of the Latino past, including references to mocking depictions by José Guadalupe Posada and José Clemente Orozco; but his primary goal is to suggest that the effeminate “wild style” of Chicano gay culture challenged the tactics of heteronormative masculinity as well as the space that it was supposed to occupy in public culture. In par­tic­u­lar, portraiture becomes a radical act when its goal is to picture that which is outside the expectations of bodily schema. Terrill’s photographic essay

the Marícon series (1975), for example, complicates heteronormative expectations by taking a “macho” pose while wearing a T-­shirt emblazoned with the term “marícon.” The Āgure refuses the typical flamboyance attributed to marícons, and thereby opens up new repre­sen­ta­tional territory for the gay male Chicano. At the same time, by writing on the body, the way a cholo might write on a wall, the artist and t­ hose who wear his T-­shirts become a kind of walking placa, and thus “mutually inscribe a territorial marker of collective self.” As a sign in the world, the body signiĀes far beyond its mere physical presence; allegorical attributes, cultural affinities, and sexual desires are all legible on its surface. Questions of racialized and gendered misunderstandings underlie the theorization of the Chicana/o body in g eneral. To which conflicting social discourses does the body belong? For whom is the body a resource for communicating the bound­aries of community? In the excerpt from their essay “The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide: Mobility, Identity, and Buenas Garras,” Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino and John Tagg examine the liminal position of the pachuco of the 1940s and his archetypal revival by Chicano artists in t he late 1970s. The authors argue that visibility and display ­were the pachuco’s weapons, and the mix of elaborate hairstyles and zoot suits was an assemblage without origin: “It was a cultural affirmation not by nostalgic return to an imaginary original w ­ holeness and past but by appropriation, transgression, reassemblage.” The authors suggest that clothes make meanings with the bodies they adorn; but agency also lies with the subjects who make meanings of their bodies through carefully chosen attire, producing a new discursive space between competing styles and worlds, between Mexican barrio life and American war­time racism. Although iconic of a par­tic­u­lar era, the pachuco was also part of an ongoing form of cultural re­sis­tance to the mainstream who found their inassimilable cultural difference intolerable. The vio­lence pachucas and pachucos experienced in the 1940s at the hands of the white establishment (especially the military and police), a vio­

lence through which their bodies ­were martyred, stirred the imaginations of a s econd generation of Chicanos who faced similar ­battles in t he 1970s. 6 Artists such as José Montoya, Ignacio Gomez, and Luis Valdez mythologized the pachucos as the Ārst Chicano freedom Āghters. Sánchez-­Tranquilino and Tagg point out that while this image may have been impor­tant for a tactical identity politics at the height of Chicano nationalism, the historical my­thol­ogy of the pachuco should not be allowed to overshadow his influence upon forms of socially radical cultural invention t­ oday, found in new linguistic experiments and innovative aesthetic strategies for the body as a surface for counterhegemonic signs. Figurations of the Chicana/o body work within and against a l arger social and cultural framework that attempts to delimit or control that body’s vari­ous meanings. In its “difference” the Chicana/o body can be threatening or unfamiliar, power­ful or weak depending on the discourses that frame it. The mainstream mass media in t he United States frequently deĀnes the Chicano and Latino body directly in relation to vio­lence and sexuality, or alternatively as subservient and exotic. Laura E. Pérez explores the way that Chicana artists have tried to rewrite this limited narrative by direct critique and through alternative models of embodiment. Her essay “Writing on the Social Body: Dresses and Body Ornamentation in Con­temporary Chicana Art” suggests that within the meta­phor of the social body as text, dress and body ornamentation are writings on and about the body. Focusing on four artists, Pérez explores the way each redeĀnes the signifying surface of the female body through clothing and adornment. The Nanny (1994), an installation by Yolanda López, pairs a maid’s uniform with two large posters advertising tourism and consumption in Mexico and Latin Amer­i­ca. In both posters a smaller, darker, and prob­ably much poorer ­woman of color is positioned in a s ubservient relation to a w hite Eu­ro­pean ­woman who has become “Latinized” by her own donning of local dress. The empty maid’s uniform hangs between ­these two images, Intr o d uctio n t o Par t III  ·  179

suggesting the ways in which the working-­class Chicana dis­appears into her ­labor identity. For Pérez the artwork articulates a s et of intersecting relations among ­women in both familial and national domestic spaces. In a m ore historical frame, Mesa-­Bains’s Venus Envy series (1993–97) traces the psychological and religious territory of the dress (Ārst holy communion, bridal gown, nun’s habit), the gendered territory of seclusion (the harem, the garden, the study), and Ā­nally the wild spirit of the goddess and the ­giant (as forms of majestic raiment and undress). In each work the artist uses garments—­some found and some fabricated—to signal the female body’s relation to sexual freedom and repression, power and subservience, mythic strength and endurance. The dress stands for both the female body and the complex condition of female subjectivity and signals the degree to which the two are understood as inseparable. This inseparability recurs in works by Esther Hernández and Diane Gamoba. Pérez closes her essay echoing the concerns raised by Shifra  M. Goldman about the invisibility of Chicana/o art, asking, “What indeed does writing on the social body mean if art by most Chicanas, like the artists whose work I study ­here, is institutionally marginalized at ­every level of the mainstream art and academic worlds, and effectively barred by racialized and gendered misunderstandings?” Asta Kuusinen’s essay “Ojo de la Diosa: Becoming Divine in D elilah Montoya’s Photography” picks up the thread of Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino and John Tagg’s argument, particularly in t he section excerpted h ­ ere: “The Pinto’s Flayed Hide: La Guadalupana.” In colloquial Spanish the term “pinto” indicates an in-­group marker in prisons, used to distinguish oneself from the rest of the prison population. Usually this marker takes the form of tattoos that are secretly administered within the prison but that can have far-­reaching implications on the “outside” as well, particularly when tied to gang membership. Montoya’s photographic works unravel the ste­reo­type of the “pinto” by offering more than a t wo-­dimensional caricature of the 180  ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

prison convict as e­ ither abject criminal or heroic rebel. In her mixed-­media installation La Guadalupana, a p rison inmate is photographed from ­behind; his bare back is entirely covered with a l arge tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe. This image becomes part of an altar installation with candles and flowers that effectively canonizes the prisoner, who is also thus ambiguously gendered both male (pinto) and female (virgin). Kuusinen argues that through the photographic pro­cess, Montoya invites the inmate to reveal his “Ārst skin” and to “invent alternative religious meta­phors devoid of the imperatives of sacriĀce and salvation central in the texts that ­either valorize or defame the ex-­convicts.” Photography, as a medium that historically has been used to cast an anthropological and colonial gaze on cultural “­others,” is ­here both referenced and critiqued in the artist’s effort to produce a s econd photographic “skin” for her subject, whose body meta­ phor­ically escapes the prison through the ­labor of her artistic practice. Perhaps the most controversial of the works included in t his section is a dig ital print titled Our Lady (1999) by the artist Alma López. Nearly twenty years ago, the piece created a s tir at the Museum of International Folk Art in Sa nta Fe, New Mexico, ­because of its scantily clad depiction of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Luz Calvo’s essay walks us through the censorship controversy but also explores the way the repression of artistic freedom is tied to pro­cesses of cultural identiĀcation. When a cultural icon is loaded with meaning, who is allowed to identify with it, when, and how? The more impor­tant the icon, the more hotly contested the answers ­will be. Calvo employs the psychoanalytic vocabulary of identiĀcation to explain the psychic investments that may underlie the arguments that erupt around key Āgures in the popu­lar imaginary. Taking the death of pop star vocalist Selena as one example, Calvo suggests that excessive attachment to stars by fans can also be explained as overidentiĀcation. When it comes to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico and the iconic religious symbol of the Chicano movement, many ­people believe

it is both sacrilegious and counterrevolutionary to transform the icon, even in a sympathetic way. Virgins are not supposed to have a sexual life, but the work of Alma López undermines this “common sense” using collage, digital rendering, and an intertextual set of references to reveal the queer potential under­lying “our lady.” The image emphasizes her brown skin, references Aztec as well as Christian iconography, and implies sexual agency. Reading this image in t he context of López’s other works, Calvo explores the ways sexual and racial difference are often linked, and become domains that overlap in the artist’s revisions of familiar Āgures in the Chicana/o popu­lar imaginary. Desire and its unpredictable eruptions are shown to be complex and layered parts of po­ liti­cal identiĀcation tied to relations of power. As a visual territory of oppositions, the Chicana queer body in the work of López circulates as a transitional subject in the pro­cess of becoming, and a transnational formation already straddling the U.S./Mexican divide; for Calvo, her psychic map is “not that of the rational, imperialist car-

tographer but rather the layered space of the unconscious, where past and pres­ent, ­here and ­there, can exist in one image.” Notes 1. See Emma Perez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 2. For a full discussion, see Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). 3. For a discussion of “visual activism,” see the “Visual Activism” issue of Journal of Visual Culture 15, no. 1 (April 2016). 4. See Gabriela F. Arredondo et al., Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 5. See Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma López, Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López’s Irreverent Apparition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). 6. For further discussion of the pachuco and pachuca, see Catherine Ramírez, The ­Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

Intr o d uctio n t o Par t III  ·  181

This page intentionally left blank

nancy kelker

20. Mel Casas  ·  2013 RedeĀning America

[. . .] The Mexican American or “Chicano” rights movement Ārst came to the attention of middle-­ class Amer­i­ca in 1965 with tele­vi­sion coverage of César Chávez organ­izing mi­grant workers in California. The Chicano movement, or el movimiento, predated the farmworkers’ strikes by at least two de­cades; its roots anchored in the racism experienced by Mexican Americans during and a­ fter World War II. I t can also be argued that the origin of the movement dates back even further to the annexation of vast stretches of Mexican lands ­after the U.S.-­Mexican War. As a result of the territorial concessions granted in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Mexican citizens in the Southwest found themselves suddenly citizens of the United States and the Ārst Mexican Americans. Although legally citizens, the pro­cess of ac­cep­tance into the cultural mainstream was difficult. The government administrators and white settlers who moved into ­these new lands saw the Mexican American residents as “outsiders.” This nebulous outsider status of

Mexican Americans lingered through much of the twentieth ­century. [. . .] Mel Casas’s response to the issues raised by the Chicano movement as well as his own experience as a M exican American can be found in Humanscape 62: Brownies of the Southwest. The painting is a p ower­ful statement of what it means to be a Mexican American living in t he American Southwest. It speaks to the h ­ ere and now as well as the longing for a s ense of communal past. In this painting, Casas deliberately plays with the shades of meaning, some innocent, some pejorative, of the word “brownie,” making it a color-­based designation for Mexican Americans, equivalent to the use of “black” for African Americans or “white” for European-­descent Americans. On the screen Casas paints a monumental plate of choco­late brownies, rendered as mouth-­watering as ­those pictured on a p ackage of Betty Crocker mix (Āg. 20.1). ­These brownies are more than a popu­lar snack; the key ingredient is choco­late, a f ood indigenous to Mexico,

FIG. 20.1. Mel Casas, Humanscape 62: Brownies of the Southwest, 1970. Acrylic on canvas, 73 × 97 in. Image courtesy of Grace Casas.

its name derived from the Nahuatl (Mexica or Aztec) word chocólatl. In this way the brownies are part of the Mexican heritage appropriated by Anglos and Anglo corporations. Choco­late or brown is also the color associated with the types of p ­ eople (Brownies) who make up the audience in this painting: a Brownie Girl Scout, an American Indian, and four Mexican ­women. Casas’s use of brown is not merely reflective of the natu­ral condition, but purposeful: “Brown as a color is ampliĀed ­because pigmentation appears to have such vehement social relevance. I u se it to give social color to what I consider signiĀcant events.”1 In each case, the color brown denotes a second-­class status in society. The Brownie is a ju­nior grade (second-­class) member of the organ­ization, not a f ull-­fledged, green-­uniformed Girl Scout. The American Indian 184  ·  nancy kelker

had been a nonperson in American society long before general Philip Sheridan opined in 1869 that the “only good Indian is a de ad Indian.”2 In the early years of the Conquest, natives ­were con­ve­niently believed to be animals, and hunted as such. The affirmation of the humanity of the American Indian did not come ­until 1537, when Pope Paul III Ā­nally issued a papal bull declaring that the Indians had souls, thereby making them targets of conversion by the Mendicant o ­ rders—­a fate, perhaps, only slightly worse than death. The four Mexican peasant ­women represent the residual Mexican ele­ment, the Mexican heritage of the Mexican American that renders him a s econd-­ class American citizen. In contrast to the “brown” real ­people, Casas paints mythical and imaginary characters: the god Xolotl, the double-­headed serpent, and the Frito

Bandito in green. The use of green for t­ hese Āgures not only marks them as unreal or super­natural but also plays on the pre-­Columbian Mexican association of the color green with “preciousness.” In the center of the canvas, Casas depicts a skeletal Āgure that he identiĀes as Xolotl, the Aztec god of monsters and twins.3 Xolotl is normally depicted in pre-­Hispanic codices with a canine head and wearing the ornaments of Quetzalcoatl, but Casas’s version calls to mind José Guadalupe Posada’s famous calaveras (skeletons), ­here posing in the role of the ancient god.4 The grinning Frito Bandito, riding piggyback on the Xolotl, is its monstrous issue, a Brownie monster. The Frito Bandito Āgure, based on the image of Pancho Villa and other peasant leaders of the 1910 Revolution, reinforces the ste­reo­type of Mexicans and Mexican Americans as thieves and bandits. The Bandito is also a statement of the corporate disenfranchisement of the Mexican ­American: they are considered to be so powerless that a derogatory caricature of them can be made into an eraser and used to market junk food to both Mexican American and Anglo ­children alike. On ­either side of the Xolotl is a double-­headed mosaic serpent perhaps meant to represent the Aztec serpent, Xiuhcoatl, a n ame in N ahuatl meaning “turquoise snake.” The model for this image is the famous turquoise pectoral, of Aztec-­ Mixtec manufacture, in the British Museum. Double-­headed and entwined snakes ­were potent symbols in a ncient Mesoamerica. They could be symbolic of the celestial realm, of renewal through the act of shedding their skin, and of the underworld—­the open jaws of the serpent representing the cave entrance to Mictlan ruled over by the fearsome skeletal lord Mictlantecuhtli. ­Here, however, according to Casas, the two-­ headed serpent characterizes the “schizothymia and dichotomous nature of the Mexican American in t he Southwest.”5 Thus, the split serpent refers to the split classiĀcation of the Mexican American who, in the social caste systems of both Mexico and the United States, is neither Mexican nor American, and who can claim neither heritage without implicitly denying the other. As a

result of this identity tug-­of-­war, the Mexican American exists in a state of cultural limbo where he clings to a fantasy past, which is both his and not his, but offers an alternative to the realities of a pres­ent in which he has no place. Even more ominous is the lesson suggested by nature, where two-­headed snakes are known to occur, although rarely. When no head is dominant, ­these animals are doomed. Casas, like Lincoln a c­ entury earlier, makes the point that a nation or a ­people so divided cannot long endure. In addition to redeĀning the social and racial status of the Mexican American, the Chicano movement also provided a n ew deĀnition of what it meant to be a “Chicano artist.” As Jacinto Quirarte noted, “The Mexican American artist is not difficult to identify in the twentieth c­ entury. His parents, grandparents, or great-­grandparents may have originally come from Mexico. He may have been born in Mexico himself but has spent a good part of his life in the United States. He may be a Ārst-­ or a sixt h-­generation American. The impor­tant ­thing is that somewhere t­ here is a tie with Mexico.”6 Furthermore, to be an authentically Chicano art, the artist’s tie with Mexico must overwhelm his connection to the culture of the United States, according to Quirarte, if the work is to be truly Mexican American art: “Coming back to the Mexican American situation, we see that ­there is a desire to move away from the so-­called Eu­ro­ pean (gabacho or Anglo) approach to the creation of a work of art. Coupled with this search for new approaches is another, which is related to what can only be described as a longing for, a feeling of, nostalgia for the ancient past. A s earch for original sources. And by this is meant the indigenous, or pre-­Columbian, sources.”7 Circumscribed by the politics of the larger movement, Chicano art became narrowly codiĀed as an art of alienation or outsider art, and as such, it needed to be stylistically distinct from that of Anglo artists to be authentically “Chicano.” Exhibitions of work by Mexican American artists, even when produced by minority curators, frequently focused on po­liti­cal and spiritual themes, as if Mel Ca sa s: Red efining Amer ­i ­c a  ·  185

t­ hose ­were the only terms in which this art could be understood by a larger, non-­Hispanic, audience. This emphasis on ethnicity caused prob­lems for the very artists such exhibitions ­were intended to promote. When the only ave­nue for exposure is an exhibition predicated on race, then ethnicity rather than aesthetic quality becomes the inviolate prerequisite for inclusion.8 Through such exhibitions Mexican American artists did gain exposure that many of them would not have received other­ wise, but recognition came at a cost, as Holland Cotter explained, “By binding art to racial, ethnic and sexual identity, multiculturalism carved out discrete areas of high visibility but kept ­those areas self-­contained. Minority artists ­were introduced to the art world power center, only to Ānd themselves, with few exceptions, viewing it from culturally speciĀc ghettos. The deal was, you could get inside the gates, but your movements ­were restricted.”9 Although the advent of the Chicano art movement proved particularly beneĀcial to younger Mexican American artists, being categorized as a “Chicano artist” could also limit a c­ areer. For artists such as Casas, who had already broken into the mainstream, such artistic typecasting was a step backward. Although the majority of paintings in Casas’s Humanscapes series comment on a wide range of social, po­liti­cal, and cultural issues in con­temporary American life, only the half dozen or so “Chicano” paintings from the early 1970s are regularly exhibited or published in the art historical lit­er­a­ture. The canvases that have come to deĀne Casas as a C hicano artist w ­ ere, with one or two exceptions, painted between 1970 and 1973. ­These years also mark Casas’s active involvement with a group of young artists or­ga­nized as Con Safo. Casas’s involvement with the group began in late 1970 when he was approached by several young paint­ers who had splintered from the Pintores de Aztlán.10 The leader of this disaffected group, Felipe Reyes, had been a student of Casas’s at San Antonio College and so he turned to his teacher for help in organ­izing a new Chicano artists group; their frustration with Pintores de Aztlán revolved around leadership prob­lems such as ca186  ·  nancy kelker

ciquismo,11 or lack of dedication to the Chicano movimiento, and no clear deĀnition of purpose for the organ­ization.12 When Ārst approached, Casas, in a personally difficult period, was reluctant to take on this responsibility. He told Reyes, “Let me think about it a l­ittle bit and I’ll get back with you.” Casas recalls, “I thought about it a ­couple of days. Maybe my life would change. I was divorced. My timeframe was dif­fer­ent, and I was teaching night and day courses to keep my h ­ ouse­hold ­going. But I deci­ded I would take a crack at art. So once I started, I met with the young men, and I listened to them and I began to realize they ­really needed to or­ga­nize.”13 They wanted an organ­ization that could not only deĀne a Chicano aesthetic but also break down the barriers erected by the local museums to exclude them from exhibitions: I got that group [Con Safo] ­going ­because I got told that they w ­ ere being slighted in San Antonio. They ­were never allowed to show. Only certain ­people showed. I took a look at it. Some of the p ­ eople in the group ­were very good, some, uh, um . . . ​It brought up a question in my mind. I could speak for their being denied their right to show. Are they being denied ­because of their racial real­ity; their subject ­matter in relation to their conscious? I found nothing to ignore. If t­ hese ­people had painted pretty En­glish landscapes—no prob­lem. So that was the prob­lem then. Culturally ­these ­people ­were seeing differently. Second, they put emphasis on other ­things the establishment did not consider that impor­tant. So the question [was]: do you challenge ­those values?14

Casas or­ga­nized the group of younger artists into an organ­ization he named Con Safo. Casas explained, “That’s the old term in S panish; you excuse yourself with con safo. It means I’m not responsible for this. I ­don’t care what you think about it. But it’s also an act of deĀance that refuses to accept responsibility for the action. . . . ​The act itself is its own real­ity ­whether you like it or not. But you Ānd that con safo is usually debasement of someone e­ lse’s property. So it’s a s ocial statement. I started working with that and carried it to extreme levels. I like to do that.”15 The result was

an exploration of the term in all its nuances that reads as ­free verse. In December  1971, Casas published a m anifesto for Con Safo, titled the “Brown Paper Report.” In this two-­page document with Āve pages of appendices, Casas laid out the po­liti­cal foundation, aesthetic concept, and action goals of the group. Casas began with a redeĀnition of the Mexican American or Chicano role in an American society that had largely ignored them:16 Brown Vision: If Americana was “sensed” through blue eyes, now brown vision is demanding equal views—­polychroma instead of monochrome. Brown eyes have visions too. It’s George Washington and Che Guevara homogenized into one. It’s Tejerina reclaiming the southwest and it’s César Chávez synthesizing farm workers into the mania that is ­middle class Americana. It’s a p romise to be—as ­middle class Americana is a p roduct of a promise to pay. Utopian facet??? Brown Dream. Con Safo: Act of deĀance Is a state of mind Alienation verbalized Clandestine Act Profanity that craves sacredness Sgraffiti with a purpose Cry of anguish Cry for help State of Anxiety Social rejection A demand for identity Language of the ghetto Language of the gutter Language of futility A demand for acknowledgement A divorcement from responsibility A seeking of responsibility of   anticipation I ­don’t believe I have been recognized? If you think evil of me—­likewise! We have been ­here before Critical Point Not Pax Americana but the social consciousness of Americana

In 1973 Casas followed up the “Brown Paper Report” with “Chicano Art: A Saccadic Scanning.” In this publication he presented a set of eight

diagrams. Each further analyzed and elaborated upon the cultural and aesthetic questions faced by Chicano artists that negatively impacted the ac­ cep­tance of their art by mainstream institutions. ­These ­were prob­lems that Casas saw as readymade by society and not t­ hose set by artists for themselves: “When you are born into a culture you are born into readymade solutions. As a r esult we never self-­actualize ourselves, we are content to play the game by the established rules. If, however, you question the values of the system, you become marginal, you are cast outside the system.”17 The art establishment, which had dismissed Chicano art as merely folk art, was a microcosm of the larger Anglo society that, traditionally, had rejected the Mexican American, among o ­ thers of color, as inferior. The challenge for American society, as a ­whole, and the art world, in par­tic­u­ lar, was to break with the dominant Eurocentric paradigms that remained as an En­glish colonial legacy. Although the United States had achieved its national in­de­pen­dence early in i ts history, Eu­ro­pean standards continued to influence the societal and artistic discourse. The mainstream artistic colloquy remained one exclusively “of the West about the West.” Casas saw in Con Safo the means to subvert this monolithic, monoethnic dialogue and convert it into an open forum: The essence of Chicano art has emerged from the realities of Chicano life. The result is a coherent Chicano visual dialogue. A deĀnition of Chicano art by its very nature has to be comprehensive, for it overlaps into religion, economics, psy­chol­ogy, sociology, politics and aesthetics. It also bridges time—­past, pres­ent, ­future—­and compresses space into ­family, country, continent and world. The Chicano artist is prepared to and is actualizing group identity by means of his visual language. A language that is governed by his own awareness and speciĀc events. The outcome is intellectual emancipation and emergence of a C hicano real­ity through art. Chicano art is not one of conformity, but rather, one of diversity of concepts and perceptions. Chicano art grew out of the barrios in the Southwest and poured into the consciousness of the rest of Americana. It removed itself from the regional phenomenon and challenged the legacy of

Mel Ca sa s: Red efining Amer ­i ­c a  ·  187

one type of American art by creating its own sense of history and in­de­pen­dent cultural validity.18

While Con Safo was successful in pushing open museum and gallery doors in Sa n Antonio and gaining well-­deserved recognition for Chicano artists, Casas knew that ­there was more to changing the national ethos than hanging a few exhibitions of Chicano art. He had given the organ­ ization the goal/slogan: “Chicano Art is not Art for Art’s Sake but Art for H ­ uman Sake.”19 This was a tall order. In essence, what Casas was proposing was nothing short of a full-­scale cultural revolution predicated on new ideas, new aesthetics, and new imagery: “We are iconoclasts, not by choice, but by circumstances out to destroy ste­reo­types and demolish visual clichés. We hope, in the pro­ cess, to encounter new pure forms that ­will act as catalysts for a visual nascence and awaken the dormant Chicano potential.”20 Casas’s paintings of the early seventies reflect his increasing po­liti­cal radicalization through his involvement with Con Safo. As the main theorist for the organ­ization, he had written all of the group’s concept papers, adopting a graphic format that bulleted the main talking points. Casas now applied that working formula to his Humanscapes, creating flow charts to explain the complex social statements presented in his paintings. Casas believed that the content of paintings should be more than just compositional or visual effects; they should make clear and power­ful statements that could be immediately understood by the painting’s audience. Such unambiguous artistic statements are even more impor­tant when the audience and artist do not share a common language or culture. In this situation, communication becomes more basic—­the drawn image or even sign language. In Humanscape 63: Show of Hands (1970) (Āg. 20.2), Casas focuses in o n the symbolic language of hand gestures. Depicted in extreme close-up on the theater screen are two marmoreal hands that pantomime the spark-­of-­life gesture in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The cast shadow of a third hand, with a single Ān­ger raised in a n obscene salute, rises in t he 188  ·  nancy kelker

center of the screen to almost touch the hand of Adam. Considered in light of Casas’s contemporaneous organ­ization of Con Safo, the reference takes on an antiestablishment context. While issues of race w ­ ere not an insigniĀcant f­ actor in the exclusion of Con Safo artists from museums and galleries, Casas avoids a frontal assault on solely ethnic grounds and instead attacks what is for Casas the core issue: institutional justiĀcation of denial of exhibition access on aesthetic grounds. In the Western tradition, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam panel from the Sistine Chapel is one of ­those rare apogeal works that has come to deĀne, in the common understanding, true art. The power­ful focal point of the Creation panel is the space between the two reaching hands, through which God sparks life and humanity in the mud-­ formed Adam. In choosing this par­tic­u­lar work as a b asis for his statement, Casas not only addresses antiquated aesthetic criteria but also the ethnocentric yardstick by which humanity has traditionally been mea­sured. In the audience space across the bottom of the canvas, Casas pres­ents a primer of additional signs that suggest additional meanings. He begins at the lower left with the brown hand of an Indian shaking a rattle in protest at the clenched Āst of a white supremacist; ­behind them is the anarchist’s black flag. In the center, four hands—­black, yellow, brown, and white—­spell the word “love” in American Sign Language. The brown hand raises two Ān­gers to depict not only the letter “v” in “love” but also the V-­gesture peace sign of the hippie generation. Building on the cultural associations of the peace symbol, Casas places two hands—­one male, the other female—at the far right. Each holds an item signiĀcant to the “Make Love Not War” movement, speciĀcally, a marijuana joint and a contraceptive pill. A second reference h ­ ere is to the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, which had culminated with a march in Los Angeles in August of that year. The Brown Berets or­ga­nized the moratorium to protest the high casualty rate of Chicano soldiers in Vietnam and a military draft that seemed to draw more heavi­ly from the Mexican American than

FIG. 20.2. Mel Casas, Humanscape 63: Show of Hands, 1970. Acrylic on canvas, 72 × 96 in. Image courtesy of Grace Casas.

from the Anglo community. Casas, a w ounded veteran of ­Korea, and against war on princi­ple, expressed his solidarity with the antiwar movement in t his painting. In the background waves the Chicano Farm Workers Union flag as an emblem of the larger social movement of which the Brown Berets w ­ ere an impor­tant part. Casas adds a pop culture subtext to the painting by allowing the third hand, rising from the audience, to cast a pall over the hands signing out “love.”21 This “bird” Ān­ger gesture, like George Carlin’s contemporaneous monologue on the expletive “F—­—­ You,” is emblematic of the po­liti­cal and sexual turmoil that plagued the “­Free Love Generation.” The summer of 1970 was an active one for César Chávez and the United Farm Workers. Almost as soon as the Delano grape strike ended, ten thousand lettuce workers went on strike in

what the news media called “the largest farm ­labor strike in U.S. history.”22 Like every­one ­else, Casas saw the worker’s strike and the retaliatory actions of the growers played out on the nightly network news. Humanscape 65: New Horizons was inspired by the Salinas strike. In this painting the VistaVision screen displays the Chicano Farm Workers Union flag: a b lack huelga ea­gle silhouetted against the sun on a red ground. The flag serves to visually identify the theme of the painting by establishing a horizon line and it also, as Casas explained, “becomes a sunrise or a sunset depending on ­whether one is optimistic or pessimistic.” Beneath the screen the blue border is transformed into the sea with crashing waves. The sea not only serves as a t raditional icon of fertility and fecundity but also geo­graph­i­cally locates the vast Āelds of lettuce that extend from the observer’s vantage point to the briny edge of Mel Ca sa s: Red efining Amer ­i ­c a  ·  189

the PaciĀc. The Āgures of farmworkers stooping over the rows are based on a photo­graph of lettuce workers taken by Joe McClelland in 1943. In this painting Casas transforms the bent-­over workers into the modern equivalents of Millet’s anonymous peasants in The Gleaners, to drive home the point that the hard life of the farmworker has changed negligibly in more than a ­century. In New Horizons, we see identically clothed ­labors engaged in t he back-­breaking work of thinning the lettuce, their ­faces turned earthward or obscured by hats. Like Millet, Casas does not individualize the workers, and in not d ­ oing so makes a statement about the nature of the work they perform and its dehumanizing effect on them— in the Āelds they become robot-­like. ­Here, too, the lettuce is more than produce or a reference to the Salinas boycott. Both the En­glish “lettuce” and the Spanish “lechuga” are slang terms for “money,” in this case “crops” g­ oing into only the grower’s pocket. While the lettuce workers’ strike might have been the focus of nightly tele­vi­sion news programs, many mainstream Americans had ­little empathy for the concerns of the Filipino (in the case of the lettuce strike) or Mexican American (the Delano grape strike) farm laborers. Such ­people ­were seen only in terms of their jobs: farm laborers, gardeners, and maids. Their only social identity was that of servants in white h ­ ouse­holds. Other­wise they went about their daily tasks largely unnoticed by their middle-­ and upper-­ class employers. The invisibility of the Mexican Americans in A nglo society is the topic of Humanscape 68: K itchen Spanish. In this painting Casas particularizes the domestic worker’s strug­ gle. The tag line “Kitchen Spanish” pertains both to the ethnicity of domestic servants in Texas and to the “Spanglish” typically spoken by upper-­ class Anglos to their Mexican servants—­just enough to tell them what to do but not enough to converse. A do mestic locale is suggested by the projected image of a gleaming, stainless steel kitchen sink with ­running faucet in the background ­behind a c urtain—­suggesting the usually unseen domestic areas of the h ­ ouse. Facing 190  ·  nancy kelker

the spectator in the “theater space” are the realistic Āgures of two Alamo Heights (an exclusive community within greater San Antonio) society ladies who epitomize the Anglo as exploiter, a young Anglo girl and boy who are victims in that they are being trained to follow in the footsteps of their elders, a Siamese cat strategically placed in relation to the maid’s anatomy to read as “pussy” twice, and a white bulldog held on a leash by the younger Anglo w ­ oman to symbolize her status as well as her control of money and power.23 Also included in the scene is the requisite (for upper-­class San Antonio families) Mexican maid, who stands just ­under the ­running ­water as a symbol of the “wetback.” Casas depicts the maid as a c artoon character, a s ort of brown-­skinned “­Little Orphan Annie,” which is just as her Anglo employers see her. As a servant, her personhood is negated in the eyes of her employers: she works for them and she has dark skin, therefore, she is inferior to them. As Constance Cortez suggests, “­Because Casas draws on flat comic-­book characters in his repre­sen­ta­tion of the maid, she becomes less real than t­ hose who employ her or even their pets. She has been repackaged in non-­ threatening Pop Art format—­the speech-­balloon provides us with her automaton responses and underlines her transformation into a mechanized ste­reo­type. She has become one of many other mechanical con­ve­niences in this ­house. The curtain, which has been drawn back, suggests domesticity, but it also symbolizes the theatrical nature of this ­human drama.”24 While the Mexican maid is rendered as a two-­ dimensional ste­reo­type in contrast to the modeled, three-­dimensional Anglo Āgures and their status-­denoting pedigreed pets, it is in­ter­est­ing that only she is given a voice. The fact that she speaks suggests a humanity denied the dumb (in both senses of the word) Anglo Āgures around her. In her speech balloon are seemingly rote responses to the demands of her employers and presumably their pets: “Si, Niño. . . . ​Si, Niña. . . . ​ Si, Senoras. . . . ​Si, Gato. . . . ​Si, Perra . . .” But ­there is more to this maid’s litany than meets the eye. Casas is a man who loves languages and who

FIG. 20.3. Mel Casas, Humanscape 70: Comic Whitewash, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 72 × 97 in. Image courtesy of Grace Casas.

is cognizant of not only the power of words but also their subtle shades of meaning. The maid’s replies to the ­children and ­women are in c haracter with her status as a domestic, but consider the responses to the implied demands of the animals. Is it just that her status, in t he eyes of her Anglo employers, is lower than that of the ­house­hold pets? What o ­ rders could a dog a nd cat give? Furthermore, why does Casas speciĀcally sex the animals as the opposite of the standardized nonspeciĀc species gender designations of cats as “she” or “female” and dogs a s “he” or “male”—­especially ­after making an overt sexual point in his placement of the cat against the body of the maid? Possibly, it is b ­ ecause the two animals are intended to be visual red herrings. In colloquial Spanish, the masculine gato is not just a male cat but also a slang term for a “moneybag,” a “rich and miserly person,” or, as in En ­glish, a

“fat cat,” while the feminine perra is a “bitch” in both senses of that word. The maid is not simply answering the demands of the animals, but her responses to them express her hostility ­toward her exploitative employers and their dehumanizing treatment of her. As a k een observer of social intercourse in American life, Casas realized that the pro­cesses of ­human degradation, detailed in Humanscapes 65 and 68, cannot be accomplished overnight; suppression of ambition and negation of self-­worth require time and consistency. Dehumanization must begin at an insidiously early age to succeed. In Humanscape 70: Comic Whitewash (Āg. 20.3), Casas explores “the message of the medium,” to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan. Much of the social theory of that era revolved around the ways in which ­children learned aggressive be­hav­ior. The psychologist Albert Bandura proposed that Mel Ca sa s: Red efining Amer ­i ­c a  ·  191

c­ hildren acquired be­hav­iors of all kinds through observational learning and social modeling. Thus, they mimic the be­hav­iors of older adolescents and adults they encounter in actuality or in the virtual real­ity of tele­vi­sion and media, such as comic books, speciĀcally aimed at them. In this painting we are presented with popu­lar comic heroes who carry the coded ethnic messages used to indoctrinate the young, both minority and mainstream. An all-­white sextet of comic heroes—­ Batman, Superman, Thor, Captain Amer­i­ca, Spiderman, and Hawkman—­emerge from the edges of a d ark, star-­strewn VistaVision screen. The center of the screen has been canceled by a fresh smear of dripping whitewash. The audience for this comic book show is a single young boy, possibly Hispanic, who, enthralled by the powers of the superheroes, thinks, “wo w.” But as Casas reveals in the chart he devised for this painting, t­ here is nothing funny about t­ hese comic characters or the messages they communicate to a young minority audience. From t­ hese cartoon exemplars, the boy learns that virtue, power, and society’s approbation belong to t­ hose who look like the heroes, who have “Band-­Aid colored flesh” as the heroes do. He learns that if he is like them, he is superior to t­ hose who are dif­fer­ent from him and the heroes. If he is dif­fer­ent, the subconscious message is that he is unwanted, that he has no power, or that he is believed to be part of a criminal population in league against the heroic forces of “good.” Subtly, he is debased and demoralized by t­ hese images; his spirit is killed by them. Indeed, t­ here is nothing at all humorous about ­these comic superheroes. Casas’s period of Chicano art activism ended for all intents and purposes in N ovember  1973 when he resigned as president of Con Safo over a dispute with the membership about their participation in the preparation of a national grant proposal.25 During the Reagan years, when the West and cowboys w ­ ere back in vogue, Casas painted several works that reference Mexican culture. However, ­these ­later paintings lack the cutting-­ edge social commentary of Casas’s “Chicano” pe-

192 ·  nancy kelker

riod; instead they pres­ent a tourism bureau folkloric construction of Tex-­Mex salsa culture, and this is, of course, the visual conundrum intended to make the viewer reexamine his cultural vision and concepts. In e­ very de­cade Casas’s paintings reflect the myriad concerns of the time; to brand him and his art based on only one concern is to miss the point of his work entirely. As Casas has said, “The Chicano movement, which I tried to help, is just a p hase of my life. You know, that same way that I was very anti-­Nixon, very anti-­ Vietnam. That’s another phase of my life.”26 Notes This chapter was originally published as Nancy Kelker, “Redefining Amer­i­ca: The Civil Rights Movements,” in Mel Casas: Artist as Cultural Adjuster (Lascassas, TN: Highship Press, 2014), 42–65. 1. Mel Casas, working chart for Humanscape 62, “Brownies of the Southwest,” sent as part of a personal communication, August 20, 2003. Humanscape 62 © Mel Casas. 2. Philip Henry Sheridan, statement attributed to him at Fort Cobb in January 1869. 3. Casas, personal communication. 4. José Guadalupe Posada was a nineteenth-­century Mexican printmaker who created satirical images of skeletons performing everyday activities for the popu­lar broadsides. 5. Casas, personal communication. 6. Jacinto Quirarte, “Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano Art: Two Views,” in Mexican American Artists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), 41. 7. Quirarte, “Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano Art,” xx. 8. Holland Cotter, “Beyond Multiculturalism, Freedom?,” New York Times, July 29, 2001, 1 and 28. 9. Cotter, “Beyond Multiculturalism,” 1. 10. Pintores de Aztlán was an early Chicano artists group in San Antonio. 11.Cacique is the Spanish term for a native chief, thus caciquismo would translate as leadership of an imperious nature. 12.“La Movida Con Safo,” C/S: Con Safos Magazine 1, no. 1 (1968). 13. Paul Karlstrom, Oral History Interview with Mel Casas, August 14 and 16, 1996, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., liv.

14. Nancy L. Kelker, unpublished interview with Mel Casas, May 15–19, 2000, San Antonio, TX, 15. 15. Kelker interview with Casas, 15. 16. Mel Casas, “Chicano Art: Stepping into the ­Future,” Brown Paper Report, December 19, 1971, 1. 17. Ruben R. Peña, “Mel Casas,” Business and the Arts (September/October 1979): 15. 18. Casas, “Chicano Art,” 1. 19. Mel Casas, “Chicano Artists: Contingency ­Factors,” Chicano Art: A Saccadic Scanning (1973): 4,http://­ latinoartcommunity​.­org​/­community​/­ChicArt​/­ArtistDir​ /­MelCas​.­html. 20. Casas, “Chicano Artists,” 4.

21. Casas, personal communication. 22.Wayne “Chris” Hartmire, “The Lettuce Strike and Boycott: Farmworkers’ Continuing Strug­gle for Self-­ Determination,” February 1973, Farmworker Documentation Proj­ect, UC San Diego Library, https://­libraries​.­ucsd​.­edu​ /­farmworkermovement​/­essays​/e ­ ssays​/­MillerArchive​/­. 23. Casas, personal communication. 24. Cheech Marin, Chicano Visions: American Paint­ers on the Verge (New York: Bullfinch, 2002), 37. 25. Ruben C. Cordova, “Con Safo: San Antonio’s Chicano Artist Group and Its Legacy,” ArtLies, no. 25 (winter 1999–2000): 18–21, 24. 26. Karlstrom, Oral History Interview, ii.

Mel Ca sa s: Red efining Amer ­i ­c a  ·  193

r o bb her nánd ez

21.Drawing Offensive / Offensive Drawing  ·  2014 ­Toward a Theory of Mariconógraphy

DeĀning maricón is a difficult undertaking. The meaning derives from a c ulturally speciĀc slippage of social, geographic, linguistic, and historical contexts that offer inconsistent but related associations with emasculation, effeminacy, penetrability, and homosexual inferiority.1 According to Jaime Manrique, “Maricón is a p erson not to be taken seriously, an object of derision. Without exception, maricón is used as a way to dismiss a gay man as an incomplete and worthless kind of person.”2 As a slur, “maricón” evokes a vehement rejection of same-­sex desire and in par­tic­u­lar the humiliating vulnerabilities of the penetrated sexual subject. As a rhetorical term, it partakes in a broader misogynistic proj­ect of eradicating male fragility, delicacy, and a perceived predisposition for exaggerated feminine mannerisms, be­hav­iors, and preferences. Together, ­these varied meanings undergird what Daniel Enrique Pérez calls the “maricón paradigm,” the reciprocal dialectics of Latino cultural machismo and mariconismo.3 According to Pérez, “All Chicanos embody some ele­ments of machismo irrespective of their sexual identity.

A  direct correlative would be that all Chicanos also embody some ele­ments of mariconismo.”4 A visual study of this paradigm is merited, as it underscores the seen/unseen relationship across ­these poles of masculinity. The interde­pen­dency of this couplet provides the basis from which mariconógraphy proceeds. At its foundation, mariconógraphy understands this fulcrum and implicitly empowers maricón imagery by asserting and exploiting its preeminent threat to a fragile image system of Latino heteromasculinist visibility. Evidence of this threat is clearly shown in visual and per­for­mance sights/sites from Latina/o literary texts. With exaggerated bodily movement, gesture, or facial affectation, maricones can disorient the heteronormative vision of the urban landscape in a manner that assaults the eye. The character Amalia Gomez provides an instructional example in J ohn Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (1991). As Amalia sojourns along Hollywood Boulevard, her experience of the heteronormative L.A. environment is disturbed by a vision of flamboyant bodily utterances: “Walking ­toward her, fluttering, was a

flurry of young men. Two w ­ ere blond, bleached blond, another was Mexican, the fourth black—­ all wore make-up. Maricónes! Amalia thought. Some young men whistled derisively at them from a passing car. The effeminate young men exaggerated the movements of their hips. Amalia turned away from them.”5 Amalia’s visual revulsion is similarly rehearsed in Piri Thomas’s gritty Nuyorican memoir, Down ­These Mean Streets (1967).6 Anticipating a v isit to the “maricones’ pad,” where hypermasculine sexual mastery was shown through the deĀlement, penetration, and violent assault of a lisping Puerto Rican “faggot,” Piri and his boys sit on a Harlem apartment stoop surveying the barrio, where “the talk turned way out, on faggots and their asses which, swinging from side to side, could make a g irl look ridicu­lous like she ­wasn’t moving.”7 Though Rechy’s and Thomas’s literary portraits arguably support the deĀnition of the maricón as abject through repugnant pre­ sen­ta­tions, they also proj­ect power­ful images of maricones that nonetheless share a predisposition for exaggerated movement, startling appearance, and visual disruption. The movement of a maricón’s hips is enough to menace, stun, and jolt Latina/o heteronormative vision away from banal barrio happenings and spatial order. Through a resistant reading of mariconógrapy, it is pos­si­ble to reclaim the shocking charge of this sight and discern how daring, risky, brazen, and confrontational images threaten and challenge. In the face of subordinated cultural invisibility, public hostility, and daily encounters of harassment and vio­lence, “maricones,” as Manrique reminds us, “can be the Āercest ­people.”8 Traces of t­ hese audacious and Āerce self-­ articulations can be found in t he early experimental per­for­mance art of Robert Legorreta and Mundo Meza from East Los Angeles, from 1969 to 1972. Using found materials, barrio detritus, luminous fabrics, and ­women’s clothing to fabricate what Julia Bryan-­Wilson calls a “ queer hand-­made aesthetic,” they ruptured the mundane happenings of the barrio, provoking urban residents into a frenzy.9 As Legorreta recalls in an

interview, “I was in ju­nior high, around fourteen years old. I met Mundo right about that time and became a team, me and Mundo, r­ unning up and down Whittier Boulevard in this semidrag to open ­people’s minds. Of course, ­there was an ele­ ment of our society at that time that c­ ouldn’t dig it. We had knives and guns pulled on us at parties. I almost got killed.”10 Seizing the streets, parks, mercados, and schools of East Los Angeles, their outrageous embodiments tested and “liberated” the bounds of Chicano gender and sexual conformity. The infamous Caca-­Roaches Have No Friends per­for­ mance at Belvedere Park on November 20, 1969, provides an impor­tant case in point.11 Written by a reclusive young artist known only as Gronk, this experimental show correlates the cockroach, an insidious racialized discourse of Mexicans as L.A.’s unwanted pests, with caca, Spanish for ­human ­excrement. The per­for­mance positions the East L.A. spectator in the Ālth, confronted by the socially repulsive, and pressed against the symbolic asshole of the fraught Chicano cultural condition. Emerging from this scatological waste was Legorreta dressed as Cyclona, who marshaled the Caca-­Roaches attired in b lack lingerie, fur, and white face p aint. An aggressive red lipstick bloodied his mouth. The same crimson color was found on his Āngernails. Photo­documentation from this show reveals Cyclona teasing the public. He raises his skirt provocatively, showing his furry thigh. In another snapshot, he exposes his odorous armpit deĀantly in w hat Legorreta called “a protest against gerontocracy.”12 A crowd of unsuspecting barrio residents was shocked to witness Legorreta and Meza stage a sim ulated orgy and public castration in the infamous “cock scene.”13 The outrage caused by t­ hese salacious actions demonstrates how mariconographic tactics challenged complicit Latino heteromasculine ocular authority and undermined the spatialization of heteronormativity in the L.A. barrio landscape. That is, Legorreta and Meza’s interventionist counterappearances destabilized the social reproduction of masculine space in a r eversal of machista self-­image that pervaded murals like Dra wing O ffens ive / Offens ive Dra wing  ·  195

[Wayne] Healy’s. “I always say East L.A. was like a ­giant rubber,” Legorreta told Elston Carr from L.A. Weekly in 1994. “[It] was ready to explode.”14 A similarly uninhibited mediation of barrio space enacted through tactics of self-­fashioning and public display was evoked in John C. Goss’s classic docudrama Wild Life (1985), also set in East Los Angeles. The Ālm, ironically released in the same year as Meza’s death from aids -­related ­causes, sets a symbolic punctuation mark in the broader register of mariconographic imagery, portending the devastation to come. aids is not mentioned in the Ālm and remains a shadow not yet realized in the lives of fifteen-­year-­old Chicanos César and Carlos. Goss’s documentary blends sound stage interviews and personal testimony with a semiethnographic strategy.15 Staged for the beneĀt of Goss as well as the viewer, the young men reenact vignettes modeling “wild life” in a tutorial of the language, fashion, facial affectations, consumer be­hav­iors, and dramatic flair that similarly deĀned mariconographic per­for­ mance in the 1970s. In the Ālm, Goss’s camera advances from the shallow conĀnes of the studio to the preferred “wilds” of East  L.A. He composes an expansive cultural geography for César and Carlos. Dislocated from the more commonly found domesticating environments for teens—­the home or school—­these queer adolescents take their fashion show to the streets, sharing a more profound relationship with vari­ous ele­ments of the barrio cultural landscape: bus stops, alleyways, urban furniture, deteriorated car parts, vacuous doorways, and voids between buildings. Fashioning a look that escapes the private domain, Gabriel Gomez observes that “wild style is a public issue not only in the boys’ clothes themselves, but also in the pro­cess of changing into them. ­These two boys are aware of dominant culture’s prohibitions. They transgress its codes to express themselves as oppositional and further as self-­deĀned. . . . ​ Their self-­presentation hinges on the sexuality expressed in the act.”16 In one instance, the young men explain how Carlos cannot wear his “wild” clothes at home 196  ·  r o bb her nánd ez

­ nder the conservative conditions established u by his Mexican ­mother, who prohibits his efforts to dress like César b ­ ecause “it looks too feminine.”17 As a result, he is forced to disrobe in the streets, seeking refuge in the dark recess of a building, threatened by imposing L.A. s unlight. Goss’s camera takes a stationary position, at Ārst carefully distanced, granting cautious discretion to Carlos’s state of undress. The wide shot foregrounds the mise-­en-­scène. The barrio becomes his dressing room. As a “ wild life” style authority, César helps Carlos dress. He tenderly attends to Carlos’s hair, shaping it, molding it. Finished, he displays a look of g­ reat satisfaction. Much as Meza painted Legorreta’s face w ith technical precision, César partakes in a similar intimate ­labor of image creation. This is further punctuated at the close of the Ālm. Goss returns César to the sound stage, which is lit by the iridescent glow of black light. In the dark silence, César paints his face, contouring its surface. The strokes of fluo­rescent paint reshape his facial plane, applying designs of his queer Chicano self across one half of his epidermal canvas. This Ānal scene is paired with Carlos’s poetic recitation, “Love is knowing you’ll never be lonely again,” in a co rrelating act of self-­image expression drawn against Goss’s juxtaposed edit.18 To construct an image, to look “wild,” and to be a maricón constitute a creative system of self-­display, visual innovation, and social collaboration. Crossing a s patial threshold that limits the sights and mobility of transgressive Chicana/o sexuality and gender through ocular discipline and threats of vio­lence, Legorreta/Meza and César/Carlos reinvest barrio public space, activating it with liberating ends. Mariconógraphy is imbued with ­these acts of spatial re­sis­tance, making places for maricones through tactical self-­image work. A similar sensibility instructs Ec­ua­dor­ian/ Nuyorican spoken-­word poet Emanuel Xavier. In “Mariconcito” (2012), he reappropriates the Spanish term for “­Little Faggot,” disclosing the torment he endured in his domestic space from an alcoholic stepfather, a v iolent ­mother, and a

sexually abusive cousin: “Mariconcito learned to exist in a fantasy world and was smart enough to survive, sure that someday a real man would save him from stupidity. He just smiled aware that one day the joke would be on them.”19 “Learn[ing] to exist” in fantasy, Xavier’s tactical position contests his familial and environmental conditions, performing in a manner reminiscent of the “wild life.” He shares a lived experience that contests and challenges spatial arrest and ocular scrutiny through self-­image conveyance. Like César’s and Carlos’s fantasized reenactments on a sound stage, living “wild” through flashy dress, fash­ion­ able gloss, and Āerce bravado, Xavier echoes a related desire by reimagining his circumstances and appearance. With a playful nod, he suggests that even a mariconcito knows that his survival is not only pos­si­ble but also imminent. Xavier’s poetic self-­reflection challenges his environmental conĀnes by evoking a self-­image that powerfully foresees “the joke would be on them.” Maricones in the Portrait Gallery

While per­for­mance is a constituent part of mariconógraphy, portraiture also participates in t he collaborative impulse from which the maricón self-­image is reclaimed and reexamined. Portraits are critical discursive sights/sites through which personal and social narratives are pictured, contested, and staged. As Ernst Van Alphen reminds us, “Not only does [the portrait] give authority to the self portrayed, but also to the mimetic conception of artistic repre­sen­ta­tion that produces that increase of authority. Since no pictorial genre depends as much on mimetic referentiality as the traditional portrait, it becomes the emblem of that conception.” For con­temporary artists the link among the portraitist, bodily form, and the sitter’s accurate depiction is deconstructed. Such art practices often undermine “the mode of repre­ sen­ta­tion which makes us believe that signiĀer and signiĀed form a unity.”20 In the context of the Chicana/o art movement, image makers revived the genre, Ānding renewed

interest in co nveying, depicting, and recording a corpus of individual heroes, historical Āgures, and iconic myths seldom found in the elite annals of Eu­ro­pean portrait galleries and institutional art museums. In fact, the cata­log from the historic Chicanismo en el Arte exhibition at the L.A. County Museum of Art (May 6–25, 1975) highlights portraiture among the most popu­lar genres represented in t he show. The curators explain, “For several artists, portraiture offers a s trong means of communication. . . . ​Manuel ­Samaniego (California State University, Fullerton) employs some of the vocabulary of the illustrator to portray both the virility and the disadvantage of the Chicano male. Yet the pictorial integrity and emotive conviction of ­these single and group portraits place them beyond illustration.”21 In their evaluation of the work of Samaniego, the curators reconstitute discursively the ways in which portraiture permits “communication,” surpasses mimetic illustration, and performs masculinist narrative. Clearly, this fraternal ideology was an undeniable ele­ment of the genre and instructive to the formative visual vocabulary of early c­ areer male artists. In mariconographic terms, the genre’s conflation with Chicano heteromasculinist visual discourse informs the context for deft visual tactics and interventions. With bodily articulation, self-­imagery, staged subjectivities, and tactical poses, ­these subversive images of the maricón undermine the portrait’s authorial Āeld of vision and heteronormative vocabulary. The collaborative portrait productions of L.A.-­based Chicano artists [Joey] Terrill and [Teddy] ­Sandoval further demonstrate this. The work of Sandoval was a major influence on Terrill’s aesthetic. Terrill Ārst encountered Sandoval’s work at the Chicanarte show at the City of L.A. Municipal Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park in 1975.22 Terrill was stirred by Sandoval’s intaglio color print of an erect penis, which exposed a natu­ral and unapologetic regard between homoerotic and Chicana/o artistic expression. Though the print titled Dear Ted (n.d.) was one of many pieces displayed among the g­ rand scale Brown Power Āsts, United Farm Worker flags, and Aztec Dra wing O ffens ive / Offens ive Dra wing  ·  197

pyramids, it expressed an artistic daring and rebellious disposition that likely stimulated Terrill, an art student at Immaculate Heart College and gradu­ate of Cathedral Catholic High School in Lincoln Heights. According to Terrill, the name “Ted Sandoval” from California State University, Long Beach left a critical impression.23 Terrill’s museum experience was soon followed by his coincidental introduction to Sandoval at Las Escandolosas, an experimental Chicana/o artist salon held at the home of Richard Nieblas. Their connection was quick and instantaneous. Both Terrill and Sandoval ­were fueled by a number of philosophical and po­liti­cal ideas on race, art, and sex. Whereas Sandoval would reference Native American spiritual belief, citing its mystical explanation of two-­spirit ­people, Terrill’s approach resonated with feminist art, lesbian repre­sen­ ta­tion, and, in p ar­tic­u­lar, the self-­portraits of American expatriate lesbian painter Romaine Brooks.24 Terrill’s aesthetic affinity for Brooks was not unfounded, given the art-­historical influence of feminist image production permeating facets of L.A. con­temporary art at the time. His work ­adopted the feminist movement mantra “the personal is po­liti­cal.” We can read his art practices alongside the radical ways in w hich Judy Chicago, Sherry Brody, Miriam Schapiro, and Faith Wilding reworked craft or “femmage”—­ including needlepoint, quilting, crochet, and scrapbooking—­for po­liti­cal ends.25 In par­tic­u­lar, the book art form and feminist collage appealed to Terrill, culminating in a piece he called 30 Lesbian Photos (1975). Promising the reader “Explicit!” photo­graphs of lesbians, the propagandistic quality of the cover art emboldens public fantasy. Rather than reconstitute patriarchal and antilesbian discourses, Terrill reverses a misogynist visual logic disguising a co vert feminist proj­ect ­behind the book cover. Asking several lesbian friends and ­family members to participate in 30 Lesbian Photos, Terrill constructed a p ersonal archive through lesbian self-­representation and image making. Instead of a sensationalist exposé, we Ānd photographic self-­portraits of lesbian everyday life: attending 198  ·  r o bb her nánd ez

college, resting at home, or partying with friends. Minimalist in desig n, each page layout centers on the w ­ oman’s individual photographic submission. The only text on the page is her handwritten name. The photo a­ lbum of lesbian snapshots reflects each ­woman’s artistic contribution to the collection, self-­documentary rec­ord, and ultimately, control over her visual depiction. By subverting the patriarchal gaze, Terrill’s book, a rare yet signiĀcant artistic statement for a homosexual Chicano male artist of the period, challenges the exploitative and objectifying conditions undergirding lesbian repre­sen­ta­tion in A merican popu­lar culture. Furthermore, it demonstrates participatory art making between a C hicana/o image maker and his social network of lesbian friends, colleagues, and f­ amily. Through ­these exchanges of art, politics, and ideology, Terrill and Sandoval sought a name for Chicana/o homo­sexuality. A raci alized homosexual subjectivity could not be pictured fully within the limited and reductive taxonomy of identity categories that included only “homosexual,” “gay,” or “sissy,” in which race is visually irreconcilable with sexuality. Together, they proposed an image-­text strategy “to see” a Chicana/o homosexual subject. The perceptual and intuitive knowledge of “seeing” sexual difference as it was evidenced for him a s a y oung man stayed with Terrill. Homosexuals ­were Anglo men sometimes glimpsed from his aunt’s ­house, which was located just across the street from Tyke’s, a gay bar in Highland Park. ­These men ­were “types,” and, as he would learn from his cousin, they could be detected in t he local laundromat by narrowing decryptions to tidy appearances and clean Āngernails alone.26 Nameless, unseen, and unknown, Chicana/o homo­sexuality was a c ultural nonentity, indiscernible from Terrill’s barrio reference point. Provided the heteromasculinist limitations of Chicana/o iconography and nationalist po­liti­cal discourse in t he movimiento, it was something that could not be fully pictured or crystallized. The term “maricón,” however, provided Terrill and Sandoval with a v isual strategy to reclaim

the vile Spanish slur, opening up a range of artistic expressions much in t he same way “Chicano,” “black,” “Nuyorican,” or “cunt” art also sought liberation through language and cultural intervention. As a s elf-­naming visual statement, the Mexican hostility and stigma of the “faggot” could be reinvested with empowering possibilities and resistant rereadings. Antimaricón sentiment was not only a hazard that young Terrill faced in the hallways of Cathedral Catholic High School but also a repugnant visual discourse prevalent in caricatures, mocking illustrations, and reviled photojournalist exploits in Mexican visual, literary, and print culture. The historical antecedents of maricón iconography might be traced to the event of November 17, 1901, that El Diario del Hogar reported as the “Baile de Sólo Hombres” (Men-­only ball). A massive police raid in Mexico City at a private home led to the arrests of forty-­one men, nineteen of whom ­were reportedly clothed in satin gowns, jeweled earrings, silk fabrics, and corsets.27 Nearly seventy years to the day before Caca-­ Roaches Have No Friends, the critical introduction of Chicana/o avant-­garde per­for­mance art in East Los Angeles, the 1901 police invasion marked homo­sexuality not as an experimental be­hav­ior but as a s ocially or­ga­nized real­ity. According to Robert McKee Irwin, Edward J. McCaughan, and Michelle Nasser, the “clandestine transvestite ball” was not an unusual discovery u ­ nder the shifting economic, technological, and social conditions of Mexico u ­ nder the PorĀriato.28 The notorious scandal, called “Los 41,” concretized the modern Mexican homosexual subject.29 Sensationalist reports persisted for three weeks ­after the incident. As a result, the Mexican print media constituted the “maricón” subject in b oth newspaper copy and pictures. Four vivid illustrations by revered Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada accompanied stories in El Diario del Hogar, creating the visual substitutes for a curious public.30 His most incendiary lithograph, Los 41 Maricones (1901), is a c aricatured portrait of Mexico City’s homosexual underground. Caballeros dressed in elegant attire lead their jubilant

damas across the wood-­paneled floor. Ball gowns swing and agile fabrics blow in choreographies of exquisite movement. At the center of the frame, a ­couple dances, focusing the visual composition. The dama is braced by her partner’s arm; her left hand is flaccid and daintily rests in hi s. She is wistful and unencumbered. Her smile is accented by the thick handlebar moustache, a sy mbol of Mexican virility that adorns the face o f each subject throughout the lithograph. For Posada, the maricón is a c lash of gendered signiĀers—­ exaggerated silhouettes, voluminous hips, bulging breasts, garish mustaches, wide brows, and shorn hair. Los 41 Maricones is a sig ht to mock, a laughable portrait of Mexican male effeminates and buffoons. Though Irwin acknowledges Posada’s “schizophrenic” and “ridiculed” vision of maricones, he also sees ­these images “promot[ing] them affectionately not as detestable criminals but as sympathetic rakes and naughty rascals.”31 What he fails to interrogate are the pictorial strategies Posada employs to typify the maricón image. What Posada and Irwin pres­ent as affection is actually an overly romantic notion of exploitative visual discourses. Maricones need not be depicted as “detestable criminals” to compose contemptible portraits of gender and sexual transgression. A mariconographic reading strategy demands a closer study of the visual vocabularies used to deĀne maricón abjection and thus distinguish how the heteronormative discourse in a Mexican image archive cites/sights sexual difference. ­After all, Posada’s pictorial imaginings had g­ reat consequence for early twentieth-­century Mexican print culture, especially on “what constituted inappropriate male be­hav­ior.”32 As McCaughan notes, Posada’s caricatured vocabulary was influential, even impacting José Clemente Orozco’s contemptible illustrations of maricones as “effeminate, sexually provocative, and objects of derisive humor” in t he socialist newspaper El Machete, and, I might add, in El Ahuizote.33 Posada’s maricón depiction is indicative of a m ore expansive visual repertoire beyond Mexico and better understood in the context Dra wing O ffens ive / Offens ive Dra wing  ·  199

of homo­sexuality in turn-­of-­the-­century Latin Amer­i­ca. Sylvia Molloy argues that “in order to defuse its transgressive and, at the very least, homoerotic charge—[posing] is usually reduced through caricature or dismissed as ‘mere imitation.’ ”34 A m ariconographic reading intensiĀes the exaggerated poses, movements, and posturing employed by Posada. His print works ­were not “affectionate”35 but rather a “defus[ing]”36 visual and literary device of the period. In ­these lithographs, maricones are obedient, frivolous, docile, and ultimately contained by heteromasculinist authority and a machista disciplining gaze. In a Foucauldian sense, Irwin argues that this censuring discourse contradictorily produced public curiosity about Mexican homo­sexuality rather than repressing it.37 In par­tic­u­lar, Posada’s reliance on the imitative pose is of note h ­ ere, as it served as a greater allegory for maricón sexual containment and disarmed same-­sex desire. Posada’s illustrations and the maricón persecution they sanctioned anticipate the mujercito phenomenon in nota roja Mexican print culture. The groundbreaking archival work of Susana Vargas Cervantes identiĀed 286 stories in ¡Alarma! between 1963 and 1986 picturing “mujercitos,” deceitful male-­to-­female cross-­dressers, abhorred as they prey on “unknowing” machos through disguise, trickery, and convincing female illusion. Predicated upon ideas of criminality, exploitation, and sexual anxiety, ­these portrait-­texts represent visual discourses making maricones ­silent. More speciĀcally, ¡Alarma! was influential to ­these artists discernible from Terrill’s shared penchant for scandal in 30 Lesbian Photos and Sandoval’s correspondence art practices. As Rita Gonzalez notes, Sandoval’s collage titled Valle de Lágrimas quotes ¡Alarma!’s design aesthetic, even imitating the tabloid’s logo in his faux magazine cover.38 Hence, Posada’s caricatured maricones and ¡Alarma!’s sensationalist mujercitos offer insight into a Mexican image archive that mariconographic image makers such as Terrill and Sandoval countered through a simi lar reappropriation of the portrait and, more importantly, a reclamation of the allegorical pose. 200  ·  r o bb her nánd ez

At Terrill’s apartment in 1975, he and Sandoval used photography to execute portraits he called the Maricón series (Āg. 21.1). In Āgure 21.1, we see Terrill, direct and determined in appearance. He Ālls the composition, standing face-­forward. His heavy dark brow, moustache, and slicked-­back hair convey a racialized masculinity, one that indexes a familiar impenetrable, virile, and athletic male embodiment. Displaying an urban style resonant among young Chicano men in the 1970s, he demands legibility within the broader vicissitudes of Mexican American masculinity and the barrio. This is further reiterated through the composition of the photo­graph and its reference to the criminal mug shot as well as the “gang portrait,” drawing on the coterminous frontal stare, confrontational posturing, and reappropriation of photographic technology to surveil, control, and police. In his provocative discussion of Chicana/o gang photography, Richard  T. Rodríguez examines the potential danger and risk inherent in the gang portrait. As the subject circulates through the disciplinary powers of the mass media, police enforcement, and the camera lens itself, he or she has the potential to be seen as both subject and suspect. Rodríguez argues, “The goal is to seize the criminal in an attempt to control his/ her purportedly inherent deĀant nature. Not surprisingly, photo­graphs have been used to identify the criminal and to pin down the alleged suspect/ subject of gang activity.”39 In the visual Āeld of the portrait, Terrill and Sandoval borrow from the mug shot and Chicana/o gang vocabulary, crafting intelligibility through related inferences of deĀance, social disobedience, and hypermasculine aggression. However, the mariconographic photocomposition also undermines t­ hese conventions through the textual self-­descriptor “maricon” (sic) branded across Terrill’s chest. His facial affectation and bodily pre­sen­ta­tion in t he portrait signal police surveillance on multiple levels, as a pseudo–­mug shot of the inherent criminality of L.A.’s barrio youth u ­ nder Rodríguez’s premise, as well as the ­imagined perversion of the “sexual outlaw” lurking in the dark corners of the sexual underground.40

FIG. 21.1. Teddy Sandoval with Joey Terrill, Portrait from the Maricón series (photo­graph of Joey Terrill), 1975. Black-­and-­white photo­graph, 4 × 6 in. Image courtesy of the artist’s estate.

Los Angeles in the 1970s was a site of police entrapment, harassment, and bar raids for homosexuals—­ something that Terrill and Sandoval ­were likely to have experienced, observed, or known.41 This sensibility is made clear in Āgure 21.1. By resisting any inviting facial cues, Terrill is made to seem hard and foreboding. His clenched mouth, protruding jaw line, and direct, pointed gaze in timidate the viewer, exteriorizing a public image that upsets the flaccid delicacy of Posada’s maricón buffoons. Terrill’s active posturing is not merely legible among signiĀers of barrio masculinity but also reads as a sexual self-­descriptor. In this instance, he prefers to be seen as the aggressor in the dalliance of male cruising. As he stands against the shallow space of one of his abstract paintings, the portrait indexes his identity as Chicano artist within his pictured self-­expression. The self-­documentary portrait conjoins mariconógraphy with the visual pos-

sibilities of his own artistic repertoire, situating this self-­image articulation among his affinities for Chicana/o art and American abstraction. Whereas recent critical attention to Terrill’s oeuvre, and in par­tic­u­lar his T-­shirt production, has brought attention to the queer exponents of Chicana/o avant-­gardism in E ast Los Angeles in the 1970s, few regard this image work within the growing camera culture, con­temporary art theory, and portraiture practices in C hicana/o conceptualism of the time. Further, the image itself is often interpreted without taking into account its explicit relationship to a broader series of Terrill and Sandoval portrait studies and mariconographic visual exercises and negotiations. For example, in Āgure  21.2, we see a r evised portrait from the same photo shoot. Posed supine, Terrill rests his folded hands on his torso. Whereas his aggressive gaze in Āgure  21.1 appropriates Dra wing O ffens ive / Offens ive Dra wing  ·  201

FIG. 21.2. Teddy Sandoval with Joey Terrill, Portrait from the Maricón series (photo­graph of Joey Terrill), 1975.Black-­and-­white photo­graph, 4 × 6 in. Image courtesy of the artist’s estate.

the criminalizing vocabulary of the mug shot and gang photo­graph, ­here his eyes are closed in passive reflection. No longer demanding self-­ recognition through an unapologetic glare, his internal retreat solicits and invites. The stagey attributes of the photo­graph foreground a s elf-­ objectifying and alluring display. His is a r eceptive body to be looked at, a motionless pose that subverts the intimidating surface typical of Chicano hypermasculine bravado and, in turn, entices voy­eur­is­tic consumption. This tension undergirds the portrait as it pictures a solid masculine body positioned in a fragile repose. Within the visual frame, Terrill has replaced the abstract painting in Āgure 21.1 with a Mexi202  ·  r o bb her nánd ez

can zarape or folk blanket, a c ulturally speciĀc prop on which he lies. B earing the marking of the maricón on his body, his self-­display is a collision of racialized, gendered, and sexualized signiĀers. The image collapses a C hicano masculine virility with a culturally and linguistically speciĀc slur, and the zarape itself is offset by its homoerotic possibility. That is, Terrill returns to the allegorical use of the maricón pose prevalent in Posada’s and Orozco’s reprehensible drawings. Defying homoerotic containment and literalizing his same-­sex desire, he physically has turned his back to the heteronormative dicta and procreative logics of Mexican and Chicana/o nationalism in f­ avor of lurid sexual be­hav­iors, be­hav­iors

lurking just beneath the still surface of the machista in waiting. In both portrait studies, we face t he word “maricon” (sic) stretched across Terrill’s chest. In each frame, his Āt athletic body practices a posture externalizing a pejorative slur in a ra nge of self-­image articulations that confront the hostility and vulgarity of the term. As we read this badge of pride across the text of his body, Terrill and Sandoval ask us to ponder: is this what a maricón looks like? Mariconographic portraiture, in this way, is deĀant and unapologetic. As a practice of visual expression, it ruptures the flamboyant caricatures in P osada’s illustrations and seeks to empower not only through its pictorial modes of repre­sen­ta­tion and pre­sen­ta­tions of self but also in its forthright citation of a sequestered subjectivity within Chicana/o visual culture. ­Here, Terrill and Sandoval create a portrait that is not only salient as Chicano and homosexual but that also stands in for a more extensive communal identity. Aspects of a socially grounded visual analytic can be seen in a collection of Terrill’s acrylic paintings from the early 1980s known as the “clone” series. ­These Āgurative social portraits ­were an impor­tant documentary exercise in his burgeoning aesthetic rejecting a m asculine archetype of gay clones: cowboys, brawny lumberjacks, leather bikers, and Lacoste-­wearing party boys. According to journalist Michael Joseph Gross, this self-­ image formed ­after Stonewall: “Gay ste­reo­types got butch: out went the queens and in came the clones—­hypermasculine, moustachioed men whose big muscles, Levis, and work boots became premium symbols of gay identity.”42 Deconstructing this repetitious and arcane archetype, Terrill’s paintings, including Nine Clones and a Hula T-­Shirt, Clone on a Bicycle, Summer Became an Endless Round of Parties Said the Clone, and Clones Eating Taquitos (ca. early 1980s), interrogated a m odel of gay manhood through visual sarcasm and stinging parody. Clone social portraiture provided Terrill with a m ethod of analy­sis that exposed the absurdity of t­ hese image conventions and illuminated the ways that

racialized signiĀcation was a troubling subject in this world of nondescript gay drones. The series is purposeful and self-­referential, perhaps quoting the visual lessons he learned in a Highland Park laundromat as a young man taught to eye homosexual difference, or in this case, homogeneity. According to Terrill, he exhibited the series at least twice at A Dif­fer­ent Light, a historic gay and lesbian bookstore in Silver Lake. His paintings ­were not always met with the satirical humor he had intended: “I remember that the proprietors . . . ​loved that I was sort of parodying within the gay community and t­ here ­were a c­ ouple of ­people who actually came up to me and said they ­were offended or criticized, ‘why are you making fun of the clone?’ Well think about it? What’s the ­whole concept of being a clone? What about being an individual? W ­ e’re subjugating our individuality to become a p art of a g roup.”43 The clone paintings offer instructional examples of the period, demonstrating how young Chicana/o artists countered this era of gay self-­replication with scrutiny of conformist modes of self-­display, selective mea­sures of male beauty, and the reiteration of image “types.” This critique and its diaristic notes show how the communal ele­ments of his portrait collaborations with Sandoval s­ haped his ­later paint­erly expressions, which grew more reliant on photorealism, autobiographical narrative, and social documentation. In fact, his clone visual commentary was critically informed by the next iteration of mariconographic portrait photography, which more directly positioned barrio queer sexualities against a Eurocentric clone tableau. Terrill and Sandoval’s mariconographic portrait exercises resonated with several friends and acquaintances also seeking ways to display Chicana/o homosexual cultural expression and po­liti­cal identity. By 1976, Terrill produced another series of maricón T-­shirts and, for his Chicana lesbian counter­parts, malflora companion pieces. Literally translated as “bad flower,” malflora is a stigmatizing euphemism for Latinas without the “proper” attributes of feminine fragility and delicacy. Such characterisDra wing O ffens ive / Offens ive Dra wing  ·  203

FIG. 21.3. Joey Terrill, Maricón/Malflora Group Portrait, 1976. Color photo­graph, 4 × 6 in. Image courtesy of the artist’s estate.

tics are conveyed in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them (2007), a novel set in East L.A., in which Turtle is viciously attacked for “behaving like some unholy malflora” ­because she refuses to wear breast-­deĀning accoutrements.44 In this way, Terrill extended the mariconographic visual proj­ect to the malflora, something anticipated by his formative participatory art proj­ects such as 30 Lesbian Photos. In his second generation of T-­shirts, Terrill foregrounds a unif orm yellow façade embellished with dif­fer­ent lettering. Pointedly adopting a blend of graffiti and Old En­glish typography, he made a tactical decision to situate his image work with the calligraphic type pop­u­lar­ ized in the barrio vernacular (Āg. 21.3). According to Chicano graffiti artist Chaz Bojórquez, “cholo writing” manipulates the affluent, esteemed, and official authority of the font-­text and applies it as an officially sanctioned signature. Thus, the placa (“tag”) demarcates a social and communal signa204  ·  r o bb her nánd ez

tory inscription upon the barrio. Bojórquez reminds us, “Cholo is much more than just graffiti. It’s a lifestyle. . . . ​This style of graffiti is written by the neighborhood for the neighborhood.”45 By literally drawing on this traditional barrio typography in his second iteration of the portrait-­ texts, Terrill employs the Chicano hypermasculine connotations of the typesetting for the unifying ends of maricón/malflora community. In his assessment of Terrill’s work, Rodríguez examines the wide dissemination of maricón and malflora ­T-­shirts as “performative politics” but understates the signiĀcance of the alternate typographies between dif­fer­ent cycles of T-­shirt production in 1975–76, especially in r elationship to the larger context of con­temporary art practice and Terrill and Sandoval’s collaborative oeuvre.46 In 1975, Terrill and Sandoval’s initial mariconographic portraits conveyed racialized and sexualized signiĀcation without an overt appeal to barrio graf-

Āti. Instead, they relied upon a mélange of camera positions and visual cues including self-­display, bodily gesture, props, and, particularly, posing. Terrill’s ­later introduction of cholo writing ushered in a more expansive repertoire of per­for­ mance expression for the wearer of the T-­shirt, not only in gay and lesbian pride parades, as Rodríguez has noted, but also in varied spatial contexts and portrait practices. Maricón and malflora self-­ image articulations stake dif­fer­ent claims, allowing a range of performative possibilities to happen through the interaction of maricones/malfloras, L.A. c ultural landscape, and group portrait photography—­performances that advance Terrill and Sandoval’s mariconographic visual expression on a w ider scale. By encoding their bodies with “cholo writing,” they draw racial and sexual legibility through the very barrio vernacular and typographical design that other­wise disavows them. Embodying the placa, their bodies mutually inscribe a territorial marker of collective self, displaying a maricón/malflora signature that irrefutably belongs to the urban environment. Photographed by Terrill in 1976, Āgure  21.3 documents an ephemeral intervention I call “corporeal tagging,” wherein a co llective group per­ for­mance trespasses and “writes” the maricón and malflora social body against settings in which queer racialized subjects disrupt the spatial-­ocular order of the landscape. Daring both a Eurocentric gay and heteropatriarchal Chicano visual regime to look, see, and know the maricón/malflora Āgure, the resistant “body-­placa” of the photo­graph is a p ictorial challenge to t­ hose archival blind spots that refuse to cite/sight the cultural real­ity of maricones/malfloras in their midst. Indeed, at this time exhibiting t­ hese shirts at pride parades, gay bars, demonstrations, and gay-in rallies was a radical and po­liti­cal declaration. However, the broader aims of Terrill and Sandoval’s mariconographic portrait studies brings the conceptualist art theory of Joseph Beuys’s “social sculpture” to bear on Bojórquez’s spatial aesthetics of the placa. Drawing new relational structures through the reterritorializing power of the barrio signature, Terrill and Sandoval’s T-­shirt enterprise sculpted

a social body tactically negotiating ways to name, affirm, and picture Chicana/o sexual difference. Their pictorial corpus is an audacious statement that reappropriates the pervasive invisibilities of maricón abjection as the material forms from which to empower, “mold[,] and shape the world in which we live.”47 This foundational visual vocabulary in p ortraiture generated other artistic proposals. For Sandoval, this meant combining his training in ceramics with mariconographic image-­texts. Sandoval returned to a familiar register, drawing upon Terrill’s photographic image. According to Terrill, they shared a truly collaborative relationship, frequently sitting for each other in life drawing exercises and studies of the Chicano male form.48 In 1976, Sandoval produced a ceramic mug indexing the Terrill image on its surface. Reducing the literal translation of the sitter’s likeness to basic ele­ ments of line, shape, and form, Terrill is emptied of mimetic signiĀers. The drawing explores his Āguration through negative space. He is a nondescript body, an abstract stand-in for the maricón subject. On the mug, lines shape Terrill’s silhouette, tracing his jaw, expressionless face, and moustache, correlating the blank form with motifs of Mexican masculine virility and homosexual clone culture. The shared visual symbol of the moustache redraws racial and sexual signiĀers and cultural parallels. Might the Mexican machista and the macho clone share predilections for hypermasculine self-­display? As Shaun Cole notes, “Clones wore their garments in a s elf-­ consciously tight manner in o rder to enhance their physical attractiveness. They kept their hair short, beards and moustaches clipped, and clothing Ātted and matched. The clothes worn by the clones have a quite dif­fer­ent meaning from the clothes’ original meaning. . . . ​They infuse[d] the style with a new meaning of eroticism and overt sexuality.”49 Depicting the maricón in a c hest-­baring shirt, Sandoval evokes a similarly suggestive tone in dress. Punctuated by the moustache, this expressionless form is resigniĀed. The Āgure conveys a penchant for Mexican masculinity and homoerotic anonymity. Whereas Dra wing O ffens ive / Offens ive Dra wing  ·  205

earlier mariconographic portrait studies emphasized the disruptive power of the maricón’s sight, Sandoval’s portrait-­text moves closer to a visual obscurity evinced by his omitted eyes. This piece tells us we need not bother with extraneous details, likeness, or personal identiĀcation in t he manner that dominated Chicana/o portraiture and generic conventions at the time. The mariconographic male form is enough. Like a lingering shadow in an unpredictable dance of cruising, he is a lo oming erotic memory made manifest. Through the tactile utility of the decorative art medium, Sandoval’s intervention shows the maricón as a b odily trace, visually experienced from the suggestive ceramic surface, glimpsed by his silhouette, and tasted through the sensory swallow of his contents. In this way, the mariconographic articulation is an allusive yet empowering sight/site of racialized same-­sex desire. In their portrait-­text analyses, Terrill and Sandoval’s varied proposals ruptured insidious maricón visual discourses, inserting risky and unapologetic pictures of Chicana/o sexual transgression in their own way and on their own terms. Notes This chapter was originally published as Robb Hernández, “Drawing Offensive/Offensive Drawing: ­Toward a Theory of Mariconógraphy,” MELUS 39, no. 2 (summer 2014): 121–52. opyright C © Oxford University Press. Used by permission of Oxford University Press. 1. I would be remiss not to acknowledge that “maricón” is a historically specific and culturally varied term. While much of this essay foregrounds its visual imaginings from a Mexican and Mexican American standpoint, in no way is it representative of the image’s rich cultural antecedents in dif­fer­ent Latin American contexts. Mariposa, marica, pato, and joto are among several other linguistic vernaculars and pseudonyms that have constituted this abject figure of Latino heteromasculine derision. Each of ­these terms evokes a grander visual archive and cultural history that deserves additional study in relationship to national, po­liti­cal, and social formations. In Lawrence La Fountain-­Stokes’s inspiring analy­sis of the pato/pata image, he notes, “In Puerto Rico and at other locations

206  ·  r o bb her nánd ez

in the Greater Hispanic Ca­rib­bean (and in its diaspora), to be called pato [male duck] or pata [female duck], far from being a sign of affection, is rather a quite disconcerting and at times traumatic event, for it is to be marked as queer, strange, dif­fer­ent, sexually or gender non-­compliant, or simply marginal. I have always been fascinated and disturbed [that] . . . ​neutral words can have such charged associations and provoke such strong emotions” (Lawrence La Fountain-­Stokes, “Queer Ducks, Puerto Rican Patos, and Jewish-­American Feygelekh: Birds and the Cultural Repre­sen­ta­tion of Homo­sexuality,” CENTRO Journal 19, no. 1 [2007]: 194). 2. Jaime Manrique, Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 112. 3. Daniel Enrique Pérez, “Entre Machos y Maricones: (Re)Covering Chicano Gay Male (Hi)Stories,” in Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Hames-­García and Ernesto Javier Martínez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 143. 4. Pérez, “Entre Machos y Maricones.” 5. John Rechy, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (New York: Grove, 1991), 128. 6. Piri Thomas, Down ­These Mean Streets (1967; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1997), 55. 7. Thomas, Down ­These Mean Streets, 54. 8. Manrique, Eminent Maricones, 114. 9. Julia Bryan-­Wilson, “Handmade Genders: Queer Costuming in San Francisco circa 1970,” in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in Amer­i­ca, 1965–1977, ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 91. 10. Robert Legorreta, “Cyclona and Early Chicano Per­for­mance Art: An Interview with Robert Legorreta,” interview by Jennifer Flores Sternad, GLQ 12, no. 3 (2006): 481. 11. Robb Hernández, The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta-­Cyclona Collection (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2009), 6. 12. Robert Legoretta, personal interview by the author, September 15, 2004, Los Angeles. 13. Hernández, Fire of Life, 8. 14. Robert Legorreta and Mundo Meza, quoted in Elston Carr, “Just Another Painter from East L.A.,” L.A. Weekly, March 18, 1994, 18. 15. For a discussion of the collaborative under­ pinnings among John C. Goss, César, and Carlos, see Gabriel Gomez, “Wild Life: Collaborative Pro­cess and Gay Identity,” Jump Cut 37 (1992): 82–87.

16. Gomez, “Wild Life,” 87. 17. John C. Goss, Wild Life, produced and directed by John C. Goss, videocassette (1985). 18. Goss, Wild Life. 19. Emanuel Xavier, “Mariconcito,” in Americano: Growing Up Gay and Latino in the USA (Bar Harbor, ME: Queer Mojo, 2012), 2. 20. Ernst Van Alphen, “The Portrait’s Dispersal: Concepts of Repre­sen­ta­tion and Subjectivity in Con­temporary Portraiture,” in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997), 241. 21.Chicanismo en el Arte, May 6–25, 1975, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1975), 1–2. 22. This statewide California art show boasted over one hundred artists, becoming one of the first all-­ Chicana/o juried art exhibitions of its size and type (Comité Chicanarte, Chicanarte: An Exhibition Or­ga­nized by the Comité Chicanarte with the Cooperation of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, September 14–­October 12, 1975[Los Angeles: Comité Chicanarte, 1976]).This exhibition preceded Chicanismo en el Arte, which was smaller in scale and centrally featured thirty-­ one emergent Chicana/o artists from twelve regional art schools. Both shows foreground a Chicana/o museum culture emerging in Los Angeles in 1975, and both included art submissions by Teddy Sandoval. 23. JoeyTerrill, personal interview by the author, August 28, 2010, Los Angeles. 24. Terrill interview. 25. Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer, “Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into What ­Women Saved and Assembled—­F EMMAGE (1977–78), ” in Theories and Documents of Con­temporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 151–54. 26. Terrill interview. 27. Robert McKee Irwin, “The Centenary of the Famous 41,” in The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901, ed. Robert McKee Irwin, Edward J. McCaughan, and Michelle Nasser (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 169. 28. Robert McKee Irwin, Edward J. McCaughan, and Michelle Nasser, “Introduction,” in Irwin, McCaughan, and Nasser, Famous 41, 1. 29. Irwin, McCaughan, and Nasser, “Introduction,” 6. 30. Irwin, “Centenary of the Famous 41,” 174. 31. Irwin, “Centenary of the Famous 41,” 174.

32. Edward J. McCaughan, “Gender, Sexuality, and Nation in the Art of Mexican Social Movements,” Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 1 (2002): 102. 33. McCaughan, “Gender, Sexuality, and Nation,” 103. 34. Sylvia Molloy, “The Poetics of Posing,” in Hispanisms and Homosexualities, ed. Robert McKee Irwin and Sylvia Molloy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 147. 35. Irwin, “Centenary of the Famous 41,” 174. 36. Molloy, “Poetics of Posing,” 147. 37. Irwin, “Centenary of the Famous 41,” 174. 38. Rita Gonzalez, “Frida, Homeboys, and the Butch Gardens School of Fine Art,” in Asco: Elite of the Obscure: A Retrospective, 1972–1987, ed. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 322. 39. Richard T. Rodríguez, “On the Subject of Gang Photography,” Aztlán 25, no. 1 (2000): 139. 40. John Rechy, The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary (New York: Dell, 1977). 41. For more on the climate of anti-­homosexual harassment, brutality, and policing in Los Angeles, see Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic, 2006). An additional historic account of federal government–­sanctioned surveillance of the so-­called homosexual menace can be found in David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 42. Michael Joseph Gross, “The Queen Is Dead,” Atlantic Monthly, August 2000, 64. 43. Terrill interview. 44. Helena María Viramontes, Their Dogs Came with Them: A Novel (New York: Atria, 2007), 25. 45. Chaz Bojórquez, “Stroke as Identity,” in Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles, ed. François Chastanet (Arsta, Sweden: Dokument, 2009), 6. 46. Richard T. Rodríguez, “Being and Belonging: Joey ­Terrill’s Per­for­mance of Politics,” Biography 34, no. 3 (2011): 476. 47. Joseph Beuys, “Introduction,” in Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in Amer­i­ca: Writings by and Interviews with the Artist, ed. Carin Kuoni (New York: Four Walls, 1990), 19. 48. Joey Terrill, personal interview with author, ­August 23, 2007. 49. Shaun Cole, “Don We Now Our Gay Apparel”: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth ­Century (New York: Berg, 2000), 95.

Dra wing O ffens ive / Offens ive Dra wing  ·  207

mar c os sánchez- t­ ranq uilino and jo hn t a gg

22. The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide  ·  (1991) 2015 Mobility, Identity, and Buenas Garras

Coats cannot be exchanged for coats . . . —­K ARL MARX

I

Xipe Totec, Our Lord of the Flayed Hide, changes his skin. —­C ARLOS FUENTES

­ ere, up ahead of us, out of our past, a familiar Th Āgure waits. Ese, Louie, “un vato de atolle,” posing in B ogart-­tough role, with his own imaginary ­music, in his dark topcoat and tailor-­made drapes, “his smile as deadly as his vaisas!” “Legs Louie Diamond,” switching the codes of fetishism on the street.1 For, while Marx may have told us that “coats cannot be exchanged for coats,” Louie changed his coat and, like the ­great Aztec God Xipe Totec, Our Lord of the Flayed Hide, in putting on a new skin, put on a new identity. Yet this identity has a strange history in the challenge it posed not only to the codes of respectable American and Mexican society but also to the codes of cultural history.

In 1973, Arturo Madrid-­Barela, Ānding that literary portraits of the pachuco paradoxically “shed more light on his interpreters than on the subject,” called on scholars “to begin the long, laborious pro­cess of peeling back the layers of falsehood and fantasy that obscure [the pachuco’s] true history.”2 The prob­lem, Madrid-­Barela knew, was one of visibility: the visibility for which the pachuco and pachuca dressed, and w ­ ere beaten and imprisoned. The question is ­whether this can be grasped in terms of paring, illuminating, clarifying, or exposing a “true history,” ­free of the mythmakers’ “distortions,”3 outside the conditions of historical narration. As Juan Bruce-­Novoa has written in the context of the debate on repre­sen­ ta­tions of Chicano history and cultural production, “As more and more emphasis is placed on the discursive pro­cess of the creation of a t ext of cultural past, the possibility of returning to a belief in a monological history invested with the status of truth fades.”4

The peeling of history implies the trace of the knife and the hand. But whose vaisa holds the fila? And what is the arc of the cut? As Bruce-­Novoa has argued, it was the continued closure of institutions of national culture to Chicanos that provoked a shift in the 1960s to a strategy of cultural nationalism, constructed out of the totalization of “communal memory and tradition” as a new truth with which to challenge “dominant history” as false or, at best, partial and distorted.5 The mythologizing and the coupled demythologizing of pachuco culture ­were outgrowths of attempts to Āx such truth in n arrative historiographical forms that assimilated themselves to the expressive structure of cultural nationalism. At the same time, the logic of cultural nationalism Āxed the identity of writer and written—­historian and object—in a c ultural affinity that, paradoxically, had to transcend historicity. What was suppressed, ­whether tactically or not, was the play of difference that was the very Āeld of emergence of the pachuco’s game. The pachuco could then be “recovered” as the protosubject of national regeneration, in a nationalist narration grounded on the notion of an essential ethnic identity that expresses itself in cultural form. Yet a troubling residuum remained: the enigmatic prob­lem of the pachuco’s Mexicanness or Americanness, bequeathed by Octavio Paz to all subsequent commentators. It is, however, the essentializing narrative itself that has made this trou­ble and produced the enigma of the pachuco. Desertion from both Mexican and American cultures and insubordinate difference ­were, for war­time superpatriots, the marks of the pachuco’s treason. Seven years l­ ater, Paz looked back with lofty patrician disdain at the scowling, self-­ destructive “sinister clown” as existential casualty: “His ­whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, an enigma. Even his very name is enigmatic: pachuco, a word of uncertain derivation, saying nothing and saying every­thing.”6 The puzzle of the pachuco as failure of identity was premised on a conception of subjectivity as given, unitary, and constitutive, and on a logic of

culture as the expression of this constitutive subject. But ­these are the same assumptions that we encounter in ­later subcultural studies, which see in the zoot suit “the product of a par­tic­u­lar social context”7 and “a shared set of experiences”: a ritual form through which “re­sis­tance can Ānd natu­ral and unconscious expression.” The structure of explanation is the same, which may account for why, as late as 1984, Stuart Cosgrove could still believe that Paz’s description of the pachuco’s delinquency and ambivalence could provide “a framework in which the Zoot Suit can be understood.”8 And what of the notion of pachuco and pachuca culture as a subculture—­subordinated once again? How could this be compatible with the recognition that it had no “parent”; it was neither the child of North Amer­i­ca, nor the orphan of Mexico. Derivation and dominance, as Paz vaguely sensed, ­were what it put at issue. And just as it spoke a double offense to both institutionally solidiĀed national cultures and their violent securities of identity, so it has gone on offending the protocols of cultural histories—­dominant or alternative—­because they do n ot speak its language. By contrast, el pachuco and la pachuca insisted on the textures of language—on el Caló, el  tacuche, los plaqueazos; on their intransigence to monolingual reading—­even while they insolently appropriated the “stinking badges” of the cultures through which they moved. To Paz’s apparent annoyance, they refused to “return to the dress of [their] forebears”9—­and what a b izarre imagining that conjures up. Instead, they got into the dress codes of white male status and normality, playing with the images of an Anglo popu­lar culture’s own masculine “outsiders”—­the southern dandy, the western gambler, the modern urban gangster. They did not, therefore, negate “the very princi­ples” of North American fashion, as Paz tells us,10 but instead subsumed them in their own rhythms, arenas, and exchanges, thereby exposing the limits of Paz’s presumed subject of modernity, comfort, practicality, and con­ve­ nience. Such a strategy repudiated subordination The Pa ch uc o’s Fl a yed Hid e  ·  209

in a hierarchy of national cultures. It was neither “inside” nor “outside”: it ruptured their structures of Otherness, at least for a moment, at least at the best times of the week. Pachuco culture was an assemblage, built from machines for which they never read the manuals. It was a cultural affirmation not by nostalgic return to an imaginary original ­wholeness and past but by appropriation, transgression, reassemblage—­breaking and restructuring the laws of language in t he speech of Caló and ­pochismos,11but also in the languages of the body, gesture, hair, tattoo, dress, and dance, and in the language of space, the city, the barrio, the street. Paz was offended and saw only negativity, a grotesque and anarchic language that said nothing and every­thing; a failure of memory or assimilation. The refusal to choose made no sense. The aggressive visibility only exacerbated the lack of cultural presence. The pachuco was an indecipherable my­thol­ogy. (The pachuca—­the Black ­Widow—­could not even be thought.) And so it goes on. Tragic, heroic, delinquent, or grotesque, without a clear identity or location, the pachuco is a scandal of civilized meaning. In the name of national dignity, for Madrid-­Barela in 1973 as for the uniformed ser­vicemen in t he streets of East Los Angeles exactly thirty years earlier, he must be stripped, peeled, skinned, down to a raw and naked truth.12 Why do they want the pachuco naked? Why do they want his clothes? The pachuco’s tacuche: the padded, Ānger-­length coat with wide lapels; the narrow-­brimmed lid or hat; the draped pants with real pleats, ballooning to the knee then narrowing tightly at the ankle; the looping chain; the double-­ soled shoes, good for dancing El Pachuco and La Pachuquilla to Lalo Guerrero and his Trio Imperial.13 And the pachuca—­dif­fer­ent from but not Other to the male—in the same drape coat, straight black skirt or narrow slacks, flat black shoes or zombie slippers, and beehive hairdo, piled high and decorated, often with razor blades.14 They knew what they ­were putting on, like the Filipinos in Los Angeles and the black youth of Georgia and Harlem, with whom pachuco and pachucas 210 ·  sánchez- ­t ranq uilino and t a gg

exchanged style cues.15 And beyond this, without necessary connection, like ­those other fascinating delinquents of the “Africas” and “jungles” of ­great, industrialized cities: the “flash” cos­ter­mon­ gers of Mayhew’s London,16 the northern scuttlers and their molls,17 the bowery boys and gals of mid-­nineteenth-­century New York City,18 or the sapeurs and sapeuses of con­temporary Kinshasa, with their immodest flashing of labels and their exuberant chanting songs of French, Italian, and Japa­nese designers’ names.19 The clothes made meanings with their bodies. They made them hateful and desirable. They made them vis­i­ble. But, worse than that, they made them readable in a wa y that had to be denied. This is not to suggest that t­ here was ever a Āxed and Ānal reading attached to the clothes, outside a speciĀc moment, framework, or intervention, or that the space of identity they described was ever homogenous or resolved. (Transgressive or not, the suit of clothes torn from the back of the zoot suiter by rioters in Harlem and East Los Angeles in 1943 could appear again on the backs of the working-­class London Teds who fomented the “Race Riots” of Notting Hill in 1958.) The point is that the meanings w ­ ere not unreadable to the cultures they inflamed. You c­ ouldn’t miss a zoot suit or a pompadour in the street—­but not only ­there. They stood out in a discursive space the pachuco and pachuca extended around them: a third space, between the dualities of rural and urban, eastside and westside, Mexican and American, and, arguably, feminine and masculine. Not pure negation. Not mestizo—­half and half—­but an even greater mestizaje.20 A new space: a new Āeld of identity. On e­ ither side of this refusal of Otherness and “this stubborn desire to be dif­fer­ent,”21 the dominant Anglo and estranged Mexican cultures each refused to recognize this new space and continued to blame the pachuco’s corruption on the contamination of the other. Displaced from both, pachucos and pachucas sought to make an identity as mobile as the space of the street they inhabited: mobile, yet legible, at least to ­those who shared the code and could read the placas emblazoned throughout

the barrio. As a s pace of mobility without guarantees, the street articulated a n ew economy of identity and power. It was a p olity marked out, but also made legible, in emphatic and constantly overpainted plaqueazos that served as a c heck on the local abuse of power in the street by their public declaration of an always shifting pattern of relations, as territories, cohorts, friends, and lovers ­were gained and lost. Yet this writing was always on o ­ thers’ walls. The space of the streets was always staked out in advance—­the routes and bound­aries laid down by city planners and patrolled by city police, social workers, and ethnolinguists; the Āxed grid for regulating movement and dissent; the commercial strips for commodity display and consumption; the passages and barriers to and from the colonia or barrio—­never an equal space for the ­housed and the homeless or for men and w ­ omen, even when, in prurient indignation, the Los Angeles newspapers crowed that “Zooter Girls” ­were Āghting with knives and brass knuckles alongside the men.22 The Āeld was one they neither owned nor controlled. And, if the path they cut across it was a path of re­sis­tance, what they made was not a track to something lost or excluded but a path of interference, a r e­sis­tance to reading, for which they paid a h eavy price. And the re­sis­tance has not stopped. It frustrates Madrid-­Barela’s call for “social and economic documentation” that ­will dispel the pachuco’s “mythic dimensions” and expose the “construct of fact and Āction.”23 Madrid-­Barela ­will have no truck with “the empty posturings of brown power or middle-­class accommodations of ethnic politics,”24 but what he offers in their place is a reduction to a duality that insists on a choice pachuco and pachucas had already subverted. This is not to deny that pachucas and pachucos operated on historical and po­liti­cal grounds; that they negotiated changing conditions of urban working-­class life, ­family structure, and employment; or that they found their opportunity in the emerging patterns of a n ew cross-­national and intercultural economy, as war work brought a relative affluence and changed patterns of l­abor

and consumption. It is not to deny that they ­were touched by the desire for the beyond of an impossible integration, by that sad optimism and nostalgia for the f­ uture that is the pathos of modernism. It is to suggest that their interlingual strategy of identity and re­sis­tance was a strategy of the border that ­will not accommodate the old homilies and historiographies, and that the consequences of this have not been engaged. Octavio Romano, for example, decides that “the Pachuco movement was one of the few truly separatist movements in A merican History.” Yet, undoing his own assertion, he goes on, “Even then, it was singularly unique among separatist movements in that it did not seek or even attempt a r eturn to roots and origins. The Pachuco indulged in a self-­separation from history, created his own real­ ity as he went along even to the extent of creating his own language.”25 For t­ hose who wore the zoot suit, it was not a question of discovering beneath the structures of domination an innate individual and collective identity that could be safeguarded and cultivated ­until the po­liti­cal moment destined for its emergence. Pachuco culture was a survival strategy not of purity, of saying less, but rather of saying more, of saying too much, with the wrong accent and intonation, of mixing the meta­phors, making illegal crossings, and continually transforming language so that its effects might never be wholly assimilable to an essential ethnicity, to a “social ecol­ogy” of delinquency, or to the spectacle of multiculturalism and commodiĀed diversity.26 II It’s the secret fantasy of ­every bato in or out of the Chicanada to put on a Zoot Suit and play the Myth más chucote que la chingada. —­LUIS VALDEZ

In 1970, José Montoya buried El Louie. In 1977, he dug him up again to take his pulse. His aim was to combat a loss of cultural memory at a time when el movimiento, the Chicano civil rights movement, seemed to be entering a less militant phase.

The Pa ch uc o’s Fl a yed Hid e  ·  211

In his documentary exhibition and publication Pachuco Art: A Historical Update, which grew out of the Royal Chicano Air Force’s Barrio Art Program in Sacramento, Montoya sought to do this through collective remembering, infusing the imagery and symbolism of the pachuco into con­ temporary Chicano art and barrio life, inverting the ste­reo­type of negation and marginalization, and instilling pride in a new generation of Chicanitos. Against the embarrassed forgetfulness of conservatives and the moralizing denial of leftists, Montoya ensured that the pachuco would push his deĀant foot forward and Āx his stare again, reinvented and reinvested as the prototype of Chicano cultural re­sis­tance, “the Ārst Chicano freedom-­Āghters of the Chicano movement.”27 The paradox, however, was that the pachuco, who never looked back or stood still, should be absorbed into a my­thol­ogy of the past as a means of making sense of pres­ent grounds of strug­gle in terms of an assertion of an essential national identity and cultural expression. The effect was to be underlined in t he following year by the popu­lar success of Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit and the image of Ignacio Gomez’s poster, with its monumental, phallicized Āgure, legs t riumphantly astride the diminutive projection of El Lay’s City Hall (Āg. 22.1). The “enigma” had taken on a new and unambiguous dignity of presence, though Montoya seemed to know that the pachuco remained a troubling if necessary space of absence in t his discourse. (El Louie was always already gone, buried from the start: “Hoy enterraron al Louie.”28 Buried in a textuality, one might say, with which he had known how to play. In all events, necessarily gone—as the very spur to his resurrection in words of remembering.)29 What is at issue in t his resurrection of the pachuco in the late 1970s is not the displacement of militancy by nostalgia. It is the repre­sen­ta­tion of that militancy through the articulation of the pachuco into the politics of identity of a nationalist movement. The prob­lems ­here are the prob­ lems of all nationalisms through which, as Tom Nairn has put it, “socie­ties try to propel themselves forward to certain kinds of goals (industri212 ·  sánchez- ­t ranq uilino and t a gg

alization, prosperity, equality with other ­peoples, ­etc.) by a c ertain sort of regression—by looking inwards, drawing more deeply upon their Indigenous resources, resurrecting past folk-­heroes and myths about themselves and so on.”30 Nationalisms work through such differentiae ­because they have to, caught as they are in t he conflicts of modernity and modernization, in co nditions of uneven development that, within the spaces of colonialist domination, may yield no resources but the geo­graph­i­cal, ethnological, and cultural peculiarities of a region, which, in the rhe­torics of nationalism, become the indices of origins, roots, hidden histories, and shared heritages. Yet, however successful it may be in articulating a populist culture of identity, “all nationalism,” Nairn says, “is both healthy and morbid.”31 What­ever momentum of reidentiĀcation and reterritorialization nationalisms make pos­si­ble, they always turn on their own strategy of terror, their own interiorization of a center, their own essentializing of a dominant frame of differentiation, their own pogroms and expulsions. What­ ever the tactical value of their reactive inversions, nationalist discourses remain prisoner to the very terms and structures they seek to reverse, mirroring their Āxities and exclusions. But the attachment is also deeper and its effects more pervasive and unconscious as nationalisms are fractured by the drive of a desire for the very Other they constitute, denigrate, and expel, yet to which they continue to attribute enormous powers. The crisis of coherence and the instability of such nationalist formations are not, then, only a function of accelerating multinational exchange or globalized communications and travel. They mark an internal crisis—­a crisis, we have been arguing, that the pachuco and pachuca knowingly provoked. Th ­ ere is a de ep contradiction, therefore, in their assimilation, alongside the conquistador and Aztec noble, to the discourse of essential identity and expressive culture, just as ­there is something highly signiĀcant in t he fact that this assimilation was primarily negotiated around the monumentalized Āgure of the male, largely to the exclusion of the pachuca.32

FIG. 22.1. Ignacio Gomez, Zoot Suit, 1980. Watercolor on paper, 24 × 17 in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California. All of None of Us Archive. Gift of the Rossman ­family. © Ignacio Gomez.

The transgressive nature of their mutual practice could not be recognized. Yet, we should be careful ourselves not to be reductive ­here. The Chicano nationalist movement that began in the 1960s was centrally an antiracist, civil rights movement that rejected all previous identities and deĀned Mexican Americans as a regionally diversiĀed, multicultural, and mixed-­ race ­people from whom would arise la nueva raza.33 Nevertheless, its attempt to shape a politics of uniĀcation and nationhood on the basis of the “reclamation” of an Indigenous, nonwhite, family-­ based identity and culture—­“a Bronze ­People with a Bronze Culture”34—­suppressed differences and conflicts in t he historically antagonistic ele­ ments it sought to merge and remained haunted by a duality of assimilation and secession beyond which the pachuca and pachuco had already gone. ­There is another sense, however, in which the rediscovery of pachuco culture was rightfully central. If the term “Chicano,” itself taken over from pachuco vocabulary, can be understood as an assertion not of a los t origin but of a simultaneity and multiplicity of identities,35 then the question of cultural retrieval may be posed as one of engaging not the imagery but the strategy of the pachuco and pachuca—­a strategy, that is, not of Āxed difference but of the transformation of languages and spaces of operation to evade both invisibility and assimilation. From this point of view, the reengagement of the past might lead not to a litany and iconography of masculinist heroics but to the mode of operation of a group such as Asco, founded in 1972 by veteranos of a distinctly dif­fer­ent Chicano youth culture and the East Los Angeles high school “blowouts” of 1968.36 Like the pachucos and pachucas, Asco saw the spaces of cultural barrioization as spaces of transformation and borders as lines to be erased.37 They seemed at odds, therefore, not only with the agencies of a dominant Anglo culture but also with ­those Chicano artists and historians whose sense of cultural identity sprang from the fountainhead of nationalist cultural metaphors—­pre-­Columbian themes, the iconography of the Mexican Revolu-

214 ·  sánchez- ­t ranq uilino and t a gg

tion, and the relics of the imagery of an adapted Roman Catholicism—­rather than from the exhilaration of cultural cross-­dressing. For Asco, the space of this nationalist strategy and its attendant historiography ­were in r uins, but this was not disabling. As Stuart Hall once remarked, “The past is not waiting for us back ­there to recoup our identities against. It is always retold, rediscovered, reinvented. It has to be narrativized. We go to our own pasts through history, through memory, through desire, not as a literal fact.”38 What we begin to make out is another narration of identity, another re­sis­tance. One that asserts a difference yet cannot be absorbed into the pleasures of a global marketing culture. One that locates its dif­fer­ent voice yet ­will not take a stand on the unmoving ground of a defensive fundamentalism. One that speaks its location as more than local yet makes no claim to the universality for its viewpoint or language. One that knows the border and still crosses the line. This is not a new story. It is not one that had to wait for the theorization of the “global postmodern.” As we began to hear it, it drifted into El Lay with the pachucos from El Paso, Texas—­not from Utopia or from Paris, but from “ol’ E.P.T.” and the border with Juárez. A v oice from the borderlands, though the border, as we know, was not always t­ here. Should we Ānd this a surprise, that this uncertain, in-­between space should be the arena of a new formation of identity? Gloria Anzaldúa would remind us, “Borders are set up to deĀne the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live h ­ ere: the squint-­eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-­breed, the half dead: in short, ­those who cross over, pass over, or go through the conĀnes of the ‘normal.’ ”39

FIG. 22.2. Juan Fuentes, Cholo Live, 1980. Lithograph on paper, 25 × 19 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

Glossary atravesados

­those who cross over or are crossed over barrio

a Chicano urban neighborhood bato or Vato

guy, man Caló

argot of the Mexican underworld and pachucos, which can be traced back to the gypsies of Spain, who referred to their language as Caló; thought to have been diffused to Mexico by Spanish bullĀghters la Chicanada

the Chicano ­people la chingada

literal translation: “the fucked one,” “the beaten-­down one”; death, hell chucote

abbreviation of pachucote colonia

a Chicano rural neighborhood ese

say, hey, guy, him, you fila

knife (pachuco; from filero, colloquial Mexican) garras

clothes (pachuco; from New Mexican dialect for “rags”); buenas garras are Āne clothes pachuco, pachuca

originally a man or ­woman from El Paso, Texas (El Pachuco) placa, plaqueazo

Chicano public “graffiti” signature, emblem, or sign pochismos

Anglicismos, which are of two main types: En­glish words that have been made into Spanish nouns or verbs through Hispanization or changes in spelling or pronunciation (for example, birria for “beer”); and En­glish or American slang expressions that have been translated into Spanish (for example, pegarle for “to beat it”) tacuche

suit (pachuco for “zoot suit”)

216 ·  sánchez- ­t ranq uilino and t a gg

vaisa

hand (pachuco for “hand”; “grip,” “like a vice”) un vato de atolle

a man of high integrity and strong character veterano

a pachuco or veteran of the Los Angeles “Zoot-­Suit Riots” of 1943; more generally, a veteran member of a youth gang, long-­time barrio resident, or a Chicano community elder Notes This version of the essay was revised in 2015.The original essay was published in 1991 as“The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide: The Museum, Identity, and Buenas Garras,” in Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991).The authors’ preferred version was published as “The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide” in John Tagg, Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics, and the Discursive Field (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Reproduced by permission of Palgrave Macmillan and University of Minnesota Press. Chapter epigraphs: Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy, vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 132; aCrlos Fuentes, A Change of Skin, translated by Sam Hileman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 371. Section 2 epigraph: Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit: An American Play, 1978, revised script, July 11, 1978, Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Although Valdez’s historic play has never been published, versions of this line are often quoted in discussions; see Jorge A. Huerta, “The Ultimate Pachuco: Zoot Suit,” in Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual Press / Editorial Bilingue, 1982), 174–85. oFr timely Chicana feminist analyses of Zoot Suit and Chicano theater, see Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano, “The Female Subject in Chicano Theatre: Sexuality, ‘Race,’ and Class,” Theatre Journal 38, no. 4 (December 1986): 389–407; and Yolanda Broyles Gonzalez, “­Toward a Re-­vision of Chicano Theatre History: The ­Women of El Teatro Campesino,” in Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Con­temporary ­Women’s Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 209–39. 1. José Montoya, “El Louie,” Rascatripas, vol. 2 (Oakland, CA, 1970); republished in Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican

American Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner (New York: Random House, 1972), 333–37. 2. Arturo Madrid-­Barela, “In Search of the Au­then­tic Pachuco: An Interpretive Essay,” Aztlán 4, no. 1 (spring 1973): 57, 31. 3. Madrid-­Barela, “In Search of the Au­then­tic Pachuco,” 32. 4. Juan Bruce-­Novoa, “History as Content, History as Act: The Chicano Novel,” Aztlán 16, no. 1 (1987): 42. 5. Bruce-­Novoa, “History as Content,” 41–42. 6. Octavio Paz, “The Pachuco and Other Extremes,” in The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 14. For a more extended analy­sis of this essay, see Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino, “Mano a Mano: An Essay on the Repre­sen­ta­tion of the Zoot Suit and Its Misrepre­sen­ta­tion by Octavio Paz,” LAICA Journal (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Institute of Con­temporary Art), no. 49 (winter 1987): 34–42. 7. Stuart Cosgrove, “The Zoot Suit and Style Warfare,” in Zoot Suits and Second-­Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and ­Music, ed. Angela McRobbie (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 5, 8, 20; reprinted from History Workshop Journal 18, no. 1 (October 1, 1984): 77–91. 8. Cosgrove, “Zoot Suit,” 5–6. 9. Paz, “Pachuco,” 16. 10. Paz, “Pachuco,” 15. 11.Pochismos, or Anglicismos, are translated and Hispanized En­glish words taken over into southwestern interlingual slang. Caló draws on southwestern Spanish, regional dialect, Mexican slang, and words that have changed ­little in form and meaning from Spanish gypsy slang of the fifteenth ­century; but it is also a ­language of constant innovation, kept in restrictive usage by frequent and rapid changes of content through the invention of new terms. See George Carpenter Barker, “Pachuco: An American-­Spanish Argot and Its ­Social Functions in Tucson, Arizona,” Social Science Bulletin 18, University of Arizona Bulletin 21, no. 1 (January 1950): 16. See also Raphael Jesús Gonzales, “Pachuco: The Birth of a Creole Language,” Arizona Quarterly 23, no. 4 (winter 1967): 343–56. 12. See Mauriclo Mazón, The Zoot-­Suit Riots: The Psy­ chol­ogy of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984). 13.Barker, “Pachuco,” 39. 14. See, for example, Beatrice Griffith, American Me (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 47. 15. See Cosgrove, “Zoot Suit”; Ralph H. Turner and Samuel J. Surace, “Zoot-­Suiters and Mexicans,” in Racism in California: A Reader in the History of Oppression, ed.

Roger Daniels and Spencer C. Olm (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 210–19; teve S Chibnall, “Whistle and Zoot: The Changing Meaning of a Suit of Clothes,” History Workshop Journal 20 (1985): 56–81; and Kobena Mercer, “Black Hair/ Style Politics,” New Formations 3 (winter 1987): 33–54. 16. See Henry Mayhew, London ­Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, The London Street Folk (London: Frank Cass, 1851), 4–61, especially“Language of Cos­ter­mon­gers,” 23–24, and“Of the Dress of Cos­ter­mon­gers,” 51–52. See also Dick Hebdige, “Hiding in the Light: Youth Surveillance and Display,” in Hiding in the Light: On Images and T­ hings (London: Comedia / Routledge, 1988), 17–36. 17. See R. Roberts, The Classic Slum (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1971). 18. See Christine Stansell, City of ­Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 89–101. eSe also Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (New York: D. Appleton, 1931); and Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last Hundred Years (New York: Random House, 1951). Con­temporary accounts and journalism include George C. Foster, New York by Gas-­Light (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1850); Abram C. Dayton, Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York (New York: G. W. Harlan, 1882); and George Ellington, The ­Women of New York, or the Underworld of the ­Great City (New York: Arno Press, 1869). 19. Michael Macintyre, “Hot Couture,” Face 2, no. 14 (November 1989): 84–89. 20. See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 5. 21.Paz, “Pachuco,” 15. 22. See José Montoya, Pachuco Art: A Historical Update (Sacramento, CA: Royal Chicano Air Force, 1977). 23. Madrid-­Barela, “In Search of the Au­then­tic Pachuco,” 58 and 31. 24. Madrid-­Barela, “In Search of the Au­then­tic Pachuco,” 57. 25. Octavio Romano, “The Historical and Intellectual Presence of Mexican Americans,” El Grito 2, no. 2 (winter 1969): 32–46, quoted in Juan Bruce-­Novoa, Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 219. 26. The emergence of “youth” as a psychosocial category linked to the notion that the city was divided and or­ga­nized into distinct “ecological” areas, each with its own “world,” was developed by the Chicago School of Social Ecol­ogy from the late 1920s on. See R. E. Pam and A. D. Mc­Ken­zie, eds., The City (Chicago: University of

The Pa ch uc o’s Fl a yed Hid e  ·  217

Chicago Press, 1967); and R. E. Faris, Chicago Sociology, 1920–1932(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). For an application of this model to research on Chicano youth gang members and prison inmates in the Chicano Pinto Research Proj­ect, see Joan W. Moore, Homeboys: Gangs, Drugs, and Prison in the Barrios of Los Angeles (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1978). On the question of cultural innovation and the diversification of commodity production and marketing, see, for example, Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics.” Nevertheless, even if, as Mercer argues, the zoot suit was absorbed into the “bold look” of mainstream 1949 “menswear,” what was repressed in this incorporation? And what repressed meanings returned to weigh “like a nightmare” on the backs of the wearers? In other re­spects, and aside from Mercer’s continued attachment to subcultural theory, our analy­sis comes close to his notion of the “creolization” of intercultural forms and his analy­sis of black dress and hairstyles in the 1940s as encoding “a refusal of passivity by way of a creolizing accentuation and subtle inflection of given ele­ments, codes and conventions” (Mercer, “Black Hair/ Style Politics,” 47). 27. Montoya, Pachuco Art, 1. 28. The opening line of Montoya’s “El Louie.” 29. In George Barker’s classic study of pachuco argot, for example, “Luey” is one of Barker’s in­for­mants and dramatis personae in the imaginary pachuco dialogue in which, as in Montoya’s poem, “Luey” stages a fight with “Goat”; Barker, “Pachuco,” 34–35. Montoya insisted that La Chiva actually existed, though reminded by Bruce Novoa that la chiva is slang for “heroin” and an occasional euphemism for la chingada, “the fucked one,” or death (Bruce-­Novoa, Chicano Poetry, 14–25). 30. Tom Nairn, “The Modern Janus,” in The Break-­Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-­Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1981), 348. 31. Nairn, “Modern Janus,” 347. 32.­There are impor­tant exceptions, however, in the work of Judy Baca, Isabel Castro, and, indeed, of José Montoya himself.

218 ·  sánchez- ­t ranq uilino and t a gg

33. See Carlos Muñoz Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (London: Verso, 1989), 15–16. 34. “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, Denver, Colorado, 1969. Perhaps the tensions of this nationalism are most poignantly gathered in the notion of “our Mestizo Nation.” See Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya and Francisco Lomeli (Albuquerque, NM: Academia / El Norte Publications, 1989), 1–5. 35. Barker, “Pachuco,” 41.The simultaneity of identities signified by the term “Chicano” is what characterizes “American” identity when that identity is not reduced to a mythical Anglo-­European paradigm; see Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino, “Murales del Movimiento: Chicano Murals and the Discourses of Art and Americanization,” in Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals, ed. Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-­Sánchez (Venice, CA: Social and Public Art Resource Center, 1990), 85–101. 36. Members of the group had earlier distinguished themselves as “jetters”: Chicano high school students who differentiated themselves from con­temporary cholos and Anglos through fashion codes based not on exaggeration but on sardonic and elegant understatement. The “blowouts” w ­ ere the 1968 walkouts of students from the high schools of East Los Angeles, protesting both the Vietnam War and the discriminatory conditions and lack of resources of their segregated education. 37. Gronk announced that he would be erasing the border in 1980. See Harry Gamboa Jr., “Gronk: Off-­The-­ Wall Artist,” Neworld Magazine 6, no. 4 (July 1980): 33–43. 38. Stuart Hall, “Old and New Ethnicities,” unedited transcript of the second of two lectures delivered in conjunction with the Third Annual Symposium on Current Debates in Art History, Culture, Globalization and the World System: Con­temporary Conditions for the Repre­sen­ ta­tion of Identity, or­ga­nized by Anthony King, Department of Art and Art History, State University of New York at Binghamton, March 14, 1989, 28. 39. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 3.

l a ura e. pér ez

23. Writing on the Social Body  ·  2002 Dresses and Body Ornamentation in Con­temporary Chicana Art

Through body dec oration, concepts of social or der and disorder are depicted and legitimized, or specific power and class structures confirmed or concealed. In all cultures body art expresses the normal and the abnormal, stability and crisis, the sacred and the profane. —­E LIZABETH REICHEL-­D OLMATOFF

­ hether they attempt to appear natu­ral within a W given culture or to create a spectacle of difference within it, as Dick Hebdige described the politics of subcultural styles,1 clothing2 and body decoration signal the nature of membership within a given culture, ­whether it be normal, privileged, marginal, in opposition, or ambiguous. In themselves, dressing and other forms of decorating the body (e.g., cosmetics and other forms of body painting, tattooing, piercing, and scariĀcation) are cultural practices that produce, reproduce, interrupt, or hybridize (and thus produce new) cultural values. The use or repre­sen­ta­tion of dress and body ornamentation in v isual, installation, or performative art practices is, similarly, both symbolic and productive. In con­temporary

culture in the United States, dresses remain particularly charged symbols that mark and produce gender identities, w ­ hether ­these be normative or historically newer forms of constructing and representing femaleness, femininity, or the undecidability of gender, and ­whether ­these are worn by females or males. Dresses, like other forms of dress and body ornamentation, are props in racialized constructions of identities as well.3 Thus, in t he United States, for example, where the majority of domestic workers are Latina or African American and racist assumptions about the inherent or cultural in­equality of ­people of color continue to circulate, the uniform of the servant or nanny is likely to connote w ­ omen of color in p ar­tic­u­lar, while the power suit is more likely to call up images of Euro-­American ­women of par­tic­u­lar classes.4 Indeed, the body itself may be thought of as a social garment.5 From pigment to physical build to comportment, the pre­sen­ta­tion and reception of the body is, following Judith Butler, part of the per­for­mance that reinscribes or interrupts social roles attributed as normal to racialized and

gendered bodies, ­whether ­these be “white” male bodies or ­those of ­women “of color.”6 Thus clothing and ornamentation in cr oss-­dressing, passing (e.g., for “white”), voguing, and subcultural styles transgress expectations according to gender, racial, and class roles.7 Within the meta­phor of the social body as text, dress and body ornamentation speak, in this sense, both of how they are inscribed within the social body and how they, in turn, act upon it.8 Dress and body decoration in the Chicana art of the 1980s and 1990s examined in t his chapter call attention to both the body as social and to the social body that constitutes it as such, speciĀcally through gendered and racialized histories of dress, ­labor (in domestic ser­vice and the garment industry), immigration, urban dwelling, academic discourse, art production, and religious belief. In so ­doing, the works of Yolanda López, Ester Hernández, Amalia Mesa-­Bains, Diane Gamboa, and Yreina D. Cervántez flesh out the numerous and conflicting ways in which socially and culturally invisible, or ghostly, bodies ­matter in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s—­particularly ­those of w ­ omen of color.9 Histories of Racialization and the Domestic Uniform: Yolanda López’s The Nanny

“The clothing of humanity is full of profound signiĀcance,” Carl Kohler wrote over one hundred years ago in A History of Costume, “for the ­human spirit not only builds its own body but also fashions its own dress, even though for the most part it leaves the a­ ctual construction to other hands. Men and w ­ omen dress themselves in accordance with the dictates of that g­ reat unknown, the spirit of the time.”10 In Margaret S. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe (1978), San Francisco–­based artist Yolanda López focused precisely on the g­ reat unknown of ­women’s socially and eco­nom­ically invisible ­labor as seamstresses.11 In her installation The Nanny (1994) López endeavored to illuminate the material effects of that other ­great unknown, the spirit of a time (Āg. 23.1). If this spirit is under220  ·  l a ura e. pér ez

stood to be embodied in the social, cultural, and economic practices of a time, then t­ hese can, in turn, be traced in t he dictates of dress within a given culture and historical moment. The Nanny succeeds in such a proj­ect, bringing into view the power differentials among w ­ omen of dif­fer­ent classes and ethnicities, through an exploration of dress and media repre­sen­ta­tion of the relationship between ­women positioned differently by ethnicity and class. At the heart of the installation, as the title suggests, is the theme of subservience as a constant ­factor in terms of how relations between Indigenous Latina w ­ omen and Eu­ro­pean and Euro-­ American ­women have been, and continue to be, historically constituted. The nanny’s uniform hangs between enlarged, ­actual advertisements for airline travel (Eastern Airlines, in a 1961 National Geographic magazine) to Mexico and for the wool industry (in a 1 991 Vogue magazine). López chooses to contextualize her study of domestic ­labor, gender, cultural difference, and ethnicity in t he visual language of ­actual media materials that stage the historical asymmetry of power relations between the so-­called First and Third Worlds. The advertisements mediate the asymmetry through the discourse of tourism. The wool industry advertisement announces that “wool feels new” and implies that the newness of this experience is like exotic travel. The off-­the-­shoulder, “Latin flavor,” clinging wool dress and large hoop earrings worn by a m odel posed in high heels, with legs wide apart, suggest “Mexican SpitĀre” adventures as well. This Euro-­ American or Eu­ro­pean tourist is clearly meant to appear as ­free, chic, and desirable, in c lear contrast to the Indigenous ­woman, who is literally in t he other’s shadow. Her clothing is both worn and s­ imple, and she does not appear to have been physically groomed for the photo­graph. She is pictured static, where the other is dynamic. This same visual strategy, of using the ­woman of color as a foil against which to contrast a “Latinized” Eu­ro­pean ­woman as desirable, functions in the travel poster, as well. Cultural appropriation and consumption are also visualized in this

FIG. 23.1. Yolanda López, The Nanny, from ­Women’s Work Is Never Done series, 1994. Mixed-­media installation, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.

ad, through the folkloric costume that the blond tourist affects and the flowers she bends over to receive. H ­ ere, the gaze of the ­woman of color is Āxed on the tourist, who does not return her gaze but rather focuses on what is presumably her purchase, while the viewer-­as-­consumer’s gaze is drawn to the visually dominating image of the tourist, and then to the other objects symbolizing the exotic and sensual allure of travel to Latin American (e.g., watermelon and flowers). In both corporate advertisements, the w ­ omen of color are vendors, as the domestic worker is of her l­abor, and are made to represent racialized relations of subservience, as the nanny uniform does in the United States, where the majority of domestic workers are w ­ omen of color. The nanny’s dress hangs on a white folding screen, over a hamper containing laundry and Indigenous clay Āgurines, near toys and a p otted cactus. Partic-

ularly ­because of the items that speak of ­house cleaning and personal ser­vice work in addi tion to child care, López’s installation suggests that ­behind the appearance of the speciĀc job description “nanny” lie troubling relations of exploitation by one w ­ oman of another, as sociologist Mary Romero has documented in h er study Maid in the U.S.A (1992). Indeed, the second chapter of Romero’s study of U.S.-­born Chicana w ­ omen engaged in the domestic ser­vice work is titled, as is López’s ongoing series of which The Nanny forms a part, ­Women’s Work Is Never Done. “House­ work is ascribed on the basis of gender,” Romero writes, “and it is further divided along class lines, and in most cases, by race and ethnicity. Domestic ser­vice accentuates the contradiction of race and class in feminism, with privileged w ­ omen of one class using the ­labor of another ­woman to escape aspects of sexism.”12 Writing o n the So ci al B o dy  ·  221

The white folding screen in the installation alludes to middle-­class conventions of hiding washers and the like ­behind screens or doors, and thus to a carefully tended culture of appearances, whereby cleansers, laundry, garbage disposal, kitchen, and domestic ser­vice itself are veiled to the degree pos­si­ble, thus erasing all evidence of the ­labor and “dirty work” b ­ ehind the seemingly effortless impeccable wife and home, an illusion that interestingly is still at work t­ oday. The potted cactus calls to mind two other artworks by López: the installation Cactus Hearts/Barbed Wire Dreams: Media, Myths and Mexicans (1988), produced in collaboration with Ricardo Rees and Larry Herrera, and the video When You Think of Mexico: Commercial Images of Mexicans (1986), in which she explored the history of ste­reo­types about Mexicans and Mexican Americans as represented in Ālms, corporate advertising, souvenirs, clothing, and ­house and garden ornaments. Thus, along with the uniform of the domestic servant (and this includes the nanny), the potted cactus can be read as a symbol of the Mexican or Chicana nanny’s effacement by Euro-­American employers whose sense of superior identity and empowerment derives, in part, from internalizing cultural ste­reo­types of Mexicans and domestic workers as culturally or socially inferior. “Hiring a ­woman from a dif­fer­ent class and ethnic background to do the h ­ ouse­hold ­labor,” Romero writes, “provides white middle-­class ­women with an escape from both the stigma and the drudgery of the work” and helps to veil the unpaid kinds of psychological and symbolic work that the Chicana domestic is commonly called upon to perform as well.13 The theme of cultural and ethnic (or “racial”) difference, staged in t he travel and wool industry advertisements, is represented differently in the installation, through focusing instead on the dress of the “invisible” ­woman of color. The other­ wise nondescript blue-­gray domestic uniform is adorned, beneath the scalloped white collar, with the gray silk-­screened necklace of hands, hearts, and skulls of Coatlicue, a pre-­Columbian goddess of balanced dualities that include life and death. 222  ·  l a ura e. pér ez

This decoration implies the power of the nanny, certainly over the child in h er care. A co lored image of the plumed serpent Quetzalcoátl, the Toltec man-­God of philosophy, technology, and the arts, is drawn above the right pocket of the uniform, and speaks of the nanny’s interior space. In the other pocket is a clear baby b ­ ottle in which is inserted a do llar bill. Between the two pockets, in the pelvic area, is stenciled a photo­graph of a nude mestizo baby. On the back of the dress are photos of Latina/o c­ hildren and a C oatlicue image. The Native American deities imagery and the photographic images on the uniform work to pres­ent the subjectivity of the nanny, against the objectiĀcation of her that is symbolized, and in part produced, by the uniform. Both sets of imagery call attention to a c ulturally dif­fer­ent system of meaning and values that may be operative in an empowering fashion for the installation’s ­imagined Chicana domestic, and to the contrast between how she is seen—­and not seen—in her own h ­ ouse­hold and ethnic culture and t­ hose of her employer. The pre-­Columbian Āgurines thrown in with the laundry point to what may be the more subversive effect of the nanny’s cultural difference, namely, the effect on the ­children. López’s concern with the agency of the nanny brings to mind Laura Alvarez’s multimedia The Double Agent Sirvienta [Servant] series,14 featuring the servant as “an undercover agent posing as a maid on both sides of the border.”15 The image of the infant, the basket of laundry, and the toys in The Nanny together suggest that indeed the work of ­women as nannies engaged in o ther kinds of h ­ ouse­hold ser­vice is never done, for their own homes must be cleaned and their ­children cared for, ­after they have relieved other men and w ­ omen of t­ hese gendered and highly racialized duties. López’s The Nanny suggests that the beauty, vitality, freedom, and pursuit of adventure that the travel and wool industry advertisements represent as the desirable cultural difference of European/Euro-­American ­women is made pos­si­ble “domestically,” as well as abroad, by the economic and gender exploitation of w ­ omen by ­women. Thus, in a n ironic

twist, advertisements exploiting and reinscribing power differentials between “First World” and “Third World” w ­ omen are renarrativized in t he installation as troubling and apt images of what is happening “back home.” By decorating a repre­ sen­ta­tion of the middle-­class domestic space with marketing advertisements articulated through a discourse of tourism that is rooted in hi stories of imperialism, López allows us to see that ­these same intertwined interests are at work in the relations between ­women in familial and national domestic spaces. The juxtaposition of the two domestic spheres (familial and national), as imbricated in common economic and historical relations, examines unquestioned cultural ste­reo­types about both dominant and “minority” cultures and thus works ­toward the denaturalization of racialized relations between ­women, and between p ­ eoples of “First World” and “Third World” origins. The Seams of the Ghostly: Ester Hernández’s Immigrant ­Woman’s Dress

“I often won­der what I would take with me if I had to pick up my life and carry it with me—to be scattered like a seed in the wind,” Ester Hernández wrote in an artist’s statement accompanying her Immigrant ­Woman’s Dress installation, originally shown as part of the Oakland Museum’s 1998 exhibition Day of the Dead: Traditions and Transformations (Āg.  23.2).16 The dress and baggage she created to imagine the geo­graph­i­ cal, cultural, and psychic journey of her grand­ mother, who fled from the Mexican Revolution to the United States with her husband and the artist’s ­mother, who was then six years old, is a transparent, pearl-­colored silk organza dress. The fabric is stamped with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the dismembered Coyolxauhqui, in w hite ink that is barely perceptible against the pale fabric. The dress is lined with images of Mexican and U.S. coins of that period as well, referring to the habit of safekeeping valuables that her grand­mother practiced throughout her life, and that must have served her well

during the dangerous period of her exodus and immigration. To one side, resting next to the dress in a patch of sand, the artist placed a small, chestlike basket, with a shawl and two small bags of corn and chile, symbolizing nourishment and protection lying over it. In the installation, the translucency of the immigrant ­woman’s dress was lit from ­behind, creating a g hostly effect that expressed the idea of the barely vis­i­ble, gendered history to which the piece’s title referred. The dress’s styling—­high neckline, sober collar, long sleeves, and full-­length, layered skirts—­and its installation within an island of sand evoked the transitory pro­cess of the turn-­of-­the-­century journey. The pale and barely perceptible Coyolxauhqui and Guadalupe stamps functioned ambiguously, suggesting a c ultural legacy in the very Āber of the immigrant’s being, yet also a lo w visibility that could be read as a gradual disappearance. The tension between the modest tailoring of the dress and the fabric that hides n othing effectively embodies a di f­fer­ent tension as well, around the limited movement of ­women within patriarchal cultures, and their vulnerability. This uncertain place of the Indian and Mexican female lineage in history and religion is told in the very fabric of a garment that is barely vis­i­ble. What it perhaps symbolizes most is the yearning for a time and a p lace where clothing can be taken to speak, like the gigantic vestments of branches and feathers in Mesa-­Bains’s work, of the honor in which the power­ful female body it clothes is held. Investitures of Power: Amalia Mesa-­Bains’s Venus Envy Chapter III

From the 1980s to the pres­ent, Amalia Mesa-­Bains has used dress and domesticana17 to explore the spaces of ­women’s gendered, and transgressive, social and cultural activities in h er altar-­based installations. Perhaps the culmination of the altar-­installation genre that she explored in more than thirteen major pieces since 1975, Venus Envy Chapter I: Or, the First Holy Communion, Moments Writing o n the So ci al B o dy  ·  223

FIG. 23.2. Ester Hernández, Immigrant ­Woman’s Dress, 1997. Mixed-­media installation, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.

before the End (1993); Venus Envy Chapter II: The Harem and Other Enclosures (1994); and Venus Envy Chapter III: C ihuatlampa, the Place of the ­Giant ­Women (1997)18 might be read as the carefully researched and meditated study of the social and cultural institutions, and the public and domestic spaces and practices that have ­shaped Latina female subjectivity, from the autobiographical pres­ent, across ancestral cultural histories, into the ancient past of prepatriarchal myth uncovered by feminist archaeology, and projecting forward through the pres­ent to postpatriarchal ­futures.19 As the third title indicates, it is also imagining the mythic Cihuatlampa, the place of heroic ­women, in con­temporary terms. All three “chapters” of the Venus Envy installations utilize dresses and gender-­speciĀc domestic or public spaces as organ­izing structures from which to consider the artist’s own, and other w ­ omen’s, shaping by and shaping of their social and cultural environments. Chapter I, for example, explores the gendered narratives of religious and social discourses symbolized by the dresses of Ārst Holy Communion, marriage, and religious ­orders in Roman Catholic Mexican and Mexican American cultures, and the interpenetration between domestic and religious spaces, as symbolized by the juxtaposition of the vanity ­table and the altar of religious ritual. Chapter II continues exploring spaces of feminine enclosure and sociality as the Ārst installation did, but now featuring re-creations of a “harem” and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s convent study, where laboratory and writing desk once again recall the altar and its invocation of the sacred, power, and ofrenda (offering/sacriĀce). ­Here, the desk-­as-­altar Āgures the predicament, sacriĀce, and heroic accomplishment of brilliant ­women such as Sor Juana ­under the patriarchal, religious, and social institutions of seventeenth-­century colonial Mexico, while the altar-­as-­desk speaks to how cultures are “written” or constructed through the gendering of religious practice and experience. As part of the second “chapter” of the trilogy, the desk-­altar resemanticizes the vanity table–­altar of the Ārst installation, interrogating the degrees of relation

among the vanity ­table, the altar, and the desk, particularly from the point of view of how spatial (e.g., domestic, public) segregation and the social limitations of day-­to-­day, as well as occupational or vocational, practices produce and enforce gender and other social identities. On the level of the use of dress, a similar circulation and interrogation of meaning is set in motion. Thus, the Ārst Holy Communion dress, wedding gown, nun’s habit, and the implied priest’s cassock of Chapter I are set in dialogue with the dresses of the Goddess-­Virgin in Closet of the Goddess; with the multiple and culturally varied bodies-­as-­garments of the ­women connoted by the harem; and Ā­nally, with the religious habit donned by the intellectual, creative writer and feminist Juana Ramírez, who found through the convent the most social freedom her time and culture would allow an unmarried woman-­ loving w ­ oman. The semantic function of dress—­ and undress—­seemingly clear in the case of the wedding gown, cassock, nun’s habit, and harem garb, is blurred as t­ hese commingle visually and conceptually in the disparate closet of Venus Envy as potentially exchangeable costumes that upset the social codes of dress and the social status and identity (i.e., sexual, gender, class, “racial”) they are meant to enact when worn according to social propriety. Thus, the dress and undress connoted by the simulation of the harem and nun’s habits both signify sexualities—­enforced sexualities, among other possibilities—­and social disempowerment. However, the reference to Sor Juana speaks to the spectacular possibilities heroically achieved by ­women, in spite of social inequity and enforced subordination. In this sense, the juxtaposition of vari­ous forms of dress, across the gender, historical, and cultural speciĀcities of their normative usage, recalls Marjorie Garber’s insightful discussion of transvestism as practices of dress that signal transgressive crossings, or “category crises” along vari­ous social vectors, pointing to the insufficiency of the social sign, including dress, to ­either deĀne or delimit gender, sexual, class, or racialized identities. “If transvestism offers a cr itique of binary sex and Writing o n the So ci al B o dy  ·  225

gender distinctions,” she writes, “it is not ­because it simply makes such distinctions reversible but ­because it denaturalizes, destabilizes, and defamiliarizes sex and gender signs.”20 To the degree that the harem and the convent are gynosocial spaces, Chapter III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the ­Giant ­Women is, like them, situated in an i­ magined place both within and without patriarchal history. Cihuatlampa is the Mexica (“Aztec”) heaven of heroines who died as result of their Ārst childbirth, as the artist has explained. Cihuatlampa, the installation, however, is populated by the memory and projection (into the past and ­future) of ­women, including the artist, whose acknowledged creativity is not consigned primarily to biological reproduction, and who other­wise exceed the gendered social roles and expectations of their time.21 An exhibition statement for the installation’s opening in 1997 reads, Amalia Mesa-­Bains uses Cihuatlampa as a m eta­ phor for her own experience of being too large for society. It is a cr itique of the restriction of ­those womyn who refuse to keep their proscribed place in the patriarchy. In Cihuatlampa, t­ hese ­giant womyn live beyond the roles that men traditionally assign to them. Cihuatlampa is a place of counterpoint to a patriarchy that tames womyn, purportedly to ensure social order and to guarantee sexual reproduction on male terms. Cihuatlampa is the mythical and spiritual place that enables Amalia Mesa-­Bains to cite/site her collective exploration through cultural material, memory, and the interrogation of sexuality and gender.22

The props in this willful projection of the larger-­ than-­patriarchal-­cultures’ possibilities for ­women and society are The Amazona’s Mirror; the sensually reclining sculpture Cihuateotl (­Woman of Cihuatlampa);23 numerous hanging iris prints; an Archaelogy ­Table;24 Der Wunderkammer: The Room of Miracles; a s helf of feminist and art history books; a miniature perfume garden; two spectacular pieces of clothing, Vestiture . . . ​of Branches, a copper-­mesh dress, nearly twelve feet in height, and Vestiture . . . ​of Feathers, a twenty-­

226  ·  l a ura e. pér ez

foot cape of red, green, and white feathers; and a g­ iant pair of high heels (Āg.  23.3). It is to the Cihuateotl sculpture, the mirror, and the two garments that I wish to turn to now in my discussion of body, dress, and body ornamentation. On one level, the gigantic Cihuateotl (­Woman of Cihuatlampa), covered as it is in green moss, engraved with pre-­Columbian Āgures, and sprinkled with withering Days of the Dead cempaxochitl flowers, seems to represent nothing less than “­Mother Earth,” from Indigenous and other pre-­Christian “pagan” perspectives wherein both “feminine” and “masculine” energies are considered common to all of nature.25 Like the Empress in the Motherpeace (1981) feminist tarot deck by Karen Vogel and Vicki Noble, Earth is represented as abundant and sensual. She is posed as an “Odalisque,” but she visibly enlarges the Western art historical tradition of the reclining female nude. Giorgione’s Venus Resting (ca. 1508–10), Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus (“The Rokeby Venus,” ca. 1650), and J. A. D. Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque I (1814), for example, represent w ­ omen as sexually desirable and available objects, as Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock have shown.26 More recently, Carol Duncan has pointed to the continuity and preponderance of this repre­sen­ta­ tion of w ­ omen in modernist and modern art. She writes that “the ­women of modern art,” as represented through museum se­lection and exhibition strategies, “regardless of who their real life models ­were, have ­little identity other than their sexuality and availability, and often their low social status.”27 In its very mass as a s culpture over eight feet long that at is widest is three feet and seven inches, Mesa-­Bains’s Cihuateotl is made to outweigh masculinist Western painting, displacing its Eurocentric construction of what constitutes the female, and the sexually desirable in ­women. If what is perceived as feminine—­that is, related to w ­ omen or supposedly womanlike—in patriarchal cultures has been historically divested of social, intellectual, creative, sexual, and spiritual power, as the artist’s three-­“chapter” installation suggests, then what the artist’s archaeological sift-

FIG. 23.3. Amalia Mesa-­Bains, “Vestiture . . . ​ Emplumada” in Venus Envy III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the ­Giant ­Women, 1997. Mixed-­media installation, dimensions variable. Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York. Image courtesy of the artist.

ing of the material culture of the past also reveals is what can only be the “Venus Envy,” or “estrus envy,”28 of patriarchal heterosexist cultures.29 What is instead divested of authority in the Amazonian province of Cihuatlampa are patriarchal, Eurocentric discourses, and ­women are (once again) invested with power, as the titles of the two regal robes underscore. Venus Envy III, like I and II, is characterized by an aesthetic that reflects the archaeological operation necessary to such investitures and divestitures. Layering, juxtaposition, the impression of images onto mirrors, the use of tables/altars as sites of accumulation, and the re-

peated use of dress (a layering over the body), all might be read to mimic, and thus signal, a feminist archaeological effort that rejects Western male-­centered discourses of knowledge as tautological creation of the Western male discourses of knowledge that reflect nothing so much as their own masculinist imagination, to put a f eminist spin on Edward Said’s thesis in Orientalism.30 In addition to presenting a f eminist rereading of art history, history, and anthropology, the artist is rethinking psychological discourse, as the title of her trilogy suggests. Mesa-­Bains appears to ironically appropriate and undermine Jacques Lacan’s

Writing o n the So ci al B o dy  ·  227

theory of the mirror stage in t he development of the psyche (i.e., as a sig n of the birth of social identity as split and founded on a s ense of loss). An im­mense “hand mirror,” mea­sur­ing over seven feet in height, indeed reflects the separation from the ­mother, but as the historical and cultural loss to patriarchal Eurocentric Christian cultures. Imprinted upon The Amazona’s Mirror, the Virgin of Montserrat, one of numerous culturally enigmatic black madonnas throughout Eu­rope and Latin Amer­i­ca, indeed reflects a lost w ­ holeness, and the psychic, cultural split from the female, African, and other “dark” ­peoples that plagued Freud, whom Lacan elaborates, and Jung.31 The artist instead would seem to concur that the black madonnas “are not ‘psychological symbols of the dark side of the m ­ other of Christ’—or not solely, or originally. They are solid iconic remains of the ancient time when the religion of the Black Goddess ruled Africa, and from thence, much of the rest of the world.”32 But, beyond the idea of Christian Virgins as vestiges of pre-­Christian or pagan goddesses, the Goddess-­Virgin in Venus Envy III (as in the other two installations) leads beyond a politics of feminist recovery of what is supposedly distinctively feminine, to nondualist notions of gender, sexuality, and spirituality. The Amazona’s Mirror, like the artist’s other scraped and imprinted mirrors in the trilogy, suggests that the surface of cultural beliefs must be worked at to uncover what lies beneath biased projections. Other images function as signs of the layered and masked historical identities of w ­ omen and what is perceived as feminine as well, particularly in the iris prints, hanging throughout the installation, produced as they are through digital manipulation, and the gigantic robes. Through their titles and stunning fabrication, t­ hese garments most directly confront the issue of the social empowerment and disempowerment of w ­ omen. Mesa-­Bains’s extravagant use of fantasy reflects a sizable desire to transcend culturally limited notions of identity, truth, and power. The ideological work of ­these costumes is perhaps therefore to be found in the construction of a nonpatriarchal mythos—­a modern-­day Cihuatlampa—­from 228  ·  l a ura e. pér ez

which to redress the split psyche of patriarchal cultures. Vestiture . . . ​of Branches, a towering garment with branches spraying out from the neck and the arms, suggests that the forest itself is the god/dess-­like wearer’s frock. A large seashell and the interlocking circles that are the symbol of atomic energy lie d warfed at the robe’s feet, like a child’s ball. ­Giant, jeweled, metal high heels lie nearby. On the other side of the Cihuateotl sculpture hangs the twenty-­foot red, green, and white feathered Vestiture . . . ​of Feathers. Like the glyphs inscribed in the moss-­covered sculpture, the feathers, and their color, refer to pre-­Columbian Mexica (“Aztec”) tradition of feather working and to the exquisite postcontact “paintings” made of feathers. Both garments and the sculpture offer suitable replies to the playful, yet socially suggestive question, how does one dress a god/dess? Sensual, beautiful, regal garments made with abundant use of precious materials, and named in etymologically rare terms, magniĀcently bespeak power. Garments styled like ­these would indeed create the impressive spectacle the artist did at the opening reception of the installation, in a b lack translucent robe with a very high collar framing her head. Within the context of the rest of the installation, the superhuman dimensions and cosmic allusions of the “vestitures” symbolize transcendence of social gender, and indeed, their androgynous styling would appear to conĀrm this. Fit for gender-­bending amazons, priest/esses,33 or god/desses, Vestiture . . . ​of Branches’ wide copper weave of metal and air, like Hernández’s Immigrant ­Woman’s Dress, speaks to the real­ity and power of that which is partially disembodied, on the level of the social (e.g., females, queers, and “minorities”), the intellectual (e.g., nonpatriarchal histories), and the religious (e.g., non-­Christian and nonpatriarchal spiritualities). ­These garments, as the ellipses in the titles of the Vestiture pieces underscore, point to the unarticulated, indeed to that which exceeds what we think we expect and believe we know. They flash us with social and spiritual beyonds that do in deed seem like Cihuatlampas of s/heroes.

Ambivalent Mimicry: Diane Gamboa’s Paper Fashions

As early as 1972, Asco, the East Los Angeles art group, was producing per­for­mance costumes made partly from paper and cardboard.34 Patssi Valdez, one of the four founding members, traces the concept of paper fashions, however, to fellow Asco member Gronk in a fashion show he or­ga­ nized in 1982, limiting the group of Chicana/o artists he invited, including Diane Gamboa, to the use of paper.35 Diane Gamboa’s fascination with the possibilities of paper fashions dates from that show through the pres­ent. Her wearable paper art is characterized by elaborately created, high-­ fashion-­styled clothing and accessory art pieces that are, in terms of design, as wildly imaginative as the most indulgent of haute couture, and that, like it, are largely throwaway, though for clearly dif­fer­ent reasons. Unlike high fashion, Gamboa’s paper fashions are, Ārst, crafted by the artist herself (rather than assigned to ­others for assembly), and second, constructed from inexpensive materials such as butcher paper, tissue, wire, and glitter. “The paper fashions stem,” Gamboa was quoted as saying in 1986, “from playing with paper dolls as a l­ittle girl and always having the fantasy of being glamorous and wearing an original. But ­because of my economic bracket, it’s very rare for me to even be able to go out and buy a dress. But I Āgure even if you only have 50 cents in your pocket, you should be able to look g­ reat.”36 At this point, Gamboa has produced seventy-­Āve paper fashions, of which some sixty-­four are dresses, including three cross-­gender dresses; and eleven other outĀts for males. In addition, she has produced “purse art” and hats, and painted on preexisting jackets, some of which accessorize her paper fashions. Alongside this art form, she has produced an im­mense body of paintings and drawings, photography, and other work, such as set designs. The strug­gle to survive has remained a co nstant in Gamboa’s work, in spite of her establishment as a major Chicana artist, in the Chicana/o

art community, and the sporadic and brief attention that the mainstream media (Los Angeles Times) and art publications (High Per­for­mance; LAICA Journal: A Con­temporary Art Magazine) gave her work in the 1980s. This theme generates power­ful tensions in her paper fashion work, as well as in her spectacular usage of dense, ornate design decorating bodies and rooms in her drawings and paintings. Rather than the horror of the void that modernist thinkers read into baroque and related aesthetics, Gamboa’s characteristic love of ornamentation can be seen as “the incarnation of a s eam that never mends,” that is, “of the incarnation of desire.”37 The desire her work registers in a g ender-­, ethnic-­, and class-­speciĀc way, is for that which is inaccessible eco­nom­ically and culturally to her, as a ­woman of working-­ class, Mexican American origins, and ­others like her. Her work registers a p o­liti­cally signiĀcant yearning for the material beauty, glamour, and creativity expressed in clothing, domestic space, and other parts of the social landscape that the social elite appropriate as innately characteristic to them. Gamboa’s work makes clear that creativity is restricted only in terms of the tools and the ­labor that are eco­nom­ically within reach for its production. Her paper fashions cite the function of clothing as symbols of social status and, in their highly eroticized, glamorous, and ornate construction, exhibit longing for more fulĀlling and creative social intercourse. As artwork, Gamboa’s paper fashions ironically reflect upon the art world (i.e., museums, galleries, publications, academia) as the machinery that produces art as ephemeral fashion, and that is ruled by class and economic interests, ­behind the pretenses of economic disinterestedness and innate cultural taste. As art pieces built through dressmaking, they call attention to the highly gendered and racialized Āelds of both dressmaking (globally, w ­ omen of “Third World” origin predominate in t he assembly “home work,” factory, and sweatshop fabrication of the garment industry) and art (European/Euro-­American men’s work continues to constitute the bulk of what is purchased, exhibited, and taught as art).38 Writing o n the So ci al B o dy  ·  229

They suggest that the historically constructed elitist class-­, gender-­, and racially biased divide between craft (e.g., dressmaking) and art is anything but natu­ral. Particularly from t­ hese perspectives, Gamboa’s appropriation of glamour and high-­fashion design as signiĀers of cultural capital, as Bourdieu deĀned it,39 display an ambivalent mimicry on her part that rec­ords her aesthetic and identity formation through popu­lar cultural media such as Ālm noir, fashion magazines, and celebrity journalism. Lavish detail, mimicry of a high-­fashion aesthetic, and the fairy-­ tale wearability of her designs coexist with the irony ­toward the ideologies embedded in ­these, and within herself. The ambivalent mimicry of Gamboa’s paper fashions functions with re­spect to desire for the glamour of the worlds represented through t­ hese media, and in p ar­tic­u­lar to how gendered social and erotic desires are constructed. A g ood number of Gamboa’s paper fashions (and their titles) sardonically comment on the constraining and gender-­producing absurdity of fashion for ­women, while inscribing herself as the artist and models (­whether female or male) within that problematic economy of desire. At the same time, her paper fashions, as well as her other similarly structured and thematized work, attempt to reclaim the terrains of the erotic and the fantastic as spaces of creativity and freedom. Cutting Through, for example, was worn by the artist to the release party of Sí, the short-­lived Los Angeles–­based Latino magazine. A b lack, strapless, very short, tight-­bodiced, wide-­skirted dress, black gloves to the elbow, fake-­jewel-­encrusted headdress, heavy “diamond” earrings and necklace, makeup that included eyebrows that ended in ornate curls, permanent tattoos on both upper arms, and a huge papier-­mâché “jeweled” sword completed the outĀt. The fantasy, wit, and sexiness of the piece aptly spoke to the challenging but welcome proj­ect of launching a p ublication dedicated to commentary on Latina/o arts and cultural life. The ludicrous and purely fantastic styling of Butterscotch Twist recalls “real” designer eve­ning wear whose symbolic function seems to be the dis230  ·  l a ura e. pér ez

play of nonutilitarian clothing as economic and social capital, and where ­women are presented as expensive ornaments. Butterscotch Twist goes one step further, presenting the ­woman model as nothing more than a superfluous sweet. Gamboa’s “rip-­off ” of high-­fashion design style is a po­liti­cally oppositional reversal of elite designers’ 1980s and 1990s ransacking of street and “ethnic” and, in an all-­time low, of “homeless” “fashions.” Her show-­stopping paper fashions dispel the delusion—­reproduced through fashion, the acquisition of art, and discourse—­that “pure” fantasy and creativity are found among the “aristocracies” (i.e., historical, economic, and social) of the world. Instead, the high-­fashion style of Gamboa’s paper fashions, like her “urban royalty” work to be examined in t he next section, show that “higher rank” is enacted through creativity in thought, art, and social action.40 Like high fashion, the design of pieces such as ­Mother and Child and In the Heat of the Night far exceeds cultural norms of propriety and utility for clothing. As “garments,” they function as ornamental excess, insisting upon the high social value of the wearers. Pieces such as the sadomasochistic-­ themed In Charge and ­Don’t Touch, as well as the already mentioned Cutting Through, are even more speciĀc in t heir statement about the imaginative paucity of social roles and thus dress for ­women—­and men—­who exceed sexual, social, artistic, and cultural norms. Painted, preexisting jackets such as Off My Back and Falling Angel and handbags such as A Night Out and Box Bag display clothing and dress as social language, by making vis­i­ble, through what is pictured upon them, the attitudes, obsessions, and desires with which we dress. When viewed from her position as a Chicana artist from East Los Angeles—­recognized within the Chicana/o art community yet all but invisible in the dominant cultural art world—­Diane Gamboa’s paper fashions in g eneral function like ­voguing and drag, appropriating and enacting supposedly c­ lass-­speciĀc and “racial” attributes signiĀed by clothing and demeanor, through cross-­class, cross-­“racial,” and cross-­gender dressing (e.g., She on He; He Wares Her Well; Boy Blue as Girl).

Gamboa’s formidable talents render her appropriation and elaboration of the design language of high fashion an indisputable “class act.” Her ambitions, however, subvert ­those of high fashion to decorate the socially and eco­nom­ically power­ful in wa ys that uniquely signal and enact their power. Painted paper, molded papier-­mâché, rhinestone jewelry, and glitter self-­consciously mark the illusion of wealth with which the paper fashions play, and suggest that the pretensions of the socially and eco­nom­ically power­ful to innate cultural, intellectual, and spiritual gifts are also paper-­thin. Gamboa’s dollar-­store originals also mark the contradictions and limits of the fairy-­tale lives of glamour, opulence, and power told by the media and signaled by designer originals. From this perspective, Gamboa’s complex paper fashions speak to the desire for beauty, creative expression, and empowerment—­however ­these are culturally understood—­that such fairy tales also Āgure. [. . .] Art by most Chicana artists, like that of most Chicano men, apparently continues to represent cultural, and therefore intellectual, challenges to Eurocentric canons regarding appropriate or in­ ter­est­ing formal and thematic concerns. Part of the solution lies in the in-­depth study of Chicana/o art in a rt history departments and art publications. Another part lies in a bandoning facile and unlearned generalizations about Chicana/o art’s essentially po­liti­cally activist nature, which maintain that if y ou have seen one piece, you have seen it all. Art by Chicana artists such as t­ hose studied ­here, like all vital art meant to do m ore than decorate the homes or vaults of the wealthy, engages issues having to do w ith our lived real­ ity and the productive reexamination of our belief systems. The generalization that Chicana/o art is mainly activist is as uninformative and dull an observation as saying that German expressionist, French surrealist, or Mexican muralist artists ­were “merely” po­liti­cal. The National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (na l ac) report on the status of Latino arts and cultural organ­izations in the United States found that “despite the emergence of several thou-

sand Latino art and culture organ­izations from 1965 to 1995, most have folded.”41 It also found that demographics had every­thing to do w ith where Latina/o arts and cultural organ­izations existed—­ and w ­ ere funded, such that “sizable populations have made it easier to advocate for Latino art and culture.” However, even where “La Raza constitutes a quarter or more of the population . . . ​­there has not been strong support for Chicano/Latino art and culture institutions.”42 Cynthia Orozco, the researcher of the Southwest section of the national report, pointedly observes in an updated version of her portion of the na l ac report, “Arts and media groups receive public funds to which all taxpayers contribute, among them Chicanos and Latinos, ­whether immigrants or U.S. citizens. But Ānancial support of art and culture has historically gone to Eurocentric institutions controlled and dominated by Eu­ro­pean Americans. . . . ​­These larger, white institutions are favored over ­those controlled by ­people of color. Latino institutions do not receive equitable funding.”43 What indeed does writing on the social body mean if art by most Chicanas, like the artists whose work I study h ­ ere, is institutionally marginalized at e­ very level of the mainstream art and academic worlds, and effectively barred by racialized and gendered misunderstandings? The gravity of the question is only compounded by the signiĀcant funding inequities experienced by the local Chicana/o and Latina/o art venues that have almost exclusively supported their work to date. Against its general social invisibility, Chicana art like that studied h ­ ere captures national art histories and identities in a m oment of their natu­ral transformations, and in so d ­ oing, it contributes to a greater alignment of U.S. culture’s “face and soul.” Notes This chapter was originally published as Laura E. Pérez, “Writing on the Social Body: Dresses and Body Ornamentation in Con­temporary Chicana Art,” in Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st ­Century, ed. Arturo J. Aldama and Naómi H. Quiñonez (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 30–63. The images discussed ­here are posted online

Writing o n the So ci al B o dy  ·  231

at vari­ous sources as well as in Laura E. Pérez’s book Chicana Art, from which this essay, in abbreviated form, has been extracted. Epigraph: Elizabeth Reichel-­Dolmatoff, “Foreword,” in Body Decoration: A World Survey, ed. Karl Groning (New York: Vendome Press, 1998). 1. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style ­(London: Routledge, 1979; London: Methuen, 1987), 102. 2. Following Bourdieu, dress may be read as one of the numerous and mundane forms of displaying cultural capital or its lack. Zoot suits in the 1940s, chola/o urban styles in the 1970s, punk attire in the 1970s and 1980s, African urban styles of the 1980s and 1990s—­all ­these styles of dress speak of specific historical moments in the United States, of dif­fer­ent forms of cultural alterity and oppositional cultural politics with re­spect to mainstream norms of dress, be­hav­ior, and beliefs. In addition, all of ­these moments in an alternative history of costume of the United States have contested, and to some degree transformed, mainstream and dominant cultures, even as they have been partially absorbed or exploited by ­these. On zoot suits, see Stuart Cosgrove, “The Zoot Suit and Style Warfare,” in Zoot Suits and Second-­Hand Dresses, ed. Angela McRobbie (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Originally published in the History Workshop Journal (1984) and Marco Sánchez-Tranquilino and John Tagg, “The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide: The Museum, Identity, and Buenas Garras,” in Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991). On punk styles of ­England, see Dick Hebdige, Subculture. 3. Consider, for example, Austrian architect Adolf Loos’s declaration in his 1908“Ornament and Crime”:

employers may expect their domestics to be Ca­rib­bean immigrants; however, in Los Angeles and Chicago they can expect to hire undocumented Latin American immigrants. Racial, class, and gender stratification so typifies domestic ser­vice that social expectations may relegate all lower-­class ­women of color to the status of domestic” (Romero, Maid in the U.S.A., 71). 5. “The idea of the body as ‘garment’ was a widespread meta­phor in antiquity,” writes Stuart Smithers in an issue of Parabola on clothing, “suggesting a metaphysics of clothing that can be traced back to the Genesis account of God clothing Adam and Eve in ‘garments of skin’ ” (Stuart Smithers, “Bodies of Sleep, Garments of Skins,” Parabola 19, no. 3 [August 1994]: 7). “Strip away layer ­after fash­ion­able layer and you discover not an unadorned body but a body that has become fash­ion­able. With virtually every­one strapped to exercise machines that ­future generations of archeologists ­will surely see as direct descendants of medieval torture devices, it should be obvious that the body is no more natu­ral than the clothes it wears” (Taylor, Hiding, 185). Per­for­mance art since the 1960s points to the body itself as socially constructed in explicit ways. The Paris-­based per­for­mance artist Orlan, for example, films and displays herself before, during, and ­after cosmetic surgery and exhibits the flesh removed in the pro­cess (Michelle Hirschhorn, “Orlan: Artist in the Post-­human Age of Mechanical Reincarnation: Body as Ready [to Be Re-]Made,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock [New York: Routledge, 1996], 110–34;Taylor, Hiding, 143–45). With re­spect to the racialized garment of the skin, Susan S. Bean writes of the importance of dress in Gandhi’s politics and charts his journey in po­liti­cal and

“I have discovered the following truth and pres­ent it to the world: cultural evolution is the equivalent to the ­removal of ornament from articles in daily use”; Adolf Loos, quoted in Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 101.Writing on domestic ser­vice in the United States in 1992, Mary Romero discusses the importance of the appearance of domestic workers for their employers. For some employers, the color of the domestic worker, like the requirement that uniforms be worn, boosts their own status, in their own eyes and socially, to the degree that a community is based on race and identity (Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. [New York: Routledge, 1992], 111–13). 4. “In South Carolina, employers typically expect to hire African American ­women as domestics; in New York,

spiritual consciousness through his attire. She writes that ­after trying to dress correctly as a gentleman by En­glish colonial standards in South Africa, “it had become clear [to him] that the color of one’s skin was as much a part of one’s costume as a frock coat, and this fundamental Indianness Gandhi would not have changed even if he could.” The loincloth and shawl that most remember him by ­today, “his satyagrahi garb[,] was his own design, and expressed simplicity, asceticism, and identity with the masses.” “By appearing in this eccentric fashion,” Bean concludes, “he forced his colleagues to notice and accommodate his view of a truly Indian nationalism. He deliberately used costume not only to express his sociopo­liti­cal identity, but to manipulate social occasions to elicit ac­cep­tance of, if not agreement with, his

232 ·  l a ura e. pér ez

position” (Susan S. Bean, “The Fabric of In­de­pen­dence,” Parabola 19, no. 3 [August 1994]: 30–31). 6. “Performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (Judith Butler, Bodies That ­Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” [New York: Routledge, 1993], 2). “Performativity . . . ​is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-­like status in the pres­ent, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition” (12). 7. “Class, gender, sexuality, and even race and ethnicity—­the determinate categories of analy­sis for modern and postmodern cultural critique—­are themselves brought to the crisis in dress codes and sumptuary regulation . . . ​the transvestite is the figure of and for that crisis, the uncanny supplement that marks the place of desire” (Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-­Dressing and Cultural Anxiety [New York: Routledge, 1992], 28). 8. “For many working-­class ­women, ­women of color, and w ­ omen of the ­middle and upper classes, the application of makeup serves as a daily ritual in which the w ­ oman, ­either consciously or not, has a hand in authoring or defining the image that she pres­ents to the world. Cosmetics and dress remain, for some ­women, their only vehicle of self-­expression and self-­ definition. For w ­ omen of color, the ­factors that limit their i­ndividual potential are written in the color, ethnic features, and gender of their own f­ aces and bodies. Makeup and other forms of masking sometimes are used to protect themselves against the harsh judgments of a society that deems them invisible or unacceptable” (Laura Gutíerrez Spencer, “Mirrors and Masks: Female Subjectivity in Chicana Poetry,” Frontiers 15, no. 2 [1994]: 69). My thanks to Juliana Martínez for bringing this essay to my attention. 9. The use of the phrase “bodies that ­matter” draws upon both Judith Butler’s Bodies That ­Matter and Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly ­Matters: Haunting and the So­cio­log­i­cal Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Butler’s discussion of bodies that are socially devalued and discursively marginal and Avery’s discussion of the social significance of that which haunts ­because it is improperly or inappropriately buried within the social psyche, so to speak, provide particularly useful ways to think about the socially haunting presence of the gendered and racialized bodies of ­women of color in the United States.

10. Carl Kohler, A History of Costume, ed. Emma Von Sichart, trans. Alexander K. Dallas (New York: Dover Publications, 1963), quoted in Parabola 19, no. 3 (August 1994): 43. My thanks to Yolanda López for our conversation, on November 10, 1999, clarifying aspects of the installation The Nanny. 11. For an image and discussion of this piece, see Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the ­Non-­unitary Subject,” Cultural Critique 28 (fall 1994): 5–28; Angie Chabram-­Dernersesian, “I Throw Punches for My Race, but I ­Don’t Want to Be a Man: Writing Us—­ Chica-­nos (Girl, Us)/Chicanas into the Movement Script,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Theories of Repre­sen­ta­tion and Difference) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). On gender and garment industry, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (1989; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Andrew Ross, ed., No Sweat: Fashion, ­Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers (1997; repr., New York: Verso, 1999). 12. Romero, Maid in the U.S.A., 15. 13. Romero, Maid in the U.S.A., 43. 14. See Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Alterities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 15. Artist’s statement. 16.The dress was reinstalled for the artist’s one-­ woman show Transformations: The Art of Ester Hernández, guest curated by Holly J. Barnett, at MACLA , San Jose Center for Latino Arts, 1998. 17.“Chicana rasquache (domesticana), like its male counterpoint (i.e., rasquachismo), has grown not only out of both re­sis­tance to majority culture and affirmation of cultural values, but from w ­ omen’s restrictions within the culture. A defiance of an imposed Anglo-­American cultural identity, and the defiance of restrictive gender identity within Chicano culture has inspired a female raquacheism [sic]. Domesticana comes as a spirit of Chicana emancipation grounded in advanced education, and to some degree, Anglo American expectations in a more open society. With new experiences of opportunities, Chicanas ­were able to challenge existing community restrictions regarding the role of w ­ omen. Techniques of subversion through play with traditional imagery and cultural material are characteristic of domesticana” ­(Amalia Mesa-­Bains,

Writing o n the So ci al B o dy  ·  233

“Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache,” in Distant Relations/Cercanías distantes/Clann I gCéin [New York: Smart Art Press, 1995], 160). 18. Installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, in New York City, which represents the artist, in 1993;Williams College in 1994; and the ­Steinbaum Krauss Gallery, New York City, in 1997, respectively. Cihuateotl (­Woman of Cihuatlampa) and The Amazona’s Mirror, both from Venus Envy Chapter III, ­were shown as part of the group show Memorable Histories and Historic Memories, an all-­woman show curated by Alison Ferris, at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, September 25–­December 6, 1998. 19. Chapter I is situated within the historical spaces of autobiography and ­family genealogy, and within the cultural spaces of con­temporary Catholic Mexican and Chicana/o cultures and explores the gender-­forming socialization of females through the meta­phor of the bride (in First Holy Communion, marriage, and the taking of religious vows). Chapter II references the cultural history of the subjugation of ­women in the Muslim legacy of Hispanic cultures and in the colonial Mexico of the intellectual and poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. 20. Garber, Vested Interests, 147. 21. Amalia Mesa-­Bains, “Venus Envy Chapter III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the ­Giant ­Women” (New York: Steinbaum Krauss Gallery, 1997). 22. Mesa-­Bains, “Venus Envy Chapter III.” 23.“Her ­giant Cihauteotl [sic] . . . ​is both a kind of ­archaeological history and a mythic inventory,” Mesa-­ Bains said. “Venus Envy Chapter III.” 24. “The second part of the exhibition, subtitled ‘The Room of Miracles,’ extends the notion of spiritual revisionism ­towards the material evidence of a long-­lost past. . . . ​What is striking about this collection of tagged specimens interspersed with magnifying mirrors and sample mounts is the way in which it carries the notion of the acquisition of culture through direct observation. Meaningfully, as the viewer identifies individual ele­ments within the artwork such as a small statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a packet of seeds, a starfish, visually and discursively what is conveyed is a pragmatic recasting of Latin American art and culture as a diverse collection of obscured fragments whose importance lies in situating a space beyond intellectual verification” (Susan Douglas, “Amalia Mesa-­Bains,” Parachute 87 ­[July–­September 1997]: 57). 25. For one reviewer of the exhibition, Susan Douglas, “Cihuateotl (­Woman of Cihuatlampa) (1997) is a key work.

234  ·  l a ura e. pér ez

In the figure of a sleeping ­woman, it suggests ancient burial mounds, thus the home of the mythical Amazonas, warriors of legend” (Douglas, “Amalia Mesa-­Bains,” 57). For Alison Ferris, “On one level, Mesa-­Bains reclaims ­women’s association with nature in this work, an idea that some feminists reject ­because this association keeps ­women from being active participants in the creation of history and culture. However Cihuateotl is also marked with cultural symbols in the form of Aztec designs that balance the association with nature. Her body is the corpus of migration and displacement in the strug­gle for land experienced by generations of Mexicans within the continent.” In addition, “one could understand Cihuateotl as Mesa-­Bains ironically offering herself as the ‘nature’ of cultural analy­sis. By providing the context in which her work is to be understood through myth, meta­phor, and history, she allows neither her work nor herself to be reduced to evidence” (Alison Ferris, “Amalia Mesa-­Bains,” in Memorable Histories and Historic Memories [Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College, 1998], 27). 26. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: ­Women, Art, and Ideology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981; NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1982). 27. Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), III.“The reclining female nude since the Renaissance—­one of the central images in Western painting—­raises the question of the male gaze in more acute form than perhaps any other artistic ste­reo­type. The ­woman is almost invariably shown as completely passive, an object for contemplation” (Judy Chicago and Edward Lucie-­Smith, ­Women and Art: Contested Territory [New York: Watson-­Guptill, 1999], 100). In the coffee ­table–­style book he recently coedited with Judy Chicago, Edward Lucie-­Smith unfortunately neutralizes to some degree the feminist insights he other­ wise appropriates, given that the more relevant issue is not ­whether images are created for contemplation, but rather ­whether ­these reproduce through the artist’s, the ideal male viewer’s, and the female repre­sen­ta­tion’s gazes unequal, gendered, power relations. See also the chapter titled “Painted Ladies,” in Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses; and Carol Duncan’s “The Modern Art Museum: It Is a Man’s World,” in Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museum (New York: Routledge, 1995), from which the citations of their work in the text are taken. 28. Garber, Vested Interests, 120. 29. On the tautology of Freudian thought: “Penis envy is phallus envy, phallus envy is fetish envy. It is not clear that it is pos­si­ble to go ‘beyond ideology’ ­here; the

ideology of the fetish is the ideology of phallocentrism, the ideology of heterosexuality” (Garber, Vested Interests, 119). n I addition, “Phallocentrism is loss of estrus. . . . ​And Freud’s attempt the make the fetish part of the female body is both denial and displacement” (120). 30. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, [1978] 1994). 31. Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, The ­Great Cosmic ­Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1987), 21–32. On the repression of the “primitive” and the occluded contributions of a female theorist to psychoanalytic theory, see Avery F. Gordon, “Distractions,” in Ghostly ­Matters. Torgovnick observes that “for Jung on the eve of his ner­vous breakdown and subsequent travels in Africa, the ‘terrible ­mother’ played the same role he would ­later attribute to Africa and to the primitive in general: like Africa, the ­mother is forever an attractive, desired site of the undifferentiated; but she is also feared as the potential absorber and the destroyer of the self. This kind of thinking, this kind of intuitive association, is surprisingly common in male or male-­identified primitivist thinking, even when it pres­ents itself as historical or scientific rather than as purely imaginative” (Marianna Torgovnick, Primitive ­Passions: Men, ­Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997], 40). 32. Sjöö and Mor, ­Great Cosmic ­Mother, 32.“None of the socie­ties most often cited as au­then­tic Goddess cultures actually conforms to our expectations. Not a single one provides clear evidence of a single, supreme female deity; not a single one exhibits the signs of matriarchal rule, or even of serious po­liti­cal power-­sharing between the sexes; not a single one displays with any surety the enlightened attitudes t­ owards social egalitarianism, nonviolent interpersonal and interstate relations, and ecological sensitivity which we have been led to anticipate. In each of t­ hese cases, the story of the Goddess is a fabrication in defiance of the facts” (Philip Davis, Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality [Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing Com­pany, 1998], 83–84). See also Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an In­ven­ted Past ­Won’t Give Us a ­Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). 33. Copper, mirrors, and shells ­were all found in the huge burial mounds of a ­people called Sarmations that are believed by Jeanine Davis-­Kimball, their discoverer, to very possibly be the Amazons from the eastern steppes described by Herodotus. Some of ­these huge mounds (60 feet high by 350 feet in dia­meter) ­were ­believed to belong to priestesses, for in them ­were

found small clay or stone altars, bronze mirrors, bronze spoons, and seashells (David Perlman, “Evidence of Long-­ Lost Amazon Tribes Uncovered,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 28, 1997, A 1, A 5). Provided by the artist’s gallery as part of her promotional materials. 34. The idea of “ambivalent mimicry” is informed by Judith Butler’s fruitful ideas of performativity in the social sphere and, more specifically, her discussion of “ambivalent drag” (Butler, Bodies That M ­ atter, 124), as well as upon the poststructuralist idea of ambivalent subject positions and Homi Bhabha’s reflections on the ambivalence of colonial mimicry. See Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial D ­ iscourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: ­Routledge, 1994), 85–92. 35. Telephone conversation with Patssi Valdez, August 7, 2000. Victoria Delgadillo, of the Mexican Spitfires, recalled several paper fashion shows, including one by Sean Carrillo, also part of that first paper fashion show. See Cathie Porelli, “ ‘Moda Chicana’ Paving Stylish Trail with Paper,” San Gabriel Valley Tribune, March 14, 1982, C1, for press coverage of the March 1982 “Moda Chicana” show. My thanks to Delgadillo for sending me a copy. 36. Linda Burnham, “Art with a Chicano Accent,” High Per­for­mance 35 9, no. 3 (1986): 50. 37.Taylor, Hiding, 123, 129. 38. On the garment industry, see Saskia Sassen, ­Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New ­Mobility of ­People and Money (New York: New Press, 1998), 84. On art, see Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 102–32. 39. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Originally published in French as La distinction: Critique social du jugement (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979). Bourdieu’s so­cio­ log­i­cal study of the concept and ideological function of cultural taste in France led him to formulate a complex notion of capital as three variably interrelated forms of “actually usable resources and powers—­economic capital, cultural capital, and also social capital.” Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (New York: Routledge Classics, [1984] 1998), 114. The concept of cultural capital takes into account what is inherited from one’s class background, such as ­table manners and distinctive forms of taste with re­spect to ­music, art, and be­hav­ior, as well as what is acquired (and/or unlearned) through education, or other forms of self-­fashioning. “The exchange rate of the dif­fer­ent kinds

Writing o n the So ci al B o dy  ·  235

of capital is one of the fundamental stakes in the strug­ gles between class fractions whose power and privileges are linked to one or the other of ­these types. In par­tic­u­ lar, this exchange rate is a stake in the strug­gle over the dominant princi­ple of domination (economic, capital, cultural capital or social capital), which goes on at all times between the dif­fer­ent fractions of the dominant class” (125). Of taste, Bourdieu observes, “­Those whom we find to our taste put into their practices a taste which does not differ from the taste we put into operation in perceiving their practices” (243). 40. Diane Gamboa, “The Brush Off, the Ink Blot, and the Right ­Angle,” Diane Gamboa 1999 Art Notes,

236  ·  l a ura e. pér ez

produced and distributed by the artist, Terminal Annex, P.O. Box 861868, Los Angeles, CA 90086, 1999. 41.The National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, Latino Arts and Cultural Organ­izations in the United States: A Historical Survey and Current Assessment (San Antonio, TX: National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, 1998), xx. 42. National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, Latino Arts and Cultural Organ­izations, 100. 43. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Chicano and Latino Art and Culture Institutions in the Southwest: The Politics of Space, Race, and Money,” in Latinos and Museums: A Heritage Reclaimed (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1998).

a st a kuus inen

24. Ojo de la Diosa  ·  2008 Becoming Divine in Delilah Montoya’s Photography

Every­thing was being nourished to destroy. Nothing was being nourished to discover and create, and I ­fi­nally destroyed myself in this huge cemetery called the prisons of A mer­i­ca. When I w ent to prison I no longer existed. I was a non-­entity. —­J IMMY SANTIAGO BACA

The Pinto’s Flayed Hide: La Guadalupana

In the Ārst part of this essay, I traced the development of Montoya’s artworks en r oute to the articulation of the kind of feminist religious agency originating from her Hispanic-­Indian-­Anglo heritage in New Mexico. Rather than resisting its patriarchal structures by superimposing her body onto sacred symbols or explic­itly suggesting gender reversal, the artist experimented with the modes of photographic repre­sen­ta­tion, seeking to rethink religious agency through ritual per­ for­mance, and from ­there moved to question the gendered inscription of religious power. At times, nevertheless, her inclusive objectives seemed to generate an ambivalence that undermined their

radical edge, verging on essentializing ­women ­because of their physiology and alleged sexual difference. The La Guadalupana installation, I propose, represents a turning point and breakthrough in Montoya’s quest inasmuch as it manages to undo the rigidifying power of gendered prescriptions. I ­will therefore briefly discuss some academic studies of the tattooed pinto—­the Mexican American convict or ex-­convict, who, like the pachuco analyzed in M arcos Sánchez-­ Tranquilino and John Tagg’s seminal essay from 1991, can also be regarded as one of the “proto-­ subjects” of la raza, male by deĀnition.1 The words of the poet Jimmy Santiago Baca quoted above reflect the fear of total annihilation of self and his desire to become fully h ­ uman—­that is, a s peaking subject. An ex-­convict from Albuquerque’s South Valley, Baca taught himself to read and write during his six-­year stint in prison, an experience he describes in t erms that connote mythological stories of visiting hell. Writing helped him stay alive while d ­ oing time, and ­later he became an acclaimed Chicano poet, scholar, and educator. His peer, Raúl Salinas, an

ex-­convict from the La Loma barrio in A ustin, Texas, literally “wrote” himself out of the prison, becoming a p oet, a p o­liti­cal activist, and the owner of Resistencia Bookstore in his hometown. Baca’s and Salinas’s survival stories are, however, exceptional. Such a happy ending did not fall on Chicano inmate Felix Martínez, a S outh Valley veterano like Baca, who modeled for Montoya’s photo­graph El Guadalupano (Āg.  24.1).2 He was found dead in his cell, suffocated by a pillow, about a year ­after his photo­graph session with Montoya in the Albuquerque Detention Center, where he was being held for a drive-by shooting in his barrio. The black-­and-­white photo­graph of Martínez’s heavi­ly tattooed arms and back is featured as the centerpiece of the La Guadalupana installation, conceived for the exhibition Ida y Vuelta: Twelve New Mexican Artists, which took place in 1998 at the Musée Denys-­Puech in Rodez, France (Āg.  24.2). ­After Ānding out that the Rodez cathedral ­housed a colonial Mexican easel painting of Guadalupe, Montoya deci­ded to bridge time, space, and repre­sen­ta­tional convention by transporting overseas an altar installation enshrining Chicano prison tattoos of the Virgin. However, the grimness of prison life experienced by large numbers of Latino men is not immediately pres­ ent in Montoya’s aesthetically compelling installation. Unlike most well-­meaning photographic work depicting inmates, it avoids bestowing the pinto subject with a ­human face a nd individuality that supposedly could liberate him f rom the ste­reo­types of victimization and criminality. Instead, Montoya’s inmate turns his back to the viewer and his torso remains anonymous, encircled by smaller color photo­graphs showing religious signs tattooed on the skin of other, equally anonymous models. Arms handcuffed ­behind his bare back, he stares at the prison bars in a vulnerable pose similar to that of the half-­ naked ­woman who reaches out t­ oward the image of Christ in the portrait Mysterio Triste. ­After the exhibit in France, the installation was purchased by the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and put on display. Th ­ ere it turned,

238  ·  a st a kuus inen

indeed, into an altar for the memory of the dead inmate when his relatives frequented the museum to leave offerings at the foot of the installation.3 Ben Olguín’s essay “Tattoos, Abjection, and the Po­liti­cal Unconscious: ­Toward a Semiotics of the Pinto Visual Vernacular” deĀnes the Spanish masculine colloquial noun pinto as an in-­group moniker used to “distinguish one’s self from the general convict population. It is racially, ethnically, and culturally speciĀc.”4 To conceptualize his topic as a universally recognized counterhegemonic practice, Olguín refers to vari­ous oppositional discourses related to Fredric Jameson’s concept of the po­liti­cal unconscious to support his argument that “Pinto (Intellectuals) deploy their prison-­enhanced oppositional consciousness—­a sensibility linked to the po­liti­cal unconscious of the Chicano community through such speciĀc signifying practices as Tatuteando—in the ser­vice of the subordinated populations located in barrios, prisons, and vari­ous other sites of strug­gle throughout the ‘southwestern’ and other parts of the United States, and the world at large.”5 Olguín deĀnes tatuteando as the transgressive bodily act of making tattoos. His conceptualization of tattoos aligns with Juliet Fleming’s observation that the tattoo’s traditionally marginal social status and its association with ancient or primitive cultures “enhance its value as a f orm of expression whose ‘low’ or atavistic character allows it to function as a conduit for unconscious or instinctive forces.”6 Using Michel Foucault’s concept of panopticon (a k ind of “utopian” prison building designed for the sole purpose of surveillance) as an organ­izing princi­ple, Olguín condenses the pinto discourse—­including tattoos, poems, drawings on envelopes, and paño art—­under the rubric “theory of praxis,” a collective form of re­sis­tance by an underprivileged ethnoracial community. In Foucault’s panopticon, the docile, inert body replaces the subject in a s ocial system based on obedience regulated by social institutions rather than by the power of ideology. “But the body is also directly involved in a p o­liti­cal Āeld; power

FIG. 24.1. Delilah Montoya, El Guadalupano, 1998. Gelatin silver print, 24 × 20 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

FIG. 24.2. Delilah Montoya, La Guadalupana, 1998. Kodacolor and gelatin silver print photomural with mixed-­media installation, 180 × 120 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

relations have an immediate hold upon it,” says Foucault. “They invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.”7 However, while building his argument on Foucauldian meta­phors, Olguín at the same time purports to reverse the phi­los­o­ pher’s utterly deterministic view of subjectivities and their meager prospective to dodge the panopticon. In short, his strategy aims to halt the brutal grinding of the prison system by setting up a scheme of correspondence where the omnipotent eye of the watchtower is undercut by the resourceful “countersurveillance” operations of the prisoners themselves, engaged in a sustained collaborative effort to provide adequate tools, protection, and concealment throughout the pro­cess of tattoo making.8 The regimented organ­ization required for a successful execution of a tattoo and the ensuing enhancement of the convict’s currency, his body, in fact converts the tattoo practice into the mirror image of the very same system of repression. Nonetheless, taking a cue from anthropological studies on tribal tattoos, Olguín proceeds to prove that prison tattoos’ role as sophisticated communal identiĀers and self-­inscribed signposts of personal histories would counteract their detrimental effects in the larger social world. By ­doing so, he also relocates Chicano communities from their mostly urban, postindustrial environment to the timeless territory of the archaic “tribal” other, determined by unconscious drives and antiquated notions of originality and inherent ethnoracial difference. The iconic pinto, in his writing, is thus singled out as the prototypical subject of a universal strug­gle for social justice, in the barrio and globally. From a so­cio­log­i­cal, albeit equally masculine and individualistic point of view, Susan Phillips views the practice of prison tattooing in a co mpletely negative light, as “self-­damnation” and as a dire obstacle to reintegration into the social world outside the prison. She emphasizes the social setbacks and the impossibility of the expected “reformation” of ex-­convicts “decorated” with tattoos. Her essay “Gallo’s Body: Decoration and Damnation in the Life of a Chicano Gang

Member” contends that “Gallo’s tattoos emerge as agents of damnation most clearly in the Ānal stages of his story, when he was striving to move beyond the gang and prison life. I met him during a t ime when his tattoos had Ā­nally brought him to his knees. He was considering somber options that included suicide by overdose. It was just eight days before another period of incarceration would engulf him, an eight-­year stretch to which he felt his own body had condemned him.”9 Phillips asserts that Michel de C erteau’s “machinery of repre­sen­ta­tion,” the concept he uses to explain bodily marking in its sociopo­liti­ cal context, can become a self-­made “machinery of repression.” The “tattoo creates aliens on the skin, where symbols are oddly cast as both self and other on a surface that mediates inside and outside worlds.”10 How do t­ hese essays conĀgure the Chicana/o identity, its dynamics and location within the Mexican American community and U.S. society at large? Though other­wise the polar opposite of Olguín’s interpretation of tattoos, Phillips’s argument builds on a similar individualistic premise, and instead of presenting an analy­sis of how the institutional system regenerates itself through the convict’s body, it ends up asserting the normalcy of an “unmarked” body, devoid of the blemishes of undesired identiĀcations. This anchors the subjectivity of the convict in his own personal choices and qualities, ultimately spinning his life ­either ­toward empowerment through reaching a higher, “heroic” level of po­liti­cal consciousness (like Raúl Salinas, the veterano studied by Olguín) or ­toward recurring incarceration and death due to an inability to reform, like Gallo. Both Olguín and Phillips rely on the assumed veriĀcation of “truth” by the factual pinto body, already established in w idely circulated images and texts about Chicano convicts and their artwork. So how do t­ hese essays relate to Montoya’s coupling of pinto discourse with Chicana feminism, then? I propose that they relate to the La Guadalupana installation by way of lack: gender perspective and ­women in general, both inside and outside the prison, are blatantly absent Ojo d e l a Diosa  ·  241

from the two essays at hand, as well as from most studies on the topic written by art historians. The latter, too, look at prison art exclusively as an individualistic male preoccupation, a p roactive tactic of re­sis­tance and self-­affirmation born reactively out of the harsh realities between la vida loca and la pinta, gang life and prison. Yet, any attempt to unambiguously elevate prison tattoos as the paramount medium of re­ sis­tance, po­liti­cal consciousness, and communal empowerment is overshadowed by the paradox caused by their ambiguous nature: inside the prison system they are Ārst applied as punishment to signify criminality and degradation, but then they turn into positive group symbols among inmates equally marked. Folklorist Alan Govenar, recognizing tattoos’ dual expression of both religious piety and violent deviancy, maintains that “facial and hand tattoos which feature prison or gang imagery are clearly anti-­social.”11 Historian Mark Gustafson states, “For the insiders, the tattooed and their sympathizers (who have yet to submit to the needle), it is a mark worn with pride, a sign of belonging, the positive connotations of which are strengthened by the negative opinions of the majority.”12 Susan Benson, in turn, discusses the pro­cesses of commodiĀcation of modern tattoos, w ­ hether commercial or noncommercial, by claiming that “the tattoo can . . . ​ be linked both to the over-­valuation of certain aspects of con­temporary Western ideas of the self—­the idea of autonomy and self-­fashioning—­ and to their transgression.”13 Remembering Montoya’s long-­time interest in Ārst documenting and then imagining Chicano communities, it is not surprising that she wanted to use the tattoo theme—in spite of all the prob­lems and paradoxes involved, or perhaps b ­ ecause of them—to further elaborate on her ideas about a sustainable communal repre­sen­ta­tion/production. Her installation, nevertheless, does not highlight the pinto Āgure as an exceptional individual, or even as an ideal personiĀcation of his community. Even though we know that his proper name is Felix Martínez, his face and individual “voice” remain secondary. Instead, the inmate yields his “Ārst 242  ·  a st a kuus inen

skin”—­complete with hair, nails, and pores—­for the photographer, enabling her to appropriate de Certeau’s “machinery of repre­sen­ta­tion” and to invent alternative religious meta­phors devoid of the imperatives of sacriĀce and salvation central in the texts that ­either valorize or defame the ex-­convicts. Consequently, instead of focusing the viewer’s attention on the victims of incarceration as such, Montoya turns her lens to confront the photographic apparatus itself and its notorious reputation in r epresenting “otherness” in s ocial history. She composes her installation around diverse, sometimes even contradictory signs of empowerment, reiĀcation, and repression, so as to historicize and recode the inscriptions made by the tattooing ­needles. The camera does not deliver truth. Likewise, the black-­and-­white photo­ graph of Martínez’s torso does not aim to reveal or download any aspect of his identity; instead, it implicates a number of older documentary traditions and so destabilizes the assumed coherence between photographic form and content. For example, the pinto’s wide shoulders are turned to block the controlling look of the conventional police mug shot, which hence becomes deprived of its privileged access to decipher ­every l­ittle feature of the inmate’s face s o as to facilitate identiĀcation and classiĀcation. Also, the concealed face makes it impossible to read into his facial physiognomy any generalized, empirical proof of ­human character as a self-­evident arbitrator of a s ocial “margin” versus the “center,” the implicit objective b ­ ehind the present-­day frenzy to identify ­people by means of imaging technology. The inmate and the photographer inhabit the same dimly lit space with a heavy grid of bars in the background, yet it is unclear w ­ hether they stand ­behind or in front of ­those bars. They are evidently separated by the degree of their physical freedom yet united by the rigid order of visual repre­sen­ta­tion they both strug­gle to challenge. Most in­ter­est­ing, Montoya’s technique also shares some common strategies with the tradition of ethnographic Āeldwork photography, which associates the installation with the discourse of

the Eu­ro­pean sciences in t he ser­vice of the colonial expansion over exotic territories. With their ubiquitous erotic connotations, ethnographic photo­graphs of tattooed, scarred, pierced, or other­wise modiĀed Indigenous p ­ eople appear particularly unsettling for the present-­day viewer. Akin to many Indigenous “exotic ­others,” the inmate in La Guadalupana also seems to be framed as if for inspection, disconnected from his natu­ ral social environment and exposed half-­naked to the voracious “colonial gaze” unanimously condemned by postcolonial theorists. Sometimes, however, the “colonial gaze” seems to waver, and we are beckoned to take into consideration that ­there also exist ways of seeing, strategies of repre­sen­ta­tion, and par­ameters of knowledge other than t­ hose girdled by the worn ste­reo­types of otherness. This kind of paradigmatic glitch is interestingly explored by Christopher Wright, who writes on Captain Francis R. Barton’s “ethnographic” photography from Papua around the turn of the twentieth ­century.14 Stressing his intention to produce photo­graphs for purely ethnographic purposes, Barton not only hand-­painted over existing tattoos to make them stand out better on the dark skin of his subjects, but he also altered his glass negatives by drawing squares around the tattooed body parts so as to isolate the skin surface for speciĀcally scientiĀcobservation. About a c­ entury ­later, Montoya uses similar interventions to create artiĀcial contrast on the inmate’s back. His tattoo of Guadalupe is Ārst traced with a cra yon that accentuates her outlines, and then, during the printing pro­cess, the Virgin’s background is tanned to “lift up” that par­tic­u­lar part of the skin from the other­wise black-­and-­ white surface of the photo­graph. Thus the image reads not only as a repre­sen­ta­tion of the inmate himself but also as a document of a certain kind of performative venture, of which the installation is itself a material product. So, the question emerges: what is the meaning of this per­for­mance and how did it actually happen, since it does not seem to emit the kind of signs of looking, Āxing, and classifying commonly associated with photographic repre­sen­ta­tion,

­ hether criminological, ethnographic, or artistic? w What comes out of the female cult of La Guadalupana if we focus on studying the technical scheme of the installation—­the pro­cesses of planning, deliberation, and work involved in producing it—­ instead of looking at its appearance only? Those involved in in terpreting and recontextualizing old photo­graphs often have no alternative to just speculating about the circumstances surrounding the physical acts of taking them; in the case of La Guadalupana, on the contrary, ­there are in­for­ mants at hand. Montoya did not herself engage in the overpainting of Martínez’s tattoo, in fac t; the reinforcement of the Virgin’s contours was done by Mike Ipiotis, a young South Valley aerosol artist who went with her to the detention center to help set up the shooting gear. This external detail, I b elieve, carries vital information about the meaning of the installation as well as about Montoya’s repre­sen­ta­tional strategy as a w ­ hole. Throughout her ­career, Montoya has frequently engaged a number of carefully selected collaborators from her own social environment who then participate, in vari­ous ways, in executing the artwork. Although the Ānal piece always expresses the artist’s personal judgment, the residue of the relations, negotiations, travels, and released communal energy lingers on, creating a sort of life of its own within the artwork. In spite of his youth, Ipiotis is a highly regarded community member due to his success as a self-­educated mural artist and poet; he escaped the snare of gang life and therefore uses the barrio autograph “360°”—­a full turn. Thus his role during the photo­graph session in t he detention center was not only to assist but also to mediate between the photographer, the camera, and the body to be captured. While alleviating the pos­si­ble repercussions of negative gender dynamics in t he situation that symbolically reiterated the moment of the ­actual needlework, he was able to discharge the positive energy of the tattoo as a sign in a speciĀc system of communal signiĀcation of which both men ­were part. Although  U.S. society at large gloriĀes aggressive masculinity, which is shown rather Ojo d e l a Diosa  ·  243

conspicuously in m edia and popu­lar culture, it is commonplace in s ocial science parlance to pathologize Latino cultures by accusing Mexican and Mexican American men in par­tic­u­lar of excessive machismo and sexism. As already mentioned, the repercussions of gender antagonism and gender bending are glaringly underanalyzed and suppressed areas in the studies of pintos and pinto art, perhaps in part b ­ ecause it is so easy to wind up in the uncomfortable position of blaming the victim. Sociologist Susan Phillips, stricken by stark physical discomfort, does not know what to make of the issue, whereas Olguín—­although he nudges elbows with French feminists by occasionally using the term écriture—­recognizes the rampant heterosexism of the pinto imagery in a p o­liti­cally correct manner but then drops the  topic without Ānding any convincing way to  account for it. Instead, the determination of the U.S. penal system to suppress the convict’s individuality—to turn him into a nonentity, as Jimmy Baca puts it—is consistently identiĀed as an attack against and a loss of the convict’s personal sovereignty-­cum-­masculinity in such expressions as “the emasculation drama of the men’s penitentiary” and “their individual and collective ‘emasculation’ and effacement as speaking subjects.”15 Consequently, the fear of the annihilation of the speaking subject is inflected through the ste­reo­ typical idiom of heterosexual male sexuality and gender dichotomy: the Virgin’s image on the convict’s back protects him against flogging and demasculinization by rape; tattoos manifest deĀlement and “damage” done to the bodies regarded as state property; tattooed images of ­voluptuous ­women function as a homosocial bond between incarcerated and emblazoned men, affirming their hegemonic masculinity across social and racial hierarchies. Internalized and enacted in d aily practices, this gendered discourse thus naturalizes the violent power relations inherent in t he appropriation of bodies (and spaces) at large. What is more, it transports into the convict’s community the antagonistic stricture of the prison system, determined by the territorial markings that also 244  ·  a st a kuus inen

characterize the empowered pinto subject in Olguín’s essay, for example.16 Montoya’s artwork, on the other hand, acknowledges the impossibility of consolidating unproblematically the ideal of seeing persons merely as effects of community affiliations (implied by Jameson’s concept of po­ liti­cal unconscious) with the individualistic ideals of personal autonomy and self-­possession that characterize pinto discourse. The absolutism of the pinto body starts to crumble at exactly the same moment when the unĀnished tattoo on Felix Martínez’s back becomes enhanced by Ipiotis’s crayon and Montoya’s camera, shifting the primary signiĀcation of his tattoo from the “Mark of the Beast” branding the criminal body to the “Badge of Honor” decorating the pilgrim.17 As an imaginary construction, the artwork materializes the quest of el guadalupano—an ex-­ convict, a pilgrim, and a follower of the Virgin of Guadalupe cult—­arbitrating between the physical body and its ideological appropriations. The artist’s fascination with the deftness of the camera in tracing the minutest detail of the inmate’s skin thus betrays her desire to dare the deterministic structure of the panopticon with its own optical tools and to provide the body of the pinto with a communally empowered identity as a pilgrim and a “second skin” of cultural meanings conceived by light rather than by ­needles. Montoya, literally overwriting the inmate’s “perpetual stigma” by photographic technology, allows his body to break out of its discursive conĀnes inside the prison, offering it to be viewed, reread, and consumed as an artiĀce, a work of art—­not as the portrait representing the man Felix Martínez. On p ublic display in t he New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe in 1999, the installation indeed became a striking reminder of the prison’s failure to accomplish its mission of total disempowerment. ­There the ­labor of completing Martínez’s unĀnished tattoo was taken over from Ipiotis and Montoya by the inmate’s relatives and friends, who donated their own ofrendas to further enhance his body altar and thereby turned it into an intimate enactment of personal mourning and communal regeneration.

­ ese ofrendas and other devotional objects not Th only infused the institutional space of the museum with Catholic mysticism but also invoked the aesthetic sensibility of Indigenous faith, particularly the Día de los Muertos practices of celebrating the dead. A store­house of legitimate national heritage, the museum in t he state capital stands as a supreme arbiter of cultural values, and inside this institutional setting Montoya’s installation started to communicate in rather unforeseen ways. It endorsed an art practice disconnected from the ideas of repre­sen­ta­tion, essential innovation, and formal evolution. It privileged familiarity over alienation, but disguised its sociohistorical speciĀcity b ­ ehind the façade of common cultural knowledge about traditional religious forms in N ew Mexico. It sneaked alien ele­ ments into the museum’s instructions about the proper consumption of art by inviting the audience to touch the artwork, even to radically alter it, and thereby to give homage not to the artist as the creator, or to the “masterpiece,” but to the memory of a community member. It changed the institutional space of the museum into a personal “place,” the meaning of which flowed from spontaneous audience participation unmediated by any kind of technological interface that generally regulates audience response.18 Inside the museum, the back of the tattooed convict bends before the transformative power of the desiring female gaze, the gaze t hat uses the male Āgure as a resource of reflection, as the “red blood of resemblance,” so as to draft its own metaphysical image, not as God or Goddess but as a catalyst for imagination and communal healing. Montoya is excluded, due to her gender, from membership in t he order of the penitente ­brothers as well as from los guadalupanos, the veterano followers of the cult of La Guadalupana, also exclusively male. She thus appropriates the pinto Āgure to become the “Holy Other” for the female icon of Guadalupe that occupies the pinto’s “real” skin, predestined for annihilation, of which the photo­graph itself is proof.19 Instead of the tattooing ­needles, the sharp rays of the Virgin’s halo rewrite the convict’s back and endow

him with the psychological and physical qualities of a mystic, who in medieval tradition is always bigendered—­the female Soul and the male Lover all in one. In medieval Christian art, this idea of an amalgamation of sexes led to bigendering the physical attributes of saints, giving birth to soft-­ featured male saints and debreasted females with short hair. Montoya’s artwork does not follow that path; as an alternative, its bigendering effect operates predominantly at the level of perception and reception, for the bisexual nature of a mystical per­for­mance allegedly preconditions the attributes of the witness-­voyeur, too. As the embodiments of the “Eye,” therefore, both the artist and the viewer are preconditioned to respond to the ensuing demands of bisexuality that actually emanate from the ideals of Christian mysticism but are violently suppressed by the customary bipolarization of the sexes that conceptually associates ­women with death and deception.20 Conclusion The obligation to become divine . . . ​is not about a preparation for life ­after death. It is about life before death where the possibilities of natality are opened out. —­G RACE JANTZEN

The presence of the altar and worshippers inside the museum heightens the performative, ritualistic, and ultimately mystical natures of art that are endorsed by phi­los­o­pher Roland Barthes in hi s influential writings on photography and death but are bemoaned by another canonized twentieth-­ century theorist, Walter Benjamin, who perceived religion as an ultimate agent of conformity.21 The latter stance tends to depoliticize particularly bodily religious experiences as something subjective and feminine, disconnecting them from social and po­liti­cal implications and therefore conĀning them to the private sphere. A simi lar dichotomy existed already in m edieval mysticism, which was divided into the affective feminine type and the  speculative masculine type,

Ojo d e l a Diosa  ·  245

of which only the latter held po­liti­cal prestige. Many Chicana artists, including Montoya, insist on having it both ways by habitually employing ­women’s domestic religious practices in their art as a medium for po­liti­cal commentary. However, this tendency in Montoya’s artwork—­rather than producing any kind of open provocation based on sexual difference or unambiguous re­sis­tance against traditional aesthetics—­has entailed a rethinking of the fundamental princi­ples of the beliefs incorporated in a nd disseminated by religious/nationalistic iconography. Grace Jantzen would call this kind of approach the hermeneutic of suspicion, potentially post-­Christian in i ts recoding of religious ethics.22 Islamist scholar Saba Mahmood, in t he same vein, emphasizes the temporal and geo­graph­i­cal locatedness of reformative activism by asserting that “the desire for freedom and liberation is historically situated and its motivational force cannot be assumed a priori, but needs to be reconsidered in lig ht of other desires, historical proj­ects, and capacities that inhere in a di scursively and historically located subject.”23 The other desire, the other historical proj­ect in the case of the artworks studied in this essay, would be the proj­ect of reimagining Aztlán, the Chicana/o homeland, and its apprehension of the divine. Thus, the desire for religious/po­liti­cal agency therein, rather than directly adhering to ontotheological princi­ples, is essentially linked with the community ­under consideration, with its internal dynamics, inclusions, exclusions, and ethics. Yet “community” does not automatically mean working according to the ethics of its members becoming divine for one another, as Luce Irigaray would have it. “It is essential that we be God for ourselves,” she writes, “so that we can be divine for the other, not idols, fetishes, symbols that have already been outlined or determined.”24 On t he contrary, communities can be deeply coercive, hierarchical, and enwrapped in the symbolism of death, based on the very idols and fetishes that keep them together. Allegedly, the elevation of sacriĀce and death as the birth of community is deeply seated in Western philosophy as well as 246  ·  a st a kuus inen

in pre-­Columbian thinking, both of which have given shape to Mexican American culture. Th ­ ese contested questions about community, traditionally regarded as the cornerstone of Chicano ideology, inexorably loom over the artworks discussed in this essay. But they also endow the artworks with a “h orizon of becoming,” at the same time ­human and divine, called for by feminist theology. Most impor­tant, Montoya’s works do not only talk the talk, but they also apply it in practice, being material products of a collaborative effort by an a­ ctual Chicano community. The involvement of a l arge number of community members in the design and execution and eventually in the reception of El Sagrado Corazón/The Sacred Heart and La Guadalupana, for example, manages to problematize the individualistic unitary voice of the pinto subject as well as that of the artist herself, despite her influential status in the community. As a replica of the vernacular home altar, La Guadalupana interrupts the gendered pattern in the conĀguration of religious knowledge and communal hierarchy, the pattern that marks the conception of the “proto-­subject” of la raza a s invariably male. It slips the private domain of ­women into the space of two very dif­fer­ent public institutions, the prison and the museum, striving to challenge the par­ameters of both and turning the artwork into a battleĀeld of repre­sen­ta­tional power politics. Handcuffs and iron bars—­the stark symbols of containment, humiliation, and dehumanization—­that foil the convict’s torso recede ­behind the signs of the sumptuous life force stirred up by the attributes of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which are repeated again and again and again in the form of a halo of roses, spikes, tattooed body parts, and burning candles. Inside this protective magical circle orchestrated by the artist, the pinto submits his rebellious masculinity, accepting a fresh inscription as a venerated pilgrim of the La Guadalupana cult, a second skin capable of absorbing and subverting the brutality of the ­needles. Instead of manifesting absolute subjugation to the system, he becomes interlinked with and sustained by the other Chicanos modeled in

the installation—­college students, barrio boys, even a white musician—­who expose their skin to the eye of Montoya’s camera and show off their tattoos without the stigma of crime. Notes This chapter was originally published as Asta Kuusinen, “Ojo de la Diosa: Becoming Divine in Delilah Montoya’s Photography,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33, no. 1 (spring 2008): 33–61. Epigraph: Gabriel Meléndez, “Carrying the Magic of His ­People’s Heart: An Interview with Jimmy Santiago Baca,” Amer­i­cas Review: A Review of Hispanic Lit­er­a­ture and Art of the USA, no. 19 (winter 1991): 64–86. 1. Already in 1991, Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino and John Tagg’s essay “The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide: The ­Museum, Identity, and Buenas Garras” proposed a criticism of the pachuco, the defiant Mexican American hero/victim of the war­time era resurrected as the essentialized “proto-­subject” of la raza and charged with primordial associations as a medium for instinctive or unconscious powers. Their criticism of the “phallocentric notion of empowerment” could well be applied in the reading of the pinto discourse, too. Conducting the traffic of ­communication between the inside and the outside worlds, both the con­spic­u­ous dressing style of pachucos and the defiant prison tattoos of pintos bestow upon a person a certain mea­sure of control over his own self-­definition, but on the other hand they often stipulate rather strict social bound­aries to its expression. The stylish pachuco outfit in effect feminized its wearers; combined with their violent be­hav­ior, that seemed particularly disturbing to the public, ethnicity notwithstanding. See Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino and John Tagg, “The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide: The Museum, Identity, and Buenas Garras,” in Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa Mc­­ Kenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano, 97–108 (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991). 2. According to Delilah Montoya, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the icon itself, and her altar are considered female; hence the feminine term, la guadalupana. In Mexico and the United States, the cult’s followers include both ­women and men. However, the masculine terms el guadalupano and los guadalupanos refer to a special group of men, pintos and ex-­pintos among them, who give homage to the cult by tattooing Guadalupe’s image generally on their backs but

sometimes also elsewhere on their bodies. Their practice is not sanctioned by any religion, but they are known in the community as los guadalupanos. Delilah Montoya, e-­mail message to author, May 29, 2007. I wish to thank Delilah Montoya, whose friendship and help have made pos­si­ble this essay as well as my dissertation on Chicana photog­raphers. 3. For an insightful discussion on Chicano altars, see the essays of Elizabeth López and Victor Sorell in Imágenes e historias/Images and Histories: Chicana Altar-­Inspired Art, ed. Constance Cortez (Medford, MA: Tufts University ­Gallery / Santa Clara, CA: Santa Clara University, 1999). In the same collection, Amalia Mesa-­Bains associates ­ omen’s artwork springing from sacred practices w directly with the exercise of po­liti­cal agency: “For many Chicana artists, the affirmation of the ­family domestic practices of the home altar and yard shrine was a sign of community power. . . . ​In a sense, the art making inspired by the remembrances of the dead, the acts of healing, and the reflections of the sacred can be described as a politicizing spirituality” (Imágenes e historias, 2). 4. Ben V. Olguín, “Tattoos, Abjection, and the Po­liti­cal Unconscious: ­Toward a Semiotics of the Pinto Visual Vernacular,” Cultural Critique 37 (fall 1997): 166. 5. Fredric Jameson, The Po­liti­cal Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 194. 6. Juliet Fleming, “The Re­nais­sance Tattoo,” in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in Eu­ro­pean and American History, ed. Jane Caplan (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2000), 62. 7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977; New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 25. 8. Olguín describes in intriguing detail the difficulties and dangers involved at the dif­fer­ent stages of the pro­cess: finding or manufacturing the tools, performing the tattooing work in secret, and ensuring the protection the tattooed man needs to keep the guards from noticing fresh tattoos (Olguín, “Tattoos,” 168–76). It seems to be rather common that prisoners’ practices of self-­ empowerment recapitulate the practices of the larger social system that subjugates them. Abby M. Schrader’s essay, for example, describes how inmates in the Rus­sian Frontier—­that is, Siberia—­“quite explic­itly classified themselves” and “drew on the corporate language of the Rus­sian social order”: “by wrestling control of practices associated with official power and reenacting its spectacle, convicts reinforced the idea that they could carve

Ojo d e l a Diosa  ·  247

out their opposition to officialdom by assimilating its technologies” (Abby M. Schrader, “Branding the Other/ Tattooing the Self: Bodily Inscription among Convicts in Rus­sia and the Soviet Union,” in Caplan, Written on the Body, 183–86). 9. Susan A. Phillips, “Gallo’s Body: Decoration and Damnation in the Life of a Chicano Gang Member,” Ethnography 2, no. 3 (2001): 358. 10. Phillips, “Gallo’s Body,” 360. 11. Alan Govenar, “The Variable Context of Chicano Tattooing,” in Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the ­Human Body, ed. Arnold Rubin (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1988), 217. 12. Mark Gustafson, “The Tattoo in the Late Roman Empire and Beyond,” in Caplan, Written on the Body, 31. 13. Susan Benson, “Inscriptions of the Self: Reflections of Tattooing and Piercing in Con­temporary Euro-­ America,” in Caplan, Written on the Body, 251. 14. Christopher Wright, “Supple Bodies: The Papua New Guinea Photo­graphs of Captain Francis R. Barton, 1899–1907,”in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 146–69. 15. Olguín,“Tattoos,” 161, 171. 16. Similar to Chicano epic poetry, Salinas’s verses claim territorial owner­ship through the invocation of his own body as the personification of the Chicano body politic and as a sole landowner in the barrios from Loma of Austin and Barelas of Albuquerque to Rose Hill of Los Angeles and the West Side of Denver. See Raúl Salinas, Un Trip through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions (Houston, TX: Arte Público, 1999). See also Rodolfo Gonzalez, I Am Joaquín/Yo soy Joaquín (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1972). 17. It is worth mentioning ­here that apart from their affinity with paganism and the practice of marking criminality, tattoos have an equally long history as an honorary sign in medieval Christian tradition, beginning long before Eu­rope’s contact with Indigenous cultures around the globe. “Throughout the medieval period,” writes language historian Juliet Fleming, “it was common practice for pilgrims to have themselves tattooed in Jerusalem, returning home bearing indelible marks as evidence both of their journey and of their commitment to the ser­vice of God” (Fleming, “Re­nais­sance Tattoo,” 79). Globalizing and historicizing the pinto discourse beyond its prison and barrio bound­aries, C. P. Jones contends that “religious tattooing continued to flourish in the Levant throughout antiquity, and has continued among eastern Christians to the pres­ent day” (C. P. Jones, “Stigma and

248  ·  a st a kuus inen

Tattoo,” in Caplan, Written on the Body, 15).This interrupted but lately rediscovered history links pinto tattoos intimately with New Mexican penitential practices, which asserted not only the pilgrim’s communion with Christ but also his subordinate status as a slave and soldier of God. Thus both ultimately act as signs of a chattel, not only pledging immunity against violent encroachment but also implying an extreme religious bondage that, as in the pinto’s case, seldom transforms to the kind of sovereign agency enjoyed by the penitente ­brother. 18. My gratitude to the reviewer of this essay for insightfully pointing out that my close reading of ­Montoya’s installation in the context of its institutional loci relates to Victor Turner’s conceptualizations of liminality, low status, and communitas. Turner clarifies his idea about communitas by referring to Martin Buber: “For me, communitas emerges where social structure is not. Perhaps the best way of putting this difficult concept into words is Martin Buber’s. . . . ​Buber uses the term ‘community’ for ‘communitas’: ‘Community is the being no longer side by side (and, one might add, above and below) but with one another of a multitude of persons. And this multitude, though it moves ­towards one goal, yet experiences everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the ­others, a flowing from I to Thou’ ” (Victor Turner, The Ritual Pro­cess: Structure and Anti-­structure, Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, University of Rochester [1969; New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995], 51).“Buber lays his fin­ger on the spontaneous, immediate, concrete nature of communitas, as opposed to the norm-­governed, ­institutionalized, abstract nature of social structure” (Turner, Ritual Pro­cess, 126–27).Yet, according to Turner, it is the oscillation between communitas and social hierarchy that constitutes the foundation of a society, which, for its existence, might depend on a kind of irrational “gap” in its center (Turner, Ritual Pro­cess, 127). 19. For a theoretically sophisticated discussion of the term “Holy Other” and the meaning of suffering associated with the body of Christ, see Amy M. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 88–110. 20. If Freud’s and Lacan’s writings conceptually link death with the female, Montoya’s artwork satirizes the romanticization and feminization of death, particularly sacrificial death, as a universal mediator between man and divinity. For example, Montoya’s multimedia piece, San Sebastiana “Angel de la Muerte” (2002); ­accessed August 2018, http://­www​.­delilahmontoya​.­com​ /­ArtistStatement​.­html#San), introduces a nuevomexicana

folklore persona, Doña Sebastiana, often depicted as a skeleton in a fancy dress. Cast as a gossiping telephone operator and the village beauty, Sebastiana, while making up her face in front of a mirror, barters for sainthood with God, who wants to hire her to be Death. ­Here we have a death figure that functions as comic relief, rather than as a token of the horrors of mortality. Montoya’s tongue-­in-­cheek foreword speculates ­whether the complementary Western icon, Saint Sebastian—­the arrow-­pierced martyr of the early Christian era—­ received a gender transfer in New Mexico once he crossed the ocean. 21. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and

Wang, 1981); andWalter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (1936; NewYork: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–52. 22. Grace M. Jantzen, Becoming Divine: T­ owards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998), 110. 23. Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Agency, and the Liberatory Subject: Some Reflections on the Islamic Revival in Egypt,” Temenos: Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion 42, no. 1 (2006): 58. 24. Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. ­Gillian C. Gill (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1987; New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 71.

Ojo d e l a Diosa  ·  249

l uz cal v o

25. Art Comes for the Archbishop  ·  2004 The Semiotics of Con­temporary Chicana Feminism and the Work of Alma López

The Virgin of Guadalupe is omnipresent in Chicano/a visual space. She is painted on car win­dows, tattooed on shoulders or backs, emblazoned on neighborhood walls, and silk-­screened on T-­shirts sold at local flea markets. Periodically, her presence is manifested in miraculous apparitions: on a tree near Watsonville, California, or on a ­water tank, a car bumper, or a freshly made tortilla.1 She is the sorrowful m ­ other, a Āgure who embodies the suffering of Chicano/a and Mexican populations in t he context of colonization, racism, and economic disenfranchisement. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a polyvalent sign, able to convey multiple and divergent meanings and deployed by dif­fer­ent groups for contradictory po­liti­cal ends. For example, the Catholic Church deploys the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in ser­vice of its regressive sexual politics. However, progressive movements have also carried the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe to signify re­sis­tance to colonization and economic exploitation, as in the War of Mexican In­de­pen­dence and in the United Farm Workers’ strug­gle for economic justice. Chicano/a cultural

workers—­from graffiti artists to novelists—­use the Virgin of Guadalupe as a sign of racial solidarity, for she is i­magined to have brown skin,2 or as a sig n of transnational solidarity, for she is the patron saint of Mexico. Chicano/a artists have reproduced and reinterpreted the Virgin of Guadalupe in their retablos, paintings, murals, posters, Ālms, per­for­mance, and lit­er­a­ture. Almost without exception, Chicano/a Ālms include the image of Guadalupe in t heir sets, nodding to her importance in C hicano/a visual space. And merchants in Chicano/a neighborhoods use the Virgin of Guadalupe to sell their product: it is commonplace to see a mural devoted to the Virgin on the outside of a neighborhood liquor store or to Ānd Virgin of Guadalupe auto “air fresheners” at the car wash. ­Because of her ubiquity and her polyvalence, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is a sign that is especially available for semiotic resigniĀcation and cultural transformation. Alma López, a Chicana lesbian artist, has seized this semiotic possibility, creating a series of digital images that break open and transĀgure previous interpretations and uses of the Virgin. López’s images make manifest

the sexuality and desire that are embedded in Chicano/a attachments to the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As might be expected, López’s work has been quite controversial. Her digital collage Our Lady (1999) incited demonstrations, community meetings, and letters to the editor when it was displayed at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico (Āg. 25.1).3 Angered by López’s image, a vocal group of Chicano and Catholic activists called for its removal from the museum. Rhetorically reducing the image to the language of fashion, ­these activists repeatedly described López’s piece as a depiction of “the Virgin of Guadalupe in a bikini.” The demonstrators gained the support of Santa Fe Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan, who called the piece “insulting and sacrilegious,” asserting that in López’s image the Virgin is “shown as a tart or a street ­woman.”4 Chicano nationalists tried to maintain control over the meaning of the Virgin of Guadalupe and contain her within the semiotic structure of the Catholic Church. The protests that surrounded Our Lady caused considerable consternation and debate within Chicano/a communities in New Mexico and beyond.5 Ultimately, however, López’s defenders successfully deployed First Amendment arguments and the New Mexico museum’s Committee on Sensitive Materials deci­ded that the work would remain on display. Undoubtedly, ­free speech arguments have strategic value—­that is, they protect a s pace for the public articulation of queer desire and the display of images that contest Āxed and static ideas about cultural identity. However, First Amendment arguments cannot begin to account for the kind of cultural work achieved by queer and feminist Chicano/a art. Speaking from the position of a queer Chicana cultural critic, I argue that rights-­based arguments assume that we (artists and critics of color, queers, and other disenfranchised ­people) already have what we seek to defend: namely, equal footing with the ­imagined subject of Western liberal democracy. In my view, López’s art poses a critique and challenge that is about more than ­free speech or even equal rights.

López’s art breaks open a p ublic, cultural space for the articulation of queer Chicana desire. This desire is at once sexual and po­liti­cal. Her images seduce the spectator into new desiring positions by exposing Chicano/a libidinal investments—­conscious and unconscious—in the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her images mobilize and disturb t­ hese investments, channeling Chicano/a desire in queer directions. SigniĀcantly, Our Lady refuses to indulge in t he disavowal of the body that informs conventional, religious repre­sen­ta­ tions of the Virgin. Instead, Our Lady represents the interlinkage of racial identities and sexual and po­liti­cal desires, while, at the same time, pointing to the constitutive ambivalence of the heart of Chicano/a—­and other—­identity formations. Working in digital collage, as well as other in media, López—­a relatively young artist—­has already produced a sizable oeuvre, much of which is displayed on her website, www​.­almalopez​.­net. López is a p ublic artist, and the internet allows her work to circulate beyond the conĀnes of the museum or art gallery. When López’s work appears in a rt exhibits and galleries, most of her prints are relatively small, and the three images I discuss in this essay are all 11 by 17 inches. López’s images are more commonly viewed on computer screens, as individual users visit her website. The scale of López’s work is most impor­tant in h er large digital murals, which have been installed on the outside walls of buildings in East Los ­Angeles and at San Francisco’s Galería de la Raza. In ­these works, López locates herself within the Mexican and Chicano/a mural tradition, which changes community space by producing art on the walls of housing proj­ects, public buildings, local businesses, and so forth. As another way of circulating her art, López has produced art for the cover of a n umber of impor­tant books in C hicano/a cultural studies and for a number of impor­tant Chicano/a conferences. The book covers and posters circulate her art in b ookstores, universities, living rooms, and dormitories.6 Through her diverse artistic interventions, López is having a signiĀcant impact on Chicano/a visual space. Art C omes fo r the Ar chbis ho p  ·  251

FIG. 25.1. Alma López, Our Lady, 1999. Digital print, 14 × 7.5 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

In Our Lady, López reconĀgures the Virgin of Guadalupe, opening up her feminist and queer potential. Our Lady makes reference to the “original” image of La Virgen de Guadalupe that hangs in the basilica in M exico City.7 In the original image, the Virgen is posed with hands in prayer and eyes cast down. She wears a lo ng-­sleeved gown, which covers her from neck to toe. Over her gown, a blue mantle drapes her head and the back of her body. The mantle is adorned with gold stars. She stands upon a dark crescent moon, held aloft by a ­little angel. López’s Our Lady pres­ents signiĀcant changes to the original version: in her image, López draws attention to the brown female body by exposing more of it. López’s image features a photo­graph of Latina per­for­mance artist Raquel Salinas, her legs, arms, and midriff bare. Salinas is clothed only in roses, a symbol of the “proof ” of the Virgin’s 1531apparition in Mexico. López modiĀes some other characteristics of the traditional image: the patterned rose-­colored gown, which usually obscures the Virgin’s body, is h ­ ere rendered as background. The Virgin’s traditional starry blue shawl is now draped and folded on a platform at the bottom of the frame. A modiĀed blue-­gray cloak covers the model’s shoulders—­this one Ālled in with the image of the Aztec goddess Coyolxauhqui, the rebellious ­daughter. The angel who holds up the moon in the traditional image has been replaced with a bare-­breasted (and pierced) Latina (Raquel Gutierrez) superimposed over a butterfly. Fi­nally, and importantly, López changes the stance of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who traditionally stands demurely with eyes cast downward and her hands together in p rayer. In López’s image, the model has her hands on her hips and her gaze cast forward deĀantly, ­toward the spectator.8 López draws from earlier Chicana feminist artistic engagements with the Virgin of Guadalupe by artists such as Ester Hernández and Yolanda López. Hernández’s La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Xicanos (1975) and Yolanda López’s Guadalupe Triptych (1978) also reĀgure the pose of the Virgen. Th ­ ese images represent the Virgin of Guadalupe in active

stances and with con­temporary Chicana identities: practicing karate or r­ unning a marathon, as a seamstress or an abuelita (grand­mother). In other images, ­these two artists explore the sexual potential of the Virgin: Hernández’s La Ofrenda (1988) depicts a tattoo of the Virgin on the back of a Chicana lesbian, while Yolanda López’s Guadalupe Walking (1978) portrays the Virgin walking in a dr ess and open-­toed heels. Like Alma López’s Our Lady, ­these two images ­were received with threats and, in some cases, vio­lence.9 The level of controversy that attends to feminist and queer revisions of the Virgin of Guadalupe reveals the high stakes of Chicano/a cultural identity—­and its constitutive ambivalence. Images—­ such as the Virgin of Guadalupe—­that purport to represent identity are inevitably locked in a paradoxical position, in t hat they can never fully achieve their goal. This is the gap between the signiĀer and the signiĀed and the ambivalence at the heart of repre­sen­ta­tion and identity. To use an example, the declarative utterance “I am Chicana” can never capture the complexity of the subject, who both exceeds the declaration (is more than that) and inevitably falls short (can never be Chicana enough). As in t his example, ­there is always a disjuncture between repre­sen­ta­ tion and the subject. Attempts to disavow this gap anchor the meaning of ethnic identity in s tatic, Āxed, and often retrograde ways, resulting in what Emma Pérez—­drawing on Michel Foucault—­ names a “fascist militancy.”10 Pérez productively considers Foucault’s provocation: “How does one keep from being a fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?”11 Pérez is correct in wa rning us of the potential po­liti­cal danger posed by t­ hose who try to control, police, and anchor the meaning of Chicano/a identity—or, by extension, the meaning of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Reading con­temporary Chicano/a politics as a space where “power polices desire,” Pérez argues, “We are threatened once again by a reemergence of uncompromising nationalist movements in which feminisms are dismissed as bourgeois, in which queer voices are scoffed at as a w hite Art C omes fo r the Ar chbis ho p  ·  253

t­ hing, in which anyone who does not sustain the ‘­family values’ of modernist, patriarchal nationalism is not tolerated and is often silenced.”12 In the case of the controversy surrounding Alma López’s Our Lady, Pérez is exactly on point, for it has been precisely ­those ele­ments of the Chicano community that remain invested in “patriarchal nationalism” (namely, the church and male nationalist activists) who have been most vigorous in their attempts to silence the Chicana lesbian artist.13 The controversy surrounding López’s art exposes the danger of fascism that arises from attempts to erase ambivalence. The Virgin of Guadalupe has the potential to be the sign of this fascist impulse. In a psychoanalytic reading, Pérez argues, “The nationalist imperative is to move back in time, a regression, a return to the ­mother, but the ­mother cannot be Malinche. She must be La Virgen de Guadalupe; she cannot be sexual.”14 Nationalists mobilize Oedipus to structure Chicano/a identity in a h eterosexual direction, embedding it in r elations of patriarchal power and the incest taboo. However, as lesbian scholars such as Teresa de L auretis have argued, the meaning of Oedipal structures is never as static— or heterosexual—as it might Ārst appear.15 In Alma López’s art, the Virgin of Guadalupe is claimed by Chicana lesbians, troubling the heterosexual matrix of Chicano/a nationalism. The nationalists root their politics in a m ythic past and an image of totality that insists on the ­mother’s heterosexual desire. However, Chicana feminism also mobilizes a n otion of totality, although differently inscribed. In Chicana feminist art, the image of the Virgin signiĀesplentitude and omniscience: she is nuestra madre (our m ­ other) who watches over us in t he context of racism, sexual vio­lence, economic injustice, and, even, homophobia. Postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha, explaining the working of identiĀcation, argues that “identity is never an a priori, nor a Ānished product; it is only ever the problematic pro­cess of ­access to an image of totality.”16 In Chicano/a contexts, the Virgin is the sign of such totality, hence 254  ·  l uz cal v o

her signiĀcance to the production of Chicano/a identiĀcations. While Chicano nationalists assume that identity is uniĀed, Āxed, and needs to be guarded from outside influence (such as queer sexualities), postcolonial critics such as Bhabha and Pérez understand identity as something produced by always ambivalent and never stable psychic pro­cesses. What Bhabha means when he writes of “access to an image of totality” is a plentitude and fulĀllment that can never be fully achieved: it is the desire for an impossible object, ­whether it be the ­mother or complete freedom. The psychoanalytic concept of identiĀcation provides a tool for understanding identity as an open-­ended pro­cess, never complete and always fraught with ambivalent desires. IdentiĀcation is the pro­cess by which a subject introjects an object from the outside. Introjection takes an object from outside (another subject or an image) and incorporates it into one’s own ego. The relationship between young Chicana fans and late pop star Selena is an excellent example of the way that identiĀcation works in C hicana contexts. This identiĀcation is the subject of Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (1999), a do cumentary by Lourdes Portillo. Her Ālm opens with a scene of young Chicana fans lip-­synching the songs of the recently deceased Selena. The young ­women emulate Selena’s style, body gestures, and dance moves. In this identiĀcation with Selena, the girls introject Selena into their own egos, or sense of self. The young girls are able to deal with the loss of their idol (in Freudian terms, their “ego-­ideal”) by keeping her alive inside themselves. Sigmund Freud provides a more trivial example of this pro­ cess of introjection: “A child who was unhappy over the loss of a kitten declared straight out that now he himself was the kitten, and accordingly crawled about on all fours, would not eat at the ­table, ­etc.”17 This example of the lost kitten illustrates the relationship between identiĀcation and loss. The child’s pain over the loss of the kitten leads the child to incorporate the pet into his own ego (his sense of self); the child, in order to keep the kitten alive, becomes the kitten. In psychoanalytic terms, the “ego” (a psychoanalytic term for

identity) is composed entirely of identiĀcations with objects that have been lost. When Chicana girls (and, not incidentally, Chicano drag queens) impersonate Selena, it is a m elancholic identiĀcation that constitutes the ego/identity along the axis of loss (Selena’s death) and plentitude (Selena’s Chicana body). Chicano/a identiĀcation with Selena is—­like all identiĀcations—­ambivalent and aggressive: her death, while experienced as an intense loss, is also an opportunity to replace Selena, that is, the opportunity to be the next pop star, to be adored and to be loved. In a footnote to her discussion of Selena’s death, Pérez reports a co nversation she had with Teresa de L auretis.18 The two scholars watched a 1995 Univisión interview with Yolanda Saldívar, Selena’s murderer and the president of her fan club. They speculate that Saldívar was less likely to be motivated by lesbian desire (this rumor circulated widely) than by the desire to be Selena: “a psychological condition experienced by obsessed fans who want to become the star.”19 Like the infamous Aimée discussed by Jacques Lacan, Saldívar’s aggression, notes Pérez, “has linked herself in memory, in history, to Selena.”20 As is often the case in psychological phenomena, this extreme form of fandom shares a similar psychical structure to the more benign forms of fan desire: in both cases, identiĀcation with the star masks an aggressive component. For her fans, Selena’s brown female body signiĀes a plentitude in the context of a racial imaginary that devalues, degrades, and disparages female and brown bodies. In hegemonic U.S. cultural texts, brown female bodies are si­mul­ta­ neously sexualized and repudiated, desired and found disgusting. The brown female body is invested with par­tic­u­lar social meanings resulting from her position at the intersection of racial and sexual categories; her body becomes the repository for U.S. cultural anx­i­eties about both sexual and racial difference. In the case of Selena—as with the Virgin of Guadalupe—­the brown female body is the cultural sign that encourages Chicana identiĀcation, even though, on the surface, ­these two Āgures appear to be very dif­fer­ent. Selena’s

body is exposed, celebrated, and commodiĀed, while the Virgin’s body is hidden and disavowed. Po­liti­cally, however, identiĀcation with Selena and the Virgin both allow for a certain recuperation of the brown female body, a possibility that can occur with public Āgures, ­either religious or pop. Sandra Cisneros, in her essay “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” directly addresses the issue of Chicana investment in t he repre­sen­ta­tion of brown female bodies. Cisneros’s essay powerfully engages the slippery, mutually embedded categories of racial and sexual difference. Writing of her relationship to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Cisneros reveals a desire to lift the Virgin’s dress, to see her underwear and her sex: “When I see La Virgen de Guadalupe I want to lift her dress as I did my dolls’ and look to see if s he comes with chones, and does her panocha look like mine, and does she have dark nipples too? Yes, I am certain she does.”21 Cisneros’s desire to see the Virgin’s body underscores the complexity of the nexus of racial and sexual difference in the formation of Chicana subjectivity. Within a c ultural context in w hich brown bodies and female bodies are undervalued, Cisneros wants to see her own image of her body (her “body-­ego,” in Freud’s terms) reflected in a sacred icon. Perhaps paradoxically, she also constructs herself of body-­ego in relation to a pornographic Ālm featuring a white ­woman. Cisneros writes, “Once, watching a porn Ālm, I saw a sight that terriĀed me. It was the Ālm star’s panocha—­a tidy, elliptical opening, pink and shiny like a rabbit’s ear. To make ­matters worse, it was shaved.”22 If the sight of the Anglo porn star’s genitals evoked in Cisneros feelings of horror, it was ­because of a difference that was at once racially and sexually coded. ­Here, the Lacanian concept of lack has application not (only) to the lack of the phallus but to the lack of the “white slit” that Cisneros witnessed in the pornography Ālm. Cisneros interprets the porn star’s genitals in relation to her own self-­image: “I think what startled me most was the realization that my own sex has no resemblance to this w ­ oman’s. My sex, dark as an orchid, rubbery and blue purple as a Art C omes fo r the Ar chbis ho p  ·  255

pulpo, an octopus, does not look nice and tidy, but otherworldly.”23 Cisneros uses Āgurative language to describe her genitals (“an orchid,” “an octopus”). The image of her Chicana body is constructed through language, including the language of pornography, religious iconography, and poetic meta­phor. In short, her brown, Chicana body is not an essential characteristic but rather a position within a grid that Āgures racial and sexual difference inside par­tic­u­lar social symbolic structures. Cisneros’s description of her horror at the sight of the porn star’s genitals recalls a scenario ­imagined by Freud: the scene of castration anxiety. In Freud’s scenario, a young boy is surprised to learn that his ­mother does not have a penis. The scene of castration constitutes the boy as threatened: his penis could be taken away. At the same time, the scene reveals to the boy that he is “endowed,” that is, he realizes that he has something his ­mother does not. A few notes of caution for t­ hose who would reject Freud’s account outright: First, this is an allegory of sexual difference and should not be read literally. Second, this account of the constitution of male subjectivity is Ārmly entrenched in historically situated, p ­ atriarchal social relations: it is not ahistorical. Fi­nally, the male subjectivity that is constituted in this scenario is thoroughly ambivalent. In her Lacanian reading of this scenario, Judith Butler argues that being endowed with the penis (or, in other terms, “phallus”) is “a symbolic position . . . ​which is only partially and vainly approximated by t­ hose marked masculine beings who vainly and partially occupy that position within language.”24 The scene of castration constructs a masculinity that is in perpetual crisis. David L. Eng makes productive use of Freud’s allegory of castration in his book Racial Castration. He argues that feminist and queer theories that deploy “psychoanalytic theory to deconstruct naturalizing discourses of sexual, and in p ar­tic­ u­lar heterosexual, difference must be rethought to include ­viable accounts of race as well.”25 Eng thoughtfully undertakes this proj­ect by reading race back into psychoanalysis, Ānding in the case 256  ·  l uz cal v o

of castration that “castration is always racial castration.”26 Drawing on Eng’s theoretical intervention (which I can only gloss ­here), I read Cisneros’s essay in terms of racial castration anxiety. For, in some sense, Cisneros’s fantasy of lifting the Virgin’s dress is also a search for the penis—­ that is, for a symbol of cultural power denied to Chicana subjects. ­Here, “the” penis would Āgure both sexual and racial difference. Cisneros’s claim that she is searching for a “ panocha like hers” hides another desire: that is, to Ānd the Chicana ­mother’s penis. This claim, of course, takes Freud’s scenario in a dif­fer­ent direction. However, if we read castration to be about the binary of presence/absence, then, perhaps, it is productive to consider “race” (­imagined as manifested on or through the body) in t­ hese terms. The enigma of the meaning of “race” for racialized subjects produces a number of questions, captured in Cisneros’s allegory of lifting the Virgin’s dress—­which can only be ­interpreted as a scenario to Ānd the social symbolic meaning of her sexed and raced body. What she Ānds is an ambivalent position: while she claims to Ānd her body ­under the Virgin of Guadalupe’s gown, Cisneros’s rhetorical consideration of pornography demonstrates that the Chicana body is overdetermined by the cultural binary of virgin/whore and presence/absence. López’s Our Lady provides yet another response to the binary of virgin/whore, presenting the materiality of the brown female body as a site of desire. While Cisneros explores Chicana identiĀcation (implicitly, heterosexual, ­because of the author’s explic­itly heterosexual—­though queer-­friendly—­public identity) with the Virgin’s brown body, López pres­ents the brown body of the Virgin as desirable, perhaps, even as seductress, thus encouraging and inciting a q ueer reading. The queer potential of the Virgin of Guadalupe is made explicit in Encuentro, which depicts the celestial meeting of la sirena and La Virgen de Guadalupe, and in Lupe & Sirena in Love, which depicts the two in a sexual embrace. Encuentro introduces three iconic ele­ments that recur throughout López’s work: la Virgen, la sirena (the mermaid), and la mariposa (the

­ utterfly). The viceroy butterfly—an orange butb terfly with black markings—is a recurring motif in López’s images. In an artist statement, López discusses her choice of the viceroy butterfly, which resembles, and indeed mimics, the better-­ known monarch butterfly. The monarch butterfly, unlike the viceroy, is poisonous to its predators. López explains, “The Viceroy pretends to be something it is not just to be able to exist. For me, the Viceroy mirrors parallel and intersecting histories of being dif­fer­ent or ‘other’ even within our own communities. Racist attitudes see us Latinos as criminals and an economic burden, and families may see us as perverted or deviant. So from outside and inside our communities, we are perceived as something we are not. When in essence we are very vulnerable Viceroy butterflies, just trying to live and survive.”27 ­There is a play of recognition and misrecognition suggested by the meta­phor of the viceroy butterfly. Ultimately, this butterfly (the queer Chicano/a subject) must forego the possibility of recognition; in order to survive, she must mimic the monarch (someone less vulnerable than herself). In Our Lady, the placement of the bare-­breasted, pierced Chicana superimposed on the viceroy butterfly sustains the meta­phor equating the butterfly with the queer Chicano/a subject. Like Cisneros, López uses Āgurative language and images to represent Chicana subjectivity and bodies. To represent the Virgin of Guadalupe’s love interest, López chooses the mermaid from the popu­lar Mexican game lotería. In lotería, as in bingo, players hold a card with a grid. In the Mexican version, the grid is Ālled not with numbers but with images that map a M exican national imaginary and construct Mexican identity.28 In this way, the game Āgures identity in much the same way as I have discussed it in this essay, as a grid in which one Ānds one’s (albeit ambivalent) place. The categories of ­people depicted on the lotería cards reflect (often problematic) national, class, racial, and gendered categories. Perhaps the most problematic cards are ­those that Āgure race: ­there is a card picturing a black dandy titled “El Negrito,”29 and another picturing an Indian

wearing a feather headdress and carry­ing a bow and arrow, titled “El Apache.” Similarly, racialized gender is reproduced in a co nventional fashion. In a card titled “La Dama,” a slender, light-­ skinned ­woman wears a ladies suit and carries a matching handbag. Masculinity is portrayed on a card titled “El Valiente,” portraying a m estizo working-­class man wielding a m achete, and on another even less flattering card titled “El Borracho,” which portrays a drunk mestizo man with a ­bottle stumbling on a sidewalk. “El Catrín,” in contrast, shows a lig ht-­skinned, upper-­class effete man dressed in a tuxedo. Within the grid of mexicanidad mapped by lotería, la sirena stands out as a hybrid subject: she is part ­woman, part Āsh. This sirena appears to be of mestiza heritage, ­because instead of the usual blonde hair this mermaid has long wavy black hair. She is yet another Āgural repre­sen­ta­tion of Chicana subjectivity. As we have seen, Encuentro is structured by the combination of three ele­ments—­lotería’s mermaid, the traditional Virgin of Guadalupe, and a butterfly. Semiotics holds that meaning is derived from two axes: se­lection (the paradigmatic axis) and combination (the syntagmatic axis). Meaning is constructed from the manner in which ele­ments are selected and combined. The string of symbols on the lotería card is an excellent example of what semioticians call a “paradigmatic axis.” Out of a s et of pos­si­ble lotería characters, the artist selects one, la sirena. Just as the artist selects la sirena instead of, say, el apache, she chooses the viceroy butterfly instead of the monarch butterfly and La Virgen de Guadalupe instead of an image of Tonantzín (a p re-­Columbian goddess). And yet, ­because ­these other—­unchosen—­ele­ments exist in w hat Victor Burgin calls the “popu­lar preconscious,” ­these ele­ments linger in t he Āeld of meaning evoked by López’s image, the “pre-­ text.”30 The popu­lar preconscious is deĀned by Burgin as “­those ever-­shifting contents which we may reasonably suppose can be called to mind by the majority of individuals in a given society at a par­tic­u­lar moment in history; that which is ‘common knowledge.’ ”31 Burgin, however, does not account for the dif­fer­ent knowledges of ­those not Art C omes fo r the Ar chbis ho p  ·  257

in “the majority.” In the case of the ele­ments in López’s work, the pre-­text is not common knowledge for hegemonic U.S. subjects, while it most likely is recognized by Chicano/as. Of co urse, this does not mean that the image is unreadable to non-­Chicano/as, but simply that the pre-­text ­will yield a dif­fer­ent set of images along the paradigmatic chain. For example, the composition of López’s Encuentro recalls Michelangelo’s portrayal of the creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a scene that is in the preconscious of many, but not all, educated in Western cultural traditions. Thus, it should be clear that chains of association are open-­ended, which means that a “meaning” of any par­tic­u­lar image is never Āxed or sealed. Rather, ­there are multiple meanings, and the same image w ­ ill register differently (produce another set of associations) with each spectator, depending in large part on their cultural location. Subaltern artistic practice makes use of a postcolonial preconscious, which is distinct from the “common knowledge” of the society at large. The subaltern’s specialized knowledge produces a p ar­tic­u­lar kind of viewing plea­sure for ­those who “get it.” For example, a c hain of linguistic associations along the paradigmatic axis suggests queerness: mariposa (butterfly) is connected to the words marimacha (dyke) and maricón (fag) through the preĀx mari-­ (and the preĀx is etymologically linked back to María, the Virgin Mary). Moreover, queer meaning is also constructed along the syntagmatic axis; that is, by the combination of two female forms in a sexual relationship. In Lupe & Sirena in Love, the three iconic ele­ ments of Encuentro—­the mermaid, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the viceroy butterfly—­are combined with more images: the cityscape of Los Angeles; the wall at the Mexico-­U.S. border replete with a mural of the traditional image of La Virgen, superimposed with “1848,” the year of the signing of the treaty of Guadalupe-­Hidalgo; and a photo­graph of a man being chased by an agent of the migra (U.S. Immigration and Naturalization “Ser­vice”). Three blond cherubs holding a g old ribbon and bouquets of roses frame this scene. In 258  ·  l uz cal v o

this image, t­ here is a depth of Āeld and layering of images that contrasts with the relative flatness of Encuentro. Fi­nally, both Encuentro and Lupe & Sirena in Love suggest a Chicana lesbian primal scene: the fantasy of nuestra madre (our ­mother) in a sexual embrace with another w ­ oman.32 This ­imagined scene stages the conception of queer desire in explic­itly Chicano/a terms. In Lupe & Sirena in Love, queer desire is inseparable from its racial and cultural context and from its geographic location in the Mexico-­U.S. borderlands. Moreover, the sense of place mapped in L ópez’s images reflects geography more akin to psychic space than physical space.33 By placing the Los Angeles cityscape and the fence at the Mexico-­U.S. border in one frame, López begins to map Chicana psychic geography as a transnational formation. Moreover, its geography is not that of the rational, imperialist cartographer but rather the layered space of the unconscious, where past and pres­ent, ­here and ­there, can exist in one image. Collage, by self-­consciously recycling images, enacts the postmodern notion that one cannot begin from outside of existing image regimes. Instead, cultural workers intervene by reworking preexisting images and remapping existing fantasies. Collage as an art form takes existing images and through a pro­cess of se­lection and combination shifts the terms of their meaning. Collage is not unlike the pro­cess of the constitution of the postmodern subject, who must piece together a self, however fragmented and shifting, by sampling bits and pieces from dif­fer­ent histories, iconographies, and relationships. López uses the digital format to make transparent the pro­cess of assembly and juxtaposition. Digital collage differs from traditional collage ­because digital images are endlessly available, and cut-­and-paste technology allows artists to resize, blend, and create images that appear “seamless.” López’s images, however, are not seamless; instead, they call attention to the cut-­and-­paste technique used by the artist to piece together her statement. Ironically, one of López’s most vociferous detractors, New Mexican artist Pedro Romero

Sedeño, astutely reads her work as “a hodge-­ podge of ideas digitally mixed.” He compares López’s art to Mary Shelley’s Dr.  Frankenstein, who, “in his lab, assembled ­human body parts, and was able to fabricate or interpret his own kind of being.”34 While Romero Sedeño intended this interpretation pejoratively, I t hink that his analogy is evocative, suggesting both Chicano/a and postmodern aesthetic practices, and the possibility of assembling new subject positions from a “hodge-­podge.” The form of López’s work draws attention to the pro­cess of fabrication and thus to the hybridity of Chicana identity. Her work challenges Chicano/a nationalist ideologies that disavow mixedness in ­favor of a fantasy of “pure” Chicano/a identity. ­There is, I t hink, a f urther similarity among collage, postcolonial hybridity, and the Chicano/a aesthetic stance called rasquachismo.35 Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto has described rasquachismo as a “stance rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability, yet ever mindful of aesthetics.”36 Poverty fuels the practice of rasquachismo, for it is a “making do,” a p iecing together, selecting from bits and pieces recovered from other uses or cheaply acquired. Ybarra-­Frausto Ānds that such “utilization of available resources makes for syncretism, juxtaposition, and integration.”37 However, reliance on ­things at hand does not mean that a highly developed code does not exist, nor that items are selected at random. Rather, rasquache aesthetics provide an apt example of a language structured by rules of se­lection and combination. In rasquachismo, the rules of se­lection run ­counter to bourgeois sensibilities and, indeed, this is part of their plea­sure. Like rasquachismo, digital art uses se­lection and combination to create new meanings. López does not attempt to create a queer Chicana viewing plea­sure from scratch; instead, she culls from existing images of Mexican and Chicana ­women. She chooses from popu­lar art forms, rather than from so-­called high art; she selects her “bits and pieces” from the existing repertoire of working-­ class Chicano/a visual culture. While López, as an artist working in digital media, has access to high

technology, she uses that technology to develop a digital rasquachismo. Like many Chicano/a artists, López does not reject the popu­lar cultural practices; instead, she deploys rasquachismo as an aesthetic stance. She selects and combines images from popu­lar and available sources, uses layering and bright colors, and juxtaposes religious iconography to photo­graphs of her friends. In both its popu­lar practice and its academic production, rasquachismo exhibits a particularly nonnormative—­indeed queer—­pleasure, as in the following deĀnition proffered by Ybarra-­ Frausto: “In the realm of taste, to be rasquache is to be unfettered and unrestrained, to ­favor the elaborate over the s­ imple, the flamboyant over the severe. Bright colors are preferred to somber, high intensity to low, the shimmering and pattern Ālling all available space with bold display.”38 In this vivid account, a queer camp aesthetic is embedded in a distinctly Chicano/a artistic practice through the “unrestrained,” “the flamboyant,” and “the shimmering.” Rasquachismo is not an essential characteristic of e­ ither gay or Chicano/a communities, but rather, an aesthetic stance that is historically and culturally produced. In its rejection of bourgeois sensibility, rasquachismo is a c ultural practice that ­doesn’t care what the neighbors think, wears too-­bright colors and a flower in its hair. An example of Chicano/a rasquache aesthetics is depicted in the novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, by gay Chicano author John Rechy. In his introduction to the second edition, Rechy describes his encounter with a ­woman who becomes Amalia, the protagonist of his novel: “[At Thrifty’s Drugstore] I . . . ​encountered one of the most resplendent w ­ omen I’ve ever seen, a gorgeous Mexican-­American ­woman in her upper thirties, a bit heavier than she might like to think, but quite lush and sexy. She wore high-­heeled sling shoes—­and a tight red dress, to show off proud breasts, but she had added a ruffle t­ here to avoid any hint of vulgarity, a fashion that deĀed all fashion except her own. She had a luxuriance of black shiny hair, and into its natu­ ral waves she had inserted . . . ​a real red ­rose.”39 Throughout this novel, Amalia is constructed Art C omes fo r the Ar chbis ho p  ·  259

as an icon of Latina suffering and working-­class beauty, by an author most widely known for his portrayals of gay hustlers. Amalia’s style is staunchly rasquache, produced by a ga y author in admiration for such w ­ omen. This novel stages an extradiegetic identiĀcation of the gay Chicano author with the working-­class, rasquache, Chicana protagonist. Rechy’s brilliant staging of this identiĀcation reveals an intersection of queer and Chicano/a working-­class desire. Mobilizing a simi lar rasquache aesthetic—­ with its embedded queer potential—­López has revised and recontexualized Chicana fascination with the Virgin of Guadalupe. In Encuentro and Lupe & S irena in Love, López stages a p rimal fantasy—­that is, a fa ntasy that constitutes a de siring subject. As in o ther primal fantasies that produce cultural locations and incite all kinds of desires (sexual, po­liti­cal, and racial), López’s art focuses attention on Chicana feminist and queer Chicana subject formation. López depicts a scene of lesbian seduction as a f ounding moment of Chicana subjectivity. In so ­doing, she places a q ueer Chicana love story on the same symbolic terrain as the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe and thus transĀgures the Virgin of Guadalupe. Making productive use of the visual image of everyday Chicano/a life, López’s images begin to create a C hicana feminist and queer iconography. Far from starting from something completely “new,” López’s art reworks (and reveals) the political-­sexual desire that is latent in the omnipresent image of the suffering Virgin. By mobilizing the semiotic pro­cesses of se­lection and combination and occupying the Chicano/a aesthetic stance of rasquachismo, López’s images successfully invite and sustain queer interpretations of the Virgin of Guadalupe and open polymorphous and perverse spaces for sexuality and desire in Chicano/a imaginaries. In conclusion, reading López’s artistic reimaginings of the Virgin of Guadalupe through Sandra Cisneros’s desire to see the Virgin’s brown body has revealed the constitutive lack that fuels all Chicano/a identiĀcations with the Virgin of Guadalupe. It becomes clear that the i­ magined 260  ·  l uz cal v o

brownness of the Virgin has always structured Chicano/a allegiance to her. Chicano/a desire for a brown-­skinned Guadalupe is formed in and through the social and historical institutionalization of racial hierarchies, a direct result of the colonization of the Amer­i­cas and its enduring racial legacies. H owever, the ­imagined collective allegiance to a s exless brown m ­ other has come at considerable cost: w ­ omen’s active sexuality. The cultural work of Cisneros and López stretches Chicano/a collective imaginaries, shifting the terms by which Chicano/a subjects understand themselves, desire ­others, and act on the social world. Notes This chapter was originally published as Luz Calvo, “Art Comes for the Archbishop: The Semiotics of Con­ temporary Chicana Feminism and the Work of Alma Lopez,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 5, no. 1 (2004): 201–24. Currently published by Duke University Press. Copyright © Luz Calvo. I would like to thank Catrióna Rueda Esquibel, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, and the anonymous readers at Meridians for their productive and generous critiques of my essay. 1.The discovery of an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on a tree near Watsonville in 1993 is referenced by Cherríe Moraga in her poem “Our Lady of the Cannery Workers,” in Goddess of the Amer­i­cas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, ed. Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), and her play Watsonville: Some Place Not ­Here in Latino Plays from South Coast Repertory Hispanic Playwrights Proj­ect Anthology, ed. Juliette Carrillo and José Cruz Gónzales (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, Inc., 2000). 2. In this essay, I use the term “brown skin” to signal a collective cultural belief about Chicano/a bodies and not to reify some bodies or skin colors as more or less au­then­tic. Indeed, “brown” Chicano/a bodies come in all shades. Brownness is a position within a social symbolic structure and is, I argue, constructed through language and fantasy, and it is not, as some might assume, an ­essential or biological characteristic. 3. Our Lady was part of Cyber Arte: Tradition Meets Technology, an exhibit that ran from February 25 to October 28, 2001.

4. Office of Communications, Archdiocese of Santa Fe, 2001. 5. López has documented this debate, collecting ­e-­mails from detractors and supporters, newspaper articles from around the world, and letters to the editor on her website at www​.­almalopez​.­net. This site is an invaluable resource for researchers. 6. For example, López has designed the covers of Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology, ed. Alberto Sandoval-­Sanchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999); Chicano/a Re­nais­sance, ed. David R. Maciel, Isidro D. Ortiz, and María Herrera-­Sobek (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000); and Velvet Barrios, ed. Alicia Gaspar de Alba (New York: Palgrave, 2003). She also designed posters for the symposium “Otro Corazón: Queering the Art of Aztlan,” February 10, 2001, University of California, Los Angeles, and for the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Conference, April 2–6, 2003, Los Angeles, California. 7. The “original” image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is thought to reference a statue of the Virgin Mary in Estremadura, Spain, which was also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe. ­Others understand the Virgin of Guadalupe to be a refiguration of a pre-­Columbian goddess. As in all repre­sen­ta­tion, the notion of an “original” referent is complicated. 8. López always names and thanks her models in public descriptions of her work. This gesture draws attention to the fact that her photo­graphs depict par­tic­ u­lar subjects, with names, histories, and a relationship to the artist. 9. ­These images and their reception have been widely discussed by Chicana visual theorists, such as Angie Chabram-­Dernersesian, “I Throw Punches for My Race, but I ­Don’t Want to Be a Man: Writing Us—­Chica-­Nos (Girls, Us)? Chicanas—­into the Movement Script,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 81–95; Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano, “The Lesbian Body in Latina Cultural Production,” in ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, ed. Emilie L. Bergman and Paul Julian Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 181–97; Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Laura Elisa Pérez, “El desorden, Nationalism, and Chicana/o Aesthetics,” in Between ­Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 1999), 19–46; and Deena González, “ ‘Lupe’s Song’: On the Origins of Mexican-­Woman-­Hating in the United States,” in Gaspar de Alba, Velvet Barrios, 251–64. 10. Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 124. 11. E. Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary, 123. 12. E. Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary, 124. 13.While the men ­were the most vocal detractors of López’s art, some Chicana and nuevomejicana ­women also joined in the public critique. Such ­women pres­ent a challenge to my argument, and I hope that ­future research might be done—­perhaps an ethnographic study—to explore their po­liti­cal and cultural formation. 14. E. Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary, 122. 15.Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 16. Homi. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 51. 17. Sigmund Freud, “Group Psy­chol­ogy and the Analy­ sis of the Ego,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1921), 109. 18. E. Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary, 158. 19. E. Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary, 158. 20. E. Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary, 158. 21. Sandra Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” in Goddess of the Amer­i­cas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, ed. Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 51. 22. Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” 50–51. 23. Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” 51. 24. Judith Butler, Bodies That ­Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 63. 25. David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian Amer­i­ca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 5. 26. Eng, Racial Castration, 5. 27. Alma López, “Mermaids, Butterflies, and Princesses,” artist statement online, November 25, 2002, http://­home​.­earthlink​.­net​/­~almaLópez​/­digital​/­lupesire​ /­encuentro​.­html. 28. The signifying system of lotería is further complicated by a series of verbal descriptions of each card. In many versions of the game, instead of the caller simply yelling out “La sirena!” she ­will instead provide a popu­lar saying. For example, for the mermaid card, the saying is “Con los cantos de sirena no te vayas a marear” (­Don’t

Art C omes fo r the Ar chbis ho p  ·  261

get dizzy with the songs of the mermaid). Thus, the meaning of lotería images is anchored not only to the descriptive title of each card but also to the popu­lar saying that accompanies them. 29. ALLGO , a queer Latino/a organ­ization in Austin, Texas, has created a queer version of lotería. In a smart rhetorical move, they recast “El Negrito” as San Martin de Porres, a popu­lar black saint from Peru and renamed the card “El Santo” (the saint) (ALLGO Austin Latino/Latina Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Organ­ization, “Lotería Jotería,” organ­ization website, November 30, 2002, http://­www​.­allgo​.­org​/­Viva​_­Cultura​/­Loteria​_­Joteria​ /­loteria​_­joteria​.­html). 30. Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 60. 31. Burgin, In/Different Spaces, 58. 32. See de Lauretis, Practice of Love, 81–142, of r her recasting of the primal scene as a site of lesbian desire, and E. Pérez (Decolonial Imaginary, 110–14) and Luz Calvo (“Lemme Stay, I Want to Watch: Ambivalence in Borderlands’ Cinema,” in Latino/a Popu­lar Culture, ed. Mary

262  ·  l uz cal v o

Romero and Michelle Habell-­Pallán [New York: New York University Press, 2001], 74) for discussions of the primal scene of colonialism and the formation of Mexican and Chicano/a subjectivities. 33. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), also maps this psychic space in her theorization of “the borderlands.” 34. Pedro Romero Sedeño, “Frankenstein Guadalupe,” e-­mail posted to Alma López’s website, February 23, 2002, accessed November 25, 2002, http://­www​ .­almaLópez​.­net​/­email​/­020223.​­html. 35.Thanks to Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto for his helpful suggestions regarding rasquachismo. 36. Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “The Chicano Movement/ The Movement of Chicano Art,” in Beyond the Fantastic: Con­temporary Art Criticism from Latin Amer­i­ca, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 171. 37.Ybarra-­Frausto, “The Chicano Movement,” 171. 38. Ybarra-­Frausto, “The Chicano Movement,” 172. 39. John Rechy, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, 2nd ed. (New York: Grove Press, 2001), vii–­viii.

Further Reading

Arrizón, Alicia. “Mythical Performativity: Relocating Aztlán in Chicana Feminist Cultural Productions.” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (March 2000): 23–49. Cisneros, Sandra. “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess.” In Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo, 46–51. NewYork: Riverhead Books, 1996. Cortez, Constance. “History/Whose-­Story? Postcoloniality and Con­temporary Chicana Art.” Chicana/ Latina Studies 6, no. 2 (spring 2007): 22–54. Flores Sternad, Jennifer. “Cyclona and Early Chicano Per­for­mance Art: An Interview with Robert Legorreta.” GLQ : A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 12, no. 3 (2006): 475–90. Goldman, Shifra M. “Luis Jiménez: Recycling the Ordinary into the Extraordinary.” In Man on Fire: Luis Jiménez, 7–20. Exhibition cata­log. Albuquerque, NM: Albuquerque Museum, 1994. González, Jennifer. “Divine Allegories: Amalia Mesa-­ Bains.” In Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Con­temporary Installation Art, 120–62. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. González, Jennifer. “Rhe­toric of the Object: Material Memory and the Artwork of Amalia Mesa-­Bains.” Visual Anthropology Review 9, no. 1 (1995): 82–91.

Hernández, Robb. “Performing the Archival Body in the Robert ‘Cyclona’ Legorreta Fire of Life/El Fuego de la Vida Collection.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 31, no. 2 (fall 2006): 113–25. Jones, Amelia. “Bodies and Subjects in the ­Technologized Self-­Portrait: The Work of Laura Aguilar.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 23, no. 2 (fall 1998): 203–19. Latorre, Guisela. “Icons of Love and Devotion: Alma López’s Art.” Feminist Studies 34, no. 1/2 (summer 2008): 131–50. Rodríguez, Richard T. “Queering the Homeboy ­Aesthetic.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 31, no. 2 (fall 2006): 127–37. Sorell, Víctor A. “Illuminated Handkerchiefs, Tattooed Bodies, and Prison Scribes: Meditations on the Aesthetic, Religious, and Social Sensibilities of Chicano Pintos.” In Mediating Chicana/o Culture: Multicultural American Vernacular, edited by Scott L. Baugh, 2–40. Newcastle, NE: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. Yarbro-­Bejarano, Yvonne. “Laying It Bare: The Queer/ Colored Body in Photography by Laura Aguilar.” In Living Chicana Theory, edited by Carla Trujillo, 277–305. Berkeley, CA: Third ­Woman Press, 1998.

This page intentionally left blank

Part IV. Public Practices and Enacted Landscapes

FIG. IV.1. William F. Herrón III, The Wall That Cracked Open, 1972. © 1972. M ural, 25 × 15 ft. Image courtesy of the

artist.

c. o nd ine ch av o ya

Part IV. Introduction Chicano art developed alongside the promotion of distinctly public forms of art, particularly posters and muralism. ­These public genres are often recognized as the essential visual expression of the activism and social demands associated with the Chicano movement. Public art takes many forms (muralism, graffiti, printmaking, and per­for­mance included) and encompasses tremendous stylistic variation (from narrative and repre­sen­ta­tional modes to conceptual practices and more ephemeral manifestations). While exploring ­these speciĀc genres and histories, the essays collected ­here also consider the role of art and artists in the public arena more broadly and raise a series of critical questions. Is art “public” simply by virtue of its placement, exposure, and accessibility? Who speaks for the public? What are the limitations, challenges, and possibilities for public art in terms of form and content as well as methods of production and function? In critically exploring the connections between space and repre­sen­ta­tion, the se­lection of texts collectively investigate how creative practices inform the landscape and how public space is experienced, perceived, and ­shaped. Bringing together writings by artists, art historians, and city planners, this section explores vari­ous models for social interaction and intervention developed by artists. The connections between public space, cultural expression, and aesthetic repre­sen­ta­tion are considered from

multiple disciplinary perspectives and through vari­ous artistic media, while drawing attention to strategies that involve the enactment of place and creation of space. Urban scholar and city planner James Rojas introduces the term “enacted environment” to describe how space is used in the community of East Los A ­ ngles. For Rojas, the identity of place is created through use, particularly the “culturally related be­hav­ior patterns of the residents.” Rojas’s theory emphasizes agency, action, and the everyday and highlights how inhabitants adapt the extant architecture to meet their aesthetic and social needs. Street vendors, signage, and public art (including yard shrines, muralism, and graffiti) are identiĀed as models of this pro­cess of place making through enactment. In sharp contrast to the analy­sis of place based solely on form and space (that is, the physical, built environment), Rojas focuses on spaces formed within the structures of the built environment that are activated through use and modiĀcation. The essay documents how residents in E ast Los Angeles regularly modify their environments for the purposes of social and entrepreneurial interests, and, in this way, Rojas emphasizes how users reconĀgure and appropriate space through social action over physical construction. Enacted environments involve a temporal ele­ ment in that the uses of space are often ephemeral

or other­wise spontaneous acts. As a result, ­these environments are not Āxed in time and space but are in a constant, dynamic state of flux. Rojas’s theory provides a p ower­ful model for recognizing and analyzing the ways in which marginalized communities negotiate and potentially re-­create their surroundings in o rder to create spaces of re­sis­tance and empowerment. The understanding of landscape proposed ­here is both as a place and as a way of seeing place, both a sensibility and a lived relation to the landscape, and as such opens up more broadly to encompass the arena of repre­sen­ta­tion and aesthetic practice. Exploring muralism, public space, and place making, Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino examines the complex interrelationship between muralism and graffiti in his essay “Space, Power, and Youth Culture.” Focusing on the proliĀc mural program based in the Estrada Courts public housing proj­ ect in E ast Los Angeles between 1973 and 1978, Sánchez-­Tranquilino methodically analyzes how Chicano muralism was fundamentally influenced by what he calls “barrio calligraphy.” He argues that both the form and the content of the murals ­were informed by the social dynamics and visual systems of communication associated with youth gang culture related to the site, including traditions of graffiti and placas that preceded the painted wall murals. Identifying how ­these vernacular forms ­were incorporated—or encoded—­ into the Estrada Courts murals enables the author to develop an argument that resolutely contests the more conventional assertion that muralism was successfully promoted as a s traightforward beautiĀcation and graffiti abatement program; instead, Sánchez-­Tranquilino positions the murals as the “condensation of a deeply charged barrio cultural tradition.” Sánchez-­Tranquilino approaches the “public writing and public art” of both placas and murals as aesthetic pro­cesses deeply connected to place making. Murals serve to communicate, and often communicate the concerns of the community, as architect Jose Gámez has suggested, “to give both social and physical shape to speciĀc places.”1 Approaching the history of Estrada Courts though the lens of enacted 268  ·  c. o nd ine ch av o ya

environments allows us to consider how public spaces are variously used and reconĀgured, modiĀed and appropriated, through social action and aesthetic innovation, and, in t his way, we may also consider how art, artists, and urban dwellers transform the environment. Wildly experimental and interdisciplinary, the art of Asco combined public art with cinematic imagery while frequently engaging the language and motifs of muralism and conceptual art in the pro­cess. Formed in the early 1970s by Gronk, Willie Herrón, Patssi Valdez, and Harry Gamboa, the Asco group was active in collaboratively creating multimedia artworks into the 1980s that repeatedly and directly engaged the urban environment. C. On dine Chavoya’s essay, “Pseudographic Cinema,” focuses on the development of the performative photographic genre that Asco in­ven­ted and titled No Movies. Chavoya directs attention to the intersections of the mass media and the urban environment, a space harnessed by the artists as site for creative appropriation and intervention. Asco’s provocative per­for­mances ­were generally unannounced and ephemeral and designed to have an impact on—to shock and surprise—­the audience that might unexpectedly encounter their work in public. The photodocumentation of t­ hese live per­for­mances and the development of the No Movie genre enabled the artists to circulate their ideas, images, and proj­ ects widely and beyond the chance audiences generated on the streets of Los Angeles. Judith Baca provocatively asks “Whose Monument Where?” in an essay that reflects on her prodigious experience as a p ublic artist developing large-­scale proj­ects that foreground multiple perspectives on site, history, and social memory. Baca’s monumental mural The ­Great Wall of Los Angeles depicts the history of California while emphasizing the perspective of ­women and minorities and the relations between land, ­labor, and development. Painted on the concrete retaining walls of the Tujunga Wash (a tributary of the Los Angeles River), the epic-­scaled mural was created over a nine-­year period by teams of inner-­city youth supervised

by Baca and facilitated by spa r c (Social and Public Art Resource Center), the organ­ization Baca co-­founded in 1976. The artist describes the mural proj­ect as “a community-­based model of interracial connection, community dealings, and revisionist historical research.” In the essay, Baca develops her critique of privatized public space and art in t he ser­vice of development, and portrays her artistic pro­cess and proj­ects as an oppositional alternative to the more conventional “canon-­in-­the-­park” forms of public art. “We can evaluate ourselves,” Baca asserts, “by the pro­ cesses with which we choose to make art, not simply by the art objects we create. Is the artwork the result of a private act in public space?” Baca outlines a historical connection between the suppression of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s mural Amer­i­ca Tropical in downtown Los Angeles’ Olvera Street (whitewashed soon ­after its completion in 1 933) and the “official re­sis­tance” that many con­temporary mural proj­ects continue to encounter. With this historical view in mind, Baca stipulates that “murals have been the only interventions in public spaces that articulate the presence of ethnicity,” a view that is perhaps modiĀed and expanded by other contributors in this section. (It is also impor­tant to note that the Getty Conservation Institute began work on preserving Siqueiros’s controversial public mural in the 1990s, catalyzed by the renewed interest Chicano muralism brought to Amer­i­ca Tropical, and particularly due to the efforts of art historian Shifra  M. Goldman, Ālmmaker Jesús Treviño, and Judith Baca, among ­others.) Baca concludes her essay with a s eries of impor­tant questions that resonate with multiple themes explored throughout this section on public art and help to articulate some overarching themes: How do ­people of vari­ous ethnic and class groups use public space? What ideas do we want to place in public memory? Where does art begin and end? In a l­ater essay focused on the creation of a digital mural commissioned for the Denver International Airport, La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra (2000), Baca conveys a distinctly more personal approach. A long-­term interest in telling forgot-

ten histories leads the artist to explore her own ­family history. This personal exploration mediates on and extends into a collaborative pro­cess for excavating the complex lives of Chicana/os in the region, involving multiple identities, histories of migration and l­abor, and the pictorial iconography of the land. In addition to the public experience and perception of space, examples from the last thirty years reveal how public debate may not only frame a work of art but also extend it, and, at times, even become a w ork of art. What roles do t he mass media and other institutions play in o ur understanding of the public and what can happen in— or be allowed in the name of—­the public? David Avalos provides a perspective on the role of public artist and art during the height of the culture wars through a cr itical account of the censorship and debate surrounding his 1986 sculpture San Diego Donkey Cart, installed outside a f ederal court­ house. The debate Avalos’s sculpture catalyzes and participates in informs the pro­cesses the artist continues in s ubsequent project-­speciĀc collaborations with Elizabeth Sisco and Louis Hock. In the interview “Public Audit” Avalos, Sisco, and Hock reflect on several previous collaborations, including their controversial public art proj­ects Welcome to American’s Finest Tourist Plantation (1988) and Art Rebate (1993), that utilized the media extensively to disseminate their ideas and to activate a p ublic discourse around ideas critically impor­tant for the artists as a way “to put a dif­fer­ent point of view before the public.” Creating large-­scale posters to be displayed on San Diego city buses both resembles and extends the traditions of Chicano muralism and graphics. As the Welcome to American’s Finest Tourist Plantation bus poster traversed the city, it functioned like a mobile mural in m ultiple that moved beyond a Āxed setting. As media attention increased so too did the art proj­ect’s circulation and public reach. And in t his way we may consider how forms of public art operate differently for dif­fer­ent publics and the mass media. Through the course of the interview, the artists deftly and critically consider questions of activism, community, demo­cratic Intr o d uctio n t o Par t IV  ·  269

practice, and public funding for the arts, while also articulating theories about the media and public space. “The idea is to create a place for public art,” as Louis Hock described the pro­cess, “in the community as it exists in p ­ eople’s lives.” And this pro­ cess extends a history of artists developing distinct alternatives to traditional “cannon-­in-­the-­park” forms of public art. Can public art encourage and promote public dialogue and debate? In the interview, Elizabeth Sisco asserts, “We create public art with the intention that it is not a monument for the public to view but a catalyst for public discussion and debate around a relevant social issue.” In a more con­temporary historical assessment focused on the public dimensions of Chicano art, curator Rita Gonzalez maintained, “From the Chicano movement’s beginnings in t he mid-1960s onward, the use of public space as locus of and site for art by Chicano artists developed according to a consciousness about ethics and relevance to community.”2 Writing from the perspective of 2008 for the exhibition Phantom Sightings: Art ­after the Chicano Movement that she co-­organized, Gonzalez draws attention to and underscores a key development and generational shift that ensued si­mul­ta­neously. During this very same time

270  ·  c. o nd ine ch av o ya

period the visual language of local street culture, particularly graffiti and muralism, became a globalized repre­sen­ta­tional system and transnational landscape of signs. The art practices highlighted in this section engage the dynamics of community, history, and location through vari­ous styles and forms of public art. The variations showcase dif­fer­ent models for the ways artists have enacted environments or other­wise activated public space over time, create forums for social interaction and communication, and circulate their ideas in public and the media. What they all share is an under­ lying belief that creative practices inform how we see, shape, and experience the con­temporary city and have the capacity to alter perceptions and activate/generate change. Notes 1. Jose Luis Gámez, “Representing the City: The Imagination and Critical Practice in East Los Angeles,” Aztlán 27, no. 1 (spring 2002): 102. 2. Rita Gonzalez, “Phantom Sites: The Official, the ­Unofficial, and the Orificial,” in Phantom Sightings: Art ­after the Chicano Movement, ed. Rita Gonzalez, Chon A. Noriega, and Howard Fox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 47.

james t. r o ja s

26. The Enacted Environment of East Los Angeles  ·  1993

One planning report on East Los Angeles found that the area “lacks a p hysical identity . . . ​ therefore needs a plaza.” Funny they should say that. As every­one in L os Angeles knows, and as visitors can perceive, East L.A. has a very strong identity that is created by the way its Mexican and Mexican A ­ merican residents use its spaces. East  L.A. is an animated and extroverted environment that confronts the viewer; no space is left unmarked or unused. By working, playing, and “hanging out” in spaces like streets, front yards, and driveways, East L.A. residents create a spontaneous, dynamic, and animated landscape that is unlike any other in Los Angeles. ­These spaces, which often isolate residents in o ther communities, bring the residents of East  L.A. together. The identity of the place is created through the culturally related be­hav­ior patterns of the residents. It is not built; it is enacted.

Selling on the Street

Street vendors are one of the most noticeable ele­ ments in t he East  L.A. landscape. They flow in and out of commercial and residential areas and attract crowds wherever they go. Los moscos (flies), as they have been called,1 are day laborers who use the streets to sell their menial ­labor. From ten to as many as fifty men station themselves at strategic locations (near hardware stores and major traffic arteries), positioning themselves on the street so they can confront ­drivers with their eyes. If a driver shows any kind of interest and slightly slows down, he ­will be swarmed by work-­hungry men. Mariachis (Mexican musicians) walk from bar to bar in t heir black uniforms and instruments, looking for work. They station themselves at one par­tic­u­lar corner, where prospective employers go to hire them for events. “Carriers,” who sell anything they can carry, are the simplest form of vendor b ­ ecause they do

not have much overhead. For example, one man carries around a box of tapes, while another carries a long pole with wicker baskets of silk flowers hanging from each end. “Asphalt vendors” stand by strategic freeway off-­ramps and on median strips at major intersections. They keep their wares on the ground, in shopping carts, or in plastic bags tied to chain-­ link fences. Th ­ ese vendors approach cars as they stop at intersections and try to sell the occupants a bag of oranges or peanuts for a dollar. “Pushcart vendors” roam the streets selling exotic fruit cocktails, tamales, ice cr eam, and vegetables. One resident said, “In the morning a man comes around selling bread and vegetables and ­later in the day dif­fer­ent vendors come selling other eatable items.” The pushcart vendors almost look out of place on the suburban streets of East  L.A., dodging moving cars as they push their small carts. “Tent vendors” sell odds and ends from their front lawns and sidewalks, mainly on Saturdays, much like a garage sale. Fences are an impor­tant part of this composition ­because they hold up items and easily delineate the selling space. One boy had sacks of peanuts tied to the fence in front of his h ­ ouse and conducted business from a small ­table on the sidewalk. “Auto vendors” are spontaneous sorts who drive around to dif­fer­ent locations to Ānd the right market. They conduct business from their truck or car by parking on the roadside and setting up shop. Some ­will set up tents on the vacant lots, while ­others prefer street corners. Some trucks have been converted to elaborate roving bazaars with ­things attached everywhere. “Roach coaches,” or food trucks, have long been part of the American vending fabric. In East L.A., t­ hese stainless steel trucks have been redesigned with long win­dows on the side t o serve customers and personalized with names like “Maritita’s.” They have become very popu­ lar and follow Mexicans all over the city, from West Side construction sites to discotecas in Hollywood.

272 ·  james t. r o ja s

No Blank Walls

In East  L.A., blank wall space has become a tableau for cultural expression for cholos (gang members), po­liti­cal groups, and shop ­owners. Very few walls are left untouched by graffiti, store signs, or murals. Even garage doors, fences, sidewalks, benches, buses, and freeway signs have become displays of personal expression. All this expression creates a new real­ity of visual stimulation, “Ālls in” the landscape, and reveals the dif­ fer­ent sorts of order in a place. Graffiti, the most proliĀc form of visual communication, can be found just about everywhere. To the outsider none of ­these markings makes any sense, but to the p ­ eople that make and read them, they do. Cholos, for example, use graffiti as territorial indicators. Most residents do not like graffiti and are constantly painting over it. Stores and buildings are kinetic ­because of their flamboyant use of graphics and words. The use of both pictures and words is very common. Certain pictures indicate the type of store. A large pig’s head or jersey cow indicates a butcher shop, and cornucopias indicate vegetable and fruit stands. Murals, the most celebrated form of public decoration, express many dif­fer­ent values. They add an ele­ment of public art and local culture to other­wise dull buildings and streets by saluting pedestrians and motorists, and they make other­wise marginal spaces very tolerable. Many buildings are painted from top to bottom, which changes the character of t­ hese sometimes rather plain structures. Religious murals of Our Lady of Guadalupe are popu­lar ­because she is the patron saint of Mexico (Āg. 26.1). Murals from the ’70s often express social concerns. However, the most common murals are ­those commissioned by shop o ­ wners for advertisements; ­these can be whimsical and animated. On one corner, a bar with an aquatic theme is covered with an ocean-­blue mural; Neptune’s eyes gaze out with a mischievous look. On another corner, another bar is covered with a mural of a ­woman in a bathing suit smoking a cigarette and having some fun.

FIG. 26.1. Lady of Guadalupe Shrine painted on a freeway wall at the end of a dead-­end street in Boyle Heights, date unknown. Image courtesy of the author.

Most murals are painted on the large walls on the side of corner buildings. They “wrap” the commercial activity from a busy street into other­wise quiet streets and forgotten areas. ­These transitional corner spots are impor­tant places. Often, vendors ­will hang out in ­these locations, further activating the space. Props

Props add a layer of architecture to the landscape and help make spaces usable. Props produce a sense of security in a place by acting as territorial

markers: they are apparent and aggressive; they can be seen, heard, felt, and smelled. A parked car can become the center of a day’s activities just by shifting its location. A pushcart selling ice cream occasions a fleeting moment of social exchange between ­eager ­children. A s ofa ­under a tree or on a porch can be a place for residents to wallow away the after­noon. A barbecue pit can generate revenue and be a place to swap neighborhood gossip. ­Music is used as a p rop ­because sound can control and deĀne a s pace. Spanish and disco ­music are aggressive to some, normal to ­others. Mariachis and car stereos add t o the ambiance

The Ena cted Envir o nment  ·  273

through their m ­ usic; each appeals to a di f­fer­ent audience. The ­music adds an extra layer to the landscape. Many shop ­owners have replaced the fronts of their stores with glass walls that can be opened during the day; ­these “opened ends” connect indoor and outdoor spaces. Inexpensive wares, placed in front of the store, serve as a three-­dimensional display that adds a tactile quality to the pedestrian experience and advertises what’s inside. Olympic Boulevard, other­wise a n o-­man’s-­ land, has been “pedestrianized” by the use of props. Gas stations have been converted into taco stands by the heavy use of props and only minor changes to the structure. Pumps are replaced with ­tables and chairs, which make a bold attempt to capture and reinforce street activity; ­people can sit ­here and have direct visual access to the street. Wrought iron sheds are sometimes added in an attempt to enclose some of the seating areas. The thirty-­foot sign that advertised the gasoline com­ pany now announces the taco stand. The use of props in both residential and commercial areas creates a connection between the two. Props scale down the landscape to a pedestrian level that contradicts the automobile scale of Los Angeles. Driving on the streets of East L.A. all one sees is a c lutter of ­people, props, and vendors. Walking, however, one experiences a rich, tactile landscape that enhances the enacted environment. What might seem like a visual mess from an automobile becomes a p ersonal and vivid experience for the pedestrian. La Yarda: A Personal Expression

Nowhere in the landscape of East L.A. is the Mexican use of space so illuminated and celebrated than in the enclosed front yard. Since many Mexican homes do n ot have American, suburban-­ style front yards, residents of East  L.A. have reinterpreted them. The front yard has become, through use and design, a place for personal expression and for re-creating traditional Mexican housing forms (Āg. 26.2). 274  ·  james t. r o ja s

Houses in E ast  L.A. are sited on their lots just like other suburban American ­houses, but the enclosure and personalization of front yards has greatly changed their appearance. In fact, the enclosed front yard is such a dominant ele­ment that it has altered the physical character of entire neighborhoods as well as residents’ be­hav­ior patterns. In a midd le-­class neighborhood, the appearance of one’s front yard is a s tandard for being accepted into the community. In East  L.A., the green, parklike setting that open front yards create in typical American suburbs has been cut up into individual slices that permit a greater range of expressiveness, create visual diversity, and allow sociability to take place more readily. The appearance of one’s front yard expresses one’s individuality; ac­cep­tance is based on physical and social contact with neighbors. Depending on the practical needs of the owner, the use and design of the front yard vary from junkyards to elaborate courtyard gardens reminiscent of Mexico. The maintenance of the front yard varies from ­house to ­house; one may be kept up nicely while the next is not. No one is ever penalized for not watering or taking care of his front yard. In ­these enclosed front yards, the residents’ private worlds unfold. All the signs and sounds from the uncontrollable street have been manipulated and tailored to the needs of the owner. The enclosed front yard acts like a room without a ceiling ­because of the personalization and sense of security. Th ­ ings that look like clutter from outside the fences actually are as or­ga­nized and purposeful as objects in a room. Most outsiders are not prepared to read front yards and think they are unsightly. But East L.A. residents identify with ­these front yards ­because they understand and can read the personalization. Walking down a n eighborhood street, one becomes aware of who might be living in e ach ­house. Residents might be outside d ­ oing something in their front yard, or the objects they leave in the yard might display traces of their lives. Toys speak of ­children living in a h ­ ouse; lots of cars and

FIG. 26.2. Personalized front yard lawn decorations reflect the creators’ talents and create pedestrian-friendly streets, date unknown. Image courtesy of the author.

auto parts might indicate that teen­agers live t­ here. A lack of planting along the fence might indicate a dog runs around the front yard. Intricate gardens, potted plants, small statues, and other ele­ments that shelter a h ­ ouse from the street might indicate an el­derly person resides ­there or that the resident is not too involved in street activity. Fences: A Social Catalyst

One can Ānd fences in m any American front yards, of course. But for East  L.A. residents, fences are a s ocial catalyst that brings together neighbors and passersby for interaction. Fences break down social and physical barriers by creating a comfortable point between a front yard and a sidewalk where ­people can congregate.

The use of fences in t he front yard modiĀes the approach to the ­house and moves the threshold from the front door to the front gate (mailboxes, for example, are hung on the fence or front gate rather than near the front door). The enclosed front yard serves as a p hysical barrier between the private spaces of the home and the public spaces of the street; it acts as a large foyer and becomes an active part of the ­house­hold. Stepping into the front yard from the sidewalk, one feels as if one is entering a home. The front gate or entry, sometimes made of wrought iron fencing or even masonry, can be articulated with structural ele­ments such as arches—­giving it a sense of being a building that is in­de­pen­dent of the ­actual ­house. The enclosed front yard becomes a large, “defendable” threshold, which, in fac t, allows for The Ena cted Envir o nment  ·  275

more social interaction to take place. In a t ypical American home or apartment, which lacks a defendable threshold, t­ here is ­great pressure to deĀne social interaction b ­ ecause one cannot have a comfortable conversation at a front door or in a hallway. In East L.A., it is perfectly acceptable to have conversations at the front gate and not to invite ­people into the home. The social interaction one experiences in the enclosed front yard is neither as demanding nor intimate as that which takes place in a h ­ ouse. Since this space is public, the interaction is very casual, like being in an outdoor café where one could stare off for a few seconds and not offend one’s companions. In the front yard, one is always aware of cars and ­people ­going by on the street. Collectively, the enclosed front yards in ­these neighborhoods create a v ery intimate atmosphere. The fences along the street break up the lawn space of each home, and the street becomes more urban than suburban in c haracter ­because the fence reflects the personality of each resident. The street can now function like a plaza, and ­every resident can participate in t he public street from the protection of his private yard. East L.A. Vernacular

In Los Angeles, the city of suburban dream homes where architectural freedom runs rampant, the small ­house­scapes of East  L.A. seem inconsequential compared to h ­ ouses designed by architects such as Greene and Greene, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, and Frank Gehry. But the small, modern ­houses in East  L.A. are distinctive ­because they ­were built by nonarchitects. They have evolved into what I call “East L.A. vernacular” b ­ ecause the combination of design and usage (­people, props, and physical form) is unique to this area. The ­houses are customized and personal; e­ very change, no m ­ atter how small, has meaning and purpose. The colors, building materials, and personal items used to embellish ­houses, fences and front yards offer a public face to the street. 276  ·  james t. r o ja s

Shy American-­style homes are transformed to an extroverted form that sets the stage for the enacted environment. Each ­house communicates with ­others. ­People, fences, and porches help extend ­house­hold activities to the street. Instead of hiding ­behind a lawn and shrubs, suddenly each ­house comes forward, staking its claim to the pavement. The neighborhood feels Ālled in, physically and socially. The sidewalk and street feel more controlled b ­ ecause the h ­ ouse­hold reaches right to ­these public areas. The typical Mexican courtyard ­house and ­house­hold extends itself to all four sides o f the lot and is designed with a patio or courtyard in the center; this form accommodates the warm weather and reflects Spanish pre­ce­dents. ­Because most rooms face t he patio, it becomes a central point into which the flow of the ­house­hold radiates. Similarly, in East L.A., the h ­ ouse is deĀned by the property line rather than the floor plan or exterior walls; the front yard and fence are integral parts of the ­house­hold. In the typical American ­house plan, rooms are arranged in a s trong linear sequence that depends on their degree of public access, from the front living room (public) to the back bedroom (private). But in the Mexican h ­ ouse­hold, as one Mexican put it, “most rooms are not private ­because many times rooms have been attached to each other as the f­ amily grows, regardless of their adjacency to other rooms. Many times one has to go through one bedroom to get to o ­ thers. Many ­people also keep their doors open to the patio ­because of the hot weather.” American ­house plans seek to protect individual privacy through the arrangement of rooms; the typical Mexican h ­ ouse plan tries to keep the f­ amily separate from the general public. In East L.A., the front yard and porch can be considered semiprivate rather than semipublic ­because the space flows out of the home to the porch, front yard, and fence. Driveways are an impor­tant feature that allows for many ephemeral uses—­parking cars, ­children playing, barbecuing, or partying. In most cases, the driveway runs the full length of the lot on

one side. The garage is placed in t he back yard, rather than at the front of the ­house. Most ­houses have easy access to the driveway through a side door. The importance of the driveway increases as additional h ­ ouses are built on the lot over time; the driveway serves as an outdoor hallway along which residents walk between their ­houses and the street. In many American neighborhoods the use and importance of front porches has declined for vari­ous reasons, and most new homes are built without them. In East  L.A., front porches have gained a new importance ­because many residents use them, and ­because they help connect the enacted front yard to the ­house. The porch is often decorated with personal and useful items, such as potted plants, birdcages, and furniture. Learning from the Enacted Environment

Modern structures neatly package and or­ga­nize ­people in comprehensible arrangements of space; life is hidden ­behind façades. Recently, architects and urban designers have realized that the presence of p ­ eople can add a rich texture to the often banal urban and suburban landscape, and they have responded by introducing street furniture, plants, and vendors in the design of public spaces. The resulting settings look like they could sustain the street life of East  L.A., but ­there is a basic difference. In ­those settings, the use of props is planned and the space controls the user,

rather than the user controlling the space. The enacted environment of East L.A. is not planned; the props and vendors reflect the nature of the ­people. The enacted environment is made up of individual actions that are ephemeral but nevertheless part of a per­sis­tent pro­cess. ­People have always criticized the Mexicans of East L.A. for being nonpo­liti­cal ­because they do not vote. The word “politics” comes from the Greek word polis, or city. ­There are two kinds of politics in t his world, theoretical and practical. Theoretical politics are the politics of politicians, who discuss how ­people should live their lives. Practical politics is the way we conduct our everyday lives and express our existence. By examining the enacted environment of East  L.A., one becomes aware of the politics of everyday life. The residents have created a life in t heir environment that says something about  themselves. They may not have po­liti­cal control, at least in theoretical terms, but I would argue that the residents have empowered themselves through the way they use their front yards and their streets. Notes This chapter was originally published as James T. Rojas, “The Enacted Environment of East Los Angeles,” Places: A Quarterly Journal of Environmental Design 8, no. 3 (spring 1993): 43–53. Reprinted by permission of Places and the author. 1. Bruce Kelley, “El Mosco,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, March 18, 1990, 11.

The Ena cted Envir o nment  ·  277

mar c os sánchez- ­t ranq uilino

27. Space, Power, and Youth Culture  ·  1995 Mexican American Graffiti and Chicano Murals in East Los Angeles, 1972–1978

Visual environments orchestrate signification, deploy and stage r elations of po wer, and c onstruct and embody ideologies through the establishmen t of frameworks of legibility. Such frameworks incorporate and fabr icate cues as t o how they ar e to be reckoned with b y individual subjec ts and g roups. —­D ONALD PREZIOSI

In print as well as in person, I often use the quotation “A Chicano is a M exican American who does not have an Anglo image of himself ” as a basic working deĀnition for politicized Mexican Americans, that is, “Chicanos.”1 This citation, ­excised from an impor­tant article by Ruben Salazar, signiĀes the dividing line between po­liti­cally conscious Chicanos and other Mexican Americans who follow a les s po­liti­cally resistant and more culturally conformist “American” identity, or who other­wise prefer not to be identiĀed with the par­tic­u­lar goals of Chicanismo, the po­liti­cal ideology of the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. 2 While I Ānd the Salazar quote most useful, I use it with caution so as not to disre-

gard the po­liti­cal activity by earlier generations of Mexican Americans or, especially h ­ ere, to lose sight of t­ hose Mexican Americans in t he pro­ cess of becoming po­liti­cally aware.3 Indeed, the following case study involving the painting of murals on walls previously marked by the very same persons with graffiti is at the core of the relationship between “Chicano” murals and “Mexican American” graffiti. It involves understanding what is personally and communally at stake when one undertakes to survive si­mul­ta­neously as a p art of two communities: the established Mexican American youth gang culture and the emergent Chicano culture of the early 1970s. My analy­sis of this cultural discourse is dependent on mapping out the differences between ­these two communities, whose identities—­the former established, the latter emergent—at times conflate so as to appear as one ­under certain cultural circumstances. In order to follow the discourse between nonpoliticized gang youth practices/Chicano community politics and Mexican American graffiti/politicized Chicano murals, I focused on this interaction as it

was taking place at a large, government-­subsidized housing proj­ect and other poor and working-­class areas of predominantly Mexican American residents in East Los Angeles. While I ­will be relating information that concerns the be­hav­ior and beliefs of Mexican American gang youth, I do s o not to glorify or condemn them but rather to shed light on one aspect of negotiating Chicano cultural survival, not only through the politics of what constitutes “art” but also through an examination of how identity is constructed as part of the pro­cess of making artistic form and content “readable” in a par­tic­u­lar context. Given the profound lack of understanding of Mexican American and Chicano culture and history in this country, I, as a “minority” art historian and cultural analyst, undertook to reveal (for myself if for no one e­ lse) the connections between “art” and “graffiti” as they existed in m y own backyard. My goal for ­doing so was twofold. As a product of the Chicano movement, I wanted to participate in uncovering what­ever cultural contributions the Chicano barrio had to make to itself. That is, in my case, to clarify the contributions of so-­called graffiti as seen throughout East Los Angeles in t erms that w ­ ere understandable within its own developmental and functional contexts and not dependent on legitimizing structures of dominant Anglo society for its value. Indeed, by that mea­sure Mexican American graffiti could be continued to be assessed only as vandalism. Si­ mul­ta­neously, my objective was to understand the machinations for creating and perpetuating ste­reo­types in order that I might participate in their dismantling. It is crucial that the reader be reminded that the persons about whom I am speaking in the following essay constitute one example of the myriad of cultures that presently make up the diverse U.S. urban youth populations.4 All of the Chicano artists and Mexican American gang youth referred to in t his essay speak En­glish, and while some are bilingual in dif­fer­ent ways, they all consider themselves “Americans.” Throughout the following discussion, as a way to signal the dialectical relationship between Mexican Americans and

Chicanos, I ­will continue to use the term “Mexican American” to indicate a po­liti­cal identity that is prior to that of “Chicano.” Mi Casa No Es Su Casa

As part of this country’s bicentennial cele­ bration in 1 976, the predominantly Mexican American residents of the Estrada Courts in East Los Angeles ­were honored by having their government-­subsidized housing proj­ect included as one of two hundred locations in the national “Horizons on Display” program.5 They ­were enlisted into the official cele­bration ­because the Estrada Courts mural program had met the se­ lection criteria. In a let ter to the Courts’ mural program director, Charles  W. “Cat” Felix, president Gerald  R. Ford commended the Estrada community for exemplifying the princi­ple that “Amer­i­ca was founded on the conviction that individuals can join together in common purpose to resolve their differences and build a life of freedom, opportunity and achievement.”6 The irony of this situation was lost on President Ford as a representative of dominant culture. For while his statement was true of the Courts’ artistic achievements, the fact that they came about was due more to dissent and re­sis­tance to the “American” paradigm. In this paradigm, conquered ethnic ­peoples and the immigrant poor, as exempliĀed by many of the Courts’ residents,7 are typically positioned as voiceless by the dominant Anglo society in t his country.8 Nevertheless, the residents’ achievement deserved the praise, for the murals at Estrada Courts have become a rec­ord of a community determined to succeed, to a large extent, on its own terms. The common purpose referred to in t he letter from the White House was the monumental achievement of the Residentes Unidos (United Residents) of the Courts, who transformed their drab, graffiti-­littered housing proj­ect into what they perceived as a uniĀed residential community.9 The many walls of the proj­ect, previously marked for years by barrio calligraphy or Mexican American Spa ce, P o wer , and Y o u th Cul tur e  ·  279

FIG. 27.1. VNE placas, Olympic Boulevard, Estrada Courts Housing Proj­ect, East Los Angeles, 1973. Acrylic, dimensions variable. Photo­graph by Kazuo Higa. Image courtesy of the author.

graffiti, had been, since 1973, painted with highly acclaimed Chicano murals.10 Through the painting of Chicano murals, the Estrada Courts’ residents had managed to (ostensibly) suppress the writing of graffiti on their proj­ect’s walls, which popu­lar social conventions held as signaling vandalism and a lack of residential pride. Between 1973 and 1978, except for the few invited, nonresident Chicano artists, the eighty-­ two murals at Estrada Courts w ­ ere produced by the artistically untrained, supervised youth (male and female) of the housing proj­ect, who included many members of the resident youth gang known as Varrio Nuevo Estrada, or simply, the vne .11 The transformation of their environment was publicly perceived as a relatively straightforward effort involving the displacement of Mexican American graffiti by Chicano murals.12 This essay, however, questions the accuracy of that public perception. Furthermore, ­because the very same 280  ·  mar c os sánchez- ­t ranq uilino

youngsters who painted many of the murals at Estrada Courts had previously marked the area’s walls with their placas, it is also my belief that the murals’ form and content ­were both influenced and informed by the earlier practice of barrio calligraphy as well as the overall social characteristics of youth gang culture (Āg. 27.1). It is my contention that placas or plaqueasos, the name given to the unique form of grafĀti insignias developed by Mexican American barrio calligraphers over several generations, is not vandalism at all but rather a visual system developed by Mexican American graffiti writers themselves to keep a public check on the abuse of power in the streets.13 While vandalism tends to appear randomly without regard to the normative function of the surface on which it occurs, placas systematically occupy speciĀc surfaces relevant to the Chicano youth street culture. Close observation of the public placement of placas reveals

that they are consciously written or spray-­painted on surfaces pertaining to buildings located on the periphery of youth gang territories. The content of ­these inscriptions also follows an established system for conveying information. Following barrio-­developed conventions for encoding information that is vis­i­ble to every­ one but “readable” by only a few, the placa’s emblematic design provides timely and vital details in a q uick visual format to the inquiring street reader.14 Included among the “street intelligence” decipherable from Mexican American graffiti by a youth gang associate, or “homeboy,”15 is the name of the youth gang that monitors the immediate area where the placas are vis­i­ble, its territorial size, and its Āghting strength. The inscription is always written by an individual who places him-­ or herself in a hierarchical context indicating his or her relationship to the youth gang. When the name of the individual writer is included, it is usually in the form of a nom de guerre or street name and invokes ­either a physical or behavioral characteristic, such as El Gato (The Cat), El Oso (The Bear), La Mousie (The Mousie), or La Loca (The Crazy One). The size and strength of the youth gang is conveyed through clusters or lists of names as part of an insignia as well as through encoded references to its cliques or age-­ranked cohorts, for example, “vne Ds” (the Dukes cohort of the Varrio Nuevo Estrada youth gang or barrio) and “vne Sharks” (the Sharks cohort of the Varrio Nuevo Estrada youth gang). A cris de guerre, motto, or “power phrase” not only affirms the youth gang’s territorial claims but also underscores the ferocity of the youth gang’s Āghting strength Ārst alluded to by individuals’ street names and cohort names such as “bear,” “cobra,” “sharks,” or “crazy.” Coded mottoes such as “R,” or Rifan (Rule or Excel), and “C/S,” or Con/Safos, are two of the oldest still in use.16 An understanding of the relationship between Mexican American graffiti and Chicano murals is accessible only through an appreciation of what encoded graffiti component brings to bear upon the apparently more easily interpreted Āgurative mural component. In my attempt to bring the

two divergent visual components of graffiti and murals into an analytic model for understanding their interdependence at Estrada Courts, a basic lesson in reading placas is required. Following is a g eneralized interpretation of the placas at Estrada Courts as represented in Āgure 27.1; the awkwardness of the reading is due to my brokering of the translation of ­these insignias, which are si­mul­ta­neously informed by En­glish and Spanish, as well as the Caló, or pachuco and cholo, patois. An absolutely necessary but unspoken relationship implied in t he writing and reading of placas is that their encodings are speciĀcally directed at other members of the youth gang culture and not at all to the general public, who are considered to be “civilians” in their world of barrio warriors. The act of decoding positions the reader as a homeboy or a homegirl. The overall meaning, stated and implied, of the vne graffiti in Āgure 27.1 is “Be warned, you are now approaching the home of the Varrio Nuevo Estrada youth gang territory. Rifamos [We rule it]; the ubiquitous placement of our placas at this location is an indication of our unquestioned authority h ­ ere. ­These placas, written in the appropriate established form and containing all of the necessary references of street visibility and authority, delineate the size of our territory and  are clearly placed on its periphery so as to avoid any confusion. As you know, our placas are both a clear message and challenge to you from all of us, including all of our Cortes’ klikas [Courts’ cliques], but especially from the toughest members of the highest ranks of the vne , namely, the Dukes, the Cobras, and the Sharks. Our individual reputations are in allegiance to the vne . We d ­ on’t want any hassles from you, but we are ready if need be; we are the best defenders of our barrio—­ number one—­and we can back it up.”17 Art History Que?

Through the use of a methodology primarily consisting of historically rooted semiological analy­ sis, my objective was to understand how the ­murals Spa ce, P o wer , and Y o u th Cul tur e  ·  281

FIG. 27.2. Willie Herrón and Gronk, The Black and White/Moratorium Mural, 1974–78. Estrada Courts Housing Proj­ect, East Los Angeles. Photo­graph by author. Mural, 24 × 32 ft. Image courtesy of the author.

­were able to displace the graffiti at Estrada Courts, from the perspective of reading muralism and graffiti as contending systems of meaning or signiĀcation.18 That is, my objective is to examine graffiti and muralism not as already given categories of an external and imposed discourse on art into which one assigns par­tic­u­lar cultural practices—in this case, public writing and public art, respectively—­but to interpret them as languages, systems that produce speciĀc meanings in and through “intersecting systems of historical constraints.”19 Approaching the analy­sis of the interdependent relationships between Mexican American graffiti and Chicano murals from the perspective of contending cultural practices permits one to evaluate certain effects produced by the traceable intersections of each system across a complex array of pos­si­ble historical strategies and negotiations. The outcome of such an approach 282  ·  mar c os sánchez- ­t ranq uilino

is an understanding of the historical discourse between Mexican American graffiti and Chicano muralism produced in and through the development of the Estrada Courts murals. I contend that a photo­graph that depicts a mural surrounded by graffiti such as The Black and White/Moratorium Mural painted by Gronk and Willie Herrón at Estrada Courts does not represent a ­simple affirmation or evidence of a “graffiti prob­lem” in this community, but rather visually demonstrates the very real contention between placas and murals for physical space and cultural repre­sen­ta­tion (Āg. 27.2).20 The following discussion reveals that similar occurrences of this contention where Mexican American graffiti and Chicano muralism ­were ­going through parallel negotiations ­were evident in other areas of East Los Angeles. Prior to the pres­ent study, the relationship between graffiti and murals in C hicano barrios received a lo t of attention but ­little serious

analy­sis. In par­tic­u­lar, ­there has not been any discussion of what being “Mexican American” or “Chicano” means in this cultural context. Past conclusions on the function of graffiti or its relationship to murals have offered what amounts to a formulaic application of earlier models created by authors studying only graffiti.21 Furthermore, approaching the interrelation between Mexican American graffiti and Chicano murals with methodologies that ­were developed for analyzing non–­Mexican American graffiti tends to support conclusions about the relationship between ­these two practices that position graffiti as culturally inferior to the making of murals. Often, a p ositivist concept of evolution from lesser to better forms lies j ust beneath the surface of many of ­these approaches; thus, cultural and historical links between murals and graffiti are reduced to the expressive fallacies of the conditions of existence of their makers. In 1975, David Kahn surmised that relationship between the two forms in East Los Angeles, the largest area of concentration of Mexican American residents in L os Angeles: “For the individual, his name means he exists. For the gang member who writes his name in coded script on a wall, he not only owns that part of the wall, his ‘soul’ is ­there. This need to have a v is­i­ble identity is the very essence and reason for the Chicano mural, an art that depicts the destructive ele­ments and ­bitter frustrations of existence in the barrio.”22 Unable to acknowledge a blurring of the interests of contending signs between muralism and graffiti, Kahn’s commentary is unwilling to concede to the complicity of the speaker’s preconditioning to culturally inflect what is “perceived.” Thus, his conclusions are based on a negation of the required understanding of the complexity of the contextual speciĀcity necessary for the interpretation of pro­cess or for an appreciation of the interdependence of one system of repre­sen­ta­tion and another. In 1976, Shifra  M. Goldman echoed Kahn’s perception of the discourse between graffiti and murals as the transparent expression of social class: “From making ‘placas’ (the solitary public expression of a voiceless, powerless adolescence) to participa-

tion in the or­ga­nized awareness of a mural is an educative step of no mean proportions. It is the difference between fratricidal gang warfare—­the internalization of oppressive social conditions—­ and externalized po­liti­cal strug­gle against the sources of oppression. Both the ‘placa’ and the mural are forms of communication and affirmation of existence: one is individual and aimlessly aggressive; the other collective and directional.”23 Neither of t­ hese analytical perspectives addresses the po­liti­cal differences between placa writers, who are relatively “unpoliticized” Mexican Americans, and Chicano muralists, who through their community-­based work are following, constructing, and developing incipient Chicano liberation ideologies to varying degrees.24 Implicit in ­these analyses is the assumption that both graffiti writers and graffiti writers-­turned-­ muralists are somehow able to unproblematically exchange one identity for the other. As previously mentioned, how a switching of apparently disparate identities by gang youth took place without apparent compromise is at the very heart of the questions raised by this study. Indeed, as discussed below, even trained Chicano artists ­were unable to escape the politics of compromise and identity and ­were fundamentally impacted both individually and communally. The mural/graffiti debate divided artists in the Chicano community into two major camps. At the time, Judith Baca represented the view that placas ­were an evolutionary step in the development of graffiti into murals: “I think that the murals w ­ ere a very natu­ral extension of that graffiti ­because what happened is, I t hink, the graffiti made one kind of statement—­‘I am who I am’ and ‘This place, this is my neighborhood, I own this wall.’ And I think the murals make a statement that is more complicated and can say many more ­things and it’s a b usiness [­matter] of pride.”25 Alan Barnett follows Baca’s observational insights and contextualizes the relationship of Chicano murals to Mexican American graffiti as an art ism, that is, as logical extensions of art of protest coupled with an ability to signify a Āxed and constitutive subject or identity. Barnett Spa ce, P o wer , and Y o u th Cul tur e  ·  283

states, “Both are not only protests; they are also affirmations of the identity of a ­people.”26 Romantic notions about the role of graffiti in society are similarly extended by Barnett to murals: “Graffiti and murals are types of strug­gle art by which ­people seek to survive as h ­ umans in a n increasingly dehumanized world.”27 As an artist, Willie Herrón represented the opposing camp, which felt that placas ­were a ­viable and original cultural form developed by barrio youth to interact effectively with one another. When he painted his memorable The Wall That Cracked Open mural in 1972, he integrated the local placas into the mural.28 He believed that this was the least he could do, since his mural was, as he saw it, appropriating the space that belonged by custom to placas. While Barnett and ­others see murals as a nonproblematic development from graffiti (“Graffiti, like the murals that often follow them”),29 Herrón’s comments on Ārst approaching walls to paint murals indicate a more complex social and cultural pro­ cess that echoes Baca’s characterization of a barrio calligrapher’s “owning” a wall. Herrón’s sensitivity to the tradition of placas had provided him with an understanding of the impor­tant prerequisite pro­cess necessary for creating grafĀti or murals: wall appropriation. Without his having participated in the appropriation of barrio walls for writing graffiti as a Mexican American youngster prior to painting his Ārst mural as a Chicano artist, he would not have had “the courage to approach a wall to paint in the Ārst place.”30 Appropriately, Herrón’s Ārst two murals ­were painted in an alley in City Terrace, East Los Angeles, where normally one expected to Ānd placas and not murals. [. . .] Uno, Dos: One, Two, Tres, Cuatro!

The success of the Estrada Courts mural program was due to several f­ actors, not the least of which was the context of community self-­help inherent in el movimiento (the Chicano civil rights 284  ·  mar c os sánchez- ­t ranq uilino

movement), as well as the experimental context of the early stages of Chicano muralism in which the Estrada Courts’ youth participated. The young paint­ers ­were able to incorporate signs and themes into the new murals that would produce similar meanings for them as barrio calligraphy previously had done. However, what took place at Estrada Courts was more than a t ransparent incorporation of Mexican American graffiti into the murals’ form. Ultimately, therefore, an evaluation of the murals’ displacement of graffiti at Estrada Courts cannot be based solely on the disappearance of the recognizable graffiti. It must be understood that ­because each signifying system is si­mul­ta­neously one of repre­sen­ta­tion, for the displacing system to be successful it had to meet the following criteria: to be able to continue to function as a means of repre­sen­ta­tion for the graffiti writers as well as, or better than, the system it displaced. The following discussion of a periphery mural demonstrates the importance of self-­representation to graffiti writers caught in the groundswell of the emergent Chicano mural movement. The original walkway murals located in front of Give Me Life, the Ārst mural painted at Estrada Courts in 1973, points to their seminal role in the pro­cess of determining the formal and contextual cross-­influences between Mexican American graffiti and Chicano muralism (Āgs. 27.3 and 27.4). Looking carefully at the repetitive abstract design painted on the left (by the Estrada Courts “kids,” directed by Charles “Cat” Felix), it becomes apparent that it can also be read as a p laca. What at Ārst appears to be an abstract colorful design is actually the repetition of the initials of the Varrio Nuevo Estrada youth gang: vne . Recalling the monogramatic techniques so often used in b arrio calligraphy, the black “V” and the red “N” ­were made up of geometric ele­ments, superimposed and connected so as not to stand out as the youth gang’s initials, while the three horizontal bars of the “E” ­were attached to a w hite perpendicular post, with the center bar ending with a white “arrowhead.” This repetitious pattern also resembles the pre-­

FIG. 27.3. Los Niños del Mundo and Charles W. Felix, Give Me Life, 1973. Estrada Courts Housing Proj­ect. Mural. Photo­ graph by Kazuo Higa. Image courtesy of the author.

FIG. 27.4. Schematic drawing by author of left side of walkway mural. Note camouflage configuration of repeating VNE placa designed to appear as a “pre-­Columbian”–­style design.

Columbian flat and roller-­stamp designs, which ­were used in other walkway murals throughout the periphery of Estrada Courts. This walkway mural was, in effect, a very long (approximately sixty feet) and ingenious placa or youth gang graffiti logo. This, of course, would have been apparent to the vne as well as to youths from rival gangs. Thus, through innovation, the vne youth gang was able to participate in t he new “mural” practice and contribute to their barrio, while still achieving their goal of a vis­i­ble collective territorial presence.31 It is crucial to understand that what has been discussed ­here is a pro­cess that, if it had been executed less subtly by the young Estrada Courts paint­ers, would have produced another example of a Mexican American “graffiti mural” such as exempliĀed in the Ken’s Market mural painted by Mexican American youth gang members supervised by Bill Butler, a n on-­Chicano artist.32 That mural included the placas of the young assistants as part of the composition without employing the camouflage techniques at Estrada Courts. Had the same method been used at Estrada Courts, each of the eighty-­two murals ­there would have included youth gang members’ names, and the perception of murals having displaced graffiti would have never been pos­si­ble. What took place at Estrada Courts constituted a cultural integration of a greater scope, due in large part not only to the fact that the murals themselves ­were painted by gang youth conversant with barrio calligraphy but, more importantly, that they w ­ ere supervised by older, former members of Mexican American youth gangs. The young adults who provided leadership at Estrada Courts had survived the destructive youth gang lifestyle and w ­ ere intent upon redirecting the lives of active youth gang members in more positive directions through Mexican American and Chicano carnalismo (neighborhood or group brotherhood).33 ­These young men, such as “Cat” Felix, ­were emeritus members of the Mexican American youth gang culture and as such w ­ ere respected as veteranos. 286  ·  mar c os sánchez- ­t ranq uilino

Streets That Cannot Divide

Barrio calligraphers wrote on public walls out of necessity. Their placas appropriated marginalized areas, such as fences, alleys, sidewalls of stores, and housing proj­ects, which for dominant society held ­little apparent value. Homeboys appropriated ­these “valueless” spaces not to vandalize them for the sake of destruction of private property but to use them for their own needs. They wanted to assert publicly their corporate identities in a wa y that was meaningful to t­ hose participating in the same youth gang lifestyle.34 The space available to Mexican American youth in the barrios (and housing proj­ects in par­tic­u­lar) for recreation and social interaction was severely restricted due to the carving up of ­these working-­class neighborhoods by manufacturers and developers.35 Placas represented a system developed by Mexican American youths by which they could divide what ­little space (territory) was left. Space as a limi ted resource was the territorial economy upon which their street culture was based. Operating on that level, placas w ­ ere designed by them to serve as a public check of the abuse of power in the streets.36 Barrio calligraphy became an innovation developed by the Mexican American street youth culture to signal and monitor visually the social dynamics of power through coded symbology in t he economy of restricted public space. To understand the socialization pro­cess of Mexican American street culture is to understand the institution of street social control, imposed not by traditional authority but rather by the youth who found it necessary to participate in it. James Diego Vigil’s Āndings are elemental in this regard: “The streets and older street youths became the major socialization and enculturation agents, with the gang representing a type of street social control institution by becoming in turn a partial substitute for ­family (providing emotional and social support networks), school (giving instructions on how to think and act), and police (authority and sanctions to enforce adherence to gang norms).”37 Therefore, one youth gang’s graf-

Āti inscribed inside a contending youth gang’s territory would constitute a public notice to every­ one concerned that an attempt was in the offing to appropriate more territory by the placa-­attacking group. Theoretically, this allowed enough time for the group considered for attack to increase its strength or vigilance and, contrary to popu­lar belief, avoid a Āght.38 Mexican American youth gangs have been characterized as Āghting gangs. However, this can describe only the pro­cess that is most easily discerned by past so­cio­log­i­cal studies as well as the general public. Prior to a street Āght ever breaking out, the Mexican American youth gang culture has intervened in many forms to avoid this taking place. In global politics, this is called détente. Art Is Sometimes Not Art

The assertions made in this essay reflect my attempt to understand the opposite of what is usually held to be true of murals: that is, the possibility of reading murals not as art at all but as graffiti; not as the displacement of vandalism but as the condensation of a deeply charged barrio cultural tradition.39 Within this context, it is pos­si­ble to begin to discern the personal and collective investment in t he construction of identity necessary for the survival of Mexican American youth gang culture through appropriation, adaptation, and innovation understood within the scope of Chicano liberation. Group cohesion in t he youth gang culture, supported by a strong identity with one’s barrio or territory, was part of what Charles “Cat” Felix, as mural program director at Estrada Courts, was willing to support and invest himself in. As a veterano, even though not originally of Estrada Courts, Felix developed, a­ fter only a short time, indelible ties of identiĀcation with the vne youth. Responding casually to my question about his assessment of the more than twenty-­Āve murals at the nearby Ramona Gardens housing proj­ect situated just Āve miles north of Estrada Courts, Felix admitted that he had never been ­there. This

answer, to a question that presumed that murals as “art” ­were to be appreciated anywhere they might be painted, seemed inconceivable. Just as the Chicano murals of the vne clearly signiĀed the defensive challenges of the Mexican American placas they made ambiguous, Felix and other vne homeboys w ­ ere able to read the murals of Ramona Gardens as re-­presenting the warnings and challenges of the “displaced” Hazard Grande youth gang graffiti. Felix’s candid admission provides one of the keys to the fundamental realization that, to t­ hose living the youth gang lifestyle, the murals ­were far more than “art”: they had become, like graffiti, an integral part of their particularized systems of cultural and territorial signiĀcation. While bicentennial visitors and other outsiders (speciĀcally, non–­youth gang members) perceived the Estrada Courts’ Chicano murals solely as art, the proj­ect youth, in the throes of a changing po­liti­cal context for the entire Mexican American community, would continue for years to read many of the signs of Mexican American graffiti and its youth gang signiĀed in t he Chicano mural compositions. Estrada Courts is the best-­defended youth gang territory—­and the murals ­there tell you so. Notes This chapter was originally published as Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino, “Space, Power and Youth Culture: Mexican American Graffiti and Chicano Murals in East Los Angeles, 1972–1978, ” in Looking High and Low: Art and Cultural Identity, ed. Brenda Jo Bright and Liza Blackwell (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 55–88. © 1995 The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. Epigraph: Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 169. 1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 89th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, December 1, 1990, as part of the panel “Looking High and Low: Art and Prob­lems of Cultural Identity,” Brenda Jo Bright and Elizabeth Bakewell, session organizers. This paper

Spa ce, P o wer , and Y o u th Cul tur e  ·  287

and the earlier version are based on the research and analy­sis done for my master’s thesis, “Mi Casa No Es Su Casa: Chicano Murals and Barrio Calligraphy as Systems of Signification at Estrada Courts, 1972–1978, ” at the University of California, Los Angeles (1991). 2. Ruben Salazar, “Who Is a Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?,” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1970. Reprinted in Chicano Art History: A Book of Selected Readings, ed. Jacinto Quirarte (San Antonio: Research Center for the Arts and Humanities, University of Texas, 1984), 5. The term “Mexican American” is written without a ­hyphen as per Chicano usage. Salazar, an unwilling martyr of the Chicano civil rights movement, was killed by a Los Angeles sheriff’s tear gas projectile while he sat at the bar of the Silver Dollar Cafe. He had run into this establishment along with other members of the Spanish-­ speaking media in order to wait out the altercation that broke out between police and antiwar demonstrators on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles. Two other Chicanos ­were also killed. The date of this dual event, August 29, 1970, marks an impor­tant turning point for the Chicano movimiento. 3. The reader should note that the term “Chicano” may be applied, in connection with graffiti, to indicate the larger historical discourse of Chicano art and culture that dates back to 1848 and, in some cases, before. For an in-­depth study of po­liti­cal action by Mexican Americans prior to the Chicano movement, see Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Identity, and Ideology, 1930–1960(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 4. I disagree with the use of the term “subculture” as representative of the culture of Chicanos or Chicano gang youth. Not only is my disagreement a re­sis­tance to subordination, it is also a questioning of the accuracy of such a categorical reference. 5. Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino, “Estrada Courts Dedicated to Housing Man ­behind Production Line” Southwest Builder and Contractor (1942): 12–15. Estr ada Courts was originally constructed in 1941. nI 1953, an additional two hundred housing units ­were added, which are known as the Extension. The Estrada Courts murals are all located within the Extension. 6. Dieter Pinke, “Wandbilder der Chicanos in Los Angeles” (baccalaureate thesis, [university not identified], Kassel, Germany, 1984), 104.The term “community” is used throughout as a meta­phor for or­ga­nized action in the po­liti­cal and cultural arenas by persons or groups acting on behalf of themselves with a collective voice. It is not intended to connote that Chicanos are necessarily

288  ·  mar c os sánchez- ­t ranq uilino

a cohesive, monolithic entity working on group interests, agendas, or goals. This paper is predicated on the understanding that Chicanos who paint murals are not all the same—­some are trained artists, while ­others are untrained; some are male, ­others are female; some are young, ­others are old; some are youth gang members, ­others are not—­and it is not always easy to differentiate among any of them without deeper analy­sis. Even then we should ask, why is it impor­tant to know who is who? And who is asking? 7. See Schlomo Hasson and Samuel Aroni, Public Housing in Los Angeles: A Social Study (School of Architecture, University of California, Los Angeles, 1979), photocopy, 25, for an economic profile of the Estrada Courts residents. Rodolfo E. Acuña provides the following summary gleaned from 1970 census information on East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights, the larger community within which the Estrada Courts housing proj­ect is located: “The area . . . ​was predominantly Chicano, since approximately 95 ­percent of the Spanish-­surname ­population belonged to that ethnic group. ­There ­were other trends. The population was young and only one-­fourth had a high school education, in contrast to two-­thirds of Los Angeles residents. . . . ​Boyle Heights residents earned approximately 56 ­percent and East Los Angeles residents, 69 ­percent of what other Angelenos earned. The ­house­holds ­were markedly larger, lowering the per capita income.” Rodolfo E. Acuña, A Community ­under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River, 1945–1975, Monograph 11 (Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 1984), 184. 8. The term “Anglo society” is used throughout, in part as a partial meta­phor for the negative historic forces that have contributed to shaping an identifiable Chicano experience as an emergent underclass in the United States. See Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1840–1890: A Social History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 103–38,or f an introduction to the dynamic interplay of U.S. history and Chicano culture as well as for so­cio­log­i­cal theories on the creation of ethnic groups that have been applied to Chicanos by vari­ous authors. 9. A board made up of concerned Estrada Courts residents created Residentes Unidos as the ­legal copyright holder of all of the Estrada Courts murals. This step represented an effort to control the proliferation of the Estrada imagery by insensitive outsiders who used it commercially in books, films, tele­vi­sion, and slides

without compensating the original artists. The board is no longer extant (Daniel Martinez, telephone interview with author, May 11, 1988). 10.“Barrio calligraphy” is the term developed by Jerry and Sally Romotsky in their 1976 analy­sis of the unique style of graffiti developed and used by Chicanos in Los Angeles and its immediate environs. The pres­ent study uses this term for the graffiti style employed by Mexican Americans for the period 1972–78 at Estrada Courts. The terms “Mexican American graffiti,” “graffiti,” “barrio calligraphy,” and “placas” are used interchangeably in this paper for the sake of par­tic­u­lar emphases. The term “Chicano graffiti” is used to signal the connections of this practice within the larger field of Chicano history. Jerry Romotsky and Sally R. Romotsky, Los Angeles Barrio C ­ alligraphy (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1976). Barrio calligraphy tends to be seen as vandalism and as a sign of a lack of residential pride by many dif­fer­ent groups of society. Not all Mexican Americans (especially ­those aspiring to the ­middle class) appreciate graffiti by other Mexican Americans or Chicanos. Many immigrants from Mexico do not like Mexican American or Chicano graffiti ­because it is similar to vandalism in their own country. It is prob­ably most appreciated by graffiti writers, for whom it fulfills several needs, including urban aesthetics. Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino, “Mi Casa No Es Su Casa: Chicano Murals and Barrio Calligraphy as Systems of Signification at Estrada Courts, 1972–1978” (master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991), 20–23. 11. See James Diego Vigil, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California, Center for Mexican American Studies Mexican American monograph 12 (Austin: University of Texas, 1988), 70–75, of r a brief cultural profile of the Estrada Courts Housing proj­ect and the Varrio Nuevo Estrada youth gang. 12. In the Eastside Sun, January 1, 1976, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley spoke about the necessity of wiping out all graffiti, and about the beauty of the Estrada Courts murals that had succeeded in accomplishing their task of replacing the vandalism. 13.The concept of vandalism as it is understood in this essay is that it does not exist as an a priori entity. It does not exist except as a meta­phor to describe a relation of power in which the expression of one subject is condemned by another. While it is generally applied to public inscriptions, theoretically it cannot be restricted to this practice. In other words, “vandalism” is a term applied to expression when it is deemed to be outside

of acceptable be­hav­ior, or when such expression is outlawed. In this sense, “vandalism” is used as a mode of restriction or censorship similar to the way other categorical terms such as “pornography,” “bad taste,” and “dirty language” are applied as part of social control. Susan Stewart analyzed the structural scope of the discourse of graffiti in a postmodern, consumerist context, which, though both qualitatively and quantitatively dif­fer­ent from that involving the graffiti practices of Chicano gang youth, nevertheless provides connections necessary for a fuller understanding of the axiological relationship into which Chicano graffiti is ultimately pulled as a result of being categorized as ­either “art” or “vandalism.” I am grateful to Brenda J. Bright for making Stewart’s article available to me. Susan Stewart, “Ceci Tuera Cela: Graffiti as Crime and Art,” in Life a ­ fter Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture, ed. John Fekete (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 161–80. 14.The placa insignias have much in common in both form and content with Eu­ro­pean heraldic coats of arms and, particularly, the heraldic device. As I noted in an earlier study, Sánchez-­Tranquilino, “Mi Casa No Es Su Casa,” 47–57, placas are heavi­ly influenced by Eu­ro­pean coats of arms and, as such, carry many of their residual forms and symbolic references. 15.The term “homeboy” serves as a unifying designation that identifies the relationship in which one participates as a barrio carnal (a barrio “­brother”) in the familial network, ­whether one is in the barrio itself or in prison, where an extension of this relationship functions as an impor­tant resource of cultural support. Joan Moore with Robert Garcia, Carlos Garcia, Luis Cerda, and Frank Valencia, Homeboys: Gangs, Drugs, and Prison in the Barrios of Los Angeles (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1978), 99. 16. It is not pos­si­ble to pinpoint the beginning of this practice. In 1976, a sixty-­year-­old plumber reported to the Romotskys that placas ­were in full bloom when he began the practice as a youngster in Los Angeles. See Romotsky and Romotsky, Los Angeles Barrio C ­ alligraphy, 12. “C/S” signals its affinity to Caló language while resisting a literal reading even in Spanish. According to Vigil, Caló originated with Spanish gypsies and was diffused to Mexico by Spanish bullfighters. This motto is the only one known that is said to confer the meaning “any disparaging remark written upon this placa also applies to the offending writer”; thus, “C/S” has been used as a charm or hex that symbolically imbues the inscription with

Spa ce, P o wer , and Y o u th Cul tur e  ·  289

the capacity to transcend all attacks upon it. See Vigil, Barrio Gangs, 177. 17. My ability to read public placa texts is due to my familiarity with the subject as research, and not ­because I practice the art of placas. So far, I am able to write only in the most rudimentary cholo style, but I continue to practice. 18. For a discussion of semiology as applied in this study, see Rosalind Coward and John Ellis Coward, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 25–44. 19. JohnTagg, “The Burden of Repre­sen­ta­tion: Essays on Photographies and Histories,” in Communications and Culture Series (London: MacMillan Education, 1988), 3. For further reading on discourse theory and discursive formations as they apply to the analy­sis of culture, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 31–39. 20. For years, Willie Herrón’s and Gronk’s names and telephone numbers as the mural’s artists appeared along with the graffiti. 21. For further inquiry into graffiti, see Ernest L. Abel and Barbara E. Buckley, The Handwriting on the Wall: ­Toward a Sociology and Psy­chol­ogy of Graffiti (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977); and Robert Reisner and Lorraine Wechsler, Encyclopedia of Graffiti (New York: Galahad Books, 1980). Studies on graffiti in general indicate that it serves a variety of communicative purposes. Therefore, the association of it as vandalism takes place only ­after graffiti, as a form of unsanctioned repre­sen­ta­tion, transcends socially imposed restrictions, ­whether spoken or written, public or private. See also Hubert Kohl, “The Writing’s on the Wall—­Use It,” Learning (May–­June 1974): 10–15; and Jerry Romotsky and Sally R. Romotsky, “Barrio School Murals: A Decorative Alternative,” C ­ hildren ­Today (September–­October 1974a), 10–15; and Jerry Romotsky and Sally R. Romotsky, “Graffiti to Learn By,” C ­ hildren ­Today (September–­October 1975), 12–14, 35, for an introduction to graffiti as a ­viable social and historical form, and for discussions that begin to address links among graffiti, murals, and education. 22. David Kahn, “Chicano Street Murals: ­People’s Art in the East Los Angeles Barrio,” Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research 6, no. 1 (1975): 118, 117–21. 23. Shifra M. Goldman, “Affirmations of Existence; Barrio Murals of Los Angeles,” Revista Chicano-­Riqueña 4, no. 4 (1976): 75, 73–76.

290  ·  mar c os sánchez- ­t ranq uilino

24. This is not to say that Mexican American graffiti writers are not politicized, but rather that they are deemed as such ­because no comparison of the po­liti­cal beliefs is offered by Kahn, Goldman, or ­others within the specific (and explicit) Chicano ideological context. 25. Excerpt from Through Walls, a contextual video written and directed by Carlos Avila in conjunction with the exhibition Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, UCLA Wight Art Gallery. Judith Baca was originally filmed saying this in Murals of East Los Angeles (1977), directed by Heather Howell and produced by Humberto Rivera. See also Judith Francisca Baca, “Our ­People Are the Internal Exiles,” interview with Diane Neumaier, in Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by ­Women of Color, ed. Gloría Anzaldua (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), 256–70, in which she subsequently clarifies that while she felt it was necessary that murals displace placas in order to bring about cohesion among her young mural team members, her mural work with them was complex and “clearly not [only] graffiti abatement” (261). 26. Alan W. Barnett, Community Murals: The ­People’s Art (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1984), 38. 27. Barnett, Community Murals, 38. 28. The mural depicts the severe beating Herrón’s older ­brother received at the hands of rival youth gang members. The attack occurred late one eve­ning on the stairway at the bottom of the wall, where Herrón began to paint his mural immediately upon returning from taking his ­brother to the hospital. Herrón intended his composition to be read by Chicano youth gang members who claimed the alley as part of their territory. The grieving grand­mother in the mural points to the related pain created in families when youth gang altercations claim victims. Herrón wanted to demonstrate visually to ­those participating in this culture that they, as well as their victims and families, ­were caught in an unforgiving wall of self-­destruction. The pre-­Columbian life and death mask from Tlatilco, Mexico, underscores the ­human investment in this situation. 29. Barnett, Community Murals, 40. 30. Willie Herrón, interview with author, Los Angeles, December 29, 1987. Herrón’s signature on “The Wall That Cracked Open” appears on the upper right side, ­toward the edge of the wall. Interestingly, the lettering style and form of the signature, “Willie Herrón—­Artist—1972,” are influenced by barrio calligraphy. Not only can Herrón’s signature be seen as his placa, but the entire mural

itself follows many compositional conventions of barrio calligraphy. 31.The success of the incorporation of the VNE placa or logo into an acceptable (albeit short-­lasting) public design may be attributable both to transformational techniques long in use in Caló (sometimes known as Chicano Spanish) as practiced by many of the Mexican American lower class and favored by pachucos, as well as to subsequent generations of Chicano gang youth and their use of barrio calligraphy and its apparent influence from Eu­ro­pean heraldry. The constraints of this study do not permit a closer comparison between Chicano visual forms and ­those produced in language through par­tic­u­lar regional variations on Chicano bilingualism. However, it is impor­tant to keep in mind that the bilingualism of the Southwest has constructed a historical context for the tendency of many cultural practices and art forms to employ techniques similar to transformational ­techniques of bilingualism. ­These include code switching, “melange” or language mixing, and language alternation. Linda Fine Katz, “The Evaluation of the Pachuco Language and Culture” (master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1974), 40–41. For further reading, see also Donald J. Bowen and Jacob Orenstein, eds., Studies in Southwest Spanish (Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1976). 32. See Eva Cockcroft, John Weber, and James Cockcroft, ­Towards a ­People’s Art: The Con­temporary Mural Movement (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), o f r discussion of the “Ken’s Market” mural. This “graffiti-­mural” exemplifies a variation on the position held by Herrón. Completed before the beginning of the Estrada Courts murals, it was painted in East Los Angeles by the ­little Li’l Valley youth gang (youth association). The mural celebrates the ­or­ga­nized mural efforts of the youth gang by incorporating their placas in the composition. 33. Moore et al., Homeboys, 77. 34. Within the exigencies of that experience, the ­attainment of personal and corporate or collective status was a primary concern, informing the many cultural forms developed by marginalized Chicano youth. Such practices included the wearing of the flamboyant ­original 1940s zoot suit and its present-­day derivations, the speaking of Caló (the pachuco argot), the adherence to a code of ethics based on the responsible soldier, and the emblazoning of barrio calligraphy based on status-­ laden Old En­glish script and public heraldic display.

35.“One of the striking characteristics of public housing proj­ects in Los Angeles is their proximity to noxious land uses”; Hasson and Aroni, Public Housing in Los Angeles, 16.This meant airports, chemical plants, freeways, milling plants, harbor facilities, and so on. See also Brenda Jo Bright, “Mexican-­American Low Riders: An Anthropological Approach to Popu­lar Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 1994), for vignettes from residents of three dif­fer­ent Los Angeles barrios that demonstrate adjustments by youths to space increasingly restricted by commerce and development. 36. See Vigil, Barrio Gangs, 131, or f casual testimony on how school territory is divided in a similar manner. A seventeen-­year-­old male from one youth gang who was transferred to a high school located in a dif­fer­ent barrio explained, “They came up to me, so we started talking about territory and shit, that they should have this territory and we should have another territory. That way every­one would have their place and no pedo [fights] would start.” 37.Vigil, Barrio Gangs, 12; emphasis in source. 38. In this regard, Vigil’s view of placas is dif­fer­ ent from mine in that he sees placas “thrown” in rival ­territory as a way of maintaining territorial dominance and “as a form of boasting much like Plains Indians’ ‘counting coup’ ” or as gaining attention from the general (nongang) public; Vigil, Barrio Gangs, 115.While I agree with his theory of territorial dominance, I tend to see (and describe) this pro­cess as a dialectic. For development of “New York”–­style tagging and graffiti art, see Craig Castleman, Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). Admittedly, in recent years a type of Chicano graffiti has been influenced by New York–­style “tagging” (although it began in New York in the early 1970s), in which the objective is to get one’s name in as many places as pos­si­ble. 39. Similar structures of material and territorial display occur in the larger art world. While major metropolitan museums can be read as “placas” of the socially privileged, the current crop of “boutique” museums put up to ­house the private appropriations of wealthy collectors indicates a new dialectical component of who rifas (rules) in this division of world art sources. Interestingly, like placas, museums employ all of the signs of legitimacy and status (including “fancy” lettering on exterior signage, letterhead, and invitations) to partially rationalize their assertions of high culture.

Spa ce, P o wer , and Y o u th Cul tur e  ·  291

c. o nd ine ch av o ya

28. Pseudographic Cinema  ·  1998 Asco’s No-­Movies

Formed in the early 1970s by four Chicano artists from East Los Angeles, Asco set out to test the limits of art—­its production, distribution, reception, and exhibition. As a co llaborative creative corps, the original members of Asco1—­Harry Gamboa  Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez—­engaged in p er­for­mance, public art, and multimedia art as a r esponse to the turbulent social, po­liti­cal period in Los Angeles and within the larger international context of alternative youth cultures and radical politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Creating art by any means necessary, while often using their bodies and guerrilla or hit-­and-­ run tactics, Asco’s work critically satirized and challenged the conventions of modernist “high” art as well as ­those of “ethnic” or community-­ based art. The initial effect of the group is testiĀed to in the connotations of their self-­adopted name, Asco—­Spanish for “nausea” or “repulsion” with the impulse to vomit. The name acknowledges the response that their street and gallery work provoked, particularly from within the Chicano art movement.

The contributions of Asco have remained largely unrecognized or underestimated. A de ­ cade ago in the mit exhibition LA: Hot and Cool, Asco was identiĀed as a pioneer of con­temporary conceptual work; the curatorial essay outlined how in 1987 (the year Asco broke up) their contributions ­were only beginning to be acknowledged.2 However, a recent survey of published histories on per­for­mance, conceptual, and public art Ānds Asco suspiciously written out altogether.3 In response to the acknowledged need for new narratives and genealogies of the avant-­garde that complicate its past and support its f­ uture,4 this essay discusses and analyzes the intersections of per­for­mance, interventionist public art, and intermedia technologies in t he work of Asco. My focus ­will be Asco’s in­ven­ted medium of a cinema by other means, the No-­Movie—­staged events in which per­for­mance artists played the parts of stars, “Ālmed” without motion picture technology throughout Los Angeles, and distributed as pseudographic Ālm stills from “au­then­tic” Chicano motion pictures. While insisting upon the value of the avant-­garde as a construct, I suggest

what the structural exclusion and palpable absence of Asco from this valuable construct reveals about the Euro-­American avant-­garde, or at least the currency of its official histories. a sc o (n a us ea) 1 a feeling of sickness at the stomach, with an impulse to vomit 2 disgust; loathing 3 Gronk, Patssi, Gamboa, Herrón 4 collaborations 1972 thru 1976.5

Between 1968 and 1973, Chicanos in southern California protested the disproportionate number of Chicano casualties in t he Vietnam War and the relationship between this statistic and inequities of education and unequal opportunity for Chicano youth.6 Gamboa, Gronk, Herrón, and Valdez all attended GarĀeld High School in East L.A., a locus of po­liti­cal organ­ization and vio­ lence, and ­were involved in a c lique of the Chicano youth movement invested in countering the established norms and “rebel[ling] against social victimization by adopting ‘an extreme and flamboyant use of language and fashion.’ ”7 Known as Jetters, they ­were noted for their wild dress, tricky talk, and sardonic attitudes, and their “extravagance of dress and manner served as a placard for social impotence.”8 Converging together through their shared sense of displacement and as an alternative to gangs, vio­lence, and other negative ele­ments affecting the community, Asco merged activism with per­for­mance. Manifesting their ideas in t he public arena, the artists recognized the power of public repre­sen­ta­tion and documentation and expertly learned to circumvent traditional institutions by creating alternative methods of access and distribution.9 In a city where only one fourth of all Mexican ­Americans graduated from high school, GarĀeld High “boasted the highest drop-­out rate in the nation, with 59 ­percent of students failing to complete the curriculum.”10 In 1968 more than ten thousand students walked out of Āve high schools in protest of the substandard educational system in t he nation’s largest barrio—­East  L.A. This student boycott for educational reform,

known as the Chicano Blowouts, was the Ārst major mass protest against racism undertaken by Mexican A ­ mericans in the history of the United States. This or­ga­nized nonviolent student strike “brought the largest school system in the nation to a s tandstill and made news across the country; a Los Angeles Times reporter interpreted the strike as ‘The Birth of Brown Power.’ ”11 Gronk, the Ārst to engage in per­for­mance and live action art, contributed to the po­liti­cal newspaper Grassroots Forum and college Chicano activist publications. Harry Gamboa  Jr. served as the vice president of the GarĀeld High School Blowout Committee and contributed to the activist news periodicals Chicano Student News and La Raza. Gamboa’s role in organ­izing the blowouts and other activist work was deemed “antiestablishment, antiwhite, and militant” propaganda in testimony before a U.S. Senate committee;12 he was named one of the one hundred most dangerous and violent subversives in t he USA, a long with Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Reies López Tijerina. The military meta­phors of the term “avant-­ garde” are dually relevant when discussing Asco. “So much death had been occurring and does occur in East L.A. without any meaning attached to it,” Gamboa said in an interview. “We wanted to give ­people a cer tain kind of almost gastrointestinal response.”13 At a time when Chicanos accounted for less than 1 ­percent of the University of California’s total student population, Chicanos, as a group, suffered the highest death rate of all U.S. military personnel.14 Asco’s avant-­garde strategies ­were “urban survival techniques that emerged from the or­ga­nized protest movement against the use of Chicanos, and other ­people of color, as the literal avant-­garde in the war in Vietnam.”15 No-­Movies: The Art of False Documents

Asco’s No-­Movies ­were conceptual per­for­mances created speciĀcally for a still camera. The No-­ Movies typically appropriated two models of pre­sen­ta­tion: the Latin American fotonovela and Pseud o grap hic Cinema  ·  293

the Hollywood Ālm still. Bearing the signature red stamp “Asco/Chicano Cinema,” No-­Movies ­were distributed to local and national press and media and to Ālm distributors, and reached an international audience through mail art cir­cuits. Chon Noriega has succinctly described the No-­ Movie format as an “intermedia synesthesia” that uses one affordable medium (the still 35 mm camera) as another more expensive medium (a 16 or 35 mm motion picture camera).16 As pseudographic Ālm stills the No-­Movies circulated as examples of “au­then­tic” Chicano-­produced motion pictures, creating the specious illusion of an active body of Chicano cinema being produced from the ubiquitous geo­graph­i­cal periphery of Hollywood. In the premier issue of the journal ChismeArte, whose name translates into something like “gossip (and) art,” Gamboa and Gronk scripted and performed a m ock interview. In this interview, they asked themselves, what is a No-­Movie? To this, Gronk responds, “I use the 3 p oint dot system for preparation of a No-­Movie. First: No Ālm. Second: Thinking with an 8 ½" × 10" format. Third: Postal distribution. The No-­Movie is a concept that involves the aforementioned system.”17 The No-­Movie concept and format went beyond the creation of an alternative cinematic imagery but operated as an ideological “rebuff to celluloidic capitalism of con­temporary cinema.”18 No-­Movies ­were both a cr itical assault on and an evasion of the Hollywood studio system, denouncing the absence of Chicano access to and participation in mass media. In a s ense the ­No-­Movies ­were not only critically satirizing Hollywood cinema but also parodying the utopian nationalism of the Chicano art movement. As such, No-­Movies ­were a critical alternative to the doctrines and practices of nationalist Chicano cinema and Third World cinema.19 Although tongue in cheek, the critique of nationalist Chicano Ālmmakers is poignantly sharp in the same interview: chis mear te: At what point did you reject the celluloid format of cinema?

294  ·  c. o nd ine ch av o ya

gr o nk: When I realized Chicano Ālmmakers w ­ ere making the same movie over and over again. gamb oa: When I di scovered for myself that a multimillion-­dollar proj­ect could be accomplished for less than 10 dollars and have more than 300 copies in circulation around the world.20

The No-­Movie that sardonically delineates this issue is appropriately titled Chicano Cinema (1976; Āg.  28.1). The image of gunshot victim fallen to the floor resembles ­those from the sensationalist Mexican true crime magazine ¡Alarma! His white tank-­top is saturated with blood, but he remains propped up in the corner of the room. Fiercely yet blankly staring ahead, his eyes confront the viewer. The cinematic mise-­en-­scène suggests a cheap motel room. The words “Chicano Cinema” have been painted on brown butcher paper above the fallen casualty. However, the Ānal letter of the title drips off the paper on to the floor indicating that perhaps the bullet penetrated the author while in pro­cess. Cryptically scrawled out on the wall below is a signature—­“Gamboa”; opposite the man a pile of banknotes is aflame. One hand is placed inside his unbuttoned trousers, the other holds a gun p ointed at the viewer; it is unclear ­whether this Āgure is a rebel with a cause or a victim of his own art and ideology. Regardless, Chicano Cinema has become his Ānal rite and epitaph. Asco set out to promote an awareness of vio­ lence and the foolishness of promoting it.21 They saw the prob­lems and vio­lence facing East  L.A. “as prob­lems ­because we w ­ ere right in the m ­ iddle of it; we wanted to change it. We wanted to reach inside and pull ­peoples’ guts out.”22 It was this set of shared convictions that in the pro­cess made it imperative for them to shatter “­people’s preconceptions of what Chicano artists should do.”23 Decoy Gang War Victim (1978) was both a per­for­mance and a media intervention (Āg. 28.2). ­After closing off a r esidential city block with flares in t he Li’l Valley area of East L.A., Gronk sprawled across the asphalt posing as the “victim” of a gang retribution killing with ketchup all over him. As Gamboa explains, “We would go around

FIG. 28.1. Harry Gamboa Jr., No Movie: Chicano Cinema, 1976. Color photo­graph. Image courtesy of the artist. © Harry Gamboa Jr.

FIG. 28.2. Asco, Decoy Gang War Victim (detail), 1974. Color photo­graph. Photo­graph by Harry Gamboa Jr. Image courtesy of the artist. © Asco; photo­graph © Harry Gamboa Jr.

and whenever we heard of where t­ here might be potential vio­lence, we would set up ­these decoys so they would think someone had already been killed.”24 The per­for­mance’s status as media hoax and counterspectacle depended upon the signiĀcantly dif­fer­ent purposes to which the documentation was put to use. A photo­graph of the per­for­mance was distributed to vari­ous publications and tele­ vi­sion stations and accepted by the local media as a predictable spectacle. The image was broadcast, for example, on khj- ­t v L.A. C hannel 9, a s an “au­then­tic” East L.A. Chicano gang murder and condemned as a prime example of rampant gang vio­lence in the City of Angels. It is highly unlikely that the decoy restored peace to the barrio or was effective in c anceling out the media’s repre­sen­ ta­tion of an ­actual death; however, the pro­cess exposed the possibility of media manipulation to the artists. Recognizing the power of documentation and appropriating the spectacle of media publicity, the practice of merging per­for­mance and media manipulation became an integral tactic in ­future Asco activities. The artists w ­ ere all too familiar with the power of photographic documents “to structure belief and recruit consent; the power of conviction and the power to convict.”25 Not only did t he mass media represent crime and vio­lence as East Los Angeles’ “major gross product,”26 but Gamboa was the target of “internal subversives” surveillance sponsored by the fbi ’s c ointel- p ­ r o agency. This was pos­si­ble, Gamboa argues, ­because “they had pictures and I ­didn’t have pictures to prove my point.”27 Thus Gamboa characterizes Asco’s work as “conceptually po­liti­cal”;28 that is to say, its themes ­were often po­liti­cal and violent, or po­liti­cally violent, or about vio­lence against ­those who ­were po­ liti­cal. As S.  Zaneta Kosiba-­Vargas concludes, “Asco rendered new interpretations of the Chicano urban experience which emphasized the irrationality of an environment s­ haped by vio­ lence, racial oppression, and exploitation.”29 The impetus was not to ­create spectacles per se but to bring attention to the spectacular condition 296  ·  c. o nd ine ch av o ya

of everyday life in the barrio and through counterspectacles to destabilize the power of the media to represent it as such. Heterotopic Per­for­mance: Spaces of Deviation, Absence, Re­sis­tance, and Imagination Los Angeles is everywhere. It is global in the fullest sense of the word. Nowhere is this more evident than in its cultural projection and ideological reach, its ubiquitous screening of itself as a rectangular dream machine for the world. —­E DWARD W. SOJA

When asked by art historian Shifra Goldman how he would deĀne an Asco per­for­mance, Gamboa replied that the idea developed and crystallized with the No-­Movies. Referring to their early unannounced street per­for­mances, he says, “We ­were the audience . . . ​Many per­for­mances ­were done very quickly, as long as it takes to go out and snap a p icture.”30 The No-­Movie format facilitated the circulation of their per­for­mances by taking “the barrio out of the barrio.”31 Gronk has described the No-­Movie concept as follows: “We ­were using Hollywood by mimicking it—we became its characters, as well as its technical staff, producers, directors; L.A., t he city, became our canvas and we became the pigment.”32 The geographic and social space of Los Angeles was thus not simply the site of Asco’s production but also the very material of their conceptual art. Asco’s spatially politicized aesthetics embodied resistant meanings in order to mobilize resistant readings. In one series of per­for­mances, Asco appointed themselves municipal officials to East  L.A., an unincorporated county territory and, thus, without a city hall. Asco toured their “municipality” on random site visits, designating vari­ous spaces and objects to be civic landmarks, monuments, and preservation zones. On one such No-­Movie per­for­mance, a s torm drain was anointed with the illustrious title Asshole Mural (1975; Āg. 28.3). Traditionally monuments mark, embody, and make vis­i­ble power relations. Steve Pile describes

FIG. 28.3. Asco, Ascozilla/Asshole Mural, 1975. Color photo­graph with vinyl stickers. Photo­graph by Harry Gamboa Jr. From the collection of Patssi Valdez. © Asco; © Harry Gamboa Jr.

this pro­cess as making space incontestable “both by closing off alternative readings and by drawing ­people into the presumption that the values they represent are shared.”33 Asco’s spatial aesthetic is an example of an enacted heterotopia that embodies and actualizes such alternative readings. Asco’s per­for­mance demonstrates a p ro­cess of recombinative simultaneity for critical re­sis­tance and dialogue: to read monuments as “grids of meaning and power” is also to recognize their active participation in the control and manipulation of space, both real and meta­phorical,34 the directly experienced spaces of repre­sen­ta­tion, and the conceptual repre­sen­ta­tions of space.35 Asshole Mural is, perhaps most importantly, a performative intervention into the historical pro­ cess that has produced Chicana/os as the categorical blind spot—­the “disposable phantom culture”36—of dominant institutions and media. The tactic utilized is to usurp the authority and

power invested in t he civic heritage industry as spectacle and transform it into a co unter­ spectacle. Jonathan Crary has described similar strategies employed by the surrealists and other Euro-­American avant-­garde artists as “turning the spectacle of the city inside out through counter-­memory and counter-­itineraries,” arguing that this strategy incarnates “a refusal of the imposed pres­ent.”37 But whereas such Euro-­American avant-­garde artists may have attempted to refuse an imposed pres­ent by reclaiming fragments of a demolished past in order to implicitly Āgure an alternative ­future, Asco’s proj­ect is clearly not one of cultural reclamation. The aesthetic and po­liti­cal invective of Asshole Mural is neither a commentary nor a metanarrative on the existing structures of the heritage industry. Asshole Mural is a performative, active invention of monuments, and in the pro­cess marks an absence. Asco’s aesthetic strategies and interventionist tactics are Pseud o grap hic Cinema  ·  297

a proj­ect of cultural invention emanating from neither the fragment nor the ruin but from the absence. Effect, Affect, and the Rhe­toric of the Pose

As collectively produced noncelluloid dramas, No-­Movies ­were originated to produce the affect of cinematic real­ity. As barrio star vehicles, No-­ Movies explored and exploited the power of the image. Vogue (1978), featuring Billy Estrada and Patssi Valdez (looking remarkably like Sophia Loren), appropriates the aura of stardom by referencing the photographic conventions of fashion advertising. Occasionally No-­Movies ­were far more explicit in their cinematic references, such as Fountain of Aloof (1978), the Patssi Valdez and Billy Estrada reper­for­mance of the Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni fountain scene in La Dolce Vita (1960). Concepts for still other No-­Movies included Asco Goes to the Universe (1975); The Gore ­Family (1975), a cannibalistic sciĀ thriller in w hich descendants of Lesley Gore are mugged while attempting to pawn a camera and are transformed into city terrorists from City Terrace; the Hollywood Slasher Victim interview and press conference (1978); and Stranglers in the Night (1978), a do mestic mass-­murder plot that unfolds in a shower stall. Gronk often invokes the celebrated postmodern photographer Cindy Sherman in his discussions of the No-­Movies (as a m eans to posit them a priori). In the influential essay “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” Douglas Crimp surveys the trajectory of advanced technological challenges to the aura, and identiĀes the work of a group of young (at the time of the essay) artists founded on a self-­reflexive displacement of the auratic investment in and fetishization of the original. “The photographic activity of postmodernism,” Crimp argues, “operates . . . ​ in complicity with the modes of photography-­ as-­art, but it does so only in order to subvert and exceed them.”38 ­These artists, of whom Sherman is a s tellar example, confront the medium’s axi298  ·  c. o nd ine ch av o ya

omatic claim to originality, to demonstrate how the medium is primarily and always “a repre­senta­tion, always-­already-­seen.”39 The aura is now only an aspect of the copy. Although ­there is a f ormal and conceptual convergence in the Asco No-­Movies and Sherman Ālm stills through their “rhe­toric of the pose,”40 t­ here is a crucial distinction to be made. For Sherman the rhe­toric of the pose is utilized to effect a sense of cinematic unreality. Working within an established, if entrenched, series of signiĀers and overdetermined narratives, the effect of cinematic unreality is a s trategy to destabilize or denaturalize normative gender codes. As Crimp describes, Sherman’s Ālm stills function in order to expose an unwanted dimension of Āction. Created in t he image of “already known ste­reo­types,” Sherman’s photo­graphs “show that the supposed autonomous and unitary self out of which other ‘directors’ would create their Āctions is itself nothing other than a discontinuous series of repre­sen­ta­tions, copies, fakes.”41 No-­Movies, in contrast, w ­ ere “designed to create an impression of factuality [sic]”42—to produce the affect of cinematic real­ity. In their impersonating an institution they wish to see themselves in, the strategy employed is to construct a s eries of signiĀers and narratives. Insofar as Sherman’s Ālm stills are a simulation of overdetermined signiĀers, the No-­Movie is a simulacrum for which ­there is no original.43 As Gronk coyly proclaims, “It is projecting the real by rejecting the reel.”44 Barrio Stars: The Heterodoxy of Hollywood

Asco’s production of barrio stars—­“survivors on the periphery”45 and “the elite of the obscure”46—­ like Warhol’s production of Factory Superstars, is able, in the words of Richard Dyer, “to put . . . ​ on the very put-­ons of glamour and sexuality that Hollywood had been peddling for so long.”47 The No-­Movies achieve the criticality that Richard Dyer wants to but ­can’t quite locate in t he Ālm work of Andy Warhol. No-­Movies like Warhol’s early Ālms take as their main points of reference

the notion of stardom and the discourse of fashion and advertisement. Rejected by New American Cinema, the star system was reformulated and reborn into its “most pristine state” in Warhol’s Ālms.48 The superstar was often the only recognizable Āgurative ele­ment in Warhol’s early Ālm work, and although he was not the Ārst practitioner, Warhol is credited with the contribution of the superstar to the iconography of the underground art Ālm.49 Soon ­after, the superstar as device was expanded into structuring idea and content.50 Warhol’s Ālm factory has been described as a flip Hollywood:51 “Hollywood’s nemesis, its Wonderland looking glass.”52 In this manner Tally Brown described the Factory as “creating Hollywood outside Hollywood, where you ­don’t have to bother with learning to act, making the rounds, ­going to agents, getting your 8 × 10 glossy, ­doing small parts being an extra, and gradually working up to becoming a star. You just got on camera and you ­were a Superstar.”53 The creation of a F actory Superstar hinged upon “the awareness that rather than transmitting a preexisting ‘substance’—­artistry, beauty, acting skill—­the media created stars as an effect, a supplement, of recording apparati and of media circulation.”54 In many re­spects, this concept complements, rather than complicates, Warhol’s fascination with the simulacral surface and his insistence that the surface was the only source of meaning. For above all, Warhol represented himself as a “pure artist,”55 a deĀnition premised on the negation of social content and critique. Hollywood cinema is often accused of furnishing the appearance of art with none of its intellectual demands. No-­Movies achieve the appearance of Hollywood cinema through the guise of art demanding intellectual and cultural response. Whereas Warhol’s strategy may have been to not direct his Ālms, Gamboa’s was to not make movies; while Warhol may have attempted to create a Hollywood outside Hollywood, Asco created the affect of Hollywood from the geo­graph­i­cal and ideological periphery of Hollywood. Although the freeway distance between East L.A. and Holly-

wood may only be fifteen minutes, Gamboa once explained, the cultural difference is about two hundred years.56 The ironic consequence for mastering Hollywood’s repre­sen­ta­tional and promotional techniques, however, was that Asco was so effective in pulling off the effect that one member, Patssi Valdez, was promoted from barrio star to superstar in a publication characterized as epitomizing the “culture of heterogeneous celebrity,”57 none other than Warhol’s own magazine, Interview.58 Conclusion

“Asco formed a di stinct impression in t he barrio that self-­determination was an active term.”59 The per­for­mance and multimedia production of Asco are an aesthetic co­ali­tion of politics and production, per­for­mance and action; in this way Asco succeeded in cr eating and effecting social commentary in nontraditional form. Their bodies provided the most immediate form, and the social space of L.A. p rovided the most effective forum for the materialization of their concepts (i.e., social commentary). How then do we account for the exclusion of Asco from the histories of the American avant-­ garde? Coco Fusco alerts us to the narrative ­devices through which the genealogies of the avant-­garde, particularly in p er­for­mance, preserve an exclusionary discourse: It is generally understood that per­for­mance as a form was introduced in the early 1970s to describe art that was ephemeral, time-­based and pro­cess oriented, that incorporated the body as an object and as a subject of inquiry, and explored extreme forms of be­hav­ior, cultural taboos, and social issues. It is also used retroactively to refer to the experiments of the 1960s, the Black Mountain College group of the 1950s, Dadaist and Surrealist events of the 20s and 30s, and so on. This genealogy is flagrantly Eurocentric, and lends credence to the assumption that American artists of color started ­doing per­ for­mance thanks to multicultural policies of the 1980s. 60

Pseud o grap hic Cinema  ·  299

How do w e work within, and yet against, such Euro-­ethnic61 genealogies of inheritance and the systemic disciplinary, historicist logic of accommodative or recuperative inclusion? We must begin by acknowledging that ­there are other sources and trajectories for “avant-­garde” practices and that t­ hese histories have been ignored and/or subjugated. As their sources of production ­were related to the experience of absence and exclusion, Asco’s strategies differ from the dominant conventions and conceptions of the Euro-­American avant-­ garde in both terms and conditions. With neither the technology nor access, Asco cannibalized the Ālmic medium to stage movement and possibility instead of static, iconic, and mythical repre­ sen­ta­tions. Asco did not adhere to the prescribed agenda for Chicano artists within the movement to unite and educate “the ­family of La Raza ­towards liberation with one heart and mind.”62 Neither obviously didactic nor consumable, their work was seen as an unproductive expenditure that did not fulĀll the tenets of nationalism within the Chicano movement and potentially obfuscated a nationalist ideology. While some Euro-­American conceptual artists ­were questioning or rejecting the art object, ­others investigated the apparatuses that produced and controlled them. The strategic counterre­sis­tance undertaken by Euro-­American artists and collectives against the museum-­market war-­machine, according to Henry Sayre, was “of course, to make art which was objectless, art which was conceived as uncollectable and un-­ buyable ­because intangible.”63 This intentional self-­absenting from commodiĀcation, Sayres argues, became a u seful instrument of change. Sayre identiĀes the practices of conceptual art, per­for­mance, and performance-­oriented genres as strategies utilized “in order to defeat or at least mitigate, the exploitation of their material manifestation.”64 Sayre is speaking directly to and exclusively about the physical aspects of medium and genre, and not the material means of production—­that is, its economic features or requisites. Indeed, it is such base issues, the limits 300  ·  c. o nd ine ch av o ya

of that which can be considered productive for ­either aesthetic or po­liti­cal agendas, that have denied Asco entry into the history of the Euro-­ American avant-­garde. The very baseness of the issues fundamentally challenges the currency, and the marketability, of the dematerialized art object, and perhaps most signiĀcantly the histories of the avant-­garde. For the issues h ­ ere are issues of value and foundation: material economic forces and social power cannot be discussed; they must be excluded. The conviction that the dematerialized object could necessarily effect a der eiĀcation of the art establishment solely by undermining its economic and aesthetic norms is a co rnerstone of vanguardist accounts. Lucy Lippard has recently characterized such “particularly tangled account[s]” of the past as escape attempts: “Communication (but not community) and distribution (but not accessibility) w ­ ere inherent in C onceptual Art. Although the forms pointed t­ oward demo­cratic outreach, the content did not. However rebellious the escape attempts, most of the works remains art-­referential, and neither economic nor esthetic ties to the art world w ­ ere fully 65 severed.” Asco’s performative assault and rejection provide a co unterexample to this avant-­garde history of self-­absenting. Given the conditions of exclusion, the dematerialized object or action was not a strategic decision, but Asco’s only alternative. Recent deĀnitions of the dematerialized object would have us believe that it was the pro­cess of reduction that “both the materials of the art and its subject are ephemeral and insubstantial.”66 The idea may have been placed over the object in Asco’s work, and their materials w ­ ere certainly disposable and ephemeral, but the founding fables that art was a relative value, a language game, or a f unction of frame and context67 do not account for the ways in w hich Asco actualized or extrapolated ­these concepts in order to make social statements. As Gronk relates, “The true avant-­garde works within the community to change a r eal situation, not a manufactured one.”68

Notes This chapter was originally published as C. Ondine Chavoya, “Pseudographic Cinema: Asco’s No-­Movies,” Per­for­mance Research 3, no. 1 (1998): 1–14. Reprinted by permission of the Taylor & Francis Group, www​ .­tandfonline​.­com, and the author. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group. Section epigraph: Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 223. 1. Humberto Sandoval has also been considered one of the original members of Asco, as he was involved in Asco per­for­mances as early as 1973. However, unlike the other core members, he is not and never has considered himself a visual artist. 2. See Dana Friis-­Hansen’s cata­log essay “L.A. Hot and Cool: Temperament and Traditions,” in L.A., Hot and Cool: The Eighties (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1987).The exhibition was or­ga­nized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 1987 and divided into two parts: “Pioneers,” which included Asco, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Edward Kienholz, Bruce Nauman, Edward Ruscha, and Betyre Saar, among ­others (Bank of Boston Art Gallery), and “The 80s,” which included Barbara Carrasco and Daniel J. Martinez, two members of Asco in the 1980s (MIT List Visual Arts Center). Two years earlier, on the occasion of the inclusion of Asco artists in Summer 1985, an exhibition put on by the Museum of Con­temporary Art, Los Angeles, the largest Spanish-­language newspaper in the USA, La Opinion, proclaimed, “Sufficient praise has been set forth by both critics and specialists so that they may be considered a fundamental part of the most impor­ tant artistic movement presently existing in the US.” ­“Calendario Cultural,” La Communidad, July 14, 1985; author’s translation. 3. See, for example, Carl E. Loeffler and Darlene Tong, eds., Per­for­mance Anthology: Sourcebook of California Per­for­mance Art (San Francisco, CA: Con­temporary Art Press, 1989); Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Per­for­mance: The American Avant-­Garde Since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Arlene Raven, ed., Art in the Public Interest (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993); Ann Goldstein, ed., Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965–1975 (Los Angeles: Museum of Con­temporary Art, 1995); Nina Felshin, ed., But Is It Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995); Suzanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995); Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-­Garde at the

End of the ­Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). One exception to this structural omission is the exhibition cata­log Outside the Frame: Per­for­mance and the Object: A Survey History of Per­for­mance Art in the USA since 1950, ed. Gary Sanster (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Center for Con­temporary Art, 1994), in which Asco is listed in the chronology but not included in the exhibition. 4. Foster, Return of the Real, 5. 5. Harry Gamboa Jr. and Gronk, “No-­Movie Interview,” ChismeArte 1, no. 1 (1976): 33. 6. In Vietnam between 1961 and 1969, 20 ­percent of U.S. American casualties ­were Chicanos and other Latinos, who at the time accounted for only 10 to 12 ­percent of the population of the southwestern states and a much smaller percentage of the country as a ­whole. California was the home to the greatest number of Chicano casualties in the Vietnam War (Ralph Guzman, “Mexican American Casualties in Vietnam,” [U.S.] Congressional Rec­ord, Ninety-­First Congress [First Session], October 8, 1969.) 7. Zan Dubin, “Artists ­Won’t be Confined to Gallery,” Los Angeles Times, part 6, June 6, 1986, 2. 8. Harry Gamboa Jr., Jetter’s Jinx Playbill (Los Angeles: L.A. Theatre Center, 1985). 9. For a more detailed account of Asco public per­ for­mances, see Harry Gamboa Jr., “In the City of Angels, Chameleons, and Phantoms: Asco, a Case Study of Chicano Art in Urban Tones (or Asco was a Four-­Member Word),” in Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1990), 121–30; see also C. Ondine Chavoya, “Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Per­for­mance Art of Asco,” in Space, Site, and Intervention: Issues in Installation and Site-­Specific Art, ed. Erika Suderberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 10. Harry Gamboa Jr., “Reflections on One School in East L.A.,” L.A. Weekly, February 6–12, 1987, 13. 11. Carlos Muñoz Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (London: Verso, 1989), 64. 12. Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, Extent of Subversion in the New Left Testimony of Robert J. Thomas, Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, part 1, Ninety-­First Congress (Second Session), 1970, 12. 13. Alicia Sandoval, Let’s Rap with Alicia Sandoval, tele­vi­sion broadcast interview with Harry Gamboa, KTLA Channel 5, Los Angeles, April 1978, audiorecording, Gamboa Collection, Stanford University Libraries Special Collections.

Pseud o grap hic Cinema  ·  301

14. Guzman, “Mexican American Casualties in Vietnam.” 15. Harry Gamboa Jr., quoted in Philip Brookman and Amy Brookman, “Interview with Asco,” CALIFAS : Chicano Art and Culture in California, transcripts, Book 3 (1983), Chicano Studies Colleción, University of California, Santa Barbara Library, 6. 16. Chon A. Noriega, “Road to Aztlan: Chicanos and Narrative Cinema” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1991), 192. 17. Gamboa and Gronk, “No-­Movie Interview,” 31. 18. Gamboa and Gronk, “No-­Movie Interview,” 31. 19. See Cine-­Aztlán, “Ya Basta con Yankee Imperialist Documentaries” (1974), and Francisco X. Camplis, “­Towards the Development of a Raza Cinema” (1975), reprinted in Chicanos and Film: Repre­sen­ta­tion and Re­ sis­tance, ed. Chon Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 20. Gamboa and Gronk, “No-­Movie Interview,” 32. 21. Beverly Jones Rupp, Harry Gamboa: Conceptual Artist, tele­vi­sion broadcast (Los Angeles: Falcon Cable Com­pany, ca. 1985), videorecording, Gamboa Collection, Stanford University Libraries Special Collections. 22. Max Benavidez, “Interview with Willie Herrón,” radio broadcast, KPFK-­F M Los Angeles, June 8, 1981, audiocassette, Gamboa Collection, Stanford University Libraries Special Collections. 23. Max Benavidez and Kate Vozoff, “The Wall: Image and Boundary, Chicano Art in the 1970s,” in Mexican Art of the 1970s: Images of Displacement, ed. Leonard Folgarait (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University, 1984), 51. 24. Brookman and Brookman, “Interview with Asco,” 7–8. 25. John Tagg, “The Discontinuous City: Picturing and the Discursive Field,” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover, NH: University Press of New ­England, 1994), 146. 26. Brookman and Brookman, “Interview with Asco,” 8. 27. Chon A. Noriega, “Talking Heads, Body Politic: The Plural Self of Chicano Experimental Video,” in Resolutions: Con­temporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 214. 28. Brookman and Brookman, “Interview with Asco,” 1. 29. S. Zaneta Kosiba-­Vargas, “Harry Gamboa Jr. and ASCO : The Emergence and Development of a Chicano Art Group, 1971–1987”(Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1988), 4. 30. Shifra M. Goldman, transcript of interview with Harry Gamboa, Willie Herrón, and Gronk, January 16,

302  ·  c. o nd ine ch av o ya

1980, Los Angeles. Collection of Shifra Goldman, used with permission. 31. Goldman, Gamboa interview transcript. 32. Gronk, “Artist’s Talk,” Cornell University, October 28, 1993, audiotape, collection of author. 33. Steve Pile, The Body and the City (London: Routledge, 1996), 213. 34. Pile, The Body and the City, 214. 35. Edward W. Soja and Barbara Hopper, “The Space That Difference Makes,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (London: Routledge, 1993), 198. 36. Harry Gamboa Jr., “No Phantoms,” High Per­for­ mance #14 4, no. 2 (1981): 15. 37. Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-­ Memory,” October 50 (1989): 107. 38. Douglas Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” in On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 97–98. 39. Crimp, “Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” 98. 40. Sayre, Object of Per­for­mance, 62. 41. Crimp, “Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” 99. 42. Harry Gamboa Jr., quoted in Marisela Norte, “Harry Gamboa, Jr.: No Movie Maker,” Revisit: Literaria de El Tecolote (San Francisco) 3 (1989): 12. 43. For a dif­fer­ent interpretation of the simulacral structure in Sherman’s film stills, see Rosalind Krauss’s essay in Cindy Sherman, 1975–1993(New York: Rizzoli, 1993). Perhaps another way to approach this debate would be through Barthes’s discussions of the “third” or “obtuse” meaning—­the signifier without a signified—­ and of the specifically filmic existing not in the moving image but in the still; see Roland Barthes, “Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Film Stills,” in Image-­Music-­Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 52–68. 44. Gamboa and Gronk, “No-­Movie Interview,” 31. 45. Gamboa quote in Rupp, Harry Gamboa: Conceptual Artist. 46. Gamboa quote in Sandoval, Let’s Rap. 47. Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (New York: Routledge, 1990), 153. 48. Greg Barrios, “Andy Warhol’s Hedy—­Hollywood’s Goetterdaemmeruner,” Film Culture 45 (1968): 27–32. 49. The Underground’s first and leading superstar was Mario Montez (a.k.a. Dolores Flores), the “man-­queen-­ star” (Ronald Tavel, “The Banana Diary [The Story of Andy Warhol’s ‘Harlot’],” Film Culture 40 [1966]: 44) of films by both Jack Smith and Andy Warhol. Ronald Tavel recounts

how the unparalleled rise to stardom in underground movies of this “square, strong shoulder[ed] . . . ​lithely dark Puerto Rican” (Tavel, “Banana Diary,” 41)“was so traditionally Hollywood as to defy belief” (57).This is the subject of my current research, for it not only affirms a history of Latino participation in the U.S. American avant-­garde but also exemplifies how this history is far more “American” than is represented by its annalists. 50. Gregory Battock, “Superstar-­Superset,” Film Culture 45 (1968): 25. 51. Critics such as Dwight MacDonald, however, argued that Warhol’s films ­were just as self-­defeating as the Hollywood product (Barrios, “Andy Warhol’s Hedy,” 32), while it was more generally asserted that Warhol’s put-on was mistaken for content and his indifference for ­will (Serge Gavronsky, “Warhol’s Underground,” Cahiers du Cinéma in En­glish 10 [1967]: 48–49). 52. Gloria Berlin and Bryan Bruce, “The Superstar Story,” CineAction!, no. 7 (December 1986): 54. 53. Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-­Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 229. 54. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, 229–30. 55. Gretchen Berg, “Nothing to Lose: Interview with Andy Warhol,” Cahiers du Cinéma in En­glish 10 (1967): 39. 56. Brookman and Brookman, “Interview with Asco,” 4. 57. Russell Ferguson, “Beautiful Moments,” in Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film since 1945, ed. Russell Ferguson (New York: Monacelli Press and Museum of Con­temporary Art, 1996), 172. 58. Patssi Valdez, Interview (January 1986): 25. 59. Harry Gamboa Jr., “National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Program Application Statement,” 1979, Gamboa Collection, Stanford University Libraries Special Collections, 1. 60. Coco Fusco, “Per­for­mance and the Power of the Popu­lar,” in Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Per­for­ mance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (London: ICA , 1995), 160.

61. Please also see Adrian ­Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, vols. 1 and 2 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), in par­tic­u­lar “Notes on the White Man’s Burden: Multiculturalism and Euroethnic Art Criticism at the Millennium” (1991) and“The Logic of Modernism” (1992). 62. 1st Chicano National Conference, “El Plan Espirtual de Aztlán,” in Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya and Francisco Lomel (Albuquerque, NM: Academia/El Norte Publications, 1989). El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán declared, “Cultural Values of our ­people strengthen our identity and the moral backbone of the movement. . . . ​We must ensure that our writers, poets, musicians, and artists produce lit­er­a­ture and art that is appealing to our ­people and relates to our revolutionary cultures” (1st Chicano National Conference, “El Plan Espiritual,” 3). A substantive distinction between Asco and other Chicano artists and collectives of the time relates specifically to their location within identity politics and divergent investments in reclaiming cultural traditions and effaced histories. In this re­spect, Gronk contrasts Asco’s work with identity-­based and/or community-­ oriented work: “A lot of Latino artists went back in history for imagery ­because they needed an identity, a starting place. . . . ​We ­didn’t want to go back, we wanted to stay in the pres­ent and find out imagery as urban artists and produce a body of work out of our sense of displacement” (Steven Durland and Linda Burnham, “Gronk” [interview], High Per­for­mance 35 [1986]: 57). 63. Sayre, Object of Per­for­mance, 14. 64. Sayre, Object of Per­for­mance, 12–13. 65. Lucy Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1965 to 1972, ed. Lucy Lippard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), xvi. 66. Jessica Prinz, Art Discourse/Discourse in Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 52–53. 67. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, 216. 68. Max Benavidez, “The World According to Gronk,” L.A. Weekly, August 13–19, 1982, 30.

Pseud o grap hic Cinema  ·  303

jud ith f. ba ca

29. Whose Monument Where?  ·  1995 Public Art in a Many-­Cultured Society

Using the term “public art” in a n audience of many cultures brings dif­fer­ent images to mind in each of us. Perhaps some of us envision the frescoes and statues of the Italian Re­nais­sance or Christo’s umbrellas, while ­others see the murals of Los Tres Grandes or the ritual sand paintings and totems of Native ­peoples. Someone said that the purpose of a monument is to bring the past into the pres­ent to inspire the f­ uture. Monuments may be like the adobe formed from the mud of a place into the building blocks of a society; their purpose may be to investigate and reveal the memory contained in the ground beneath a “public site,” marking our passages as a ­people and re-­visioning official history. As artists creating the monuments of the nineties, the ultimate question for us to consider is, what ­shall we choose to memorialize in our time? Over the past twenty years as a public artist, I have been struck by how our common legacy in public art is derived from the “cannon-­in-­the-­ park” impulse, which ­causes us to drag out the rusty cannons from past wars, polish them up, and place them in the park for ­children to crawl

over at Sunday picnics. The purpose was to evoke a time past in which the “splendid triumphs” and “strug­gles of our forefathers” shifted the course of history. ­These expositions ­were meant to inspire an awe of our g­ reat nation’s power to assert its military ­will and prevail over enemies. ­Running our hands over the polished bronze, we shared in t­ hese victories and became enlisted in ­these ­causes. Never mind if f or us as p ­ eople of color they ­were not our forefathers, or even if the triumphs ­were often over our own ­people. A more con­temporary example of displaying cannons in the park occurred during the promenade of military weapons on the Mall in Washington, D.C., immediately ­after Amer­i­ca declared victory in the Gulf War. In an exhibition prepared for American families in the adjoining Smithsonian Institution Hall of Science, a grandfatherly voice (sounding remarkably like Ronald Reagan) soothed us into believing the war was a b loodless, computerized science demonstration of gigantic proportions. Young American men with adroit reflexes trained by a v ideo-­game culture demonstrated our superiority as a n ation over

Saddam Hussein through video-­screen strategic air strikes. From the triumphant bronze general on horseback—­the public’s view of which is the underside of galloping hooves—to its more con­ temporary corporate versions, we Ānd examples of public art in the ser­vice of dominance. By their daily presence in our lives, ­these artworks intend to persuade us of the justice of the acts they represent. The power of the corporate sponsor is embodied in the sculptures standing in front of the towering office building. Th ­ ese ­grand works, like their military pre­de­ces­sors in the parks, inspire a sense of awe b ­ ecause of their scale and the importance of the artist. ­Here, public art is unashamed of its intention to mediate between the public and the developer. In a “ ­things go down better with public art” mentality, the ­bitter pills of development are delivered to the public. While percent-­ for-­art bills have heralded developers’ creation of amenable public places as a positive side effect of “growth,” e­ very inch of urban space is swallowed by skyscrapers and privatized into the so-­called public space of shopping malls and corporate plazas. ­These developments predetermine the public, selecting out the homeless, vendors, adolescents, urban poor, and p ­ eople of color. Planters, benches, and other “public amenities” are suspect as potential hazards or public loitering places. Recent attempts in L os Angeles to pass laws to stop or severely restrict pushcart vendedores from selling elotes, frutas, paletas, and raspados made activists of nonaggressive merchants who had silently appropriated public spaces in largely Latino sections of our city. Vendedores, loved by the ­people not only for offering popu­lar products but also serving as familiar reminders of their homelands, provide a Latino presence in public spaces. Any loss of botánicas, mercados, vendedores, and t­ hings familiar reinforces segregation, as ethnic ­people dis­appear to another corner of the city. Los Angeles provides clear and abundant examples of development as a t ool to colonize and displace ethnic communities. Infamous developments abound in p ublic rec­ord, if n ot consciousness—­Dodger Stadium, which displaced

a historic Mexican community; Bunker Hill, now home to a p remier arts center, which displaced another; and the less well documented history of how four major freeways intersected in the m ­ iddle of East Los Angeles’ Chicano communities. One of the most catastrophic consequences of an endless real estate boom was the concreting of the entire Los Angeles River, on which the city was founded. The river, as the earth’s arteries—­thus atrophied and hardened—­ created a ­giant scar across the land that served to further divide an already divided city. It is this meta­phor that inspired my own half-­mile-­long mural on the history of ethnic p ­ eoples painted in the Los Angeles river conduit (Āg. 29.1). Just as young Chicanos tattoo b ­ attle scars on their bodies, the ­Great Wall of Los Angeles is a tattoo on a scar where the river once ran.1 In it reappear the dis­appeared stories of ethnic populations that make up the ­labor force that built our city, state, and nation (Āg. 29.2). Public art often plays a supportive role in developers’ agendas. In many instances, art uses beauty as a fa lse promise of inclusion. Beauty ameliorates the erasure of ethnic presence, serving the transformation into a homogenized visual culture: give them something beautiful to stand in for the loss of their right to a public presence. Two New York–­based artists ­were selected to decorate the lobby of the new skyscraper of First Interstate Bank in do wntown Los Angeles. To represent multiculturalism in L os Angeles, they chose angels from the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli near Assisi, Italy. They then tacked ethnic emblems onto the Eu­ro­pean angels, “borrowing” the pre-­Columbian feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl from the Aztecs, the crowned mahogany headpiece from Nigerian masks, and the ea­gle’s wings from our Native p ­ eoples as “emblems of a variety of cultures.” Th ­ ese symbols replaced the real voices of ­people of color in a city torn by the greatest civil disorder in t he Unites States in de­cades. At the dedication, which took place shortly ­after the rebellion (the Los Angeles riots of 1992), black and Latino c­ hildren unveiled the angels in an elaborate ribbon-­cutting Whose Mo nument Wher e?  ·  305

FIG. 29.1. Judith F. Baca, ­Great Wall of Los Angeles: Zoot Suit Riots (detail), begun in 1976. Mural. © Judith F. Baca. Photo courtesy of SPARC , sparcinla​.­org.

ceremony. Hailed by the developers as a g­ reat symbol of “unity,” t­ hese artifacts stood in for the real ­people in a ci ty terriĀed of the majority of its citizens. Tragically, the $500,000 spent on this single work was more than the w ­ hole city bud­get to fund public murals by ethnic artists who work within Los Angeles’ diverse Chinese, African American, Korean, Thai, Chicano, and Central American neighborhoods. No single view of public space and the art that occupies it w ­ ill work in a metropolis of multiple perspectives. While competition for public space grows daily, cultural communities call for it to be used in dramatically dif­fer­ent ways. What come into question are the very dif­fer­ent sensibilities of order and beauty that operate in dif­fer­ent cultures. When Christo, for example, looked for the Ārst time at El Tejon Pass, he saw potential. He saw the potential to create beauty with a personal vision imposed on the landscape—­a beauty that Āt his individual vision of yellow umbrellas fluttering in the wind, marching up the sides of rolling hills. The land became his canvas, a backdrop for his personal aesthetic. Native ­people might look at the same landscape with a v ery dif­fer­ent idea of beauty, a beauty without imposition. They might see a perfect order exempliĀed in nature itself, integral to 306  ·  jud ith f. ba ca

a spiritual life grounded in place. Nature is not to be tampered with; hence, a plant taken requires an offering in r eturn. Richard Ray Whitman, a Yaqui artist, said, “ScientiĀcally cohesive—­I am the atoms, molecules, blood, and dust of my ancestors—­not as history, but as a continuing ­people. We describe our culture as a circle, by which we mean that it is an integrated ­whole.”2 Maintaining a relationship with the dust of one’s ancestors requires a g enerational relationship with the land and a respectful treatment of other life found on the land. Or perhaps Native ­peoples could not think of this area without recalling Fort Tejon, one of the Ārst California Indian reservations established near this site in the Tehachapi Mountains, placed ­there to “protect” Indians rounded up from vari­ ous neighboring areas, most of whose cultures have been entirely destroyed. In Christo’s and the Native visions we have two dif­fer­ent aesthetic sensibilities, as divergent as the nineteenth-­century En­glish manicured garden and the rugged natu­ ral New Mexican landscape of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Perhaps a les s benign implication of Christo’s idea is that landscape untouched by man is “undeveloped land.” This is a continuation of the concept of “man over nature” on which this

FIG​. ­  29​. ­2​. ­ Judith F. Baca, ­Great Wall of Los Angeles: Division of the Barrios and Chavez Ravine (detail), begun in 1976. Mural. © Judith F. Baca. Photo courtesy of SPARC , sparcinla​.­org.

country was founded, a heritage of thought that has brought us clear-­cutting in Ārst-­growth forests and concrete conduits that kill rivers as an acceptable method of flood control. ­These ideas Ānd their parallel in t he late modernist and postmodernist cults of the exalted individual, in which personal vision and originality are highly valued. As a s olidarity creator the artist values self-­expression and “artistic freedom” (or separateness rather than connectedness). He is therefore responsible only to himself rather than to a shared vision, failing to reconcile the individual to the ­whole. When the nature of El Tejon Pass—­a place known to locals for its high winds—­asserted itself during Christo’s proj­ect and uprooted an umbrella planted in t he ground, causing the tragic death of a w ­ oman who had come to see the work, Christo said, “My proj­ect imitates real life.” I ­couldn’t help musing on what a di f­fer­ent proj­

ect it would have been had the beautiful yellow umbrellas marched through Skid Row, where Los Angeles’ 140,000 homeless lie in the rain. Art can no longer be tied to the nonfunctionalist state, relegated by an “art for art’s sake” tyranny. Would it not have been more beautiful to shelter ­people in need of shelter, a gesture and statement about our failure as a society to provide even the most basic needs to the poor? Why is it not pos­si­ble for public art to do more than “imitate” life? Public art could be inseparable from the daily life of the ­people for which it is created. Developed to live harmoniously in public space, it could have a function within the community and even provide a venue for their voices. For the Mexican sensibility, an impor­tant manifestation of public art is a work by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros on Los Angeles’ historic Olvera Street. This 1933 mural, painted over for nearly sixty years by city f­ athers ­because of Whose Mo nument Wher e?  ·  307

its portrayal of the plight of Mexicanos and Chicanos in C alifornia, is currently in t he pro­cess of restoration. Siqueiros depicted as the central Āgures a mestizo shooting at the American ea­gle and a cr uciĀed Chicano/Mexicano. While this mural is becoming museo-­Āed, with millions of dollars provided by the Getty Foundation for its preservation and re-­presentation to the public, it is impor­tant to recognize that the same images would most likely be censored if painted t­ oday on Los Angeles’ streets. The subject ­matter is as relevant now, sixty years ­later, as it was then. ­Murals depicting the domination of and re­sis­tance by Los Angeles’ Latinos or other populations of color provoke the same official re­sis­tance as they did in 1933. Despite ­these strug­gles, murals have been the only interventions in public spaces that articulate the presence of ethnicity. Architecture and city planning have done l­ittle to accommodate communities of color in our city. As competition for public space has grown, public art policies have become calciĀed and increasingly bureaucratic. Art that is sanctioned has lost the po­liti­cal bite of the seventies murals. Nevertheless, a r ich legacy of murals has been produced since Amer­i­ca Tropical was painted on Olvera Street by the maestro. Thousands of public murals in places where ­people live and work have become tangible public monuments to the shared experience of communities of color. Chicano murals have provided the leadership and the form for other communities to assert their presence and articulate their issues. T ­ oday, works appear that speak of ­children caught in the cross Āre of gang warfare in the barrios of Sylmar, the hidden prob­lem of aids in t he South Central African American community, and the strug­gles of immigration and assimilation in t he Korean community. ­These murals have become monuments that serve as a community’s memory. The generations who grew up in n eighborhoods where the landscape was dotted by the mural movement have been influenced by t­ hese works. With few ave­nues open to training and art production, ethnic teen­agers have created the graffiti art that has become another method 308  ·  jud ith f. ba ca

of resisting privatized public space. As the Ārst visual art form entirely developed by youth culture, graffiti has become the focus of increasingly severe reprisals by authorities who spend fifty-­ two million dollars annually in the County of Los Angeles to abate what they refer to as the “skin cancer of society.” It is no accident that the proliferation of graffiti is concurrent with the reduction of all youth recreation and arts programs in the schools. Working with communities in p roducing public artworks has put me into contact with many of ­these youths. On o ne occasion, I wa s called to a lo cal high school ­after having convinced one of the young ­Great Wall production team members that he should return to school. The urgent message from the boy in the principal’s office said, “I need you to come ­here right away b ­ ecause I’m ­going to get thrown out of school again.” My deal with the boy, formulated over a long mentorship, was that he would not quit school again without talking to me Ārst. I arrived to Ānd the principal towering over the young cholo, who was holding his head in a deĀant manner I had seen over and over in my work with the gangs. This stance, reminiscent of a warrior, called unceremoniously “holding your mug,” is about maintaining dignity in ad verse circumstances. The principal was completely frustrated. “­You’ve written on the school’s walls and you simply do n ot have re­spect for other ­people’s property. Tell me, would you do this in your own h ­ ouse?” I c­ ouldn’t help but smile at his admonition, despite the seriousness of the situation. This boy was an impor­tant graffiti artist in his community. I h ad visited his h ­ ouse and seen the walls of his room, where e­ very inch was covered with his intricate writings. Two dif­fer­ent notions of beauty and order ­were operating, as well as a dispute about owner­ship of the school. The boy’s opinion was that he has aesthetically improved the property, not destroyed it. At this time the conditions of our communities are worse than ­those that precipitated the civil rights activism of the sixties and seventies. Fifty-­ two ­percent of all African American c­ hildren

and 42 ­percent of all Latino c­ hildren are living in poverty. Dropout rates exceed high school graduation rates in ­these communities. What, then, is the role of a s ocially responsible public artist? As the wealthy and the poor are increasingly polarized in our society, face-­to-­face urban confrontations occur, often with catastrophic consequences. Can public art avoid coming down on the side o f wealth and dominance in t hat confrontation? How can we as artists avoid becoming accomplices to colonization? If we chose not to look at triumphs over nations and neighborhoods as victories and advancements, what monuments could we build? How can we create a public memory for a m any-­cultured society? Whose story ­shall we tell? Of greatest interest to me is the invention of systems of “voice giving” for t­ hose left without public venues in which to speak. Socially responsible artists from marginalized communities have a par­tic­u­lar responsibility to articulate the conditions of their ­people and to provide catalysts for change, since perceptions of us as individuals are tied to the conditions of our communities in a racially unsophisticated society. We cannot escape that responsibility even when we choose to try; we are made of the “blood and dust” of our ancestors in a co ntinuing history. Being a catalyst for change w ­ ill change us also. We can evaluate ourselves by the pro­cesses with which we choose to make art, not simply by the art objects we create. Is the artwork the result of a p rivate act in a p ublic space? Focusing on the object devoid of the creative pro­cess used to achieve it has bankrupted Eurocentric modernist and postmodernist traditions. Art pro­cesses, just as art objects, may be culturally speciĀc, and

with no single aesthetic, a di verse society ­will generate very dif­fer­ent forms of public art. Who is the public now that it has changed color? How do p ­ eople of vari­ous ethnic and class groups use public space? What ideas do we want to place in public memory? Where does art begin and end? Artists have the unique ability to transcend designated spheres of activity. What represents something deeper and more hopeful about the ­future of our ethnically and class-­divided cities are collaborations that move well beyond the artist and architecture to the artist and the historian, scientist, environmentalist, or social ser­vice provider. Such collaborations are mandated by the seriousness of the tasks at hand. They bring a range of ­people into conversations about their visions for their neighborhoods or their nations. Finding a p lace for ­those ideas in m onuments that are constructed of the soil and spirit of the ­people is the most challenging task for public artists in this time. Notes This chapter was originally published as Judith F. Baca, “Whose Monument Where? Public Art in a Many-­Cultured Society,” in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 131–38. 1.The ­Great Wall of Los Angeles, painted over a nine-­ year period by a team of inner-­city youths (over 350 have been employed), is a community-­based model of interracial connection, community dealings, and revisionist historical research. Each panel depicts a dif­fer­ent era of California’s history from the perspective of ­women and minorities. When completed, the mural ­will extend over one mile in the Los Angeles flood control channel. 2. Richard Ray Whitman, quoted in El Encuentro ­( Venice, CA: Social and Public Art Resource Center, 1992).

Whose Mo nument Wher e?  ·  309

jud ith f. ba ca

30. La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra  ·  2005 Colorado

My mural for the Denver International Airport, titled La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra, is of a personal nature (Āg.  30.1). My grandparents came from Mexico to La Junta, Colorado, during the Mexican Revolution. They followed the course traveled by thousands of other Mexican families, from Chihuahua to the United States through the historic northern territories of Mexico (Texas, New Mexico, Colorado) via the “Ellis Island” of the southwest, El Paso. It is a story that has been ­little chronicled and one for which I was anxious to create a visual rec­ord. Over the years, working as a muralist, I had told many stories of communities across the United States but never my own. My ­mother was born in La Junta, educated in Colorado’s segregated school system, and raised in its segregated housing in the 1920s and 1930s. A few years ago, she returned to La Junta, for a high school reunion, for the Ārst time in m any years. ­There she visited her ­father’s grave, only to Ānd that the segment of the graveyard designated for Mexicans had not been maintained for many years. A ­ fter much searching among the fallen gravestones, she found her ­father’s grave.

He was buried in a j unkyard of old, unmarked stones and loose dirt while the rest of the graveyard was green and well maintained. Not Ānding recourse with the local authorities, who remained steadfast in their refusals to rectify the situation, she was successful in petitioning the governor of Colorado to remedy the segregated graveyard of her hometown. Due to my m ­ other’s insistence, the governor mandated preservation and maintenance for my grand­father’s grave and t­ hose of the other Mexicans who ­were buried in the Mexican section of the La Junta cemetery. The ­simple real­ity that even in death the bodies of racially dif­fer­ent ­people ­were separated moved me to create an artwork that would give dignity to the mestizo’s story and the stories of countless o ­ thers who toiled in the mines, Āelds, and railroads of Colorado. I wanted not only to tell the forgotten stories of ­people who, like birds or ­water, traveled back and forth across the land freely before t­ here was a lin e that distinguished which side y ou w ­ ere from, but also to speak to our shared h ­ uman condition as temporary residents of the earth.

My great-­grandfather, as ­family my­thol­ogy recites, had w ­ ater rights and delivered w ­ ater with a wagon to residents of the area. His Spanish bright-­green eyes and red hair distinguished him, as did hi s large ­horses. He is also buried in t he La Junta graveyard. Perhaps my ancestors’ being planted in C olorado’s soil caused me to won­der what was recorded t­ here in the granules of dirt, where I b elieve the memory of the land might reside. In a sense this mural is an excavation of the Chicano/as complexity as an Indigenous ­people and of their multiple identities as Spaniards, Africans, and Asians, living among newly immigrated Irish, Greek, and Italian ­peoples. The making of this work was a re-­membering of their histories. By revealing what is hidden, t hrough pictorial iconography of the land, this mural is a kind of Mayan map not r­ eally intended to guide your path, but instead to tell you about the road. In the La Junta Museum, my research located photo­graphs of railroad workers of the region and of my grand­father, which became impor­tant to the narrative aspect of the work. I conducted interviews with many from the region and led a workshop with University of Southern Colorado students on the region’s history. Students brought photos and personal narratives of their ­family history in C olorado, which provided me with valuable insight for this work. I visited seven local high schools and spoke with the young ­people, and met with scholars and archivists. Stored in boxes in a garage in Pueblo, I found a priceless photo by Juan Espinosa (photographer and founder of El Diario de la Gente in B oulder, Colorado) of an impor­tant meeting between Corky Gonzales of the Colorado Crusade for Justice and César Chávez of the United Farm Workers. This photo was taken at the moment of the agreement to bring the grape boycott to Colorado and became the basis of the mesas in my mural. I also learned of the Luis Maria Baca land grant, with my ­family’s name, which inspired many more questions and led to further research beyond the mural. Could the Luis Maria Baca land grant, the origin of so many creeks and

streams, be where my great-­grandfather Seferino Baca’s ­water rights originated? One corner of this land is also the site of the Sand Creek massacre of the Cheyenne ­people, ­today unjustly marked by a t own named for the Col­o­nel Chivington who carried out the brutal attack on w ­ omen and ­children. No rec­ord exists of a man named Silos Soule who would not attack the Cheyenne and was killed by the townspeople for his re­sis­tance to the ­orders. In 1998, as a m aster artist-­in-­residence with the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue (ia c d ) at Harvard University, I was afforded the time to work with interns on the development of a web portion of the mural and to continue my research. ­There I designed a collision of the landscapes my grandparents crossed from Hidalgo de Parral to Colorado by horse-­drawn cart, train, and on foot, escaping the troops who wanted to enlist my grand­father, Teodoro Baca, into Pancho Villa’s army. In a b asement studio at Harvard, I spent the summer painting the landscapes of Chihuahua, New Mexico’s Mesa Verde, the Rio Grande, and Ā­nally the Arkansas River as if seen from the dif­fer­ent eye levels of my grandparents as they made the journey. I painted los caminantes walking on ­water with their small child to provide an alternate view of immigrants from ­those so often broadcast in the media, images of ­people scattering like small insects from crowded trucks. Teodoro Baca owned land and a store with established routes to the north to gain impor­tant supplies for that region of Mexico. The simultaneous robbery of my grand­mother at the f­ amily store and of my grand­father on the train ­going to replace supplies from previous robberies pushed them to leave every­thing ­behind to go north. When they Ā­nally arrived in Juarez, they heard that Pancho Villa’s men ­were only a day ­behind them. So, they deci­ded to cross. They must have found the town Ālled with the thousands of refugees that history rec­ords ­there at that time. They traveled to Seferino Baca and settled at the base of the Purgatory River, facing Kansas in a b ­ itter cold place to which my grand­mother would never become accustomed. La Memo r ia d e Nues tr a Tier r a  ·  311

FIG​. ­  30​. ­1​. ­ Judith F. Baca, La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra: Colorado, 2001. Mural. © Judith F. Baca. Photo courtesy of SPARC , sparcinla​.­org.

With the use of computer technology, I have incorporated t­ hese images and documents into the mural. The landscape imagery was hand-­ painted at a small scale and then scanned into the computer at a very high resolution for inclusion into the mural. La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra combines a meticulously hand-­painted landscape with historic photo­graphs in a s eamless blend imprinted upon the holographic-­like surface of a metallic coated substrate. The Ānal work is a b reakthrough in dig ital murals, printed digitally on a bronze-­colored aluminum ten feet by fifty feet in len gth and installed in t he Jeppesen Terminal of the Denver International Airport. The work is also stored

312 ·  jud ith f. ba ca

digitally, existing as an interactive website at www​ .­judybaca​.­com, so is entirely reproducible should it be damaged. The mural was completed in the ucl a- ­s par c Digital/Mural Lab in 2000 a nd is currently on permanent display at the Denver International Airport. It is in t he making of this artwork that my ­family my­thol­ogy and that of so many ­others is Ānding substance in place. Note This chapter was originally published as Judith F. Baca, “La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra: Colorado,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 30, no. 1 (spring 2005): 195–99.

La Memo r ia d e Nues tr a Tier r a  ·  313

david a val os

31.The Donkey Cart Caper  ·  1986 Some Thoughts on Socially Conscious Art in Antisocial Public Space

To Begin With . . .

In December 1985 I was given written permission by the General Ser­vices Administration’s office of the Field Office Man­ag­er in San Diego, California, to place a sculpture, a painted wood construction, in front of the Federal Court­house for a two-­week period from January 4 through 17, 1986. I was one of four artists whose works ­were being shown at dif­fer­ent locations in downtown San Diego as part of an exhibition titled Streetworks sponsored by Sushi, Incorporated—­a nonproĀt per­for­mance and visual art gallery. I installed the work on January  5. The next day the General Ser­vices Administration removed it and placed it in t he basement of the Federal Building ­after receiving a m emorandum that stated, “For security reasons you are hereby directed forthwith to cause the removal of the structure standing in f ront of the United States Court­house.” It was signed by Gordon Thompson, Jr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court in San Diego.

Consequently, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, Sushi and I are suing both the General Ser­vices Administration and Chief Judge Thompson. The case is being heard in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. About “The Structure” a.k.a. San Diego Donkey Cart  . . .

The sculpture, San Diego Donkey Cart, follows the basic design of the carts found on Avenida Revolucion in T ijuana, Mexico (Āg.  31.1).Th ­ ese carts are a Mexican form of tourist art. Originally in the 1930s and 1940s they w ­ ere modiĀed animal-­drawn work vehicles, but now the carts are designed speciĀcally as a p hotographer’s set for the taking of photos and for visitors to this border city. ­These souvenirs document the tourist surrounded by the ste­reo­typical Mexico—­ rural with its cactus, colorful with its serapes, and pre­industrial with its beasts of burden. The fact that this souvenir is created on the streets of a modern city—­the second-­largest urban

FIG​. ­  31​. ­1​. ­ David Avalos, Donkey Cart Altar, 1985. Maquette, 42 × 28 × 45 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

center on the West Coast of North Amer­i­ca—­ seems to make ­little difference. The nonfunctional and unmoving cart succeeds in transporting the tourist away from the con­temporary social, economic, and po­liti­cal issues of Tijuana. Th ­ ese issues inevitably involve San Diego as well, as can only be confronted by ­people capable of seeing each other with both feet on the ground. I am sure that if t he San Diego Donkey Cart had conĀned itself to cactus and serapes, Chief Judge Thompson may have been willing to have

had a souvenir photo snapped. But I added a portrait of a Border Patrol agent arresting an undocumented worker. The “Illegal Alien” as Media Celebrity . . .

The Mexican worker within U.S. society has ­become well established in the public’s consciousness as the so-­called illegal alien. This group receives constant exposure through media such as The Do nke y Car t Cap er  ·  315

newspapers, magazines, radio, Ālms, and tele­vi­ sion. The sense is created that this group, though existing outside of the law, is constantly available for public scrutiny. Of co urse, U.S. society suffers from a def ormed sense of what “public” ­really means. Virtually all forms of mass media in this country are privately owned and, for the most part, privately consumed. Nevertheless, we maintain the absurd notion that we are involved in public information exchange while we sit on the toilet reading a n ewspaper item edited by a functionary of a proĀt-­making private business. It seems to me that more and more our sense of what is public has nothing to do with the idea of social interaction on public property. Ironically, we have a situation in which the Mexican worker as a group seems to exist in a public realm, is in fact a media celebrity, while, actually, l­ittle, if any, opportunity exists for social interaction or dialogue between them and ­those of us comfortably occupied in front of our tele­vi­sion sets. Suspended above Tijuana’s Avenida Revolucion the tourist never comes to terms with the gritty realities of con­temporary Mexico. Out of touch with a t ruly public space, the San Diego resident has no location for social dialogue or interaction and is therefore limited in his or her ability to come to terms with modern U.S. society and the disgrace of twentieth-­century slavery—­ the condition of the noncitizen worker within that society.

in conversation about public space, public art, immigration, and po­liti­cal expression. I wa nted to interact socially with my fellow residents on public property while discussing issues of public concern. The parent bureaucracy of the Border Patrol, the Immigration and Naturalization Ser­vice occupied offices overlooking the location of the San Diego Donkey Cart in front of the court­house. I anticipated complaints from them about the content of the work. I Āgured that if I kept my ears open that I might be able to create a controversy that could result in a lo cal newspaper feature or two. But the real­ity was something ­else. Public Art, Private Acts . . .

­ ere has never been any doubt in my mind that Th Chief Judge Thompson’s action to remove the San Diego Donkey Cart was censorship, based on the content of my work. Therefore, the lawsuit Āled in the Los Angeles Federal District court asks that: 1 The actions of chief federal district judge Gordon Thompson Jr. and the General Ser­vices Administration be declared unlawful. 2 The San Diego Donkey Cart be placed on exhibit in front of San Diego’s Federal Court­house as originally agreed for twelve more days. 3 The plaintiff ’s costs and attorney’s fees be paid for by the defendants.

Public Art, Private Dreams . . . Some Thoughts on the Mass Media . . .

So I cr eated a simulacrum of a T ijuana donkey cart, replacing the usual backdrop panel depicting an Aztec warrior with one depicting a Mexican worker being handled by a B order Patrol agent, and transported the ­whole ­thing to the Federal Court­house in downtown San Diego. Ideally, I had hoped to combine artistic concerns with po­liti­cal activism and some moderate media hype. My plan was to station myself next to the sculpture for a c­ ouple of hours each day around lunchtime. I expected to engage passers-by 316 ·  david aval os

Some ­people felt that the San Diego Donkey Cart received its greatest public attention (through the mass media) ­after it was removed from public view (the street). Mixed-up ideas about what’s public are at work ­here. Actually, I wa s a w illing participant in t he daily media coverage of the event—­coverage that was both national and international (Āg.  31.2). But it soon dawned on me that the issues being discussed ­were not immigration or public art or

FIG. 31.2. Coverage of Donkey Cart Altar in La Prensa (San Diego), a bilingual newspaper, published January 10, 1986.

public space and social interaction. The issue was reduced to the single one of government censorship, which explains the media interest. The mass media like to pretend that the First Amendment’s guarantee of ­free expression is their license to make a buck. And while I appreciated all the help I could get, I had no illusions that the media ­were interested in discussing their own role in the creation of antisocial public space. By “social” I mean having to do with h ­ uman beings living together as a g roup in a si tuation requiring that we communicate and interact as equals with one another directly. The antisocial nature of the news media contributes to po­liti­cal inequities. So does the law. In 1986, the social real­ity of the undocumented worker parallels that of the antebellum South. Black slaves w ­ ere an integral part of plantation society, yet ­were kept out of all social

institutions through slavery laws. So, too, the Mexican laborer is an indispensible part of the economic vitality of the “sun b ­ elt” states, yet is kept out of all social institutions by U.S. immigration law. With the media and the law we have structured a society in which Mexican workers handpick the lettuce and tomatoes that we put in our mouths whenever we eat a “ McD.L.T.” Yet it is nearly impossible to have a di alogue with ­these workers in a public space about the conditions of their lives within a society that beneĀts so much from their presence. As activist community artists we need to understand the nature of our work in relation to social interaction in p ublic space. I f eel that I a m primarily a co mmunicator—­using all forms of communication yet understanding that face-­to-­ face dialogue is the most potent form. The Do nke y Car t Cap er  ·  317

When Chief Judge Thompson rendered the San Diego Donkey Cart invisible, it revealed that our sense of what is public, l­egal, and artistic can be basically antisocial. On Community Art . . .

Art that claims that it is purest only when f­ ree of social reference or interaction is in s ome ways irresponsible and ultimately the least capable of defending its freedom. Freedom of expression is a po­liti­cal guarantee. It is nonsense to insist that art never refer to the context that allows its freedom. Art is a reflection of the health of a society’s freedom of expression. We have a community

318 ·  david aval os

responsibility to communicate through art with society’s po­liti­cal and social structure if w e are to expect freedom to become a r eal­ity. The San Diego Donkey Cart was one way I tried to mea­ sure our state of health. The attention that the work has received is an indication of how sick we have become and, I hope, how concerned we are with recovery. ¡Raza si, migra no! Note This chapter was originally published as David Avalos, “The Donkey Cart Caper: Some Thoughts on Socially Conscious Art in Anti-­social Public Space,” Community Murals Magazine: An International Visual Arts Magazine (Berkeley, CA) 11 (fall 1986): 14–15.

cylen a s imo nds

32. Public Audit  ·  1994 An Interview with Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos

The current economic recession has been debilitating for many artists regardless of the content of their work. Since this climate is characterized by a par­tic­u­lar hostility t­ oward controversial art, it is especially signiĀcant that Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos have maintained a reputation for causing trou­ble in San Diego. Their collaborative public art proj­ects receive scandalous reports in local and national news media and are often used as examples of the National Endowment for the Arts’ inadequate standards of quality. Their most current collaborative proj­ect, Art Rebate (1993), refunded ten-­dollar bills to 450 undocumented workers along the San Diego, California–­Mexico border (Āg.  32.1). It was commissioned by the Museum of Con­temporary Art, San Diego, and Centro Cultural de la Raza as part of the La Frontera/The Border exhibition. In response to recent attention to border relations due to naft a and other government policies, the artists wished to refute the popu­lar misconception that undocumented Mexican workers do not pay taxes as well as demonstrate, albeit with a small symbolic gesture, their appreciation of the

undocumented as valued members of Western states’ communities. Furthermore, I believe their work has signiĀcant implications for undocumented workers from other nations, residing in other regions of the United States—­Caribbean workers in Flo rida and New York City, for example. If the communities in which the undocumented workers from ­these areas work and reside could also acknowledge their common contributions, in the form of taxes among other ­things, then perhaps we as a society could also begin to address the crimes inflicted upon ­these groups and apply our demo­cratic notions of h ­ uman rights to ­those within our national borders. The term “community” proliferates in ­today’s po­liti­cal rhe­toric and has inĀltrated the rhe­toric of many professions, including the alternative arts Āeld. Yet, in the vari­ous contexts in which it is used, it is difficult to determine what is being referred to or how it is deĀned by the individuals or groups using it. Often “community” is unscrupulously repeated and reiterated without any acknowledgement of its ambiguity or its several, sometimes contradictory, working deĀnitions.

FIG. 32.1. Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos, Art Rebate, 1993. Photo by Elizabeth Sisco. Image courtesy of the artists.

Sisco, Hock, and Avalos grapple with their own layered deĀnitions and attempt to avoid the gross generalizations of community that occur particularly in public art endeavors. As they state, the artists are not seeking to create communities, they are seeking to create public forums that involve diverse participation. They do not profess nor attempt to “empower” anyone, but instead try to reveal public policies that are implemented without public debate. The Ārst of their collaborative proj­ects was Welcome to Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation (1988). This proj­ect consisted of a b us poster depicting a p air of hands washing dirty dishes, a pair of hands being handcuffed, and a pair of hands delivering clean towels to a ­hotel room. ­These images ­were displayed on the back panel of one hundred public buses in San Diego whose routes stopped in the restaurant and h ­ otel districts. The piece, executed in t ime for the 1988 Super Bowl held in San Diego, attempted to re320  ·  cylen a simo nds

veal the presence of undocumented workers in the tourist industry of the city. In between ­these proj­ects Sisco, Hock, and Avalos have been involved in s everal other ­collaborative works with other artists and scholars. Red Emma Returns (1989) was a street per­ for­mance staging a r eturn of anarchist po­liti­cal ­activist Emma Goldman to San Diego a­ fter her Ārst and only visit in 1912 to assist the Āght against the Anti–­Free Speech Ordinance; participating artists ­were Carla Kirkwood, Deborah Small, Bartlet Sher, William Weeks, and Scott Kessler, in addition to Hock, Sisco, and Avalos. Amer­i­ca’s Finest? (1990; Āg. 32.2) consisted of bus benches that appeared throughout the city for one month critiquing the increasing use of deadly force by San Diego police officers and the city government’s refusal to hold the department accountable for their actions; artists involved included Small, Kessler, Sisco, and Hock. nhi (1992) was a multievent proj­ect including a billboard, a photo ex-

FIG. 32.2. Deborah Small, Scott Kessler, Elizabeth Sisco, and Louis Hock, Amer­ i­ca’s Finest?, 1990. Installation view of public bench poster, 24 × 84 in. Photo by Dave Gately. Image courtesy of the artists.

hibition, and a per­for­mance, mwi—­Many ­Women Involved (1992), by Kirkwood that brought the San Diego community’s attention to the brutal serial murders of low-­income ­women and sex workers in the city and the police department’s inappropriate procedures while investigating the cases.1 Collaborating artists consisted of Kirkwood, Small, Kessler, Sisco, and Hock. ­These are only some of the proj­ects that have involved Sisco, Hock, or Avalos. When arranging this interview the artists expressed concern that they would be misrepresented as the “leaders” of their collaborative proj­ ects. An impor­tant premise of their pro­cess is that all collaborators have equal authority during the proj­ect and in its attribution. Therefore, the artists ­will only speak about proj­ects in which all three of them ­were involved.2 This interview took place by phone on April 22, 1994.

proj­ects. The idea is to put the proj­ects in the foreground rather than the notion of authorship or the idea of an artists’ group with a sin gular identity. ­People working on the proj­ects have individual ­careers, as artists generally, and so ­these proj­ects are simply shared work.

cylen a simo nds: Your proj­ects have involved many participants from many dif­fer­ent disciplines. Why is it that you have not chosen a name for your collaborative group?

eliz abe th sisc o: Part of our collaboration has always been to explore how a group of individuals in the context of a par­tic­u­lar theme can come together, collaborate, and make a cohesive proj­ ect. Our art practice, to a certain extent, is about the examination of collaboration itself. Realizing that each one of us has strong individual characteristics that we bring to the group, ­we’ve spent

l o uis ho ck: The proj­ects have always been oriented around speciĀc topics, such as the undocumented. They are also distinct from one another and include dif­fer­ent participants in di f­fer­ent

david aval os: One of the t­ hings that ­these proj­ects are about is the tension between the individual and the community or communities. Our belief is that t­ here is a speciĀcity we want to preserve by having individual names identiĀed with the proj­ects. lh: When you create a named entity ­whether you call it a collaboration or something ­else you also create an entity that has a lif e of its own, often separate from the proj­ects and the participating artists. We want to keep the focus on the topics and the proj­ects.

Public Aud it  ·  321

most of our time Āguring out how to bring our individual concerns together to create the best and the strongest proj­ect pos­si­ble without feeling the proj­ect was authored primarily by one individual with the work of a f ew supporting players. cs: How would you deĀne community? How would you deĀne your constituency? da : The pro­cess of creating the pieces is about forming communities. ­There’s no such ­thing as a free-­floating entity called community. Communities exist through social relationships and ritual. In the case of Art Rebate (1993), the community consists of all taxpayers—­including the unrecognized ones—­such as Mexican Indians who are in the U.S. working, paying taxes, and contributing to the proĀts of ­labor contractors. ­There is also a community of individuals who over a p eriod of years have chosen to work together on dif­fer­ ent events, and dif­fer­ent proj­ects. We constitute a community in that sense. As far as a constituency, I do n ot feel that I represent anyone other than myself. I’m not accountable po­liti­cally to any group. Th ­ ere prob­ably is a co nstituency for our work but I’m not sure how it operates. It certainly ­doesn’t operate for us as it would an elected official such as a ­union or­ga­nizer or a politician. lh: The proj­ects the three of us have worked on together have used the media extensively. In the past, a s ense of community has always involved communication and usually had speciĀc limits of physical proximity—­your neighbor or your neighborhood. The bound­aries of what we would call community t­ oday have expanded with the possibilities of communication technology. ­People ­today deĀne their community much more broadly. Tele­vi­sion, computers, and telephone networks comprise what we would describe as community. One of the ­things that Art Rebate tried to do wa s operate in t hat con­temporary public space as a v enue for public art using informational rather than physical space. That communications arena also includes individuals, government officials, newspapers, and tele­vi­sion.

322 ·  cylen a simo nds

The idea is to create a place for public art in the community as it exists in ­peoples’ lives. es: The proj­ects connect community with communication. We are concerned with how dif­fer­ ent groups within a community are included or excluded from the official voice and are referred to in official language like the language of the press and po­liti­cal rhe­toric. The proj­ects try to pres­ ent a more balanced repre­sen­ta­tion of opinions within our community. We use the mass media to disseminate that idea ­because it reports the ofĀcial voice. da : Th ­ ere’s a lin k between t­ hese two questions ­you’re asking, about our lack of a group name and our deĀnitions of community and constituency. We d ­ on’t have a group name ­because ­we’re not a group. It’s that s­ imple. We have to be understood as individuals looking for a f orum, not a co mmunity. We all come from speciĀc communities that are not necessarily in dialogue with one another. For example, I can identify myself with the Chicano community. ­We’re individuals from dif­ fer­ent backgrounds looking for a larger forum in which we can discuss issues that are of common social, po­liti­cal, and cultural concern. Concepts of community and constituency are always ­things ­people are g­ oing to ask about in t erms of public art but I also think it’s impor­tant to ask how this relates to creating forums for discussion and debate. cs: Your engagement with the communities in which the work takes place seems to me to be astute and familiar, more so than other artists attempting public art proj­ects. Do you attribute this to your long-­time residence in the San Diego area? es: Yes, we have all lived in Sa n Diego most of our adult lives. Since we are well aware of how economic and social discrimination operate in our geographic community, we have been able to make ­simple, well-­timed public art proj­ects that ruffle the feathers of the powers that be and attract broad media coverage. It is no secret to anyone living in San Diego that the tourist industry

employs undocumented ­labor, but to circulate this fact at the time when San Diego was gearing up to host the Super Bowl was blasphemous. Especially since part of the funding for Welcome to Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation came from the city’s Transient Occupancy Tax—1 ­percent of the taxes collected from h ­ otel room rates—­that goes ­toward arts funding in the city. lh: Art Rebate was initiated by public action and caused ­people within the power structure to respond. One of the intentions of Art Rebate was to get ­people who are in positions of power, be they at newspapers or in t he government, as well as ­people sitting in cafés or walking down the street to discuss the ideas in the proj­ect. Having a speciĀc topic that p ­ eople felt strongly enough about to voice their opinion encouraged an inclusive, broad-­based discussion with participants questioning one another’s attitudes. In the case of Art Rebate the newspapers and the politicians had sufficiently viliĀed undocumented ­people to the point that they ­were unrecognizable as anyone’s neighbors. The undocumented had become unimaginable as part of the community. We tried to point out that politicians ­were Āctionalizing a po­liti­cal narrative around the undocumented to exclude them from the community. ­Whether it be senator Diane Feinstein, governor Pete Wilson, or attorney general Janet Reno, they all came to the border to make a raging case about our economic woes being a r esult of the supposed plague of the undocumented sapping our social system. es: For Art Rebate we worked with a g roup of ­people we called facilitator-­advisors, all of whom have a lo ng history as advocates for mi­grants’ rights. We asked them to participate in Art Rebate in a way that gave the proj­ect a deeper resonance. If we had done the proj­ect without them we would have been the sole spokespersons for the issue. Instead we ­were able to bring in expert experienced voices. da : I think the astuteness you referred to is also a function of our experience working with a

variety of communities, publics, and individuals. To many ­people it’s inconceivable that undocumented workers pay taxes, but we know about it Ārsthand. The idea was inspired by living h ­ ere, having certain experiences. The astuteness is based on looking at the resources available to us where we live and making decisions about how we can get access to them and the ramiĀcations of this access. cs: The proj­ects often interact with local and national media and legislators. Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation and Art Rebate provoked heated debates. Is this an aspect you consciously manipulate? lh: The proj­ects are clearly controversial. That’s not an accident. It’s not as if someone latches on to the proj­ects and holds them up as problematic. We intend to create something that is provocative and engenders a public discussion. It is public art, not art in the public. The work is deĀned by its per­for­mance in t he community. The public discussion is crucial to the proj­ect. In order to begin a discussion we initiate an action—­for example, a bus poster or a t en-­dollar rebate—­that starts the ball rolling. We deĀnitely aim to draw in the broadest spectrum of ­people, including ­those in power, for the discussion. Obviously the media is not a n eutral mechanism for communicating the events that unfold during the proj­ects; it has an agenda that shapes its participation in the discussion. For example, much of the language used to describe Art Rebate in the press was the same inflammatory rhe­toric promoted and laid out by the politicians who had given a proĀle of blame to the undocumented. Similarly, the press had a hard time imagining, and therefore was unable to fairly convey, the undocumented as taxpayers. The press was invited to experience the act of rebating ­these signed ten-­dollar bills. They w ­ ere encouraged to ask the opinion of undocumented workers concerning their status as taxpayers, but the responses failed to appear prominently in the news media. The media coverage was not a means of evaluating the proj­ect but rather a component of the proj­ect. Their viewpoints describe Public Aud it  ·  323

a conceptual social space in which they situate the taxpayer and the undocumented in dif­fer­ent realms. da : We ­don’t create ­these controversies. They already exist. In the case of Art Rebate a statewide trend ­toward immigrant-­bashing had already begun. It ­hadn’t received much national attention when the proj­ect began. It w ­ asn’t yet a de bate ­because it was one sided. ­These proj­ects are about revealing oppositions to what is presented as a consolidated po­liti­cal agenda. In the case of Art Rebate, we saw the absence of any kind of dramatic response to what Wilson and the state legislature ­were proposing before the issue went national and created with a very s­ imple gesture a relationship that ­people refuse to recognize. That relationship as we enacted it is “Hey, ­we’re out ­here on the street rebating tax dollars to taxpayers. W ­ e’re part of the same community.” es: With Art Rebate we controlled press access to the rebate actions for a number of reasons. One was out of re­spect for the safety of the workers standing on the street waiting for work. They are in a p recarious position b ­ ecause they are undocumented and could be arrested by Immigration and Naturalization Border Patrol agents. We quickly learned that the news photo­graph of the workers receiving their rebate read as an image of someone on the dole. This is ironic ­because the workers generally line up for work and, in fact, or­ga­nized themselves into a line to receive the rebate. When the interpretation of the news photo became clear to us we started to think of ways around it. We invited more Spanish-­language press to the rebate actions and we d ­ idn’t invite or allow any U.S. tele­vi­sion coverage. The Spanish-­language press presented a dif­fer­ent interpretation of the Art Rebate proj­ ect, including a s tronger voice from the workers. Local and national tele­vi­sion news stations wanted to come on a r ebate—­even Peter Jennings wanted to witness a rebate, but that would have presented far too unsavory a v isual image of the undocumented worker b ­ ecause with tele­ vi­sion the image is the news. 324  ·  cylen a simo nds

da : When we did t he bus poster Welcome to Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation, one of the ­things we pointed out, and before critics did, is that in all the attention given to the proj­ect nobody took the time to interview undocumented workers. We attempted to remedy that in the Art Rebate proj­ect, but I never thought that we controlled or manipulated the media. We initiate certain possibilities and then it’s out of our hands. ­We’re not masters of ­these events. If our intention was to ensure that ­every undocumented worker received a r ebate, was interviewed, and their quotes became headlines, then we failed. But our intention was to ask the tax-­paying community, “Can you be so sure of your self-­righteousness when you condemn ­others who, like you, are paying taxes and, maybe unlike you, are not citizens?” As far as the media’s portrayal of the proj­ ect and what they chose to highlight in terms of politicians’ responses, our intention, my intention, was never to have congressman Randy Cunningham show up in our homes apologizing, but to put a di f­fer­ent point of view before the public. And to create an opportunity where, unlike Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation, Mexican and Central American laborers would be interviewed. It’s impor­tant to point out our correspondence with Note Mex, a wire ser­vice out of Mexico City that distributes information throughout the hemi­ sphere to Spanish-­language newspapers, tele­vi­ sion, and radio s tations. Note Mex interviewed workers, and their stories ­were very dif­fer­ent than what was reported in t he New York Times, for example. Spanish-­language Cable News Network, which broadcasts to all the Spanish-­ speaking worlds, was very interested in conducting extended interviews with undocumented workers. It’s impor­tant to understand that ­there are dif­fer­ent media, dif­fer­ent publics, dif­fer­ent media audiences. Some p ­ eople talk about “giving voice.” I d ­ on’t know how you “give voice” to other ­people. We initiated a pro­cess in which we tried to maximize certain opportunities but understood that ­there are enormous limits. And primarily our point was to raise a question that was not being raised at that time.

lh: Many newspapers are big players in promoting an image of the undocumented as villains, even to the point of stifling opposing points of view. For example, if you read the letters to the editor in San Diego newspapers over the duration of the proj­ect, both pro and con responses to the news and editorials, and then spoke with the numerous ­people—­heads of organ­izations, ­labor leaders, et cetera—­who tell you they wrote positive letters regarding the proj­ect, you realize that you ­were not reading a broad sampling of public sentiment. So when you talk about negative press, that “negative press” is often a m ­ atter of editorial control. da : The media is not the beginning and ending of ­these proj­ects. One of our facilitator-­advisors, Aniba Yanez Chaña, an immigration researcher originally from Mexico City, delivered a paper to the PaciĀc So­cio­log­i­cal Association in San Diego as part of their sixty-­fifth annual meeting, and he spoke exclusively about the Art Rebate proj­ect. Another facilitator-­advisor, the Reverend Martiñez, told me that he has begun to use the phrase “undocumented taxpayers” when describing his constituency. It’s impor­tant to understand the vital role the media plays, but the discourse also moves into other areas, other spaces, and manifests itself in a variety of ways. lh: Much of the media’s hostile response had to do with the sacredness of the relationship between the taxpayer and the dollar within a U.S. frame of reference, coupled with the ongoing viliĀcation of the undocumented. I think that if we had handed out plaques rather than ten-­dollar bills that symbolically referenced the contribution of the undocumented worker acknowledging their participation in the tax-­paying body, or if we had rebated bills to the homeless, the proj­ ect would have been received differently. “Hard cash,” tax money being given back or “away” to ­people representative Robert  K. Dornan called “car thieves” on the congressional floor, was a loaded explosive gesture to many. On t he other hand, if you ­were an undocumented worker, the rebate seemed, in t heir words, “a surprise,” but “like justice.”

lh: San Diego is a t ourist town with a t ourist industry. ­After Welcome to Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation the phrase “tourist plantation” has reappeared numerous times to describe the relationship between undocumented workers and the tourist industry in San Diego. The rhe­toric of our proj­ects becomes inscribed in t he community narrative that relates to David’s point—­the life of the work also functions outside of the news media. cs: The Art Rebate proj­ect is very performative. The art is the acting out of the event. Is t­ here an exhibition component to the piece? How does it function in t erms of the goals of the proj­ect as ­you’ve previously expressed them? es: ­Because of the complexity of the issues what interests us most at this point is putting the vari­ous levels and layers of the Art Rebate proj­ ect together to create a cd- ­r om version of the documentation so that ­people can enter the space of the proj­ect in a n interactive nonlinear way. The cd- ­r om user could follow dif­fer­ent lines of pursuit: they could learn the history of migration or read about attitudes ­toward the undocumented worker or the proj­ect itself. How do undocumented workers pay taxes and how much do they pay? What ­were the prevailing attitudes of politicians ­toward art funding when the proj­ ect was ­going on? What ­were the responses of the community to the proj­ect? In the past when we have exhibited the public works, w ­ e’ve created reading rooms with all the tele­vi­sion and newspaper coverage, our press releases, and other ­related documents. The repre­sen­ta­tion of the proj­ect within the gallery space is, from my point of view, educational. The proj­ects become a model that ­people interested in ­doing artwork based in their own communities might be able to follow. The art itself actually happens in t he street at a speciĀc moment, such as at the edge of a tomato Āeld during Art Rebate. Combining all the media coverage is far more didactic. As David said earlier, the art is the creation of a community forum around an issue that is impor­tant to us. To underscore this, we have exhibited the bus poster Public Aud it  ·  325

in a trashcan with media coverage of the proj­ect displayed by its side. The art i­ sn’t about placing an object before the public but about the discourse that the public art action provokes. lh: Liz stated it pretty well. We’ve been talking about cd- ­r oms ­because the past exhibitions have primarily, perhaps exclusively, occurred within an art community. We used t­ hose exhibitions as places for ­people to grapple with the material and come to some sense of what it might mean to them, and particularly outside San Diego, what it might mean to their own geographic community. The cd- ­r om creates the possibility of moving the discussion out of a b racketed art context to circulate more broadly around the themes of the proj­ects themselves. da : The proj­ects continue to play out in t he art world as a point of discussion or a bone of contention. Just as it plays out in t he academic conference I referred to earlier, or in discussions and pre­sen­ta­tions in community settings, as I referred to in the case of Martinez. I recently spoke to John Walshman, a co lleague of Louis’s at the University of California at San Diego, who presented a paper at Harvard University on a number of art proj­ects, including Art Rebate. Patricio Chavez, one of the curators of the La Frontera exhibition, asked Jane Alexander of the nea what she thought of Art Rebate. He claims that her response was that we should let sleeping dogs lie. cs: Could you talk about the relevance of the Art Rebate proj­ect work for undocumented workers in other areas of the U.S.? da : I’m more interested in w hat effect it could have on middle-­class taxpayers in Sa n Diego and elsewhere in t he U.S. The nice ­thing about this proj­ect is it’s easy to see an immediate beneĀt to the undocumented—­the ten dollars. Some workers immediately purchased breakfast or diapers for their babies with the money. I’m more interested in how the approach could be applied in other parts of the Southwest and California to get ­people to realize that the debate that is taking place around the social costs of undocumented 326  ·  cylen a simo nds

l­abor is a very disingenuous debate. P ­ eople need to start asking themselves what is the economic beneĀt, why is it that generation ­after generation workers have been covertly invited, encouraged, and rewarded for coming to the U.S. to pick crops, or work in factories, or private homes? The beneĀt to the undocumented in other areas is indirect, in the sense of trying to encourage a more honest social or public discourse that would make the rest of us less complicit in a cr ime against Mexican and Central American laborers and beneĀt us all. es: I agree. It’s more impor­tant to judge the relevance and response of the ­people who are complicit in t he false construction of the undocumented worker as a le ech sucking all life energy out of our community b ­ ecause at this point in time the undocumented worker, po­liti­ cally speaking, is voiceless. They are suffering from taxation without repre­sen­ta­tion. It’s more impor­tant to look at the ability of the proj­ect to speak to ­people outside of San Diego who have a voice in the po­liti­cal system and who can change ­things. lh: At the time of Welcome to Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation, about 10  ­percent of the San Diego population was undocumented. Local leaders ­were unable to come to terms with the real­ity of who their neighbors w ­ ere and whom their city was eco­nom­ically dependent upon. Since 1988 this has become a national issue and in many ways a n ational delusion. The media has convinced a national audience that t­ here is a group of ­people who are outside the realm of the American institution of taxpaying despite the fact that undocumented workers support the U.S. economy through spending their wages in t his country. Art Rebate suggests that the ten-­dollar rebates ­didn’t remain in t he wallets of the undocumented but perhaps ended up in y our wallet, Cunningham’s wallet, or Alexander’s wallet. In both proj­ects the major focus of the work was to encourage the public to imagine the undocumented as a vital segment of the general taxpaying community.

cs: In spite of the increasingly hostile climate of arts funding you have been able to produce very controversial work. How do you negotiate acquiring funding for your proj­ects, and how have you been forced to change your approach over time? es: In the case of Art Rebate we ­were given a commission by the Museum of Con­temporary Art, San Diego, and the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Sa n Diego to create a p ublic artwork for their exhibition La Frontera/The Border. They gave us this commission that was partially funded by the nea knowing our history as public artists and that more than likely we would create a proj­ect that would stir controversy within the community. Though the climate is becoming even more oppressive, institutions like the centro and the museum are willing to accept what ­others might consider to be a r isky enterprise and fund artists with a r eputation for stirring ­things up. You would have to admit that t­ here is something positive ­going on at a time of increasing self-­censorship and conservatism in the arts, if some institutions are still willing to fund po­ liti­cally sensitive proj­ects. We ­haven’t applied for any nea funding since before John Frohnmeyer was chair. When we did apply, it was u ­ nder the umbrella of Interarts in San Diego. We have always been very direct, very up front about what we plan to do. We are a group of artists interested in exploring the limits of freedom of expression in this so-­called democracy. We create public art with the intention that it is not a monument for the public to view but a catalyst for public discussion and debate around a r elevant social issue. Th ­ ese are ­things ­we’ve stated on our grant applications, and w ­ e’ve received nearly e­ very grant ­we’ve applied for. lh: Relative to our work I question ­whether the climate has become increasingly hostile. I’m not so sure that it was ever friendly to begin with. We’ve always made the assumption that b ­ ecause the work is controversial ­there is a ­great likelihood for censorship. And w ­ e’ve always understood that to get the work up in public required some adroit moves at the time of its initial unfolding.

I do t hink that the nea is afraid of controversy. I ­don’t think it ­matters what the devil the topic is; I think they just ­don’t want any more front-­page publicity. They want t­ hese issues to be nestled in the art pages. The point of our proj­ects is to have a migration from the art pages into a broader forum and possibly onto the front pages of newspapers and magazines. For the nea, no news is good news. es: I think Louis’s point is impor­tant—­that in San Diego the environment for public art has always been hostile. ­There’s a history in this city of public monies for the arts continually being denied to public art proj­ects, including “established” artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Vito Acconci, and the like. Part of what we w ­ ere exploring with the bus poster was creating a space for public art within this hostile environment. The back of the buses became a w onderful mobile gallery, a m obile wall to move our art throughout the community. And that mobility moved from the back of the buses into the press, onto the tele­vi­sion, onto the beaches where surfers debated the proj­ect, and into elementary schools and college classrooms. da : The situation has certainly changed. Some of ­these proj­ects that dif­fer­ent artists have been involved in o ccurred before the ­whole Serrano/ Mapplethorpe brouhaha. Th ­ ere is an ongoing debate about public funding of public art, and it has its ups and downs. At this par­tic­u­lar moment the phones have not been ringing off the hook for Sisco, Hock, and Avalos to do a public art proj­ect in San Diego. lh: ­Were they ever, David? da : Well, what was it that Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Con­temporary Art, San Diego, said recently about funding our work? es: What he said to me was, “I have to balance my programming, and at this point in t ime I could not do another proj­ect with the three of you.” da : My understanding was that the board of the American Organ­ization of Museum Directors said that ­battles have to be picked, and they Public Aud it  ·  327

­ eren’t willing as a body to challenge the nea ’s w ruling on Art Rebate. es: Davies asked for the support of the museum directors to go to the nea to challenge the pre­ce­ dent of their decision to disallow the $4,500 used by the rebate to be considered as a legitimate artist supply. The museum directors told Davies to forget it. Basically Art Rebate was a proj­ect they did not think was worth Āghting for. The perception was that this proj­ect endangered the nea . da : While t­ here’s always been a b ad climate, it has gotten worse. I did a p ublic art proj­ect in which a general man­ag­er of a local tele­vi­sion station supported my First Amendment rights. A c­ ouple years ­later, that same individual, still a general man­ag­er at one of the local tele­vi­sion stations, condemned Welcome to Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation and wanted it removed from the bus panels. Th ­ ere are a lot of p ­ eople in the art community who are shy about engaging in any debates about ­free expression and about what is or i­ sn’t appropriate activity for tax dollars to support in art. I think t­ here’s a lot of self-­censorship ­going on. The climate for public art is dreadful, partially ­because the economy is dreadful. This economic situation has been used to limit public space as a f orum for diverse points of view and diverse expressions. Somehow t­ hese proj­ects ­will continue despite the climate, but that ­isn’t to say the climate has not become much more restrictive. cs: Do you see yourselves more as artists or activists or a combination of the two? lh: I ­don’t see myself as an activist. I t hink of an activist as using art as a m echanism to realize an agenda that ideally has a speciĀc po­liti­cal goal. Many artists dealing with the aids issue have called themselves activists and are artists/ activists in that way. Our proj­ects, while they are po­liti­cally oriented and have a di stinct point of view, do not use art as a means to reach a speciĀc po­liti­cal goal. Rather, the ­whole social per­for­ mance is the goal. The idea is to engender public discussion centered around a co mmunity issue. 328  ·  cylen a simo nds

We operate as artists rather than activists. Simply ­because the work is collaborative, or ­because it’s po­liti­cal, or ­because it uses public rather than institutional space ­doesn’t exclude it from an art context or, conversely, make it activist work. In fact, one intention of our proj­ects is to expand the idea of what p ­ eople might think of as an art context. In order for our public proj­ects to exist, it has been necessary to create a co nceptual space in which they can function, a s pace of possibility. In the case of the bus poster, which was partially funded by city money, we had to buy advertising on buses to reclaim a public site, creating a public space for the opening of a dialogue. Also, many ­people would like to think of the bus poster or the artist-­signed bills as the artwork. ­People with that object-­oriented thinking have a h ard time imagining the w ­ hole performative activity as a genuine art practice. da : I used to be an activist; now I’m e­ ither semiretired or semicomatose. What­ever resources you have available and are able to use most effectively, you use. I am a Chicano d ­ oing an impersonation of an artist, so I do use art and art resources for the purpose of getting at po­liti­cal and economic issues, but also for the purpose of trying to demonstrate that ­there is a n otion of a common humanity. That ­isn’t to say ­there ­aren’t enormous differences between all the dif­ fer­ent types of taxpayers in t his country. And, parenthetically, taxpaying is not the greatest expression of an individual with demo­cratic ideals. ­We’re not praising that activity as a liberating one. ­These pieces enact a gesture that is a recognition of common humanity and community. Some ­people want to see that gesture. Some ­people ­don’t. I d ­ on’t know if it has to go a lot farther or if it could. In terms of the California public’s attitude t­ oward the undocumented, ­things are ­going to get worse before they get better. I think it’s a function of the lack of po­liti­cal organ­ization within the Latino community. es: Although Art Rebate prob­ably ­didn’t change a lot of p ­ eople’s attitudes ­toward undocumented

workers, ­doing it was better than ­doing nothing at all. For democracy to work, citizens need to be active participants in the formulation of society. Creating equality and social justice is an ongoing effort that requires all of the innovation, humor, goodwill, and energy p ­ eople have to contribute. In terms of art’s ability to create social change, what our art proj­ects do is reframe a social issue. With the bus poster we ­were able to put a frame around the relationship of the undocumented workforce to the city’s ability to host the Super Bowl in a way that pointed to endemic racist attitudes. We used art to reframe a s ocial real­ ity. With Art Rebate too we reframed the image of the undocumented worker. It is an image, an icon of sorts that is manipulated and demonized by anti-­immigrant rhe­toric. We ­were able to twist the ste­reo­typical repre­sen­ta­tion of the undocumented worker by pointing out that they pay taxes just like the rest of us. Migration and the ­labor that mi­grants provide in our community is an ongoing real­ity that we need to look at from a dif­fer­ent point of view than we have been over the past de­cades. If we can make art that broadens the spectrum of debate and discussion around an issue, w ­ e’ve succeeded. cs: What do y ou think public art can accomplish that cannot be accomplished in a m useum setting? es: If you look at the percentage of the public that goes to museums, ­you’re ­going to Ānd that it is ­really small. I am dissatisĀed with the strategy of “preaching to the converted” within the conĀnes of the gallery. Public art that’s performative, that is designed to get something moving in the public sphere, is about reaching an audience a museum ­can’t. I ­don’t think that the museum space should be avoided by artists. I t hink it’s a w onderful contemplative arena to go into to look at ­things. But that’s not where our public artwork is intended to be. cs: The performative aspect of your work allows you to bring the work to ­those who you want to see it.

es: We also quite clearly use the media to broaden the audience. It’s no secret that ­every proj­ect has been accompanied by a press release as a way of waving a carrot in front of reporters who may be interested in a di f­fer­ent ­angle on topical issues. ­We’re ­really trying to expand and diversify the audience for art. Before we did Welcome to Ameri­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation, I t ook a s eries of photo­graphs at bus stops in San Diego over the course of many months. I photographed border patrol agents searching the buses and removing, sometimes physically, Mexican and Central American men and ­women who ­were ­here without documentation. I s howed the images from this series in galleries. I was very dissatisĀed with the experience ­because I felt it was not the gallery audience but the other p ­ eople riding the buses who should be seeing the work. The ­people who should be seeing t­ hese photos are the p ­ eople in the community who ­really have their blinders on. It was partly this experience that led to the bus poster proj­ect. In fact, the central image of the bus poster is from that series—­the image of the hands being handcuffed. lh: It’s in­ter­est­ing that in the La Frontera/The Border exhibition, the same exhibition that included Art Rebate and two other public artworks—­the bus poster, Welcome to Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation, and Amer­i­ca’s Finest [another collaborative proj­ect by Small, Kessler, Sisco, and Hock]—­sat quite comfortably in the museum without a peep from anybody who was contesting Art Rebate. Once the work entered the domain of the museum, it was essentially removed from the public sphere. It d ­ idn’t have the voices of contention working with it. The museum is generally a sanctioned space, at least for work without any explic­itly sexual or religious content. Hostile responses and all, I feel Art Rebate did hit on the vital character of “the border,” reflecting a more complete social sphere and having more po­liti­cal signiĀcance than if we had done an artwork inside the institution. da : This society is an oligarchy, yet it professes demo­cratic ideals. I t hink public art is a r eal challenge to the oligarchy. It’s also a c hallenge Public Aud it  ·  329

to everyday ­people and the demo­cratic ideal. The  U.S. has not progressed in terms of Ānding ways to de­moc­ra­tize the arts. As Liz said, who goes to museums? ­People of a cer tain background, of a certain education. Who created the museums? The power elite created the museums. The museums have served speciĀc purposes, and ­there is no evidence that they can serve more demo­cratic purposes now. In the public art arena the prob­lem of how to de­moc­ra­tize the arts plays in a dramatic way. It’s a central issue for any society with demo­cratic ideals. lh: One ­thing ­we’ve also talked about as a group is the idea that we work outside of an institution in terms of curating our own proj­ects. ­There’s a crucial direct relationship between the audience and the proj­ects ­because we do not have a gallery, a museum, or some other institutional entity acting as a gatekeeper for what should be shown and what should not be shown. cs: Are you planning any f­ uture proj­ects together? da : No. lh: We never plan to do ­things together again. es: But we ­don’t mean this in a negative way.

330  ·  cylen a simo nds

lh: No, not in a b ad way. But we d ­ on’t plan to work together again. ­There is an anarchic quality to the proj­ects. They ­don’t have a s cheme; they ­don’t have an agenda. They come out of personal discussions. They depend on a topic achieving a kind of critical mass that propels us into ­doing a proj­ect together and not working on our individual proj­ects. ­There has not been a way of predicting if, with whom, when, or how a collaborative work ­will happen. Notes This chapter was originally published as Cylena Simonds, “Public Audit: An Interview with Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos,” Afterimage 22, no. 1 (summer 1994): 8–11. See www​.­vsw​.­org​/­ai. Copyright © Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism and the Visual Studies Workshop. Reproduced by permission of Afterimage and the author. 1. For a review of the “NHI ” proj­ect by Deborah Small, Elizabeth Sisco, Luis Hock, Carle Kirkwood, and Scott Kesles, see Afterimage 19, no. 9 (n.d.): 3. 2. Documentation of Amer­i­ca’s Finest?, Welcome to Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation, NHI , and Welcome Back Emma (also titled Red Emma Returns) is available in book form from Printed ­Matter Bookstore, DIA Center, 77 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012.

Further Reading

ADOBE LA . “Heterotopias

of Latino Culture in Los Angeles.” In Ciudad Hibrida/Hybrid City: The Production of Art in “Alien Territory,” edited by Gustavo Leclerc and Ulises Dias, 6–9. Los ­Angeles: Southern California Institute of Architecture and SC 2, Southern California Studies Center, USC , 1998. Benavidez, Max, and Kate Vozoff. “The Wall: Image and Boundary, Chicano Art in the 1970s.” In Mexican Art of the 1970s: Images of Displacement, edited by Leonard Folgarait, 45–54. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University, 1984. Castellanos, Leonard. “Chicano Centers, Murals, and Art.” Arts in Society 12, no.1 (spring/summer 1975): 38–43. Chavoya, C. Ondine. “Orphans of Modernism: The Per­for­mance Art of Asco.” In Corpus Delecti: Per­for­ mance Art of the Amer­i­cas, edited by Coco Fusco, 240–64. New York: Routledge, 2000. Cordova, Ruben. “The Cinematic Genesis of the Mel Casas Humanscape, 1965–1967. ” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 36, no. 2 (fall 2011): 51–53, 60–82. Gamboa, Harry, Jr. “In the City of Angels, Chameleons, and Phantoms: Asco, a Case Study

of Chicano Art in Urban Tones (or Asco Was a Four-­Member Word).” In Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, edited by Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­ Bejarano, 121–30. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991. Gámez, Jose Luis. “Representing the City: The Imagination and Critical Practice in East Los Angeles.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 27, no. 1 (spring 2002): 95–120. Goldman, Shifra M. “A Public Voice: Fifteen Years of Chicano Posters.” Art Journal 44, no. 1 (spring 1984): 50–57. Reprinted in Dimensions of the Amer­i­cas: Art and Social Change in Latin Amer­i­ca and the United States, 162–76. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Gonzalez, Rita. “Phantom Sites: The Official, the Unofficial, and the Orificial.” In Phantom Sightings: Art a ­ fter the Chicano Movement, edited by Rita Gonzalez, Chon A. Noriega, and Howard Fox, 47–73. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Gunckel, Colin. “The Chicana/o Photographic: Art as Social Practice in the Chicano Movement.” American Quarterly 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 377–412.

Marrero, María Teresa. “Public Art, Per­for­mance Art, and the Politics of Site.” In Negotiating Per­ for­mance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o Amer­ic­ a, edited by Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas, 102–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

332 ·  Fur ther Read ing

Romotsky, Jerry, and Sally Romotsky. “Placas and Murals.” Arts in Society 2, no. 1 (summer–­fall 1974): 286–99.

Part V. Border Visions and Immigration Politics

FIG. V.1. Yolanda López, Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim?, 1978. Lithograph, 30 × 22 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

jennifer a. gonz ález

Part V. Introduction The  U.S.-­Mexico border deĀnes the very conditions of existence for many Chicanos, whose ­family histories are tied intimately to experiences of immigration, transnational ­labor cir­cuits, and economies of cultural attachment. As many scholars and artists have attested, the border is not merely a p hysical marker or a g eo­graph­i­cal zone of contention and contact, it is a psychological condition of double-­consciousness.1 As  U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, Chicanos are never ­free of this framing discourse that implies histories of both domination and trespass. Mexicans who make art along the border and recent Mexican immigrants are also part of this story, so we purposefully deci­ded to include their perspective in this section as well. Geo­graph­i­cally dispersed ­labor forces ultimately produce narratives of survival, homesickness, and cultural yearning. For many Chicanos, however, the border reminds one of the impossibility of being completely “at home.” As a region, the border becomes the site of racist projections and fears as well as furtive escape attempts and po­liti­cal satire, a p lace of mourning and a g rave for ­those who die in t he crossing; this liminal zone represents a p urgatory of last hopes and lost hopes.2 For this reason, the border functions as a cr itical site for social activism and institutional critique, emphasizing the visual and linguistic intersections that arise

from the cross-­cultural conditions that the border produces. ­Today the border serves as a m eta­phor for a larger U.S. anti-­immigration agenda. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo redrew the border in 1848 so that Mexico lost 55 ­percent of its prewar territory (including areas that are now part of California, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico). ­There ­were approximately eighty thousand Mexicans in t­ hese areas, and they made up about 20 ­percent of the population. Anti-­immigration groups typically claim that Mexicans are alien to the Southwest, ignoring the fact that our complex cultural histories have intersected for many generations. In 2006 the Secure Fence Act was passed to allocate funds ­toward the construction of a s even-­hundred-­ mile fence along the border. By late 2008 a bout $2.4 billion had been allocated to complete  approximately 670 miles of vehicle and pedestrian fencing along the roughly two thousand miles of border between the United States and Mexico. However, only part of the fence was built, and in 2010 the proj­ect was halted due to reports indicating it was unsuccessful, inefficient, and not cost-­effective. As if in response, Arizona passed a law in 2010 that allowed racial proĀling in order to apprehend undocumented laborers, offering one example of the ways that border politics

insinuates itself into the general population’s perception of Mexicans and Mexican ­Americans as always already illegal merely b ­ ecause of the color of their skin. Currently, in 20 18, conservative politicians are calling for even more aggressive mea­sures to keep p ­ eople from crossing the border and ­there are new efforts to continue fence building.3 Artists meanwhile are taking mea­sures into their own hands. On Saturday, April 9, 2016, Ana Teresa Fernandez in Ci udad Juárez, Jenea Sanchez in Agua Prieta, Maria Teresa Fernandez in Mexicali, and numerous volunteers staged a symbolic erasure of the U.S.-­Mexico border.4 The dark brown of the rusted steel was replaced with a light blue paint that rendered the fence less vis­ i­ble against the sand and the sky, creating an illusion of transparency. With a live feed around the world to cities such as Berlin that w ­ ere once divided with a “permanent” wall, the painting per­ for­mance, titled Borrando La Frontera (Erasing the border), seeks to imagine a f­ uture in w hich such forms of social and economic exclusion are unnecessary. ­Until that time, the U.S.-­Mexico border remains an “open wound.” Gloria Anzaldúa’s essay “Border Arte: Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera,” explores la frontera as am ­ atter of personal and social negotiation, of complex intersections and interwoven histories that cannot be easily unraveled, and provides useful vocabulary for framing the conception of the border addressed by subsequent authors. The exhibition Aztec: The World of Moctezuma at the Denver Museum of Natu­ral History forms the backdrop to the poet’s considerations of what she sees as the misappropriation of Indigenous culture. Rather than addressing the concerns of the pres­ent, the exhibition presented Mexican culture as primitive and ancient, distant in b oth place and time, cut off from U.S. culture. Anzaldúa argues that the exhibition invited viewers to move through the space as passive consumers, and compares the pro­cess to that of colonization in which “regurgitated” culture returns to the “native” viewers in a predigested form. In the face of this reductive cultural context, the author pres­ ents her theory of the “border” as a permeable, 336  ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

flexible, and ambiguously shifting place where two cultures touch one another. It forms a locus of re­sis­tance, rupture, and fragmentation creating the conditions for unique reassemblage. She sees this kind of rupture and repair operative in works by a number of Chicana/o artists, including Santa Barraza, Carmen Lomas Garza, Malaquías Montoya, and Irene Pérez. Anzaldúa takes up the term nepantla (a N ahautl word meaning “between worlds”) to disrupt neat separations between cultures, emphasizing instead una mestizada, a cultural mixing that exceeds the “pictorial” as a method for con­temporary visual artists. ­Those who experience a b order consciousness take spatial disorientation, cultural hybridity, shifting geographies, and multilingual paradigms simply as the conditions of daily life. Anzaldúa ambivalently reads the museum as a socially conservative space for the maintenance of ste­reo­types, as well a potentially rich space where cultures can intersect, and diverse perspectives can be shown in a productive border space between worlds. The perpetual crossing of the U.S.-­Mexico border by immigrants, emigrants, tourists, U.S. corporations, and economic refugees invites broader considerations about territoriality, the right to exist and to Ānd a home, and the experience of living on the edge, “in-­between,” or “out of place.” Yet, border and homeland are more than physical spaces, they are a state of mind, a binational experience. The border belongs not only to Chicana/os but to all who migrate and live in its affective zones. Jo-­Anne Berelowitz surveys three historical moments in C hicano/Latino art practice that focus on the idea of “home,” and though her primary focus is Chicana/o art, she includes other U.S. and Mexican artists working across the border. Berelowitz examines how Chicano artists have placed “the home” in tension with “the border,” observing that common associations of home include rootedness and domesticity, whereas associations accompanying border culture include transience and risk; yet t­ here are many ­people for whom the border is home. Bringing us back to Gloria Anzaldúa, who writes, “This is my home / this thin edge of / barbwire,”

Berelowitz invites us to consider the paradox of living in a liminal zone, si­mul­ta­neously familiar and alienating. Three successive chronological periods structure her essay. The Ārst extends from the late 1960s to the late 1970s and corresponds to the Chicano movement’s years of militant nationalism and territorial claims to the “lost land” of Aztlán. For poet Alberto Baltazar Urista, a.k.a. Alurista, Aztlán was a lost Eden and Chicanos w ­ ere warriors in a heroic b ­ attle of reclamation. Proj­ects such as Chicano Park near the Coronado Bridge overpass are viewed as forms of territorial reclamation resulting from determined activism on the part of local barrio inhabitants. The second period, from 1984 to the mid-1990s, is deĀned by a p hilosophical shift from a g eo­graph­i­cal and territorial homeland to an emotional or spiritual homeland. Rather than focusing on a heroic Indigenous past, artists began to focus on a new border consciousness of the pres­ent, on the condition of living in two or more cultural spheres and often in two or more languages. Berelowitz reviews artworks such as the baw/t af ’s communal meal per­for­mance The End of the Line (1986) that was staged around a long ­table that crossed the U.S.-­Mexico border. She suggests the proj­ect envisions the border as a potentially utopic domestic space where the lines between communities and cultures no longer exist. Berelowitz analyses several other artists in her discussion of this period, including the per­ for­mance artist Guillermo Gomez-­Peña, who recounts in hi s per­for­mance titled “Real-­Life Border Thriller” (1993) the time when the San Diego police arrested and detained him ­because they thought he had kidnapped his own son, who looked racially white, unlike his darker-­skinned Mexican ­father. Experiences of cultural and racial abuse such as this form the conditions for a perpetually “unhomely” existence for Gomez-­Peña and ­others living on the border. A ­later phase of San Diego–­Tijuana border art (mid-1990s to 2002) emphasizes a binational condition and acknowledges that the border cannot be denied or superseded by hybrid consciousness but must be negotiated and recognized as a bifurcated space.

Berelowitz looks at a variety of proj­ects hosted by the international organ­ization InSITE that invites visiting artists to produce provocative works on both sides of the border. In par­tic­u­lar she looks at the works of e rre , whose mammoth two-­headed ­horse on wheels, Toy an Horse (1997), puns on the original Trojan ­horse while drawing attention to the nature of gifts, hospitality, and mutual suspicion that attends the relations between the two nations. The artwork of this latter period is sometimes referred to as “postborder art” b ­ ecause the border involves not only a lin e of demarcation but also a mobile web of social and ­legal inĀltration. Ultimately, Berelowitz concludes, we have entered a historical moment of “virtual” borders in the form of identiĀcation databases that control the movements of ­people around the globe. The “border” is more than a passport control zone, it is more than state of mind, it is a cultural framework that follows and constrains generations of p ­ eople across nations and continents. As one example, the next essay takes us away from a focus on the Southwest United States to the northern border with Canada, speciĀcally Michigan. In “Straddling la otra frontera: Inserting MiChicana/o Visual Culture into Chicana/o Art History,” Dylan Miner repositions Chicana/o cultural identity outside of the framework that tends to dominate the rest of border art discourse. Miner offers several close readings of works by George Vargas, Martín Moreno, and Nora Chapa Mendoza, all centered in D etroit. Like Berelowitz, Miner emphasizes that many of the artworks, and especially murals, are used to articulate a sense of “home,” but in the case of Michigan, a C hicana/o feeling of belonging has more to do with a universal solidarity with other working-­class and oppressed p ­ eoples than it has to do with a geographic relationship to Mexico or Aztlán. At the same time, dif­fer­ent Chicano communities around the country historically have had similar experiences, such as the forced repatriation of Mexican immigrants in the 1930s due to the economic depression in t he United States, forming the basis of artworks such as Mendoza’s Los Repatriados. Miner thus wants to draw ­attention Intr o d uctio n t o Par t V  ·  337

to the impor­tant parallels and signiĀcant differences between Southwest Chicana/o art and MiChicana/o art. For example, as with Berelowitz’s essay, Southwest Chicano history habitually positions the late 1970s as the end of the movimiento, but for Michigan, the late 1970s and early 1980s ­were the most active years for movimiento artists. Miner emphasizes the activist and po­liti­ cally radical focus of several artists, and calls for the inclusion of Midwest artworks in the annals of Chicana/o art history. By extending the discussion to “el otro frontera” (the other border), and by framing the proj­ect in the context of broader research goals, he invites us to consider how the “border” is still a rich domain for exploration. Recent immigrants have a di f­fer­ent perspective on the border than second-­ or third-­ generation Chicana/os; its condition as a barrier and its deep l­egal and bureaucratic reach touch their memories and bodies in violent and immediate ways. We therefore deci­ded to add another voice to the conversation by including Gabriela Valdivia, Joseph Palis, and Matthew Reilly’s essay about Cornelio Campos, a Mexican artist working in N orth Carolina whose paintings create an immediate activist response to the social and economic conditions of border crossing and mi­ grant life. Campos’s nomadic life in C alifornia, Georgia, Missouri, and North Carolina follows the path taken by many immigrants who have worked in the agricultural sector picking fruit or tobacco. Enduring economic exploitation, physical hardship, and cultural marginality, Campos deci­ded to dedicate his artistic practice to explicit renderings of this experience. Valdivia, Palis, and Reilly use Schmidt C ­ amacho’s concept of “mi­ grant imaginaries” to analyze Campos’s diverse set of cross-­cultural references, and situate this po­liti­cally engaged art somewhere between the public address of the Mexican muralist tradition and Chicana/o activism. SpeciĀcally, Campos addresses the visual culture of “­free trade,” showing the unequal and uneven ways this economic model operates in Mexico and the United States and “the contradiction of how the ­free flow of trade and money that circulates throughout the 338  ·  jennifer a. go nz ález

hemi­sphere and the globe does not also include the f­ ree flow of p ­ eople.” The clash of commercial, traditional, and science Āction sensibilities appear in p aintings that document the placement of Walmart stores next to ancient Aztec pyramids in Mexico, or that conflate the “alienated” status of undocumented workers with extraterrestrials. Nevertheless, a sense of hope appears in several works that reveal a y outhful cross-­border generation, united despite the conĀnes of ethnicity and language. Returning us to the notion of “nepantla,” Valdivia, Palis, and Reilly read Campos’s art practice as mediating across a s et of apparent contradictions not in o rder to resolve them but to demonstrate the possibilities of a ­future coexistence. Artists’ books are rarely included in studies of the visual arts, but ­these can often be exceptional opportunities for the cross-­pollination of ideas and forms. For Codex Expangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (1998), per­for­mance artist Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, visual artist Enrique Chagoya, and book artist Felicia Rice collaborated to produce a mock codex (hand-­printed manuscript in a book form) on the model of t­ hose produced by the Aztecs in pre-Conquest Mexico. Chagoya’s sumptuous prints meld images from con­temporary popu­lar culture in the United States with Aztec iconography, contrasting commercial cartoon heroes (such as Mickey Mouse and Superman) with ancient heroes and gods. Gomez-­ Peña’s text, taken from his per­for­mances, assails the reader with sharp po­liti­cal humor but also lamentations for “my land, cut in half.” The voice that speaks is one that is purposefully poetic, yet raunchy, angry, and dispossessed. To exist as an “outsider” is already to be offensive, so Gómez-­ Peña pres­ents an offensive front. We started this section with a p oet, Gloria Anzaldúa, and close it with a p oet, Juan Filipe Herrera. The Ārst version of his playful and acerbic poem “187 Reasons Why Mexicanos ­Can’t Cross the Border” was written in 1994 partially in response to Proposition 187, a referendum that voters passed in the state of California that same year designed to restrict undocumented immi-

grants from gaining access to public health and education ser­vices. The law was never successfully implemented, and was eventually declared unconstitutional by the federal government, but its passage revealed rather starkly a culture of close-­Āsted nationalism and racial discrimination. Herrera then issued a “remixed” version in 2007, which we have reprinted ­here, and which remains remarkably current at a moment when the international refugee crisis has created a worldwide impact, and the divide between the poorest and wealthiest ­people on the planet has never been more extreme. With witty brevity Herrera lays out the bicultural real­ity of never leaving Mexico ­behind, of never fully assimilating to a “Nordic/Teutonic approach.” The poem sends up xenophobic Americans who fear cultural takeovers, and who crave cultural homogeneity, as well as sympathizing with Mexicans or Chicana/os who refuse to relinquish their favorite ­music and food, habits and proclivities, or their civil rights. It is this invisible barrier of

phobias and hostilities, pleasures and commitments, that is the primary reason “Mexicans” ­can’t—or ­won’t—­“cross the border,” even if t hey ­were born in the United States. In 2012, Herrera was named California’s poet laureate, and U.S. poet laureate in 2015, becoming the Ārst Chicano poet to cross this literary “border.” It seems a good sign of pro­gress. Notes 1. See essays by Jo-­Anne Berelowitz (chapter 34) and Gloria Anzaldúa (chapter 33). 2. See, for example, Margaret Regan, The Death of ­Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands (New York: Penguin Random House, 2010). 3. Philip Elliot, “The Military ­Can’t Build Trump’s Border Wall. ­Here’s Why He Keeps Insisting It Can,” Time, March 29, 2018, http://­time​.­com​/­5219475​/­donald​-­trump​ -­pentagon​-­border​-­wall​/­. 4. Chris McGonigal, “­These Artists Tried ‘Erasing’ Parts of the U.S.-­Mexico Border Fence,” Huffington Post, April 11, 2016, politics section.

Intr o d uctio n t o Par t V  ·  339

This page intentionally left blank

gl o r ia anz ald úa

33. Border Arte  ·  1993 Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera

The gatekeeper at the museum takes our ticket. We enter the simulation of the Aztec capital city, Tenochtitlán, as it was thought to exist before the Eu­ro­pean colonizers destroyed it. It is opening day of the Aztec: The World of Moctezuma exhibition at the Denver Museum of Natu­ral History. El legado indígena.1 H ­ ere before my eyes is the culture of nuestros antepasados indígenas.2 Sus símbolos y metáforas todavía viven en la gente Chicana/Mexicana.3 I a m again struck by how much Chicana/o artists and writers feel the impact of ancient Mexican art forms, foods, and customs. We consistently reflect back t­ hese images in r evitalized and modernized versions in theater, Ālm, per­for­mance art, painting, dance, sculpture, and lit­er­a­ture. La negación sistemática de la cultura mexicana/chicana en l as Estados Unidos impide su desarrollo, haciéndolo este un acto de colonización.4 As a p ­ eople who have been stripped of our history, language, identity, and pride, we attempt again and again to Ānd what we have lost by digging into our cultural roots imaginatively and making art out of our Āndings. I ask myself, What does it mean for me, esta jotita, this

queer Chicana, this mexicatejana, to enter a museum and look at Indigenous objects that ­were once used by my ancestors? ­Will I Ānd my historical Indian identity h ­ ere along with its ancient mestizaje? As I pull out a pad to take notes on the clay, stone, jade, bone, feather, straw, and cloth artifacts, I am disconcerted with the knowledge that I t oo am passively consuming and appropriating an Indigenous culture. We (the Chicano kids from Servicio de l a Raza and I) a re being taught our cultural roots by whites. The essence of colonization: rip off a culture, then regurgitate the white version of that culture to the “natives.” This exhibit bills itself as an act of good w ­ ill between the United States and Mexico, a s ort of bridge across the border. The Mexico/United States border is a site where many dif­fer­ent cultures “touch” each other and the permeable, flexible, and ambiguous shifting grounds lend themselves to hybrid images. The border is the locus of re­sis­ tance, of rupture, implosion and explosion, and of putting together the fragments and creating a new assemblage. Border artists cambian el punto de referenda.5 By disrupting the neat separations

between cultures, they create a culture mix, una mestizada, in t heir artworks. Each artist locates her/himself in t his border “lugar,”6 and tears apart and rebuilds the “place” itself. The museum, if i t is daring and takes risks, can be a kind of “borderland” where cultures co-­ exist in the same site, I think to myself as I walk through the Ārst exhibit. I a m jostled amid a white middle-­class crowd. I look at videos, listen to slide pre­sen­ta­tions, and hear museum staff explain portions of the exhibit. It angers me that all ­these ­people talk as though the Aztecs and their culture have been dead for hundreds of years when in fact ­there are still ten thousand Aztec survivors living in Mexico. I stop before the dismembered body of la diosa de la luna,7 Coyolxauhqui, bones jutting from sockets. The warrior goddess, with bells on her cheeks and serpent b ­ elt, calls to mind the dominant culture’s repeated attempts to tear the Mexican culture in t he United States apart and scatter the fragments to the winds. This slick, prepackaged exhibition costing $3.5 mi llion exempliĀes that dismemberment. I s tare at the huge round stone of la diosa. To me, she also embodies the re­sis­tance and vitality of the Chicana/ Mexicana writer/artist. I c an see resemblances between the moon goddess’s vigorous and warlike energy and Yolanda López’s Portrait of the Artist as t he Virgin of Guadalupe (1978), which depicts a C hicana/Mexicana w ­ oman emerging and r­ unning from the oval halo of rays with the mantle of the traditional virgen8 in one hand and a serpent in t he other. Portrait represents the cultural rebirth of the Chicana struggling to f­ ree herself from oppressive gender roles.9 The strug­ gle and pain of this rebirth also is represented eloquently by Marsha Gómez in earthworks and stoneware sculptures such as This ­Mother ­Ain’t for Sale. The sibilant, whispery voice of Chicano Edward James Olmos on the Walkman interrupts my thoughts and guides m e to the serpentine base of a reconstructed sixteen-­foot ­temple where the ­human sacriĀces ­were flung down, leaving bloodied steps. Around me I h ear the censori342  ·  gl o r ia anz ald úa

ous, culturally ignorant words of the whites, who, while horriĀed by the blood-­thirsty Aztecs, gape in v icarious won­der and voraciously consume the exoticized images. Though I, t oo, am a gaping consumer, I feel that ­these artworks are part of my legacy. I r emember visiting Chicana tejana artist Santa Barraza in h er Austin studio in the mid-1970s, and talking about the merger and appropriation of cultural symbols and techniques by artists in s earch of their spiritual and cultural roots. As I wa lked around her studio I was amazed at the vivid Virgen de G uadalupe iconography on her walls and drawings strewn on ­tables and shelves. The three “madres,” Guadalupe, la Malinche, y la Llorona, are culture Āgures that Chicana writers and artists “reread” in our works. And now, sixteen years ­later, Barraza is focusing on interpretations of pre-­Columbian codices as a reclamation of cultural and historical mestiza/o identity. Her “codices” are edged with milagros and ex votos.10 Using the folk art format, Barraza now is painting tin testimonials known as retablos, traditional popu­lar miracle paintings on metal, a m edium introduced into colonial Mexico by the Spaniards. One of her devotional retablos is of la Malinche with maguey (the maguey cactus is Barraza’s symbol of rebirth). As with many Chicana artists, Barraza’s work explores Indigenous Mexican “symbols and myths in a hi storical and con­temporary context as a mechanism of re­sis­tance to oppression and assimilation” (Āg. 33.1).11 Once more my eyes return to Coyolxauhqui. Nope, she’s not for sale, and neither are the original la Lupe, la Llorona, and la Chingada, and their modern renditions. Olmos’s occasional musical recitations in Nahuatl further remind me that the Aztecs, their language and culture, are still very much alive. Though I w on­der if O lmos and we Chicana/o writers and artists also are misappropriating Nahuatl language and images, hearing the words and seeing the images boosts my spirits. I feel that I am part of something profound outside my personal self. This sense of connection and community compels Chicana/o writers/artists to delve into, sift through, and rework native imagery.

FIG. 33.1. Santa Barraza, Nepantla, 1995. Oil on canvas, 41.5 × 56 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

I won­der about the genesis of el arte de la frontera.12 Border art remembers its roots—­sacred and folk art are often still one and the same. I recall the nichos (niches or recessed areas) and retablos (altarpieces) that I had recently seen in several galleries and museums, such as the Denver Metropolitan State College Art Museum. The altarpieces are placed inside open boxes made of wood, tin, or cardboard. The cajitas13 contain three-­dimensional Āgures such as La Virgen, photos of ancestors, candles, and sprigs of herbs tied together. They are actually tiny installations. I make mine out of cigar boxes or vegetable crates that I Ānd discarded on streets before garbage pickups. The retablos range from the strictly traditional to the modern, more abstract forms. Santa Barraza, Yolanda M. López, Marcia Gómez, Carmen Lomas Garza, and other Chicanas connect everyday life to the po­liti­cal, sacred, and aesthetic with their art (Āg. 33.2).14 I walk from the glass-­caged exhibits of the sacred world to Tlatelolco, the open mercado, the ­people’s market, with its strewn baskets of chiles, avocados, nopales on petates,15 and ducks in hanging wooden cages. I think of how border art, in critiquing old, traditional, and erroneous repre­sen­ta­tions of the Mexico/United States border, attempts to represent the “real world” de la gente16 ­going about their daily lives. But it renders that world and its ­people in more than mere surface slices of life. If one looks beyond the obvious, one sees a connection to the spirit world, to the underworld, and to other realities. In the “old world,” art was/is functional and sacred as well as aesthetic. At the point that folk and Āne art separated, the metate (a flat porous volcanic stone with rolling pin used to grind corn) and the huipil (blouse)17 ­were put in museums by the Western curators of art. Many of ­these officiators believe that only art objects from dead cultures should end up in m useums. According to a f riend18 who recently returned from Central Amer­i­ca, a museum in G uatemala City ­houses Indigenous clothing as though they w ­ ere garments only of the past. Th ­ ere was l­ittle mention of the w ­ omen she saw still weaving the same kind of clothing 344  ·  gl o r ia anz ald úa

and using the same methods as their ancestors. However, the men in Todos Santos, a Guatemalan community, wear red pants while men from another area wear another color. In the past, Indigenous ­peoples ­were forced to wear clothing of a certain color so that their patrones19 could distinguish “their” peons from ­those of other bosses. The men’s red pants reflect a colonization of their culture. Thus, colonization influences the lives and objects of the colonized, and artistic heritage is altered. I come to a glass case where the skeleton of a jaguar, with a stone in its open mouth, nestles on cloth. The stone represents the heart. My thoughts trace the jaguar’s spiritual and religious symbolism, from its Olmec origins to present-­day jaguar masks worn by ­people who no longer know that the jaguar was connected to rain, who no longer remember that Tlaloc and the jaguar and the serpent and rain are tightly intertwined.20 Through the centuries, a c ulture touches and influences another, passing on its meta­phors and its gods before it dies. (M eta­phors are gods.) The new culture adopts, modiĀes, and enriches t­ hese images, and, in t urn, passes them on. The pro­cess is repeated ­until the original meanings of images are pushed into the unconscious. What surfaces are images more signiĀcant to the prevailing culture and era. However, the artist on some level still connects to that unconscious reservoir of meaning, connects to that nepantla state of transition between time periods, and the border between cultures. Chicana/o artists presently are engaged in “reading” that cenote,21 that nepantla, and that border. Art and la frontera intersect in a liminal space where border ­people, especially artists, live in a state of “nepantla.” “Nepantla” is the Nahuatl word for an in-­between state, that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another, when changing from one class, race, or sexual position to another, when traveling from the pres­ent identity into a n ew identity. The Mexican immigrant at the moment of crossing the barbed wire fence into a h ostile “paradise” of el norte, the United States, is caught in

FIG. 33.2. Carmen Lomas Garza, Camas Para Sueños (Beds for Dreaming), 1985. Gouache on Arches paper, 23 × 17.5 in. © Carmen Lomas Garza. Collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Image courtesy of the artist.

a state of nepantla. ­Others who Ānd themselves in this bewildering transitional space may be the straight person coming out as lesbian, gay, bi-­ or transsexual, or a person from working-­class origins crossing into middle-­classness and privilege. The marginalized, starving Chicana/o artist who suddenly Ānds her/his work exhibited in m ainstream museums, or being sold for thousands in prestigious galleries, as well as the once neglected writer whose work is in ­every professor’s syllabus, for a time inhabit nepantla. I think of the borderlands as Jorge Luis Borges’s Aleph, the one spot on earth that contains all other places within it. All ­people in i t, ­whether natives or immigrants, colored or white, queers or heterosexuals, from this side o f the border or del otro lado,22 are personas del lugar, local ­people—­all of whom relate to the border and to the nepantla states in dif­fer­ent ways. I continue meandering absently from room to room, noticing how the dif­fer­ent parts of the Aztec culture are partitioned from o ­ thers, and how some are placed together in o ne room, a few feet apart, but still seem to be in neat l­ittle categories. That bothers me. Abruptly, I meet myself in the center of the room with the sacriĀcial knives. I stand rooted ­there for a long time, thinking about spaces and ­orders and moving in them and through them. According to Edward Hall, early in lif e we become oriented to space in a way that is tied to survival and sanity. When we become disoriented from that sense of space we fall into danger of becoming psychotic.23 I question this—to be disoriented in space is the “normal” way of being for us mestizas living in the borderlands. It is the sane way of coping with the accelerated pace of this complex, interdependent, and multicultural planet. To be disoriented in space is to be en nepantla. To be disoriented in space is to experience bouts of dissociation of identity, identity breakdowns and buildups. The border is in a constant nepantla state and is an analogue of the planet. This is why the borderline is a p er­sis­tent meta­phor in el arte de la frontera, an art that deals with such themes of identity, border crossings, and hybrid imagery. 346  ·  gl o r ia anz ald úa

Imágenes de la Frontera24 was the title of the Centro Cultural Tijuana’s June 1992 exhibition.25 Malaquías Montoya’s Frontera series and Irene Pérez’s Dos Mundos monoprints are examples of the multisubjectivity, split-­subjectivity, and refusal-­to-­be-­split themes of the border artist creating a ­counter art. The nepantla state is the natu­ral habitat of artists, most speciĀcally for the mestizo border artists who partake of the traditions of two or more worlds and who may be binational. They thus create a new artistic space—­a border mestizo culture. Beware of el romance del mestizaje,26 I hear myself saying silently. Puede ser una ficción.27 I warn myself not to romanticize mestizaje—­it is just another Āction, something made up, like “culture” or the events in a person’s life. But I and other writers/artists of la frontera have invested ourselves in it. ­There are many obstacles and dangers in crossing into nepantla. Border artists are threatened from the outside by appropriation by popu­ lar culture and the dominant art institutions, by “outsiders” jumping on their bandwagon and working the border artists’ territory. Border artists also are threatened by the pres­ent unparalleled economic depression in t he arts gutted by government funding cutbacks. Sponsoring corporations that judge proj­ects by “­family values” criteria are forcing multicultural artists to hang tough and brave out Ānancial and professional instability. Border art is becoming trendy in ­these neo­co­lo­nial times that encourage art tourism and pop culture rip-­offs, I think, as I walk into the museum shop. Feathers, paper flowers, and ceramic statues of fertility goddesses sell for ten times what they sell for in M exico. Of co urse, ­there is nothing new about colonizing, commercializing, and consuming the art of ethnic ­people (and of queer writers and artists), except that now it is being misappropriated by pop culture. Diversity is being sold on tv and billboards, in fashion lines and department store win­dows, and, yes, in airport corridors and “regional” stores, where you can take home Navaho artist R. C. Gorman’s Saguaro or Robert Arnold’s Chili Dog, a jar of

Tex-­Mex picante sauce, and drink a margarita at Rosie’s Cantina. I touch the armadillo pendant hanging from my neck and think, frontera artists have to grow protective shells. We enter the silence, go inward, attend to feelings and to that inner cenote, the creative reservoir where earth, female, and ­water energies merge. We surrender to the rhythm and the grace of our artworks. Through our artworks we cross the border into other subjective levels of awareness, shift into dif­fer­ent and new terrains of mestizaje. Some of us have a highly developed facultad 28 and may intuit what lies ahead. Yet the po­liti­cal climate does not allow us to withdraw completely. In fact, border artists are engaged artists. Most of us are po­liti­cally active in our communities. If disconnected from la gente, border artists would wither in isolation. The community feeds our spirits, and the responses from our “readers” inspire us to continue struggling with our art and aesthetic interventions that subvert cultural genocide. A year ago, I was thumbing through the Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 cata­log. My eyes snagged on some lines by Judy Baca, Chicana muralist: “Chicano art comes from the creation of community. . . . ​ Chicano art represents a par­tic­u­lar stance which always engages with the issues of its time.”29 Chicana/o art is a form of border art, an art shared with our Mexican counter­parts from across the border,30 and with Native Americans, other groups of color, and whites living in the vicinity of the Mexico/United States border, or near other cultural borders elsewhere in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Both Chicana/o and border art challenge and subvert the imperialism of the United States, and combat assimilation by e­ ither the United States or Mexico, yet they acknowledge its affinities to both.31 “Chicana” artist. “Border” artist. ­These are adjectives labeling identities. Labeling affects expectations. Is “border” artist just another label that strips legitimacy from the artist, signaling that s/he is inferior to the adjectiveless artist, a label designating that s/he is capable of h ­ andling only

ethnic, folk, and regional subjects and art forms? Yet the dominant culture consumes, swallows ­whole the ethnic artist, sucks out her/his vitality, and then spits out the hollow husk along with its labels (such as Hispanic). The dominant culture shapes the ethnic artist’s identity if s/he does not scream loud enough and Āght long enough to name her/himself. ­Until we live in a s ociety in which all ­people are more or less equal and no labels are necessary, we need them to resist the pressure to assimilate. I cross the room. Codices hang on the walls. I stare at the hieroglyphics: the ways of a p ­ eople— their history and culture—­put on paper beaten from maguey leaves. Faint traces in red, blue, and black ink left by their artists, writers, and scholars. The past is hanging ­behind glass. We, the viewers in the pres­ent, walk around and around the glass-­boxed past. I won­der who I used to be, I won­der who I am. The border artist constantly reinvents her/himself. Through art s/he is able to reread, reinterpret, reenvision, and reconstruct her/his culture’s pres­ent as well as its past. This capacity to construct meaning and culture privileges the artist. As a cultural icon for her/his ethnic community, s/he is highly vis­i­ble. But ­there are drawbacks to having artistic and cultural power—­the relentless pressure to produce, being put in the position of representing her/his entire pueblo,32 and carry­ing all the ethnic culture’s baggage on her/his espalda,33 while trying to survive in a g ringo world. Power and the seeking of greater power may create a s elf-­centered ego or a fake public image, one the artist thinks ­will make her/him acceptable to her/his audience. It may encourage self-­serving hustling—­all artists have to sell themselves in order to get grants, get published, secure exhibit spaces, and get good reviews. But for some, the hustling outdoes the art making. The Chicana/o border writer/artist has Ā­nally come to market. The prob­lem now is how to resist corporate culture while asking for and securing its patronage and dollars, and without resorting to “mainstreaming” the work. Is this complicity on the part of the border artist in the appropriation Bor de r Arte  ·  347

of her/his art by the dominant dealers of art? And if so, does this constitute a self-­imposed imperialism? The impact that money and making it has on the artist is a l­ittle into their season—­now is the time of border art. Border art is an art that supersedes the pictorial. It depicts both the soul of the artist and the soul of the pueblo. It deals with who tells the stories and what stories and histories are told. I c all this form of visual narrative autohistorias.34 This form goes beyond the traditional self-­portrait or autobiography; in telling the writer/artist’s personal story, it also includes the artist’s cultural history. The altars I make are not just repre­sen­ta­tions of myself; they are repre­sen­ta­tions of Chicana culture. El arte de la frontera is community ­and academically based—­ many Chicana/o artists have M.A.s a nd Ph.D.s and hold precarious teaching positions on the fringes of universities. To make, exhibit, and sell their artwork, and to survive, las artistas band together collectively. Fi­nally, I Ānd myself before the reconstructed statue of the newly unearthed el dios murciélago, the bat god with his big ears, fangs, and protruding tongue, representing the vampire bat associated with night, blood, sacriĀce, and death. I make an instantaneous association of the bat man with the nepantla stage of border artists—­the dark cave of creativity where they hang upside down, turning the self upside down in order to see from another point of view, one that brings a new state of understanding. I won­der what meaning this bat Āgure ­will have for other Chicana/os, what artistic symbol they ­will make of it, and what po­liti­cal strug­gle it ­will represent. Perhaps like the home/ public altars, which expose both the United States’ and Mexico’s national identity, the murciélago god questions the viewer’s unconscious collective and personal identity and its ties to her/his ancestors. In border art ­there is always the specter of death in the background. Often las calaveras (skeletons and skulls) take a prominent position—­and not just of el Día de los M uertos (November 2). De la tierra nacemos, from earth we are born, a la tierra retornamos, to earth we ­shall return, a dar lo que ella nos dió, to give back 348  ·  gl o r ia anz ald úa

to her what she has given. Yes, I say to myself, the earth eats the dead, la tierra se come a l as muertos. I walk out of the Aztec exhibit hall and turn in the Walkman with the Olmos tape. It is September  26, mis cumpleaños.35 I s eek out the ­table with the computer, key in my birthdate, and ­there on the screen is my Aztec birth year and ritual day name: 8 R abbit, 12 Skull. In that culture, I would have been named Matlactli Omome Mizuitzli. I stick my chart ­under the rotating rubber stamps, press down, pull it out, and stare at the imprint of the rabbit (symbol of fear and of ­running scared) pictograph and then of the skull (night, blood, sacriĀce, and death). Very appropriate symbols in m y life, I m utter. It’s so raza. ¿Y qué?36 At the end of my Āve-­hour “tour,” I wa lk out of the museum to the parking lot with aching feet and questions flying around my head. As I wait for my taxi, I ask myself, What direction ­will el arte fronterizo take in t he ­future? The multisubjectivity and split-­subjectivity of border artists creating vari­ous ­counter arts w ­ ill continue, but with a parallel movement where a polarized us/them, insiders/outsiders culture clash is not the main strug­gle, where a refusal to be split w ­ ill be a given. The border is a hi storical and meta­phorical site, un sitio ocupado, an occupied borderland where single artists and collaborating groups transform space, and the two home territories, Mexico and the United States, become one. Border art deals with shifting identities, border crossings, and hybridism. But t­ here are other borders besides the a­ ctual Mexico/United States frontera. Juan Davila (a C hilean artist who has lived in A ustralia since 1974), in hi s oil painting Wuthering Heights (1990), depicts Juanita Leguna, a h alf-­caste, mixed breed transvestite. Juanita’s body is a simulacrum parading as the phallic ­mother, with a hairy chest and tits.37 Another Latino artist, Rafael Barajas (who signs his work as “El Fisgón”), has a mix ed-­media piece titled Pero eso si . . . ​soy muy macho38 (1989). It shows a M exican male wearing the proverbial sombrero taking a sies ta against the traditional cactus, tequila ­bottle on the ground, gun b ­ elt

hanging from a nopal branch. But the leg protruding from beneath the serape-­like mantle is wearing a hig h-­heeled shoe, hose, and garter b ­ elt. It suggests another kind of border crossing—­gender-­bending.39 As the taxi whizzes me to my h ­ otel, my mind reviews image ­after image. Something about who and what I am and the two hundred “artifacts” I have just seen does not feel right. I pull out my “birth chart.” Yes, cultural roots are impor­tant, but I was not born at Tenochitltán in the ancient past nor in a n Aztec village in m odern times. I was born and live in that in-­between space, nepantla, the borderlands. Hay muchas razas40 ­running in m y veins, mezclades dentros de mi, otras culturas41 that my body lives in and out of, and a white man who constantly whispers inside my skull. For me, being Chicana is not enough. It is only one of my multiple identities. Along with other border gente, it is at this site and time, en este tiempo y lugar, where and when, I create my identity con mi arte.

i th ank d iann a willi amso n and Cla­ris­sa Rojas, my literary assistants, for their invaluable and incisive critical comments and suggestions, Natasha Bonilla Martinez for editing, and Gwendolyn Gómez for translating this essay. Thanks to Kathryn Kanjo for the opportunity to participate in the La Frontera/The Border exhibition. Fi­nally, gracias also to Servicio de la Raza Chicano Center in Denver for the pricey and hard-­to-­get ticket to the opening of the Aztec exhibition. Notes This chapter was originally published as Gloria Anzaldúa, “Border Arte: Nepantla, El Lugar de la Frontera,” La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience, ed. Kathryn Kanjo (San Diego, CA: Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Con­temporary Art, 1993), 107–14. o Cpyright © The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Literary Trust. Reprinted by permission of AnaLouise Keating. A note on translation: ­Because Gloria Anzaldúa frequently chose to mix Spanish and En­glish in her es-

says, the editors have chosen to maintain the bilingual consistency of the original by placing our translations of Spanish terms in endnotes. The parenthetical translations that appear in the text ­were in Anzaldúa’s original essay. 1.The Indigenous legacy. 2. Our Indigenous ancestors. 3. Their symbols and meta­phors still live in the Chicana/Mexicana ­people. 4. The systematic negation of Mexicana/Chicana culture in the United Stated impedes their development, making this an act of colonization. 5. Change the point of reference. 6. Place. 7. The goddess of the moon. 8. Virgin. 9. See Amalia Mesa-­Bains, “El Mundo Femenino: Chicana Artists of the Movement—­A Commentary on Development and Production,” in Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano, exhibition cata­log (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991). 10. See Luz Maria and Ellen J. Stekert, untitled essay in Santa Barraza, exhibition cata­log (Sacramento, CA: La Raza / Galeria Posada, 1992). Milagros and ex-­votos are religious talismans used as a votive offering, sometimes to fulfill a vow or in gratitude. 11. Santa Barraza, quoted in Jennifer Heath, “­Women Artists of Color Share World of Strug­gle,” Sunday Camera, March 8, 1992, 9C . 12. Art from the border. 13. Small open boxes. 14. See Carmen Lomas Garza’s beautifully illustrated ­children’s bilingual book, ­Family Pictures/Cuadros de familia (San Francisco, CA: ­Children’s Book Press, 1990), in par­tic­u­lar “Camas para Sueños/Beds for Dreaming.” Lomas Garza has three pieces in the La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience exhibition. 15. Cactus paddles on palm mats. 16. Of the ­people. 17.The Maya huipiles are large rectangular blouses that describe the Maya cosmos. They portray the world as a diamond. The four sides of the diamond represent the bound­aries of space and time; the smaller diamonds at each comer, the cardinal points. The weaver maps the heavens and underworld. 18. DiannaWilliamson, June 1992. 19. Overseers.

Bor de r Arte  ·  349

20. Roberta H. Markman and Peter T. Markman, eds., Masks of the Spirit: Image and Meta­phor in Mesoamerica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 21.Well. 22. From the other side. 23.The exact quote is: “We have an internalization of fixed space learned early in life. One’s orientation in space is tied to survival and sanity. To be disoriented in space is to be psychotic.” Edward T. Hall and Mildred Reed Hall, “The Sounds of Silence,” in Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, ed. James P. Spradley and David W. McCurdy (Boston: ­Little, Brown, 1987). 24. Images of the border. 25. The exhibition was part of the Festival Internacional de la Raza 92. The artworks ­were produced in the silkscreen studios of Self Help Graphics, Los Angeles, and in the studios of Strike Editions in Austin, Texas. Self Help Graphics and the Galería Sin Fronteras, Austin, Texas ­or­ga­nized the exhibitions. 26. The romance of cultural mixing. 27. It may be a fiction. 28. Senses. 29. See del Castillo, McKenna, and Yarbro-­Bejarano, Chicano Art, 21. For a good pre­sen­ta­tion of the historical context of Chicana/o art, see especially Shifra M. Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “The Po­liti­cal and Social Contexts of Chicano Art,” in del Castillo, McKenna, and Yarbro-­Bejarano, Chicano Art, 83–95. 30. For a discussion of Chicano posters, almanacs, calendars, and cartoons that join “images and texts to depict community issues as well as historical and cultural

350  ·  gl o r ia anz ald úa

themes,” meta­phor­ically link Chicano strug­gles for self-­determination with the Mexican Revolution, and establish “a cultural and visual continuum across ­borders,” see Tomás Ybarra-­Fausto, “Grafica/Urban Iconography,” in Chicano Expressions: A New View in American Art, exhibition cata­log (New York: INTAR Latin American Gallery, 1986), 21–24. 31. Among the alternative galleries and art centers that combat assimilation are the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas; Mexic-­Arte Museum and Sin Fronteras Gallery in Austin, Texas; and the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco. 32. Community. 33. Back. 34. Self-­history. 35. My birthday. 36. And so what? 37. See Guy Brett, Transcontinental: An Investigation of Real­ity (London: Verso, 1990). The book, which accompanied the exhibit at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and Corner­house, Manchester, explores the work of nine Latin American artists: Waltércio Caldas, Juan Davila, Eugenio Dittborn, Roberto Evangelista, Víctor Grippo, Jae Leirner, Cildo Meireles, Tunga, and Regina Yater. 38. But What If . . . ​I Am Very Macho. 39. See Ex profeso, recuento de afinidades colectiva plástica contemportánea: Imágenes: Gay-­lésbicas-­eróticas, put together by Círculo Cultural Gay in Mexico City and exhibited at Museo Universitario del Chopo during La Semana Cultural Gay, June 14–23, 1989. 40. ­There are many races. 41. Mixtures inside of me, other cultures.

jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

34. The Spaces of Home in Chicano and Latino Repre­sen­ta­tions of the San Diego–­Tijuana Borderlands (1968–2002) ·  2005

I want to suggest that the concept of home seems to be tied in some way with the notion of identity—­the story we tell of ourselves and which is also the st ory ­others tell of us. —­M ADAN SARUP Home is neither ­here nor ­there. Rather, itself a hybrid, it is both h ­ ere and ­there—an amalgam, a pastiche, a per­for­mance. —­A NGELIKA BAMMER It’s not a c omfortable territory to live in, this plac e of contradictions. . . . ​No, not comfortable but home. —­G LORIA ANZALDÚA

Introduction

This paper is about repre­sen­ta­tions of home in the San Diego–­Tijuana borderlands from the late 1960s to the pres­ent. SpeciĀcally, I exa mine ways that artists of this zone have represented and negotiated a t ension between two spatial arenas: home and the border. Home bears associations of rootedness, enclosure, domesticity, safety, a h aven to be ventured from and returned to; whereas border suggests up-

rootedness, transnational movement, international governance, liminality, risk, exposure, and change. And yet, for large numbers of ­people, the borderlands are home. For the past forty years home has been an enduring theme of borderland artists—­both visual and verbal. In this essay I exa mine how borderland artists have conceptualized home and how consciousness about home has changed over time. Three distinct repre­sen­ta­tions of home are established, corresponding to three successive chronological phases. A dif­fer­ent group of artists is associated with each. Phase 1, extending from the late 1960s through the 1970s, corresponds to the Chicano movement’s years of militant nationalism and focuses on a ra llying issue articulated by Chicano studies intellectuals: the experience of displacement from the lost homeland of Aztlán and the strug­gle to recapture it.1 This strug­gle took two forms: (1) material contestations over space, and (2) iconic repre­sen­ta­tions by artists and poets to resurrect the lost land emblematically. During this phase, which was dominated by a masculinist po­liti­cal

framework, “home” was identiĀed not with the domestic but, rather, with “homeland.” Phase 2, from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, is marked by a reconceptualization of Aztlán as deracinated, mobile, a spatial imaginary located in the hearts of Chicanos rather than a place on the map. Chicano intellectuals call this the “borderlands,” a t erm that signiĀes the encounter of two cultures and that embraces the Chicano diaspora. The artistic group involved with this discursive shift was the Border Art Workshop/ Taller de Arte Fronterizo (baw/t af ). baw/t af problematized the concept of the border as home or homeland, proposing instead a complex constellation of repre­sen­ta­tions of the domestic that spanned the spectrum from utopia to dystopia. The most illustrious member of the workshop was Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, who unhinged “the border” from the international boundary line and deployed it as a meta­phor signifying homelessness or deterritorialization. Phase 3, t he postborder condition, extends from the mid-1990s to the pres­ent. Its artists acknowledge cultural difference and the material real­ity of the international boundary between Tijuana and San Diego. At the same time they recognize that global forces have transformed this zone into a transborder metropolis2 in which “home” is part of a complex pro­cess of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, binationalism, and biculturalism. The artists most closely identiĀed with this phase have been associated with InSITE, a binational transborder arts organ­ization that has staged installation art on both sides o f the border ­every two or three years since 1992 and plans to do so again in the ­future.3 Theory and Background

The border is polyvalent—­a space of transition and passage for many, but also a p lace of long-­ term settlement with a permanent boundary population. For p ­ eople of Mexican descent, including ­those with a long history in t he region, making the border “home” has been fraught with 352 ·  jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

difficulty: “This is my home / this thin edge of / barbwire.”4 In ­these lines Gloria Anzaldúa poignantly captures the heart of the prob­lem: in a b order zone where displacement and interdiction are the norm, where residents hold binational and bicultural identities, home is a hig hly charged issue. How is home sustained, negotiated, and represented at the border? Let us begin by considering some of the meanings that inflect ­these key terms “home” and “border.” A common meaning of “home” in m odern En­glish is “a place of origin returned to.” The Greek word nostos (homeward journey) enfolds something of this, surviving in En ­glish as “nostalgia”—­a painful longing for or melancholia about an absent home. Nostalgia, or homesickness, is the “dream of belonging,”5 the identiĀcation of “home as place” and of homelessness as “without place.”6 Whereas “home” is often identiĀed with a speciĀc ­house, “house” and “home” carry distinctive denotations. Prob­ably the earliest instance of their conflation was in the early seventeenth c­ entury when the Jacobean judge Sir Edward Coke wrote, “The ­house of everyman is to him as his ­castle and fortresse, as well as his defense against injury and vio­lence, as for his repose.”7 Instances of the conflation abound. In academic discourse it appears as the analytic category “housing,” which addresses home and homelessness.8 At the other end of the spectrum, the U.S. real estate industry euphemistically claims to sell “homes”—­intimate domestic sanctuaries—­rather than “houses”—­inert structures with the potential to become sanctuaries.9 Whereas “house” always refers to a concrete ediĀce with edges, walls, doors, a roof, and so on, “home” is a more abstract term, embracing as it does a ­mental or spiritual condition (as in, f or example, “I felt at home ­there”), and does not require a building. The close and obvious linkage of the German words heim and heimat—­home and native country—­lead to consideration of the relation of “home” to “homeland.” As Eric Hobsbawn points out, “Heim, chez soi, is essentially private. Home

is the wider sense, Heimat, is essentially p ­ ublic.”10 The Ārst belongs to you alone, the second is ­collective; the Ārst shelters the nuclear unit or ­family, the second is the territory of anonymous individuals who constitute the national “­family.” Both involve narratives—­often with mythical or Āctional dimensions—­that construct personal and/or collective identity and establish the discursive right to a space—­a ­house, a community, a country.11 “Home” enfolds the contradictions and ambiguities of private domestic and public national space,12 being charged with a “semantic energy”13 from the vari­ous instances of its application over the past three centuries. Our own modern period is characterized by what Peter Berger has referred to as “the homeless mind”—­“a deepening condition of ‘homelessness’ . . . ​a metaphysical loss of ‘home.’ ”14 “In this situation, subjects are endlessly and constantly in transition ‘between’ a va riety of divergent, discrepant, even contradictory, social milieu.” Deracinated from a Ārst and “original” (albeit, perhaps, imaginary) social milieu, individuals come to be at home nowhere while, at the same time, feeling deeply nostalgic for “home”—­a tenaciously held, resilient utopic dreamscape, the shimmering mirage that sustains mi­grant wanderings. The border is the Āgure for such wanderings, a spatial trope resonant with rhe­torics of mobility, marginality, and exile, a pregnant signiĀer for the antinomies of home.15 As with “home,” writers invest the word “border” with poetic, melancholic, and utopic associations. For Homi Bhabha it provides “a place from which to speak both of, and as, the minority, the exilic, the marginal and the emergent.”16 For Nestor Canclini it is an environment for the production of “cultural hybridity.”17 For bell hooks it is a “space of radical openness.”18 For Ed Soja it is “Thirdspace,” where the “construction/production—­the ‘becoming’—of histories, geographies, socie­ties” occurs.19 Less poetically, borders are produced by po­ liti­cal and economic dynamics between nations and mark the territorial margins of the nation-­ state,20 the line at which two nations meet. In

the case of the U.S.-­Mexico border, this meeting is a co nfrontation between the Third and First Worlds and is, therefore, a zone of Āssion, fusion, and radical disparity. The northern San Diego side offers jobs and economic opportunity, a higher standard as well as a higher cost of living. South of the border in Tijuana a large ­labor pool of Mexicans and Central Americans daily crosses and recrosses, negotiating between home in Mexico and work in the United States—­much of it in t he agribusiness, restaurant, domestic ser­vice, garment, tourist, and building industries. Two ports of entry permit passage between Tijuana and San Diego—­Otay Mesa and, more signiĀcantly, San Ysidro, the single-­most-­traveled border crossing along ­either U.S. border and one of the busiest in the world. In 2002 ­these two border crossings handled 56.6 million individuals.21 The pattern of migration is circular, marked by crossings and recrossings that occur daily, seasonally, annually, or sporadically e­ very few years, with the majority of crossers being residents of the border region.22 A contingent of U.S. citizens also crosses frequently, some to work, some for a vacation, some to purchase cheap phar­ma­ceu­ ti­cals, alcohol, and cosmetics. Other crossers are undocumented, having made their way at ­great cost and risk across dangerously hot or freezing desert or crammed into trucks as the illegal cargo of polleros.23 For them the border marks a passage to the Shangri-la of the United States. For most non-­Latinos on the U.S. side, Tijuana is the site of radical otherness. Phase 1 (1968–­Late 1970s):The Chicano Movement and the Strug­gle to Regain the Lost Homeland of Aztlán The Lost Homeland of Aztlán

Nostalgia for a lost homeland and the determination to reconnect to it and to the warrior ethos that once sustained it w ­ ere signiĀcant themes of the Chicano movement, which had its heyday from 1968 to the late 1970s. A ra llying trope of

The Spa ces o f Home  ·  353

the movement was Aztlán, mythical, primordial homeland of the Aztec ­people. [. . .] A key Āgure in establishing an originary homeland for Chicanos was the poet Alberto Baltazar Urista, better known as Alurista—­the name he ­adopted in 1966. [. . .] In effect, Alurista helped create what Benedict Anderson has called an “­imagined community”—­ the entity that makes it pos­si­ble to “think,” indeed, to “invent” the nation,24 for Alurista “in­ven­ted” an iconography and a heritage that transformed Mexican ­Americans into the ­family of la raza25 with an ancestral homeland in a n ancient empire. Artists in this newly constituted raza began working with this iconography. Aztlán became their core emblem of cultural nationalism, dwelling, home, dispossession, and ­future homeland. It was the symbol around which they and other Chicano activists in San Diego rallied when they strug­gled to claim territory within San Diego in order to re-­create Aztlán. La Tierra Mia (My Land): The Creation of Chicano Park

Chicano activist ­battles took place at two sites within the city: an area in Balboa Park (the cultural center of the city), and an area ­under the freeway on-­ramp for the Coronado Bridge, which had once been part of the barrio but was now a wasteland. The site in B alboa Park was for the establishment of a Centro Cultural de la Raza, a space in which to ­house and celebrate the culture of Chicanos, Mexicans, and Native Americans of the border region. The site u ­ nder the freeway on-­ramp was for the creation of a Chicano park. The spaces at issue w ­ ere not in t hemselves particularly desirable—­indeed, the area ­under the on-­ramp was decidedly bleak—­but, for reasons given below, the Chicano community was deeply attached to them. City administrators thwarted the Chicano community’s efforts to claim ­these areas—­which only intensiĀed the attachment. Both territories (the space in t he park and the

354  ·  jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

wasteland ­under the on-­ramp) became synecdoches for Aztlán, and the strug­gles to claim them took on the signiĀcance of recapturing the lost homeland. The Āght for a Chicano centro cultural occurred Ārst. In the following brief synopsis of the founding of the Centro, I am indebted to Philip Brookman’s detailed history in which he recounts that the impetus to establish Chicano community resources arose from the student movements at San Diego State University ( sd su ), San Diego City College, and the University of California at San Diego.26 Alurista, who had been a s tudent and became a professor at sd su , was a k ey Āgure in t he student movement and a co founder of ma ya , the Mexican American Youth Association. Through ma ya and sd su he met other Chicano activists who ­were also artists, among them Salvador Torres, a v isual artist enrolled in a gradu­ate program in painting at sd su . In 1968, ­eager to produce large portable murals on canvas, Torres embarked on a search for a spacious studio. He Āxed on an abandoned fa­cil­i­ty, the Ford Building, in B alboa Park, where several of the city’s cultural facilities are concentrated. Late that year he was given permission by the San Diego Parks and Recreation Department to make use of it. Designed in 1935 as a display space for the Ford Motor Com­pany’s participation in the California-­ PaciĀc International Exposition, it was a large circular building. Soon a­ fter being granted the space, Torres invited other artists to share it. Access was then expanded to include other forms of the arts, such as ­music and folkloric dance. The arrangement developed into the idea of establishing a c ultural center for all the arts within San Diego’s Chicano community. Shortly ­after the community began to use the fa­cil­i­ty, a g roup of key members got together to draw up a p lan to convert the building into a Centro Cultural de l a Raza. The name u ­ nder which they formally or­ga­nized was Los Toltecas en Aztlán, a name devised by Alurista. The Toltecas ­were a pre-­Aztec Indian culture, supposedly of master craftsmen that flourished in C entral Mexico, and by adopting their name Alurista and

his colleagues established for San Diego’s Chicano artists a v enerable cultural lineage. Their manifesto, similar to that of “El Plan,” was marked by dedication to furthering the goals of la raza. Los Toltecas petitioned the city for the use of the Ford Building as their centro cultural, proposing that “El Centro Cultural de l a Raza ­shall be the heart of our ancestry . . . ​a center where the culture and history of our Chicano p ­ eople can Ānd a place ­under the sun that bronzed our skins and our hearts.”27 Although barrio residents had by then used the fa­cil­i­ty for a ­couple of years and ­were now identifying it as their own, the city had plans to develop it into an aerospace museum. Conflict thus arose between the city and the Chicano community. As Brookman recounts, “By late 1970 the group was asked by the city to leave the Ford Building and they refused. The situation was . . . ​seen as [an] occupation, where Los Toltecas en Aztlán would not gain access to cultural facilities without a det ermined strug­ gle.”28 Alurista viewed the strug­gle as “Āghting death at a cultural level with our own culture.”29 The occupants chained the doors, and police ­were sent to evict them. They did not leave the building ­until the city agreed to designate another site in the park as a centro cultural. The move to the new building occurred in 1971, and with it was realized the dream of a C entro Cultural de la Raza. Its founding princi­ples ­were and are to support “the expressions of t­ hose ­people who are indigenous to the border region” and to produce, promote, and pres­ent “Chicano, Mexican and Native American arts, crafts, m ­ usic, dance, lit­er­a­ture and folklore.”30 At this time mainstream art institutions ­were not showing Chicano art, but at the Centro it found a home. At the inauguration ceremony held on July  17, 1971, Alurista concluded the dedication with the words, “We have a nation to build and our strug­ gle must be collective”31—­acknowledging the centro cultural as a k ey ele­ment in t he nascent proj­ect of nation building. Indigenismo was impor­tant in the philosophy of the Centro. It lay at the core of Los Toltecas en Aztlán, and it dominated activities during the

early years of the Centro. Thus efforts w ­ ere made to revive ancient Indigenous dances and ­music and to connect with American-­Indian groups who, like the descendants of the Aztecs, claimed the Amer­i­cas as their homeland long before Eu­ro­pean invasion and dispossession. The effort to integrate Indigenous philosophy with con­ temporary creative action led to the formation of groups such as Ballet Folklorico de Aztlán (Folkloric Ballet of Aztlán) and to mural painting on the interior wall of the Centro. Titled La Dualidad (Duality), the mural shows the ancient Aztec past as gloriously heroic, while the con­temporary is seen to be monstrous, destructive, pregnant with death, and something from which to flee. In this valorization of the past over the pres­ent, reviving the past while deploring modern technology, artists participated in a tendency, frequent in Chicano art, to romantic nostalgia. This points to a contradiction at the heart of the Chicano movement, for, although its overt goal was revolutionary liberation, the movement was also marked by a reactionary tendency to demodernization—­ profound discontent with the perceived evils of modernity and a longing for reintegration into a premodern, spiritually oriented, all-­embracing communitarian society. Berger, in The Homeless Mind, describes demodernizing liberation movements as manifesting a lo nging for “home”—­a situation of nonalienated meaningfulness.32 If we apply his argument to the Chicano movement—­ with its adoption and repre­sen­ta­tion of art forms and iconography from the lost homeland—we can characterize the movement as governed by a desire for home. But it was, it must be added, a masculinist concept of home predicated on crucial silencings of gender and sexual issues.33 ­Later refusals by ­women, gays, and lesbians within the movement to remain ­silent eventually undermined Chicanismo34 as a ­viable po­liti­cal movement and Aztlán as a desirable goal, revealing that la raza was not a big happy f­ amily but one riven by internal conflict.35 Like the ­battle for a cen tro, the ­battle for a park became a sy necdoche for recapturing the lost homeland. The area that became the site of The Spa ces o f Home  ·  355

contention had long been part of Barrio Logan Heights, the second largest barrio on the West Coast. For many years, and to no avail, the community had petitioned the city to establish a park ­there. In the early 1960s the city took action—­not to establish a p ark but to tear down a va st area of the barrio to make way for the intersection of the Interstate 5 f reeway and the on-­ramp for the Coronado Bridge. The eight-­lane freeway bisected the community and displaced about Āve thousand residents, many of whom had lived ­there all their lives. By 1969, when the Coronado Bridge was completed, the area had become a desolate tract of massive concrete pillars. During the degradation, community residents petitioned the city for permission to establish a park in the wasteland ­under the pylons. Their petition was granted, but the city almost immediately went back on its word and began the unannounced clearing of land to construct a s ubstation and parking lot for the Highway Patrol. On April 22, 1970, the community mobilized by occupying the land ­under the bridge and formed ­human chains to halt the bulldozers. Their occupation lasted twelve days, during which time they began the pro­cess of creating the park they had dreamed of for so long. Resolute in their unwillingness to compromise, they took a stand. In the words of one activist, “The only way to take that park away is to wade through our blood.”36 On a t elephone pole they raised the Chicano flag, and, by using garden tools and their own l­abor, began to work the land, planting nopales, agaves, and flowers—­ making the land theirs by the investment of l­abor, according to the princi­ples of “El Plan.” By taking action as a co mmunity, they produced a n ew meaning for the space ­under the bridge. Contestation led to negotiation. Victory was theirs when the city agreed to purchase the site from the state for the establishment of a community park. The park was always, from the outset, more fraught with meaning than is usually signiĀed by the conventional deĀnition of the word “park,” given by Webster’s as “a piece of ground in or near a city or town kept for ornament and recreation.”37 For Chicano activists the occupation and capture 356  ·  jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

of the land ­under the bridge ­were a microcosmic fulĀllment of the larger goal—to reclaim the occupied homeland of Aztlán. Filmmakers Mario Barrera and Marilyn Mulford convey this in their video Chicano Park (1988).38 ­Here the introductory voice-­over states, “This is the story of one piece of Aztlán, reborn. . . . ​This is the story of Chicano Park. . . . ​The ancient prophesy for a new Aztlán was answered . . . ​the Park was won.” Indeed, the logo of the park became “La Tierra Mia, Chicano Park”—my land, Chicano Park. Three years ­after their victory, artists from Barrio Logan and elsewhere embarked on a proj­ ect that would emblematically identify the park with Aztlán and further its transformation into a culturally resonant place. On t he pylons and retaining walls they painted murals in a visual language anchored in Aztec imagery. The list of Āgures included Quetzalcóatl (the feathered serpent god of Mesoamerica), Coatlicue (Aztec Goddess of the Earth), Aztec warriors, Indian dancers, ancient Mexican pyramids, Tamoanchan (the Aztec mythical place of origin and, supposedly, an ancient Mexican Eden), an image of the founding of Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), and pre-­Columbian glyphs. ­There is also a large mural of the occupation of Chicano Park and another of a Chicano ­family made up of ­mother, ­father, and a son who holds a schoolbook: the heroic past is reborn in the pres­ent strug­gle, and a ­future lies a head for the next generation (represented, signiĀcantly, as exclusively masculine, the essential subject for a paternalist narrative of group identity, and within a ­family structure that is unequivocally heterosexual). One of the pylons proclaims the name “Aztlán.” In the wasteland u ­ nder the pylons, the ancestral homeland, it seemed, was being reclaimed. It was, of course, a fragile reclamation, a pyrrhic victory over the city, for where the community now had a “homeland,” barrio residents had once had homes. Chicano Park thus points to the tenuousness of “home” in the borderlands. Indeed, the “homeland” ­under the freeway—­ signiĀer of mobility and orientation to the ­future—­ironically highlights the deracination of Chicanos and their inscription within the restless

rhythm of life in the United States. The atavism of Chicano Park is literally dominated, ruled over, and subsumed by the hegemonic culture’s mastery of space and time. If we accept that “space can . . . ​serve to channel social relations (even as it is produced through t­ hese very relations),”39 then Chicano Park reproduces the condition of Chicanos as subaltern. The b ­ attle for Chicano Park was a strug­gle for territory, for repre­sen­ta­tion, for the constitution of an expressive ideological-­aesthetic language, for the re-creation of a mythic homeland, for a space in w hich Chicano citizens of this border zone could articulate their experience and their self-­understanding. However, the proj­ect as it is currently realized represents only a small part of what the barrio planning commission envisioned. An intimation of their dream for the community can be gleaned from a co mmunity master plan of Barrio Logan drawn up in about 1971.40 This represents a p lan for extending the barrio to the bay by taking over the industrial structures that occupy the waterfront and establishing in their place a complex of Chicano-­ oriented facilities centered on Chicano Park and designed according to motifs based on pre-­ Columbian architectural forms. ­These include a University of Aztlán, a C osmic Ball Park, a mercado (market), a Chicano ­free hospital, and a Chicano f­ ree port, which would welcome ­people from Ec­ua­dor, Panama, and Argentina—­ refugees seeking a homeland in a new Eden but who might have difficulty with ingress through regular U.S. channels. Extensive parkland (including community gardens) would connect t­ hese dif­fer­ent amenities so that the ­whole would constitute a utopic space for the educational, recreational, shopping, health, and humanitarian needs of the community. In positing a C hicano city beside the Anglo-­dominated San Diego, the plan accorded with the Chicano ethos of establishing a distinct and separate identity in a di stinct and separate place—­a nation of Aztlán with its own harbor and access to the international community. The pre-­Columbian style of the proposed

structures would stamp its image and identity as Mesoamerican. The unrealized plan indicates that, for the activists who conceived it, the achievements of Chicano Park are bittersweet. The community does have its park—­much beloved, much used, and a source of community pride. But, for members of the barrio planning committee, the park was to be only the beginning of an ambitious proj­ect in which the Chicano community would carve out for itself a Chicano urban space contiguous to and parallel with the city of San Diego. Chicano Park was to have been only the Ārst step ­toward a reconquest of territory that was once, supposedly, part of the mythical land of Aztlán. Homeland, home, and f­ amily (raza) w ­ ere the rallying cries of this dream, but, increasingly, they became harder to sustain as Aztlán failed to map the aspirations of many within the movement and as Chicanas began to view themselves as doubly oppressed: by the hegemonic Anglo culture and by Chicano men.41 Phase 2 (1984–­Mid-1990s): The BAW/TAF and the Move from “Homeland” to “Borderlands”

By the early 1980s the nationalistic phase of the Chicano movement was over, and activists directed their energies to reforming rather than overthrowing the existing po­liti­cal system. By this time, too, Aztlán had under­gone a s hift in signiĀcance for the movement, coming to denote not so much a speciĀc geographic locale and former homeland as a sy mbol for conceptualizing Chicano unity and Chicano identity. Luis Leal articulated this shift when in 1981 he concluded his essay “In Search of Aztlán” with the words “whosoever wants to Ānd Aztlán let him lo ok for it, not on maps, but in the most intimate part of his being.”42 For Leal, as for ­others in the movement, Aztlán became deracinated, mobile, a co ncept whose place was in t he hearts of Chicanos, an ele­ment of Chicano subjectivity, rather than an expanse of territory. This reconceptualization of Aztlán coincided with the recognition by many The Spa ces o f Home  ·  357

in the movement that the romanticized nostalgic focus on Aztlán was limiting in terms of po­liti­cal efficacy. What took its place was the “borderlands,” a term that Chicano intellectuals use to designate the entire Āeld of Chicano dispersion in t his country. What the borderlands signify is not a physical terrain but an experience—­the experience of living and moving between disjunctive worlds: Indian and Eu­ro­pean, Mexico and the U.S.A., self and other, home and not home.43 The discursive shift from Aztlán-­as-­home to the borderlands-­as-­home-­not-­home occurred in t he mid-1980s. The earliest published discussion of this shift was Sergio Elizondo’s “ab c : Aztlán, the Borderlands, and Chicago” (1986).44 While members of the Chicano community continued to work on the Chicano Park murals through the 1980s, the de­cade was marked by the emergence in the San Diego–­Tijuana borderlands of a d ynamic new artistic force—­the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (baw/t af ). An artist collective whose members came from both sides of the U.S.-­Mexico border, the workshop evolved out of the Chicano movement but distinguished itself from it, most clearly in its participation in the discursive shift from Aztlán-­as-­home to the borderlands-­as-­home-­ not-­home. Although 1986 marks the entry of the borderlands into academic discourse, it appeared earlier as a p erformative praxis in t he work of the baw/t af , which was founded in 1984. The name of the collective, with its matter-­of-­fact denotation of the border, contributed to and was a participatory ­factor in this shift. Although the impact of the baw/t af on the Chicano movement as a ­whole is difficult to prove, its effect on the Centro is clearly evident—­and I take the Centro as a p aradigmatic instance of the Chicano movement. The following discussion of the impact of the baw/t af on the Centro serves to illustrate the shift from Aztlán-­as-­home to the borderlands-­as-­home-­not-­home. From the inception of the baw/t af in 1984, the Centro was baw/t af ’s base of operations and institutional support umbrella, for it had a prior history with most of t­ hose who became 358  ·  jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

members, having sponsored individuals as artists in residence, exhibitors, or staff. SigniĀcantly, the collective that had dominated Centro activities during the 1970s was Los Toltecas en Aztlán, whose very name signiĀed an orientation ­toward the past. In contrast, the name “Border Art Workshop” was unpoetic, deliberately devoid of the rich matrix of associations signiĀed by Los Toltecas. Stylistically, baw/t af members avoided the folkloricism and Aztec iconography that marked Chicano movement art, embracing instead conceptual and installation practices then current in the art world. They drew attention not to the glories of the Aztec past but to racist repre­sen­ ta­tions of Mexican immigrants in the local press and to civil rights violations perpetrated by Border Patrol agents and right-­wing vigilantes. Instead of demonstrating the endurance of the Aztec heritage, they demonstrated the binationalism and biculturalism of the border region, pointing out that the border has produced a speciĀc and living culture that spans the divide of the international border. Moreover, it was pres­ent real­ity that mattered to them. They shifted the focus of the Centro from the past to the pres­ent, from the Aztec homeland to the borderlands. Increasingly through the 1980s and into the 1990s the Centro showcased the border rather than Aztlán. “Real­ity” was the theme and rubric of the baw/t af . Its Ārst exhibition (at the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco) was titled Border Realities, and its subsequent (and annual) exhibitions at the Centro in Sa n Diego ­were always titled Border Realities, followed by a r oman numeral (Border Realities I, II, III, IV, e­ tc.). A retrospective cata­log produced by baw/t af in 1988 contains a “General Statement” that serves, effectively, as a manifesto. ­Here, too, the word “real­ity” appears. Although the statement was published four years into baw/t af ’s history, its tenets ­were pres­ent at its beginning. I t herefore cite it ­here, italicizing and emphasizing key engagements: baw/t af , the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, is a g roup of Mexican, American, and Chicano artists working . . . ​to discover and deĀne

the myriad levels of a border consciousness. Using the past history and pres­ent realities of the San Diego/Tijuana border region baw/t af members incorporate image, text, media analy­sis and per­formance to reveal the negative aspects of ethnocentricism and the new growing dynamics of borderland cultural multiplicity. baw/t af does not recognize cultural borders but is extremely concerned with the border between pres­ent and ­future. If the United States–­Mexican border is to become a region of ­human cooperation and cultural consciousness then Mexicans and North Americans must establish a pro­cess of social dialogue to deal with the many prob­lems now confronting them.45

Additionally, the work of baw/t af artists operated with a di f­fer­ent sense of place from that of movement activists. Where Aztlán was the symbol of an enduring place attachment of ancestral origination, a territory that some activists attempted to locate as a Āxed and stable entity on a map, baw/t af artists, focusing on the immediate and pres­ent real­ity of the borderlands, made work that was place-­specific—­grounded in the particulars of the San Diego–­Tijuana border ­region, which they viewed as a liminal zone of dynamic interchange between cultures. Moreover, most members viewed the border as a m eta­phor for the Chicano experience—­a liminal subjectivity disjunctively and at once Indian and Eu­ro­pean, Mexican and United States, self and other, at-­ home and not-­at-­home. Where “homeland” and “nationhood” had been key engagements for activists within the Chicano movement, members of the baw/t af focused on “the border.” The term “border” operated as a key trope for the collective, signifying at once a material geographic real­ity, a set of relations between and among p ­ eople, and a p ower­ful visual symbol evocative of crisis, upheaval, disorientation, mobility, migrancy, exile, and deterritorialization. Home is the absent half of ­these extremes. Not surprisingly, the domestic is a frequent motif in baw/t af art and in t he work of artists who moved on from baw/t af .46 The following four examples serve to illustrate baw/t af ’s focus on the domestic.

Example 1: The End of the Line (1986)— ­the Border as a Utopic Domestic Space

While much baw/t af art was about crisis and upheaval, The End of the Line offered a utopic vision of a borderless ­future. It was performed on October 12,1986, Columbus Day, as a site-­speciĀc per­for­mance at the end of the border fence where Tijuana and San Diego meet at the PaciĀc Ocean. (In t­ hose days the fence ended where the sand begins, so the beach itself was unmarked by a boundary, and beachgoers could move freely across the sand from country to country. In 1990 the fence was extended several hundred feet into the PaciĀc Ocean, making the international border impassable to foot traffic at the beach.) One of the ideas driving the event was to challenge the media repre­sen­ta­tion of the border as a “war zone”—as was common in t he local and national press.47 To this end, participants enacted a communal meal across the international divide. The rectangular ­table around which they gathered was painted to resemble a s egment of freeway. Initially, the t­ able was placed so that its lengthwise axis both paralleled and straddled an imaginary borderline that extended from the border fence t­ oward the ocean from east to west. Before sitting down to share food, performers picked up the ­table and turned it ninety degrees so that its length ran north-­south, thereby suggesting a “freeway” between Mexico and the United States. For a second time they rotated the ­table so that its lengthwise axis again straddled the borderline, seating Mexican participants in Mexico, and Anglos and Chicanos in U.S. territory. Then they exchanged places, entering “illegally” into one another’s countries, thereby underscoring the artiĀciality of the border. Reaching across the imaginary line, they passed food across the ­table and held hands, transforming a s pace of division—­the reputed “war zone”—­into one of harmony. Gathering around a ­table and sharing food evokes ­family, the domestic, home, a s pace of welcome and hospitality. If only for an after­noon, The End of the Line transformed a site of division

The Spa ces o f Home  ·  359

and separate national identity into a b orderless freeway, a u topic zone of intercultural familial harmony. Example 2: 911: A House Gone Wrong (1987)— ­the Border as a Dystopic Domestic Space

Where The End of the Line conveyed the possibility of utopia at the border, 911 highlighted the sense of crisis, strug­gle, and upheaval that more characteristically marks the border zone. Performed in 1987  in a small storefront (administered by the La Jolla Museum of Con­temporary Art) in downtown San Diego, the artists created an odd domestic space that was part fun ­house, part ruin, part horror movie set. Subtitled House Gone Wrong, the installation blended two markedly dif­fer­ent yet characteristic h ­ ouses in t he border zone: a s uburban tract h ­ ouse, typical of middle-­class housing developments in Sa n Diego, and a “ Cartolandia” (cardboard land) makeshift cardboard shack, typically found in the poorer colonias of Tijuana. This hybrid domestic space was topsy-­turvy—­a meta­phor for the chaos of the border zone. Instead of a cei ling for overhead cover, the artists created a lawn with lawnmower, which hung over the heads of visitors like a suburban sword of Damocles; the floor was made of roof shingles; doors and win­ dows ­were hung upside down; a flagstone walkway traversed the lawn ceiling overhead; and the medicine cabinet was a reliquary packed with drugs. In reference to the telephone number of the title, a busy signal insistently repeated its irritating beep, suggesting that the emergency number was e­ ither out of order or overloaded—­and, by implication, that the border was in a s tate of crisis with no help forthcoming. Adding to the sound w ­ ere loudspeakers broadcasting news bulletins about po­liti­cal crises in C entral Amer­i­ca and the border, and the crooning sounds of the old Gene Pitney pop song “Town without Pity,” whose melancholic lyr­ics seemed particularly suited to San Diego. In baw/t af ’s view, domestic tranquility at the border has turned to chaos, intimate havens

360  ·  jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

have become nightmarish, and disorder reigns on both sides. The border is represented as a place of dystopic dissonance. This “domestic sanctuary” is characterized by dysfunctionality. Example 3: Richard A. Lou’s Border Door (1988)— ­the Border as Doorway from a Domestic Space to a Global ­Labor Market

Richard A. Lou’s Border Door references the experience of border crossers who leave their homes in Mexico to seek work in t he U.S.A. but lack papers authorizing residence and employment (Āg.  34.1). Created in M ay  1988, in r esponse to an invitation from the baw/t af to contribute to its annual Border Realities show, the piece was installed on the borderline one quarter mile east of Tijuana’s Rodriguez International Airport, seven feet from the main highway. Although made in r esponse to a baw/t af invitation, no member of the workshop ever saw the piece in situ—­although they did s ee photo­graphs—­for it was destroyed (presumably by the Border Patrol) within two days. It has nonetheless become an icon in the history of the workshop and is given a two-­page spread in baw/t af ’s cata­log. Lou describes the piece as follows: “It was a f reestanding door and it worked. It was painted gold. The frame was blue with gray in i t. And ­there ­were 134 detachable keys on the south side. Th ­ ey’re on nails on the door. It was an installation but it was also a per­for­mance piece, ­because in addition to installing it, the other aspect of the per­for­mance was ­going to the neighborhood where I grew up, the Colonia Roma, starting at the h ­ ouse where I grew up, walking to the other neighborhood where my wife grew up, where I handed out between 200 and 300 keys and invited ­people to use my border door, to open it with a k ey and cross the border with dignity. The keys on the door ­were for the ­people I ­couldn’t encounter.”48 Lou further explained that the piece “­really had a lot to do with growing up on the border” and was “speciĀc” to his grand­mother and wife, who had both experienced humiliation and closed doors when attempting to cross into the U.S.A.

FIG. 34.1. Richard A. Lou, Border Door, 1988. Installation view, dimensions variable. Photo by James Elliott. Image courtesy of the artist.

As he put it, “The piece was dedicated to my wife ­ ecause she was an undocumented mi­grant ­here b in the U.S. supporting her f­ amily. When I Ārst met her she was still an undocumented worker and in our Ārst few months of courtship she was thrown out by the Immigration and Naturalization Ser­vice. They came and raided the store where she worked and she was put u ­ nder arrest. That history infused the piece. It’s very much infused with the emotional, po­liti­cal, and ideological conflicts I had as a young man with this par­tic­u­lar border.”49 Infused with his own life experiences, Lou’s Border Door is marked by place attachment. But his place attachment is dif­fer­ent from that which Chicano activists felt for Aztlán. Followers of Alurista’s poetics of nostalgia saw Aztlán as an idyllic homeland, an Eden to which

they would one day return; in co ntrast, Lou’s place attachment to the San Diego–­Tijuana border zone was imbued with deep conflict. It was his home, but also a place where t­ hose he loved had been made to feel not-­at-­home, illegal, not welcome. His attachment to the border, his compulsion to make art ­there, arose out of the rootedness of familial, cultural, and social relationships that made it pregnant with meaning for him. But it was meaning fraught with ambivalence and conflict. Lou explained that he intended his Border Door to offer an alternate experience (albeit symbolic) to mi­grant workers who cross the border “like animals,” crawling u ­ nder barbed wire or through drainage pipes and then r­ unning in the darkness. It was, he said, “an alternative for The Spa ces o f Home  ·  361

shameful crossing,” a way “to ­counter the image of the undocumented mi­grant ­running in t he night, cutting the wire, being illegal, ­because if you have the key to a door and you enter through it, then y­ ou’re ­legal and y­ ou’re walking into a place to which you have the key.”50 The place to which most ­people “have the key” is their home, their front door, a threshold that admits them to intimacy and security. Lou’s Border Door, while attempting to transform the border from a place of interdiction to one of open passage, references a home left ­behind. It opens to potential danger and the unknown as well as to new possibilities. His image emblematizes what Yi-­Fu Tuan has called a h ome-­centered or “domicentric” view of ­human experience as well as the “domifuge questing myth”51 of the voyager, the adventurer, who goes forth into the world, taking risks in alien places in order to live.52 Just as Lou’s relationship to the border is marked by ambivalence, so too his door articulates a binary set of meanings around home. Lou’s photo­graphs of the Border Door show the barbed wire fence that separates the U.S.A. from Mexico as ineffectual, destroyed, tramped down by the nameless thousands of undocumented mi­grants who have made the journey northward. While the worn domestic aspect of the door serves to domesticate the border, shifting emphasis from the concept of the border as a militarized zone to one inflected by the private and domestic, it also makes the point that global economic forces have a power­ful impact on domestic life. While the Border Door opens onto the United States and new opportunities, it also speaks of the wrenching loss of homeland, home, and ­family. Place-­Particular Border Art

What t­ hese three examples have in co mmon is a rootedness in the dynamics of the San Diego–­ Tijuana border region, a r ootedness that stems from long-­term dwelling. The palpably intimate relationship of ­these artists to the border led critic Jeff Kelley to describe their work as “a

362  ·  jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

place-­particular theater of po­liti­cal spectacle,” for they are “artists who make art about, in, and of the place where they live,”53 the border being both “their home and their work.”54 When Kelley references “home,” he seems to use the word in its most common sense—­denoting a p lace of belonging, familiarity, intimacy, roots, bonding, and attachment. Although this relationship to the border characterized the work of most baw/t af artists, the situation was more complex for the most illustrious member of the collective, Guillermo Gómez-­Peña. Example 4: Gómez-­Peña and the “Unhomely” Life

Gómez-­Peña came to the United States from Mexico City in 1978 and was thus Indigenous to the core rather than the periphery. L ­ ater, when he became famous, his relocation from the center to the margin became an issue for Indigenous border artists who accused him of having exploited and commercialized the border to advance his own art.55 But for Gómez-­Peña an organic relationship to the border was never an issue b ­ ecause for him the “border” was always a mobile, elastic, and theorizable concept—­much more so than for other members of the baw/t af , who tended to treat it as a site-­speciĀc geopo­liti­cal demarcation that was secondarily inflected with symbolic and psychological resonances. For Gómez-­Peña the border was primarily symbolic and psychological. For him it was more a mode of consciousness than a geo­graph­i­cal zone. It was a locational meta­phor that aptly signiĀed a co ndition of homelessness or deterritorialization, which he describes as “a pro­cess . . . ​of loss, displacement or distancing from one’s own culture.”56 Although home is a refrain in Gómez-­Peña’s essays and per­for­mance texts, it is presented as an impossibility, something he has not known, nor expects to know. His identity is predicated not on home but on nomadism. Indeed, he pres­ents the very concept of identity as problematic, viewing it as subject to constant displacement, ever in a state of mobilization, never realized, but accumulated through space and over time in a sequence

of kaleidoscopic perspectives. In this worldview, home is always an absence, a place of rupture that can never be restored. For Gómez-­Peña, home is that place of rupture: “I live smack in the Āssure between two worlds, in the infected wound: half a block from the end of western civilization and four miles from the beginning of the Mexican/ American border, the northernmost point of Latin Amer­i­ca.”57 Gómez-­Peña wrote this while living in San Diego, literally in the border zone, his residence from 1978 to 1991. Three years ­after he had moved away, he reflected on this period and wrote, “The border became my home, my base of operations, and my laboratory for social and artistic experimentation.”58 On a s uperĀcial reading he seems to use the word “home” in its customary meaning—to reference an enclosure of shelter, familiarity, settlement. But “Āssure,” “infected wound,” “border,” and a limin al zone “between two worlds” are not usual descriptors for home. Such anomalous inflections should alert us that when the poet claims that the border “became [his] home,” he means it in b oth a literal and a meta­phorical sense, but ultimately it is the meta­phorical sense that carries most weight. Beginning with Warrior for Gringostroika, and continuing through his subsequent books, liminality, “borderness,”59 and border crossing are Gómez-­Peña’s constant themes. Just as Aztlán, according to Leal, shifted from a s peciĀc location on a m ap to “the most intimate part of [a Chicano’s] being,”60 so too the border becomes an intimate part of Gómez-­Peña’s being, something that he carries with him, n ot restricted to po­ liti­cal geography, not a stable line on a map, but part of his own restless awareness that “Home is always somewhere ­else. Home is both ‘­here’ and ‘­there’ or somewhere in between. Sometimes it’s nowhere.”61 Feeling himself unanchored by home and country, in 1987 he wrote, “­Today, eight years ­after my departure from Mexico, when they ask me for my nationality or ethnic identity, I ­can’t respond with one word, since my ‘identity’ now possesses multiple repertories: I a m Mexican but I a m also Chicano and Latin American. At the border they call me chilango or mexiquillo; in

Mexico City it’s pocho or norteño; and in Eu­rope it’s sudaca. The Anglos call me ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino,’ and the Germans have, on more than one occasion, confused me with Turks or Italians. I walk amid the rubble of the Tower of Babel of my American post-­modernity.”62 Just as identiĀcation with patria, homeland, dis­appears in G ómez-­Peña’s work, so too does traditional paternal protection of f­ amily, of his child. In “Real-­Life Border Thriller”63 Gómez-­ Peña recounts an incident that took place in San Diego in 1993 when police apprehended and ­detained him o n suspicion of kidnapping the blond, blue-­eyed boy in hi s com­pany—­his son Guillermito. Two ­women had observed him—­a dark-­skinned man of Latin descent—­parting from a fair-­skinned, red-­headed ­woman—­his ex-­wife—­with a sm all blond boy—­their child—­ with whom he entered a taxi. Convinced that the multiracialism of this trio signaled something dangerously awry, the w ­ omen notiĀed the police, who in turn dispatched he­li­cop­ters and citywide units to comb the streets in search of the Mexican kidnapper of a white child. Fearing that the suspect might cross the border with the child, units ­were sent to the international line, and the Border Patrol was alerted. With information from the cab driver about the address where he had dropped off the suspect, armed police surrounded and then entered and searched the ­house. But Gómez-­Peña and Guillermito had gone out for a walk. When they returned, Gómez-­ Peña was arrested and detained. Although the situation was eventually resolved—by Gómez-­Peña showing his press card and threatening negative publicity for the San Diego Police—­the child was distressed by the incident and grew anxious that outings with his f­ ather ­were invitations to danger. Reflecting on the incident in his article, Gómez-­ Peña is a­ ppalled that tragedy might have ensued from interpreting a father-­son outing as an interracial, intercultural crime. For this border crosser—­resident of the ­in-­between, of the rupture—­the ordinariness of paternal care becomes charged with the uncanny, with what Bhabha has termed the “unhomely,” The Spa ces o f Home  ·  363

the moment that ­causes the terriĀed subject to take the mea­sure of his divided and disorienting dwelling.64 In Bhabha’s terms, Gómez-­Peña lives the “unhomely” life, characterized by an “estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world . . . ​[where] the recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions.”65 ­Because of racial prejudice in the social fabric, a ­father is suspected of kidnapping his child, the public domain invades the private, and the subjects of that invasion are confronted with a p rofound awareness of division and disorientation. Whereas par­tic­u­lar events may trigger especially acute awareness of this condition, disorientation and division are permanent characteristics of Gómez-­Peña’s being, eliciting his recognition that “no ­matter where I wa s, I wa s always on ‘the other side,’ feeling ruptured and incomplete, ever longing for my other selves, my other home and tribe.”66 Although a cer tain melancholia of solitude inflects his keen awareness of this state, ­there is also exultation at the freedom such ungrounded fluidity affords. Thus he writes, “I have learned to accept the advantages and disadvantages of being a ‘border citizen,’ which means I am always the other, but I get to choose my identity. Depending on the context, I can be a Mexican, a post-­Mexican, a C hicano, a chica-­lango (half-­ chicano and half-­chilango), a L atin American, a trans-­American, or an American—in the widest sense of the term.”67 Not only does Gómez-­Peña “accept . . . ​being a ‘border citizen,’ ” he chooses it, noting, at one point, “I . . . ​opt for ‘borderness’ and assume my role.”68 The role Gómez-­Peña assumes is that of cultural worker facilitating intercultural dialogue among ethnic groups, creating, via art, a map of a world without borders, a new utopian cartography that he calls the “Fourth World.” ­Here, he notes, “­there is very ­little place for static identities, Āxed nationalities, ‘pure’ languages, or sacred cultural transitions. The members of the Fourth World live between and across vari­ous cultures, communities, and countries.”69 It is, of course, a description of himself. He is the ambassador of 364  ·  jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

this Fourth World, working together with a small league of deracinated artists who view the role of the artist as social thinker, cultural diplomat, broker between communities and cultures, embodiments of hybridized border subjectivities who know not the stabilities of homeland, home, and ­family, for they are cosmopolites, citizens of the world, voluntarily assuming dispatriation to further a new world order. Self-­described as belonging to a leg ion of ­“escaped convicts . . . ​migratory intellectuals, smugglers of ideas and cultural ‘polleros,’ ”70 Gómez-­ Peña’s place of shelter in a s trange city is, Āttingly, not a ­hotel—­which, as James Clifford writes, “suggests an older form of gentlemanly occidental travel.”71 Instead, he goes to the home of a friend. Gómez-­Peña is on the run, undertaking a “ journey . . . ​full of dangers and uncertainty,”72 Ānding shelter, however fragile, by the grace of friends and coconspirators. Phase 3 (Mid-1990s to the Pres­ent): The Postborder Condition and the Concept of Home

Where phase 2 i s about the establishment of a borderland consciousness (both geo­graph­i­cally grounded and free-­floating) that basically denies the barrier of the international line between the U.S.A. and Mexico, phase 3 acknowledges—­ indeed, insists upon—­this barrier. Phase 3 differs from the Ārst phase in not being about nationality or homeland, and from the second in not making liminality a s eminal issue. Instead, it offers a co mbinatorial consciousness of a b inational identity that is both rooted in t he border zone and worldly, both committed to a p olitics of location and keenly aware of the hyperspace of postmodernity. Michael Dear refers to this as the “postborder condition” and to its visual art production as “postborder art.”73 Although Dear Ārst wrote about this condition in 2002, its manifestation in the visual arts can be identiĀed earlier in t he work of artists associated with InSITE, a t ransborder arts

­ rgan­ization that staged art proj­ects on both sides o of the San Diego–­Tijuana border in 1992, 1994, 1997, and 2000–200 1 and has plans to do so again in the ­future.74 Briefly, the facts about InSITE that are relevant to my argument are (1) that it has, since its inception, staged art at scattered sites on both sides of the border; (2) that InSITE, although administered from San Diego, is a binational proj­ ect in w hich vari­ous cultural, educational, and po­liti­cal institutions from Baja California and Mexico City are involved at an orga­nizational level; (3) that InSITE’s directors are as dedicated to promoting the bicultural and binational dimensions of InSITE as to sponsoring quality art proj­ects; (4) that InSITE is part of a globalized art world in which sponsoring institutions fly in artists from many dif­fer­ent points around the globe and from the many dif­fer­ent (but also similar) international biennials where they have installed their work and established their reputations; and (5) that most of InSITE’s artists are foreign to the region, with only a sm all minority being local, and that the nonregional artists are flown in for brief residencies to enable them, if they choose, to make work that connects in some way to the dynamics of this border zone. InSITE is part of and a co ntributor to the “postborder” condition: it operates in a world in which “the border,” having become a m eta­phor for a co ndition of deracinated subjectivity, has been disembedded from a li teral connection to a site-­speciĀc border, and has in fac t become a theme in art world discourse; at the same time, InSITE operates at the border—­a signiĀcant place with a real purchase on social life. InSITE’s most in­ter­est­ing artists have made work that addresses the “postborder” condition, many of them via the thematic of ­family, ­house, and home. In what follows, I discuss the work of two artists who are from this region: Sheldon Brown, based in Sa n Diego, and Marcos Ramirez e rre (or e rre , as he prefers to be called), who lives in Tijuana. Whilst I ac knowledge that artists from elsewhere have contributed perceptive insights about this region, my focus on home in

the borderlands is directed t­ oward artists whose experiences ­here have extended beyond residencies of a few weeks. The example of Brown’s work, discussed below, was commissioned by InSITE. Of e rre ’s work, the Ārst two examples that I discuss ­were for InSITE; the third was for Mixed Feelings: Art and Culture in the Postborder Metropolis, an exhibition at the Fisher Gallery at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Example 1: Sheldon Brown’s Mi casa es tu casa (My Home Is Your Home) (1997)

Sheldon Brown is director of the Center for ­Research in Computing and the Arts at the University of California in San Diego. He produced Mi casa es tu casa for InSITE 97 at two sites: one in Sa n Diego (the ­Children’s Museum), the other in Mexico City (the Multimedia Center of the National Center for the Arts). Each was created as a n etworked, interactive, virtual real­ity environment that permitted ­children between the ages of four and twelve at the two locations to “play h ­ ouse” together. Each site was equipped with identical physical setups: a room with a variety of play­house activities that included a dressup area, a building area, and a geography center for exploring the world. The ­children’s actions and interactions ­were input into a computer via video camera and transducer inputs. Actions in each space triggered events in t he shared virtual environment located in each space—­a large video projection on a wall of the physical play­ house environment. Within this virtual environment, the positions and actions of the ­children ­were mapped to a character they constructed by playing virtual dress-up from a virtual wardrobe. As ­children moved through the ­actual, physical space, their virtual doubles moved through the virtual environment, and their actions and movements ­were mediated to the other site in real time via the internet. The images in the two cities ran asynchronously from each other, resulting in a constant slippage of a­ ctual space from mediated space. The proj­ect was a wa y to examine how

The Spa ces o f Home  ·  365

c­ hildren of dif­fer­ent nationalities and cultures, living in cities far distant from one another, had begun to construct their worlds, and to invite them to connect ­those worlds by playing ­house together.75 In other words, the proj­ect was open to exploring difference arising out of embodied location while offering pathways for connection in hyperspace. Brown was drawn to the cliché of the title—­Mi casa es tu casa—­because its sentiments are open, warm, and inclusive. And ­because the phrase is a cliché, it was not necessary to translate it. He wanted to make ­children aware that the world is something that we construct, that the new geography of cyberspace can reach across nationality and class difference to create a space of embrace so that your h ­ ouse becomes mine, and mine, yours. By using the familiar, humanistic image of a ­house as the basis for virtual connections in hyperspace, he succeeded in creating an embodied intimacy—­embedded in t he concreteness of the space we call home—­while working with the disembodying and deterritorializing technologies of globalization. Mobilizing the “frontier technology” of the internet,76 his proj­ect worked ­toward a utopic postborder world that acknowledged difference while seeking ave­nues for exchange and connection. Assuming that U.S. ­children are more technologically savvy than Mexican ­children, administrators at the two sites ­were concerned that the proj­ect would empower U.S. ­children, thereby highlighting unevenness in national competence in technology. But, Brown informed me, this was not an issue at all, for “you could not detect nationality or class from the interaction.” However, “with older kids, you started to detect gender: older girls of twelve, thirteen, are more self-­conscious, and boys become more aggressive; but ­until ages eight or nine you could not tell gender differences.”77 According to Brown, younger c­ hildren at both sites ­were equally uninhibited in t ransgressing spatial bound­aries—an observation that bears out the claim by Nick Bingham et al. that “when it comes to cyberspace, it is not, by and large, the adults but rather the ­children who comprise 366  ·  jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

the more ‘competent’ cohort.”78 It is ­these young ­children who are Donna Haraway’s “cyborgs-­ without-­sex” holding out possibilities of transformation.79 ­After age and gender, the next most distinct difference was generated not by nationality but by suburban and urban experience, biculturalism and cosmopolitanism, with the Ārst term in each coupling characterizing San Diego, and the second characterizing Mexico City. Brown observed that biculturalism, bilingualism, and binational identity are more characteristic of ­children in San Diego than in Mexico City, which is more oriented ­toward a w orld stage. He surmised that, had the proj­ect also been staged in Tijuana, Tijuana would have been more similar to San Diego than to Mexico City, for residents of Tijuana are similarly marked by biculturalism, bilingualism, and binationality. Example 2: ERRE’s C ­ entury 21(1994) at the Civic Center in Tijuana

e rre , a native Tijuanese, spent nineteen years working in the construction industry in Tijuana, San Diego, and Orange Counties. In 1989 he began making art. Not surprisingly, given his work experience and location, much of his art is about housing and home in t he borderlands and draws on skills learned in the construction trade. His Ārst signiĀcant proj­ect was in 1994 when, as part of InSITE, he constructed a makeshift shanty ­house on the concrete plaza of Tijuana’s Centro Cultural (cecu t )—­the jewel in t he crown of this border town. He named it ­Century 21—at once a play on the name of a major real estate com­pany that sells homes in the United States, a comment on the horrendous conditions that constitute home for millions who live on the margins of cap­i­tal­ist prosperity, and a prophesy that such conditions would continue into the twenty-­Ārst ­century. The shack revealed erre ’s familiarity with the shantytowns that have been and continue to be part of the urban fabric of Tijuana’s poorest neighborhoods, for he constructed it of cardboard, corrugated iron, old tires, rebar, and plywood. Visitors

­ ere permitted to enter the ­simple one-­room space w and to observe its tidy domesticity: plastic flowers in a vase on the plastic-­covered ­table, a tele­vi­sion screen given pride of place. Beside the structure was the ironic frame-­up: a sham ­Century 21 “For Sale” sign, a photographic display with tongue-­in-­ cheek advertising of scenic canyon vistas, and an arrangement of building plans and permits presenting the structure as a legitimate real estate investment opportunity. e rre ’s fragile shack referenced not only the poverty of Tijuana’s most desperate colonias (urban quarters) but also an earlier spatial history in the River Zone (where the concrete plaza and the cecu t now stand), for ­until the late 1970s this was a residential area, Cartolandia, occupied by thousands of poor families in cr ude cardboard shelters. In the late 1960s the Mexican government, having concluded that the squatter community constituted a threat to Tijuana’s ­future economic well-­being, set out to reclaim the valuable flatland of the riverbed for commercial, residential, institutional, and tourist development. To that end, in 1972, the government evacuated approximately three thousand squatter families. In 1978 the pro­cess of removal was intensiĀed, and the state forced from their homes about 40,000 residents who lived in co lonias along the floodplain of the riverbed. They bulldozed Cartolandia, destroying the homes of approximately 25,000 residents, flooded the homes of residents who hung on, cemented the riverbed, and began to develop plans for the cecu t and the rest of the River Zone.80 Millions w ­ ere spent, making this the largest public development program in the history of the city. Designed in the “international style” and completed in 1982, the cecu t , with its Disneyland-­ inspired bola, surrounding malls, and modern and postmodern buildings, draws Tijuana closer to the urban landscape of downtown San Diego, making it a co mfortable entry point for North American tourists. Indeed, it is now one of the three principal tourist areas in T ijuana, and its shopping malls are a m agnet for many San Diegans (even Los Angelenos) who regularly cross

the border to stock up on cheap phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, makeup, alcohol, and gift items. e rre ’s ­Century 21 reinscribed the seemingly innocent spatiality of the cecu t with the relations of power that underlie its repressed history, bringing the poverty of Cartolandia into the upscale civic modernism and postmodernism of Tijuana’s acclaimed cecu t , reminding city residents and tourists that beneath Tijuana’s icon of big-­city status lies a history of homes and lives destroyed. While e rre ’s art was clearly and obviously a comment on official spatial politics in Tijuana and Mexico City, it also (if obliquely) referenced Tijuana’s relationship to the U.S.A., for the spatial politics that govern Tijuana’s land use are driven by that city’s linkage to and integration within the economy of Southern California. e rre ’s ­Century 21 shack referenced both the local history of Tijuana and the dynamic of transborder, postborder development. Example 3: ERRE’s Toy an Horse (1997) at the San Ysidro Border Crossing

e rre ’s second proj­ect for InSITE—­his Toy an Horse for InSITE 97—­continues and extends ­these engagements. The title plays on Homer’s story in t he Iliad in w hich a wooden h ­ orse, devised by the besieging Greeks as an instrument of war, was perceived by the beleaguered Trojans as a gift offering. They took it into their city, thereby permitting the Greeks hidden w ithin the cavity of its belly to overrun and defeat them. e rre ’s ­horse, like that in the ancient story, was made of wood. With its angular lines and clear silhouette, its aesthetic referenced that of archaic Greece. However, it differed from Homer’s ­horse in being two-­headed, looking at once in t wo directions: both north and south, ­toward the U.S.A. and ­toward Mexico. Throughout InSITE 97, and for a y ear thereafter, Toy an Horse straddled the U.S.-­Mexico borderline at the San Ysidro port of entry. The bidirectionality of its gaze in sisted that viewers acknowledge that traffic at the border goes both ways, that the cultures on ­either side p enetrate

The Spa ces o f Home  ·  367

one another equally in ways and to degrees that are both evident and not yet known, that this trafĀc is both a “gift” from one culture to the other and a way of profoundly disturbing the other’s social fabric. With its body over the borderline and a head in each of the two countries that share that line, the ­horse proclaimed binationality. While it clearly and obviously referenced the Trojan ­horse, it spoke also of other classical mythologies that return us to the theme of h ­ ouse and home. In its two-­headed aspect, the ­horse invoked Janus, the double-­headed Roman god who presided over gates, archways, entry­ways, thresholds, and beginnings. Indeed, the deistic, double-­headed, and domiciliary associations of the ­horse go back even further than the Roman (urban quarters) Janus, for they reach to the pre-­ Hellenistic past, to the god from whom Janus’s own attributes descend: Hermes, many-­headed god of transitions, guardian of doors and limits, of entrances to cities and crossways, of trespassing, of merchants, thieves, and ­others who use roads, ancient symbol of mobility and of relations with strangers. For the ancients, Hermes was one half of a dyadic c­ ouple. His partner and polar opposite was Hestia, goddess of stillness, settling down, Āxed identity, enclosing and keeping, of the circular hearth at the center of the h ­ ouse, of the sphere of ­women who keep watch at home. A dif­fer­ent form of hospitality is associated with each of t­ hese gods: Hermes, favoring an exchange of gifts, might accept the stranger as an equal, but as a s tranger nonetheless. Hestia, on the other hand, might receive a stranger into the closest circle of the h ­ ouse on condition that the stranger squat before her at the hearth. The stranger, now drawn into the domestic hierarchy, ceases to be a stranger and is taken into the oikos (house­hold). Viewed thus, e rre ’s Toy an Horse becomes a pregnant symbol of both rootedness and mobility, of identity and change. Indeed, e rre ’s ­horse can be viewed as a variant of Lou’s Border Door. Both at once signify the domifuge questing myth of the adventurer taking risks in alien places and the domicentric stillness of ­those who stay home. 368  ·  jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

Interestingly, whereas Lou’s Border Door was destroyed shortly ­after he created it (presumably by the Border Patrol), U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents became so attached to e rre ’s ­horse that they asked InSITE’s administrators not to remove it at the end of the contractual period. It remained ­there for a year, bestriding the borderline like a deity, a compelling if enigmatic monument to the power­ful forces that induce travelers to leave home, cross a b order, exchange gifts as equals, even, perhaps, cease to be strangers and be accepted into the oikos.81 The references to the ancient world remind us that ­these themes have a long history and a wide dispersion—­although the rate and scale at which they occur at San Ysidro would have been unimaginable to the ancients. Example 4: ERRE’s Walls/Muros (2002)—­Constructing Homes in “Places” and “Non-­places” in the Borderlands

In 2002 e rre again treated the theme of home in the borderlands, this time for Mixed Feelings: Art and Culture in the Postborder Metropolis, at the University of Southern California’s Fisher Gallery. This proj­ect brings additional dimensions to the discussion of home. The installation, Walls/Muros, consisted of two large parallel walls separated by six in ches. One wall was made of two-­by-­six-­inch wooden scaffolding framing studs, the other of brick. Projected onto screens on each wall ­were short videos. The wooden scaffolding represented the U.S. side. ­Here a t eam of highly coordinated Mexican workers machine-­assembled a f rame wall by using power saws and nail guns—an aggressive, rapid-­Āre, efficient construction proj­ ect. B ­ ehind them ­were scores of similarly constructed scaffolds—­housing as a co rporate enterprise, marked by the anonymous uniformity of assembly-­line princi­ples so that each h ­ ouse becomes indistinguishable from t­ hose on e­ ither side of it. The video also showed the workers eating lunch—­not brown-­bagged from home, not shared among them, but purchased from a food industry lunch-­vending van that circulates

from ­labor site to l­abor site, dispensing identical items made by anonymous hands at some food-­ processing plant. Th ­ ese the workers consumed in ­silent absorption, lined up in a row against a wall to give their tired backs support—an arrangement not conducive to social interaction. The brick side r epresented Mexico. H ­ ere the video showed Mexican workers building a brick-­ and-­mortar wall using traditional labor-­intensive methods, seemingly a l­abor of love as each brick was carefully placed in its own bed of concrete. When the lunch break came, workers collaborated in s etting up a m akeshift grill on which to warm tortillas brought from home. Drawn together around their hearth in s olidary connection, more ­family now than strangers, they shared talk as well as food. Although both sets of home-­building workers ­were Mexican, they seemed worlds apart. In devising this proj­ect, e rre meant, as he wrote, to refer not “strictly to the quality of the Ānished work, or to the ability to develop and culminate a proj­ect, but to each and ­every characteristic and situation of everyday life that accompanies the pro­cess.”82 In this statement he lets us know that ­these dif­fer­ent approaches to home building are synecdoches for lifestyles. His video directs viewers to conclude that the assembly-­line pro­cess of home building in the U.S.A. disembeds workers from ethnic roots, alienating, atomizing, and rendering them less ­human. Workers in Tijuana, on the other hand, are still connected to older, more traditional, more communitarian ways of constructing their physical and social worlds. e rre has romanticized Tijuana, presenting it as an instance of what Marc Augé has called an “anthropological place”—an ideal Gemeinschaft 83 of “the organically social,”84 where interactivity and productivity occur according to a s low rhythm that sustains a link between the pres­ent and the past and where routine actions preserve social connection. Although e rre does not reference Augé, Augé’s categories of place and “non-­place” can be usefully applied to his proj­ect. Just as e rre ’s repre­sen­ta­tion of home building in T i-

juana suggests Augé’s concept of anthropological place, so his repre­sen­ta­tion of home building in San Diego suggests Augé’s concept of “non-­place”—­ that which is not “relational, or historical, or concerned with identity”85—­a form of locational experience which Augé calls “supermodernity.”86 Although the examples Augé offers—­hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, airports, and railway stations87—do not include suburban tract housing developments, they might have, for t­ hese Āt his criteria of non-­places in n ot being relational, or historical, or concerned with identity. In such proj­ects each ­house is a replicant of ­every other h ­ ouse in a locale devoid of organic relation to community (although such non-­places may, over time, transform into places where social relations become embedded). It is, perhaps, surprising that e rre has ­here drawn such a simplistic contrast between home building and lifestyles in Tijuana and San Diego, for the preceding examples of his work discussed above revealed a keen awareness of the imbrication of ­these two border cities. His ­Century 21, for example, spoke of housing policy in Tijuana that disrupted organic settlement to put an upscale postmodern face on the city’s center—­a move driven by Tijuana’s dynamic growth as a border town. His Toy an Horse revealed his awareness that culture in t­ hese borderlands is about transit, interchange, crossroads, and passage, with Tijuana invaded by San Diego culture, and San Diego by Tijuana. e rre , who has accumulated a vast photographic archive of Tijuana, is fully aware of that city’s hybrid culture, knows that it is thoroughly deterritorialized, delocalized, bilingual, bicultural, binational, populated not only by the descendants of Tijuanese but also by immigrants from Oaxaca, Puebla, Michoacán, and the Federal District, as well as from other countries in South Amer­i­ca. Indeed, he is, himself, part of that hybridity—­bilingual, bicultural, binational—­ living in Tijuana, working in the U.S.A., exhibiting his art south of, at, and north of the border, as well as in countries marked by other borders. For what­ever reasons, erre , in Walls/Muros, succumbs to nostalgia, investing the domestic space in The Spa ces o f Home  ·  369

Tijuana, his homeland, with the qualities of intimate sanctuary even while he knows—or perhaps ­because he knows—­that no such sanctuary exists. His art gives us a world in a p ro­cess of rapid change in which the old is turned into a spectacle— or a specter: the ghost of Cartolandia, of the Trojan ­horse, of an older slower rhythm of constructing a home—­the combinatorial consciousness that marks the postborder condition. Conclusion

Clearly time and place ­matter ­here, for while this region actively participates in a nd is affected by globalization, it has, arguably, produced a distinct regional aesthetic with a unique history. Its artists have represented the borderlands as homeland, Eden regained, Aztlán, home-­not-­home, an ele­ ment of Chicano subjectivity, a set of relations between and among p ­ eople, a utopic domestic space, a dystopic domestic space, doorway to a global l­abor market, location of the unhomely, and location of a combinatorial consciousness that is both rooted in the border zone and worldly—­exemplifying Dear’s concept of “postborder art”: an aesthetic of “the in-­between spaces . . . ​manufactured from the archaeologies of past and emerging identities . . . ​ a repre­sen­ta­tional aesthetic concerned with the production of hybridities in t he liminal/interstitial bound­aries between po­liti­cal ideologies.”88 But even as we seek to construct an aesthetic of the in-­ between spaces, we must remind ourselves that, just as the border is porous, so too are the repre­ sen­ta­tions that seek, in va ri­ous ways, to map it. Their tidiness, their completion, both exceeds and falls short of the experiences of ­those who live in this region, or make contested passage through it, or die while attempting to cross to the other side. In the words of David Avalos, a native of the border region and a founding member of the baw / t a f, “The border is always more fantastic than it can ever be portrayed, or enacted.”89 In the same article Avalos went on to argue that the border had become “imploded,” collapsed “inwards ­towards the civic centers of the heartland.”90 What he was 370  ·  jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

referring to when he made this statement in 1996 was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986,91 which permitted agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Ser­vice to enter places of ­labor anywhere in the United States to determine the immigration status of any employee. This act made the border mobile, shifting it from a line that circumscribes the United States to a web that inĀltrates ­every aspect of life ­here. Avalos’s comments resonate anew for me on this morning of Monday, May  24, 2004, as I p repare to conclude this essay, for on the front page of the New York Times is an article with the subheading “ ‘virtual border’ planned.” It tells of a program “known as U.S.-­Visit and rooted partly in a Pentagon concept developed ­after the terrorist attacks of 2001, [that] seeks to supplant the nation’s physical borders with what officials call virtual borders. Such borders employ networks of databases and biometric sensors for identiĀcation at sites abroad where ­people seek visas to the United States.”92 With a virtual border in place, the ­actual border guard ­will become the last point of defense, rather than the Ārst, b ­ ecause each visitor ­will have already been screened by a global web of databases.93 The article notes that civil libertarians are concerned that such databases might be used to monitor not only foreign visitors but also U.S. citizens. It strikes me that, increasingly, as concerns about securing our “homeland” intersect with concerns about the erosion of liberty, we Ānd ourselves, with Anzaldúa, inhabiting “this thin edge of / b arbwire.”94 What repre­sen­ta­tions ­will artists come to make of home in ­these virtual borderlands? How ­will such repre­sen­ta­tions map the experience of life in a co untry ­under the problematic guardianship of a Department of Homeland Security? W ­ ill we, like Anzaldúa, Ānd ourselves “at home, a stranger”?95 Notes This chapter was originally published as Jo-­Anne Berelowitz, “The Spaces of Home in Chicano and Latino Repre­sen­ta­tions of the San Diego–­Tijuana Borderlands,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23, no. 3

(2005): 323–50. Reprinted by permission of and copyright © Pion Ltd. Epigraphs: Madan Sarup, “Home and Identity,” in Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, ed. Jon Bird et al. (London: Routledge, 1994), 95; Angelika Bammer, “Editorial,” New Formations: Journal of Culture/ Theory/Practice 1, no. 2 (1992): ix; Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), preface. 1. Angie Chabram and Rosa Linda Fregoso, “Chicana/o Cultural Repre­sen­ta­tions: Reframing Alternative Critical Discourses,” Cultural Studies 4 (1990): 203–12. 2. Michael Dear, “Introduction: Hitting Soft and Looking South,” Mixed Feelings: Art and Culture in the Postborder Metropolis, exhibition cata­log (Pasadena, CA: ­Castle Press, 2003), 14–31. 3. For an extended discussion of InSITE, see Jo-­Anne Berelowitz, “Border Art since 1965,” in Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California, ed. Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc (New York: Routledge, 2003), 143–81. 4. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 3. 5. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 97. 6. Mike Featherstone, “Global and Local Cultures,” in Mapping the ­Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. John Bird et al. (London: Routledge, 1993), 177–79; Jon May, “Of Nomads and Vagrants: Single Homelessness and Narratives of Home as Place,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, no. 6 (2000): 737–59. 7. Cited in Joseph Rykwert, “House and Home,” in Home: A Place in the World, ed. Arien Mack (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 47–58. 8. April R. Veness, “Home and Homelessness in the United States: Changing Ideals and Realities,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, no. 4 (1992): 445–68. 9. Rykwert, “House and Home.” 10. Eric Hobsbawn, “Introduction,” in Mack, Home, 63. 11.Bammer, “Editorial.” 12. Hobsbawn, “Introduction,” 62–63. 13. John Hollander, “It All Depends,” in Mack, Home, 40. 14. Peter Berger, The Homeless Mind (New York: Random House, 1972), 82. 15. See Geraldine Pratt, “Spatial Meta­phors and Speaking Positions,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, no. 3 (1992): 241–44, for a discussion of popu­lar use of spatial meta­phors. 16. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 149.

17. Nestor Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 18. bell hooks, Yearning (Boston: South End Press, 1990). 19. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-­and-­Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 73. 20. For further discussion on this topic, see Lawrence Herzog, Where North Meets South: Cities, Space, and Politics on the U.S.-­Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 13–32. 21. Kenn Morris, “Moving ­toward Smart Borders,” Our Ports of Entry and Homeland Security: A Dialogue with Asa Hutchinson, San Diego Dialogue’s Forum Fronterizo, June 2003. 22. Crossborder Business Associates, “Analy­sis of Banco de México Data,” http://­www​.­census​.­gov; Data Management Improvement Act Task Force, First Annual Report to Congress (Washington, DC: United States, Department of Justice, Immigration and Neutralization Ser­ vice, 2002), 11.http://­uscis​.­gov​/­graphics​/­shared​/­lawenfor​ /­bmgmt​/­inspect​/­D MIA ​_C ­ onRptl202​.p ­ df. 23. Pollero is slang for the guide (sometimes also referred to as a “coyote”) that undocumented mi­grants pay to help them elude the Border Patrol. The literal meaning of the word is “chicken herder.” This term refers to the way that mi­grants follow the guide like hens following a chicken herder who leads them by holding out a bowl of grain. Polleros are basically traffickers in desperate ­human cargo, often raping, robbing, and abandoning their charges in the hot desert region south of the border. 24. Benedict Anderson, ­Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 25. Raza means “­people,” “race,” or—­sometimes—­ “­family.” 26. Philip Brookman, “El Centro Cultural de la Raza, Fifteen Years,” in Made in Aztlán, ed. Philip Brookman and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña (San Diego, CA: Tolteca Publications, 1986), 12–53. 27. Brookman, “El Centro Cultural de la Raza,” 12–53. 28. Brookman, “El Centro Cultural de la Raza,” 52. 29. “Culture as a Weapon: An Interview with Alurista,” La Verdad, September 1970, 9, cited in Brookman, “El Centro Cultural de la Raza,” 22. 30. Brookman, “El Centro Cultural de la Raza,”14. 31. Brookman, “El Centro Cultural de la Raza,” 24.

The Spa ces o f Home  ·  371

32. Berger, Homeless Mind, 196. 33. Beatriz M. Pesquera and Adela de la Torre, “Introduction,” in Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed. Beatriz M. Pesquera and Adela de la Torre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 2. 34. Chicanismo—­an often militant embrace of a separatist Chicano identity which, in the early stages of the movement, was also sexist; see Ignacio M. Garcia, Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos Among Mexican Americans (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). 35. Angie Chabram Dernersesian, “And, Yes . . . ​The Earth Did Part: On the Splitting of Chicana/o Subjectivity,” in Pesquera and de la Torre, Building with Our Hands, 34–56. 36. Brookman, “El Centro Cultural de la Raza,” 19. 37. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam, 1980), 827. 38. Marilyn Mulford and Mario Barrera, Chicano Park (New York: Cinema Guild, 1988). 39. Scott Kirsch, “The Incredible Shrinking World? Technology and the Production of Space,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, no. 5 (1995): 551. 40. Berelowitz, “Border Art since 1965,” 150. 41. See, for example, Beatriz M. Pesquera, “ ‘In the Beginning He ­Wouldn’t Lift Even a Spoon’: The Division of House­hold ­Labor,” in Pesquera and de la Torre, Building with Our Hands, 181–95. 42. Luis Leal, “In Search of Aztlán,” in Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (Albuquerque, NM: Academia/El Norte, 1989), 13. 43. For an extended discussion of ­these issues, see Rafael Pérez-­Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, against Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially 56–96. 44. Sergio D. Elionzo, “ABC : Aztlán, the Borderland and Chicago,” in Missions in Conflict: Essays on U.S.-­Mexican Relations and Chicano Culture, ed. Renate von Barteleben (Tübingen: Gunter Nar Verlag, 1986), 13–23. 45. BAW/TAF , Border Art Workshop (BAW/TAF ), 1984–1989: A Documentation of 5 Years of Interdisciplinary Art Proj­ects Dealing with U.S.-­Mexico Border Issues (A Binational Perspective) (San Diego, CA: Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, 1988). 46. This includes a feminist collective, Las Comadres, constituted by former ­women members of BAW/TAF who ­were angered at their perceived marginalization within BAW/TAF and at BAW/TAF ’s failure to address gender and sexuality as borders requiring renegotiation. For an extended discussion of Las Comadres, see Jo-­Anne Bere-

372 ·  jo- ­a nne ber el o witz

lowitz, “Las Comadres: A Feminist Collective Negotiates a New Paradigm for ­Women at the U.S./Mexico Border,” Genders 28 (1998). 47. See, for example, “The Invasion from Mexico,” U.S. News and World Report, March 7, 1983. 48. Richard A. Lou, interview with author, July 2000. 49. Lou interview. 50. Lou interview. 51.Domifuge means “to flee from home.” 52.Yi-­Fu Tuan, “Geography, Phenomenology and Study of ­Human Nature,” Canadian Geographer 15, no. 3 (1971): 181–92. 53. Jeff Kelley, “Crossed Placed,” in BAW/TAF , Border Art Workshop, 18. 54. Kelley, “Crossed Placed,” 19. 55. Jo-­Anne Berelowitz, “Conflict over ‘Border Art’: Whose Subject, Whose Border, Whose Show?,” Third Text, no. 40 (autumn 1997): 69–83; Berelowitz, “Border Art since 1965”; Debra A. Castillo and Maria-­Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba, Border ­Women: Writing from la Frontera (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 12. 56. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, “Border Culture and Deterritorialization,” La Linea Quebrada 2, no. 2 (March 1987): n.p. 57. Gómez-­Peña, “Border Culture and Deterritorialization,” n.p. 58. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, The New World Border: Prophesies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the ­Century (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1996), 63; emphasis added. 59. See Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, Warrior for Gringo­ stroika (San Francisco, CA: Gray Wolf, 1993), 37. 60. Leal, “In Search of Aztlán,” 13. 61. Gómez-­Peña, New World Border, 5. 62. Gómez-­Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika, 37. 63. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, “Real-­Life Border Thriller,” LA Weekly, May 28–­June 3, 1993, 50–56; Gómez-­Peña, New World Border. 64. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 9. 65. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 9. 66. Gómez-­Peña, New World Border, 63. 67. Gómez-­Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika, 21. 68. Gómez-­Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika, 37. 69. Gómez-­Peña, New World Border, 7. 70. Gómez-­Peña, “Border Culture and Deterritorialization.” 71. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth C ­ entury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 31.

72. Gómez-­Peña, “Border Culture and Deterritorialization.” 73. Dear, “Introduction,” 14. 74. See Berelowitz, “Border Art since 1965.” 75. Sheldon Brown, interview with author, June 2002; Sheldon Brown, “Mi Casa Es Tu Casa” [My home is your home], in Private Time in Public Space, ed. Sally Yard (San Rafael, CA: Palace Press International, 1998), 196. 76. Nick Bingham, Gill Valentine, and Sarah Holloway, “Where Do You Want to Go Tomorrow? Connecting ­Children and the Internet,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17 (1999): 655–72; eslie L Haddon, “Explaining ICT Consumption: The Case of the Home Computer,” in Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Space, ed. Eric Hirsch and Roger Silverstone (London: Routledge, 1992), 82–96. 77. Brown interview. 78. Brown, “Mi Casa Es Tu Casa,” 196. 79. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and ­Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 80. See Herzog, Where North Meets South; Abe Opincar, “The Tijuana Cultural Center Comes of Age,” San Diego Reader, October 10, 2002, 36–39. 81. Marc Augé, Non-­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 58; Jean Robert, “Hestia and Hermes: The Greek Imagination of Motion and Place,” 1996, http://­ www​.­pudel​.­uni​-­bremen​.­de​/­pdf​/­H ESTIA ​.p ­ df.

82. ERRE , “Artist’s Statement,” in Dear, Mixed Feelings, 19. 83. Gemeinschaft is a concept of organic community (constituted by ­family and neighborhood) and represents a form of life rooted in place. See Ferdinand Tonnies, On Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, ed. and trans. Charles P. Loomis (1887; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957). 84. Augé, Non-­places, 94. 85. Augé, Non-­places, 77. 86. Augé, Non-­places, 78. 87. Augé, Non-­places, 78–79. 88. Dear, Mixed Feelings, 14. 89. David Avalos with John Welchman, “Response to The Philosophical Brothel,” in Rethinking Borders, ed. John Welchman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 190. 90. Avalos, “Response,” 190. 91. See Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986, Social Security, Program Operations Manual System, accessed August 2018, http://­policy​.­ssa​.­gov​/­poms​.­nsf​/­lnx​ /­0500501440. 92. Eric Lichtblau and John Markoff, “U.S. Nearing Deal on Way to Track Foreign Visitors: ‘Virtual Border’ Planned,” New York Times, May 24, 2004, 1, 18. 93. Lichtblau and Markoff, “U.S. Nearing Deal,” 1, 18. 94. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 3. 95. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 194.

The Spa ces o f Home  ·  373

dyl an miner

35. Straddling la otra frontera  ·  2008 Inserting MiChicana/o Visual Culture into Chicana/o Art History

I was born in D etroit, and the bor derlands I k new best during my youth straddled the Unit ed States and Canada. The po­liti­cal border dividing the two nations was marked by the Detroit River, easily crossed by tunnel or bridge to reach Windsor, Ontario, located immediately to the South. —­D ENNIS VALDÉS

In the summer of 1979, artists George Vargas and Martín Moreno ­were commissioned by the Hubbard Richard Agency to paint a mural in the heart of the Chicana/o community of Detroit. Created a de­cade into the Mexican American civil rights movement, this mural, CitySpirit, is one of the only surviving exterior murals in Michigan from the days of the movimiento (Āg.  35.1). Nearly twenty years ­after CitySpirit was painted, another mural, The Cornfield (1997–98), went up across the street. Situated within one kilo­meter of la frontera norteña with Canada, t­ hese murals speak to a s peciĀc Chicana/o experience of the upper Midwest. It is this speciĀc MiChicana/o (or Michigan Mexicana/o) experience, as described through the murals and other visual culture, that

I use to revision the historiography of Chicana/o art. As I s­ hall demonstrate, although the histories and experiences of ethnic Mexicans in t he Midwest and the U.S. Southwest are similar, the Midwest community must be contextualized and understood distinctly to properly understand its importance. I t herefore attempt to problematize naturalized assumptions about Chicana/o history and cultural studies in an attempt to recenter the discourse on Chicana/o art histories. CitySpirit, the mural that I w ­ ill ­later discuss in depth, is situated in close proximity to the base of the international Ambassador Bridge. The bridge crosses south to Windsor at the only location in the continental United States where U.S. territory is north of Canada. Anglo American popu­lar culture speaks of lo mexicano as being “south of the border,” but since southwest Detroit is north (and west) of the border, this problematic saying cannot be applied to the Chicana/o community of Detroit. The unique geography of this “borderlands” site plays a signiĀcant role in constructing meaning among members of the local Latina/o community. Although Michigan Chicana/os share

FIG. 35.1. George Vargas and Martín Moreno, CitySpirit, 1979. Mural. Restoration by Vito Jesús Valdéz and Kelly Callahan. Photo by Marilyn Zimmerman and James Puntigam. Image courtesy of the artists.

experiences with their compadres throughout the country, local intricacies must be noted. CitySpirit is impor­tant ­because it situates MiChicana/o art within a regional framework of the Chicana/o experience and, more impor­tant, ­because it functions as an utterance that creates “home” for Detroit Chicana/os along la otra frontera. For this reason, local cultural practices must be compared and contrasted with other Chicana/o and Mexican visual texts, especially Diego Rivera’s mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In this article I ­will also include a discussion of the visual production of Nora Chapa Mendoza. [. . .] With a history of agricultural and industrial ­labor, the Mexicana/o communities in Michigan and Detroit have suffered a le vel of oppression similar to, if n ot worse than, the oppression of other ethnic Mexican communities across the nation. Due to the par­tic­u­lar class-­based social

position of Michigan Mexicana/os, ­these regional experiences relate to larger issues of l­abor activism and counterhegemonic re­sis­tance movements. One of my objectives is therefore to show that a MiChicana/o “home” is produced through the construction of a “universal” solidarity with other working-­class and oppressed ­peoples in the region and throughout the world. At pres­ent, knowledge of the cultural and artistic history of the MiChicana/o community prior to the movimiento is somewhat sparse. ­There exist small holdings of archival material ­housed primarily at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. However, ­little is recorded of the speciĀc visual artists working in t he region during the early twentieth ­century. According to a biography by Yolanda Broyles-­González, famed Tejana musician Lydia Mendoza toured Michigan farmworker campos Strad d ling l a o tr a fr o nter a  ·  375

with her f­ amily as a c hild. Although only one example, Mendoza’s presence in the state demonstrates, at least superĀcially, that during the early to mid-­twentieth ­century ­there did exist a cultural network that linked MiChicana/os with other Mexicana/os. This network was bolstered by the numerous cultural and civic institutions established in Detroit and other Chicana/o communities during the 1920s and 1930s. 1 ­These institutions ­will be discussed ­later in this essay. In terms of the visual or Āne arts, ­little was documented or collected before the late 1960s. Material speciĀcally addressing the art historical and visual legacy of the community needs to be fully uncovered and analyzed. I turn to art of the Chicana/o civil rights movement for multiple reasons. One is accessibility: since many activist artists are still practicing ­today, the movimiento era in Chicana/o cultural history is the ideal time period for an initial investigation into the history of MiChicana/o visual culture, as the artists can be interviewed and can provide oral histories and archival material. I have chosen to discuss the work of Nora Chapa Mendoza, George Vargas, and Martín Moreno ­because ­these individuals and the organ­ ization ­were influential in producing and disseminating a uniquely MiChicana/o visual culture to a national audience. Vargas and Moreno ­were two of the most widely established muralists in Michigan from the movimiento. Additionally, since both artists have relocated to the Southwest, they have received recognition outside of the region yet remain indebted to their experiences in the Midwest. I include Mendoza b ­ ecause of her commitment to larger activist proj­ects and her importance within MiChicana/o art history. [. . .] My arguments are grounded in art historical formal analy­sis in h opes of fully inserting MiChicana/o visual culture into both Chicano studies and art history discourses. Following the approach explicated by Chicana feminist Chela Sandoval, I w ­ ill evoke a multiplicity of tactics from a variety of methodological standpoints. Sandoval calls this hybrid positionality “differential consciousness.” For 376  ·  dyl an miner

her, this oppositionality enables intellectuals (as well as artists and activists) to draw from disparate ideological frameworks of past movements and paradigms without being fully locked into a monolithic, doctrinaire Āeld. According to Sandoval, this “tactical subjectivity” has the “capacity to recenter” without succumbing to partisan fragmentation.2 For this reason, I b elieve that an informed application of multiple approaches ­will best address the complicated cultural practices in M ichigan. Trained as a s ocial historian of art, I o bviously bring this disciplinary approach to my study of MiChicana/o visual culture. As a l­abor activist and anarchist, mentored by Marxists, poststructuralists, and semioticians, I concurrently apply t­ hese seemingly contradictory approaches to MiChicana/o culture. As Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci so adeptly wrote from prison, “Worldviews are rarely consistent; they typically involve a contradictory amalgam of ideas.”3 Such is the case with the work addressed ­here. Through the application of ostensibly paradoxical paradigms, I w ­ ill recenter the discourse on Chicana/o visual culture by problematizing the Southwest-­centrism and by critically analyzing prominent MiChicana/o artworks. My application of differential consciousness can be viewed in my engagement with visual culture created in alliance with multiple po­liti­cal proj­ects. It is for this reason that my analy­sis attends to the seemingly conciliatory narratives of George Vargas, Martín Moreno, and Nora Chapa Mendoza. By way of both reformist and revolutionary po­liti­ cal approaches, MiChicana/os have staked their claim along la otra frontera. Mendoza and MiChicanismo

In terms of iconography within Chicana/o art, Aztlán is one of the most habitually evoked themes. However, painter Nora Chapa Mendoza rarely positions the concept of Aztlán within her visual language as an overt theme that is visually manifest. On the contrary, for Mendoza, Aztlán

serves as an aboriginal unifying device that connects her work with other Native and Latina/o artists throughout the Amer­i­cas. Curator Ursula R. Murray describes Mendoza for a 2000 exhi bition of Michigan Latina/o artists as “soft-­spoken yet articulate,” adding, “[She is] passionate about the conditions confronting the poor of North, Central and South Amer­i­ca, our mi­grant workers, ­those disenfranchised by industrialization and cap­i­tal­ist interests, our undereducated ­children, and our hungry land-­working ‘campesinos.’ ”4 This passion, or rather compassion, that Murray documents is manifest in a n enunciation of a distinct vision of Aztlán that does not alienate non-­Chicana/os but rather constructs a complex network of social alliances that strive for social justice. This may in fact be the hallmark of MiChicana/o culture; it is “nationalist,” yet at the same time it is somehow receptive to mainstream ideas, ideologies, and aesthetics. Although she does not speciĀcally represent Aztlán in her work, this is not to say that Mendoza is disinterested in the role that Aztlán plays for Chicana/os, especially t­ hose in Michigan. Quite the opposite is true, as Mendoza is involved in Latina/o and Indigenous spiritual practices and cultural strug­gles in both the United States and Mexico. Since the 1980s, Mendoza has actively practiced Indigenous Mesoamerican spiritual lifeways. She does not participate in a co ndescending manner, but rather displays an earnest solidarity with anticolonial Indigenous strug­gles throughout the continent. In many re­spects, Mendoza proposes a di alectic Aztlán that embraces working-­class strug­gles and the diasporic realities of transnational migration but is locked within an alternative indigenismo. Mass movements of p ­ eople, therefore, become a co mmon trope for Aztlán within her body of work. As a s elf-­taught artist, Mendoza received training similar to that of the Ārst generation of Chicana/o artists in the Southwest. An analy­ sis of the history of Chicana/o art demonstrates that the majority of ­these artists, even ­those trained within the university system, maintained a working-­class solidarity and w ­ ere often viewed

as operating outside of or in opposition to the art market. However, if we discuss Mendoza’s work solely in r elation to her being self-­taught, it is pos­si­ble, and this frequently happens with Chicana/o and Latina/o art, that we would presuppose her status as a “vernacular” or “outsider” artist and would then be forced to operate in a reductive manner.5 I believe it is instructive to position her work within the framework of a regional history and observe the manner in which she articulates speciĀc narratives related to it. In other words, Mendoza’s works are individual utterances that are speciĀcally oriented t­ oward a MiChicana/o audience. For this reason, the work of Mendoza often receives inaccurate readings by ­those who assume a generalized Latina/o or “Hispanic” context. Mendoza mediates between the lived realities of the working-­class Michigan Chicana/o community and the Āne art market of metropolitan Detroit. Her trajectory as a practicing artist is one of “middle-­class” economic mobility, but it is a mobility tied to an oppositional consciousness. Born in a one-­room, dirt-­floored chante in South Texas, Mendoza was only four when her ­mother died of tuberculosis.6 ­After spending time in South Texas as a mi ­grant worker, she ended up in Detroit when her husband moved to the city to work. It was not ­until ­later in life, when she was in her forties and divorced, that she began her ­career as a v isual artist. When Mendoza began making artwork is of importance to our discussion h ­ ere, yet only in relation to where she began making it. During her period of initial art making, Mendoza was living in t he G ­ reat Lakes region. She was not making artwork as a response to the localized lived real­ity of South Texas, as ­were Santa Barraza and Carmen Lomas Garza; rather, Mendoza’s art making emerged out of her experiences as a Chicana living in Michigan.7 Grounding my arguments in a n oppositional consciousness, I see it as paramount not to privilege one Āeld over another but rather to investigate bodies from dif­ fer­ent positions. This complex positionality frequently turns to notions of place and space, as Strad d ling l a o tr a fr o nter a  ·  377

FIG. 35.2. Nora Chapa Mendoza, Employment Agency, 1990. Acrylic painting. Image courtesy of the artist.

well as land, to properly situate Chicana/o bodies. Henri Lefebvre argues that “space is permeated with social relations; it is not only supported by social relations but also producing and produced by social relations.”8 The work of Mendoza posits Aztlán (which is a p ar­tic­u­lar Chicana/o chronotope) as a unique social space permeated by conflicting social relations. How this mutually constitutive pro­cess operates in M ichigan is of ­great importance. In her work and that of other artists discussed in t his article, the social relations of class mediate how MiChicana/os identify and construct their culture. Additionally, migration and cultural change are at the forefront of MiChicanidad. For this reason, three ­factors remain essential to the interpretation of Mendoza’s oeuvre: migration, ­labor, and the articulation of MiChicanidad. Yet t­ hese three individual ­factors, as part of a complex social identity, cannot be disentangled from other f­ actors within her artwork. Like 378  ·  dyl an miner

many Chicana/o artists, Mendoza works in a broadly deĀned narrative style, yet she does so as a cr itique of existing master and metanarratives, even ­those being articulated from within the Chicana/o community. In the early 1990s, Mendoza worked on a s eries titled Mi­grant Workers. Works from this series ­were published as greeting cards to raise funds for the United Farm Workers and as illustrations for the book Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the G ­ reat Lakes Region, 1917–1970.9 From this series we are able to discern the regionally speciĀc strands within her work. An initial engagement with Employment Agency reveals the narrative of four ­people, presumably mexicano, standing near text that reads, “Se necesitan betabeleros para Michigan” (beet pickers needed for Michigan) (Āg. 35.2). This is followed by a li st of six M ichigan cities where beet Āelds and pro­cessing plants ­were located. The denotation or noncoded iconic message of the narrative is obvious: it is a ­simple telling of

the working-­class traditions of the campo, of the manner by which Mexican workers w ­ ere exploited by Anglo American employment agencies, and of the integral role that mexicano workers played in the development of Michigan agriculture. However, this reading, as well as associated readings, is unfortunately reductive and unable to deal with the critical manner by which Mendoza acts as an intermediary between existing Chicano histories and their revisioning. ­Here the coded iconic message within her work utters, to ­those able to understand its language, a narrative not usually apparent in con­temporary Chicana/o or art historical discourses. In 1990, the year this image was painted, literary critic Ramón Saldívar published Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference, in w hich one illustration shows a Texas office that recruited betabeleros for work in M ichigan. The caption reads, “Mi­grant farmworkers and hiring agents gathering at an informal employment agency advertising work in Michigan for ‘beet pickers’ in Corpus Christi.”10 Although Saldívar is a­ dept at merging Marxist criticism with Chicana/o literary texts, the inclusion of this par­tic­u­lar image in Chicano Narrative appears arbitrary, as ­there is ­little talk of Michigan in the book.11 As an artist who revisions dominant Chicana/o narrativized histories, Mendoza uses this photographic reproduction as the source material for the painting Employment Agency. However, ­instead of using the photo­graph for its basic illustrative nature, as Saldívar apparently does, Mendoza procures the image for its site speciĀcity and instigates a rearticulation of a particularized MiChicana/o (art) history. Of the cities that appear on the sign—­Alma, Croswell, Caro, Lansing, Sebewing, and Saginaw—­the writing of George Vargas places two of them, Saginaw and Lansing, as centers of Chicano art production in the state.12 I myself was born in Alma and raised in Caro, and I attended numerous bailes mexicanos in Sebewing and Saginaw. I have witnessed the fact that to this day each of ­these cities maintains a v ibrant Latina/o community, all established and developed in r esponse to the economic needs of the

area. By being particularized, Employment Agency begins formulating a more inclusive Chicana/o visual narrative, one that includes other­wise marginalized Chicana/o iconography. If, as Rafael Pérez-­Torres maintains, “land lies at the heart of the Chicano movement,”13 Mendoza speaks of a place not commonly included in m ainstream Chicana/o discourse. Although this place is not easily recognizable as Aztlán, works such as ­those that she created for Roberto Rodriguez and Patricia Gonzales’s Aztlanahuac Proj­ect demonstrate her rectiĀcation of a S outhwest-­centric Aztlán by inserting Michigan into a dialogue with other popu­lar narratives. In other words, by living in a place without a critical mass of Chicana/o bodies, Mendoza and other MiChicana/o artists produce work that is multilayered and transcends easily discernible readings. Employment Agency, like most con­temporary art (as well as Aztlán as a co ncept), functions as a palimpsest, with Mendoza reinscribing localized meaning onto a p reexisting photo­graph contemporarily circulating within the Chicana/o community. For example, while within Saldívar’s Chicano Narrative the linguistic signiĀers of the cities in the photo (Alma, Croswell, Caro, Lansing, Sebewing, and Saginaw) simply serve as tropes for the role of mi­grant ­labor within Chicana/o history and lit­er­a­ture, Mendoza redirects ­these ­signiĀers and embeds within the painting certain regional histories and identities. While certain ele­ments in the original photo­graph, such as the dirt “sidewalks,” clearly appear to show a lo cation other than Michigan, Mendoza has excluded ­these ele­ments from her work, visually and textually placing it within the geographic speciĀcity of Michigan. Employment Agency begins to articulate the role that class identity and MiChicanidad play within the MiChicana/o community. A more recent work, Los Repatriados, although deĀnitely within the same vein as Employment Agency, speaks directly to the role that migration plays within the history and culture of the region (Āg.  35.3). On a n oncoded level, as the title attests, this image retells the narrative of the forced Strad d ling l a o tr a fr o nter a  ·  379

FIG. 35.3. Nora Chapa Mendoza, Los Repatriados, 2001. Acrylic painting. Image courtesy of the artist.

repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from Michigan, as well as other locations in the United States, during the 1920s and 1930s. This image identiĀes the truckloads of Mexicana/os being driven back to Mexico ­because of Depression-­era joblessness in t he United States. ­Here we see the a­ ctual pro­cess of migration, which within this image is read as the deportation of Mexicans and their forcible exclusion from the perceived opportunities of industrial Detroit. The coded iconic message is paramount to the work’s proper reception. While knowing the general history of the deportation activities within the region is impor­tant to the interpretation of this work, knowing community history becomes even more relevant to decoding the work from an insider’s perspective. Beginning in 200 1, a g roup of Detroit Chicana/os, including Mendoza, began conducting oral histories in t he city’s Latina/o community in an attempt to deconstruct, reconstruct, and document its problematic history. While many Mexicana/o families have been living in the city for generations, many of their ancestors and 380  ·  dyl an miner

relatives w ­ ere forcibly deported as part of the so-­called repatriation activities. According to Paul Taylor, an economist who studied Mexican ­labor during the G ­ reat Depression era, a disproportionate number of the repatriates came from the Midwest (1933–34).14 This is highlighted in the work of the Los Repatriados Committee and Fronteras Norteñas.15 The community’s response to this alienating practice of repatriation was overwhelming. Although numbers have never been analyzed, oral histories tell of numerous community members returning immediately to Michigan ­after their deportation to Mexico. So what Mendoza is ­doing with Los Repatriados is coded beneath the obvious image of repatriación: ­here we are si­mul­ta­neously viewing the deportation and the subsequent return to Michigan of Mexicana/o laborers. It is this speciĀc regional articulation that is aimed at revisioning current discourses in C hicana/o cultural studies. It is impor­tant to note that Mendoza produced artwork for Cantos al Sexto Sol, a book published in conjunction with the Aztlanahuac Proj­ect,16

and she also appears in Roberto Rodriguez and Patricia Gonzales’s documentary Ālm Amoxtli San Ce Tojuan. Both of ­these proj­ects by well-­known public intellectuals position Chicana/o history within a f ramework of continental indigeneity. Similarly, Mendoza engages Aztlán, but she does so from her position as a former mi­grant worker living outside of the U.S. Southwest—­“Aztlán Ocupado”—as Armando Navarro attests.17 Like other sacred sites hallowed by aboriginal p ­ eoples, Aztlán (as a creation/migration narrative) functions as an axis mundi for Mendoza, but one with its focus on pro­cess and journeys as opposed to a par­tic­u­lar site within real space. If the Indigenous Mexica considered Aztlán and Tenochtitlan to be alternate versions of the same concept, Mendoza envisions Aztlán as the a­ ctual movement between ­these two places. B ­ ecause she lives and works in  Michigan, Mendoza’s connection to place is very much about the migrations, journeys, and movements between sites. This is commonly seen in MiChicana/o culture. [. . .] Placing MiChicana/o Art in Context

The existence of a C hicana/o artistic canon is still very much in q uestion.18 Although certain artists have achieved mainstream recognition, a Chicana/o art history has yet to be fully written. The recording and documentation of Chicana/o murals, for instance, has received virtually no attention outside of California and the Southwest. In recent years, California Chicana/o murals have been addressed by art historians Holly Barnet-­ Sánchez and Eva Cockcroft, among o ­ thers, while archival documentation by Judith Baca and her comadres at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (spa r c ) has created a clearing­house of public art. Apart from t­ hese developments, the documentation of murals by Chicana/o artists has received ­little consideration. As Rita ­Gonzalez points out, “Few monograph publications and scholarly articles detail the work of individual artists.”19 The fate of ­Great Lakes and midwestern

Chicana/o murals is particularly serious, with ­little to no attention paid to the individual artists. In fact, ­there is virtually no art historical analy­sis of midwestern murals and muralists, the only exception being the scant research on the Latina/o murals of Chicago. Much of this research was conducted twenty years ago. In 1987, Chicago’s newly established Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (now the National Museum of Mexican Art) hosted an exhibition titled The Barrio Murals/Murales del Barrio. As curator René Arceo Frutos writes in the cata­ log, the exhibition sought to highlight “the contributions that Mexican muralists have made to the Chicago mural scene.”20 This exhibition, occurring at the zenith of the community mural movement, documented the history of Latina/o murals in C hicago. Regrettably, similar exhibitions underscoring the importance of muralism within the regional histories of the Chicana/o community have not yet come to fruition. This is representative of the failures of art historical scholarship and the institutions that fund them. Tracy Grimm of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies maintains that “relatively few institutions have initiated archival proj­ ects to Ānd and preserve” Latina/o visual art and associated ephemera.21 In turn, MiChicana/o art history is very much in peril of vanishing without immediate changes in documentation and exhibition. Founded in 2001, Artes Unidas, a statewide co­ali­tion of artists supported by the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, could possibly serve as the impetus for that change. But where exactly does MiChicana/o visual culture Āt within the larger discourses on Chicana/o and Latina/o art history? Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, known simply by the acronym car a, was the Ārst blockbuster exhibition of Chicana/o art to be hosted by mainstream institutions. Traveling to ten cities across the United States from 1990 to 1993, it served as the stimulus for further exhibitions, criticism, and documentation.22 But even car a was not without deĀciencies. The exhibition displayed fifty-­four murals in p hoto­graphs Strad d ling l a o tr a fr o nter a  ·  381

and slides; of ­these, only seven came from the Midwest (loosely deĀned as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas), and four of ­those ­were from Chicago. Of the three remaining Midwest murals, two ­were painted in Michigan. While the Michigan murals thus made up less than 4 ­percent of all ­those in the exhibition, their inclusion nonetheless points to the existence of a productive Chicana/o mural movement in the state. Although ­there was a dearth of midwestern art exhibited in car a, this does not necessarily point to a failure by proj­ect coordinators Holly Barnet-­ Sánchez and Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino; rather, it reflects the unforeseen circumstances of selecting art by way of a “curatorial collective.” In other words, the absence of a midwestern narrative in the development of a Chicana/o art canon demonstrates the prob­lems with the bureaucratic structure of the exhibition and art history in general. As Alicia Gaspar de A lba points out, the “academic voices . . . ​traditionally Āltered by the curator of an exhibit, in a s how that resisted the curatorial approach had to be Āltered through the visions of the dif­fer­ent organizers.”23 While the collectivity of the car a se­lection pro­cess is commendable, even decisions made by consensus may marginalize certain communities, as was the case with the Midwest. As a r esult, the scholarship on Chicana/o visual and artistic production continues to neglect the existing cultural practices in areas outside the Southwest. Although regional absences and biases within Chicana/o art historical and curatorial work w ­ ere pointed out early in the development of a Chicana/o canon (which is still not fully formed), they have not been signiĀcantly addressed within the lit­er­a­ture. As early as 1976, the journal Aztlán recognized the absence of academic material engaging historical and so­cio­log­i­cal concerns affecting Latina/os in t he Midwest. In the summer of that year, Aztlán published a special issue devoted to the Midwest. It was in this issue that Gilberto (Gilbert) Cárdenas published “Los Desarraigados,” which examined the so­cio­log­i­cal impetus for 382  ·  dyl an miner

Mexican migrations to the region. Since then, a multiplicity of counterhegemonic historical studies have been undertaken on the region. In fact, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies gave l­abor historian Dennis Valdés the 2002 na c cs Scholar Award for his achievements in the Āeld. Valdés, a p rofessor of history and Chicano/Latino studies at Michigan State University, is particularly interested in working-­class Mexicana/o histories in the Midwest. Yet even with the continued development and recognition of regionally speciĀc Chicana/o histories, cultural studies and art historical scholarship in the area is still sparse. The most signiĀcant recent development in the Āeld is the newly established Midwest Latino Arts Documentary Heritage Initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies.24 In 1982, Pat Mathey-­White addressed the body of lit­er­a­ture on the Northwest in Bibliography of Chicano/Latino Art and Culture in the Pacific West. Three years l­ater, art historian Shifra M. Goldman and literary critic Tomás Ybarra-­ Frausto recognized the demographic need to study the Midwest and the Northwest in their annotated bibliography Arte Chicano.25 ­These works notwithstanding, nonsouthwestern Chicana/o art history remains entirely peripheral. Nonetheless, much work is being done in Michigan to combat ­these deĀciencies. As cultural workers, both George Vargas and Martín Moreno, the CitySpirit artists, have in one way or another worked to demarginalize research on regional Latina/o art histories. As a gradu­ate student at the University of Michigan, Vargas wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the history of Latina/o artists in Michigan (1988) and published an Occasional Paper for the Julian Samora Research Institute addressing Michigan-­based Cuban American muralist Carlos López.26 Vargas has since been hired at Texas A&MUniversity–­Kingsville, a hotbed of Chicana/o visual art. His scholarship no longer deals speciĀcally with issues in MiChicana/o visual production, although his experiences in Michigan influence his art historical scholarship on Chicana/o art.

Moreno grew up in t he Sunnyside barrio of Adrian, Michigan. He spent his childhood working in the tomato Āelds and his early adulthood in the chemical and manufacturing industries.27 He was one of the key Āgures in the community mural movement in Michigan. In 1978 he painted Vibration of a New Awakening in Adrian, and in 1980 the Latino Experience in Michigan, an interior mural at Eastern Michigan University. Like Vargas, Moreno left Michigan at least in p art ­because of the lack of exposure for Latina/o artists in t he state. He currently lives in A rizona, where he has gained recognition making art and working with Chicana/o youth. George Vargas served on the Raza Art and Media Collective editorial committee alongside noted MiChicana/o artists and intellectuals Ana Cardona, Jesse Gonzales, S.  Zaneta Kosiba Vargas, and Zaragosa Vargas. Although outside the scope of this article, the Raza Art and Media Collective, with its equitable gender relationship and its focus on the importance of visual art for Michigan Latina/os, merits an expanded study. Quoting George Vargas, Chicana anthropologist Karen Mary Davalos notes that the “rejection of a ‘strict Chicano or Latino/Raza aesthetic’ allowed Midwestern groups to support the Chicano nationalist proj­ect of self-­determination . . . ​ while remaining inclusive of artists whose identities ­were not Chicano.”28 In Chicago, MARCh (Movimiento Artistico Chicano) and art historian Victor Sorell have done an adequate job of documenting movimiento art-­making practice in that city. The National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, El Museo Latino in Omaha, and the University of Notre Dame’s Galería América are impor­tant institutions in terms of documenting and exhibiting Latina/o arts in the Midwest. Likewise, t­ here are dozens of community-­run spaces that need further investigation. While car a presented artworks by Chicana/o artists across the United States, the fact that t­ here ­were few Chicana/o art historians dealing with the Midwest established a lacuna in the repre­sen­ ta­tion of midwestern Chicana/o cultural practices. While t­ here ­were (and are) few historians

of Latina/o art, Midwest Chicana/o art historians ­were and are even scarcer. This void, which remains ­today, needs to be assessed, and the histories of midwestern Mexicana/o artistic production must be documented, as Tracy Grimm29 and Rita Gonzalez,30 respectively, outline. With the lack of historical and theoretical texts that engage with Chicana/o studies in t he Midwest, this vacancy extends itself harshly into art history and cultural studies. Nevertheless, regional and local Latina/o histories cannot be completely removed from national and international narratives. In 1968, the same year that Antonio Bernal painted the Del Rey mural (the Ārst recognized “Chicano mural” in California), Mario Castillo and youths from Chicago’s Mexican barrio of Pilsen created a mural titled Metafísica: The Wall for Peace on the exterior wall of the Halsted Urban Pro­gress Center. According to the Barrio Murals cata­log, this was Chicago’s Ārst public mural since the w pa and the impetus for the Chicana/o mural movement in Chicago and throughout the country.31 Over the course of the next de­cade, community mural movements emerged around the globe. Muralismo, and its hybrid use of Indigenous histories, became a m arker of Chicana/o identity and a signiĀer of community sovereignty. Wherever one could Ānd colonias and barrios ­there ­were most likely murals retelling local histories from a community perspective. Murals and other forms of Chicana/o artistic production, including CitySpirit, became a popu­lar site of re­sis­tance and a lo cation for the rearticulation of local “Hispanic” identities. Through highly adaptable visual forms, Chicana/o communities ­were able to position themselves and their histories on their own terms. Public art allowed them to create a vis­i­ble “home” within the public sphere of an other­wise oppressive location. Like countless murals painted as part of the community mural movement, many movimiento murals in Michigan expressed solidarity with working-­class and oppressed ­peoples of the world. Internationalist solidarity was a r ecurring theme that connected MiChicana/o murals Strad d ling l a o tr a fr o nter a  ·  383

to other community-­based art-­making practices, as well as to global anticolonial strug­gle. We need only turn to Martín Moreno’s Vibrations of a New Awakening to see expressions of cross-­cultural solidarity with other working and oppressed ­peoples. In this nonextant exterior mural in Adrian, racially ambiguous laborers march in protest through the rows of a fac tory farm t­ oward the hideous architecture of an industrial factory. As posited in Vibrations, the “awakening” of humanity occurs through the “universality” embedded in a ll working-­class and oppressed ­peoples of the world. In other words, our strug­ gle to awaken and to be accepted as equals is a universal strug­gle to become fully ­human. This expression of solidaridad was also pres­ ent in Chicana/o poster production. In the essay “Not Just Another Social Movement,” George Lipsitz states that the internationalism, class consciousness, and solidarity with strug­gles for social justice among other aggrieved groups manifest in t­ hese posters reveal that the movement was an effort to convince ­people to draw their identity from their politics rather than drawing their politics from their identity.32 As Lipsitz asserts, MiChicana/os w ­ ere forming their identities based on po­liti­cal praxis and not solely on identity and racial politics. Although Indigenous Mexican themes occupy an impor­tant space within the myriad expressions of Chicana/o visual culture around the state, as Davalos makes apparent,33 they in no way function in a framework of orthodox nationalist exclusion. A ­ fter all, we must keep in mind that MiChicanismo is connected, as Váldes succinctly argues, to a radical articulation of class strug­gle. Finding the Barrio

While studies dealing with southwestern ethnic Mexican histories have often focused on race and ethnicity as the impetus for subjugation, research dealing with midwestern Chicana/os has often treated class as the primary basis for Mexican in­equality. In his study of Mexican communities 384  ·  dyl an miner

in urban and rural centers of the Midwest, Dennis Valdés emphasizes four reasons for a continued Chicana/o working-­class consciousness: “First, the experience of conquest and systematic subordination in t he Southwest was not replicated in the Midwest. Second, the sharpest race-­based historical division in the region has been between Black and White, rather than Mexican and Anglo. Third, ­because of the smaller and more scattered Mexican population, ­there ­were fewer opportunities for a t radition of mutual and systematic hostility based on racial features or competing identities to develop. Fourth, Mexican migration to the region remained overwhelmingly a f unction of employer demands for unskilled ­labor.”34 As Valdés argues, the northern movement of Mexicans responded to the seasonal industrial and agricultural needs for manual l­abor. This continued demand for l­abor positioned (and continues to position) midwestern Mexicana/os in a certain working-­class location within the region. While recent oral histories tell oppositional narratives of speciĀc racial and linguistic oppression, Valdés’s point is clear: the established discourses on race and class in Chicana/o studies are in­effec­ tive when applied to the speciĀcity of midwestern histories.35 It is through the cultural and artistic domains that I expand upon Valdés’s claim of a regional, localized history, one that is tied to a world systems theory of connected economic and cultural practices. As Rita Gonzalez makes apparent, Chicana/os are all but absent from conventional art history textbooks. She concludes that t­ here exists “a signiĀcant lack of lit­er­a­ture on active and successful Latino artists.”36 To make the ­matter worse, MiChicana/o artists are doubly absent from texts on Latina/o art. To properly connect the regional history of Michigan Latina/os with t­ hose of the U.S. Southwest, we need to begin with the earliest migrations into the Midwest region. Initial migrantes came predominantly from Texas, mainly from in and around San Antonio, as well as from northern and north-­central Mexico. Zaragosa Vargas writes that the “Detroit Mexican community took

form during and ­after World War I when Mexican immigrant workers, mostly t­ hose who had worked on Midwest railroads and in s teel mills and foundries, settled in the city.”37 This pattern of settlement created huge colonias and barrios across Michigan in industrial cities such as Saginaw, Flint, Pontiac, and Lansing, among o ­ thers.38 From the very earliest stages of migration, the Mexican American community in Michigan was subjugated by and subjected to the seasonal and economic peculiarities of the local ­labor market. While economies in the Southwest also had seasonal demands for workers, the cyclical nature of agricultural and industrial production in t he Midwest was dif­fer­ent, making the region’s employers reliant on trabajadores del campo in t he summer and on manual industrial laborers in the winter. ­Because the need for industrial ­labor was keyed to the harvesting and mining of raw materials, class and ethnic identities developed differently in the Midwest than in the Southwest. According to Norman Humphrey, a sociologist working with Detroit’s Mexican community during the 1930s, all Mexicana/os ­were perceived as working-­class, regardless of their prior class affiliation in Mexico or the Southwest. He writes that even skilled professionals “tended to become common laborers” once they moved north, “as a consequence of the specialized character of American production.”39 Unlike the severe phenotypical and “racial” oppression that Mexicans faced in t he Southwest, the experience of midwestern Mexicans was predicated on a working-­ class identity similar (although not identical) to that of other working-­class immigrant groups. Although Humphrey collapses the complexities of social identity into a monolithic class system, what may be taken from his position is that class, although not the only causality, must be addressed in tension with race, gender, and other social markers. Much like the Mexican community in Los Angeles and countless other working-­class communities of color, Detroit’s Mexican community was spatially dissected into two separate parts when city planners ran an interstate highway through

the heart of the barrio during industrial expansion. The highway slicing through the community has become, as Gloria Anzaldúa might say, una herida abierta.40 To this day the highway divides the real space of the barrio, with community residents and institutions situated on e­ ither side o f this open wound. Although Anzaldúa evoked the herida abierta to speak about the U.S.-­Mexico border, not a highway, she also recognized its application to all borders: geopo­liti­cal, community, racial, gender, sexual, and class, among o ­ thers. She writes that “borders are set up to deĀne the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them.”41 In effect, southwest Detroit is the borderlands par excellence: situated between the United States and Canada, divided by the vio­lence of the highway, marginalized by the regional Southwest-­centrism of the Chicana/o community, and operating as a brown-­skinned neighborhood in t he black-­ white racial dynamics of a northern city. Following the open-­endedness of Anzaldúa’s frontera, I hope to expand our working deĀnition of la (otra) frontera to incorporate the complexities of MiChicana/o experiences. A ­ fter all, la frontera cannot be encapsulated simply by the geopolitics of the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands. Michelle Habell-­Pallán welcomes the signiĀcation of the U.S.-­Canada border in our reformulation of José Martí’s concept of nuestra América.42 Habell-­ Pallán writes, “As a scholar trained in the southwest, I h ad never conceptualized Canada as participating in a larger culture of the Amer­i­cas. However, my analytical framework was changed forever during my Ārst drive across the northwestern border” between Washington State and the Canadian province of British Columbia.43 Likewise, many radical working-­class midwesterners construct an imaginary Canada capable of unraveling U.S. capitalist-­colonialism (which, of course, it cannot). This imaginary is analogous to the way in which many working-­class Mexicana/ os envision the United States as enabling familial economic stability. It is through the concretization of this Canadian imaginary with the lived real­ity of the geopo­liti­cal border that la otra frontera is Strad d ling l a o tr a fr o nter a  ·  385

manifest. If fronteras are to remain theoretically relevant and fertile to our multifaceted intellectual and po­liti­cal proj­ects, they must be reinvigorated to encompass otras frontera, including la frontera canadiense. Not surprisingly, it was along this open wound, the vio­lence enacted by the highway and the Canadian border, that MiChicana/o muralists concentrated their didactic, pedagogical, and orga­nizational efforts as part of el movimiento. A few hundred meters away from the highway is situated one of the few extant murals in Michigan from, as George Vargas refers to it, the Latino Mural Re­nais­sance. At the corner of Bagley and Sainte Anne streets, artists Moreno and Vargas painted their outdoor mural. Although Chicana/o studies historiography habitually positions the late 1970s as the end of the movimiento, Davalos argues that in the PaciĀc Northwest the majority of Chicana/o murals ­were actually painted in the 1970s and 1980s and that “by 1974 the mural became one of the most popu­lar visual forms throughout the United States.”44 In certain areas, such as the Northwest and Midwest, impor­tant movimiento activities occurred well into the 1980s and even the 1990s. As for Michigan, the late 1970s and early 1980s ­were the most active years for movimiento artists. During this productive period, artists ­were not only manufacturing vast amounts of work but ­were also theorizing about the artist’s role within the community and the signiĀcance of the physical location in which they constructed works. So the a­ ctual site that CitySpirit occupies within the barrio is of utmost importance. Likewise, the position of the barrio in relation to the border is essential when discussing local Chicana/o cultural practices. As if attempting to reconstruct the border experience desde el sur al norte, the real space of the barrio, with its physical placement “north of the border,” can serve as a m etonym for the Michigan Chicana/o experience. While the border is often used as a trope in Chicana/o studies, it functions ­here in a m uch more concealing manner. While Detroit’s Chicana/o community may appear analogous to counterpart 386  ·  dyl an miner

communities in the U.S. Southwest, upon closer inspection ­these similarities become superĀcial, and localized structures and identities need to be clariĀed. In 1997–98, nearly twenty years a­ fter the initial painting of the CitySpirit mural, Michigan artists Vito Valdéz and James Puntigam painted a larger mural across the street, simply titled The Cornfield. Similar to CitySpirit, this public mural physically and meta­phor­ically repositions Aztlán to the United States–­Canada border. Valdéz led the restoration of CitySpirit in the same year. Although ­these two murals are stylistically and compositionally dissimilar, they both play a par­ tic­u­lar role within the community and help locate the cultural and physical space for the community frequently dubbed “Mexicantown.” Within one city block of ­these two murals are the main cultural institutions of the barrio. Immediately to the east is the Roberto Clemente Community Center, named ­after the famous Boricua baseball player. While nonmembers of the community refer to the area as Mexicantown, the naming of the community center speaks to the Puerto Rican history and thus the Pan-­Latina/o identity of the neighborhood.45 To the south of the mural, ­toward the Detroit River and la frontera with Canada, is Sainte Anne’s Church. For George Vargas, the church performs a par­tic­u­lar role in the community. He writes that “in recent history, the church has served as an organ­izing force in the Latino colonia.”46 At certain moments in the history of the barrio, Saint Anne’s has been instrumental as a meeting place and as a po­liti­cal force for Catholic Mexican Americans. To the west of the mural, just across the street before reaching the highway, is the Bagley Housing Association (bha ) and its con­temporary gallery space. While the gallery ­doesn’t solely exhibit the work of local Chicana/o and Latina/o artists, the majority of its exhibitions feature the work of artists from Detroit and Michigan. In the past, the bha Gallery has assisted scholars like me in initiating interviews with artists and has allowed us to pres­ent papers at gallery openings, usually attended by local artists. The gallery’s director,

Ursula Murray, has worked with city and state agencies to create traveling exhibitions and corresponding cata­logs of art by Michigan Latina/o artists. La Casa de U nidad, a f ew blocks away, is ­another impor­tant cultural space within the community. Founded in 1981, la Casa de Unidad offered courses, hosted Ālms and exhibitions, and served as the cultural core of the community. It has recently stopped offering ser­vices but hopes to reopen. In Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan, Rudolph Valier Alvarado and Sonya Yvette Alvarado write that “the nonproĀt organ­ ization’s mission is to provide southwest Detroit and other communities with the best available resources and programs which discover, develop, celebrate, and advance the Hispanic/Latino arts.”47 La Casa de U nidad has also published collections of poetry and texts on the cultural history of the Latina/o community in Detroit. Although not mainstream or large institutions, the bha and la Casa de Unidad have been pillars of the community by exhibiting individual and group shows, providing a space where artists can work with local youth, and developing artist networks within the city and state. Their par­tic­u­lar histories need to be written and included in t his discussion.48 CitySpirit as Marker of Michigan Experience

As this essay began by placing CitySpirit and The Cornfield as sites of community maintenance along la otra frontera, I w ­ ill close my arguments by returning to CitySpirit as a signiĀer of MiChicana/o experience. As previously stated, in the late 1970s Vargas and Moreno, with the orga­ nizational help of Carolina Ramón, painted this work, now one of the last remaining movimiento murals in Detroit. CitySpirit drew upon multiple influences while asserting itself at the heart of the barrio chicano. Its name was an allusion to its funding by the National Endowment for the Arts’ CitySpirit Program. The mural, in its speciĀc location in the real space of the community along

la herida abierta, plays a cer tain function in asserting a community identity and home space for Detroit Chicana/os. In his work dealing with space and place in urban Chicana/o lit­er­a­ture and culture, Raúl Homero Villa writes that “social commentators have long noted the importance of the barrio’s internal “geo­graph­i­cal identity.” This identity, manifest in the unique conjunctural forms of its residents’ cultural practices and consciousness, has been a vital mode of urban Chicano community survival against the pressures of a dominant social formation.”49 Through their “internal geo­graph­i­ cal identity,” MiChicana/os posit a uniq ue form of localized consciousness or, as Sandoval would conclude, “differential consciousness.” Like the visual production of Mendoza, CitySpirit serves as a positive articulation of the community’s cultural practices. In addition, CitySpirit contributes to the creation and maintenance of a Chicana/o home space along la otra frontera. Blocks away from the fragmentation caused by the poorly (or cleverly) planned highway construction, the Chicana/o community has asserted a communal sense of identity and home with the painting of CitySpirit and The Cornfield. Using Villa’s language, CitySpirit creates a s peciĀc “geographic identity” by using both Chicana/o universalisms and references speciĀc to the Detroit Chicana/o community. Many casual observers, Chicana/o and non-­Latina/o alike, use the mural to identify the geography of the neighborhood and position themselves within the city. According to Vargas,50 thousands of ­those who have viewed the mural have no knowledge of the original artists or of the work’s origins but appreciate it as a visual portrait of Mexicantown and of Detroit. CitySpirit was painted in a n industrial-­grade paint on the side o f a b uilding in t he center of  Mexicantown. The painting is designed in a collage-­like manner with images painted virtually onto one another within the picture plane of the flat wall surface. The main focal point of the composition is a tree in the center of the painting. This tree extends downward ­toward the surface of the sidewalk and upward to the roof of Strad d ling l a o tr a fr o nter a  ·  387

the building on which it is painted. To the right side of the painting are a variety of iconographic images relating directly to precolonial Mexico, while the left side locates the mural Ārmly within the local community. The overall theme of the composition rearticulates the local history of Mexican Detroit, but it does so by way of a self-­ determining community visual narrative. The iconography of CitySpirit draws directly upon the urban, pluri-­ethnic, working-­class history of Detroit, but it is grounded in an earth-­ based, agricultural Mexicana/o ­labor history, as Vargas notes: “One of the most impor­tant models that [the artists] considered was Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry fresco cycle executed in 1932 and 1933 at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Its design features a historical and cultural portrait of the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan, from ancient to modern times. Inspired by Rivera’s ­simple but accurate narrative of the agricultural, industrial and scientiĀc technology of a con­temporary era in Michigan, the two artists or­ga­nized the design ele­ments according to a symmetrical framework: a ­simple tree would unify the ancient and con­ temporary worlds.”51 Unlike murals by Chicana/o artists in t he Southwest, CitySpirit directly links Vargas and Moreno, as well as Detroit Mexicans, to Diego Rivera. Many Chicana/o art historians have asserted that among the paint­ers collectively known as los tres grandes—­Rivera, Davíd Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco—­Rivera has often been seen as having the least influence on Chicana/o muralistas in the Southwest. While this may be an accurate portrayal of Rivera’s influence on California muralists, the work of many artists of Mexican descent in Michigan can be traced ­either iconographically or compositionally to Rivera and especially to his Detroit Industry murals. In fact, oral histories tell the story of Rivera’s interaction with the parents of a certain Chicano artist still actively working in the community ­today. Accordingly, Diego Rivera’s presence within Chicana/o art in the Midwest is not matched anywhere ­else in the United States. In 1972, Chicago artist Marcos Raya created a “Chicano version” of Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads. 388  ·  dyl an miner

Additionally, Martín Moreno and George Vargas both continue to evoke Rivera’s Detroit Institute of Arts (d ia ) frescos as a source of both artistic and aesthetic inspiration. In its founding princi­ ples, Artes Unidas, a co­ali­tion of Latina/o artists in Michigan, speciĀcally recalls Rivera and Frida Kahlo as MiChicana/o cultural patrimony. In CitySpirit, the iconography of a tree and its root structure dominates the composition, with the tree taking up nearly one third of the space and the roots and mineral substrata extending the entire width of the working surface. To ­either side of the tree are enormous hands giving strength and support to the base of the tree. Within the tree’s trunk are two ancient sculptural forms, one referencing Africa and the other Indigenous Mesoamerica. H ­ ere solidarity is established between the working-­class ­peoples in the black and brown communities of Detroit. Since Detroit has such a large African American population, this alignment seems appropriate. Even so, cross-­cultural solidarity was a hallmark of the civil rights movement that came to a head in 1968 with Ralph Abernathy’s Poor P ­ eople’s Campaign, which included African American, Native, and Latina/o activists and community leaders. Both Reies López Tijerina and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales participated in the campaign. To the right of the “Cosmic Tree” are icons delineating the Indigenous legacy of Mexico. Both earthly and sacred versions of Quetzalcoatl (who was both an ­actual ­human being and a spiritual energy or deity) become manifest inside a repre­sen­ta­tion of Da Vinci’s Re­nais­sance, or Vitruvian Man, as well as the re-­creation of an architectural Quetzalcoatl, an image frequently seen in Chicana/o murals. In Mexica culture, this plumed-­serpent teotl (best translated as “energy,” but frequently mistranslated as “deity”) was one of the main spiritual Āgures. In addition to the Quetzalcoatl of Mexica cosmology, Vargas and Moreno include the Mayan Chac Mool Āgure who, according to George Vargas, “represents a fa llen warrior.”52 Like other Chicana/o muralists in the Southwest, Vargas and Moreno rearticulate both Mexica and Maya iconography within a sin gle

visual narrative. By including speciĀc Indigenous Mexican symbology, Vargas and Moreno assert an Indigenous-­mestiza/o identity for Detroit Chicana/os. This mural establishes the fact that although Chicana/os have migrated to Detroit from the Southwest or Mexico, they are indigenous to this continent and thus cannot be dehumanized as “illegal aliens.” This assertion of belonging, as seen in much of the current cultural production being created in M exicantown, helps fashion a sense of home within southwest Detroit. As Shifra M. Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto write, the use of “pre-­Columbian motifs in Chicano art served to establish pride and a sense of historical identity for the artists and the communities they addressed.”53 CitySpirit, elucidating a “hi storical identity” combined with a “geo­graph­i­cal identity,” is intended for a MiChicana/o audience and helps establish and maintain community along la otra frontera. While the right side o f the mural shows a Chicana/o interpretation of Indigenous Mexican histories, the left side portrays modern Mexicantown emerging as a major junction in this postindustrial city. This imagery underscores the strong presence of both Mexican and Mexican American culture in D etroit while representing a cr itical part of the multicultural, multiracial population in Michigan. Contrasting with the right side, the left side o f the mural does not appear as heavy with collage-­like imagery. In this portion of the composition, Vargas and Moreno have included many dif­fer­ent ele­ments of Mexicantown’s built architectural landscape. For instance, they have depicted the Hubbard Richard building, the location where the mural is painted; Sainte Anne’s Church; downtown Detroit’s Re­nais­sance Center, recently renamed ­after an automotive corporation; and the Ambassador Bridge, the gateway through la frontera norteña. Across the top of the mural is a d ualistic repre­sen­ta­tion of night and day as well as a man and ­woman controlling their own destinies, as symbolized by the industrial cogs. ­Here the homage paid to Rivera is apparent. Unlike Rivera’s Man and Machine fresco, which uses images

of laborers to represent his vision of a proletarian ­future, Moreno and Vargas have used laboring Mexicana/os to portray their familial ties to industrial ­labor, their communities’ dependence on manual l­ abor, and a co ntinued working-­ class consciousness. So while many aspects of the mural recall Rivera’s fresco cycle at the dia , Vargas and Moreno append the stories of Detroit Industry to Āt a late-1970s Mexican American context. Like Nora Chapa Mendoza, Vargas and Moreno use their visual art as a critique of established master and metanarratives to correspond to their individual and communal lived experiences. As previously stated, the focal point of the mural is the central ele­ment of a tree. According to George Vargas, the tree can be seen as a source of energy, symbolizing the Cosmic Tree that featured prominently in p re-­Columbian, Egyptian, Christian, and Buddhist art.54 Vargas and Moreno use the tree in much the same way that Rivera uses a “tree structure” in his d ia frescos. Art historian Francis O’Connor has argued that the entire structuring of Rivera’s d ia mural cycle, speciĀcally his use of directionality, comes from the Mixtec Codex Féjerváry-­Mayer.55 The use of the tree by Vargas and Moreno, and Vargas’s allusion to it as the Cosmic Tree, is a direct gesture not only to Rivera and his use of directionality but also to the Indigenous cosmology and artistic production of Central Mexico. Once again, Vargas and Moreno are asserting the speciĀc identities of Detroit Chicana/os: even though they are geo­graph­i­cally distant from Mexico and the Southwest, they are able to incorporate, recontextualize, and rearticulate ­these “Mexican” epistemologies in the face of adversity. According to Frantz Fanon, this is what differentiates culture from custom: “Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simpliĀcation. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture. The desire to attach oneself to tradition or bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean ­going against the current of history but also opposing one’s own p ­ eople.”56 ­After all, ­these Strad d ling l a o tr a fr o nter a  ·  389

artists and activists are interested in constructing a vibrant culture, not purely reifying custom. Directly below the tree, spanning the entire width of the mural, are vari­ous mineral, root, and seed ele­ments. The references ­here are multiple. The use of imagery in a R ivera-­esque manner again connects directly to the Detroit Industry murals. On t he north and south walls of the Garden Court, Diego Rivera used minerals to represent what he saw as the four races of humanity. Below each of ­these racially constructed Āgures, Rivera continued depicting the mineral substrata. In a p amphlet on Detroit Industry, Linda Downs writes that “gigantic hands grasp materials used in t he production of steel, symbolizing both mining in p ar­tic­u­lar and the aggressive drive to c­ apture the riches of the earth in general.”57 For Vargas and Moreno, in contrast to Rivera, the hands do not pull minerals from the earth but instead grow organically from it. While Rivera expressed an unorthodox proindustrial Marxism, Moreno and Vargas, as citizens in a late-­ capitalist United States, have seen the ill effects of industrialization on the earth and on all working ­peoples. ­Here, the artists have chosen instead to portray the minerals as remaining in t he earth and thus sustaining the hand. The artists have taken an overtly ecological stance. In his essay addressing CitySpirit, Vargas writes that “the unique geology of Michigan is pictured, a source of vari­ous minerals and fuels in t he ­Great Lakes region. Iron ore provides steel which is used in t he manufacture of automobiles, the state’s leading industry.”58 H ­ ere the minerals, native to the region, stand in for the brown-­skinned Mexican working class. Iron ore, representing the brown Mexican body, positions Detroit Mexicans as an “organic” working-­class community (not “illegal,” as immigration proponents would have it) that works alongside other groups in this location that straddles la frontera norteña. Following Raúl Villa’s assertion, the local (read Native) mineral ele­ments, as well as speciĀc references to the lived environment of the local community, are used to position a “ geo­graph­i­cal identity” for Detroit Chicana/os. It is this identity that the 390  ·  dyl an miner

communities in and around Mexicantown create in contrast to the “pressure of a dominant social formation.”59 In Rivera’s Detroit Industry, the four “races” of humanity extract the materials from the earth, reproducing Rivera’s epistemology of Man (Being) Master of the Universe, an ideology that he enacted in t he infamous nonextant Rocke­fel­ ler ­Center mural in New York (Man at the Crossroads) and subsequently replicated in Mexico City (Man Master of the Universe). In the dia fresco cycle, Rivera used minerals to represent racial difference, with iron ore representing the Indigenous ­peoples of the Amer­i­cas. For Vargas and Moreno, the same meta­phor applies, but it is enacted in a dif­fer­ent manner. While Vargas speciĀes that iron ore is used to fuel the steel industry, the ore, referencing Rivera, also becomes the meta­phoric Indigenous Mexican l­abor. In fact, la raza de bronce, as expressed in “ El Plan Espiritual de Azt lán,” translates in t his mural, for Vargas and Moreno, into “the iron ore p ­ eople.” Since the ore operates as a t rope for the Native/Mexican body, as long as the ore remains in t he earth the Native and mestiza/o (Mexican) ­labor cannot be colonized and exploited. In a s ense, leaving the minerals unmined signiĀes the anticolonial body of the Western hemi­sphere. This ­simple visual device allows for an attack on the colonizing practices of cap­i­tal­ist economies. Like the narratives of Mendoza, this MiChicana/o mural continues to attack the hegemonic narrative of both the Southwest Chicana/o experience and that of working-­class, “immigrant” Detroit. With the iron ore, as the Mexican body, deposited solidly within the earth, the Chicana/o community is represented as having likewise solidiĀed its sense of home in the city and along la otra frontera. [. . .] In the end, MiChicana/o visual culture acts as a (r e)centering device within the barrio and establishes an organic sense of community and home along the U.S.-­Canada border. By turning to CitySpirit, as well as to the work of Mendoza, I hope that we may begin to rectify the omissions and absences in the development of an expanding

Chicana/o artistic canon. Through the simultaneous problematization and resolution of la frontera, we begin to transcend the pres­ent discursive limitations of Chicana/o studies and open up new possibilities. A ­ fter all, is it not this “opening up” that allows the borderlands to be so po­liti­ cally transgressive? And if so, have MiChicana/o artists and activists succeeded in o pening up la frontera? Vamos a ver. Notes This chapter was originally published as Dylan Miner, “Straddling la otra frontera: Inserting MiChicana/o Visual Culture into Chicana/o Art History,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33, no. 1 (spring 2008): 89–122. Copyright © University of California Chicano Studies Research Center. Reprinted by permission of Chon Noriega and the author. The original article includes a discussion on the Xicano Development Center and radical Xicanx politics in Michigan. Epigraph: Dennis N. Valdés, “Region, Nation, and World System: Perspectives on Midwestern Chicana/o History,” in Voices of a New Chicana/o History, ed. Refugio I. Rochín and Dennis N. Valdés (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 115–40. 1. Dylan Miner, “El Renegado comunista: Diego Rivera, La Liga de Obreros y Campesinos, and Mexican Repatriation in Detroit,” Third Text 19 no. 6 (2005): 647–60. 2. Chela Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders 10 (1991): 14. 3. Antonio Gramsci, Se­lections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 333. 4. Ursula R. Murray, Tenth Annual Michigan Hispanic Artists Exhibition Cata­logue (Detroit: Michigan Hispanic Cultural/Arts Association, 2000), 12. 5. Examples of such reductionism are unfortunately quite frequent. For instance, the work of Carmen Lomas Garza is commonly positioned as “folk art.” In Arte Latino: Trea­sures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2001), 46, Jonathan Yorba considers her paintings “delightful works,” as if the work of Lomas Garza serves no other purpose but to “delight”! 6. Amber Arellano, “Artist’s Healing Spirit: Self-­Taught Painter Blossoms to Aid Hispanics in Area,” Detroit ­Free Press, September 22, 2000, B 1.

7. It is in­ter­est­ing to note that while Santa Barraza calls South Texas her home, Carmen Lomas Garza produces her images about South Texas from San Francisco. 8. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 286. 9. Dennis Valdés, Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the ­Great Lakes Region, 1917–1970(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). 10. Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 99. 11. A reference to Michigan does appear on page 137 of Saldívar’s Chicano Narrative. This is in relation to Rolando Hinojosa’s evocation of Michigan in Estampas del Valle (1973), which was ­later rewritten in En­glish and reissued as The Valley (1983). 12. George Vargas, “Con­temporary Latino Art in Michigan, the Midwest, and the Southwest” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1988), 253. 13. Rafael Pérez-­Torres, “Refiguring Aztlán,” in The ­Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán, 1970–2000, ed. Chon A. Noriega, Eric R. Avila, Karen Mary Davalos, Chela Sandoval, and Rafael Pérez-­Torres (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2001), 115. 14. Paul S. Taylor, Mexican ­Labor in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1920–34). 15.This is discussed in my article in Third Text, “El Renegado comunista.” 16. Cecilio Xilo García-­Camarillo, Roberto Rodriguez, and Patrisia Gonzales, eds., Cantos al Sexto Sol: An Anthology of Aztlanahuac Writings (San Antonio, TX: Wings, 2002). 17. Armando Navarro, Mexicano Po­liti­cal Experience in Occupied Aztlán: Strug­gles and Change (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2005). 18. Although it may appear that attempting to ­create a definitive typology—­aesthetic or other­wise—of MiChicana/o art would make sense within the overall scheme of this essay, I have intentionally avoided this discursive stance. Diverging from the work of Alicia Gaspar de Alba, in par­tic­u­lar her essay “­There’s No Place Like Aztlán: Embodied Aesthetics in Chicana Art,” in CR : The New Centenial Review 4, no. 2 (fall 2004): 103–40. I contend that the codification of “ethnic” aesthetics simply sustains a community’s marginal position within larger art historical fields. Although MiChicana/o art and visual culture may produce a unique visual language, I believe that it is more informative to recognize its ambiguous influence than to attempt to codify what it is.

Strad d ling l a o tr a fr o nter a  ·  391

19. Rita Gonzalez, An Undocumented History: A Survey of Index Citations for Latino and Latina Artists, CSRS Research Report No. 2. (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2003). 20. René H. Arceo Frutos, The Barrio Murals/Murales del Barrio (Chicago: Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 1987), 2. 21.Tracy Grimm, Identifying and Preserving the History of Latino Visual Arts: Survey of Archival Initiatives and Recommendations, CSRS Research Report No. 6. (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2005), 2. 22. CARA : Chicano Art, Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and

35.The unpublished work of Estrella Torrez, visiting lecturer at the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, delineates how Mexican and Mexican American agricultural ­labors have been systematically stripped of language sovereignty through educational policies. 36. Gonzalez, Undocumented History, 2. 37. Zaragosa Vargas, “Mexican Auto Workers at Ford Motor Com­pany, 1918–1933”(Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1984), 1. 38. While the term colonia (colony) usually demarcates a rural community, within Michigan both rural and urban Latina/o communities have been considered colonias. Within the historiography of the region, some of the

Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejerano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991). 23. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 108. 24. For information on the Midwest Latino Arts Documentary Heritage Initiative, see the proj­ect’s website at http://­www​.­midlad​.­org. 25. Shifra M. Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, Arte Chicano: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of Chicano Art, 1965–1981(Berkeley: Chicano Studies Library Publications Unit, University of California, 1985). 26. George Vargas, Carlos López: A Forgotten Michigan Paint­er, Occasional Paper 56 (East Lansing: Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, 1999). 27.Vargas, “Con­temporary Latino Art in Michigan,” 313–15. 28. Karen Mary Davalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 78. 29. Grimm, Identifying and Preserving the History. 30. Rita Gonzalez, Archiving the Latino Arts Before It Is Too Late, CSRS Latino Issues and Policy Brief No. 6. (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2003); Gonzalez, Undocumented History. 31.Frutos, “Introduction,” Barrio Murals, 1. 32. George Lipsitz, “Not Just Another Social Movement: Poster Art and the Movimiento Chicano,” in Just Another Poster? / ¿Solo un cartel mas? Chicano Graphic Arts in California, ed. Chon Noriega (Santa Barbara, CA: University Art Museum, 2001), 73. 33. Davalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje, 78. 34. Dennis Valdés, Barrios Norteños: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth ­Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 19.

earliest English-­language texts about Michigan Mexicans refer to the “Detroit Mexican colony.” Therefore, in this essay I use the terms colonia and barrio interchangeably. Similarly, Juan R. García in Mexicans in the Midwest, 1900–1932(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996) uses colonia when discussing urban Mexican communities in the Midwest. 39. Norman D. Humphrey, “The Migration and Settlement of Detroit Mexicans,” Economic Geography 19, no. 4 (1943): 358–61, quot ed in Valdés, Barrios Norteños, 19. 40. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute, 1987), 3. 41. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 3. 42. José Martí, Nuestra América (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1939). 43. Michelle Habell-­Pallán, Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popu­lar Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 207. 44. Davalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje, 67. 45. Similarly, Wayne State University’s Latina/o studies program, although in peril of collapsing, is named the Center for Chicano-­Boricua Studies, highlighting Latina/o solidarity in the city of Detroit. 46. George Vargas, “A Historical Overview/Update on the State of Chicano Art,” in Chicano Re­nais­sance: Con­ temporary Cultural Trends, ed. David R. Maciel, Isidro D. Ortiz, and María Herrera-­Sobek (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000). 47. Rudolph Valier Alvarado and Sonya Yvette Alvarado, Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003), 64. 48. A sustained study of the history and role of the Bagley Housing Association gallery and La Casa de Unidad is a proj­ect that should be undertaken, but the specific role of ­these institutions within the Chicana/o art

392  ·  dyl an miner

movement in Detroit falls outside the scope of this paper. I mention the gallery so that readers can place CitySpirit in relation to impor­tant community institutions. 49. Raúl Homero Villa, Barrio Log­os: Place and Space in Urban Chicano Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 5. 50. George Vargas, “City Spirit,” Bagley Housing Association, Detroit, 2000, http://­www​.­bagleyhousing​.­com​ /­CitySprit​.­htm. 51.Vargas, “City Spirit.” 52. Vargas, “City Spirit.” 53. Goldman and Ybarra-­Frausto, Arte Chicano, 40. 54. Vargas, “City Spirit,” n.p.

55. Francis V. O’Connor, “An Iconographic Interpretation of Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals in Terms of Their Orientation to the Cardinal Points of the Compass,” in Diego Rivera: A Retrospective, ed. Cynthia Newman Helms (Detroit, MI: Found­ers Society, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1986). 56. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 224. Originally published in 1961 asLes damnés de la terre. 57. Linda Downs, The Detroit Industry Frescoes (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1994), 5. 58. Vargas, “City Spirit,” n.p. 59. Villa, Barrio-­Logos, 5.

Strad d ling l a o tr a fr o nter a  ·  393

gabr iel a v ald ivi a, jos eph palis, and ma t the w r eill y

36. Borders, Border Crossing, and Po­liti­cal Art in North Carolina  ·  2011

Since the 1990s the Southeast has experienced a continued and dramatic growth in Latino populations in b oth rural and urban areas throughout the region. This immigrant population is establishing and building communities, transforming the landscape, and producing diverse cultures in places that are not traditionally Latino. In this essay we focus on the work of the Mexican artist Cornelio Campos, who lives in North Carolina and whose artwork represents journeys of Mexico-­U.S. migration and imaginaries of po­liti­cal, cultural, and physical bound­ aries to examine how art engenders questions and reflection about t­ hese borders. We argue that Campos’s artwork brings the Mexico-­U.S. border closer to non-­Latina/o audiences in North Carolina and by ­doing so shapes their geographic imaginations of the Latinization of the South. The essay is based on interviews with the artist, observation, and proj­ects conducted by undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina. [. . .]

Situating the Artist and the Art Work From Agricultural to Cultural Worker

Coming from the town of Cherán in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, Campos has lived in California, Georgia, Missouri, and North Carolina. He came to the United States for the Ārst time in 1989 to visit f­ amily members in California and started to work in t he agricultural sector. In 1990, encouraged by a f­ amily member who worked regularly in North Carolina, he came to pick tobacco leaves in H enderson during the warm months of the year. Not having traditionally worked in agriculture, he found the experience less than ideal: housing infrastructure consisted of mobile homes that ­were not adequate for h ­ uman living, and the work performed was hard and at times hazardous. According to Campos, this was the beginning of his recognition of “seeing difference” and the “contradictions of the experience of migration” for the undocumented mi­grant; the American Dream and the realities of working in

the United States ­were two very distinct ­things, a theme that recurs in much of his work.1 According to Campos, in t he early 1990s, North Carolina was “a virgin state for mi­grants”: work was largely available, and to him it seemed that few employers w ­ ere concerned with the repercussions of hiring undocumented l­abor.2 He continued to travel between California, Florida, and North Carolina, joining a network of mostly male agricultural mi­grants that crisscrossed the nation to follow the seasonal agricultural l­abor market. In 1993, due to lack of funds at the end of the tobacco season and unable to travel back to his f­ amily in California, Campos deci­ded to stay and moved to Durham with a distant relative to spend the winter months in North Carolina. In Durham, he worked in l andscaping and found this to be much less arduous than the tobacco Āelds. By the time the tobacco season started again, Campos had made up his mind: he would remain in D urham. He started taking En­glish classes and married his Ārst wife, a U.S. citizen. Throughout his agricultural employment, Campos hardly painted, despite having developed a keen interest in the arts since the age of nine. In Durham, however, his life changed drastically. He remembers this as a period of turbulence. Living in one of the poorest neighborhoods in northern Durham, Campos found out that the few Hispanic families in t own ­were constant victims of racial harassment and petty crimes. He sought help from the recently established Centro Hispano, a grassroots community-­based organ­ization dedicated to strengthening the Latino community and improving the quality of life for Latina/o residents in Durham. As he describes, this experience helped him develop an understanding of the need for po­liti­cal activism. He learned about the right to seek police protection in c ase of vio­lence, or the steps required to report assaults and confront vio­lence. He also reacquainted himself with painting, seeing it as a way of reflecting upon the prob­ lems he encountered and heard about. By way of connections forged throughout his community, his work has been slowly but steadily recognized

among grassroots organ­izations and community organizers. Campos uses the canvas to convey the migration experience and the experience of Latina/o diaspora in the United States, his own, along with the experiences of t­ hose he has met while in the United States. This is not surprising. When individuals migrate, they bring with them vari­ous identities and imaginaries that are challenged and changed as they encounter new material, po­liti­ cal, social, and cultural domains. Alicia Schmidt Camacho uses the term “mi­grant imaginaries” to describe the complex aspirations, hopes, dreams, and knowledge of increasingly mobile Mexican border crossers that compose one part of the transnational migratory cir­cuit.3 Campos’s work exhibits ­these “mi­grant imaginaries” strongly. ­Whether depicting ­people, ­things, or money crossing physical, cultural, and imaginary bound­aries between Mexico and the United States, Campos’s work represents a g rowing social consciousness and community formation within the rapidly growing Latina/o community in North Carolina. In an interview conducted in 2010, he elaborated on the reasons why he uses art as a way of expressing the experience of migration: “When we talk about the border, or migration, we talk about it as a p o­liti­cal prob­lem. But we hardly ever talk about the ­human feeling, or the ­people that cross the border. We hear about ­people being l­egal or illegal. I [use my work] to imagine and remember the humanity of p ­ eople, what they encounter and what they leave b ­ ehind. They focus on the po­liti­cal and forget about the sacriĀce, suffering, and losses that ­people experience when they chose to cross that border illegally.”4 Art as Activism

Drawing on his “mi­grant imaginaries,” Campos produces two main types of canvas repre­sen­ta­ tions. The Ārst type of repre­sen­ta­tion is what he terms “po­liti­cal art”: art to educate about and disrupt established notions about the pro­cess of Mexican migration. This art typically involves a

Bo r d ers, Bo r d er Cross ing  ·  395

muralist and mosaic style that depicts migration stories and the movement of ­people, goods, and ideas across geopo­liti­cal bound­aries and other real and ­imagined borderlines. He often juxtaposes t­ hese with pre-­Columbian motifs that point to the crossing of temporal bound­aries. His subjects are mi­grants and their families, communities, and larger society in Mexico. Campos’s highly politicized aesthetic addresses issues of immigration, the border, U.S./Mexican relations, identity, and cultural integrity, and challenges notions of alienness, (il)legality, and citizenship. As Maria Herrera-­Sobek would say, Campos’s use of modern and pre-­Columbian symbology and the ways in which he depicts stories of difference are forms of aesthetic activism that promote social questioning.5 In this light, Campos’s work can be seen as the legacy of both the Mexican muralist movement of the early and mid-­twentieth ­century and the subsequent Chicano arts movement in the United States during the latter part of the twentieth ­century.6 As his second type of repre­sen­ta­tion, Campos has developed an original “folkloric” art style that builds on Mexican folkloric traditions and his own memories of events observed and lived. For Campos, this folkloric art is not only a public action but also a personal one. Produced on canvases of a smaller scale, ­these paintings represent everyday scenes of men, ­women, and ­children performing mundane tasks (such as selling flowers or plowing Āelds) or religious cele­brations. Both of ­these artistic repre­sen­ta­tions, the po­liti­cal and the folkloric, are intended to shape geographic imaginations about Mexican and Latina/o national and transnational spaces and have the potential to disrupt established perspectives and relationships among distinct collectives in North Carolina. Campos describes himself as an educator, historian, and activist, and as such, his choice of venue is signiĀcant to his work. His po­liti­cal art tends to be exhibited in public venues (community colleges, m ­ iddle school libraries, and churches) to raise awareness among a b road audience about immigration issues. His position regarding the appropriate venues to display his po­liti­cal art 396  ·  vald ivi a, palis, and r eill y

parallel ­those of the Mexican muralists, who saw their art as aimed at a dif­fer­ent audience, not the traditional collectors and museums, but the public.7 Campos’s folkloric art, however, tends to be more broadly placed. Ranging from art galleries to restaurants and public institutions, t­ hese artworks aim to increase awareness of the rich heritage of Mexican identity. As Campos describes, they tend to be seen as “apo­liti­cal” ­because they do not tackle issues of immigration directly. Instead, they depict a politics of the everyday life in rural Mexico that d ­ oesn’t seem to be as “intimidating” as his po­liti­cal art. In the next sections, we review three examples of Campos’s cultural work. We focus speciĀcally on his po­liti­cal art, where he draws on geographic imagination of border crossing and ­people being crossed by borders to represent the experience of migration. Campos’s Art: Border Stories

Campos’s “po­liti­cal art” uses the themes of borders (physical, geopo­liti­cal, economic, emotional, and so on) and border crossings to explore the relationship between the United States and Mexico. He frequently partitions canvas space whereby each section tells a dif­fer­ent yet interrelated story. This artistic device emphasizes a dialectic tension between repre­sen­ta­tions of e­ ither the United States or Mexico, which invariably becomes the imaginary and material border that divides the two nations. This juxtaposition of visual repre­sen­ta­tions creates a series of binary oppositions: between a m odern/bountiful/demo­cratic/ male/white “Self ” ’ (the United States) and a premodern/barren/backward/feminine/colored “Other” (Mexico). Color also highlights this tension, with the colors representing Mexico usually dark and earthy brown, arid, and barren, while the United States is represented in bright colors as green, verdant, and full of life. Below, we expand on three paintings that exemplify Campos’s po­liti­cal art and w ­ ere most frequently discussed by students in their Āeld proj­ects.

FIG. 36.1. Cornelio Campos, Libre Comercio, 2004. Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

Libre Comercio (2004; Āg.  36.1) explores the emotional trauma of migration and the contradiction of how the ­free flow of trade and money that circulates throughout the hemi­sphere and the globe does not also include the ­free flow of ­people. The painting is typically exhibited at Latina/o heritage or empowering events such as ­those sponsored by amex can , which aims to promote the understanding of Mexican culture in North Carolina. Campos tells interlocking stories of loss, surveillance, money, and border crossing by dividing the painting into sections. In the ­middle is a vigilant ea­gle with binoculars as its legs who watches over the world of commerce and trade while si­mul­ta­neously guarding the border. Below the ea­gle are row upon row of crosses representing the unknown mi­grants who perished on their journey across the border. ­There

is also a repre­sen­ta­tion of the Rio Grande in the shape of the Amer­i­cas, with a skeleton head resting atop South Amer­i­ca and barbed wire r­ unning the length of the spine of the continents. One hundred dollar bills circulate over the map, out of reach of the Āgures on the ground, representing the unidirectional ­free flow of money that comes with ­free trade. At the bottom on the U.S. side is a Āgure from the Ālm The Terminator that enforces border security. Above are the verdant agricultural Āelds worked by the silhouettes of distant workers and the skyline of Raleigh, North Carolina. At the top is the distorted face of a politician (reputedly Bill Clinton), with the U.S. flag waving ­behind him. On t he bottom side that represents Mexico is a ­family that mourns next to a coffin draped in the Mexican flag at the airport. ­There is also a Walmart store sign, next to a pyramid. Bo r d ers, Bo r d er Cross ing  ·  397

At the top are the blacked-­out ­faces of Mexican politicians. When describing the Walmart sign, Campos says, “Money is power. . . . ​­Here is an archeological site and they put a Walmart next to it. ­There is a law that says you ­can’t do that, that you ­can’t do business at a certain distance [from an archeological site]. But Walmart did it ­because ­there is money to be made. The [Mexican] politicians are involved in accepting Walmart.”8 According to Campos, this painting is about naft a and personal suffering: Some friends told us about how when crossing [the border], they would Ānd the skeletons of p ­ eople with handkerchiefs on the leg o r hand, I im agine that means they ­were bitten by a snake . . . ​but sometimes ­people minimize t he trauma. That is why I see my work as educational. . . . ​My own experience is not as relevant as the ­things I paint. When I crossed twenty years ago, it ­wasn’t like this. But for my nephew, who crossed three years ago, it was very dif­fer­ent. He saw a man that had baby ­bottles with him. H e had been looking for his wife and child for a day and a half. He was asking around to see if anybody had seen them. . . . ​The borders are like cemeteries ­because ­people die cr ossing. . . . ​I imagine that ­these ­people, in their last few minutes of crossing the desert prefer to die and stop the suffering. So I see [skeletons] as an aid. . . . ​You ­don’t need to be the person that had the experience but to understand the pain of ­others. In another occasion, a man of about sixty told me about his ­daughter’s husband, a y oung man that drowned in t he river and nobody could Ānd his body. The Río Bravo is not easy to cross. . . . ​That is the trauma that the paintings express. When p ­ eople tell me stories like this, it is not my personal trauma. It is a collective trauma.9

Realidad Norteña (2003) is located in t he building of the Campus Y at unc –­Chapel Hill, which ­houses student organ­izations on campus that focus on social justice issues. It was purchased by the board of the Campus Y in 2008. It conveys a di f­fer­ent aspect of the migration experience, focusing on the realities of adapting and growing in the United States for ­those coming from Mexico. The central theme is the merg-

398  ·  vald ivi a, palis, and r eill y

ing of two potent symbols of each country: the Statue of Liberty and the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin of Guadalupe, a repeated symbol in many of Campos’s pieces, represents a s ource of faith and hope. She protects immigrants on their journey across the border and in their new lives in the United States. The Statue of Liberty also has long been a symbol of freedom, liberty, and hope for mi­grants, and Campos’s merging of the images points to this similarity. The line that divides the two halves of the painting is also the line that divides the two halves of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Statue of Liberty, which are at the forefront of the painting, along with a monarch butterfly, and a flower that is half a bird of paradise (representing Mexico) and half a dogwood flower (the state flower of North Carolina). For Campos, this painting represents stories of intimacy that cross the geopo­liti­cal border. On the Mexican side the landscape is brown and arid and devoid of life, with the Āgure of an Indigenous ­mother and child waiting while their husbands, ­fathers, and ­brothers, across the border, send remittances back home. The  U.S. side is Ālled with bright green tobacco Āelds, worked by the same male mi­grant ­labor while the ­woman and child await. At the bottom, on the U.S. side, are crosses in a bleak inhospitable landscape and twisted Daliesque suffering Āgures. Campos says this painting is about a “personal vision connected to the suffering of ­people”:10 I painted this ­after a long hiatus of painting, about ten years. It is the story of being in the U.S. up to that point. I wanted to express the personal. It has Aztec symbology. It has the Statue of Liberty, which means hope. The same as the Virgin of Guadalupe. . . . ​The tobacco Āelds is me working in agriculture. In construction ­there are also very young ­people. They stop working the Āelds in M exico, leave their m ­ others, wives, and kids. But at the same time they have a solid base from our ancestors. And this is what we see. . . . ​I also have the monarch butterfly that migrates from Michoacán. It means ­there are no borders. The self-­sacriĀce is in the desert. The m ­ other of my child is American, my son is

in the ­middle. The new generations are about ­people united. Maybe they ­will see a di f­fer­ent world. The Mexican American. That is what the bird of paradise and dogwood represent. . . . ​The fact that unc chose to purchase this painting was very surprising and impor­tant to me. I f eel like I h ave reached a p oint in my life where I see this personal expression of the mixing for me, it is as if ­people are coming to accept my personal idea of how I see t­ hings.11

Gloria Anzaldúa describes the immigrant artist as living in a s tate of nepantla, a N ahuatl word meaning being in a state of in-­betweenness when moving or crossing from one identity to another.12 This is a Ātting term to describe the reflections that Campos shares. The border is a power­ful historical and meta­phorical site within immigrant imaginaries—it is a site of dislocation, trauma, stretching, becoming, or radical possibility.13 For Campos, the border is about not only physical characteristics but also subjective associations. It is “a meta­phorical trope, a m aterial geo­graph­i­cal real­ity, a s et of relations between and among ­people.”14 In Antorcha Guadalupana (2007), Campos examines the relationship between immigration to the United States and the American Dream. Campos typically displays this painting at the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Durham, during the annual event of La Antorcha Guadalupana, a 3,800- m ­ ile relay run from Mexico City to New York that brings together thousands of families divided by the Mexico-­U.S. border. Departing from the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, the torch passes through ­every state where families of immigrants reside, including North Carolina. In this run, ­family members of Mexican immigrants carry a torch in Mexico that w ­ ill be touched ­later on by their relatives who live in the New York City area. One of the reasons this painting is exhibited during the time of the Antorcha event is that ­there is a Āgure of a r unner carry­ing the torch from Mexico to the United States, carry­ing the mi­ grant’s message. In this piece, a Statue of Liberty towers over the Washington, D.C., Capitol Building in t he

center of the painting over neat rows of agricultural farmland. Campos says that while many immigrants set out from their home countries seeking the American Dream, “they do t his by being misinformed. They know they need to be successful. Once you cross the border you think you ­will be successful in every­thing. But across the border is where the prob­lems begin.”15 On the left side of the painting is the Virgin of Guadalupe, along with a p re-­Columbian pyramid and a colonial Catholic church, while the right side is dominated by skyscrapers and construction equipment, images of the supposed modernity, pro­gress, and industry of the United States. On the bottom half are Aztec and Mayan images, skeleton heads, and archeological artifacts juxtaposed among twisted steel girders, rotting wooden planks, and high-­tech futuristic surveillance cameras. In the skies above both Mexico and the United States ufo s are flying over the landscape while a Homeland Security officer leads away an extraterrestrial alien in handcuffs. In an interview for the documentary The Virgin Appears in the Maldita Vecindad (2009), created by Altha Cravey, Elva Bishop, and Javier García Mendez, Campos explains the use of the extraterrestrial motif in this painting: “I am from Mexico and e­ very day we hear on the radio, on tv , in t he newspapers they focus on us as ‘illegal aliens.’ . . . ​For me, ‘aliens’ can mean many ­things. It implies to me something out-­ of-­place, something that does not belong. They use it as a term to exclude us. It makes it sounds as if w e are creatures from another planet. . . . ​ When I h ear ‘aliens,’ I imm ediately think of extraterrestrials.”16 When asked what his contribution to con­ temporary art in the United States was, well-­known Chicano mural artist Leo Tanguma said, “I bring into the mainstream a consciousness and an imagery that is humanizing to the w ­ hole society, as well as images that have been suppressed and repressed in Amer­i­ca.”17 In much the same way, Campos uses his work to “help ­people in the U.S. see what is ­behind us, immigrants,” and pres­ent his culture and ­people and their traditions along Bo r d ers, Bo r d er Cross ing  ·  399

with what he sees as a co llective trauma resulting from the intersection of economic policies and desires on both sides o f the U.S.-­Mexico geopoliti­cal border. While Campos’s intentions and moral commitments are signiĀcant for understanding his art as activism, the signiĀcance of his artistic products also depends on how audiences engage with them to represent themselves. [. . .] Concluding Thoughts: On Borders Being Crossed (or Not) and on Borders Crossing Us

A recent New York Times publication described the “higher proĀle” and “money infusion” used by cultural institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts to create a “ Latino Arts Initiative” that educates p ­ eople on the growing presence of Latinos in the United States and to “break down barriers” and build community.18 While this is an impor­tant effort, this essay has demonstrated that education about borders and barriers is multifaceted and multilocational. It is impor­tant to not only illustrate the dynamics and contexts of migration, such as why ­people cross the geopo­liti­cal border or seek for employment illegally, but also how that border is manifested in m ultiple locations, far from the physical geopo­liti­cal border. Indeed, work by geographers has already started exploring how geopo­liti­cal borders have emerged at more intimate scales of governance than the physical border between Mexico and the United States.19 The devolution of immigration authorities to the county level, for example, has led to the development of new geographies of surveillance and security at more intimate geographic scales. Our study points to the need to better understand not only how borders can shift geographic scales but also how their rescaling is experienced and made sense of by t­ hose that are not typically considered border crossers, in t his case, non-­ Latina/o individuals. Latinization, while a pro­ cess that creates new hybrid spaces that reflect 400  ·  vald ivi a, palis, and r eill y

the shifting demographics of the South—­for example, through the proliferation of Latina/o oriented ser­vices and venues—is also a pro­cess that engenders anx­i­eties (as well as promise) about how established communities and ways of knowing “the local” ­will change. Campos’s artwork, which is very much geo­graph­i­cal in its depiction of geopolitics, po­liti­cal economy, and cultural identities, has helped illustrate the need to consider how borders also cross p ­ eople, often without their own choosing. Or, as Valerie Walkerdine puts it, “It is as though crossing this anxious border is via a no man’s land, the place in which you cannot go back but never fully belong, a place of extreme anxiety about the joy of belonging, the escape from restriction and pain, and the ever-­present threat of being returned and found wanting.”20 As a meta­phorical border, we see Campos’s artistic work contributing to the pro­cess of Latinization in N orth Carolina in t hree interconnected ways: (1) he contributes to consciousness raising by depicting what he sees are impor­tant and ignored ele­ments of the migration experience in mainstream society, (2) his work focuses on bound­aries and distinctions often articulated with the presence of Latina/os in t he United States to question the discursive constructions that support structures of control and power and to challenge what is seen as a g iven, and (3) his work reflects on impor­tant aspects of the strug­gles over the meaning of the experience of crossing (and being crossed by) geopo­liti­cal and cultural borders. While this is not a comprehensive list of how Campos’s artistic work can be conceptualized, we use this as a way of thinking about the historical and social dimensions that condition his work and his role in creating consciousness of the growing Latina/o communities in North Carolina. Concomitantly, his artwork also works as a b order that its audiences are asked to recognize and cross. For audiences sympathetic with his politics, this is not a difficult task. For ­others, the artwork is a border that is resisted by their situated politics and lived experiences.

Notes This chapter was originally published as Gabriela Valdivia, Joseph Palis, and Matthew Reilly, “Borders, Border-­Crossing, and Po­liti­cal Art in North Carolina,” in “Carolina del Norte: Geographies of Latinization in the South,” special issue, Southeastern Geographer 51, no. 2 (summer 2011): 287–306. U sed by permission of the publisher. 1. Cornelio Campos, interview with the authors, May 30, 2009, Durham, NC. 2. Cornelio Campos, interview with the authors, no date, Durham, NC. 3. Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Mi­grant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-­Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 5. 4. Cornelio Campos, interview with the authors, ­February 28, 2010, Durham, NC. 5. Maria Herrera-­Sobek, “Border Aesthetics: The Politics of Mexican Immigration in Film and Art,” Western Humanities Review 60, no. 2 (2006): 60. 6. The Mexican muralist movement originated with the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Paint­ers, and Sculptors, founded in 1922 in Mexico City—­and is famously recognized in the works of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and José Alfaro Siqueiros. See James Ballinger, Hugh Davies, and John Lane, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Twentieth ­Century Mexican Art: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection (San Diego, CA: San Diego Museum of Con­temporary Art, 2001).When asked about artistic influences, Campos made reference to ­these three artists as well as Salvador Dalí. Chicano art, in the form of portraiture, posters, paintings, conceptual art, and particularly mural paintings, focuses on Mexican workers and immigrant experiences from the perspective of a unified Mexican community and imagination. See Shifra Goldman, “The Iconography of Chicano Self-­ Determination: Race, Ethnicity, and Class,” Art Journal 49, no. 2 (1990): 167–73; Philip Brookman, “Looking for Alternatives: Notes on Chicano Art, 1960–90,” in Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castilo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991), 181–93; Shifr a Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “The Po­liti­cal and Social Contexts of Chicano Art,” in del Castilo, McKenna, and Yarbro-­

Bejarano, Chicano Art, 83–96; Antonio Prieto, “Border Art as a Po­liti­cal Strategy,” Isla Information Ser­vices Latin Amer­i­ca, accessed May 12, 2010, http://­isla​.i­ gc​.­org​ /­Features​/B ­ order​/m ­ ex6​.h ­ tml; Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “Prologue: Immigrant Imaginations and Imaginaries,” in Caras Vemos, Corazones No Sabemos/Faces Seen, Hearts Unknown: The ­Human Landscape of Mexican Migration (Notre Dame, IN: Snite Museum, University of Notre Dame, 2006), 6–13). 7. Ballinger, Davies, and Lane, Frida Kahlo. 8. Campos interview, May 30, 2009. 9. Cornelio Campos, interview with the authors, June 5, 2009, Durham, NC. 10. Campos interview, May 30, 2009. 11. Campos interview, May 30, 2009. 12. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Border Arte: Nepantla, El Lugar de la Frontera,” in La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience, ed. Natasha Martinez (San Diego, CA: Centro Cultural De La Raza: Museum of Con­temporary Art, 1993), 110. 13. bell hooks, “Marginality as a Site of Re­sis­tance,” in Out ­There: Marginalization and Con­temporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trin T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Con­temporary Art, 1990), 341. 14. Jo-­Anne Berelowitz, “Conflict over ‘Border Art’: Whose Subject, Whose Border, Whose Show?,” Third Text 40 (1997): 71. 15. Campos interview, June 5, 2009. 16. Campos interview, n.d. 17. Monica Lettieri, “Cultural Identity and Ethnic Dignity in Chicano Mural Art: An Interview with Leo Tanguma,” Confluencia 16, no. 2 (2001): 142. 18. Susan Hodara, “Turning a Spotlight on Latin American ­Music and Art,” New York Times, December 4, 2009, http://­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2009​/­12​/­06​/­nyregion​ /­06artswe​.­html. 19. See Jamie Winders, “Changing Politics of Race and Region: Latino Migration to the U.S. South,” Pro­gress in H ­ uman Geography 29, no. 6 (2005): 683–99; Matthew Coleman, “What Counts as Geopolitics, and Where? Devolution and the Securitization of Immigration ­after 9/11,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (2009): 904–13. 20. Valerie Walkerdine, “Workers in the New Economy: Transformation as Border Crossing,” Ethos 34, no. 1 (2006): 12.

Bo r d ers, Bo r d er Cross ing  ·  401

enr iq ue ch a go ya, guillerm o gómez- p ­ eñ a, and felici a r ice tex t by guillerm o gómez- p ­ eñ a

37. Excerpts from Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol  ·  2001

Many burning questions remain unanswered: Given the endemic lack of po­liti­cal and economic symmetry between the three countries [Mexico, Canada, and the United States], ­will Mexico become a m ega-­maquiladora nation or, as artist Yareli Arizmendi has stated, “the largest Indian reservation of the U.S.,” or w ­ ill it be treated as an equal by its bigger partners? ­Will the predatory Statue of Liberty devour the contemplative Virgin of Guadalupe or are they merely ­going to dance a sweaty quebradita?­Will Mexico become the toxic and cultural waste dump of its northern neighbors? Given the exponential increase of American trash and media culture in Mexico, what w ­ ill happen to our Indigenous traditions, social and cultural rituals, language, and national psyche? W ­ ill the ­future generations become hyphenated Mexican-­ Americans, brown-­skinned gringos and Canochis or upside down Chicanos? And what about our northern partners? W ­ ill they slowly become Chicanadians, Waspbacks, and Anglomalans?

By the year 2000 w ­ ill every­body be fluent in Spanglish, Franglé, and Gringoñol? What­ever the answers are, naft a ­will profoundly affect our lives in m any ways. W ­ hether we like it or not, a new era has begun, and a new economic and cultural topography has been designed for us. We must Ānd our new place and role within this bizarre federation of U.S. republics. I travel across a dif­fer­ent Amer­i­ca. My Amer­ i­ca is a continent (not a country), which is not described by the outlines on any of the standard maps. In my Amer­i­ca, “West” and “North” are mere nostalgic abstractions—­the South and the East have slipped into their mythical space. Quebec seems closer to Latin Amer­i­ca than its Anglophone twin. My Amer­i­ca includes dif­fer­ent ­peoples, cities, borders, and nations. The Indian nations of Canada and the United States, and also the multiracial neighborhoods in t he larger cities, all seem more like Third World microrepublics than like communities that are part of some “Western democracy” (Āg. 37.1).

FIG. 37.1. Enrique Chagoya, Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis (detail from artists’ book), 2001. Image courtesy of the artists.

My Land Cut in Half

Charro-­Mántico sits on a cigar or toilet. He drinks from shampoo ­bottle, applies make-up, and talks to a hanging death chicken. His voice is soft and raunchy. A plant in t he audience screams ­every now and then “Speak in En ­glish, you beaner!” “Can you be less fuckin’ obscure?” A map of the United States and Mexico is projected on the screen for twenty seconds. Soundtrack: Mexican bolero on waltz. Ay, la nostalgia La nostalgie, Yea yea, wow wow Protects me against the gringos, La Migra, the art world Qué fuckin chingón pasado I had My past, pasado, pasadíssimo

(­Music begins) aaa y y y ! El esss . . . ​mog Que me vío crecer, Las chavas de la banda, Picudas, tierníssimas (Hago señal de cogida) Las madrizas en la colonia, Qué madrizas aquellas bro Translation please? . . . ​(No one translates) Where is the fuckin’ interpreter we asked for? Where is the Mexican Consulate When we need them? See, pollito, we are alone In this gringo world And then . . . ​the departure, La Partida man, Qué partida De maaadres, My mamita, My land

Excer pt s fr om Co d ex Es pan gliens is  ·  403

FIG. 37.2. Enrique Chagoya, Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis (detail from artists’ book), 2001. Image courtesy of the artists.

Cut in half With a Gigantic Blade, Gachísmo You know, We live therefore we cross The journey, man, Siempre hacia el Norte Pollito, do you know where’s the North? (I point at vari­ous points and audience members) ­There, no, ­there, ahi, no I mean my North, my-­gration, my dangerous poetry Tijuana, La Revu, los coyotes (I howl) La migrate, man, their guns guapa, Los dogos infernales (I howl)

404  ·  ch a go ya, gómez- ­peñ a, and r ice

To’ mordido bro Like you, Llegué todo mordido Y mojado a California Wet back, wet feet, wet dreams, that’s me They call me “supermojado” (I pause) How, once on the other side, o sea, acá Un culture shock de aquellas Los skinheads, bikers, y demás patriotic Califeños San Dollariego, Lost Angeles, remember? Busted seven times, myself apañadísimo For looking like this . . . ​can you believe it? For looking “suspicious” El go-­mex siempre horny, scared and interstitial Filled with all ­these ancestral memories (I speak in tongues) Conversations y entrepiernes on the beach,

“Te quierro my king taco mariachio” (I begin to masturbate) El agua fría y contaminada “I lay yu jani malguita descolorida” California fornicare sin memoria

Note This chapter was originally published as Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol, artists’ book by Enrique Chagoya, Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, and Felicia Rice (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2001). Used by permission of the authors.

Excer pt s fr om Co d ex Es pan gliens is  ·  405

juan felip e her r era

38. 187 Reasons Why Mexicanos ­Can’t Cross the Border (Remix)  ·  2007

—­Abutebaris modo subjunctive denuo ­Because Lou Dobbs has been misusing the subjunctive again ­Because our suitcases are made with biodegradable maguey Ābers ­Because we still resemble La Malinche ­Because multiplication is our favorite sport ­Because ­we’ll dig a tunnel to Seattle ­Because Mexico needs us to keep the peso from sinking ­Because the Berlin Wall is on the way through Veracruz ­Because we just learned we are Huichol ­Because someone made our id s out of corn ­Because our border thirst is insatiable ­Because ­we’re on peyote & Coca-­Cola & Banamex ­Because it’s Indian land stolen from our ­mothers ­Because ­we’re too emotional when it comes to our ­mothers ­Because ­we’ve been ­doing it for over Āve hundred years already ­Because it’s too easy to say “I am from ­here”

­Because Latin American petrochemical juice flows Ārst ­Because what would we do in El Norte ­Because Nahuatl, Mayan & Chicano ­will spread to Canada ­Because Zedillo & Salinas & Fox are on vacation ­Because the World Bank needs our abuelita’s account ­Because the c ia trains better with brown targets ­Because our accent is unable to hide U.S. colonialism ­Because what ­will the Hispanik mba s do ­Because our voice resembles La Llorona’s ­Because we are still voting ­Because the North is ­really South ­Because we can read about it in an ethnic prison ­Because Frida beat us to it ­Because U.S. & Eu­ro­pean Corporations would rather visit us Ārst ­Because environmental U.S. industrial pollution suits our color ­Because of a new form of Overnight Mayan Anarchy

­Because ­there are enough farmworkers in California already ­Because ­we’re meant to usher in a postmodern gloom into Mexico ­Because Nabisco, Exxon & Union Carbide gave us Mal de Ojo ­Because ­every nacho chip can morph into a Mexican wrestler ­Because it’s better to be rootless, unconscious & rapeable ­Because ­we’re destined to have the “Go Back to Mexico” blues ­Because of Pancho Villa’s hidden trea­sure in Chihuahua ­Because of Bogart’s hidden trea­sure in the Sierra Madre ­Because we need more murals honoring our Indian past ­Because we are ­really dark French Creoles in a Cantinflas costume ­Because of this Aztec reflex to sacriĀce ourselves ­Because we ­couldn’t clean up Hurricane Katrina ­Because of this Spanish penchant to be polite and aggressive ­Because we had a vision of Sor Juana in drag ­Because we smell of tamales soaked in tequila ­Because we got hooked listening to Indian jazz in Chiapas ­Because ­we’re still waiting to be cosmic ­Because our passport says ­we’re out of date ­Because our organ donor got lost in a Bingo game ­Because we got to learn En­glish Ārst & get in line & pay a ­little fee ­Because ­we’re understanding & appreciative of our Cap­i­tal­ist neighbors ­Because our 500-­year penance was not severe enough ­Because ­we’re still ­running from La Migra ­Because ­we’re still kissing the Pope’s hand ­Because ­we’re still practicing to be Franciscan priests ­Because they told us to sit & meditate & chant “Nosotros Los Pobres” ­Because of the word “Revolución” & the words “Viva Zapata” ­Because we rely more on brujas than ­lawyers

­Because we never Ānished our PhD in Total United Ser­vice ­Because our identity got mixed up with passion ­Because we have visions instead of tele­vi­sions ­Because our huaraches are made with Goodyear & Uniroyal ­Because the pesticides on our skin are still glowing ­Because it’s too easy to say “American Citizen” in cholo ­Because you ­can’t shrink-­wrap enchiladas ­Because a Spy in Spanish sounds too much like “Es Pie” in En­glish ­Because our comadres are an International ­Po­liti­cal Party ­Because we believe in The Big Chingazo Theory of the Universe ­Because ­we’re still holding our breath in the Presidential Palace in Mexico City ­Because ­every Mexican is a Living Theater of Rebellion ­Because Hollywood needs its subject ­matter in proper folkloric costume ­Because the Grammys & iTunes are Ā­nally out in Spanish ­Because the Right is writing an epic poem of apology for our proper ediĀcation ­Because the Alamo ­really is pronounced “Alamadre” ­Because the Mayan concept of zero means “U.S. Out of Mexico” ­Because the oldest ceiba in Yucatán is prophetic ­Because ­England is making plans ­Because we can have Nicaragua, Honduras & Panama anyway ­Because 125 million Mexicans can be wrong ­Because ­we’ll smuggle an earthquake into New York ­Because ­we’ll or­ga­nize like the Viet­nam­ese in San José ­Because ­we’ll or­ga­nize like the Mixtecos in Fresno ­Because East L.A. is sinking ­Because the Christian Co­ali­tion ­doesn’t cater at César Chávez Parque ­Because you ­can’t make mace out of beans 187 Rea so ns Why  ·  407

­Because the computers ­can’t pronounce our names ­Because the National Border Police are addicted to us ­Because Africa ­will follow ­Because ­we’re still dressed in black rebozos ­Because we might sing a corrido at any moment ­Because our land grants are still up for grabs ­Because our tattoos are indecipherable ­Because ­people are hanging milagros on the 2,000 mi les of border wire ­Because ­we’re locked into Magical Realism ­Because Mexican dependence is a form of higher learning ­Because making chilaquiles leads to plastic explosives ­Because a ­simple Spanish Fly can mutate into a raging Bird Flu ­Because we eat too many carbohydrates ­Because we gave enough blood at the SmithĀeld Inc., slaughter­house in Tar Heel, North Carolina ­Because a quinceañera ­will ruin the concept of American virginity ­Because huevos rancheros are now being served at Taco Bell as Wavoritos ­Because ­every Mexican grito undermines En­ glish intonation ­Because the President has a Mexican maid ­Because the Vice President has a Mexican maid ­Because it’s Rosa López’s fault O. J. Simpson is guilty ­Because Banda ­music ­will take over the White House ­Because Aztec sexual aberrations are still in practice ­Because our starvation & squalor ­isn’t as glamorous as Somalia’s ­Because agribusiness ­will whack us anyway ­Because the information highway is not for Chevys & Impalas ­Because white men are paranoid of Frida’s mustache ­Because the term “mariachi” comes from the word “cucarachi” ­Because picking grapes is not a British tradition 408  ·  juan felip e her r era

­Because they are still showing Zoot Suit in prisons ­Because Richie Valens is alive in West Liberty, Iowa ­Because ? & the Mysterians cried 97 tears not 96 ­Because Hoosgow, Riata, Rodeo are Juzgado, Riata and Rodeo ­Because Jackson Hole, Wyoming, ­will blow as soon as we hit Ocean­side ­Because U.S. narco-­business needs us in Nogales ­Because the term “Mexican” comes from “Mexicanto” ­Because Mexican queers crossed already ­Because Mexican lesbians wear Ben Davis pants & sombreros de palma to work ­Because vfw halls ­aren’t built to serve cabeza con tripas ­Because the National Guard are ­going International ­Because we still bury our feria in the backyard ­Because we ­don’t have international broncas for proĀt ­Because we are in love with our ­sister Rigoberta Menchú ­Because California is on the verge of becoming California ­Because the pr i is a ­family affair ­Because we may start a tele­vi­sion series called No Chingues Conmigo ­Because we are too sweet & obedient & confused & (still) full of rage ­Because the c ia needs us in a Third World state of mind ­Because brown is the color of the ­future ­Because we turned Welfare into El Huero Félix ­Because we know what the Jews have been through ­Because we know what the blacks have been through ­Because the Irish became the San Patricio Corps at the ­Battle of Churubusco ­Because of our taste for Yiddish gospel raps & tardeadas & salsa limericks ­Because El Sistema Nos La Pela ­Because you can take the boy outta Mexico but not outta the Boycott

­Because the Truckers, Arkies, and Okies enjoy our telenovelas ­Because we’d rather shop at the flea market than at Macy’s ­Because pan dulce feels sexual, especially conchas & the elotes ­Because ­we’ll Xerox tamales in order to survive ­Because ­we’ll export salsa to Rus­sia & call it “Pikushki” ­Because cilantro aromas follow us wherever we go ­Because ­we’ll ­unionize & sing De Colores ­Because A Day Without A Mexican is a day away ­Because ­we’re in touch with our Boriqua camaradas ­Because we are the continental majority ­Because ­we’ll build a sweat lodge in front of Bank of Amer­i­ca ­Because we should wait for further instructions from Televisa ­Because 125 million Mexicanos are potential Chicanos ­Because ­we’ll take over the Organic Foods business with a molcajete ­Because 2,000 mi les of maquiladoras want to promote us ­Because the next Olympics ­will commemorate the Mexico City massacre of 1968 ­Because ­there is an Aztec ­temple beneath our Nopales ­Because we know how to pronounce all the Japa­ nese corporations ­Because the Comadre network is more accurate than cnn ­Because the Death Squads are having a hard time with Caló ­Because the mayor of San Diego likes salsa medium-­picante ­Because the Navy, Army, Marines like us topless in Tijuana ­Because when we see red, white & blue we just see red ­Because when we see the numbers 187 we still see red ­Because we need to pay a ­little extra fee to the Border

­Because Mexican ­Human Rights sounds too Mexican ­Because Chrysler is putting out a lowrider ­Because they found a lost Chicano tribe in Utah ­Because harina white flour bag suits ­don’t cut it at graduation ­Because ­we’ll switch from a t&t & m ci to Y-­ que, y-­que ­Because our hand signs ­aren’t registered ­Because Freddy Fender ­wasn’t Baldomar Huerta’s real name ­Because “lotto” is another Chicano word for “pronto” ­Because we ­won’t nationalize a State of Immigrant Paranoia ­Because the depression of the ’30s was our fault ­Because “xenophobia” is a po­liti­cally correct term ­Because we should have learned from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 ­Because we ­should’ve listened to the Federal Immigration Laws of 1917, ’21, ’24 & ’30 ­Because we lack a Nordic/Teutonic approach ­Because Executive Order 9066 of 1942 shudda had us too ­Because Operation Wetback took care of us in the ’50s ­Because Operation Clean Sweep picked up the loose ends in the ’70s ­Because one more operation ­will Ānish us off anyway ­Because you ­can’t deport 12 million migrantes in a Greyhound bus ­Because we got this ­thing about walking out of every­thing ­Because we have a heart that sings rancheras and feet that polka Note This chapter was originally published as Juan Felipe Herrera, “187 Reasons Why Mexicanos ­Can’t Cross the Border (Remix),” in 187 Reasons Mexicanos ­Can’t Cross the Border, Undocuments, 1971–2007(San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2007), 29–35. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books. All rights reserved.

187 Rea so ns Why  ·  409

Further Reading

Brookman, Philip. “Conversations at Café Mestizo: The Public Art of David Avalos.” In Café Mestizo, edited by Philip Brookman, 6–20. New York: INTAR Gallery, 1989. Girven, Tim. “Sin Fronteras: Chicano Arts from the Border States of the U.S.” Travesia: Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (1993): 129–42. Gómez-­Peña, Guillermo. “The Virtual Barrio @ The Other Frontier.” Warrior for Gringostroika: Essays, Per­for­mance Texts, and Poetry. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 1993. Grynsztejn, Madeline. “La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience.” In La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience, edited by Kathryn Kanjo, 23–39. San Diego, CA: Centro Cultural de la Raza and Museum of Con­temporary Art, 1993. Habbell-­Pallán, Michelle. “ ‘No Cultural Icon’: Marisela Norte and Spoken Word—­East L.A. Noir and the U.S./Mexico Border.” In Loca Motion: The Travels

of Chicana and Latina Popu­lar Culture, 43–80. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Klein, Jennie. “Per­for­mance, Post-­Border Art and Urban Geography.” PAJ : A Journal of Per­for­mance and Art 29, no. 2 (May 2007): 31–39. Mancillas, Aida, Ruth Wallen, and Marguerite R. Waller. “Making Art, Making Citizens: Las Comadres and Postnational Aesthetics.” In With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture, edited by Lisa Bloom, 107–32. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Sorell, Víctor A. “Telling Images Bracket the ‘Broken-­ Promise(d) Land’: The Culture of Immigration and the Immigration of Culture across Borders.” In Culture across Borders: Mexican Immigration and Popu­lar Culture, edited by María Herrera-­Sobek and David R. Maciel, 99–148.Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. Vargas, George. “Border Artists in the Con­temporary El Paso Mural Movement: Painting the New Frontier.” In Chicano Studies: Survey and Analy­sis, edited by Dennis J. Bixler-­Marquez, 347–56. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1997.

Part VI. Institutional Frameworks and Critical Reception

FIG. VI.1. Asco, Spray Paint LACMA , 1972. © Harry Gamboa Jr.

c. o nd ine ch av o ya

Part VI. Introduction This section charts the critical reception of Chicano art and explores the shifting institutional responses to its display. Diverse in scope and perspective, this collection of texts brings together art criticism, primarily in the form of exhibition reviews, and scholarly essays that trace and analyze a historical trajectory of Chicana/o art exhibitions and the responses they generated. From the 1970s to the recent past, the emergence of a developing public discourse on Chicano is outlined with attention to the debates and controversies that emerge when a subaltern expressive form circulates in the mainstream art world. Some of the earliest exhibition reviews published in n ewspapers and art magazines frame the critical encounter with Chicano art as an ethnographic exposé. Paradigmatic of this style and method is William Wilson’s 1970 review (not reprinted ­here) of the early group exhibition Arte de los Barrios. As one of the Ārst stories on Chicano art to appear in the Los Angeles Times, Wilson’s review is also one of the earliest examples of mainstream journalism’s engagement with Chicano art more broadly. Written in t he style of a p ersonal chronicle, the review opens with a peculiar admission of disorientation, “Watts and Harlem, I k now how to get t­ here, but Fetterly St. in East L.A., I had to Ānd it on the map.” As he travels to the exhibition, the art critic is confronted with his past and personal associa-

tions with Chicano art and culture, including growing up on “the East L.A. border in terriĀed admiration of the Mexican kids” who w ­ ere his schoolmates.1 ­After surveying the multimedia exhibition, Wilson asks, “Sure, this art is about Chicanos but is it Chicano art?” The very heterogeneity of the work on display (presumably, formal, aesthetic, and material) confuses the art critic. The critic is frustrated ­because he did not encounter a more uniĀed or formalized aesthetic, and believes that “if a g roup of ­people have a h omogenous identity it has a distinctive artistic language, a style.” And, as he stridently stipulates, “­There is nothing homogenous about the look of ‘Arte de Los Barrios.’ ”2 As a result, Wilson reads the exhibition in all of its diversity of form, technique, and imagery in t erms of aesthetic failure and cultural irrelevance. Yet, this evaluative paradigm assumes that Chicanos are always-­already a homogenous group, culturally and socially, and that Chicano art is a Āxed, well-­established, and well-­known aesthetic tradition. What Wilson was perhaps unable to recognize ­were the vari­ous ways in which Chicano identity, culture, and art ­were all very actively in pro­cess (“called into being” so to speak) through the activities and activism of the Chicano civil rights movement. Indeed, as evidenced throughout this anthology, Chicano art arose at the end of the 1960s as part of the Chicano

movement, a national mobilization initiated and led by a range of constituents. An exhibition in 1974 showcasing the work of  the art group Los Four at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (l a cma ) became the Ārst exhibition of Chicano art in a public museum and garnered unpre­ce­dented media coverage, including a review (reprinted ­here) in Artforum magazine by noted art critic Peter Plagens (whose book Sunshine Muse: Con­temporary Art on the West Coast was published in t he same year). Following the lead of William Wilson, Plagens (skeptically) asked if the group of artists and the exhibition reflected a Chicano aesthetic. In addition to the question of categorization (both stylistic and cultural), Plagens is essentially concerned with the question of authenticity and the role of the museum to arbitrate such questions or determine such standards. To this effect, he asks ­whether the art and artists at l a cma have the capacity to “Chicano-­ize the museum” or if the inclusion of Los Four can only function to “museum-­ize the Chicanos”? The initial reviews by mainstream art critics such as William Wilson, Peter Plagens, and ­others, including Alfred Frankenstein writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, establish the purview for subsequent critical discourse and debates. In other words, ­these early reviews si­ mul­ta­neously introduce and establish a cr itical framework for presenting Chicano art in a rt criticism and journalism. In effect, art criticism’s ongoing engagement with Chicano art has been fundamentally concerned with questions of inclusion and authenticity. Where does Chicano art belong? What is its proper context? Is ­there an appropriate method for interpretation and means of evaluation? And, importantly, how should Chicano art be exhibited, collected, and interpreted by museums and other civic or educational institutions? The early critical reception not only articulates the conditions (aesthetic terms and social contexts) upon which Chicano art is to be assessed and critically engaged with but also shapes how it is to be included and framed within the museum. 414  ·  c. o nd ine ch av o ya

Questions concerning Chicano art, authenticity, and museum inclusion continue to resurface in art criticism. Meanwhile, new perspectives emerge and a debate unfolds as authors begin to reconsider the paradigms and critical terms used for evaluation. For example, in a review of a Movimiento Artistico Chicano (mar ch ) group exhibition in C hicago in 1977, Raye Bemis Mitchell announces an alternative paradigm for evaluation by identifying “the long-­standing antagonism between overtly po­liti­cally motivated art and art for art’s sake modernism” at the onset of the review. Ralph Rugoff ’s review of the historic exhibition Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (car a ) suggests a similar recognition and negotiation of competing, potentially incompatible, paradigms: a cr itical divergence encapsulated in the question that frames the art critic and curator’s examination, “Chicano Art: Retro Progressive or Progressive Retro?” In charting the development of debates concerning the critical reception and pre­sen­ta­tion of Chicano art in museums, it may seem unusual, odd, or counterintuitive to open with such antagonistic reviews that appear to question the fundamental concept of Chicano art. And, yet questions repeatedly asked at the onset and explored over time persist in a wa y that some artists and curators Ānd productive and o ­ thers Ānd troubling and onerous. More recently, an exhibition that featured ninety-­two artworks by seventy-­two artists drawn from the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum’s permanent collection titled Our Amer­i­ca: The Latino Presence in American Art generated a lively debate that took several forms, including a review in t he Washington Post in 20 13. Pulitzer Prize–­winning art critic Philip Kennicott’s commentary that “Latino art, t­ oday, is a meaningless category” sparked a dynamic group discussion on Facebook that developed into a more focused e-­ mail exchange between the critic and media artist and Ālmmaker Alex Rivera, and was published one week ­later. In turn, this exchange inspired a story on National Public Radio that extended the debate and asked “What Do We Mean When We Talk about ‘Latino’ Art?”

From the outset, Chicano art was largely ­deĀned in relationship to institutionalization—­ which is to say, outside of (or in o pposition to) the museum. In the 1980s, as museum exhibitions began to historicize Chicano art, ostensibly divergent critical voices converged to argue that the museum (as a site, institution, structure, and practice) decontextualizes Chicano art. Like other key debates and polemics identiĀed in this section, this critical crossroads is understood to be both aesthetic and social, related to meaning and function, since the institutionalization of Chicano art (the moment of entrance into museum and market) was criticized as hampering the work’s public commitment (see also part I). The late art historian Shifra M. Goldman understood the public orientation and commitment of Chicano art as the “matrix of social change and community ser­vice” that brought the Chicano art movement into existence. In a review of two exhibitions in 1981 featuring Chicano art “pioneers” in California, Goldman expressed signiĀcant reservations about the pro­cess of institutionalization. Goldman, a pioneer herself in the Āeld of art history for her groundbreaking scholarship and steadfast commitment to both Chicana/o and Latin American art, was particularly trepidatious about the exhibition Murals of Aztlán: The Street Paint­ers of East Los Angeles or­ga­nized by the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, which commissioned well-­known artists to create large-­scale murals on canvas and invited the public to view the artists painting inside the museum galleries. Goldman found the exhibition’s premise contradictory and argued that the museum exhibition thoroughly decontextualized muralism and v­ iolated its form and function as a public art. Suspecting that the transposition of wall to canvas was propelled by market forces seeking untapped genres, Goldman ruminates on the impact that this re-­or decontextualization of mural art w ­ ill have on the f­ uture of muralism and for muralists. Judithe Hernández, one of the participating artists in t he exhibit and a m ember of the art group Los Four, challenged Goldman in a let ter

to the editor and questioned ­whether institutional ac­cep­tance and commercial success would necessarily compromise an artist’s aesthetic or social commitments. In counterdistinction to Goldman, Hernández proposed that one of the beneĀts of Murals of Aztlán was that the exhibition provided the opportunity for the public to experience muralism in a di f­fer­ent context and to witness its creative production in c lose proximity. Hernández’s response prompted another by Goldman asserting that her critique was directed ­toward the institution and not the participating artists while underscoring the original critical concern with privatizing (forms of) public art; this critical exchange was published together and is recollected in this volume as the essays shift from art criticism to scholarship on museum exhibitions. ­These debates and reviews are followed by longer essays that pay close attention to the history of display in galleries and museums. Karen Mary Davalos provides a thoughtful perspective in the essay “All Roads Lead to East L.A.,” which introduces the history of the Ārst Chicano arts organ­ ization in East Los Angeles, the Goez Art Studios and Gallery. Davalos examines the formation of this community-­based arts organ­ization and explores the diverse programs Goez developed over its twelve-­year history, ranging from muralism to Āne arts restoration and from art classes to commercial sales and contracts. The framework Davalos unearths in t his institutional history is that of an “arts institution that had to deĀne, from the ground up, what it meant to ­operate for Chicanos.” Beginning in t he late 1960s, a g rowing number of arts institutions, organ­izations, and artist-­run spaces emerged in w ide-­reaching areas across the country, including El Grito de Aztlán Gallery (Denver, Colorado), Mechicano Art Center (Los Angeles, California), Plaza de la Raza (Los Angeles), Galería de l a Raza (San Francisco, California), Centro Cultural de la Raza (San Diego, California), Self Help Graphics & Art (Los Angeles), Centro de Artistas Chicanos (Sacramento, California), mar ch (Movimiento Artistico Chicano, Chicago, Illinois), Southwest Chicano Art Center (Houston, Texas), Mexican Intr o d uctio n t o Par t VI  ·  415

Museum (San Francisco), Xochil Art and Culture Center (Mission, Texas), spa r c Social and Public Art Resource Center (Venice, California), and MARS (Movimiento Artístico del Río Salado) Art Space (Phoenix, Arizona), among o ­ thers. All of ­these institutions—­and the many ­others like them—­worked “from the ground up” and supported Chicana/o art, artists, and communities before more mainstream institutions began mounting exhibitions of Chicana/o art. Chicano art exhibitions attained greater national visibility in t he 1990s, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba surveys the terrain of museum exhibitions focused on Chicano art during this time in a co nceptual coda to her influential analy­sis of the cara exhibition in the book Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House (1998). Gaspar de Alba’s essay, along with ­others in t he collection, demonstrates the ways in w hich the focus shifts over time from the terms of inclusion to consider how Chicano art proffers an expanded understanding of American art. As the po­liti­cal, economic, and corporate structures of the museum garnered greater critical attention, museum exhibitions and curatorial practice became an impor­tant arena for scholarly analy­sis. The writings of Jo-­Anne Berelowitz, Karen Mary Davalos, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Chon Noriega are exemplary in t his regard as they closely examine museum structures, exhibition practices, and vari­ous critical debates and controversies associated with exhibitions featuring Chicano art. This body of scholarship approaches the museum as a s tructure and institution and asks that we consider, in the words of Noriega, the museum as “a product of and a catalyst for dialogue, debate, and change.” During this same period, museums also became an impor­ tant site for artistic practice through site-­speciĀc installations and an increase in installation-­based exhibitions, including the exhibition Revelaciones/Revelations: Hispanic Art of Evanescence (1993) cocurated by Noriega and analyzed in his essay “On Museum Row: Aesthetics and the Politics of Exhibition.” Installation art practices often transpose and recontextualize the sites of produc416  ·  c. o nd ine ch av o ya

tion and display, and, as Noriega’s essay elucidates ephemeral, site-­speciĀc installations also have the capacity to generate spectator participation and bring heightened, critical attention to par­ tic­u­lar spaces and situations. As the discourse on Chicano art developed and the number of exhibitions expanded, curatorial practice was brought into increasing focus for critical reflection and examination, and, in turn, this expanded realm of critical inquiry provides an opportunity for innovation and intervention among scholars who enter into the museum and curatorial Āelds in order to develop exhibitions about Chicano art and its multivalent histories. Writings by scholars and curators such as C. Ondine Chavoya, Jennifer González, Rita Gonzalez, Amalia Mesa-­Bains, Chon Noriega, Tey Marianna Nunn, Laura  E. Pérez, Reina Prado, and Terezita Romo, among ­others, effectively and deftly reflect on the role of curator and institution to provide the context through which art is interpreted. Rita Gonzalez’s essay “Strangeways ­Here We Come” closes this volume with a r eflection on a roundtable conversation among a group of artistes, curators, and scholars on the state of con­ temporary art. As new counter-­monuments, installation art, and social practice proj­ects have developed, she considers how they operate both inside and outside museum structures and how Chicana/o traditions have influenced a y ounger generation (who came to prominence ­later in the exhibition Phantom Sightings: Art a­ fter the Chicano Movement in 2008). G onzalez recaps a passionate debate and disagreement that developed among the participants, which attests to the continuing need to examine and question the critical and institutional frameworks in which we operate and to foster debate as a means for developing new conceptual paradigms and new artistic possibilities. Notes 1. William Wilson, “Art of Barrios in East L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1970, D 1, D 7. 2. Wilson, “Art of Barrios in East L.A.,” D 7.

peter p l a gens

39. Los Four  ·  1974

“Los Four” (Roberto de la Rocha, Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert Luján, and Frank Romero) at Los Angeles County Museum of Art ( l a cma) is one of ­those patronizing, Cheviot Hills liberal shows that, if ­you’ve any quality sense (and who operates with none? ), puts your conscience on the spot: demo­crat or elitist, pluralist or academician, open spirit or cancerous up-­tighter? The exhibition documents—by way of a bewildering (to the Bauhaus-­corrupted, anal-­retentive eye) array of drawings, collages, flea-­market bric-­a-­brac (on a cooperative “altar”), demimurals, paintings, and even the primered [sic] nose end of a ’51 Chevy (my Ārst car)—­the Chicano aesthetic (Āg.  39.1). The museum’s imperatives are real: anything east of Western Ave­nue is obviated from “cultural” L.A., which means ­whole barrios, ghettos, and white trash neighborhoods go unattended, if not condemned; Chicano artists have been speciĀcally underexposed, even while official tokens went out to blacks and ­women; and the plastic stuffiness of l a cma needs regular fumigating. But in the presence of such a so­cio­log­i­cal bazaar (the walls are painted bright pink, banana green,

and beige—­like a Lincoln Heights cantina) some questions occur: 1 Out front, are “Los Four” any good as artists? 2 Do “Los Four” reflect a Chicano aesthetic? 3 Is this Chicano aesthetic any good? (A fair query, I think. Why is it sentimental stereotypes—­Jews as warmly familial, blacks bursting with “soul,” wa sps as ingenious and industrious, and w ­ omen with osmotic roots in lif e—­pass unchallenged, while no more greatly inaccurate downers—­Jews as usurers, blacks as loafers, wa sps as xenophobic haters, and ­women as . . . ​well, skip it—­are as scandalous as pee in the holy ­water? If ­you’re ­free to say, “This is the Chicano aesthetic and it’s terriĀc,” y­ ou’re equally ­free to say, “This is the Chicano aesthetic and it stinks.”) 4 How much are we to sentimentalize/add/subtract for the disadvantages of the barrio? Is the subliminal title of the exhibition “Four Chicano Artists Who ­Aren’t Much Good But Who Might Be If They Had the Same Privileges You Have?”

My answers are: (1)fair, and uneven; (2) yes, but glossed over with art-­schoolisms; (3) yes, in the original—­the spray-­can graffiti around Belmont

FIG. 39.1. Gilbert Luján, installation view, 1974. Image courtesy of the artist.

High is ten times as sharp as the rounded-­off appropriations ­here; and (4) none, since the artists are living professionals, not anonymous Ānds of an archaeological dig. The trou­ble with “Los Four” as artists is that ­they’ve been corrupted: ­they’ve taught in art schools/colleges, worked as designers, and so on, and the road back is rocky indeed. Many of the amalgams (cubism + tattoo doodling, abstract expressionism + “Viva los Flats C/S” on the bus bench, or soft painting + murals por la gente) ­don’t catch, or need more time. It took a few hundred years for the Hispano invasion to blend with the Indian cultures to produce Mexican culture, and it might take another hundred for the Mexican culture to meld with the (ugh) industrial materialism of white American consumerism. Still, Chicano is not Mexican (prizeĀghts between featherweights from Sonora and Maravilla at the Olympic Auditorium assume,

with the divided crowd, the intensity of civil wars), so it’s a l­ittle strained, for instance, when the big mural-­size canvas of the noble, Aztec-­ like farmworkers against the porcine, malignant cops/growers drapes itself in t he cloak of badly drawn Rivera/Orozco/Siqueiros muscle-­bound proletarianism. The trou­ble with the museum is that its architecture, bureaucratic air, and curatorial chic have, collectively, the ability to authenticate anything; “Los Four” ­doesn’t Chicano-­ize the museum (why ­don’t they paint the outside of that monstrosity pink/green/beige? ), but rather museum-­izes the Chicanos. Note This chapter was originally published as Peter Plagens, “Los Four,” Artforum 13, no. 1 (September 1974): 87–88. Copyright © Artforum.

Los Four  ·  419

ra ye bemis

40. MARCH to an Aesthetic of Revolution  ·  1977

You set up such a saf e criteria as “art” and c onceal within yourself a v ague po­liti­cal inclination (to the left) dropping the phrase “art for art’s sake” from time to time. . . . ​­Isn’t this just h y­poc­risy and c ommercialism? I would like you to know this: ­There is always a needle in art; t­ here is always poison; you ­can’t suck honey without the poison too. —­Y UKIO MISHIMA

To a m odernist and postmodernist aesthetic sensibility most of social-­realist art is ugly. The exhibit of paintings, prints, drawings, and photography by the artists of mar ch (Movimiento Artistico Chicano) at Alpha Gallery would prob­ ably provoke a simi lar judgment by the majority of modernist artists and critics—­a judgment indicative of the long-­standing antagonism between overtly po­liti­cally motivated art and art-­for-­art’s-­sake modernism. Thus this exhibit by the mar ch artists typiĀes the aesthetic predicament of modernism and social realism when ­either tries to evaluate the “merits” of the other. It is not just a ­matter of indoor versus outdoor wall preferences; both sides a re intrinsically

hampered by contradictions that surface only as differences in “style.” mar ch describes itself in its calendar as “basically an organ­ization of ­people concerned with art and its effect on humanity as a ­whole. mar ch members include not only professional artists and art instructors, but also a wide spectrum of the general population including art students, factory workers, and residents of the Barrio community who share a co mmon dedication to the preservation and promotion of ‘el Arte de La Raza’ as well as a consciousness and understanding of 20th millennium cultural heritage. mar ch was originally founded in 1972  in Indiana as ‘el Movimiento Artistico de la Raza Chicana,’ and was officially chartered in Chicago in 1975 as ‘el Movimiento Artistico Chicano.’ ”1 Artists included in t he exhibit are Salvador Vega, Rey Vasquez, Salvador Dominguez, Carlos Cumpián, Jose Gonzalez, Marguerite Ortega, Francisco Blasco, Carlos Cortez, Aurelio Diez, Efrain Martinez, and Jesus Moron. The disdain for any type of social-­realist art is so automatic, immediate, and pervasive among

t­ hose steeped in the tradition of the avant-­garde that the disdain has become more a conditioned reflex than a response. But this disdain is based (covertly at least) on something more substantial than taste. The subject m ­ atter of social realism (the collective act, po­liti­cal and historical enlightenment, and ethnic and class consciousness) is directly aimed at inspiring a rebellion against class and cultural controls. Thus it behooves the wary modernist, who in this country at least has been allied with the dominant cultural and commercial powers, to dismiss the art of the social-­ realist as “ugly” and “po­liti­cally motivated.” In light of t­ hese considerations, it is difficult to see how proponents of e­ ither of t­ hese ideological positions can fairly or accurately assess the artistic achievements of the other. One might ask the question, is it logical given their contradictory goals even to try? To pass a modernist/formalist judgment on the mar ch exhibit would not be too difficult. With a few exceptions the work looks “amateurish” in technique and formal structure. The drawings lack Ānesse, space is the “left-­over” around the Āgures, and most of the art (bar the photo­graphs) looks emotionally forced. If t­ hese artists aspired to formalist goals only, they fell far short. Marguerite Ortega’s portrayal of a s treet walker is too gaudily colored and tastelessly intense to pass as a “good” formalist painting. But as a deliberate mirror of the gaudy tastelessness with which the prostitute paints herself, underlining her symbolic value as a c lass victim, it is very successful. Ortega combines increased feminism and social conscience in her work. Bullshitting at G is one of two drawings that make use of a sleazily clad, overly made-up, and boney female image to express a min ority ­woman’s frustration at having only the options of party-­girl promiscuity and prostitution as the main alternatives to motherhood and marriage. Ortega’s work is not art about art, but art about unpleasant and unchosen social circumstances. Her work denies the possibility of coincidence as the reason why one social class prefers and does one kind of art and another social class prefers

and does another. Clearly one person’s “ugly” is another person’s “relevant.” Adeptly drawing the right number of knuckles on a c lenched Āst is impor­tant to the social-­realist, but the emphasis is on what the Āst represents. If that message gets across and if the viewer is spurred to a social realization and action, then the piece has succeeded. Perhaps ­because he is of an older generation that came to maturity when the modernist’s discovery of the spare beauties of oriental art was still fresh, Carlos Cortez achieves a balance between aesthetic considerations and po­liti­cal messages more acceptable to an eye trained on twentieth-­century French masters. In his I.W.W. posters he uses a flat graphic style, expressive ­faces, and bold type for the po­liti­cal blurb. His paintings and prints are equally spare, but exacting in their emotional directness. Salvador Vega’s ­etchings are proof of his technical ability. In two of Vega’s prints, portraits of Indians, the Indians stare stoically back at the viewer with the determined complacency of ­those who know they ­will get (or get back) what they want in a m ­ atter of time. That message or threat would be greatly diminished translated into geometric shapes. Aurelio Diaz’s work bears the strongest imprint of the Mexican muralist tradition. Relying to a l arge extent on the groundwork laid by Rivera, Siquieros, and Orozco, he uses violent Mexican folklore images, g­ reat scale contrasts, near and far spatial plays, and exaggerated foreshortening in hi s four-­part painting. ­These juxtapositions charge the work with an immediacy that transcends the historical signiĀcance of the images. They reflect the physical and psychological vio­lence of the con­temporary urban ghetto and proj­ect the idea of vio­lence as part of the revolutionary ­future. The social-­realists’ and muralists’ unabashed use of a “dated” still-­serviceable traditional style marks them as less aesthetically adventurous to artists who compulsively dally in the avant-­garde obsession of “demystiĀcation.” But they (the social-­realists and muralists) have no reason to MARCH to an Aes the tic o f R ev o l u tio n  ·  421

demystify art; it already has a ­viable function. Art expresses who they are individually within a minority group within this society, and what they want—­the “who” being the overt message, and the “want” being the covert message. The covert message of much of Chicano social realism, as well as many of the local minority muralist groups (­behind the history lesson and brotherhood message) is one of revolution. The images are used as tools to pique the latest revolutionary consciousness of the pres­ent day Chicano or of any group in t he underdog category. Brotherhood equates with collective action and minority solidarity.

422  ·  ra ye bemis

Notes This chapter was originally published as Raye Bemis Mitchell, “MARCH to an Aesthetic of Revolution,” New Art Examiner (February 1977): 11. Republished with permission from the author. Epigraph: Yukio Mishima, letter to the Bungakuza Group appearing in Asahi Shimbun. See Henry Scott Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 176. 1. Carlos Cortez, “History of March,” Calendario de MARCH (Chicago: Movimento Artistico Chicano, Inc., 1976). Dated 1977 in ICAA archive: http://­icaadocs​.­mfah​ .­org​/­icaadocs​/­THEARCHIVE​/­FullRecord​/­tabid​/8 ­ 8​/d ­ oc​ /­1065497/​ ­language​/­en​-­US​/­Default​.­aspx (accessed August 2018).

ralp h r ugo ff

41. Resisting Modernism  ·  1990 Chicano Art: Retro Progressive or Progressive Retro?

If ­you’re addicted to the thrill of the next new ­thing, it’s difficult to enjoy art that is stubbornly nonexperimental. For this reason, much con­ temporary Latino work seems anachronistic to the gringo art world. The aesthetic traditionalism of much Latino art renders it irrelevant, not to mention downright boring, when judged by a modernist program that prizes formal innovation, or by the terms of postmodernism’s self-­ conscious criticality. Judged on its own terms, such art is a radical critique of our obsession with novelty and “pro­ gress”—an obsession that has drawn Eu­ro­pean and North American art ever closer to the capriciousness and triviality of the fashion industry. Indeed, to many in the Latino art community, what we consider “progressive” art appears naïve or self-­ indulgent, especially in its apo­liti­cal worship of the new. Do ­these two cultures harbor irreconcilable ideas about art? This is the question inevitably raised—­and inadequately answered—by Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, an ambitious and somewhat desultory historical exhibition at ucl a ’s Wight Art Gallery. Featuring

works by more than ninety artists from across the United States, car a is distinguished from most survey shows of “Latin art” by the speciĀcity of its focus. In brief, it attempts to identify Chicano art as an outgrowth of el movimiento, the Mexican ­American civil rights movement that flourished from the mid-1960s to late 1970s, which brought together a co ­ali­tion of rural mi­grant workers, ­labor activists such as César Chávez, urban community groups, and students. The operative word in car a’s title is “affirmation.” Most of the work in t he show seems primarily concerned with promoting and glorifying Chicano identity. With some impor­tant exceptions, this task is accomplished through the use of romanticized religious iconography, cultural clichés, and a nostalgic recycling of mythological symbols. Images of sacred hearts, jalapeño peppers, the Virgin of Guadalupe, zoot-­suited pachucos, lowriders, Day of the Dead, calaveras, and Aztec jaguars abound in stunning redundancy. While basically good-­natured, the use of ­these affirming images lacks the inventiveness of the very traditions being venerated. None of

FIG. 41.1. Celia Alvarez Muñoz, “Which Came First?” Enlightenment #4, 1982. Mixed-­media book. Image courtesy of the artist.

the Āve works saluting Frida Kahlo, for example, generates the imaginative surprises of her own paintings. Nor do the vari­ous tributes to lowriders come close to matching the mocking wit of that subculture’s reversal of mainstream values, in which the USA’s mania for speed and newness is flipped into an aesthetic of slowness and obsolescence. Instead, most of the work in car a insistently draws on the very clichés you’d think Chicano artists would deliberately avoid in order not to conform to ste­reo­types of what Chicano art is “supposed” to be. If car a offers an accurate picture, Chicano art ­doesn’t resist ste­reo­types so much as it embraces them, often with l­ittle or no irony. The most exciting work in t he show deĀes such an evaluation. In “Which Came First? ” ­Enlightenment #4 Texan Celia Muñoz plays ineloquent visual aids off a minim al narrative to investigate the confusion of learning a language 424  ·  ralp h r ugo ff

(Āg.  41.1). Accompanied by photos of rows of eggs, a printed text relates the author’s twin difĀculties as a c hild—­learning to speak En­glish and understanding chickens. “How does it lie an egg? ” ­she’d ask. “Through its mouth,” is the incongruous printed response, while a lin e at the bottom of the page, written on loose-­leaf paper in a child’s careful script, asserts, “The chicken lies ­every day.” Given the context of the narrative, the humor is both poignant and sharp-­edged, as Muñoz’s misguided corrective exercises underline the extent to which language not only colors our perception but potentially sabotages it, isolating the speaker in a fog of misunderstandings. Ester Hernández is another artist who d ­ oesn’t merely affirm cultural icons, but twists and subverts them. Her pop-­inspired Sun Mad print is a searing takeoff on the Sun-­Maid raisin box that replaces the bounty-­bearing maid with a ghoulish skeleton and text protesting the use

FIG. 41.2. Ester Hernández, Sun Mad, 1982. Screen print, 26 × 20 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

of insecticides (Āg. 41.2). By blending a conventional icon such as the calavera with name-­brand packaging, Hernández achieves the kind of startling or compelling effect that is missing from the more traditional work in the show. Diane Gamboa’s Snow Queen similarly dodges familiar conventions while addressing issues related to ethnic identity and social class. Hanging from wires, a ballroom gown and diadem hover in t he air as if adorning a g host; constructed from butcher paper, tissue, and glitter, the ethereal outĀt comes across as a terse meditation on illusion and fashion, its throwaway materials referring the viewer to the economic realities ignored by its fantasy of upper-­class elegance. The satiric humor of Hernández and the wryness of Muñoz are not only adroit po­liti­cal

weapons; they also create points of entry for the non-­Chicano viewer. Unlike conventional agitprop, which maintains an anti-­intellectual bias as Āerce as that of our boob-­tube culture’s, their art demonstrates that aesthetic play is not incompatible with po­liti­cal statement. Unfortunately, most of the art included in car a is more straightforwardly affirmative. Instead of questioning mass-­ produced icons, it tends simply to reproduce and honor them. Nowhere is this more evident than in a sprawling home-­altar installation created by critic and artist Amalia Mesa-­Bains. An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio pres­ents production stills of the former Hollywood star encompassed within a g littering shrine of mirrored shelves lined with dried flowers, religious statues, cosmetics, and candles. Res is ting Mo d er nis m  ·  425

While the home-­altar format is initially intriguing in its mixture of the funky and the sublime, Mesa-­Bains never delivers a co nceptual punch line; ­there’s no probing, for example, of the types of Ālm roles played by the Mexican-­born actress. Instead, the work pres­ents itself as a sincerely reverent valentine, saluting del Río for her crossover success. It’s a magnanimous impulse, but as art, it’s frustrating in its refusal to go further. It’s not as if ir ony ­isn’t a p art of the Chicano artistic vocabulary. In a c ata­log essay by critic Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, rasquachismo—­which sounds ­here like a Mexican version of camp—is identiĀed as a salient Chicano sensibility. Characterized by a delight in artiĀce, excess, and embarrassingly tacky decorative schemes, rasquachismo embodies the deĀant wit and inventiveness of the underdog, insulting middle-­class standards and savaging pride with its transformation of junk into a coherent aesthetic. In car a, however, most of the art that borders on being rasquache ends up seeming trite rather than truly offensive. Part of the prob­lem is that the boutique knickknack industry has, to a large degree, appropriated this aesthetic; as a result, a work such as Teddy Sandoval’s Chile Chaps looks more like a c ute gift idea from Melrose than a subversive parody of Mexican ­American clichés. Where, one won­ders, are the Chicano artists making use of velvet paintings or winking Jesuses? Unfortunately, t­ here’s nothing like that on hand. The most pertinent commentary is offered by Rubén Trejo’s Birth of the Jalapeño, a mixed-­ media sculpture that playfully mocks the obsessive search for origins and identity that characterizes so much “Chicano” art. One of the frustrating aspects of discussing a show like car a is that it arrives in a prepackaged aura of righ­teousness, its supporters and organizers insisting that the artists’ good intentions place the work above criticism. Any gringo critic who comes along and Ānds fault with some of this work is thus identiĀed in ad vance as a c allous cultural imperialist. Yet the exhibit raises a host of questions that need to be answered. Is it the ideas or the 426  ·  ralp h r ugo ff

form of expression that makes art recognizably “Chicano”? Is ethnicity an integral part of this art’s deĀnition? What if a b lack or a white artist ­were to appropriate ­these same iconographies? Would that be Chicano art? And what is the advantage of replacing images related to con­temporary experience with ­those of myth? Why, for example, does Yolanda M. López use the ubiquitous Latin American saint La Virgen de Guadalupe as role model for con­temporary Chicanas? Apart from the fact that the work i­ sn’t hung in chronological order (an irritating decision given the show’s historical pretensions), the most annoying part of car a’s curatorial slant is its failure to situate Chicano art in the larger and more disorienting context of U.S. culture, where Taco Bell is as American as Burger King and Madonna gets cast to play Frida Kahlo. In an environment where the uncritical ac­cep­tance of media images helps pacify, numb, and eviscerate the body politic, the icon-­oriented art in car a warrants scrutiny rather than ­simple cele­bration. Affirmation of ethnic and po­liti­cal identity can be a form of re­sis­tance in a h ostile culture, but in the work featured in car a, the desire to uplift and exalt the downtrodden has all too often inspired a deceptive simpliĀcation. In real­ity, the question of multicultural identity is more complex, more difficult, and painfully less coherent than most of the work in t his show suggests. (Surely, art ­today needs to do more than explore roots.) Useful as a historical document, car a is also instructional in t he pitfalls it reveals. Perhaps this exhibit ­will spur a n ew generation of artists to move beyond the ghetto of “affirmation,” beyond theme shows where an artist’s ethnic heritage is more of a consideration than his or her ideas. Note This chapter was originally published as Ralph Rugoff, “Resisting Modernism: Chicano Art: Retro Progressive or Progressive Retro?,” L.A. Weekly, October 5–11, 1990, 43–44. Republished with permission from the author.

philip kennic o t t

42. Our Amer­ic­ a at the Smithsonian  ·  2013

One begins to won­der if it’s even pos­si­ble to or­ga­ nize a major art exhibition devoted to an ethnic or minority group. So many try, and so many fail, and so, too, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which opened a rather dutiful show called Our Amer­i­ca: The Latino Presence in American Art on Friday. It ­isn’t a b ad show, but surely work made by artists who belong to the more than fifty million ­people who identify as Hispanic or Latino in the United States is more vibrant, provocative, and in­ter­est­ing than what is on display ­here. Surely ­there’s a more compelling way to pres­ent it, and more in­ter­est­ing ­things to say about it. Mostly one feels the strictures placed on the curators, the rules they are following in a leaden, academically proper way. Of course, if it’s a show about Latino art, it must be inclusive and relatively comprehensive, and no major movements or artists must be left out. Of course, if it’s about a population group that has suffered prejudice, it must cut a Āne line between accurately presenting the impact of bigotry and reducing Latinos to victims. Of course ­there ­isn’t ­really any universally

agreed upon sense of what “Latino” means, and who belongs to the group, so the label must never be applied in a limiting way. And it ­mustn’t make any claims that might alienate artists or art lovers, about what Latino art should or s­ houldn’t be. Add to that a p rob­lem particularly acute at the Smithsonian: that the show offend no one, give no heartache to the notoriously timid overseers in the ­Castle, and prompt no visitor to write so much as a single angry e-­mail. Sample the prose from essays that ­will eventually be published as a cata­log for the show when it travels to other venues: “The tone and character of much current expression revolves around personal responses to global realities,” writes one author. “­These rich examples encourage us to see Latino art not as a b ounded category but as a fluid one, open to many dialogues and trajectories,” writes another. This ­isn’t just the usual academic blah blah, but a t elling symptom of an insoluble prob­lem: Latino art, ­today, is a m eaningless category. Historically, ­there are movements and periods when  the category is in­ter­est­ing, for example,

the politicized Chicano and Nuyorican art movements of the 1960s and ’70s, whose artists provide some of the best material on display. Th ­ ere are also subdivisions of “Latino” art that might make sense as a f ocus for a m ore targeted exhibition (such as Cuban art dealing with themes of exile). ­There are also myriad stylistic and formal categories that might narrow the subject enough to see useful detail: 1960s abstraction, conceptual art, videos, posters, and mural work. But throw it all together and try to argue that it’s a v irtue rather than a fa ilure of curating to stress the fluidity of deĀnition, the unbounded categories, the many trajectories, and you get a big mess. That ­shouldn’t detract from the work, which is often well made and fascinating. Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s brilliant 1957–58 vivisection of an old cowboy and Indian Ālm, chopped up with a t omahawk and reassembled in f renetic bits and pieces, some of them upside-­down, is still hypnotically power­ful and encompasses so many basic conceptual moves that similar work by other artists since feels derivative. The Puerto Rican artist ad al embeds a v ideo monitor in an old suitcase, and mashes up scenes from the Ālm West Side Story with other kinds of m ­ usic and voices from a police scanner. The results are strikingly power­ful, as the fake sentimentalized emotion of the Ālm’s caricatures takes on a more desperate, au­then­tic sense of trauma. Manuel Acevedo’s 2004 photo­graphs of a slum in H artford are altered to include ghostly suggestions of architectural additions, though their lines, rendered in strict perspective, suggest prison fences as much as they might intimate the hope of urban renewal. And Delilah Montoya’s nearly empty photo­graphs of border regions in the Southwest (including her celebrated image Humane Borders W ­ ater Station) give us a power­ ful sense of the land as a b eautiful, dangerous, eternal constant, unforgiving (to ­those who confront its arid and torrid expanse), and disinterested in our affairs (especially where we place our borders).

428  ·  philip kennic o t t

The exhibition also includes work that has become or should be canonical. One of Abelardo Morell’s wonderful camera obscura images rendered inside an empty room (made in 1996) is included, but feels strangely out of place, shy, and inward looking, just like the technique that produces it. ­There is also a faux documentary photo­ graph by the collective Asco, Decoy Gang War Victim, made in 1974 and widely seen on the cover of Artforum two years ago. The Asco image, which shows a body lying in the street ­under dim blue light, was shopped around to tele­vi­sion stations with the ridicu­lous claim that it represented the “last” victim of gang vio­lence in t he barrio. The intent was to underscore the sensationalism and credulity of lazy local news programs. But even strong work ­doesn’t stand much of a chance if one sees it in isolation, decontextualized or in the com­pany of uninspiring neighbors. Jesse Amado’s Me, We reproduces in sm ooth, beautifully pro­cessed granite and marble two wooden shipping palettes, gritty, almost invisible industrial objects. It is a coy and smart gesture, not just to elevate the everyday but also to focus on the mythic power latent in t­ hese purely functional objects. One thinks of Atlas, with the world on his shoulders, and all the backbreaking uncelebrated, miserable work it takes to keep a relatively small number of ­people supplied not just with the necessities of life but with art as well. But why place it in a room with undistinguished abstract paintings? Its cool, circumspect power would make much more sense in a nother room, where some of the strongest visual invention—­posters that chart the politicization of Latino groups—is displayed. ­There is also plenty of work that simply ­isn’t very good, derivative and dull, adding ­little to the pre­ce­dents that inspire it: knock-­offs of Claes Oldenburg and Cindy Sherman, second-­rate abstraction, and sentimental treacle in regionalist styles. The exhibition includes only work from the museum’s collection, ninety-­two pieces by seventy-­ two artists. Most of it has been acquired since 2011,which is impressive, though one won­ders

if the museum is getting the strongest pieces by each artist. One also won­ders if ­there is need for some introspection at the American Art Museum. This i­ sn’t the Ārst disappointing show it has mounted in recent seasons (Art of Video Games, Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage, and the ­Great American Hall of Won­ders ­were all problematic). The last truly substantial show was the small but rigorous George Ault exhibition in 2011. It’s painful to say: someone, or something, seems to be driving the museum ­toward exhibi-

tions that feel a bit spineless, or formless, or that overtly pander to the audience. And why is the cata­log not ready for the opening of this show? ­Don’t Washington audiences deserve better? Note This chapter was originally published as Philip Kennicott, “ ‘Our Amer­i­ca’ at the Smithsonian,” Washington Post, October 25, 2013. Republished with permission from the Washington Post and the author.

Our Amer­i ­c a a t the S mithso ni an  ·  429

philip kennic o t t

43. Alex Rivera, Philip Kennicott Debate Washington Post Review of Our Amer­ic­ a  ·  2013

My October 25 review of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Our Amer­i­ca: The Latino Presence in American Art, ignited strong reactions from some Latino artists. Several participants in a co nversation on Facebook took par­tic­u­lar exception to my claim that the show’s lack of focus was “a telling symptom of an insoluble prob­lem: Latino art, t­ oday, is a meaningless category.” I asked the author of the original post, digital artist and Ālmmaker Alex Rivera, if he would like to have the conversation more publicly. He agreed, and what follows is a transcript of an e-­mail exchange over the past two days. alex r ivera: Can you explain why you used your review of this show to make a pronouncement about the entire concept of “Latino Art”? This is the sentence I’m referring to: “. . . an insoluble prob­lem: Latino art, ­today, is a meaningless category.” It seems to happen over and over again: when a group show like this one is mounted, critics attack the fundamental notion of looking at the work as a group. Why?

The prob­lem is that, while critics raise doubts about categories like “Latino Art,” ­there’s never any discussion of the absence of that work in show ­after show that keep groups like Latinos on the margins or excluded entirely from the American conversation. For example: the 2012 Whitney Biennial featured exactly zero Latino artists. How can that be a s urvey of “American Art”? Where is the questioning of that absence in p ublications like the Post? It seems like the absence of Latino artists is normal, not newsworthy, but the organ­ izing of our presence ­causes questions about our existence. philip kennic o t t : I called Latino Art a meaningless category for two reasons. First, I think it is so broad as to be meaningless. The exhibition I was reviewing includes work by artists of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Mexican descent, but it might just as well include artists who claim heritage in almost all of the countries in South and Central Amer­i­ca. And is all of this art in fac t linked by some essential unifying ­thing? Is the art made by

a Cuban exile educated in Paris somehow similar to street art made by a Mexican American in Los Angeles? Maybe, but then tell me what the link is. As a critic, you hear over and over again that artists ­don’t want to be pegged by their nationality, language, ethnic group, or sexual identity. The second reason I said it was that the curators seem to argue exactly that: They insist that the show ­isn’t about labeling, i­ sn’t about deĀning anything essential about the category of Latino art. As a critic, you begin to won­der why bother d ­ oing ­these group shows if t he ultimate intent (and a desirable one) is to place the focus back on individual artists, and individual artworks, rather than the group identity that every­one seems to resist? Make the show more speciĀc, perhaps more limited, with a more speciĀc argument, and use the best art and artists from this larger show to make a point you can stand by. I take your point about the absence of Latino artists in many exhibitions, though one of the best shows I’ve seen recently that attempted to negotiate the idea of group identity, the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek devoted to gay artists, had a robust repre­sen­ta­tion of art by Latinos. ar: I should have mentioned in my Ārst message: I wish you’d had a better time at the museum! Reading your comments, a question comes to mind: do you Ānd “Latino Art” meaningless, or do you Ānd the notion of “Latino” meaningless? I ask ­because I understand your observation that ­there’s a lot of diversity within the ­imagined community of “Latinos.” But what big grouping of ­people ­doesn’t embody diversity and conflict within itself? I imagine you regularly review shows in m useums of “American Art,” but never spend the review space critiquing the concept of “American” (which is more broad than the category “Latino”). Why attack categories like “Latino” when ­they’re used proactively to or­ga­nize a show, while other vague categories are left unquestioned? In terms of what unites Latino artists, well. . . . ​ It might be aesthetics that one way or another trace back to distant Spanish and Indigenous

influence. It might be an engagement with questions of assimilation in t he United States or of migration or exile. It could be none of ­these. But one strong glue that unites the community of Latino artists I k now is awareness that ­we’re still “outsiders” in spaces that claim to speak for the nation. ­Isn’t long-­standing absence enough “glue” to make this survey of Latino Art at the Smithsonian a worthy endeavor? pk: You ask if it’s Latino art I Ānd meaningless, or “the notion of ‘Latino’ ” art? Emphatically the latter, and if t hat ­wasn’t clear in m y review, then I should have been more careful. I say that I enjoy much of the art on display, only I wish it was better presented, better contextualized, better focused. What I grappled with is the use of the label—­Our Amer­i­ca: The Latino Presence in American Art—in a show that ­doesn’t seem to want to deĀne or even accept the validity of that label. You give one pos­ si­ble ave­nue for Ānding meaning in the category: the origins of some of the visual material in t he “distant Spanish and Indigenous influence.” I think that would be an in­ter­est­ing way to focus an exhibition. And I gave some other possibilities: One would be looking at the wonderfully provocative and visually incisive Chicano art movement of the 1960s and ’70s. But you see, ­we’re already whittling a big category down to smaller ones. That’s a h ealthy ­thing, I’d argue, forcing p ­ eople to think about real connections, not simply labels. Again, I point out that my prob­lem with the label has a lot to do with how many Latino artists resist it . . . ​just as many African American artists resist being labeled, and so too gay artists. I remember a recent show in Washington called 30 Americans, which looked at three de­cades of recent African ­American art. Again, the cata­log writers went through the usual contortions of saying that they ­didn’t want to imply that t­ hese artists had anything in common, stylistically, or in terms of content or approach, simply by virtue of being African American. Very similar to the intellectual contortions surrounding the Smithsonian’s Latino

Alex R ivera, P hilip Kennic o t t Deba te  ·  431

Presence show. The difference, however, is that the content of 30 Americans at least had a common sensibility, and tone, and often stylistic approach. ­Whether or not that was ­because the artists ­were African American, or ­because the show was derived from a sin gle private collection, ­didn’t ­matter. The impor­tant ­thing was a sense that the show had a focus. That was what was lacking in the Smithsonian exhibition. Let me ask a question: Do you think it’s enough that a major show of Latino art at the Smithsonian can only be summarized as having included a lot of art by Latinos? Is rectifying the absence you speak of all that ­matters, or should it have also been a g ood show in t raditional museum terms (i.e., with focus, an argument, a s cholarly component)? ar: Apologies for any confusion. To be clearer, you explained that you Ānd “Latino Art” a m eaningless category ­because it is broad (encompassing Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican artists, e­ tc.). So, I was curious if it was not “Latino Art” that you had trou­ble with, but the simpler notion of “Latino” as an identity category at all. That’s what I meant to suggest—­that perhaps you ­don’t Ānd grouping together tens of millions of ­people in this way helpful. And if you ­don’t see the commonality of experience in that ­imagined community, then of course a survey of our artistic output would seem a fruitless exercise. And so. . . . ​Do you think “Latino” is a useful category for thinking about p ­ eople? Does it illuminate anything about history or just confound? If not, what do we call ourselves? If so, why ­can’t we have something called “Latino Art”? Fi­nally, in answer to your questions about ­whether this par­tic­u­lar show at the Smithsonian need be a “good show” as well as a ­simple manifestation of presence. . . . ​Well, of course I’m ­going to say “yes.” The trou­ble is that the metric of “good” is always subjective and questions of “quality” are hard to get at when the argument is shifted to w ­ hether or not the fun-

432  ·  philip kennic o t t

damental organ­izing concepts have any merit or not. If your review had contrasted the qualities of this survey of Latino art with o ­ thers, focused on the strengths and weaknesses of par­tic­u­lar aspects of the show, and accepted that ­there needs to be a presence of something called “Latino Art” in a m useum like the Smithsonian, I p rob­ably ­wouldn’t have gone nuts on Facebook. pk: As a demographic category I’m sure “Latino” is useful, and I d ­ on’t want to suggest that the category ­isn’t meaningful for ­people who embrace it. As a gay man I Ānd the category “gay” meaningful even though many younger ­people who might have embraced it a de­cade ago now reject it. Identity is deeply personal and something we construct. But demographic categories ­aren’t necessarily useful for explaining habits, preferences, and be­hav­ior. “Latino shoe preference” or “gay driving habits” d ­ on’t ­really refer to useful ideas, do they? The question posed h ­ ere is ­whether “Latino” is useful for explaining something in­ter­est­ing about art. ­Here’s some text from the Our Ameri­ca cata­log essay by Carmen Ramos: “Latino art is an imperfect composite construct that traditionally refers to the art of Mexican Americans/ Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and more recent arrivals such as Dominicans. ­These demographics, however, are by no means settled or clear-­cut. Nor can one term adequately shoulder the divergent histories it seeks to contain. I u se the term ‘Latino art’ not as a sign of cultural essence but as an indicator of descent, shared experience, and art historical marginalization.”1 So from the very beginning we have curatorial acknowledgement that the category is “an imperfect composite construct” and i­ sn’t “settled or clear-­cut” and it c­ an’t “shoulder the divergent histories” it seeks to contain. And the work it is supposedly able to do—­indicator of descent, shared experience, and art historical marginalization—is in fact so broad that it c­ an’t ­really focus the exhibition. The last two of t­ hese subcategories in the

deĀnition Ramos offers—­shared experience and art historical marginalization—­are more useful than the Ārst—­indicator of descent—­and they would offer grounds for a better exhibition. But it would have to be much better focused than what is on display at the Smithsonian. As for your argument that “­there needs to be a presence of something called “Latino Art” in a museum like the Smithsonian,” I would agree . . . ​ if we insert one word: “­Great.” ­There absolutely needs to be a better repre­sen­ta­tion of ­great Latino art in a museum like the Smithsonian. And many of the pieces in the exhibition I reviewed qualify for that inclusion. ar: Well, for starters, I a gree that “Latino shoe preference” is not a m eaningful category, so we can at least agree on that! (But I bet readers involved in marketing shoes would disagree.) I also agree that how we identify is a personal decision. And that “Latino” is a big, unruly way to categorize ­people. Like “American.” But ­here’s the rub: the review you wrote sparked heated reactions among some Latino artists, in part, ­because ­we’re very used to reading reviews like it. Take this review in t he New York Times of Phantom Sightings, an exhibition of post-­Chicano art, which starts with the line: “Is it time to retire the identity-­based group show?” Or this mention in t he Times of a s how featuring an American majority—­women—­whose work somehow rarely makes it into American museums: “Sexism is prob­ably a good enough explanation for inequities in the market. But might it also have something to do with the nature of the art that ­women tend to make?”2

Time and again reviews of shows that feature work of “minority groups” (who are in many instances majorities in ci ties where the art world thrives, but what­ever) become the occasion not to talk about the show at hand, but to attack the fundamental gesture of curating shows featuring our work. We read ­these reviews against the backdrop of media silence that has for de­cades enabled our erasure from spaces like museums and galleries. In your review, you took an ­angle that attacked not the show at hand—­but the entire meaning of “Latino Art” as a c ategory. A g ood portion was also spent on critiquing the general direction of the institution of the Smithsonian. I ­don’t doubt the show is imperfect, and worthy of critique. I d ­ on’t doubt that the show is broad in nature. But in the f­ uture I hope to read reviews that take me into the show, on the show’s terms. Reviews that help me understand what speciĀcally works and what ­doesn’t. And reviews that accept as a starting point that presenting the work of p ­ eople who inhabit big categories like “Latino Artists” is vital and urgent. Notes This chapter was originally published as Philip Kennicott, “Alex Rivera, Philip Kennicott Debate Washington Post review of ‘Our Amer­i­ca,’ ” Washington Post, November 1, 2013. Republished with permission from the Washington Post and the author. 1. Carmen Ramos, “What Is Latino about American Art?,” in Our Amer­i­ca: The Latino Presence in American Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2014), 36. 2. Ken Johnson, “Arts: The Week Ahead, November 11–17, ” New York Times, November 8, 2012.

Alex R ivera, P hilip Kennic o t t Deba te  ·  433

eliz abe th bl air

44. What Do We Mean When We Talk about “Latino Art”?  ·  2013

a ud ie c o r nis h (hos t): How much should art and the creative pro­cess be seen through the lens of race and ethnicity? Do ­these categories aid our understanding and appreciation or do t hey detract? Well, some in the art world are upset that a new exhibition at the Smithsonian lumps artists of Latino heritage together. The show is called Our Amer­i­ca: The Latino Presence in American Art. npr ’s Elizabeth Blair speaks to artists about race and labels. eliz abe th bl air (byline): Filmmaker Alex Rivera came across a review of an exhibition that had many of his friends agitated. alex r ivera: Well, just another night on the internet. I was home alone. It was late at night. I was pretty stunned by what I read. In the Ārst few paragraphs, the reviewer dismissed the notion of Latino art as a useless or meaningless category. bl air: “Meaningless,” wrote Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott, ­because by throwing together works by artists of dif­fer­ent styles, periods, and backgrounds, you get, quote, “a big mess.”

philip kennic o t t : If we look at the art included in t his exhibition, it includes every­thing from a C uban exile who spent a lo t of time in Paris and worked in a v ery kind of cool, lovely, abstract style, to Mexican ­American artists who ­were d ­ oing a very po­liti­cal kind of art in Los Angeles. And one begins to won­der if ­there is, in fact, a lot in common between what ­they’re ­doing. bl air: Other than their ethnicity. It was a lively Facebook thread with several ­people in t he Latino arts community chiming in. A rtist Judithe Hernández wrote, for example, “When was the last time the Guggenheim, Whitney, or moma exhibited con­temporary Latino American artists?” Even Philip Kennicott chimed in. kennic o t t : I was kind of the skunk at the party in ­those discussions, but I was interested ­because it was a good conversation. bl air: Kennicott and Rivera continued the debate in t he Washington Post. Someone who did not weigh in wa s the curator. It took Carmen Ramos three years to put together the Smith­

sonian exhibition, which includes ninety-­two artworks by seventy-­two dif­fer­ent artists who have roots throughout Latin Amer­i­ca. Ramos agrees the term “Latino art” is extremely broad. But she says, so often many of t­ hese artists, regardless of style, have been ignored by mainstream museums. carmen ram os: We use the term “Latino art” as a construct, as a ­handle, ­really, to talk about an absence in the way that we think about American art and culture. That’s why the word “Presence” is in the subtitle. Presence is the opposite of absence. bl air: But that brings up a larger issue: are museums ­doing any artist a ­favor or a disser­vice when they group shows around ethnicity or gender rather than aesthetics? Adrian ­Piper believes it’s a disser­vice. She’s a conceptual artist whose work is in the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She recently demanded that a Ālm of hers be removed from a show of black per­for­mance art. ­Piper preferred not to be interviewed, but she sent npr the e-­mail she sent to the show’s curator. In it, she wrote that as a ­matter of princi­ple, she does not allow her work to be exhibited in all-­ black shows, ­because she believes they “perpetuate the segregation of African-­American artists from the mainstream.” Sculptor and writer Barbara Chase-­Riboud feels the same way. She currently has a solo show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She’s also the author of Sally Hemings: A Novel. From her home in Paris, Chase-­Riboud says it’s time to get rid of ­these race-­based groupings, not just in the visual arts but in ­music and lit­er­a­ture. bar bara ch a se- ­r ib o ud: I ­don’t think ­people ­really understand the almost humiliation of a creative person who thinks and believes he is ­doing something original and ­doing something universal, to suddenly be lumped in w ith anybody or every­body who happens to have the same skin color. ­There’s no logic to it. ­There’s no intellectual logic to it, and ­there’s not aesthetic logic to it.

bl air: Chase-­Riboud also thinks it also lets institutions off the hook. ch a se- ­r ib o ud: So if they had one black show per year, that meant that they could go on ­doing business as usual for the rest of the year, which is why certain black writers have stopped publishing in February. bl air: Black History Month, says Chase-­ Riboud, might have been created for good reasons, but now it feels like tokenism. But some in the Latino arts community insist that the show at the Smithsonian is a major milestone. New York University professor Arlene Dávila says given the real­ity of how the predominantly white art world is set up, this is the only way Latino artists can stand on such a big stage. In fact, Dávila supports the ongoing campaign for a S mithsonian museum dedicated to Latino culture. ar lene dávil a: I would love to be in a universe where we ­don’t need to have culturally speciĀc museums ­because we do have a diverse museum world that represents all of us. But I ­don’t live in that society right now. I ­don’t know if ­we’re ­going to be living in that society even a hundred years from now, the way we are. bl air: The Smithsonian exhibition Our Ameri­ca: The Latino Presence in American Art is on view in Washington, D.C., through February. Then it travels to six more cities. Note This chapter originally appeared as “What Do We Mean When We Talk about ‘Latino Art’?,” featuring Elizabeth Blair, Barbara Chase-­Riboud, Audie Cornish, Arlene Dávila, Philip Kennicott, Carmen Ramos, and Alex Rivera, NPR , November 25, 2013. © National Public Radio, Inc. NPR news report titled “What Do We Mean When We Talk About ‘Latino Art’?” by Elizabeth Blair was originally published on npr​.­org on November 25, 2013, and is used with the permission of NPR . Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

Wha t D o We Mean . . . ?  ·  435

shifra m. goldman

45. Chicano Art  ·  1981 Looking Backward

When writers start d ­ oing memoirs and editions of their “collected works” and artists have retrospectives, one can assume that some sort of plateau has been reached from which a backward glance can be taken at the landscape traversed before plunging forward, hopefully, into new verdant territory. Such evaluative pauses are impor­ tant provided they are not artiĀcially induced by art market manipulations that consider three years of an artist’s production as “retrospective.” No such danger threatens the current backward-­looking mood of the California art community that is symbolized by two exhibitions featuring “pioneers”: Califas: An Exhibition of Chicano Artists in California, held at the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery of the University of California, Santa Cruz, in A pril, and Murals of Aztlán: The Street Paint­ers of East Los Angeles, presently at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles. For one t­ hing, Chicano art is barely entering the establishment art structure composed of galleries, private collections, museums, critics, and art periodicals. For another, it has not even been a de ­cade since Chicano art has been

accepted by the mainstream as a di screte and recognizable cultural expression reflecting the newly discovered pluralism of the American art scene. Fi­nally, the Chicano art movement presently Ānds itself at the portentous crossroad at which retrospective exhibitions that yield a sense of history or market manipulations that proĀt from creating instant artistic genealogies are ­matters of secondary concern. What is at stake, basically, is the question of commitment: should Chicano artists, at the cost of economic security and pos­si­ble artistic recognition, continue to express themselves artistically around the same matrix of social change and community ser­vice that brought their movement into existence? Or should they, now that some of the barriers are cracking, enter the mainstream as competitive professionals, perhaps shedding in t he pro­cess their cultural identity and po­liti­cal militancy? Or is ­there a ­middle path between the two? This dilemma is, from my point of view, the unspoken and perhaps unrecognized subtheme of both the Califas and Murals of Aztlán group show. Neither purported to be “retrospective”

in the ordinary meaning of the term. ­There was no attempt to pres­ent a chronology of the movement or of the artists—­which could have been very exciting—by exhibiting a p rogression of works that would demonstrate development and change. Instead, both shows simply focused on an older generation of Chicano artists. Califas, or­ga­nized by art professor Eduardo Carrillo at the University of California, Santa Cruz, proposed to spotlight the work of fifteen “of the most signiĀcant con­temporary Mexican American artists now working in California [who] have devoted themselves to the arts and have been exhibiting their work for at least ten years and some for as many as twenty-­Āve years.”1 The list included, from the Bay Area, conceptualist and Xerox artist René Yañez and poster maker Ralph Maradiaga, codirectors of the ten-­year-­old San Francisco Galería de l a Raza; printmaker Carmen Lomas Garza; Rupert García, nationally known for his po­liti­cal silkscreen posters and more recently for monumental pastel paintings; poster maker and muralist Malaquías Montoya, who in 1969 formed the seminal group Mexican American Liberation Art Front (mal af ) along with René Yañez, Esteban Villa, and Manuel Hernandez (not in the exhibit). From Sacramento came painter and muralist José Montoya, draftsman and nationally recognized poet, who or­ga­nized the Royal Chicano Air Force (r caf , originally the Rebel Chicano Art Front) twelve years ago. Paint­ ers Eduardo Carrillo and Sue Martinez came from Santa Cruz. Los Angeles was represented by Judy Baca, muralist and head of Social and Public Art Resource Center (spar c ); Roberto Chavez, painter and muralist from East Los Angeles College; and nationally known muralist Willie Herrón, member of the conceptualist/ per­for­mance groups Asco and of The Illegals, a Chicano rock band that performed at the opening. From San Diego came Ramses Noriega and draftsman Salvador Roberto “Queso” Torres, who conceived Chicano Park, an environmental artwork in San Diego. Each artist showed from one to three works.

A perusal of the above list reveals two facts about the progenitors of the Chicano art movement. First, that their choice of media—­silkscreen posters and murals—­overwhelmingly reflects their public and community orientation. Secondly, their involvement with artistic organ­izations demonstrates not only the desire to work collectively but also the imperative to create an alternative cultural structure in the face of mainstream indifference or hostility during the evolution of con­temporary Chicano art expression. ­These facts also underline the paradox of the Califas show, which valiantly attempted to express a sense of history within a cra mped, traditional gallery format that militated against that history. This was made most evident by the submission of r caf organizers Villa and Montoya, who instead of displaying individual works mounted the maquette of a recently completed, collectively executed mural, with Xerox photo­graphs of the pro­ cess. The ­whole was fancifully titled Los Codices Xeroxtlan, a r eference to pre-­Columbian picture books. Torres’s Chicano Park Underwater Garden (for which the artist was humorously awarded the “prize of a diving mask”) consisted of an abstract blue painting and three blue ceramic jars mounted in a case. Completely lost in the gallery format was the concept of the Garden, an in­ter­ est­ing environmental proj­ect involving the extension of San Diego’s Coronado Bridge, with freeway pillars bearing murals, into the w ­ ater ­under the Coronado Bridge. Chicano park is literally “liberated territory” (in the spirit of ­People’s Park in Berkeley during the 1960s), taken over in 1970 to protest the callous bisection of the Logan barrio by a freeway extension. Since then, it has been dedicated to ­children, art, ­music, and community gatherings. Among the works that seem best to express the range and quality of con­temporary Chicano art ­were Noriega’s tiny, exquisite drawings in colored inks; Garza’s ­etchings and gouache, which are evocations of her small-­town Texas childhood; Maradiaga’s beautifully executed silkscreen of a co wboy boot with thorns, heart, chile, and nopal cactus in gold and earth colors; Malaquías Chicano Art  ·  437

FIG. 45.1. Murals by (left to right) Judithe Hernández, East Los Streetscapers, and Carlos Almaraz, 1981.Murals of Aztlán in pro­gress at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles. Image courtesy of Judithe Hernández.

Montoya’s haunting expressionist ink drawing with handwritten text about the neutron bomb; García’s large, dramatically colored pastel of an assassinated worker; Yañez’s Xerox and graph paper work, U.S. Out of El . . . ​, and his yellow, pink, and turquoise construction of a Southwest altar; Herrón’s slashing head of a ­woman in o il pastel on Masonite; and Baca’s four-­foot, three-­ part construction affording a mirrored image of the viewer between two large pencil drawings of Chicana ­women, past and pres­ent. Murals of Aztlán, featuring artists who have done murals in East Los Angeles within the last de­cade, is, to my mind, a thoroughly contradictory and artiĀcial construct. This is not to fault the participating artists, whose roster includes several of the most talented in t he Los Angeles area, all of whom have been, or are, members of 438  ·  shifra m. go ldman

artistic collectives with venerable histories: Los Four, Asco, and the East Los Streetscrapers. For this Los Angeles Bicentennial event, nine artists—­Carlos Almaraz, David Botello, Gronk, Wayne Alaniz Healy, Judithe Hernández, Willie Herrón, John Valadez, George Yepes, and Frank Romero—­were or­ga­nized by the latter to paint murals on portable canvases in the caf am galleries over a period of one month (Āg. 45.1). “In the true folk tradition of street painting, the public is invited to watch the artists work and talk with them about their dif­fer­ent approaches to mural painting,” says the museum’s press release. The event was structured presumably to replicate the pro­cess of East Los Angeles neighborhoods where artists painted murals “on the walls of stores, restaurants, alleys, freeways, and housing proj­ects” while “engaging in a v ital social dialogue with

their community.” ­After completion, the murals and documentation of their production ­will be on display u ­ ntil July 12, a­ fter which they are slated to travel. As ­giant canvases, they ­will also be for sale, prob­ably, as one muralist suggested, to a corporation or collector that has the money and space to own them. Completing the validation and packaging of the murals as marketable art are a poster and a cata­log. A number of conceptual prob­lems attend this exhibit—­some aesthetic, some social. Murals on canvas, disassociated at their inception from a predetermined location and audience, violate the root meaning of the “mural,” which is by deĀnition an artwork intended for a wall. “A successful mural,” says Ralph Mayer, “is not merely superimposed embellishment: it must be appropriate to and partake of its architectural setting.”2 It has distinct laws of composition and perspective. In addition, the social history of Chicano murals (and the Mexican prototypes from which they often drew inspiration) is predicated on the notion of public art as an alternative to privately owned and gallery art that is neither accessible nor of relevance to large segments of the barrio communities. For the street mural, location is part of its content, and its subject ­matter is meaningful to the residents in w hose environment it is placed. Their needs have been a crucial part of the “vital social dialogue” in which many muralists are engaged, and all barrio muralists are aware of the ways in which a community can accept or reject a mural.

The fashionably located Craft and Folk Art Museum on Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile has placed a framework around East Los Angeles muralism that decontextualizes it and violates its function. It is not “folk art” in t he correct meaning of that term (art forms produced by ­people without formal training but with an established tradition of styles and craftsmanship) but con­temporary art with a popu­lar audience. The work was not meant to be produced in a gallery for sale to private collectors. Fi­nally, the attitude of the public best symbolizes the “exotic” and alienating nature of the event. Gallery visitors come equipped with as many cameras as questions, and the dialogue that takes place is largely motivated by detached curiosity. Other visitors watched the mural production while dining and chatting on the balcony restaurant above the gallery. It is a pleasant way to spend the after­noon. Notes This chapter was originally published as Shifra M. Goldman, “Chicano Art: Looking Backward,” Artweek 12, no. 22 (June 20, 1981): 3–4. Republished with permission from the author’s estate. 1. Philip Brookman and Eduardo Carillo, “Califas: Chicano Art and Culture in California Collection,” Online Archive of California, CEMA 64, 1982–86, video and conference materials, accessed August 2018, https://­oac​.­cdlib​ .­org​/­findaid​/­ark:​/­13030/​ ­kt0j49r8t8​/e ­ ntire​_t­ ext​/­. 2. Ralph Mayer, The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques (New York: Penguin Books, [1940] 1991).

Chicano Art  ·  439

jud ithe elen a her nánd ez d e neikr ug

46. Readers’ Forum Letter to the Editor in Response to Shifra Goldman’s Exhibition Review  ·  1981

As an artist who is a participant in the Murals of Aztlán exhibition discussed in your “Overview” section, I would like to respond to some of Shifra M. Goldman’s comments. In her opening statement she establishes a thoroughly confusing basis for her criticism that neither exhibition was retrospective in nature. Although she notes that neither was intended to be a retrospective of Chicano art, she blithely dismisses them as simply a focus on “an older generation of Chicano artists.” ­Isn’t that somewhat like dismissing a bowl of fruit for not being the orchard? Why is it wrong for Chicano artists to exhibit their current work and not be held responsible for the entire art history of our culture? Furthermore, I a m sick and tired of ­people, like Ms. G oldman, who impudently suggest that my commitment to my p ­ eople is in danger of being compromised by my professional success! Why should changes in my work and social-­political attitudes be construed as compromising my commitment to my Chicanismo, while in another artist the same would be perceived as personal and professional growth?

Are Chicano artists so shallow and corruptible that at their Ārst chance at mainstream success ­they’ll forget who they are? Or, is she insinuating that without the backdrop of Chicano art our work would have no validity based on its own merit? This dilemma, as Ms. G oldman sees, it is most certainly not the “unspoken or perhaps subtheme” of the Murals of Aztlán at the Craft and Folk Art Museum. caf am should be applauded for its effort to showcase con­temporary Chicano artists! If Chicano art ­were as well accepted and recognized as Ms. Goldman thinks, why can the art institutions in L.A. ( l a cma, l aica, Barnsdall, ­etc.) only point to one or two (if that many) Chicano shows in t he last ten years? The exhibition at caf am was intended to feature artists who have been major forces in the East  L.A. mural movement and to give the public a closer look at the mural pro­cess. It was never meant to re-­create the street environment, architecture, or audience. How could it! I intensely resent Ms. Goldman’s assertion that our work outside the barrio somehow becomes

“decontextualized” and its function v­ iolated by the “folk art” tradition of caf am and the museum setting itself. What rubbish! Of co urse what we do is not folk art! This was an exhibition with the two specific  purposes I previously stated. Given the purposes, the context of the museum is as appropriate for this work as the streets of East Los [Angeles] are  for our street murals. Moreover, the pieces for the museum ­were not speciĀcally produced with the intent to sell and Ms. G oldman has no right to imply that we are less than loyal to the Chicano cause if we begin to realize Ānancial reward for our work. ­Those of us who have persisted in the face of g­ reat odds and pursued our ­careers as artists ­will grow in spite of ­people, like

Ms. Goldman, who could internally chain us to “Chicano art.” That too is a form of segregation. As our Mexican pre­de­ces­sors before us, our work ­will mature and change. Chicano art and Chicano artists, I am sure, w ­ ill always pay homage to the traditions of the Mexicano/Chicano culture. As time goes by, the relevance of our work to a l arger international audience ­will become more and more apparent. Note This chapter was originally published as Judithe Elena Hernández de Neikrug, “Readers’ Forum Letter to the Editor in Response to Shifra Goldman’s Exhibition Review,” Artweek 12, no. 25 (August 1, 1981): 16. Republished with permission from the author.

Read ers’ Fo r um Let ter t o the Ed it o r  ·  441

shifra m. goldman

47. Readers’ Forum Response to Judithe Hernández’s Letter to the Editor  ·  1981

In response to Judithe Hernández (whom I have known as a p erson and an artist for at least six years), the framework of the Murals of Aztlán exhibit at the Craft and Folk Art Museum ­toward which I directed my criticism was that of the museum itself, presumably with the knowledge and consent of the artists. I did n ot invent the terms “folk art tradition of street painting” (which Ms. Hernández herself correctly rejects), nor the notion that the interplay between artists and spectators as the murals ­were painted was intended to be a replay of the barrio street pro­cess. ­These ­were taken directly from caf am’s publicity. Secondly, the issue of pos­si­ble co-optation through professional success was originally raised not by me but by a r espected pioneer Chicano artist, Malaquías Montoya, with whom an appreciable number of Chicano artists agree, though I only do p artially. “Chicanos,” Montoya says, “cannot claim to be oppressed by a sys tem and yet want validation by it as well as by their own ­communities. . . . ​Instead of continuing to explain [to the Chicano communities] through their art the existing conditions and how to change

them . . . ​Chicano artists are competing among themselves for the diminutive funds made available. Once again they are allowing themselves to become subservient to the dominant culture.”1 ­There is a cer tain applicability in t his statement to the pres­ent case in which caf am took advantage of Los Angeles’ bicentennial to obtain funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Tosco Corporation (which surely paid the museum’s overhead and publicity), so that this exhibit cannot be said to have been mounted, as is suggested, as purely a ­matter of princi­ple. Each artist was paid for her/ his participation as well as retaining possession of the Ānished works (not for sale? )—­some of which have now been sold to a private collector. Several artists, including Ms. Hernández herself, stated that they would not paint in the streets as they did in caf am; that the content was more personal. What then happens to the construct of the supposed street mural pro­cess ­under ­these conditions? A further question that arises is why, in view of the hundreds of murals available to the public

within a f ew square miles of East Los Angeles, it was necessary to recapitulate this activity in a gallery environment, on canvas? The answer becomes obvious. Gallery visitors—­many of whom I am sure have traveled around Eu­rope and Mexico viewing murals at scattered locations—­ will not travel ten to fifteen miles (even with an available Goez Gallery map) to see murals in situ. They fear to go to the barrio. Therefore caf am brought the barrio to them, tamed, sanitized, and air-­conditioned. (It reminds one of exploitative Ālms like Gang, Boulevard Nights, and Mojado Power.) Could one imagine Mexican muralist Siqueiros, originator (in L os Angeles’ Olvera Street) of the outdoor or street mural, performing ­under such circumstances? Siqueiros was one who early on spoke against art for private collectors and sought to take murals into the street for the ­people, and therefore was and is honored by the Chicano art community. Every­thing in i ts place, however, I a m certainly not the one to pigeonhole Chicano artists. I am in f­ avor of having works of merit suitable to gallery exhibition and private acquisition exhibited in m ajor (or minor) institutions; of artists addressing themselves to national and international audiences and making artistic statements about any and all subjects. I certainly ­wouldn’t claim that all Chicano artists should make murals or do public art; not all Mexicans did, do, or should. My activities in the last ten years as a modern Latin American art historian,

critic, teacher, and curator make this evident. In reviewing the works of our Chicano artists (two of whom are part of the Murals show at the l ac e Gallery2), I documented precisely the type of establishment racist standards about which Ms. H ernández so validly complains. However, this is dif­fer­ent from exploiting and turning into “exotica” an outdoor militant art form and its pro­cess, originally created for an embattled working class (which rarely or ever visits art galleries and museums), for the sake of an artist’s upward mobility—or “personal and professional growth” and “Ānancial reward,” as Ms. Hernández puts it. I wish her and her fellow artists at caf am ­every pos­si­ble merited success in the private domain, but reserve my right to criticize objectively the so­cio­log­i­cal and ideological, as well as the aesthetic aspects of any given art situation. Notes This chapter was originally published as Shifra M. Goldman, “Readers’ Forum Response to Judithe Hernandez’s Letter to the Editor,” Artweek 12, no. 25 (August 1, 1981): 16. Republished with permission from the author’s estate. 1. Malaquías Montoya and Lezlie Salkowitz-­Montoya, “A Critical Perspective on the State of Chicano Art,” Metamorphosis 3, no. 1 (spring/summer 1980): 3–7 (see chapter 5, this volume). 2. See Artweek, September 20, 1980.

Read ers’ For um Res po ns e  ·  443

kar en mar y d aval os

48. “All Roads Lead to East L.A.,” Goez Art Studios and Gallery  ·  2011

Goez  Imports and  Fine  Arts  and  the East Los Angeles School of Mexican American Fine Arts (known by the acronym tel a somaf a )  ­were among the earliest Chicano arts organ­izations in Los Angeles (Āg.  48.1). For-­proĀt businesses, Goez and tel a somaf a w ­ ere cofounded in 1969 and 1970, respectively by two ­brothers, José Luis and Don Juan/Johnny  D.  González, along with David Botello (Āg. 48.2).1 During a period of collaborative creativity, 1969–81, Goez and tel a so maf a w ­ ere ­housed in the same building located on East First Street in E ast Los Angeles.2 They ­later merged, forming the foundation for Goez Art Studios and Gallery. In this era it expressed the complex strategies, identities, influences, and values of Chicano visual production and early movimiento politics.3 As historian Ernesto Chávez convincingly argues about the Chicano sociopo­liti­cal mobilizations in L os Angeles, the ideas, tenets, and strategies of el movimiento chicano “­were not static,” as “numerous individuals and organ­izations ­were constantly adopting and reĀning them.”4 Students, Catholic parishioners, educators, and po­liti­cal organizers shared a lan-

guage of Chicanismo yet “differed in tactics and goals and in [their] appeals to dif­fer­ent sectors of the community.”5 In this spirit Goez supported cultural pride and self-­determination for the Mexican-­heritage community while also promoting the economic autonomy and employment of artists. In their very brief discussions of Goez, Chicano art historians and critics have described it only as a commercial gallery, missing its role in t he formation of community-­based arts organ­izations.6 I argue that Goez established the foundation for what would become the hallmark of centros culturales de Chicanos: critical education. The vision of knowledge as a tool for empowerment and social transformation was expressed in three major Goez programs: murals, maps, and “errata exhibitions,” the latter being a p hrase I h ave coined to describe a type of visual arts activity that corrects and analyzes the errors made by the so-­called public museum. Distinguishing itself as a complex site of visual production, Goez also blended critical education, the major activity of Chicano cultural centers, with a heritage tourism initiative.

FIG. 48.1. Map from the Goez Art Studios and Gallery brochure, ca. 1975. The phrase encircling the map and Goez Logo © 1970­were created and designed by Don Juan a.k.a. Johnny D. González. The title of this article was taken from the original version of the saying “In Eu­rope all roads lead to Rome. In Southern California all freeways lead to East Los Angeles,” which Johnny coined in his 1970 cultural heritage tourism initiative titled “Proj­ect: East L.A. to Tourist Attraction.” Image courtesy of the artist.

The commercial aim of Goez  and tel a somaf a , therefore, was not separate from their desire to assist, empower, and educate Chicano artists and youth.  They  used multiple strategies to advocate for Chicano visual arts, including the creation of a s chool, promotion of public art, commercial contracting, and economic development. Their emphasis on critical education produced the Ārst Chicano school of the arts. Initially a separate business, tel a somaf a coordinated and provided studio art classes, workshops for youth, and apprenticeships. Painting and drawing classes and instruction in m ural techniques ­were offered to professional artists from the neighborhood for individual ­career development as well as community betterment.7 Murals and monuments ­were intended both as neighborhood beautiĀcation and as critical education for East Los Angeles residents, most of whom never learned in school about ancient Indigenous

civilizations, modern Mexican arts and culture, California history, or con­temporary Chicano art (Āg. 48.3). Critical pedagogy was woven into the heritage tourism initiative, with mural tours for tourists and local residents and maps that indicated the location and signiĀcance of Chicano landmarks. Tours and gallery pre­sen­ta­tions ­were offered each year to dozens of schools and colleges, connecting with students and teachers as far away as Lancaster, California, as well as to tourists from Japan, Canada, Eu­rope, and Africa. ­These activities ­were a signiĀcant staging of empowerment and cultural awareness and a declaration of civic engagement.8 Between 1969 and 1982, Goez was a center of arts activity operated by Chicanos. It achieved tremendous success for an arts institution that had to deĀne, from the ground up, what it meant to operate for Chicanos.9 Goez was a multipurpose com­pany that si­mul­ta­neously functioned as “ All R oads Lead t o Ea st L.A. ”  ·  445

FIG. 48.2. José Luis González (left), David Botello, Robert Arenivar, and Don Juan/Johnny D. González at Goez, ca. 1975. The background shows a bust painted in an abstract style, a nail relief, the sketch for the mural Una Nueva Unidad, and the carved Goez sign. Photo­graph courtesy of José Luiz (Joe) González. Image courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

an art studio, gallery, dealership, clearing­house for muralists, import business, Āne arts restoration studio, and cultural center.10 The gallery represented over three hundred artists, some of whom achieved international acclaim. They included Esperanza Martinez, Robert Arenivar, Ray Aragon, and Ignacio Gomez, who ­were selected for an exhibition at Rus­sia’s Pushkin Gallery in 1978, as well as Willie Herrón III, who exhibited large avant-­garde paintings at the gallery as early as 1971 and received mural commissions through Goez.11 The public monument at Estrada Courts housing development, the mural site directed by Charles  W. Felix, is one example of how Goez helped create the mural re­nais­sance in L os Angeles.12 ­Because of its role in making Los Angeles the mural capital of the world, a reputation the city claimed for two de­cades (1980s and 1990s), 446  ·  kar en mar y daval os

Goez was invited to paint an expansive banner on the National Mall for the Smithsonian Institution’s Folklife Festival in 1975 and for the Bicentennial in 1976.13 Goez also achieved extensive integration into the city’s arts infrastructure. This helped the Chicano community acquire cultural capital at a time when Chicanos ­were beginning to build their civic engagement and po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion. Radio and tele­vi­sion stations, newspapers, and magazines frequently featured the gallery and its cofound­ers, spotlighting their accomplishments, reviewing the exhibitions, and announcing signiĀcant collaborations with corporations such as 7Up, Anheuser-­Busch, Atlantic RichĀeld Com­ pany, Dewar’s, Disney, and Vidal Sassoon. The gallery appeared regularly in t he weekly listings of the Los Angeles Times calendar section and on

FIG. 48.3. The Birth of Our Art mural (detail) was designed in 1970 by Don Juan a.k.a. Johnny D. González and completed in 1971 ot give birth to an East Los Angeles Chicano mural movement as part of his cultural heritage tourism initiative titled “Proj­ect: East L.A. to Tourist Attraction.” By 1976, Johnny, his partners, and a number of Chicano artists in this community had created three hundred murals, which ­were attracting tourists and the media from around the world. Image courtesy of the artist.

local tele­vi­sion stations (kmex, kce t , khj- t­ v, and ktl a ), and it won consistent attention and praise from art critics writing for the Los Angeles Times, the Herald-­E xaminer, and other news­ papers. José González, known as Joe, was appointed to leadership positions within Los Angeles civic society, working with the mayor’s office, citywide cultural affairs committees, the public museum, and arts co­ali­tions. Los Angeles had to wait ­until the new millennium to witness again the level of integration and public media coverage of Chicano arts that Goez enjoyed.14 Fi­nally, Goez is seminal to Los Angeles history ­because of its early promotion of public art as the foundation for cultural tourism that produces state, county, and city revenue.15 With the  mural titled  The Birth of Our Art (1971) and the First Street Store “Mural Wall” titled The Story of Our Strug­gle  (1974),  tel a somaf a and  Goez launched Johnny  González’s dream of creating public sites that would draw local, regional, and international tourists to the com-

munity. Johnny  was the architectural designer of the “Mural Wall,” and with  David  Botello and  Robert  Arenivar codesigned  the  nineteen-­ panel tile mural that was fabricated by Mexican ceramist Joel Suro Olivares. Joe González was a partner on the proj­ect. It was commissioned by Robert Kemp, man­ag­er of the First Street Store, a landmark department store (now closed) that served working-­class residents of East L.A. Furthering the initiative for cultural tourism, Johnny drafted plans for El Monumento de l a Raza, a pyramid-­shaped ­water fountain with icons of Mexico’s mestizaje and massive busts of Aztec gods. This public artwork, designed but not built, was intentionally mammoth in scale in order to produce awe and attract a large number of visitors; the influx of tourists was expected in turn to stimulate the development of ­hotels, restaurants, and a nightclub to bolster the Ānancial and social capital of Mexicans in East L.A.16 In the end, murals became the major strategy for interweaving public art and heritage tourism. “ All R oads Lead t o Ea st L.A. ”  ·  447

Critical Education: Making Un Centro Cultural

Within one year of opening, the cofound­ers reframed their original sales venture and expanded the Goez mission to include cultural tourism, community beautiĀcation through public art, and a school.17 While it continued to operate a commercial gallery, Goez helped construct the critical orientation of Chicana/o arts activity and functioned as a C hicano cultural center, un centro cultural. An innovator in critical education, Goez used multiple strategies to “teach [cultural awareness] through our murals and through our center.”18 Critical pedagogy, or critical education more generally, has since become a hallmark of Chicano cultural centers. It provides ­people with new information, ways of interpretation, and methods of engagement with which to challenge domination, particularly race, class, and gender oppression (although the challenge to patriarchy did not collectively surface within Chicano arts organ­izations ­until the late 1970s). 19 Goez “transformed East L.A. into an outdoor gallery,” creating approximately fifty “Goez murals” by 1976. 20 The murals and mural tours ­were designed to educate the general public, but also the Chicano community itself, about Chicano culture and history. Goez developed a set of note cards for mural tour guides that provided a new interpretation of Chicano art production, suggesting that it began with ancient Mesoamerican civilizations. Echoing the urban reformers of the 1890s, who saw urban art as a means of social advancement, but also ­going beyond their limited perspective, Goez viewed mural production as a way to both beautify the neighborhood and engage urban youth. Goez ­imagined that young Chicanos would give up graffiti and instead produce public art that “depicted their culture . . . ​heritage . . . ​and traditional values.”21 Goez designed both celebratory and critical content, with images of Mexico’s Indigenous civilizations, mainly Aztec, Toltec, and Maya;

448  ·  kar en mar y daval os

Spain’s role in Catholic conversion and the legacy of colonialism; American racism and imperialism; and the bicultural sensibilities of mestizaje. The images of Mexicans, Chicanos, and Indigenous ­people as subjects allowed for a cr itique of knowledge production, the media, and other sites of power from which ­these groups had been absent. Chon Noriega’s observations about artists of this period are apt: Goez “articulated [Chicano art] as the through-­line and endpoint for four radically dif­fer­ent contexts: pre-­Columbian Indigenous history, the Spanish conquest of the Amer­i­cas, the Mexican nation-­state, and the United States.”22 The Ārst historical moment—­ pre-­Contact civilizations—­produces an Indigenous genealogy that did not depend upon Amer­ i­ca’s colonial heritage, and the latter context—­the United States—­produces cultural capital that allows Chicanos to make demands on the public sector. As one art promoter noted about the cofound­ ers, they had a “sincere sense of community responsibility.”23 They toured the community murals to instill pride in residents of East Los Angeles, following the rhetorical logic of Chicano nationalism, which emphasizes self-­respect as a po­liti­cal tool that enables ­people to demand their rights and a fair share of educational and economic opportunities. The production of public art did not create a conflict for the proprietors of a commercial gallery ­because they had also made an investment in social transformation. This early devotion to public art qualiĀes Goez as a con­temporary of, if not a precursor to, the Citywide Mural Program, which became the Social and Public Art Resource Center (spar c ), the city’s most impor­tant institution supporting mural production, preservation, and documentation.24 But Goez and spar c differed somewhat in their approaches to muralism. ­Under Judy Baca’s leadership in t he late 1970s, spar c emphasized the pro­cess of mural production as a pedagogical space. Artists and youth assistants would create community solidarity and social transformation in t he pro­cess of making murals, not merely by observing a mural’s content.

Goez, although equally committed to social change, did not follow the spar c model and use the pro­cess of art making as a tool for community organ­izing. Rather, Goez, like most ­others involved in m uralism in L.A. a t the time, understood the mural’s content as the site of social transformation. Art Historical Intervention: The Errata Exhibition

The exhibition of art inside the Goez Gallery also fostered critical education. The cofound­ers introduced a visual arts activity, the errata exhibition, that would become by the 1980s a major component of Chicano arts programming. Although it can be argued that Chicano art exhibitions largely function as counterbalance to the Eurocentric art establishment, the errata exhibition provides what is immediately missing from the intellectual and aesthetic conversation and aims to overturn a co ncurrent curatorial message. It enters the errata into public discourse. Goez was the Ārst Chicano arts organ­ization to develop an errata exhibition. In 1978, opening during Hispanic heritage month, Goez presented The Walls of East Los Angeles, a photographic exhibition of thirty-­nine community murals. Prepared by Ricardo Garcia for the University of Oregon Art Museum, the show “demonstrated the influence of the old Mexican masters on con­temporary artists.”25 Goez offered The Walls of East Los Angeles as the errata to a concurrent show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (l a cma ), Trea­sures of Mexico from the Mexican National Museums, which exhibited “almost 200 works tracing Mexico’s history in art over thirty centuries.”26 In a critical maneuver Goez placed Chicano muralists into the genealogy with the ancient wall paint­ers of Mesoamerica and the modern masters, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. Conceptually, each photo­graph was a co unterstatement to the exhibition at l a cma . With this and other exhibitions, Goez launched an intervention into the curatorial rec­ord.27

Heritage Tourism as Critical Education

When Goez coupled its proĀt-­making enterprise with critical pedagogy, it produced the most complex moments and sites of its alternative education. The murals w ­ ere the platform on which to build heritage tourism, and Goez thus used public art to anchor the cultural authority of the barrio. Heritage tourism is typically associated with national heritage rather than with the cultural identity of marginalized populations within a nation-­state. But Goez recognized that it could play a role in “what constitutes our collective po­ liti­cal memory.”28 Johnny’s “dream was [to make] East L.A. a tourist attraction.” He, and eventually his cofound­ers, understood the “symbolic importance of being represented” in public space.29 In this era scholars, urban planners, and policy makers had not yet identiĀed heritage tourism as a strategy for urban revitalization or community development, so Goez drew on intuition. They promoted Gray Line tours of the East L.A. murals and drafted designs for monuments, fountains, and outdoor sculptures. They pushed local businessmen to commission murals, and collaborated with East Los Angeles Doctors Hospital to produce massive urns that resembled warrior heads from Aztec, Olmec, or Toltec civilizations. Goez also produced calendars, postcards, and maps as souvenirs for tourists to buy, although some, such as the postcards of murals commissioned by the Victor Clothing Com­pany, ­were offered ­free to gallery patrons.30 Attracting busloads of international and local sightseers, the tours marked the overwhelming success of the heritage tourism venture.31 The frequency of the tours forced the cofound­ers to create note cards for volunteer docent tour guides, work from a des k near the front of the gallery rather than from the Spanish-­galleon office, and recruit other volunteers to assist them with the business.32 The correspondence from teachers, school administrators, and students affirms that Goez tours promoted cultural pride, supporting a C hicano nationalist call for community empowerment, and

“ All R oads Lead t o Ea st L.A. ”  ·  449

­ ere the core component of the critical education w offered by Goez. As one educator noted about a recent tour, “You spoke of history, philosophy, math, English—­all in relation to ourselves, our families, and always in relation to the ­people of the world.” The commissioned public art and the quality of the work on display was “more than enough to inspire a young artist.”33 Spatial and Aesthetic Reversal: The Maps of Goez

Maps ­were an impor­tant part of the heritage tourism initiative and a f oundation for alternative knowledge about East Los Angeles and its residents. Building on the organic collecting traditions of Mexicans and Chicanos who saved calendars or religious cards for home display,34 Goez produced maps as collectable items, “as something that [­people] could frame, and something that they could keep with pride.”35 The Goez maps are signiĀcant in t wo ways: they function spatially and geo­graph­i­cally to locate the community or gallery within a larger territorial context, and they visually articulate the po­liti­cal and aesthetic authority of the community or gallery. The second map produced by Goez was a site of counterhegemonic discourse. On its own brochure, Goez mapped its location within the city but also symbolically positioned the gallery as equal to well-­known public monuments, including the murals commissioned by the Doctors Hospital and the Pan American Bank murals by Mexican artist José Reyes Mesa. With the words that encircle the map, “In Eu­rope all roads lead to Rome—­In Southern California all freeways lead to Goez,”  Johnny  González  coined the phrase that called attention to two distinct spatial impositions of power. The Roman imperialist expansion relied on roads leading to and from the empire’s center, whereas the freeways of Los Angeles w ­ ere designed to “direct the movement of p ­ eople and their money ­toward the suburbs and away from the inner city.”36 Both systems imposed power relations through the organ­ization of space. Although the construction of highway interchanges 450  ·  kar en mar y daval os

in East Los Angeles resulted in a m assive displacement of Chicanos,  Johnny, in a new “folklore of the freeway,” critically commented on this spatialization of power by rereading the roads as a source of advantage, bringing ­people into the urban core.37 Other maps continued this satirical gesture. The original version of the text, which offers a dif­fer­ent destination,  appears on the 1975 map conceptualized and created by Johnny González and drawn by David Botello: “In Eu­rope all roads lead to Rome. In Southern California all freeways lead to East Los Angeles.” This spatial reversal encompasses of all of East Los Angeles as the destination of cultural and aesthetic authority. It precisely illustrates the location of “271 individual murals . . . ​at 107 separate locations” as of April 1, 1975, in “East Los Angeles, California, United States of Amer­i­ca, Mexico, Aztlán.” The latter text appears in the top left register and further reorders geopo­liti­cal spatiality. The geographic location of East L.A. is si­mul­ta­neously within the bound­ aries of the United States, Mexico, and the mythical homeland, Aztlán; this alone is a sig niĀcant po­liti­cal gesture about transnational and transhistorical subjectivity and belonging. The map uses the head of Quetzalcoatl, as the Aztec god is depicted in sculptural form at Teotihuacan, to indicate the four cardinal directions; it is another power­ful spatial allegory that temporally links East Los Angeles to an Indigenous heritage that serves literally as the compass for con­temporary bearings. In addition, a p re-­Columbian mask appears in t he top portion of the map, which is framed by Mesoamerican step-­fret designs and Eu­ro­pean Āligree patterns.38 To the right of Quetzalcoatl is a revision of the Mexican revolutionary slogan (Tierra y L ibertad becomes Tierra por Libertad), while drawings by Arenivar that illustrate early California history, especially Mexican and Spanish contributions to agriculture, ranching, mining, and leisure, are located at each corner. The map thus accomplishes a C hicano sensibility that combines the cele­bration of Spanish California, Mexican nationalism, and Indigenous symbols of cosmological power with

a proclamation about Chicano spatiotemporal authority in East Los Angeles. The freeways that ­were intended to vacate the downtown are now channels ­toward the city center, East Los Angeles. Goez could not “change the course of the freeway, but they could change its meaning.”39 This visual and conceptual reversal of Chicano influence is duplicated by  González and Botello’s  gesture ­toward authorship. Some prints are numbered, an indication that they likened the map to a limited edition Āne-­art print produced by Goez Publishing Com­pany, which González and Botello cofounded as a for-­proĀt business separate from Goez Art Studios and Gallery. Complex articulations of subjectivity are common among marginalized populations.40 The corporate headquarters of Arco relocated from New York to downtown Los Angeles in the early 1970s. Arco Plaza, two fifty-­two-­story towers, transformed the Los Angeles skyline and constituted the tallest building in t he area at the time. To commemorate National Hispanic Heritage Week in 1979, Arco produced a m ap of Los Angeles.41 In the style of maps that locate landmarks pictorially but largely ignore perspective and scale, the Arco map pres­ents a hand-­drawn L.A. freeway system. Unlike González and Botello’s meticulous drawing, the Arco map indicates no streets, only prominent places such as the Arco Plaza, City Hall, San Gabriel Mission, G ­ rand Central Market, and the Coliseum. But the Arco map intermingles symbols of “white racial primacy” and economic power with visual repre­sen­ta­tions of barrio life: Maravilla Housing Development, Belvedere Park, East Los Angeles College, Olvera Street, La Placita, and Goez itself.42 In this way the map introduces Chicano landmarks to tourists and provides a visual repre­sen­ta­tion of the eastside community that structurally equates the city’s well-­known sites with Chicano spaces imbued with working-­class barrio experience. It integrates the latter sites into the city’s historical and cultural landscape, announcing an end to Chicano marginalization. This map, like t­ hose created by Goez, gestures ­toward Chicano centrality and inclusion, countering the social displacement that Chicanos experienced

with the construction of Los Angeles’ freeway system as well as the earlier deterritorialization of Mexicans with the annexation of Mexico’s Northern Frontier in 1848.43 The Arco map is further complicated by aesthetic references that ground the work in regional and transnational graphic arts and culture. The line drawings of the landmarks float in a b ackground Ālled with psychedelic designs inflected with Mexican sunbursts and paisley patterns evocative of Rick Griffin’s Southern California surĀng culture aesthetic. The ornamentation includes kaleidoscopic patterns, stylized columns, spirals, and concentric circles, accentuated by repetition and the inversion of positive and negative space. The overall effect is of an ultrabaroque sensibility drawing on Spanish colonial and Mexican postcolonial styles. The visual overload offers another reading of the map, one of cele­bration and exuberance. This is a Chicano space of victory or potentiality. The strug­gle has ended, and Mexican Americans now enjoy po­liti­cal, cultural, and spatial authority throughout the region. Arco’s promotional map parallels Goez’s vision of East L.A. as a site ­free of racial and class constraints, a vision that it hopes tourists and residents ­will share. The creative energy of psychedelia is symbolic of the visual arts activity of Goez. The organ­ ization’s work—­the murals, maps, tours, and errata exhibitions—­reflects a co mplex integration of cap­i­tal­ist enterprise and alternative knowledge. Its arts activity, as Noriega has observed about Chicano art more generally, “reveals the need to sustain, not an essential truth or an under­lying coherence, but contradictory images, shapes, languages, and frames of reference.”44 Goez produced a generative visual culture that could imagine, and educate about, a new space or time in which Chicanos held power. Notes This chapter was originally published as Karen Mary Davalos, “ ‘All Roads Lead to East L.A.,’ Goez Art Studios and Gallery,” L.A. Xicano, exhibition cata­log (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011),

“ All R oads Lead t o Ea st L.A. ”  ·  451

29–39.The printing featured in this anthology is a modified version of the original. Republished with permission from Chon Noriega. This proj­ect was inspired by the twenty-­seven hours that Johnny D. González and Irma Becerra devoted to the Chicano Studies Research Center’s Los Angeles Latino Art Survey. Students Mirasol Riojas and Lourdes Olivares, of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Lauro Cons, of Loyola Marymount University, offered invaluable research support. I thank C. Alejandra Elenes, whose manuscript crossed my desk as I was completing this essay, for her review of Chicana feminist scholarship, which helped me recognize strategies and modes for complex subjectivities. Tere Romo’s insights over the past de­cade have improved my thinking about Chicano art. 1.This research is based on ephemera, photo­graphs, correspondence, and institutional papers collected by Joe González (hereafter cited as José Luis González Personal Papers), on interviews with the cofound­ers, and on media sources. 2. When Goez closed its main location on East First Street in 1981, it moved to an industrial zone outside the city core. In addition, Goez operated a second gallery on Olvera Street from 1981 to 1988. See Pete Moraga Jr., “Goez: A New Face, A New Place,” 18–19, and“Goez Art Gallery Brings ‘Chicano Art’ to Olvera Street,” ca. 1981, José Luis González Personal Papers. 3. The cofound­ers operated several companies on First Street, each engaged in a par­tic­u­lar activity. For clarity and brevity, I refer to their work collectively as “Goez.” 4. Ernesto Chávez, “¡Mi Raza Primero!” (My ­People First!): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966–1978(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 4. 5. Chávez, “¡Mi Raza Primero!,” 7. 6. See Eva Sperling Cockcroft, “From Barrio to Mainstream: The Pa­norama of Latino Art,” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Lit­er­a­ture and Art, ed. Francisco Lomelí (Houston: Arte Público, 1993), 192–217; vEa Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-­ Sánchez, eds., Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press / Social and Public Art Resource Center, 1993), 28; Eva Cockcroft, John Weber, and James D. Cockcroft, T­ oward a ­People’s Art: The Con­temporary Mural Movement (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), 57; Carlos Francisco Jackson, Chicana and Chicano Art: ProtestArte (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 81–82; Guisela Latorre, Walls of

452  ·  kar en mar y daval os

Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 151.Two sources acknowledge the varied activities of Goez: Denise Lugo Saavedra, “Arte de ‘East Los’ y el movimiento muralista público de los setenta,” in Los Chicanos: Origen, presencia, destino (Colima, Mexico: Universidad de Colima, 1990), 121–26; and Luis R. Torres, “A Profile of an Hispano Artist: Charlie ‘Clavos’ Felix,” La Luz 4, no. 6–7 (1975): 3–4. 7. “Ecol­ogy and Art Join Forces,” East Los Angeles Brooklyn-­Belvedere Comet, June 24, 1971, 5. 8. Correspondence from Tom Roybal, instructor at Antelope Valley College, to Joe Rodriguez [sic], May 9, 1974, and correspondence from Lilia Stapleton, curriculum specialist, ABC Unified School District, to John González, February 11, 1975, José Luis González Personal Papers. Also see Juan (Johnny D.) González, interview by Karen Mary Davalos, October 28–­December 20, 2007, for the Los Angeles Latino Art Survey conducted for the Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC ) at the University of California, Los Angeles (hereafter cited as Juan González interview, 2007). 9. Elsewhere I argue that Chicano arts organ­izations and museums did not take the public museum as their guide. See Karen Mary Davalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001). 10. Lorraine Panicacci, “The History of Goez,” Belvedere Citizen (Los Angeles), January 1, 1976, José Luis González Personal Papers. 11. Gloria González, “Joe González: The Man ­behind the Goez Art Gallery,” ca. 1979, José Luis González Personal Papers; Myrna Oliver, “Esperanza Martinez: Artist Won Worldwide Acclaim,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1998,“Obituaries”; Mark Stevens, “Art Flows from Chicano Barrio,” Christian Science Monitor, July 6, 1979, Western edition, 2; Juan González interview, 2007. 12. Carol Clark, “Painting a New Life,” East Los Angeles Magazine 3, no. 1 (September 11, 1975): 8; Mike Castro, “Murals Replacing Graffiti on Walls of Apartment Complex,” Los Angeles Times, August 10, 1973, C 1; Ava Gutierrez-­O’Neill, “Cinco de Mayo: Putting the French on the Run,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, n.d., 7, José Luis González Personal Papers; correspondence from Frank del Olmo, Los Angeles Times, to Mr. González, December 3, 1973, José Luis González Personal Papers. See also “Goez and Its Murals,” mural cards, José Luis González, Personal Papers. 13.“­Matter of Heritage,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1975, 3, and “Tour Art Gallery,” Belvedere Citizen

(Los Angeles), August 21, 1975, 1, José Luis González Personal Papers. 14.While SPARC and muralism received extensive media coverage in the 1980s and 1990s, Chicano and Chicana arts advocates ­were not regular players in Los Angeles’ arts establishment ­until 2004, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA ) hired Rita Gonzalez as an assistant curator, initiated a five-­year collaboration with the Chicano Studies Research Center, and elected master printer and artist Richard Duardo as chairman of the museum’s Graphic Arts Council. 15.“Chicano Muralist ­Will Speak at Whittier Library Friday,” Whittier (California) Daily News, May 13, 1975, 10. 16. David Botello, interview by Karen Mary Davalos, September 23–­November 15, 2007, for the CSRC Los ­Angeles Latino Art Survey (hereafter cited as David Botello interview, 2007); Juan González interview, 2007. 17. By 1972, Goez began to focus on Mexican-­heritage artists, abandoning their original impulse to sell inexpensive reproductions from Spain. 18. José Luis González interview, 2004. 19. Davalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje; Latorre, Walls of Empowerment; Raúl Homero Villa, Barrio-­Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 20. The first quotation is from José Luis González interview, 2004. It is unclear what qualifies a mural as a “Goez mural,” since the artists had several levels of involvement with the gallery. See Panicacci, “History of Goez.” 21. José Luis González interview, 2004. 22. Chon A. Noriega, “The Orphans of Modernism,” in Phantom Sightings: Art ­after the Chicano Movement, ed. Rita Gonzalez, Howard N. Fox, and Chon A. Noriega,

27. Notable examples of this visual genre are Other Footprints to Aztlán, or­ga­nized by SPARC as the errata to LACMA’s Road to Aztlán (2001), and Arts of Mexico: Its North American Variant, or­ga­nized by Self Help Graphics & Art as the errata to the traveling exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (1990), at the county art museum. 28. Linda K. Richter, “The Politics of Heritage Tourism Development: Emerging Issues for the New Millennium,” in Con­temporary Issues in Tourism Development, ed. Douglas G. Pearce and Richard W. Butler (New York: Routledge, in association with the International ­Acad­emy for the Study of Tourism, 1999), 109. 29. The first quotation is from Juan González interview, 2007; the second is from Richter, “Politics of Heritage Tourism Development,” 109. 30. For an analy­sis of the development of heritage tourism, see Myriam Jansen-­Verbeke and Els Lievois, “Analyzing Heritage Resources for Urban Tourism in Eu­ ro­pean Cities,” in Pearce and Butler, Con­temporary Issues in Tourism Development, 81–107. For information about Goez cultural tourism initiatives, see Gutierrez-­O’Neill, “Cinco de Mayo,” and “Oportunidad para el artista ofrece una galería de E. L.A.,” La Opinión (Los Angeles), July 25, 1971, sec. 2, 5, José Luis González Personal Papers; and Juan González interview, 2007. 31.“The Opening Door,” C ­ areer World, December 1975, 17, José Luis González Personal Papers. 32. Juan González interview, 2007; José Luis González interview, 2004. 33. Correspondence from Ophelia Flores to John Gonzales [sic], July 6, 1973, José Luis González Personal Papers. 34. Shifra M. Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto,

exhibition cata­log (Berkeley: University of California Press / Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2008), 18. 23. F. Herbert Hoover, Hoover’s Guide to Galleries: Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Camaro, 1974), 116. 24. In 1976 Goez recognized SPARC cofounder Judith Baca with the East Los Angeles Mural Day Award, a special certificate for completing five murals in the city. See Juan González interview, 2007. 25.“L.A. Mural Exhibit Opens at Gallery,” El Sereno Star (Los Angeles), September 6, 1978; see also Catherine Coyne, “­Family Guide to Weekend Events,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1978, F 12. 26. Los Angeles Times, calendar listing, September 17, 1978,L 99.

Arte Chicano: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of Chicano Art, 1965–1981(Berkeley: Chicano Studies Library Publications Unit, University of California, 1985), 23. 35. Juan González interview, 2007. 36. Eric Avila, “The Folklore of the Freeway: Space, Identity and Culture in Postwar Los Angeles,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 23, no. 1 (1998): 17. 37. Avila, “Folklore of the Freeway.” 38. The mask is likely a composite of Aztec and Maya styles. It lacks the flared headdress associated with the Aztecs but includes the ear flares and jade necklace associated with the Maya at Copán, as well as the scarification found on Teotihuacan masks. I acknowledge Constance Cortez for ­these observations. 39. Avila, “Folklore of the Freeway,” 25.

“ All R oads Lead t o Ea st L.A. ”  ·  453

40. Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); José E. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Per­for­mance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 41. I use deductive logic to determine the year the map was produced. During President Car­ter’s administration, only two years—1978 and 1979—­begin Hispanic Heritage Week on September 10. However, Pico Rivera Arena was not built ­until 1978, making the date of the map most likely 1979.

454  ·  kar en mar y daval os

42. Alicia Schmidt Camacho defines “white racial primacy” as the social and po­liti­cal logic that grants power to the group of ­people identified as Euro-­American. It may follow the rule of law or work unlawfully as racism, but it operates with authority. Alicia Schmidt Camacho, “Hailing the Twelve Million: U.S. Immigration Policy, Deportation, and the Imaginary of Lawful Vio­lence,” Social Text 105 28, no. 4 (2010): 1–24. 43. Villa, Barrio-­Logos; Avila, “Folklore of the Freeway.” 44. Chon Noriega, “Art Official Histories,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 23, no. 1 (1998): 3.

alici a ga spar d e alb a

49. From CARA to CACA  ·  2001 The Multiple Anatomies of Chicano/a Art at the Turn of the New ­Century

exhibitio ns r evie wed in this essa y Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 The Chicano Codices: Encountering the Art of the Amer­i­cas Ceremony of Spirit: Nature and Memory in Contemporary Latino Art Xicano Progeny: Investigative Agents, Executive Council, and Other Representatives from the Sovereign State of Aztlán From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography Art of the Other Mexico: Sources and Meanings La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/ United States Border Experience Across the Street: Self-­Help Graphics and Chicano Art in Los Angeles East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous

Although Americans of Mexican descent have been producing art from the time of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the pres­ent, Chicano art per se did not exist before the 1960s, when it came into being as the cultural extension of el movimiento, the Chicano civil rights movement. Like many of the civil rights movements of the period—­the black power movement, the ­women’s

movement, the American Indian movement—­ the one focusing on the lives, identities, and strug­gles of Mexican-­descended ­peoples in t he United States had several branches: a p o­liti­cal branch, a cultural branch, and a student branch, to name a few. The cultural branch was itself divided into several branches: the visual arts, which included every­thing from muralists to graffiti artists to Ālmmakers; the performing arts, led by Luis Valdez’s farmworker theater troupe, Teatro Campesino; and floricanto, or flower and song, the branch concerned with poetry and the musical arts. All of t­ hese ­were part of what came to be known collectively as the Chicano art movement, though it was the mural arts and Teatro Campesino that dominated the scene in the early years. The Chicano art movement functioned as the aesthetic repre­sen­ta­tion of the po­liti­cal, historical, cultural, and linguistic issues that constituted the agenda of the Chicano civil rights movement. Chicano art, then, was about activism, and as such, relied heavi­ly on two forms for its production and dissemination: the mural and the

poster. Both of ­these forms had ties to the Mexican school of the 1920s and 1930s, led by los tres grandes in m uralism, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and by José Guadalupe Posada in the graphic arts. Unlike the abstract modernism of American or Eu­ro­pean art, the art of the Mexican school had a po­liti­cal character that was born out of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. As Chicano art historian Jacinto Quirarte explains, “The purpose and function of the new art was to educate the Mexican ­people and to create a Mexican national identity.”1 For as dif­fer­ent as the individual styles and po­liti­cal visions of los tres grandes ­were from each other, the predominant iconography of their murals pictured events and heroes in Mexican history, particularly ­those pertaining to the Mexican Revolution, as well as native subjects and overt critiques of ruling-­class ideologies. Moreover, theirs was an art supported and commissioned by the state for the purpose of not only representing the majority underclass of Mexicanos (Indians, mestizos, and campesinos), but, more importantly, teaching them the nationalistic ideals of the revolution. Thus, the mural was selected as the most appropriate form for mass consumption of this revolutionary art, though the graphic arts in broadsides and posters had been pursuing a simi lar purpose for at least a de ­cade before the Mexican school was created. In the same vein, but without the support and patronage of their government, Chicano and Chicana artists practiced the politics of education and repre­sen­ta­tion in their art. Through the popularly accessible forms of murals and posters, Chicano/Chicana artists represented their community’s social prob­lems, issues, and historical trajectories while creating a new artistic and po­liti­cally responsible sensitivity (at least in the United States). Rather than “art for art’s sake,” which was the modernist manifesto in mainstream American art, the art of the Chicano art movement was an art of social relevance; its purpose was consciousness raising, empowerment, and affirmation. In this regard, Chicano artists 456  ·  alici a ga spar d e alb a

(the majority of them trained in professional art schools and institutes in the West and Southwest) flew in the face of prevailing dogma in the art world, which privileged abstraction over Āguration, form over content, and minimalism over what we call the rasquache aesthetic, a uniquely Latino working-­class sensibility that values layering, texturing, recycling, and excessive use of color and material.2 Chicano/Chicana artists in places as dif­fer­ent as Kingsville, Texas, and Sacramento, California, ­were being told by their art teachers to “leave [their] sarapes, plumas, and politics at home,”3 alluding not only to the prevalence of Native American and Mexican Indian iconography in their artwork but also to the overt po­liti­cal content of the material. They w ­ ere told to concentrate, instead, on producing “real” art, that is, art divorced from any social or ethnic context. “Abstract Expressionism was what was ­going on at the time,” says Texas artist César Martínez. “If you wanted to make it into the art world, that’s what you did. If you ­didn’t do t hat, then you ­were a failure.”4 Tejana artist Santa Contreras Barraza found that, in t he art school at Texas a&m University in the early 1970s, she had to educate herself about her own cultural history ­because, she says, “­there ­weren’t any formal courses regarding that. We had to research Mexican art on our own and discuss it amongst ourselves.”5 Barraza’s research revealed aspects of her ethnic and cultural identity that she wanted to explore in her artwork, such as her Indigenous roots, her colonial history, and iconography representing Tejano oral traditions—­all of which became the nutrient source of Barraza’s imagery, but which also won her the label of “folk artist.” Despite this institutional pressure to assimilate, “our creativity won out,” says California artist and poet José Montoya. “We ­didn’t succumb.”6 It was the Chicano movement and its emphasis on history and culture that catalyzed Chicano/a artists into a concerted crusade of cultural recuperation and po­liti­cal justice. Clearly, ­these early Chicano and Chicana artists had their own distinctive style and purpose,

and yet, since most of them ­were professionally trained, they could not escape altogether the influence of aesthetic movements in t he larger art world. A f ew of them consciously appropriated methods and styles from their mainstream counter­parts, such as Andy Warhol and Alex Katz, further subverting even the repre­sen­ta­tion/ abstraction subversions of both Chicano and pop art. Turning to images pirated from the mass media and consumer goods, pop artists such as Warhol took as the subject of their art objects from everyday life, popu­lar culture, and the commercial industry. The pro­cesses for pop art’s development and reproduction ­were mechanical, relying largely on the use of photography, serigraphy, and lithography. The compositional formats ­were flat, large-­ scale, and isolated. ­These same characteristics can be said to apply to the work of Rupert García, Melesio Casas, César Martínez, Ester Hernández, and Carmen Lomas Garza, among ­others. The main difference, of course, is that while conceptually the pop artists w ­ ere interrogating m ­ atters of size, spatial orientations, subject, and mechanical replication in t he making of art, Chicano/a artists who appropriated the pop modes and motifs ­were interrogating ­matters of social bigotry, ­human rights violations, and cultural annihilation, using the master’s tongue, as it w ­ ere, to talk back to the master. “Just like many Pop artists,” writes Ann Ayres in L.A. Pop in the Sixties, “the Chicano artists who came from rural or urban underprivileged situations had watched consumerism from the outside and had not been able to partake in it. Pop Art’s connection to popu­lar culture was its strength, the difference being that for a Chicano artist, this connection to popu­lar culture served a p o­liti­cal function.”7 Like pop art, Chicano/a art is an American art rooted in the images and activities of daily life in the United States. Unlike pop art, Chicano/a art goes beyond formalist concerns and individual artistic vernaculars and uses methods of mass production for demo­cratic rather than elitist purposes, for raising the consciousness of art rather than its value. Like the art of the Mexican school, Chicano/a art was and continues to be about

identity and revolution, or rather, po­liti­cal and social change. Unlike the art of los tres grandes, however, which depicted the po­liti­cal ideals of the new Mexican state, Chicano art’s main oeuvre has been about protest against the state—­meaning, of course, the United States, which is the country of Chicano/a nationality, our country of origin before it was even called the United States. Thus, Chicano/a art is and is not Mexican art, is and is not American art, but is a mestizaje of both and a derivation of neither. Let us now see how this art, and all of its inherent conflicts and contradictions, was exhibited in the Ānal de­cade of the twentieth ­century. Bodies of Work (1990–2000)

In “Exhibitions of Chicano Art: 1965 to the Pres­ ent,” Jacinto Quirarte states, “Although Chicanos and other Latinos in the United States stress the importance of having their art identiĀed on the basis of ethnicity, they are equally, if n ot more, concerned with its authenticity and its relation to other bodies of work.”8 If ethnic identity is less a co ncern for Chicano/a artists of the late twentieth ­century than “authenticity” or relationship to “other bodies,” can we say that the most recent exhibitions of Chicano/a art in t he 1990s actually expressed ­those more postmodern concerns? What, exactly, is authenticity vis-­à-­vis Chicano/a art, anyway? Is ­there an implicit correlation between “authenticity” and “quality,” or between “authenticity” and “identity”? And what does Quirarte mean by “other bodies of work”? Other kinds of art, other types of exhibitions, or the art of other ethnicities? ­Because it is loaded with interpretive possibilities, “bodies of work” seems the most appropriate meta­phor by which to discuss the most impor­tant group exhibitions of Chicano/a art that closed out the twentieth ­century.9 This essay, then, briefly extends the chronology started in Quirarte’s overview. What characterizes the nine shows reviewed ­here is an attempt to materialize Chicano/a art by giving it a face, a heart, a spirit, a memory, a Fr om CARA t o CACA ·  457

social location, a language, a progeny, a home, and a terrain.10 Moreover, this materialization of an ethnically speciĀc and po­liti­cally motivated, hitherto marginalized art has taken place in what I have called elsewhere the “master’s h ­ ouse,”11 that is, the mainstream art museum, through the touring schedule of Āve of the nine shows (four of them did not travel outside of the museum in which they ­were or­ga­nized). Museums including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Tacoma Art Museum, the ucl a Armand Hammer Museum, the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, and the Palm Springs Desert Museum, among ­others, opened their ivory doors to ­these dif­fer­ent “bodies” of Chicano/a art and thereby made pos­si­ble its materialization in the eyes of a mainstream museum public. ­Because some of ­these shows also traveled south of the border, where the complexities of Chicano/a identity are even more misunderstood than they are in el norte,12 venues such as the Centro Cultural de Tijuana, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and the Museo Regional de Oaxaca offered Mexican museumgoers an opportunity to see Chicano/a life and culture from the inside, and to recognize that their imaginary impressions of U.S. Mexicans ­were wrong in the extreme. Fi­nally, two other common denominators link ­these shows. First, they all came packaged with their own cata­logs. Second, eight of them w ­ ere or­ga­nized and put on display at the same historical moment—­a moment that is framed on one side by the “culture wars” of the late 1980s, other­ wise known as the diversity movement, marked by the advent of multiculturalism in s chools, universities, and other public institutions across the country; and on the other side, by the quincentennial, the Āve hundredth anniversary of the Columbian voyage to the so-­called New World.13 The last show, though or­ga­nized several years ­later at the very cusp of the twenty-­Ārst ­century, nonetheless participated in t he same debates about quality versus diversity that characterized the multicultural movement. With ­these internal 458  ·  alici a ga spar d e alb a

and external par­ameters in mind, let us explore the multiple anatomies of Chicano/a art from the face down. Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (CARA) Or­ga­nized by Wight Art Gallery at the University of California at Los Angeles and the car a National Advisory Committee, September 1990–­August 1993. Touring venues: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fresno Art Museum, California; Tucson Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Albuquerque Museum of Art; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Bronx Museum, New York City; El Paso Museum of Art; San Antonio Museum of Art.

The Ārst major national traveling exhibition of Chicano and Chicana art, car a had as its explicit goal not Chicano/a repre­sen­ta­tion, exactly, but rather Chicano/a presence in the mainstream art world of the early 1990s. car a presented itself as both an interpretive retrospective of the art produced in the Ārst twenty years of the Chicano art movement and as a historical exhibition that documented the relationship between the social conditions of Mexicans in the United States and the work of Chicano/a artists. To that end, the car a exhibition overtly displayed a content-­based and po­liti­cally charged art, produced by self-­identiĀed Chicano/a artists, which candidly represented social issues affecting the lives and identities of Americans of Mexican descent—­such as economic colonization, territorial dispossession, civil rights violations, stereotyping, racism, poverty, and second-­class citizenship. By educating and empowering their own community, Chicano/a artists, and by extension, the car a exhibition itself, helped expand the po­liti­cal agenda of the Chicano civil rights movement at the same time that they ­were incorporated into the mainstream cultural narrative of multiculturalism. car a provoked a va riety of responses from art critics and viewers across the country. One of the two most consistent comments, made by the majority of art critics who wrote about the show, was that Chicano/a art was not art but politics,

more concerned with ideological propaganda about the plight of brown-­skinned ­people in t he United States than with formal or technical quality in the making of art. The second comment, found throughout the comment books and other devices for recording viewer responses to the show, was that at long last Chicanos could see themselves reflected and represented in the master’s h ­ ouse, a pro­cess of both aesthetic and po­liti­cal validation that brought hundreds of thousands of Chicanos, as well as other Latinos, to the mainstream museums that hosted the exhibit. As one of several exhibitions promoted u ­ nder the aegis of multiculturalism, car a did not necessarily unlock the doors for Chicano and Chicana artists seeking entrance into the mainstream art world. It did, however, introduce the breadth and depth of Chicano/a art to mainstream audiences across the country, allowing o ­ thers to see insider repre­sen­ta­tions of Chicano/a identity for the Ārst time. It drew Chicano/as to see themselves as both subjects and producers of aesthetic objects. By virtue of its interculturally collaborative orga­ nizational structure and its art-­for-­community-­ empowerment agenda, the exhibition participated in the cultural dialogue that occupied the late 1980s and early 1990s about the presence of ethnic minorities in the educational system and culture industry of the United States. And, more importantly, car a helped put Chicano/a art in the inventories, exhibition rosters, and lecture cir­cuits of mainstream museums such as the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the National Museum of American Art. Thus, ­whether or not it permanently opened the doors of access to the master’s h ­ ouse for Chicano/a artists at the end of the twentieth c­ entury, the car a exhibition positioned Chicano/a art as an art native to the United States, albeit produced in t he margins of U.S. culture. Ultimately, car a signiĀed the presence not of one monolithic identity that calls itself “Chicano” but also of multifaceted, often-­contradictory identities signiĀed by the acronym car a, which means “face” in Spanish. The one face that all ­these identities have in common is the Indigenous brown face of American history.

The Chicano Codices: Encountering the Art of the Amer­ic­ as Curated by Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino, The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, September  23–­November  29, 1992. Touring venues: Foothill Arts Center, Golden, Colorado; California State University at Northridge and Plaza de la Raza, both in Los Angeles, California.

The first of the San Francisco shows in the Mexican Museum’s series titled “RedeĀning the Aesthetic: T ­ oward a N ew Vision of American Culture,”14 Chicano Codices was curated by one of the originators and proj­ect coordinators for car a, Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino. The exhibition’s express purpose was to “reinstate the indigenous art form of the codex as a con­temporary Chicano artistic medium while symbolically gathering the dispersed and destroyed pre-­Hispanic picture books of the Amer­i­cas.”15 Or­ga­nized explic­itly to ­counter the prevailing mainstream attitudes of the quincentennary “cele­bration,” this show drew attention to one of the most violent acts of the Spanish “encounter” with the Amer­i­cas: the burning of the Aztec, Mayan, and Mixtec codices that had recorded several millennia worth of native history and culture. Along with the destruction of the native ­temples and icons, this immolation, which artist Carmen Lomas Garza equated with the burning of “­every single public library, ­every single private library in the nation,” including the Library of Congress,16 signiĀed the cultural, physical, and symbolic erasure of an entire civilization. By recuperating the form of the codex and reinscribing it with their own names, personal histories, and po­liti­cal commentaries, the twenty-­six artists in the show, including Lomas Garza, Delilah Montoya, Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez, Gronk, Harry Gamboa, Kathy Vargas, the East Los Streetscapers, and Barbara Carrasco,17 not only resurrected what was lost in the conquest of Mexico but also reaffirmed their identity as latter-­day Aztecs in a s till conquered land. Like other counterquincentennial shows that ­were or­ga­nized in t andem with what some in Washington, D.C., called the Quincentenary Fr om CARA t o CACA ·  459

Jubilee—­the massive birthday party of the Amer­ i­cas that was spearheaded by the governments of Spain and the United States—­Chicano Codices told the story of la conquista from the perspective of the conquered rather than the conqueror, as Howard Zinn would put it.18 ­Because the codex form—­ whether interpreted through painting, sculpture, collage, or assemblage—­was as impor­tant as the content in t he curator’s conceptualization of this exhibition, all of the artwork for the show was commissioned, that is, it was made speciĀcally to flesh out the curator’s vision of both the quincentennial and Chicano/a identity. That it was curated by Sánchez-­Tranquilino, and that the show was touring at the same time that car a was showing the multiple ­faces of the Chicano art movement across the country, is more than an in­ter­est­ing footnote in the annals of Chicano/a exhibition making. ­After Sánchez-­Tranquilino and his wife and fellow car a coordinator Holly Barnet-­Sánchez encountered difficulties in the making of car a,19 Sánchez-­Tranquilino quit the car a proj­ect and went north, so to speak, to curate this exhibition for the Mexican Museum, where his expertise in ­matters of Chicano/a art and identity would not be questioned or undermined. What resulted, then, was a m ore curatorially focused po­liti­cal vision of Chicano/a identity than that offered by car a, which was or­ga­nized by committee upon committee rather than by a single curator. Whereas car a offered the many f­ aces of Chicano/a art to a mainstream audience, Chicano Codices presented the Indigenous heart of Chicano/a identity. Ceremony of Spirit: Nature and Memory in Con­temporary Latino Art Curated by Amalia Mesa-­Bains, The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, December 8, 1993–­February 20, 1994.

The second exhibition in the Mexican Museum’s “RedeĀning the Aesthetic” series, Ceremony of Spirit,20 was the polar opposite of Sánchez-­ Tranquilino’s vision, yet at the same time was the previous show’s complement. They w ­ ere opposite in terms of their overarching themes: indigenismo, or a po­liti­cal Indigenous consciousness, for Codi460  ·  alici a ga spar d e alb a

ces, and syncretic spiritual practices for Ceremony. Yet they ­were complementary ­because both of them looked to the pre-­Columbian past for making meaning of the post-­Reagan/Bush pres­ent for Chicano/as and Latino/as. Curated by Chicana artist and activist Amalia Mesa-­Bains, this show focused explic­itly on the spiritual “remembrance of ­things past” from a p an-­Latino perspective.21 Memory as a p hysical act rooted in b oth history and the natu­ral world served as the anchoring meta­phor for the exhibition. Well-­known Chicana/o artists, including Santa Barraza and César Martinez (both from Texas), Ester Hernández (northern California), and Patssi Valdez (southern California), w ­ ere joined with Latino/a artists such as Pepón Osorio (Puerto Rico), Arturo Lindsay (Cuba), and Regina Vater (Brazil) to produce an exhibition of mostly mixed-­media installations that spoke to several religious and spiritual strains in the “New” World, among them Santería, curanderismo, Voodoo, and the hybrid Catholicism of the native communities of Mexico. Though just as concerned with preserving Indigenous history and native cultural practices as the Codices show, Ceremony had more of a ritualistic than a recuperative function, and to that end used traditional religious forms such as the altar, the ex-­voto painting, the retablo, the nicho, and the shrine for its installations. Ultimately, although memory itself, the act of remembering, is the ritual, and the purpose of the ritual is the continuity and survival of the Chicano/a and Latino/a spirit, what the exhibition underscored was that memory is enacted in a speciĀc place (nature) at a speciĀc time (history), without which t­ here could be no ritual and no survival. Xicano Progeny: Investigative Agents, Executive Council, and Other Representatives from the Sovereign State of Aztlán Curated by Armando Rascón, The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, April 1–­June 18, 1995.

The third of the “RedeĀning the Aesthetic” series, this show did not travel outside of the Mexican Museum. Guest curated by a veterano22

artist of the Chicano art movement, Armando Rascón, the show brought together seven young artists of diverse Latino/a backgrounds meant to represent the newest generation of art makers in the sovereign state of Aztlán, the conceptual and imaginary homeland of the Chicano/a nation. Aside from the assumption of Aztlán as the Chicano/a homeland,23 the two po­liti­cal narratives that framed the show w ­ ere the passage of Proposition 187 in California, which denied basic h ­ uman and civil rights to undocumented immigrants, and the pro­cess of immigration itself. This is curious, given the uses of Aztlán in the Chicano imaginary as the conquered and occupied Mexican north, the site of Chicano cultural nationalism, and the soil where the roots of Chicano/a identity are planted. Implicit in Rascón’s paradigm was the notion that, though they represent distinct Latino/a ethnicities, this new generation of artists could be seen as “progeny” of the Chicano art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a n ew breed of artists emerging from Aztlán. Thus, though formally their work had l­ ittle to do with the forms employed by the “parent” generation—­computer technology, digital photography, and interactive electronic media versus murals and posters, for example—­the content of their art, Rascón explained in his curatorial essay in the cata­log, reflected the “bold confrontational style” of the “ancestral” generation. Interestingly, the curator’s vision of what constituted t­ hese artists’ status as “second-­generation Raza artists” did not have to do w ith ethnic bloodlines, Chicano/a po­liti­cal affiliation, or even nativity to Aztlán as much as with the overt po­liti­cal message of their work. A de construction of the po­liti­cal content embedded in t he dif­fer­ent pieces for this show, however, reveals po­liti­cal affinities that can be said to be more mainstream than Chicano, such as issues of gender, fashion, internet access, and individual aesthetics. Ironically, although the conceptual stage for the unveiling of this new art was the native homeland of Aztlán, by framing the exhibition within the discourse of immigration, Rascón unwittingly

reiĀed the mainstream ideology of Chicano/as as foreigners, rather than natives, to the United States. From the West: Chicano Native Photography Curated by Chon  A. Noriega, The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, December 9, 1995–­March 3, 1996.

The last of the Mexican Museum’s “RedeĀning the Aesthetic” shows, this exhibition shifts perspective: from “Aztlán” to the American “West.” Its art and vision are positioned as “from the West,” thus implying an insider’s (or what I call “alter-­Native,” both Other and Indigenous) view of a terrain that was, before 1848, the Mexican north. In this way, guest curator Chon Noriega, a professor of Ālm and tele­vi­sion at the University of California at Los Angeles, challenges the per­ sis­tent exclusion of Mexican American perspectives from both the history of the “West” and the genre of narrative photography, especially as that photography was used to construct the ideology of the Western from the conqueror’s side of the story. The very title of the show, From the West, signiĀes an implicit critique of Frederick Jackson Turner’s view of the West as an open frontier—as both garden and wilderness—­that any intrepid white male pioneer, ­under the banner of Manifest Destiny, could claim as his own. To effect his critique and offer an alternative/alter-­Native history, from within the land base now known as the West, Noriega commissioned six well-­known Chicano/a photog­raphers—­Miguel Gandert, Delilah Montoya, Kathy Vargas, Robert Buitrón, Harry Gamboa, and Christina Fernandez—to tell their stories of the “West” from a Mexican or Chicano/a perspective. Each artist produced a series of still images to construct his/her individual narrative about “the West.” Gandert rewrote Edward Curtis’s imperialist portraiture of “primitive” American Indians in the West. Vargas revised the story of the Alamo from a native Tejana’s point of view. Buitrón showed the racist underbelly to the Lone Ranger and Tonto stories that not only helped justify the white man’s conquest of the West but also kept Indians and Fr om CARA t o CACA ·  461

Chicanos on ­enemy terms. Fernandez depicted the story of her Mexican grand­mother’s migration al norte, from Juárez to Los Angeles, at the time of the Mexican Revolution. Gamboa, in t ypical antinarrative style, critiqued the idea that “the West was won” through a tug-­of-­war analogy that portrayed both sides pulling back and forth in dif­ fer­ent poses of victory and loss. Fi­nally, Montoya used the genre of the postcard book to pres­ent her view of the “West” as a tourist attraction in which the native inhabitants e­ ither dis­appear or are put on display, a place of theme parks, parades, monuments, Indian reservations, and national forests to be looked at, visited, and experienced. Taken collectively, and given the curator’s expertise as a Ālm scholar, all of ­these images can be said to construct an “anti-­Western,” a Chicano/a docudrama in stills about the historical presence of Chicano/as in t he so-­called West. The West, then, like the Mexican north or the Aztec homeland of Aztlán, must be contextualized within the narrative of Chicano/a territorial and cultural memory. Moreover, t­ hese six Chicano/a photog­ raphers must be positioned within the history of narrative photography of the West. Art of the Other Mexico: Sources and Meanings Curated by René H. Arceo-­Frutos, Juana Guzmán, and Dr. Amalia Mesa-­Bains, June 1993–­March 1995. Sponsoring venue: Mem’can Fine Arts Center Museum, ­Chicago. Touring venues: Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Museo Regional de Oaxaca, Mexico; Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico; Palm Springs Desert Museum, California; Museo del Barrio, New York City; Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

Unlike the car a exhibition and most of the other shows discussed above, this exhibition, sponsored by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago and cocurated by Amalia Mesa-­Bains, René Arceo-­Frutos, and Juana Guzmán, was packaged less as Chicano/a politics and more as Mexican nostalgia. Based on Américo Paredes’s notion that ­there are two Mexicos—­one the Mexican Republic itself, the other the nation of Mexicans and their descendants in the United States—­the title of this 462  ·  alici a ga spar d e alb a

exhibition implied a direct genealogical connection between the art of Mexican Americans (or Chicano/as) and the Mexican motherland. Although the majority of the artists of the exhibition—­such as Santa Barraza, Rupert García, Judy Baca, Patssi Valdez, John Valadez, Ester Hernández, Luis Jiménez, Carmen Lomas Garza, Patricia Rodriguez, and César Martínez, all of whom appeared in car a—­ identify themselves as Chicano/a, the lack of the “Chicano” signiĀer in the title or in the conceptual categories of the show prompted some reviewers to question the “authenticity” of the exhibition. Was this an authentically Chicano/a art show, or was this an anti-­Chicano/a art show curated, curiously, by at least one self-­identiĀed Chicana? What was ­behind the usage of “the Other Mexico” as the cultural signiĀer for Mexican Americans? car a clearly positioned itself as confrontational to mainstream identity politics, while at the same time asserting that Chicano/a art was an Indigenous American art, not an art of the immigrant experience. Art of the Other Mexico, on the other hand, from its title forward, positioned itself in the margins of both the mainstream art world and the Chicano/a worldview: not Chicano/ Chicana, not American, but “Other,” as the title suggests, “alien” and “foreign” as that Othering implies. Ironically, however, despite the exhibition’s overtly depoliticized ethos, the three conceptual themes that compose its cultural map—­ land, ­family, and afterlife—­can be interpreted as direct extrapolations from old-­school Chicano/a identity politics. “Land” equals Aztlán, the Aztec empire, Spanish conquest, the Mexican north, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Manifest Destiny, and occupied Amer­i­ca. “­Family” equals the nuclear and extended familia, community values, la vida loca (or barrio life), cultural traditions, generational conflicts, male dominance, feminist consciousness, and the Chicano movement. “Afterlife” equals Catholicism and curanderismo, the Virgin of Guadalupe and Tonantzin, Day of the Dead and Santa Claus; drive-­ins and drive-­ bys; Don Pedrito Jaramillo and Juanito Soldier, who died for the country that never accepted him as its native son. All of ­these points, in fact, are

made and elaborated upon in the cata­log’s curatorial essay by Amalia Mesa-­Bains. Why, then, one could ask, does Art of the Other Mexico go to such extremes to avoid naming the art or the artists of the exhibition as Chicano/Chicana? We could turn to the sponsoring venue’s mission statement at the opening of the cata­log: “The Museum has the following goals: to sponsor special events and exhibits that exemplify the rich variety in visual and performing arts found in t he Mexican culture; to develop a signiĀcant permanent collection of Mexican art; to encourage the professional development of local Mexican artists; and to offer arts education programs.”24 Mexican culture, Mexican art, and “local” Mexican artists—­nowhere is the word “Chicano” used, or even insinuated through the hyphenated identity of Mexican-­American. It is as if t­ here ­were no land and no history between Chicago and the Mexican border, as if 150 years of Anglo colonization of the Mexican north had not altered Mexican identity, or its culture, or its art, or its artists in the United States. As if the “half a million Mexicans residing in t he Chicagoland area,” whom the museum serves and represents, had just yesterday crossed that ethereal, ahistorical, apo­liti­cal bridge between Mexico and the Midwest.25 Although Victor Sorell argues that “the border is this exhibition’s overarching and master trope,”26 I would argue that the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum wants to ignore the border, or to pretend, at least, that Chicago exceeds the border. For to acknowledge the border as a living and dynamic entity, to admit that Mexicans in C hicago, like Chicano/as in L os Angeles or Hispanics in Albuquerque or Mexican Americans in E l Paso, are indeed border dwellers, would mean, necessarily, to acknowledge not only the existence but also the validity of a border art, a border culture, and a border identity that is neither puro mexicano nor true-­blue American. It would seem that the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum’s insistence on erasing Chicano/as and even Mexican Americans from its repre­sen­ ta­tional agenda is the real po­liti­cal statement of the exhibition. Interestingly, the curatorial essay

in the cata­log, the art itself, and the identity of most of the artists selected all belie the museum’s Octavio Paz–­like interpretation of Chicano/a identity. In keeping with the anatomical framework of this essay, then, I would suggest that this show, in i ts sponsoring institution’s overt rejection of the Chicano/a experience, offers us a new take on what Carey McWilliams called the “fantasy heritage”;27 however, in its cultural mapping of the art of a Greater Mexico, in its dedication to the memory of United Farm Workers leader César Chávez, the show also offers us a good dose of that time-­honored Chicano/a tradition: re­sis­ tance to both structural and internalized racism. La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/ United States Border Experience Curated by Patricio Chávez and Madeleine Grynsztejn (a collaborative proj­ect between the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Con­temporary Art, San Diego), March  1993–­December  1994. Touring venues: Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico; Tacoma Art Museum, Washington; Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Arizona; Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase; San Jose Museum of Art, California.

Touring at almost exactly the same time as Art of the Other Mexico, this exhibition, though or­ ga­nized not around the concept of ethnicity but rather around a g eopo­liti­cal sense of place, had the same core po­liti­cal motives as the car a exhibition: to represent, educate, and empower its own community. Indeed, one of the basic tenets of border art as a movement is that it is an issue-­ based art, and its issues are ­those of el movimiento, particularly ­those that focus on ­matters of immigration, deportation, citizenship, bilingualism, and biculturalism; hence, border art can be seen as a f orm of Chicano/a art, even if s ome of its prac­ti­tion­ers are not Chicano/a or even Latino/a. Another similarity that this show had with car a was the interculturally collaborative nature of its orga­nizational pro­cess. As described in t he introduction to the cata­log, this cross-­cultural pro­ cess between the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an alternative Chicano/a community arts center that Fr om CARA t o CACA ·  463

dates back to the early years of the Chicano movement, and the Museum of Con­temporary Arts in San Diego, a m ainstream art institution, challenged both sides to cross their own personal and institutional borders at the same time that they sought to represent the most po­liti­cally committed art about the U.S.-­Mexico border. The result was an exhibition of thirty-­seven artists and artist collectives, including David Avalos, Yolanda  M. López, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Celia Muñoz, las Comadres, and the Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (baw/t af ), that interrogated the many meanings and interpretations of the border in the context of both Chicano/a identity politics and multiculturalism. Reading the border as a li ved real­ity, as an ­actual place on the map with a history and a landscape, as well as a conceptual space in which to negotiate the ambiguities and contradictions of Chicano/a existence, t­ hese dif­fer­ent artists used a va riety of media to depict their par­tic­u­ lar narratives of the border. Stereotyping, anti-­ Mexicanism, environmental racism, nightlife in Tijuana, the flow of h ­ uman beings back and forth across the river, the dif­fer­ent shades of mestizaje, the blend of cultural traditions, linguistic terrorism, the mass media and the military as institutions of deception—­these are some of the border stories narrated in this exhibition through collage, diorama, sculpture, photography, installation, works on paper, video, mixed media, billboard ads, and bus posters. Though all of the works in t his exhibition focused primarily on a singular site, we must remember that the border is nearly two thousand miles long, and in t hat shifting longitude, this exhibition exposed us to perhaps the most diverse voices of Chicano/a art. Across the Street: Self-­Help Graphics and Chicano Art in Los Angeles Or­ga­nized by the Laguna Art Museum and Self Help Graphics, October 1995–­December 1996. Touring venues: Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, University of California at Los Angeles; Art Museum of South Texas; Anchorage Museum of History and Art.

464  ·  alici a ga spar d e alb a

Unlike La Frontera, a s how of widely divergent art uniĀed by the concept of place, this show’s unifying categories ­were both place—­Southern California—­and form: graphic art produced at Self ­Help Graphics’ Screenprint Atelier Program since 1982. Like La Frontera, this show was the product of collaboration between a C hicano/a community arts space in East Los Angeles and a mainstream art institution “across the street” in the master’s ­house. ­Because it involved the Laguna Art Museum’s acquisition of 170 pieces of graphic art produced at Self ­Help Graphics—­“the largest collection of Chicano prints held by any public institution”28—­this collaboration became more a b usiness partnership between the two institutions than a p o­liti­cal alliance built on a common goal, as happened with La Frontera, or an experiment in turning the ­tables of power in the exhibition-­making game, as happened with car a. In other words, the occasion for this exhibition was to showcase the Laguna Art Museum’s recent additions to its permanent collection. In that sense, it was the most apo­liti­cally or­ga­nized exhibition of all of the ones discussed ­here. This is not to say, of course, that the prints themselves had no po­liti­cal content, or that the purchase of a sizeable collection of Chicano/a art is not po­liti­cal news in the mainstream art world. Nor do I wa nt to suggest that Self H ­ elp Graphics played no role in the show. Indeed, Self ­Help Graphics was as much on display as the prints, and both of the essays in the cata­log, as well as the foreword, take par­tic­u­lar care to situate Self ­Help Graphics at the center of graphic arts production in Los Angeles. With artists such as Juana Alicia, Barbara Carrasco, Yreina Cervántez, Patssi Valdez, Daniel Martinez, Malaquías Montoya, Frank Romero, Gronk, Leo Limón, and Dolores Guerrero Cruz (to name but a few), it would be difĀcult not to see the contours of Chicano/Chicana po­liti­cal art in t he exhibition. Meshing imagery from mainstream American popu­lar culture, pop art references, Day of the Dead iconography, Aztec signs, and native American symbols, the content in the seventy-­Āve screen prints selected for the exhibition displays a rich canvas of expe-

riences that go beyond viva la Raza or “boycott grapes” sloganeering. Calaveras and drag queens, ­family portraits and lucha libre, the Olympics and Guatemala, aids and unemployment—­ these, too, constitute everyday life and po­liti­cal concerns for Chicanos/Chicanas in Los Angeles. And it i­ sn’t just Frida Kahlo or los t res grandes that serve as cultural icons of the latter-­day Chicano/a art movement but also Boy George, Carmen Miranda, Anthony Quinn, Barbie, and Mickey Mouse. More than simply showcasing an addition to the permanent collection of the Laguna Art Museum, Across the Street demonstrated the cross-­ cultural mobility of Chicano/a graphic art. East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous Curated by Chon Noriega, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, September 15–­November 18, 2000.

Unlike the previous eight shows that used Chicano/a art to convey a po­liti­cal, historical, or repre­sen­ta­tional vision, this exhibition focused on the collector of Chicano/a art. The concept of a co llector-­based show “is nothing new” in the world of exhibition making, curator Chon Noriega tells us in hi s essay in t he cata­log.29 A more compelling motivation for Noriega in organ­izing the show was the kind of collection to be displayed, the inherent meanings and questions raised by the act of collecting this par­tic­u­lar kind of art, the identity politics of the collectors themselves, and the way that ­these collections participate in the po­liti­cal economy of art collecting in general. The 170 objects in East of the River belong to seven private collections of Chicano/a art owned by the members of Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous (ca ca )—an eclectic group of middle-­class, college-­educated, and mostly Chicana/Chicano art collectors whose social location is east of the Los Angeles river. Eighty-­three of ­these pieces, most of them small-­scale works on paper, belong to a single collection and are installed in a re-­creation of a hallway in the home

of David Serrano and Robert Wilson, where the work is displayed. The twenty-­two pieces in the collection of Mary Salinas and Armando Durón are also installed in a similar dioramic style, gathered in a co rner of what is meant to re-­ create the Duróns’ living room, complete with furniture and floor rugs, that shows how the ­family lives with its art. The remaining Āve collections, all reflective of the personal tastes and preferences of their collectors, are installed in a more traditional gallery style, separated from each other by different-­colored backgrounds on the walls.30 Oils, acrylics, gelatin-­silver prints, lithographs, gouaches, pastels, pencils, watercolors, ceramics, and mixed-­media pieces—­the show contains a v irtual smorgasbord of styles, genres, and artists. Most of the Chicana/o artists represented in East of the River have had work included in a t least one of the exhibitions already discussed. Eigh­teen of them, for example, showed their work in t he car a exhibit, among them veterans of the Chicano art movement such as Harry Gamboa  Jr., Barbara Carrasco, César Martínez, Leo Limón, and Gilbert “Magu” Luján, as well as the internationally renowned Gronk, Judy Baca, Frank Romero, Carlos Almaraz, and Patssi Valdez. The collections also include work by other familiar names in t he Chicano/a art world: Daniel Martinez, John Valadez, Diane Gamboa, Linda Vallejo, Adam Avila, Kathy Vargas, and Christina Fernández. Pieces by David Serrano, Joseph Maruska, Salomón Huerta, and Miguel Angel Reyes appear in at least Āve of the collections. Some of the collections also include the work of non-­Chicano/as such as Ann Chamberlin, Alfredo de B atuc, Alex Donis, and Lisa Cohrs. Francisco Goya and Joan Miró make cameo appearances in two collections. One of the more fascinating features of this show, beyond the idea that ­these seven collections are, in fact, collections of Chicano/a art, is that ­these are home collections, that is, art that lives in t he collectors’ homes. Like home movies, they reflect and display the identity of the ­people that ­reside in t he home as much as the Fr om CARA t o CACA ·  465

work of the artists.31 Thus, the artwork collected in each home, or rather “framed” in t he home space, as Jennifer González’s illuminating essay in the cata­log describes it, reflects what the ­owners like to see on their walls and, at the same time, constructs a narrative about how the ­owners see themselves and their community through the pictures on their walls. “What you see on the museum walls,” Noriega candidly admits, was not the main curatorial priority in t he exhibition.32 The main goal of the show was to highlight the passion and o ­ bsession at the heart of collecting Chicano/a art. Indeed, the ca ca members consider their fascination for Chicano/a art a form of “addiction,” as implied by their collective name: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous. Noriega explains that “the name conjures up a support group a la Alcoholics Anonymous: the under­lying idea is that art collection is an addiction rather than a conscious act and that self-­identiĀcation as an addict and a twelve-­step program can lead to recovery, although never a cure.”33 The addictive nature of ­these collections signals not only the collectors’ desire for Chicano/a art and the plea­sure derived from their ability to acquire and display the objects that fulĀll their desire; it also signiĀes a relative abundance of supply. That is, ca ca collects Chicano/a art ­because ­there is enough of it out ­there to collect. The abundance of Chicano/a art being produced leads to the addictive habit of collecting; hence supply feeds demand. Art in a c ap­i­tal­ist society has never been just about what is on the museum walls;34 it has always been a commodity whose aesthetic quality as “art” has a direct correlation to its value in the art market. Put another way: the more it costs, the more it sets the standard for aesthetic worth. What the collectors in ca ca demonstrate is not only their middle-­class clout that permits them to buy art but also their commitment to and participation in ra ising the value of Chicano/a art by collecting it. Thus, this po­liti­cally charged art born of a minority social movement gets elevated to the status of “real,” that is, collectable, art. An exhibition whose primary focus is on the act of collecting Chicano/a art extends the value, and 466  ·  alici a ga spar d e alb a

by extension the quality, of Chicano/a artistic production by showing its currency in t he art market.35 Making Room for Chicano/a Art

Neither the anatomical allusions that have been the organ­izing princi­ple of this essay nor the acronyms in the main title are meant to suggest any evaluative judgments about the exhibitions ­under discussion. Th ­ ere is absolutely no explicit or implicit message that the Ārst show reviewed ­here, car a, representing the diverse ­faces of the Chicano art movement, is superior (vertically or other­wise) to the ca ca show—­the acronym in this case spelling the Spanish colloquial word for “excrement.” Irony and language play have always characterized the Chicano/a creative sensibility, and, as we see in the Ālms of Cheech Marin, for example, Chicano/a cultural producers often intentionally use puns and word play to satirize social ste­reo­types of ­people of Mexican descent. According to Noriega, “Such a rhetorical move is similar to the adoption of Chicano itself in t he 1960s, wherein a c lass-­based derogatory name became the basis for self-­affirmation. ­Here the [ca ca ] group anticipates the ‘low-­class’ status of Chicano art within the art world in w hich they now participate on the margins as middle-­ class collectors. In both instances, naming works tongue-­in-­cheek, subverting expectations without locking the group into a purely reactive position. It makes room for art.”36 Indeed, make room for Chicano/a art could be seen as the intrinsic motto of all of the exhibitions reviewed in this essay. For the collectors featured in the ca ca show, making room meant making a p ersonal, po­liti­ cal, economic, and aesthetic commitment to the work produced by Chicano/a artists. Integrating this art into their private living spaces organically transformed their homes into repositories and alternative galleries for Chicano/a art and also built a co llective ethos among them based on the addictive practice of art collecting. For

the curator of the show, making room signiĀed creating an opportunity in the museum world wherein ­these private collections could be made public, and where a dialogue about race and class in the mainstream American tradition of collecting could take place. But making room in t his context also means something ­else; it means accommodating the public in the private as much as integrating the private into the public. In a reverse application of the famous adage, rather than drawing Mohammed to the museum, all of t­ hese shows (and the ca ca show almost l­iterally) drew the museum to Mohammed’s ­house. If Mohammed’s ­house can be read as symbolic of a marginalized art community and the museum can be said to represent the master’s ­house, then the question is, Do t­ hese Chicano/a art exhibitions, from car a to ca ca , turn the master into a visitor in his own ­house? Or, by bringing the master into Mohammed’s living room, do ­these shows force Mohammed to accommodate the master’s visit?37 To refurbish an old joke: Why did the ­Chicano/ Chicana artist cross the street? To get to the Other side. Ultimately, that is what r­ eally ­matters. How or why the work of Chicano/a artists got into mainstream exhibition venues at the end of the twentieth c­ entury is, I think, less impor­tant than the fact that they got ­there at all. Some ­were invited to the master’s h ­ ouse. Some kicked the door open. Some crossed the river. Some sneaked in ­under the rainbow-­colored banners of multiculturalism. What t­ hese nine shows demonstrated to the nation’s museum public is something the car a exhibition itself tried to do in its last room: to show how Chicano/a art is changing the face of American art, in every­thing from production to consumption. Thanks to ­these shows; their organizers; the artists who continue to ply their trade despite opposition, marginalization, or incorporation; and the collectors who buy and display their work, viewers from Chicago to Washington, D.C., from Oaxaca to Alaska, from Santa Monica to the Bronx, learned, at the turn of the new millennium, that ­there are in fact many ways to be

an American artist, and multiple anatomies by which to embody the spirit of the alter-­Native art produced by Chicanos and Chicanas. Notes This chapter was originally published as Alicia Gaspar de Alba, “From CARA to CACA : The Multiple Anatomies of Chicano/a Art at the Turn of the New ­Century,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 26, no. 1 (spring 2001): 205–31. Republished with permission from the author and Chon Noriega. 1. Jacinto Quirarte, “Mexican and Mexican American Artists in the United States: 1920–1970, ” The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States: 1920–1970, ed. Luis Cancel (New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts / Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 14; emphasis added. 2. Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” in Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa Mc­ Kenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991), 155–62. 3. California artist José Montoya, quoted in Rubén Hernández, “California: Chicano Art Exhibition,” Hispanic (November 1990): 58. 4. César A. Martínez, interview with the author, July 15, 1992, San Antonio, Texas. 5. Santa Barraza, interview with the author, July 15, 1992, San Antonio, Texas. 6. Hernández, “California: Chicano Art Exhibition,” 58. 7. Ann Ayres and John Baldessari, eds., L.A. Pop in the Sixties (Newport Beach, CA: Orange County Museum of Art, 1989), 10. 8. Jacinto Quirarte, “Exhibitions of Chicano Art; 1965 to the Pres­ent,” in del Castillo, McKenna, and Yarbro-­ Bejarano, Chicano Art, 163. 9. ­Because the focus of this review essay is on group exhibitions of Chicano/Chicana art or­ga­nized within the United States, I am excluding the single-­artist retrospectives that ­were or­ga­nized and exhibited in the same time frame of the 1990s, including the retrospective shows of Rupert García (1991), Gronk (1993), Luis Jiménez (1994), Carmen Lomas Garza (1995), and Emmanuel Martínez (1995). I am also excluding the smaller, more localized shows such the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s Mutual Influences/Influencias Mutuas (1992), Self ­Help Graphics’ Chicano Expressions (1993), andRevelaciones/Revelations: Hispanic Art of Evanescence, an installation art exhibition curated by Chon A. Noriega at Cornell University (1993).

Fr om CARA t o CACA ·  467

Other exclusions that nonetheless provide a framework for the number of Mexican/Chicano/Latino shows that ­were on display in the last de­cade of the twentieth ­century include the mammoth exhibition of Mexican art Mexico: Thirty Centuries of Splendor, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991; the comparative Chicano & Latino: Parallels and Divergence/ One Heritage, Two Paths that toured between 1991 and 1992; andAnte América: Regarding Amer­i­ca, an exhibition of Latin American and U.S. Latino art that toured in 1993–94. Fi­nally, although it was or­ga­nized and toured only in Eu­rope, Les Démon des Anges: 16 Artistes Chicanos Auteur de Los Angeles in 1989–90 set the stage for international interest in Chicano/a art. 10.“Materialize” is used ­here in all of its connotations, from making something physically perceptible to the theory of historical materialism that connects identity to material condition, or class, to the magician’s trick of making something appear as if out of nowhere. 11. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 12. To say that Chicano/a identity is “misunderstood” in Mexico is an understatement; “vilified” would be a better word. See Octavio Paz, “Pachucos and Other Extremes,” in Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985), for a representative case of Mexican attitudes ­toward Chicanos, who are seen as sellouts to the United States who have willingly rejected their Mexican identity and heritage, as corruptors of the Spanish language, and as a general embarrassment to most “true” Mexicanos. 13. For an extended analy­sis of the impact of multiculturalism and the quincentennial on the art world, see my book on the CARA exhibition (Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art), particularly chapter 4 and the conclusion. 14.This series was sponsored, in large mea­sure, by a grant from the Lila Wallace–­Reader’s Digest Fund for the purpose of exhibiting and exploring the newest contours of the Mexican American experience. Codices was also the only one of the four in the series to travel outside of the Mexican Museum. 15. Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino, foreword to The Chicano Codices: Encountering the Art of the Amer­i­cas (San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum, 1992), 3. 16. Susan Ferris, “S.F. Exhibit Explores Mestizo ­Heritage,” San Francisco Examiner, October 12, 1992, A 2. 17. Indeed, all but six of the artists had work in the CARA exhibit.

468  ·  alici a ga spar d e alb a

18. Howard Zinn, A ­People’s History of the United States, 1492–2001(New York: HarperCollins, 2003). 19. See chapter 2, “Through Serpent and Ea­gle Eyes: Intercultural Collaboration,” of my book on CARA (Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art) for a more detailed analy­sis of the complex orga­nizational pro­cess of the exhibition. 20. Ceremony of Spirit is based on an earlier exhibition titled Ceremony of Memory: New Expressions of Spirituality among Con­temporary Artists, which was curated by Dr. Mesa-­Bains and Robert B. Gaylor, then director of the Center for Con­temporary Arts of Santa Fe. This earlier incarnation of Ceremony of Spirit included the work of twelve Chicano and Latino artists, none of whom reappears in Ceremony of Spirit, and toured to venues such as the Museum of Con­temporary Hispanic Art in New York City; the Lannan Museum in Lake Worth, Florida; and the Meadow Museum in Dallas, Texas. That show toured from January 28, 1989, to March 6, 1991. 21. Amalia Mesa-­Bains, “Curatorial Statement,” in Ceremony of Spirit: Nature and Memory in Con­temporary Latino Art (San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum, 1993), 9. 22. Veterano, literally “veteran,” refers to the 1960s to 1970s generation of Chicano/a activists. 23. Aztlán is believed to be located in what was once the Mexican north, now known, by virtue of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, as the West and the Southwest of the United States, specifically the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. 24. Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, “Mission Statement,” in Art of the Other Mexico: Sources and Meanings (Chicago: Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 1993). 25. Not coincidentally, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum refused to sponsor the CARA exhibition, which is part of the reason CARA was never seen in the Midwest. 26. Victor Alejandro Sorell, “Citings from a Brave New World: The Art of the Other Mexico,” New Art Examiner, May 1994, 29. 27. Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-­ Speaking ­People of the US (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1949). McWilliams was referring to the delusional tendency of some Mexican Americans to deny their Indian or Indigenous blood and identify only with their Spanish ancestors. I suggest that Mexicans who deny the influence of Americanization and the long-­term cultural and linguistic impact of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on the Mexican experience in the United States, and, instead, only identify with Mexican culture and Mexican national identity, are similarly deluding themselves, as well as

contributing to the continued oppression of Chicano/as and Mexican Americans on both sides of the border. 28. Laguna Art Museum, Across the Street: Self-­Help Graphics and Chicano Art in Los Angeles (Laguna Beach, CA: Laguna Art Museum, 1995). 29. Chon Noriega, “Collectors Who Happen to Be . . . ,” in East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous (Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2000), 8. 30. The other collectors are Anita Miranda (twelve pieces), Ricardo and Esperanza Valverde (fifteen pieces), Jacquelyn and Barry Scheinberg (ten pieces), Martha Abeytia and Charles Canales (thirteen pieces), and Luz Marie and Carl Meyerson (fifteen pieces). 31. Again, we see Noriega’s training as a film scholar informing the curatorial vision of another of his art exhibitions. 32. Noriega, “Collectors Who Happen to Be . . . ,” 15. 33. Noriega, “Collectors Who Happen to Be . . . ,” 11. 34. See Christopher Knight’s art review of East of the River, “A Collective Effort,” Los Angeles Times, Septem-

ber 21, 2000, 52; see also Noriega’s rebuttal, “Museum Walls Are an Issue in Any Show,” Los Angeles Times, October 2, 2000. 35. Karen Mary Davalos’s essay in the cata­log ­deconstructs the meaning of “collecting ourselves,” that is, becoming the consumers of our community’s own ­images of our lives and identities. See Karen Mary Davalos, “In the Blink of an Eye: Chicana/o Art Collecting,” in East of the River. 36. Noriega, “Collectors Who Happen to Be . . . ,” 11. 37. This is, of course, a play on the Mexican adage mi casa es su casa, which, in the modified form, mi casa [no] es su casa, both Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino and I have used to structure our very dif­fer­ent anti-­ accommodationist arguments about the role of Chicano/Chicana art. Noriega further modifies it in his curatorial essay above by writing it as mi casa es mi casa, to underscore that the collections reside in and belong to the homes of their collectors.

Fr om CARA t o CACA ·  469

cho n no r iega

50. On Museum Row  ·  1999 Aesthetics and the Politics of Exhibition

I am driving down the highway when the sign appears: “Museum Row Next Exit.” The exit itself further informs me that museum row is on the “miracle mile,” suggesting the combined forces of cultural heritage, urban renewal, and tourism. And so I arrive at the museum for a p anel discussion that I h ad a nominal role in putting together, which is to say, my name is well-­placed in the program but the event itself is in no way an expression of my own intentions, ­whether as a scholar or as a curator. Such t­ hings happen quite often on museum row. But rather than indict the museum for not honoring my intentions, I would like to sketch the generic features by which such an event comes together. While somewhat dif­fer­ ent from t­ hose for exhibitions proper, they nonetheless reveal the institutional context within which notions of aesthetic, scientiĀc, and historical value are determined prior to public exhibition. My brief sketch is a composite of several incidents. The phone call comes several weeks before the panel discussion. The director explains the vari­ ous rationales for the event: outreach to the “com-

munity” as part of a c urrent exhibition; a p rogramming requirement by the foundations that are footing the bill; and a public-­relations gesture ­toward grant makers, artists, civic leaders, and the “community.” In a n od to the redemptive power of art, ­these rationales ­will be explored through a discussion of new approaches being created by artists in the face of some relevant ­crisis—in this case, the decrease of federal support coupled with a visual culture increasingly deĀned by global corporate media. But above all ­else, I am told, the panel should not be “academic.” This last point has been a recurrent and annoying admonition from both foundations and museums since the early 1990s. In effect, what I am being told is that the panel ­will serve vari­ous social functions and that academics are anathema within that public sphere. Such a p ositioning requires more so­cio­log­i­cal consideration than I c an provide h ­ ere, since it speaks to the par­tic­u­lar way in which the university has been both isolated from public discourse and made more dependent on private interests. For my part, I a m called b ­ ecause I p articipate

in museum and foundation activities, not as an academic per se, but as a c urator, advisor, and writer actively involved in t he arts. Bur rather than see myself as an exception, I b elieve that my own work proves that academia, the museum, and foundations share a common ground as social institutions. What I k now as a s cholar follows me into ­these other arenas, just as what I know as a curator and advisor follows me back to the university. In any case, the panel ­will not be “academic.” The phone call itself evidences an incredible skill on the part of the administrator, that of a calculated and strategic ambivalence: I am never quite sure if I am organ­izing the event or merely providing some advice. I do know that “community” is a code word for e­ ither a single minority group or all minority groups, depending on the context. The other functions to be served by this event pull in another direction, namely, to satisfy the institutions that provide funding and po­liti­cal support and that also share a professional culture within which the museum operates. The “community” is merely a content within this context, meaning that the institutional arena has its own internal demands and requirements distinct from what­ever or for whomever it may advocate at a given moment. Taking all of ­these considerations into account, I suggest something bold, provocative, engaging, and thereby constructive. As a scholar who also curates exhibitions, I b elieve in di alogue, which means understanding your audience, voicing a clear and coherent position, and then being prepared to listen to and engage the responses. ­Toward that end, I suggest three artists whose work combines community-­based practices with a critique of institutional spaces. ­These artists also appropriate aspects of media culture, but do s o within an alternative arts sector far removed from the machinations of the art market, let alone global corporate media. The director, on the other hand, wants “balance” within the pro­cess and in the event itself. In fact, for such an administrator, the pro­cess is the event, since it is ­here that the institutional net-

work that sustains the museum comes into play. Thus, the director notes in an awkward and self-­ conscious way that the artists I h ave suggested are all ­women of color, as if t hat is the limit of what they can represent, but continue to proceed apace. ­After all, pro­cess is every­thing. The three names are run past the funders, the other organ­ izations involved, staff members, and trustees before the director returns to me with the result of ­these many conversations: three other artists have been selected, each for valid reasons having to do with the original rationales. But the panel itself lacks an overarching conceptual coherence. The panel is diverse, but each artist is reduced to a demographic niche, very much reflecting the interests of the vari­ous players involved in t he decision-­making pro­cess. My suggestion would not have avoided this prob­lem, but it did address an under­lying assumption manifested by the Ānal panel: minorities never get to represent more than their marginality. The in­ter­est­ing ­thing about this pro­cess is that I am not taken out of the loop; rather, I am put into the loop, and it is the needs of the loop itself that determine the Ānal outcome. Indeed, public pre­sen­ta­tions are as much the product of dialogue as they are the catalyst for dialogue. Thus, while exhibition curators have more autonomy than in the above example—­their se­lections being implicitly protected by freedom of expression—­ such autonomy is by no means absolute. If anything, ­there are a few more players added to the loop, most often planning groups and advisory committees, which function on a m ore formal basis. ­These groups satisfy humanities-­based funding sources as well as proj­ect a demo­cratic aura: ­whether for expertise or representativeness, the right ­people w ­ ere consulted before the curator made the Ānal decisions. In this manner, curating an exhibition looks more like an instance of policy formation than an individual choice made on the basis of aesthetic considerations or rational cognition. Even if t he curator operates with a s ense of complete autonomy, the par­ameters for that autonomy have already been determined in the steps leading up to On Museu m Ro w  ·  471

the “go-­ahead” decision. Of necessity, the curator breathes the ether of po­liti­cal contingency. The internal politics of the museum, plus what have been deemed to be the relevant external f­ actors (funders, the government, and social groups), constitute an arena within which the museum seeks to establish “balance” in the pro­cess and “authority” in the product. To the extent that balance and authority contradict each other, the museum necessarily walks a tightrope from one extreme to the other. To start, the museum must deal with the fact that authority is already diffused across the professional culture, state agencies, the po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tions system, foundations, corporations, trustees, social groups, and the press. As a strategic ­matter, then, the notion of “balance” incorporates ­these groups within the exhibition pro­cess but subordinates them to the imperatives of expertise, order, and purpose. Even if one or another group acquires an inordinate amount of influence in the pro­cess, the end result—­the exhibition—­expresses the museum’s own authority. Museum scholars tend to look at this situation backward, studying the content of exhibitions in order to abstract the museum’s social authority, thereby leaving l­ittle sense of the museum as a hiera rchical organ­ization that bears an uneasy correspondence with the world in which it participates. Instead, the museum functions as a sort of “black box” out of which emerge exhibitions that orchestrate the fragments of material culture for the purposes of the nation-­state, the bourgeoisie, and social control. It is not that such an approach is wrong; in many ways, it produces rather insightful histories of the cultural “meaning” of the museum. But its methods—­basically, discourse and textual analy­sis—­leave at least two major questions unanswered: Did audiences ever respond along ­these lines? And how do changes come to pass within the museum itself? ­After all, the museum has changed. Forty years ago the decision-­making loop looked a lot dif­fer­ent. It was smaller and more homogeneous, divided between the major museums that acquired international prominence, especially ­after World War II, a nd smaller municipal museums 472  ·  cho n no r iega

that reflected the local elite class. Since then, the decision-­making loop has become more complicated as the federal government has played a more signiĀcant role in m useums, in l arge part due to the rise of arts and humanities funding agencies. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s as well as the neoconservative backlash of the 1980s and 1990s also resulted in legislation and po­liti­cal pressures that impacted the day-­to-­ day life of museums, from employment issues to censorship strug­gles. But if government became more impor­tant, so, too, did other sources rooted in the private sector, including corporate and ­family foundations. Prior to the late 1970s, the Ford Foundation seemingly dominated the Āeld, with assets equal to one-­sixth of the assets of the other twenty-­Āve thousand U.S. foundations combined. ­Today, a wide range of both foundations and corporations have become major funding sources. The past four de­cades have witnessed a two-­ part shift in museums and public culture. In the Ārst part, rights-­based movements opened up the electoral pro­cess and social institutions, culminating in the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965), which ­were followed by a state-­sponsored and -­regulated public sphere within which to accommodate this inclusiveness, most notably through affirmative-­action programs. But this intervention actually spread much wider, from the creation of public tele­vi­ sion to an increase in support for the arts, neither of which was particularly diverse or inclusive. If civil rights legislation resulted in universal rights and suffrage, the state played an equal role in expanding the public sphere to incorporate racial and sexual minorities now granted the rights of full citizenship. But it did so in a c alculated way that maintained class and racial stratiĀcation: in effect, white middle-­class artists went to the National Endowment for the Arts (nea ); minority and working-­class artists went to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (c eta ). When ­these distinctions broke down in the early 1980s, largely due to the dismantling of c eta and similar programs, the culture wars began.

While the legacy of t­ hese changes continues, their under­lying po­liti­cal and economic support vanished almost overnight with the global recession in 1974. The impact of the recession cannot be overestimated, even if it has been overlooked in ­favor of more ideological f­ actors originating in the 1980s. Quite simply, ­wholesale changes took place in t hat one year: rights-­based movements ­were supplanted by cultural nationalism and identity-­based politics; and diverse public-­affairs programming on network tele­vi­sion ended, replaced over time by corporate-­funded and -­produced Ānance programs and conservative talk shows on public tele­vi­sion. The Ford Foundation lost half its assets and cut its funding accordingly, especially with re­spect to its more activist programs, for which it was often the sole or major supporter. This abrupt change brought an end to the media reform movement, while it required that minority civil rights and community-­based organ­izations turn to the private sector—­the very arena they had been created to challenge. Given this context in the arts, 1974 serves as perhaps the best (and most materially consequential) year with which to mark the shift from the modernist avant-­garde to postmodernism.1 In the second part of the two-­part shift in museums and public culture, a market-­based approach to social issues emerged in the late 1970s and has been official state policy since the 1980s. Ironically, while government support decreased, its signiĀcance increased, serving as the staging ground for ideological conflicts over the public sphere. Racial and sexual minorities received the lion’s share of the attention in the press and public debate, but the real change had less to do w ith minorities per se than with the role of the federal government in s ecuring public institutions to serve a diverse nation. To be blunt, inclusion required ­either more space to accommodate the new groups knocking at the door or that whites accept the possibility that the public sphere they once claimed as their own might no longer be their exclusive domain. The former proved eco­ nom­ically unsustainable in a Cold War economy and what is now a g lobal economy; the latter

proved po­liti­cally untenable for a still largely white electorate. In the po­liti­cal strug­gle that ensued, every­one looked to the past for an answer. But if the Left looked back to a time when ­these public institutions w ­ ere autonomous, and the Right looked back to a t ime when t­ hese public institutions ­were homogenous, they both ­were looking at the same t­ hing: the American university and museum at midcentury. ­These two forms of nostalgia are intimately linked, which is why I prefer to see the past four de­cades as manifesting a two-­part shift rather than to privilege one part over the other. Change is necessarily more complicated. Since the 1960s, the social function of the American museum correlates both to a more diverse public and to a more diverse institutional arena. With re­spect to the public, as Tony Bennett argues in The Birth of the Museum, “­There are . . . ​two distinctive po­ liti­cal demands that have been generated in relation to the modern museum: the demand that ­there should be parity of repre­sen­ta­tion for all groups and cultures within the collecting, exhibition and conservation activities of museums, and the demand that the members of all social groups should have equal practical as well as theoretical rights of access to museums.”2 In contrast, the museum itself increasingly operates within a p o­liti­cal and corporate environment seemingly removed from such concerns. What bears special emphasis, however, is that neither social demand identiĀed by Bennett would have emerged without the loss of autonomy, wherein the museum came ­under the increased administrative control of the po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­ tion system and the economic imperatives of the corporate marketplace. H ­ ere my policy analogy provides some insight with re­spect to the period before ­these changes. If policy articulates a commitment of resources, then, as po­liti­cal scientist H. K. Colebatch notes, “the most impor­tant form of commitment is inertia.”3 What Colebatch is calling attention to is the way in which policy reinforces the status quo. Prior to the 1960s, museums exhibited a similar inertia. What­ever the demo­cratizing function of the American museum On Museu m Ro w  ·  473

in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its institutional conĀguration—­including its policy of assimilation through ediĀcation—­ countermanded e­ ither parity of repre­sen­ta­tion or rights of access for minority groups. T ­ oday ­things are dif­fer­ent, in large part b ­ ecause the resources are dif­fer­ent. The American museum has become more dependent on earned income and more ­accountable—if that is the right word—­with re­ spect to public funds. The result has been a drastic change in the way museums approach their audience. Rather than edifying, the museum increasingly plays to the masses in co mpetition with tourist sites, amusement parks, cultural centers, bookstores, and shopping malls.4 As such, the museum exhibition has become much more event-­ oriented—in roughly the same way as motion pictures during this period—­while the museum itself now offers a w ide range of revenue-­generating ser­vices and activities beyond that of the exhibition proper. In a s ense, we are witnessing the breakdown of the traditional distinctions between a museum and all other sites of public exhibition. Similarly, the newer ethnic-­speciĀc museums created during the past three de­cades tend to blur the traditional bound­aries for the dif­fer­ent types of museums: art, history, and science. The ethnic group itself takes pre­ce­dence over and unites the vari­ous approaches to knowledge. Such museums are also more transparently instrumental, since they seek transcendence within the context of an exclusionary national culture rather than within the universal realm of art, science, or history. Even so, their demands have also become commodities. By way of some examples, I w ould like to focus on the art museum. I do s o ­because the function of art in con­temporary U.S. society has been one of the major focal points for public debate in the last de­cade, serving in many ways as the symbolic battleground for under­lying questions of community, citizenship, and identity.5 Unfortunately, ­these complex issues are now often deĀned by entrenched “us-­versus-­them” positions: quality versus diversity, conservatives versus liberals, the art world versus the state, and 474  ·  cho n no r iega

so on. Within this context, “minority” issues are seen not as an integral part of national categories and debates but rather as an unsettling set of outside demands. In the pro­cess, the exhibition spaces being fought over are assumed to be homogeneous entities. Thus, debate unfolds without a consideration of the wide range of exhibition spaces, intended audiences, and aesthetic orientations. Indeed, debate often unfolds as if it ­were limited to two sides—­ours and theirs—­that remain constant despite the shifting terrain of American politics. But in order to appreciate the complexity of t­ hese issues, we need to look at the museum through the Ālters of local and federal government and related social institutions. In each of the three case studies that follows, I ­will clarify the dif­fer­ent ways in which art museums engage with their po­liti­cal and economic contexts. In the Ārst, I consider the strug­gle over the governance of a municipal museum in a city in which the predominantly nonwhite population has acquired po­liti­cal power. In the second, I examine a private institution and its periodic attempt to assess con­temporary American art. Fi­ nally, I explore the tensions between private and public, museum and university, that ­were made vis­i­ble during a r ecent site-­speciĀc installation. What makes ­these examples instructive is that they are not reducible to each other. If art participates in social conflicts, it does so in ways that are as dif­fer­ent as the museums within which it appears. Ours and Theirs

It is with this point in mind that I turn to the most radical Chicano artist, a Chicana artist, Carmen Lomas Garza, an artist so dangerous that she brought down a museum’s cultural elite. Her example reveals the debate over aesthetic value as symptomatic of a p ower shift within local government and museum governance within minority-­dominant cities since the late 1980s. Lomas Garza produces gouache paintings called monitos that provide a chronicle of communal,

familial, historical, and cultural practices as refracted through personal memory. Her monitos respond to the institutional histories of Texas—of the Alamo and the Texas Rangers—­although not at the level of documenting racial oppression or po­liti­cal re­sis­tance. Instead they tell of traditional customs, communal events, and local folk heroes. The monitos are the product of a compromiso, or promise, to remember for her community, a proj­ ect that is by no means Ānished, and one whose pleasing and deceptively s­ imple appearances bear the weight of more violent and exclusionary institutional histories. Her retrospective, then, provides a striking instance of an art exhibition that became the site of po­liti­cal strug­gle at the municipal level. Or­ga­nized by the Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, Texas, in t he fall of 1991, Pedacito de mi corazón (A ­little piece of my heart) traveled Ārst to the El Paso Museum of Art, where it was on display from December 14, 1991, ­until February 2, 1992.6 The exhibition came amid a national power shift regarding the role of the museum and the function of art in ci vil society, one aspect of which was publicly debated in t erms of “cultural diversity” versus “aesthetic quality.” What was less reported was how ­these changes—of demographics, of funding policies—­affected the internal structure of the art museum, such that the board of trustees, the museum director, and the vari­ous curatorial departments came to have dif­fer­ent, and often conflicting, constituencies. And this is what happened in El Paso. The previous year, Becky Duvall ­Reese had been hired as the new museum director and was given a mandate to bring about change for the Ārst time in twenty-­Āve years. The museum was 100 ­percent municipally funded and yet was not responsible to the local community, especially the ­Mexican ­Americans who made up 70 ­percent of the local population. Instead, the museum reflected the city’s cultural elite, which oversaw the museum via the El Paso Art Museum Association. Duvall ­Reese set out to open up the museum to the general public, starting with an exhibition of Mexican colonial art from the permanent collection,

followed in q uick succession by three Chicano exhibitions: the Lomas Garza retrospective; Chicano & Latino, or­ga­nized by the Daniel Saxon Gallery in L os Angeles; and the Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation exhibition.7 ­These exhibitions turned around declining museum attendance, which averaged twenty p ­ eople a d ay, boosting attendance to a hundred a day, with the Lomas Garza retrospective setting a rec­ord attendance of 6,500 ­people in its six-­week run and the Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation exhibition attracting 4,000 ­people to the opening alone. The Lomas Garza retrospective, however, initiated an all-­out public ­battle between the director and the association. In a front-­page newspaper story published in late January of 1992, the president of the El Paso Art Museum Association announced that he had taken a p ersonal survey of the show and found that no one liked it. “I’ve asked p ­ eople to rate the exhibit from one to ten,” he told the El Paso Herald-­Post, “and ­didn’t Ānd a single person who rated it above a one. To me, it’s an embarrassment.”8 Off the rec­ord, the association complained about the “brown art” and “brown f­ aces” that now Ālled the museum. Lomas Garza responded to the press statements, “­There is a strain of racism in that attitude, which is also a form of censorship. I’m not threatened by it. I think it’s sad.”9 ­Were it to end t­ here, this story would not be that unusual, a sad-­but-­true tale of thwarted ideals and expression. But Duvall R ­ eese and Lomas Garza went one step further. If the association would take the high road of eternal value held by a cultural elite, they took the low road of po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion. They went to Freddy’s Breakfast. That is where the town leaders would meet in the mornings before session. Lomas Garza worked the room, meeting with the mayor and council members, explaining her work, and answering questions. To make a lo ng story short, the city government moved to legally disenfranchise the association. That is, while the association continued to exist, it no longer governed the museum. Instead, the mayor and city council now appoint an advisory board, and the museum director On Museu m Ro w  ·  475

reports directly to the mayor. For better or worse, the museum lost the façade of autonomy by which a public institution served private interests. To look at this case strictly in t erms of censorship or even something that could be called “reverse censorship” misses the point. It is not just a m ­ atter of expression, but is also about how expression can correlate to governance, that is, in relation to who gets to make administrative decisions. In this light, then, we need to ask why recent anticensorship strug­gles in t he arts have proceeded on the assumption that expression and censorship are the mirror images of each other, not just in a given case, but in all instances. In other words, all would-be censors are alike and can be lined up on one side of the border, while members of the art “community” are all alike and can be lined up on the other. Th ­ ere is an epic and Manichaean quality to this scenario—­and it is not without effectiveness in the subsequent strug­gles for control over exhibition spaces and federal funds. But what happens in the pro­cess is that any censorship case is read as metonymic of the national strug­gle between the forces of censorship and f­ ree expression. The local and intra-­ institutional levels—­and the possibility that ­these strug­gles can point in a n umber of directions—­ are lost except to the extent that local events can serve as an allegory of the nation. What happened in El Paso does not work as a national allegory, but it does provide an exemplary case of local strug­gle over the governance of public museums. The question of aesthetic value does not precipitate ­these strug­gles. Instead, it marks the boundary between their institutional and public manifestations, between governance and exhibition. Such a phenomenon is a local one; the situation is somewhat dif­fer­ent at the national level. Art as Curator

For major museums that represent the nation to itself, questions about aesthetic value focus on the objects exhibited and reviewed, but their Ānal 476  ·  cho n no r iega

locus resides in the museum’s authority to select and pres­ent objects in the Ārst place. Established in 1932, the Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art represents the arbiter of “cultural value” for con­temporary American art. While t­ here are other and older annuals and biennials in the United States, the Whitney’s has become, in art critic Roberta Smith’s words, the “informative, if hardly infallible, barometer of con­temporary art.”10 Indeed, within the art world, its existence is taken for granted. And yet each exhibition is the object of much contention, even scorn and ridicule. It is, as the press often notes, “The Show the Art World Loves to Hate.” The intense public debate over the Whitney Biennial must be read as a sign of the high stakes—­ both ideological and commercial—­involved in the effort to deĀne or other­wise mea­sure the notion of “American” art. But it is, at the same time, also a sig n of the impossibility of achieving consensus. Still, few ­will argue that no such ­thing as “American” art exists. And yet, ironically, the ensuing debate means that each deĀnition of “American,” each edition of the Whitney Biennial, inevitably becomes identiĀed as a par­tic­u­lar position or point of view. Thus, the Biennial can set the terms of the debate, but it cannot in itself occupy the universal high ground implied or assumed by that debate. That right is reserved for the museum itself. In 1993, the Biennial presented itself as the Ārst signiĀcant inclusion of sexual and racial minorities, while it also broke from the “painting and sculpture” dichotomy of past biennials, placing an emphasis on mixed-­media installations, video, and per­for­mance. In fact, single-­channel video was projected within a m ain gallery, while video installations ­were dispersed throughout the museum. The Biennial also featured fewer artists (about eighty as opposed to one hundred), many of whom w ­ ere in their twenties or thirties. In addition, literary and cultural theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Avital Ronell w ­ ere invited to contribute to the cata­log, the Ārst time outside writers had been solicited.11 Indeed, it seemed as though an ascendant cultural studies had van-

quished (or “hybridized”) the art market, a p osition that the subsequent Ārestorm in the press seemed to conĀrm even further. Dubbed the “multicultural Biennial” in the press, the exhibition became the target of both conservative and liberal critics. In U.S. News & World Report, John Leo proclaimed a “Cultural War at the Whitney.”12 As in o ther critiques, two Latino artists—­Daniel Martinez and Pepón Osorio—­took the brunt of the author’s criticism of the show’s ostensible diatribe. Concluding with an account of the cata­log’s emphasis on “replacing the center with the margin,” Leo mused on the avowed purpose of the Biennial: “In other words, it’s a cultural war to destabilize and break the mainstream. The question is why institutions of the center should join this crusade to do themselves in.”13 Why, indeed? Though Leo did n ot offer any speculations, Art+Auction did, pointing out that the move t­ oward diversity had as much to do with the contentious po­liti­cal climate as it did with the weak art market of the early 1990s. 14 As proof, Art+Auction pointed to an earlier “diverse” biennial that occurred u ­ nder similar conditions twenty years before, providing a meeting ground of sorts for civil rights and the recession. In 1993, ­there was even speculation that Elisabeth Sussman, the museum’s curator, had made her initial decisions and se­lections on the assumption that president George Bush would be reelected, and, hence, that the culture wars would continue unabated. Thus, the Biennial would emerge as a new focal point in the strug­gle against censorship and decreased government funding for the arts. Beneath the accepted oppositions of po­liti­cal partisanship, however, a more subtle transformation was taking place in t he Whitney Museum, one that required Latino theoretical and aesthetic concepts such as “border culture” and mestizaje, but not (necessarily) Latino artists or artworks. Indeed, in t he book-­sized cata­log, the articles give the impression of a l arger Latino presence in the Biennial than was, in fact, the case. In the citation of Latino concepts, writers, and art not included in the exhibition, the cata­log became a

document for a ­future agenda. One year before the exhibition, the New York Times announced that “borders” had been selected as the theme for the Biennial.15 While the exhibition never acquired an explicit theme, Sussman informed me that it would be quite apparent to ­people reading the cata­log that “borders” served as an organ­izing concept for the exhibition, which she described to me (and in her cata­log essay) as dealing with “the new sense of community emerging out of the plurality of cultures.” But why borders? The evolving role of the Whitney Museum had been the subject of much press in t he three years prior to the 1993 Biennial, during which time the museum articulated three goals: (1) to dismiss the notion of a homogeneous national culture, (2) to place the revised (but unspeciĀed) notion of American art against a “global” context, and (3) to achieve t­ hese two goals through the examination of international “influences.” To go “global” suggests that one has undone the myth of a sin gle American cultural identity. But if one has not done that, if the myth remains, then the international arena merely provides a chance to place that myth in a broader context. One ends up trying to deĀne foreign “influences” for the same old categories, and “American” influences on other national arts. Nothing undercuts the notion of hybridity as much as an “aesthetics of influence” that, by its very nature, requires discrete and noncontingent categories in order to postulate that one affects the other. In other words, the exploration of “influences” reinforces rather than challenges the notion of a homogeneous “American” art, especially insofar as hybridity and heterogeneity are reĀgured as international phenomena that occur between nations rather than within them. That said, it also provides a ra tionale for exhibiting works from outside the United States as the museum adapts its original mission to a more competitive environment. In the Whitney’s move to exhibit non-­ American art, the concept of “borders” provided an intermediary step ­toward opening the door to international art, especially Latin American On Museu m Ro w  ·  477

art. As a do cument ­toward that end, the cata­ log resituates the concept of “borders” within an international, global, if n ot universal, framework. In other words, if a rt critics feel that the Biennial has made “class, race, and gender” hegemonic within the art world, the cata­log’s renowned literary-­cum-­cultural theorists reassure us that such coherence of ideology and identity cannot be the case in our postcolonial, poststructural, postmodern moment. As Bhabha explains in the Biennial cata­log, “The ‘­middle passage’ of con­temporary culture, as with slavery itself, is a pro­cess of displacement and disjunction.”16 True enough, I s uppose, but within the pages of the cata­log, such insights merely provide the groundwork for the curatorial agenda to reassert the museum’s role in rebuilding the “social fabric” of a national “community of communities.” In the end, the fabric itself—­the 1993 Biennial—­becomes less impor­tant than the sewing machine—­the Whitney Museum—­that takes up the task of binding together the “decentered ­whole.” ­These institutional maneuverings within cultural politics resulted in t he expedient conflation of “new genre” art, po­liti­cal thematics, and notions of cultural diversity. Thus, rather than presaging the structural assimilation of sexual and racial minorities within the art world, this exhibition served to mark the ongoing strug­gles for cultural equity as a stylistic moment. In fact, the civil rights generation of minority artists was largely excluded from the exhibition, except in the area of Ālm and video. Most of the minority artists ­were born ­after 1954, and, hence, came of age ­after Watergate, Vietnam, Stonewall, and the vari­ous civil rights movements. Without this historical continuity, the meta­phorical “border crossings” of multiculturalism and postcolonialism could be reĀgured as the end of the swing of an aesthetic pendulum, soon to be replaced by something else—­internationalism. Critics should have asked why museums—­ seemingly antithetical to such po­liti­cal art—­ should suddenly embrace it in t he early 1990s. Instead, the curatorial agenda was attributed to the art itself—­not just the works in ­these exhibitions, 478  ·  cho n no r iega

but all “minority” art. And this response was not just a n eoconservative one. Consider professor of art history Hal Foster’s comments in a roundtable on the 1993 Whitney Biennial by the October editorial collective. Foster calls attention to a “pervasive [tendency] in con­temporary art and criticism alike: a certain turn away from questions of repre­sen­ta­tion to iconographies of content; a certain turn from a politics of the signiĀer to a politics of the signiĀed.”17 Having just got the hang of the notion that all expression, all language, involves a play of signiĀers, a continual deferral of the signiĀed (and by implication, the referent)—­and that as goes language so go both the unconscious and society—we are now informed that, in fact, some art is attentive to this pro­cess, while other art is not. Apparently, this “other” art goes against the nature of language itself. While Foster raises this issue as an aesthetic observation, he does so as part of an academic group with deep ties to the Whitney Museum itself, a group whose semiotic and psychoanalytic deĀnition of the “po­liti­cal” was seemingly ignored by the 1993 Biennial. So it is not too difficult to see the roundtable as more of an insider dialogue with other critics and curators than as an outside critique of the artists in the Biennial.18 In addition, the few close readings undertaken in the roundtable are curious for their selective formalism—­that is, they engage only selected portions of a w ork, deeming the rest “irrelevant.”19 Still, ­there is an assumption at work ­here that Foster shares with the curators and critics he takes to task (and even the neoconservative critics both sides o ppose). It is an assumption of privilege that unites them across the ideological spectrum and vari­ous professional moorings. If we w ­ ere to patch together a statement out of t­ hese dif­fer­ent positions it would go something like this: “The barbarians are at the gate with their multicultural demand. We must tolerate their necessary inclusion, but at the same time their work is dif­fer­ent—it is po­liti­cally correct, identity-­oriented, and, as an aesthetic ­matter, merely illustrative. In some ways, it is not ­really art as we have come to know art (as an aside, it is ­here that every­one’s Greenbergian premises peek

through), and, hence, it is work that cannot sustain a close reading.” The lines ­were drawn between the minority artist and every­one ­else in the art world, even as a civil libertarian overlay held every­thing together in a s trategic co­ali­tion against the forces of censorship and reduced federal funding. If censorship served as the burning issue for the Biennial, it did so at the expense of a more informing national allegory found in the quality of the art world’s own response. Th ­ ese arts professionals, while claiming to look at the art, ­were ­really keeping an eye on each other, bracing themselves against change. Aesthetic Space

As a Ānal consideration, I would like to talk about an exhibition I cocurated at Cornell University’s Herbert  F. Johnson Museum and its consequences within the private university and public sphere. Of p ar­tic­u­lar interest h ­ ere is the structural relationship between museums and universities insofar as it informs recent debates over the public sphere. The exhibition, Revelaciones/Revelations: Hispanic Art of Evanescence, included eight Latino artists who work in the genre of site-­ speciĀc installation, ranging from the personal to the cultural to the po­liti­cal.20 In par­tic­u­lar, I want to discuss Daniel J. Martinez’s installation on the main Arts Quad at Cornell—­a series of eight-­ foot-­tall plywood walls painted with tar and lining both sides of the pathways. On the day before the opening, Martinez mounted Styrofoam statements on top of the walls. Th ­ ese ­were taken from his installation at the 1993 Biennial and included one by Greek phi­los­o­pher Diogenes in 380 B.C.: “In the rich man’s ­house the best place to spit is in his face.” Titled The ­Castle Is Burning, and built over the course of Parents’ Weekend, Homecoming, Alumni Weekend, and Halloween, the installation became the catalyst for heated debate on campus. Prior to its opening, art students repeatedly used the installation walls as a “blackboard”

for their own expressions. L ­ ater on, the installation became the target of vandalism expressing class bias and racial hatred. In essence, Martinez’s piece served as a b lank screen that made vis­i­ble many of the prob­lems Latino students and faculty had complained about for years. The installation then inspired a L atino student rally against the vandalism. The students marched to the administration building seeking a m eeting with the president in order to address the under­ lying issues. Upon being denied a meeting, they initiated an impromptu sit-in that lasted for four days. The sit-in ended with the administration promising to negotiate with the students. In the meantime, the students established contact with other Latino student and alumni groups across the United States. In many ways, Martinez was a perfect catalyst for such a sequence of events. In the early 1990s, he emerged as a controversial Āgure in the “new” public art, drawing attention to racial and class discrimination through strategic intentions in public space. Michael Kimmelman, in the New York Times, refers to this as “a new paradigm for public art,” in which artists collaborate “directly with communities that ­will come in to contact with the work, the pro­cess of collaboration becoming, in many cases, as impor­tant as the end result.”21 ­Needless to say, this type of art is not new (consider, as two earlier extremes, the mural movement and the happenings), and, in fact, the current trend in public art is notable for its self-­conscious dialogue with the po­liti­cal pro­ cess and with per­for­mance art of the 1960s. In his public art, Martinez poses a ­simple question—­“What is public?”—­from within a site that should be its obvious answer: the streets and sidewalks of urban centers. What happens in the course of t­ hese installations, however, is that the public space is exposed as ­little more than a conduit or access between private or institutional spaces.22 At Cornell, Martinez turned to the quasipublic space of the Arts Quad, its pathways between classrooms meta­phoric of the lifepath cut by a university, which provides not just knowledge but also a r efined sense of class status and a On Museu m Ro w  ·  479

lifelong set of social networks. Rather than focus on “public,” Martinez raised the issue of “privilege” within spatial terms. Cornell was a unique site insofar as it is a h ybrid private-­and-­public institution. In hindsight, it is in­ter­est­ing to note that few students or faculty members thought of  the Arts Quad in t erms of its pathways, although they are its predominant feature (and also the focus of Martinez’s installation), with at least twelve distinct paths crisscrossing the other­wise “open” space. As the numerous letters to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun revealed, each critique relied upon an assumption about the essential spatial characteristic of the Arts Quad. ­Those who argued on the basis of a ­violated “beauty” assumed that they spoke about the quad-­as-­ nature. ­Those who complained about the violation of majority rule assumed that the quad was a public space. ­Those who invoked the outrageous tuition their parents had paid assumed that the quad was a p rivate space and that tuition granted them some basic property rights, or land-­lease right. And, Ā­nally, ­those who pointed Ān­gers or asked, Who approved this? Who’s in c harge ­here? , assumed that the quad was an institutional space subject to administrative protocols and accountability. ­Because the controversy surrounding the installation was so voluminous—­with over three hundred articles, editorials, and letters to the editor in Ithaca newspapers alone—­I ­will highlight aspects that give some insight into Martinez’s work and its signiĀcance for the museum.23 In the course of his installation, Martinez was a high-­proĀle Āgure on campus, in l arge part ­because his proj­ect adapted mural-­making techniques, with their emphasis on large-­scale collaboration and communitarianism. This adaptation resulted in a s ense of shared owner­ship among the dozens of students who turned out each day to help Martinez paint the walls of his structure. But b ­ ecause Martinez withheld narrative or iconographic content u ­ ntil the last day, the students’ sense of allegiance or patrimony rested not in a self-­apparent artwork but in their 480  ·  cho n no r iega

participation in t he proj­ect, in t heir encounter with Martinez, and in w hat he was saying to them about the artwork. Thus, Martinez’s words became the object of exegesis on the part of art students and ­others attempting to assign a meaning to the piece—in par­tic­u­lar, a m eaning that justiĀed their active involvement and interaction with the installation. In short, Martinez’s actions established him as someone able to deny permission within the university structure itself. This authority was an impor­tant aspect of his investigation of privilege. Nonetheless, this strategy also put him in a problematic position as an artist insofar as his heroic ­battle against the university and an earlier generation of earth artists—­who had their Ārst museum-­sponsored exhibition at Cornell University in 1969—­was itself placed in opposition to the up-­and-­coming generation that stood in the wings of his per­for­mance.24 Several art students, mostly white ­women and black men, felt that Martinez had given them permission to use the tar-­covered walls as a “blackboard” for their own artistic statements. Thus, what began as a question of privilege within an elite institution and art world also raised questions about class and generational conflicts among minority artists. In both instances, Martinez was at the center of ­these questions. ­After the opening of the exhibition, Martinez returned to Los Angeles. By the time of the sitin, his position had changed in an unusual way. With Martinez gone, the university became the default steward of his installation and its “artistic integrity”—­that is, of Martinez’s intention. In this manner, “Martinez” (both the ­actual person and an idea of him based on exegesis) was incorporated into the decision-­making loop as university officials attempted to respond to the vandalism against the piece. Martinez’s physical absence, coupled with his troubling discursive presence (he seemed to have expressed just about ­every pos­si­ble intention), brought university officials to a standstill. In the midst of the sit-in, Larry Palmer, vice president for academic programs and campus

affairs, put the issue of stewardship on public rec­ord: “We could not—­given the conflicting messages of public art—­take stewardship of the piece.” As an act of symbolic politics, the initial rally must be seen as the students taking stewardship of the installation. The subsequent sit-in, then, became an act of expanding the students’ stewardship to include the university curriculum. This act was done more to draw attention to an administrative vacuum than to effect an improbable power shift. While Martinez deĀnes his installation in terms of the viewer’s privilege, he fails to mention its flip side—­his own privilege, one that is based on getting permission to make the installation in the Ārst place. During the installation, Martinez was the quin­tes­sen­tial outsider, negotiating with officials who had some claim upon the space he occupied. In the end, his proj­ect made vis­i­ble the orga­nizational flow chart for the university, in which ­there ­were seven units ­under the vice president for academic programs and campus affairs, each with dif­fer­ent claims to the space of the Arts Quad: Hispanic American Studies Program (funding and implementation) Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (aesthetics) Risk Management (liability) Grounds Department (maintenance) Office of Environmental Health and Safety (safety) Planning, Design, and Construction (“structural soundness”) Facilities of Arts and Sciences (access)

Jose Piedra and I, as the curators, w ­ ere located in the Hispanic American Studies Program, from where we negotiated with the other six dep artments and, as t­ hings heated up, with Martinez himself. Fi­nally, the vice president for university relations played a crucial role in framing the student takeover, especially before the regional and national press could reach Ithaca. Ironically, Martinez’s permission was based on the fact that no one ever asked what he was ­really up to in making the installation. The p ­ eople involved remained within the limits set by their

institutional position, their bailiwick. As long as Martinez and his installation satisĀed the bailiwick of a par­tic­u­lar department, that department was not about to assume the larger responsibility and ask why. And, as long as all of the seven departments ­were satisĀed, the office of the vice president for academic programs and campus affairs was not about to ask why ­either. This situation seemed to come about ­because the proj­ect was undertaken in the name of art. (Earlier, students had been denied permission when they proposed a similar, albeit nonart, use of the Arts Quad.) As such, the larger responsibility—­the holistic or synthetic level of control over the space—­was reĀgured in aesthetic terms. In this instance, control worked from the bottom up, rather than the top down. What the installation did, then, was to bring to the surface not just deep-­rooted social conflicts but the hierarchies and lines of communications that deĀned campus power relations. In making vis­i­ble both the racism and the decision-­making structure that existed on campus, the installation and sit-in implicated the one in the other. Consider the following editorial in the Cornell Review: “Mr.  Martinez: we have a special message for you. You snot-­brained Āend, you flighty, warbling, galavanting, strutting l­ittle twit. You whining, moaning, kvetching, sniggering, paste-­and-­construction paper excuse for an artist. You puerile non-­entity, you prattling babe in the woods, you slobbering lapdog of the putrid international art establishment. ­You’ve ruined our campus, both with your pitiable attempt at aesthetic moment, and with the furies of po­liti­cal stupidity your troublemaking has released. Rot in hell!”25 While this excess is so laughable as to be beyond parody, its sentiments are not, especially as expressed in graffiti on the walls of The ­Castle Is Burning: “Cesar Chavez is Dead” (with a smiley face dra wn beneath), “Kill the Illegals,” and “White Pride.” Interestingly enough, the student protesters ­were grateful, ­because now it would be impossible for the administration to deny the racist climate that existed on campus. On Museu m Ro w  ·  481

Clearly, The ­Castle Is Burning was effective within the university and public sphere. But is it art? In Martinez’s piece, despite the overlapping and blurring of categories, ­there is a decisive moment when art ends and politics takes over—or, to be more precise, when his art ends, and the students’ politics takes over. The installation was located midway between the museum and the administration building; it was produced u ­ nder the auspices of the former, but aspired to affect the latter. And so, on November  29, 1993, Martinez sent a let ter to president Frank Rhodes: “Given the response from the University students and all concerned, it seems t­ here is a g­ reat need for the symbols that represent the freedoms of speech, thought, and expression and a forum that allows all voices to be heard. ­After the exhibition has concluded, I would like to offer in donation the artwork The ­Castle Is Burning to Cornell University. I would like to make this temporary artwork a permanent public sculpture for generations of students and faculty to experience and feel proud of our ­great country and what it represents.” In the end, the museum declined the offer, while the university president negotiated with the students for some long overdue changes. A  few weeks ­later, the installation was torn down. If it had an impact, it was ­because the museum already operated within institutional relationships that reached across the Arts Quad to the president’s office and beyond. Martinez’s installation made ­these connections material and, hence, vis­ i­ble within the public space. In each of the above case studies, the aesthetic is as variable as the museum sites themselves. So, too, are the relationships between the art exhibition and a larger body politic. Perhaps ­these connections explain why ­there are never street signs announcing that you are leaving museum row. Arrival is every­thing in Amer­i­ca! In the end, aesthetic value and the politics of exhibition are not the same t­ hing. One cannot be reduced to the other. And the dynamic between them w ­ ill be dif­fer­ent across local and national, public and private, contexts. For its part, the museum provides the occasion by which they come together, 482  ·  cho n no r iega

as a product of and catalyst for dialogue, debate, and change. Such a p ro­cess can never be pure. We ­will not have parity of repre­sen­ta­tion and rights of access without having other complicating ­things, too. Notes This chapter was originally published as Chon Noriega, “On Museum Row: Aesthetics and the Politics of Exhibition,” Daedalus 128, no. 3 (summer 1999): 57–81. Copyright © 1999 by the American Acad­emy of Arts and Sciences. Republished with permission from the author. 1. I examine ­these changes in greater detail, with attention to the role of the Ford Foundation, in Chon A. Noriega, Shot in Amer­i­ca: Telecommunications, Chicano Cinema, and the State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 2. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 9. 3. H. K. Colebatch, Policy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 10. 4. See Barbara Kirschenblatt-­Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 5. For an excellent anthology on science and ­technology museum exhibitions, see Sharon MacDonald, ed., The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London: Routledge, 1998). 6. Carmen Lomas Garza, A Piece of My Heart/Pedacito de mi corazon: The Art of Carmen Lomas Garza (New York: The New Press, 1991). See also Carmen Lomas Garza, ­Family Pictures/Cuadros de familia (San Francisco, CA: ­Children’s Book Press, 1990). 7. See Chicano and Latino: Parallels and Divergence/ One Heritage, Two Paths (Los Angeles: Daniel Saxon Gallery and Kimberly Gallery, 1992); Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano, eds., Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991); and1993 Biennial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993). For an insightful study of the Chicano Art exhibition, see Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 8. Robbie Farley Villalobos, “Museum President Embarrassed: ‘Personal’ Survey Shows Public ­Doesn’t Like Current Exhibit,” El Paso Herald-­Post, January 25, 1992, A 1.

9. Villalobos, “Museum President Embarrassed.” 10. Roberta Smith, “Art View: A Remembrance of Whitney Biennials Past,” New York Times, February 28, 1993. 11. Elisabeth Sussman, ed., 1993 Biennial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1993). 12. John Leo, “Cultural War at the Whitney,” U.S. News & World Report, March 22, 1993. 13. Leo, “Cultural War at the Whitney.” 14. Art+Auction, March 1993. 15.New York Times, April 28, 1992. 16. Homi K. Bhabha, “Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation,” in Sussman, 1993 Biennial Exhibition, 67. 17. Hal Foster et al., “The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the Whitney Biennial,” October 66 (fall 1993): 3. 18. I am not arguing for some sort of critical purity, as if inside and outside ­were discrete categories, but rather pointing to the failure of the countable members to locate themselves within their critique of the museum. To be fair, I was an “outside” advisor to the biennial, while I had quite a dif­fer­ent critique of the museum, not for including “minority” artists with a limited understanding of the signifier (as if the two ­were the same ­thing), but for the politics signified by the limited se­lection of “minority” artists. Chon Noriega, letter to Elisabeth Sussman, September 5, 1993. 19. See especially Rosalind Krauss’s reading of Lorna Simpson’s installation Hy­po­thet­i­cal?(1992), in which she essentially equates the cata­log texts with the art itself. Simpson’s piece consists of three walls: one wall covered with mouthpieces from vari­ous brass instruments opposite another wall with a photo­graph of the lips of a black person; on the third wall ­there is a newspaper clipping in

which Tom Bradley is asked ­whether, as a black man, he would be afraid ­after the Rodney King verdict if he ­were not also the mayor. Bradley replies, “No, I ­wouldn’t be afraid. I’d be angry.” Ironically, Krauss insists on attention to the “material level of the piece,” and yet dismisses the third wall as “irrelevant to the piece” in order to redirect its meaning from “black rage” to “the play of the signifier.” For Krauss, the former reading is “profoundly unpo­liti­cal,” a point she extends ­later when she implies that blacks and other minorities should be grateful to modernism for ending (aesthetic) slavery: “The fact that modernism fought a ­battle to liberate images from a slavery to text, to a totally instrumental, illustrative task, ­doesn’t occur to this generation.” In the end, Krauss’s repeated call for “multiplicity” becomes a code word for not talking about certain ­things, like race, no ­matter how material to a piece. Some signifiers are not allowed to signify. Foster et al., “Politics of the Signifier,” 4–6, 11. 20. Chon A. Noriega and José Piedra, eds., ­Revelaciones/Revelations: Hispanic Art of Evanescence (Ithaca, NY: Hispanic American Studies Program, 1993). A documentary on the exhibition is available through the Cinema Guild in New York City. 21. Michael Kimmelman, “Art View: Of Candy Bars and Public Art,” New York Times, September 26, 1993. 22. See Daniel J. Martinez, The ­Things You See When You ­Don’t Have a Grenade! (Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1996). 23. Exhibition documents and press clippings are archived in the Special Collections Department at the Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California. 24. Earth Art (Ithaca, NY: Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, 1969). Dickson was the precursor to the Johnson Museum. 25. Editorial, Cornell Review, November 29, 1993.

On Museu m Ro w  ·  483

r it a go nz alez

51.Strangeways ­Here We Come  ·  2004

If we make ar t, as though w e know what’s g ­ oing to happen, ­whether it is hopeful or c ynical, w ­ e’re not

T­ oward a Development of the “Conceptually Po­liti­cal”

working on an ar t proj­ect—­we’re working against an art proj­ect! Only with g ­ reat uncertainty can some very small achiev ements be made f or some f­ uture that we cannot see or imag ine. We have to work in strange ways and hopeless w ays but not c ynical ways. —­J IMMIE DURHAM

I empathize with Jimmie Durham’s exhaustion and optimism. Looking back to engage with a recent past demands certainty, but you might consider my current undertaking as pretext to an unforeseen f­ uture. I was dislocated from Los Angeles, my lifelong home, for a number of years. Throughout the 1990s I li ved in N orthern and Southern California. Yet I n ever quite left L.A. This intervallic essay reflects my tuning into the recent past and is culled from dialogue, research, and remembrance.1

Two young art students discover one another while perusing the stacks of a co llege library. Unlike a c lichéd movie moment, they ­don’t bump into each other literally, but slowly come to recognize the other’s imprint in t he rubber date stamps of two par­tic­u­lar library books. The books in question: cata­logs for Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 1990s (Museum of Con­temporary Art [moc a ], Los Angeles, 1992) and Chicano Art: Resis­tance and Affirmation (car a) (ucl a Wight Gallery, 1990). The artists’ meeting takes place a few years a­ fter ­these exhibitions and, signiĀcantly, in the aftermath of the Los Angeles uprising. For them, ­these two books, Helter Skelter and car a, replayed a m oment in t he city when the focus was on repairing civic discontent, dealing not only with racism in black and white but also as it had erupted across racial, ethnic, and class lines.

­ ese benchmark exhibitions mattered in Th wildly dif­fer­ent ways, yet provided certain conceptual under­pinnings for an emerging group of artists in the 1990s. While car a was an exhibition or­ga­nized according to the pedagogy of consensual politics (with a strong concern for establishing the sociopo­liti­cal climate for Chicano art production), Helter Skelter’s lone curator, Paul Schimmel, produced a d ark counternarrative to the received ideas of Los Angeles in both popu­lar culture and art history.2 Furthermore, Schimmel’s exhibition fueled the “LA effect” in co n­ temporary art discourse, propelling it in another direction. car a was a s how predicated on ethnic speciĀcity and the ongoing reckoning of art and politics. Helter Skelter presented artists and writers of color in b oth the exhibition and the catalog—­yet prob­ably for the Ārst time since the height of multiculturalism, artists’ identities did not result in ­either a label or a cordoned-­off section reserved for difference. What the two library-­ dwelling art students did notice was that the artists and writers of color included in Helter Skelter did not produce content that was illustrative of what had become by the early 1990s an acceptable ethnic aesthetic. They also noticed that some of the most dissonant and complex work associated with car a came through the academics, critics, and artist/theorists who contributed to the cata­ log, rather than the exhibition itself. Harry Gamboa Jr. served as an interlocutor for both exhibitions, appearing in car a as an artist and writer, and as Āction writer in the Helter Skelter cata­log. Gamboa’s images and writing w ­ ere in dialogue with his notion of phantom identities—­ identities considered marginal to institutional and cultural arbiters of meaning, taste, and relevance.3 Gamboa’s assertive casting of phantom identity had a sympathetic connection to identity-­ based claims for “re­sis­tance and affirmation,” but rather than championing the uplifting images and words of the folkloric, the communal, or the ethno-­national, Gamboa chose the urban, the discordant, and the stateless. Gamboa describes the divide between some of the university-­trained artists who “consciously portrayed the vari­ous ele­

ments of con­temporary Chicano culture that dealt with the obvious symbols of material identiĀcation, i.e., lowrider automobiles, tortillas, tattoos, traditional ceremonies, and modiĀed graffiti,”4 and t­ hose “urban realists” and barrio existentialists with whom he identiĀed. Gamboa insisted on theorizing the “phantom culture” in a n attempt to document the simultaneous experience of being hypervisible—in the repertoire of ethnic stereotypes—­and invisible—on an institutional level. Asco (“nausea” in Spanish, 1971–87),the conceptual art group with which Gamboa Ārst began to produce as an artist, was not guided by an overriding ideology but, in his words, by “conceptually po­liti­cal” strategies.5 So how did t he shows resonate for the two art students? And how did t he collision of each show’s sensibility play out in t heir work? Ultimately, Mario Ybarra Jr. and Ruben Ochoa (the two mystery art students) would spend the latter part of the 1990s making work derived from a radical juxtaposition of the consensual politics of car a and the cryptopo­liti­cal, aesthetically violent material of Helter Skelter. Ybarra Jr. would create monstrous hybrids culled from a wild-­style mixture of urban subculture and the Babel-­like noise of clashing immigrant outposts of Los Angeles. Ochoa would rip the zoot suit out of time, fashion a new one from shards of broken glass, and wear it in a per­for­mance at a museum exhibition opening for Dale Chihuly’s glass sculptures.6 His raucous entrance caused severe panic. Post–­Helter Skelter and the Rise of the M.F.A. in Los Angeles

l ax : The Los Angeles Exhibition 1992 developed in the shadows of moc a ’s Helter Skelter. Staged around Los Angeles in seven dif­fer­ent alternative artist spaces and cultural centers,7 its multiple shows represented vari­ous outpost identities of artists living in Los Angeles, as well as the alternative spaces in which they most often performed and exhibited. As Los Angeles art and art schools gained notoriety during the late 1990s, a number Strange wa ys H ­ er e We Come  ·  485

of the spaces included in l ax would fold or radically change their agendas. The proĀling of the Los Angeles art scene would soon shift to both popu­lar and scholarly mappings of its graduate-­ school offerings.8 As the issue of pedagogy and the rise of the L.A. art schools are so crucial to the evolution of the Southern California art scene, ­here’s a longish excerpt from a series of exchanges between l ax or­ga­nizer Ed Leffingwell, artist Fred Fehlau, and writer Amy Gerstler. In response to a discussion of exclusionary tactics in Los Angeles art spaces, Fehlau states, It must also be said that t­ here are many involved in this argument (ethnic-­speciĀc institutions included) that have done as much to maintain t­ hese differences as the powers that be. In a dra ft of an essay for this cata­logue, Plaza de la Raza deĀned its mission as an effort “to continue to offer Chicano, Mexicano, and Latino artists an opportunity to add their voices and perspectives of the discourse of con­temporary art.” The text refers to the fact that although Frank Romero, the subject of the Plaza’s exhibition for “LAX,” has exhibited extensively throughout the world, he has never had a solo exhibition within the community (“his community”) that inspired his greatest works. In this context, the drawing back of one of our “own” further deĀnes Romero and his work as a direct expression of an individual community. Chevy “lowriders” and East Los Angeles landscapes become illustrations of an experience, or in other terms, an expression of “lifestyle.” In that, they remain the property of that par­tic­u­lar group, effectively secluded and removed from the community of ideas and individuals at large. As an aside, I must relate a classroom experience I h ad a few years ago. A s tudent presented a series of images based upon a historical and cultural narrative of cockĀghting in t he rural Black South. That same month, Angel Heart was playing in local movie theaters, a Ālm also set in the South and including scenes of cockĀghting and religious rituals and sacriĀce. The images in t he student’s work ­were grainy and rough, and certainly had the double-­edged look of fashion and documentary. But the real­ity was that the student, who is African-­ American, got a b unch of her friends together, all of whom live in L os Angeles, and in t rue Hollywood fashion “staged” the event, complete with

486  ·  r it a go nz alez

poultry and sexual overtones. The student had no direct experience with that ritual and, upon discussion, could not Ānd any reason why she, as a Black ­woman, would necessarily be more informed of or familiar with ­these images than anyone e­ lse in the classroom. The reason, of course, was that all of our readings (of the piece, the repre­sen­ta­tions, and the ritual) ­were constructed from a shared and mediated set of information, information that was intended to be and produced to be familiar. Although every­one recognized the story, no one could recognize themselves in the story. An opposite but corollary point can be made about Frank Romero’s work: while most every­one can recognize and understand the imagery (what­ever ste­reo­types and generalizations that maintains is another issue), the author’s assumption is that the audience at Plaza de la Raza ­will be able to identify themselves through it.9

I read over Fehlau’s comments several times; and although he, Gerstler, and Leffingwell ­were involved in a fast-­paced exchange of gut responses and anecdotes and did not, perhaps, conceptualize their text with the rigor of a cr itical essay, a certain poignancy in it rang true for me. ­After many discussions with artists who went through M.F.A. programs from the 1990s through the early 2000s, I Ānd in Fehlau’s text a crystallization of several impor­tant “post-­M.F.A.” issues, most notably, mentorship, authenticity, and reception. Fehlau’s classic liberal response to his student indicates some of the continuing complexities that art students face in cr itiques. Emerging artists, especially in the Los Angeles art schools, are often given wildly divergent opinions about cultural aesthetics, identity politics, and community accountability. Reading Howard Singerman’s book Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University recently, I wa s struck by his comments on the determinations of po­liti­cal art’s critical success. Singerman notes that while most proponents of po­liti­cal art are outwardly concerned with the relevance of what they do t o a p ar­tic­u­lar community, the signiĀcance of their practice and the discourse it generates is ultimately appraised by academia. As Singerman goes on to note, this

“doubledness of po­liti­cal art” does not necessarily short-­circuit its po­liti­cal capacities, but it does broach a range of issues alluded to in Fehlau’s address, particularly the idea that what comes from a po­liti­cally oriented and community-­bound practice runs the risk of serving as “a report for outsiders on an au­then­tic inside.”10 Con­temporary artists renounce authenticity claims ­because of the numerous forces that affect their art practice. Didactic and illustrative tactics are complicated by transcultural or subcultural allusions and by an unmooring of an instantly recognizable ethnic or racial aesthetic. The growth of the numbers of artists of color who are receiving M.F.A.s (or who study with mentors of color) has had a dir ect impact on the proliferation of attitudes about protectionism, community accountability, and professionalization. Th ­ ose who share the concerns of the writer of La Plaza de la Raza’s entry (referenced by Fehlau) still maintain the necessity of cultural speciĀcity and a s pace of their own. However, ­there are ­those ­shaped by spaces such as La Plaza de la Raza (est. 1970) and Self H ­ elp Graphics (est. 1973) who understand the continuing need for activism and education but are also critical of separatism and protectionism.

curious manner in w hich the metal shards that make up Gamboa’s language and the grenade-­ like sentences Āred off by Martinez have been responsible for the development of several artists and critics who emerged in the 1990s. Although Gamboa and Martinez stopped conversing and collaborating back in t he late 1980s, each has been called upon for public forums and both have made their marks as educators throughout Southern California. Although I do not have the space in this essay to discuss the artistic and discursive output of Gamboa and Martinez in t he detail they merit, I ­will say that, simply put, drastic changes have occurred in t he rendering of the “conceptually po­liti­cal strategies” of an emerging group of artists and scholars who became aware of Gamboa’s and Martinez’s artistic and discursive example.12 But I wa nt to move on to consider the work of a generation of artists in their late twenties and early thirties that illustrated vari­ous “conceptually po­liti­cal strategies” in i ts engagement with language, history, and depictions of urban space as strange Āction. The following artists concoct countermemories in p art to derail expectations (of what art by a C hicano/Mexican A ­ merican should look like), and in part to betoken t­ hings to come.

Collisions The Pocho Research Society

About a de­cade before Ybarra and Ochoa’s chance meeting, another collision of attitude occurred somewhere in downtown Los Angeles. Reflecting on his initial encounter with Harry Gamboa, artist Daniel J. Martinez remarked, “Harry was the Ārst Mexican-­American I met who was like me. We are both light skinned and not exactly ste­ reo­typically Latino in our looks. He d ­ idn’t speak Spanish. He ­didn’t do murals. He was interested in language. He was interested in conceptual art. We started to talk about identity politics and we talked about a new, reinterpreted version of conceptual art.”11 What is key for my own account of L.A. a rt in t he 1990s is not only  the artistic output of Gamboa, Asco, and Martinez, but the

Underscoring the invisibility of multiple histories of Los Angeles, Operation Invisible Monument (2002) and the recent October Surprise (2004) are proj­ects of the Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History (pr s), an organ­ization that operates in secrecy but is known to work with visual artist Sandra de l a Loza (Āg.  51.1). In their founding statement, the pr s claims to understand “history as a battleground of the pres­ent, a location where hidden and forgotten selves hijack and disrupt the oppression of our moment.”13 The pr s layers the discourse of clandestine militant action with the benign gestures of historical memorializing—­not simply to produce a s ubtle Strange wa ys H ­ er e We Come  ·  487

FIG. 51.1. Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History, Operation Invisible Monument, 2002. Documentation. Image courtesy of the artist.

insertion into a l andscape but to generate debate on the use and rendering of sites and entire communities. The pr s uses the historical plaque, an often subtle sign affixed or adjacent to a b uilding or architectural domain, to camouflage its radical intentions. By blending into asphalt and brick, ­these faux monuments perfectly simulate the gravitas of the historical marker. The language employed by pr s also mimics the elegiac tenor of the sanctioned civic plaque. In Invisible Moment #4, a graffiti artist named Chaka is given a marker titled “Triumph of the Tagger.” The text reads, “During the late 1980s an invisible army assaulted the city with spray cans transforming bland concrete walls into canvases Ālled with an explosive language of hard-­edged urban forms, radiating color, and an abstract coded lexicon. The most proliĀc, the Boyle Heights tagger known as 488  ·  r it a go nz alez

Chaka, single-­handedly inflicted $30,000 worth of damage [on] the Southern PaciĀc Railroad.” While pr s enshrines subversive Āgures and spaces (among t­ hose it celebrates are a s hort-­ lived punk club called the Vex and DeCenter, a post–­L.A. uprising resource center run by local anarchists), the organ­ization also selects sites that have been the center of revisionist historical debate on both the scholarly and community level. In pr s’s series Operation Invisible Monument, ­operatives placed a surrogate monument alongside one paying tribute to the site of Dodger Stadium (Āg. 51.2). The pr s monument narrated the displacement of the inhabitants of Chávez Ravine, a community of mostly Mexican ­American families that existed in Solano Canyon u ­ ntil the development of Dodger Stadium.14 It is impor­tant that the historical plaques are installed clandestinely, usually ­under the cover

FIG. 51.2. Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History, Operation Invisible Monument, 2002. Documentation and installation view, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.

of darkness, and without the permission of public officials—­and are then immediately documented. The resultant “landmarks” ultimately exist only as documentary evidence of a per­for­ mance perpetrated in i solation, since security guards or property o ­ wners consistently remove the plaques shortly ­after their installation. The blanket disapproval of pr s’s monuments, evidenced by their speedy removal, suggests that ­these types of sites “await the development of interpretive traditions within which they can be assessed, framed, and promoted.”15 While most monuments are designated for sanctioned spaces and designed to impart a condensed lesson about a landmark event or key facilitator in civil society, the “countermonuments” of the pr s operate in the erased spaces of community memory to champion the forgotten subjects of history. pr s is keenly aware that the graphics they produce for

insertion in notionally public spaces (but actually private property) are countermemorials. That is, the plaques emblematize the constant threat of the evaporation of cultural memory in relation to what gets documented—­and memorialized—by official historical discourse. The Slanguage Sublime

In addition to meeting Ruben Ochoa at Otis College of Art and Design, Ybarra Jr. also came into contact with Juan Capistran. They started collaborating shortly ­after the Los Angeles uprising of 1992, in part ­because of their shared interest in public uses of urban space a­ fter the riots. Capistran was born in Mexico, but his ­family settled in South Central Los Angeles when he was a child. Ybarra was raised in W ilmington, the harbor Strange wa ys H ­ er e We Come  ·  489

area of Los Angeles. Both have mentioned that growing up outside East Los Angeles (generally considered the Southern California center of Chicano po­liti­cal and cultural identity) ­shaped their notions of self in relation to urban identities, allowing them to be more aware and in synch with multiple subcultures and ethnicities.16 I call their work “tactical graphics.” Tactical graphics mine and mimic the designs and distribution networks of the informal economies and underground cultural and subcultural events that occur throughout Los Angeles (or any other city with a constantly changing demographic). Tactical graphic artists add another layer to the urban palimpsest and intervene in sites that are u ­ nder erasure. They are feedback generators, recycling the visual and aural noise that for the most part goes unnoticed by t­ hose who do n ot listen to Spanish-­ or Vietnamese-­language radio shows, or for ­those who do not shop at predominantly Latino or African American small businesses, or for ­those who do not attend Chicano punk shows. ­After the riots, many buildings, especially in South Central and ­Korea Town, lay in r uins. Chain-­link fences went up on major boulevards and individuals started to use ­these fences as bulleting boards to post ads for their unique ser­vices (braiding, plumbing, car repair, ­etc.). Ybarra and Capistran ­were attracted to ­these handmade signs and intervened with their own series of Sublime paintings (Āg.  51.3). Their hand-­painted signs ­were placed amid the other homemade signage on corners throughout South Central. Since then Ybarra and Capistran have created work and performed ­under a number of h ­ andles (Space Invaders 13 and AllModCons, among ­others). In 2002, Ybarra and Capistran opened an alternative space called Slanguage, a combination studio, site for guerilla education, and exhibition space. The neologism “slanguage” suggests a mutation of common speech—­a street-­level transfusion. This new formation is born out of an aural and pictorial sensitivity to noise. Ybarra and Capistran translate and generate street-­level articulations (of mixed[-up] identity, of urban sampling, of altered forms of popu­lar culture), and as 490  ·  r it a go nz alez

such, both artists function as the lexicographers of this new Slanguage. One facet o f Slanguage has been the visual language of black-­market promotion vis-­à-­vis tactical graphics. The poster diptych Sonido Slang (2003) uses a dig ital output to simulate a popu­lar graphic design style in the promotion of banda and norteño acts in S outhern California. Ybarra and Capistran ­were drawn to the fonts and designs used in ­these posters, especially in relation to an influential Japa­nese science Āction aesthetic that would seem to run ­counter to the aesthetics of narcocorrido. As hip-­hop culture has taught Ybarra and Capistran, a new language and visual code are necessary for the creation of alternative educational and cultural production models. Imaginary Murals and the Twenty-­First ­Century

­ fter strolling through the 18th arrondissement, A Scoli Acosta is distracted with thoughts about the murals of Los Angeles. He is 5,673 miles from the city but starts a dra wing anyway. He titles it The Imaginary Mural of Los Angeles. Like old cartographies that miniaturize the city and bloat the hand of the draughtsman, the corner of his drawing features a ga unt, disembodied hand in the pro­cess of mapping. The washed-­out colors reprise ­those faint hues long familiar to Thomas Guide devotees. However, users of such guidance devices would run pell-­mell from Acosta’s labyrinthine map. Acosta attended Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (l a chsa ), located at the brutal (yet aerially sublime) intersection of four urban freeways. The divisiveness of the freeway—­ and its harsh ramiĀcations for the mostly Mexican/Chicano population—­gave birth to a s eries of epic projections on the public-­facing walls of stores, libraries, housing proj­ects, and cultural centers. Acosta grew up with ­these and with other daily transformations of his urban surroundings. Punks, beatniks, neo-­Aztecs, Mexican rockeros, Beverly Hills nannies, and former

FIG. 51.3. Slanguage (Juan Capistran and Mario Ybarra Jr.), Sublime, 1998. Documentation of hand-­painted posters installed in South Central Los Angeles. Image courtesy of Juan Capistran.

Jetters crossed his path. His u ­ ncle, Sean Carrillo, was a p articipant in t he expanded lineup of Asco in the 1980s. In the 1990s, Acosta would get an M.F.A. at the Kansas City Art Institute, followed by years of travel through Eu­rope. His extended foray involved the building of an elaborate archive (composed out of hand-­crafted and found artifacts) devoted to his double passion for French nineteenth-­century writer Gérard de Nerval and documentation of his own intermittent per­for­mances. Why does this twenty-­Ārst-­century nomad, this suburban refugee who grew up on the nectar of Los Angeles river ­water, beat culture, and sonic confusion, make work that looks and sounds like it is from another dimension of time and space? The Imaginary Mural of Los Angeles is what one sees projected across time ­after walking through Paris on an extended lark. It is a dim and unruly memory ­shaped in a city overloaded with history—­about a m egacity that regularly recycles its own. The Imaginary Mural has no bound­aries—­just endless contortions, like the unpredictable flow of L.A. r iver ­water. The map flows out of the black veins of a floating hand that hovers over the city like a phantom. Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon Set Off the Post-­Black Effect; or, If Post-­Black Is the New Black . . . ​Then What Is the New Brown?

We gathered together—­some fifteen artists, art historians, and curators—at a r ound ­table to discuss the state of con­temporary art, or rather (echoing one of the participants) w ­ hether or not we ­matter to the state of con­temporary art. All of ­those gathered ­were “Latino,” but we used Chicano art and its newly historical status as a starting point for our comments. The topic “post or wave” (conceived by artist/writer Ken Gonzales-­Day and myself) was meant—­one way or another—to differentiate us from an artistic culture that served as an auxiliary of a p o­liti­cal movement.17 ­Were we “post-­Chicano” (a term actually concocted by art critic Max Benavidez in 492  ·  r it a go nz alez

the early 1990s 18) or ­were we—on the model of second-­and third-­wave feminism—in a historiographic mode characterized by empathy, re­spect, and distance? Or ­were we seeking an exit strategy from all of the above? Although this roundtable took place in 200 4, our dialogue was a sort of summary judgment of the last two de­cades, during which most of us ­were educated and acculturated. We had all taken dif­fer­ent paths—­some ­were the ­daughters and sons of activists in el movimiento, ­others ­were the descendants of Central Americans affected by U.S. interventions. Culturally, we w ­ ere ­shaped by anything from hip-­hop to Sub Pop, from Morrissey to Queer Nation—­from the art of po­liti­cal graphics to minimalism. We w ­ ere ­there around the ­table—we ­were impressed, we ­were supportive, we ­were scheming—­and we ended up turning against deĀnition. Ultimately, our group epiphany arrived at a mutual dissatisfaction with any staple term or seamless category. Of course, some of us felt more attuned to “strategic ambivalence,” while ­others had worked out a way of dealing with our perceived irrelevance through any number of canny tactics. As curator and art historian C. Ondine Chavoya pointed out, the artists that interested and inspired him w ­ ere ­those engaged in “situations not institutions.” Many at the ­table acknowledged similar penchants: strategies for survival in t he art world and avoidance of historical myopia. But each participant had a dif­fer­ent way of adjudicating her or his position. One artist at the t­ able suggested that we could no longer be impractical in our dealings with the art world—­that if w e continued with the same cycle of self-­examination, we would continue to be irrelevant. He called the framework for our roundtable “repeating lyr­ics on a broken cd .” And he was surely right. Since the onset of conversations about an ethnically speciĀc aesthetic practice in the early 1970s, t­ here has always been a false dichotomy between art world success and an isolationist notion of authenticity. The frustrated artist went on to cite the 9/11 Commission’s Āndings that the cabinet of George W. Bush suffered from a “failure of imagination”—­and made

the connection to our very own critical meltdown. Although I agreed with the urgent call for an imaginative expansion of our art production and critical work, I did not think we could ignore the disparities and inconsistencies that still drive art world institutional and discursive practices. Some left the meeting rather weary, with a sense that recent M.F.A.s want to distance themselves from identity politics altogether. Artists Christina Fernandez and Sandra de l a Loza voiced discontent with an amnesiac strain in the discussion, suggesting the critical importance of the Chicano and feminist movements. We agreed on one t­ hing, at least, that without a do ubt the terms Chicano/post-­Chicano should cease to be the sole generators of (and refuges from) curatorial and critical paradigms. Earlier generations of artists ­were beset with the same semantic dilemmas, so it seemed clear that, at the risk of stagnation, the group should discuss the issues and pro­cesses that drive their work, and, in ­doing so, search for areas of critical intersection and mutual relevance. What seemed utterly clear was the fact that manifestations of dissent and agitation from the late 1960s to the pres­ent had laid the groundwork for upcoming generations to have the liberty to choose when, where, and how to deal with the contextualization of identity in t heir work. But what also seemed clear was that the drive of artists to be “known by their art” was also based on a romanticized notion of the artist operating in the fluffy drift of formal purity. We have to work in strange ways and hopeless ways but not cynical ways. Notes This chapter was originally published as Rita Gonzalez, “Strangeways ­Here We Come,” in Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California from the 90s to Now, ed. John C. Welchman, Southern California Consortium of Art Schools Symposium (Zu­rich: JRP Ringier, 2004), 87–104. Republished with permission from the author. Epigraph: Jimmie Durham, “Prob­ably This ­Will Not Work,” Strategies for Survival—­Now! A Global Perspective on Ethnicity, Body, and Breakdown of Artistic Systems, ed.

Christian Chambert (Lund: Swedish Art Critics Association Press, 1995), 223–35. 1. In par­tic­u­lar, I would like to acknowledge the following friends and colleagues who shared many insights: Sandra de la Loza, C. Ondine Chavoya, Ken Gonzales-­Day, Daniel J. Martinez, Jim Mendiola, Mario Ybarra Jr., Jennifer Sternad-­Flores, Juan Capistran, Bill Kelley, Ruben Ochoa, Perry Vasquez, Rubén Ortiz-­ Torres, Yanira Cartageña, and Pete Galindo. I would also like to thank John C. Welchman, C. Ondine Chavoya, and Joseph Mosconi for their invaluable editorial assistance. 2. For an examination of the influence of Lynn Foulkes and Robert Williams as the se­nior emissaries of “dirty pop” in the Los Angeles art scene, see Howard Singerman, “Helter Skelter,” Artforum 43, no. 2 (October 2004): 125–26, 284–85. 3. For a primer to Gamboa’s oeuvre, see Chon Noriega’s “No Introduction,” in Harry Gamboa Jr., Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., ed. Chon Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1–22. 4. Harry Gamboa Jr., “Serpents in the City of Angels,” Artweek 20 (1989): 24. 5. C. Ondine Chavoya has treated the spatial productions of Asco in “Orphans of Modernism: The Per­for­ mance Art of Asco,” in Corpus Delecti: Per­for­mance Art of the Amer­ic­ as, ed. Coco Fusco (London: Routledge, 2000), 240–63. 6. Ochoa executed this per­for­mance at the opening for Chihuly: The George R. Stroemple Collection at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, in 1999. For his account of the per­for­mance, see Ruben Ochoa, “Breaking Down Glass Walls,” Aztlán 28, no. 1 (spring 2003): 175–78. 7. The exhibition was coordinated by Ed Leffingwell of the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, and included a general survey at the Barnsdall Park gallery; installations at the Fisher Gallery at the University of Southern California and the Santa Monica Museum of Art; abstract art at Otis School of Art and Design; two crafts artists at the Japanese-­American Cultural Center; and a retrospective of painter Frank Romero at the Plaza de la Raza; while Los Angeles Con­temporary Exhibitions (LACE ) hosted a per­for­mance and video series and an exhibition curated by artists Karen Carson and Jacci Den Hartog. 8. See Lane Relyea, “LA-­Based and Superstructure,” Public Offerings (Los Angeles: Museum of Con­temporary Art, Los Angeles, 2001), 248–65.Thanks to Jane ­McFadden for recommending this essay.

Strange wa ys H ­ er e We Come  ·  493

9. Ed Leffingwell, LAX : The Los Angeles Exhibition 1992 (Los Angeles: Directors of the Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park, 1992), 23, 32; emphasis in sour ce. 10. Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 203, 260. 11. Daniel J. Martinez, cited in Coco Fusco, “My Kind of Conversation: The Public Artworks of Daniel J. Martinez,” in The ­Things You See When You ­Don’t Have a Grenade (Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1996), 21. 12. Gamboa has given artist talks at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Cornell, among other universities. He was also included in the panel for the exhibition Made in C ­ alifornia at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1999). Martinez has presented countless lectures at universities and museums, including at the San Juan Trienal de Poli/Graphica (December 2004). 13. Pocho Research Society, “Guerilla Historians Hit LA with (Un)Official Historical Markers,” press release, May 4, 2002. 14. For more on the history of “urban renewal” proj­ ects and their often dire consequences on Mexicano

494  ·  r it a go nz alez

and Mexican ­American communities, see Raul H. Villa’s Barrio-­Logos, Space, and Place in Urban Chicano Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 15. Kenneth Foote, Shadowed Ground: Amer­i­ca’s Landscapes of Vio­lence and Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 294. 16. For more on the history of Slanguage, see my interview with Juan Capistran and Mario Ybarra Jr., “Eddie Olmos and the ­Future Conceptualists: An Interview with Juan Capistran and Mario Ybarra Jr.,” LatinArt​.­com, accessed August 2018, http://­www​.­latinart​.­com​/­transcript​ .­cfm​?­id​=5 ­ 3. 17. Participants at this informal roundtable on July 23, 2004, included Saul Alvarez, Yanira Cartageña, C. Ondine Chavoya, Sandra de la Loza, Christina Fernandez, Pete Galindo, Ken Gonzales Day, Rita Gonzalez, Bill Kelley, Daniel J. Martinez, Chon Noriega, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Jorge Nava, Leda Ramos, and Mario Ybarra Jr. ­Others ­were invited but could not attend. 18. See Max Benavidez, “Mexican Gothic: A Post-­ Chicano Aesthetic,” unpublished lecture, Foundation for Art Resources, Los Angeles, California.

Further Reading

Andrade, Sally J. “Painting a Dif­fer­ent Picture.” Washington Post, December 17, 1995, G 7. Berelowitz, Jo-­Anne. “Conflict over ‘Border Art’: Whose Subject, Whose Border, Whose Show?” Third Text 40 (autumn 1997): 69–83. Caragol, Taína B. “Archives of Real­ity: Con­temporary Efforts to Document Latino Art.” American Art 19, no. 3 (fall 2005): 2–8. Davalos, Karen Mary. “A Poetics of Love and Rescue in the Collection of Chicana/o Art.” Latino Studies 5, no.1 (spring 2007): 76–103. Frankenstein, Alfred. “A Long-­Range View of Latino Art.” San Francisco Chronicle, October 15, 1977, 34. Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. “The Solar of Chicano/Pop­u­ lar Culture: Mi Casa no es su casa.” In Chicano Art: Inside/Outside the Master’s House, 31–88. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Mesa-­Bains, Amalia. “The Real Multiculturalism: A Strug­gle for Authority and Power.” In Dif­fer­ent Voices: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Framework for Change in the American Art Museum, 86–100. New York: Association of Art Museum ­Directors,

1992. Reprinted in Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Con­temporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift, edited by Gail Anderson, 99–109. Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira, 2004. Ramos, E. Carmen. “The Latino Presence in ­American Art.” American Art 26, no. 2 (summer 2012): 7–13. Richard, Paul. “Tejana Nostalgia.” Washington Post, December 3, 1995, G 5. Sanromán, Lucía. “PST Mexican American and Chicano Exhibitions Legitimize the Periphery.” Art Journal 71, no.1 (spring 2012): 76–87. Shaked, Nizan. “Phantom Sightings: Art ­after the Chicano Movement.” American Quarterly 60, no. 4 (December 2008): 1057–72. Wilson, William. “A Blending of Hispanic Roots, Visions.” Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1978, F 90. Valasco II, Robert. “Complex Latino Experience.” Washington Post, December 13, 1995, A 28. Ybarra-­Frausto, Tomás. “Imagining a More Expansive Narrative of American Art.” American Art 19, no.3 (fall 2005): 9–15.

This page intentionally left blank

Glossary actos

camaradas

acts

comrades, friends

almanaque

capilla

almanac

chapel

al troche y moche

carpa theater

half-­assed, haphazardly

tent theater, Chicano counterpart to vaudev­ille

antepasados

catrín

ancestors

dandy, well dressed

artesanias

chanclas

crafts, handicrafts

flip-­flops

barrio

chillantes

neighborhood, “hood,” Latino neighborhood, Latino “ghetto”

shrieking, howling

bola

the fucked one; generally refers to Doña Marina, who was the translator, slave, and mistress of Hernán Cortés

ball Boriqua

Puerto Rican bultos

packages cabeza con tripas

head with guts caciquismo

la chingada

cholo

a chicano gangster colonización

colonization communidad

community

(system of) dominance by the local party boss, petty tyranny, despotism

conchas

calendario

con/safos

calendar

being with or not with the group or volunteering or not volunteering to help get something done; “con” is

cunts; insult meaning vagina

affirmative, while “safos” is used to get out of ­doing something, as in “not me”

kachinas

dama

limpias

lady

clean (possibly: innocent, proper, respectable)

danzantes

llorona

professional dancers

ghost of a ­woman

desarrollo

lotería

development

Mexican Bingo

diran

mariposa

to say, to tell

butterfly; also slang for gay, “faggot”

Estados Unidos

mestizo

United States

mixed-­race person

ex votos

metáforas

votive offering

meta­phors

floricanto

migrantes

word for poetry referencing the Nahuatl language dual term meaning the flower (flor) and the song (canto)

itinerant workers, mi­grants

fregado pero no jodido

mortar

scrubbed but not fucked graphica

­woman graphic artist

(Navaho/Dine) a deiĀed ancestral spirit

molcajete

movidas

moved (emotionally) Mysterio Triste

used when loudly singing an old or current Spanish song, often while drunk

infamous Mexican bandit, El Philipio Mysterio Eden Sanchez, known for his card tricks and moustache; his powers come from his mystical sombrero

hacer rendir las cosas

negación

make ­things work

negation, denial

haciéndolo

negrito

­doing it

term of endearment meaning sweetheart; derogatory term for a black person

grito

harina

flour, dough, cash historia

history huelga

strike huevos

eggs, testicles indígenas

Indigenous ­people juntas pero no revueltos

together but not scrambled

498  ·  Gl ossar y

nichos

niches nopales

prickly pear oratorio

oratory pachuco/a

juvenile gang member pan dulce

sweet bread

panocha

santeros

pussy, slang for vagina; also used to criticize someone for being scared

pious, ­people excessively devoted to the saints, Santeria priests or believers

pelados

santo

broke, skint, peeled, bald

holy, saint

penitente

servirlas

penitent, repentant

serve them

periferia

símbolos

periphery

symbols

pinto

Sirena

heavi­ly tattooed Chicano who was just released from prison

beautiful girl who can be picky, stubborn, and have an attitude, yet is still amazing; she is worth it, the deĀnition of perfect

placas

plates, trays, plaques, tattoos, police, homies quebradita

fragile, inĀrm quinceañera

fifteenth birthday cele­bration rancheras

popu­lar Mexican songs rasquache

low-­class, underdog, resourceful, colorful raza

race, the ­people rebozos

sistemática

systematic soldaderas

camp follower tablitas

a cutting board or platter tardeadas

late Tejana

Texan ­woman turista

tourist

shawl, wrap, long scarf covering the head and shoulders

unidad

retablo

valiente

altarpiece

brave

revolución

veteran

revolution

retired or current gangbanger with experience

unity

Gl ossar y  ·  499

This page intentionally left blank

Contributors car l os almaraz (1941–1989), early in hi s c­ areer, created artwork to support the farmworker movement and El Teatro Campesino, and painted murals throughout Los Angeles. Along with Roberto (Beto) de la Rocha, Gilbert Luján, and Frank Romero, Almaraz was one of the founding members of Los Four, a seminal artist collective of the 1970s; his work is in numerous collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. gl o r ia anz ald úa   (1942–2004) was an American scholar of  Chicana cultural theory,  feminist theory, and queer theory. She received her M.A. in En­glish and Education from the University of Texas at Austin. Her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) was influenced by her growing up on the Mexico-­Texas border. She co-­edited This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical ­Women of Color (1981, with Cherríe Moraga), edited Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by W ­ omen of Color  (1990), and co-­edited This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (2002, with AnaLouise Keating). david aval os beneĀts from having come up in Old Town National City, California. otnc ’s predominately Chicana/o community produced his parents, as well as nationally and internationally recognized artists, ­human rights activists, scholars, and educators who have greatly influenced his life’s journey. In 1984 at the Centro Cultural de l a Raza, he cofounded the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (baw/t af ), a binational

group devoted to socially and po­liti­cally engaged art of the border region. Avalos is currently a professor emeritus in the Art, Media and Design Department, School of Arts, California State University San Marcos. jud ith f . ba ca is a painter and muralist, monument builder, and scholar who has taught art in t he University of California system since 1984. She was the founder of the Ārst City of Los Angeles Mural Program in 1974, which evolved into a community arts organ­ ization known as the Social and Public Art Resource Center (spa r c ), which has been creating sites of public memory since 1976. She continues to serve as its artistic director and focuses her creative energy in the ucl a @ spa r c Digital/Mural Lab, employing digital technology to create social justice art. ra ye bemis makes site-­speciĀc installations, perfor­ mance-­speciĀc installations, and multimedia digital works and objects. The work tends ­toward minimalism using materials with sensory appeal in t ransient states of impermanence. Bemis has been exhibiting for several de­cades. Alternative art spaces have been more aligned with her po­liti­cal sympathies.  The disparities between the economic and social conventions of the art system and the communities of color in which she grew up on Chicago’s South Side have ­shaped many of her exhibition choices. However, the formal aesthetics of her art and the politics expressed in her activism have been and remain mutually exclusive. jo- ­a nne ber el o witz is a professor of art history at San Diego State University. She has published on mu-

seum histories and border studies in t he Oxford Art Journal, Genders, the Canadian Journal of Comparative Lit­er­a­ture, Sociotam, Third Text, and Society and Space. Her work is included in the anthology Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across ­England and North Amer­i­ca (1994), and in Mixed Feelings: Art and Culture in the Post-­border Metropolis (2002). eliz abe th bl air is se­nior producer and reporter on the Arts Desk of npr News. She produces, edits, and reports arts and cultural segments that air on npr News magazines, including Morning Edition and All Th ­ ings Considered. She has written and produced long-­form documentaries on cultural icons such as Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday, and oversaw the production of special proj­ects, including “50 G ­ reat Voices” and the “In Character” series. She is the recipient of two Peabody Awards and a Gracie Award. ch ar les “ch az” bo jó r q uez is well known for an aesthetic style that draws from placas, a di stinctive graffiti, inscribed on the walls of East Los Angeles. He developed his style ­after pursuing an education in ceramics and painting from the Chouinard Art Institute and studies of Chinese calligraphy. Bojórquez’s art is held within notable collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. philip br o o kman is consulting curator in t he department of photo­graphs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and was previously chief curator and head of research at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Early in his ­career, he was curator at El Centro Cultural de la Raza in Sa n Diego and  helped develop their visual art exhibition program. His documentary Mi Otro Yo—­ My Other Self was broadcast nationally on pbs in 1989. He has since collaborated on major exhibitions at museums, including Tate Modern, London; the National Gallery of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. l uz cal v o is a professor of ethnic studies at California State University, East Bay. They are coauthor of Decolonize Your Diet: Plant-­Based Mexican-­American ­Recipes for Health and Healing  (2015), in addi tion to having published numerous academic essays in t he Āelds of Chicanx queer studies, visual culture, and critical race psy choanalysis. They recently co-­curated an exhibit, Comida es Medicina, at Galería de La Raza in San Francisco’s Mission District.

502  ·  Co ntr ibu t o rs

mel ca sa s (1929–2014) was born in E l Paso, Texas, but moved to San Antonio where he helped form the Chicano art group Con Safo, whose members included Carmen Lomas Garza, César Martínez, Jesse Treviño, and Kathy Vargas. He is best known for his Humanscape series of paintings that evoke the scale and appearance of cinema screens and use humor to explore issues of repre­sen­ta­tion. enr iq ue ch a go ya is professor in t he Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He was born and raised in Mexico City and studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute and uc Berkeley. His artwork has been shown nationally and internationally and has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and o ­ thers. He has received numerous awards and grants, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Acad­emy of Arts and Letters in New York, and Cité Internationale des Arts in France. c. o nd ine ch av o ya is a professor of art history and Latina/o studies at Williams College. Chavoya’s writings have appeared in Afterimage, Artforum, Aztlán, cr : The New Centennial Review, and numerous exhibition cata­logs and edited volumes. His recent curatorial proj­ects include co-­organizing the exhibitions Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A R etrospective, 1972–1987 (with Rita Gonzalez) and Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. (with David Evans Frantz). kar en mar y daval os   is  a professor and chair in the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her award-­ winning books on Chicana/o art include  Yolanda  M. López (2008) and The Mexican Museum of San Francisco Papers,  1971–2006 (2010). Her latest book,  Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata since the Sixties (2017), draws on two de­cades of interdisciplinary research in Los Angeles. Her work on Chicana/o art has appeared in Aztlán, Latino Studies, Archives of American Art, and Diálogo, as well as numerous exhibition cata­logs. r uper t gar cí a is a p ainter and printmaker who played an influential role in t he formation of workshops and collectives such as the Galería de la Raza and the San Francisco Poster Workshop. His work is held in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of

Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Smithsonian Institute’s American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. García has also made impor­tant contributions to Latino art history through his scholarship on California Chicano muralists.

ten for periodicals such as Aztlán, Frieze, Bomb, Camera Obscura, Journal of Visual Culture, and Art Journal and has contributed chapters to numerous anthologies. Her books include Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Con­temporary Installation Art (2008) and Pepón Osorio (2013).

alici a ga spar d e alb a is a Chicana writer/scholar/ activist who uses prose, poetry, and theory for social change. Alicia is a p rofessor of Chicana/o studies, ­En­glish, and ­women’s studies at ucl a . In 1997, she published Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the car a Exhibition. A collection of her essays titled [Un]Framing the “Bad” ­Woman: Sor Juaa, Malinche, Coyolxauqui, and Other Rebels with a Cause was published in 2014.

r it a go nz alez is curator and acting department head in con­temporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she has curated Phantom Sightings: Art ­after the Chicano Movement; Asco: Elite of the Obscure; and A Universal History of Infamy, among numerous other exhibitions and public programs. Her curatorial work and writing interrogates the term “post” and engages dif­fer­ent generational perspectives on the Chicano movement, identity politics, and Latinx art.

shifra  m. go ldman (1926–2011) was an acclaimed pioneering scholar of Chicana/o and Latin American art whose collected writings w ­ ere published in Dimensions of the Amer­i­cas: Art and Social Change in Latin Amer­i­ca and the United States (1994) and Tradition and Transformation: Chicana/o Art from the 1970s through the 1990s (2015). Goldman was instrumental in building support for the restoration of Siquieros’s mural Ameri­ca Tropical. Her lifelong work focused on “deflect[ing] and correct[ing] the ste­reo­types, distortions, and Eurocentric misunderstandings that have plagued all serious approaches to Latino art history since the 1950s.”

r o bb her nánd ez is an assistant professor of En­ glish at the University of California, Riverside, whose research combines the study of Latinx lit­er­a­ture with critical approaches in visual, material, and per­for­mance studies. His monographs include Finding aids : Queer Chicanx Art in the Time of an Epidemic  (2019),  viv a Rec­ords: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles (2013), and The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta—­ Cyclona Collection (2009). In 2017, he co-­curated Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Amer­i­cas in conjunction with the Getty Foundation’s PaciĀc Standard Time LA/LA Initiative.

guillerm o gó mez-­peña explores cross-­cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, “extreme culture,” and new technologies in the era of globalization. His work includes per­for­mance art, video, audio, installations, poetry, journalism, and cultural theory. He has received the Prix de l a Parole from the International Theatre of the Amer­i­cas (Montreal), the New York Bessie Award, and the Los Angeles M ­ usic Center’s Viva Los Artistas Award. He became the Ārst Chicano/ Mexicano artist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship and was included in The u tne Reader’s “List of 100 Visionaries.” He also received the American Book Award for The New World Border (1996) and the Cineaste lifetime achievement award from the Taos Talking Pictures Ālm festival.

jud ithe Elen a her nánd ez d e neikr ug Ārst won acclaim in the 1970s as a muralist during the Los Angeles Mural Re­nais­sance, and as a m ember of the celebrated Chicano artist collective Los Four. She has held teaching appointments at universities in California and Illinois and an artist residency at the University of Chicago. Her solo ­career has achieved international recognition through a signiĀcant rec­ord of exhibition and acquisition by institutions such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Espace Lyonnais d’Art Contemporain, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Pennsylvania Acad­emy of Fine Art, and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil.

jennifer a. go nz ález is a professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at the Whitney Museum In­de­pen­dent Study Program, New York. She has writ-

juan felip e her r era is the Ārst Latino to be named poet laureate of the United States (2015–16).From 2012 to 2014, Herrera served as California Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include Notes on the Assemblage; Senegal Taxi; and Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, a recipient of the pen/

Co ntr ibu t o rs  ·  503

Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Herrera is also a per­for­mance artist and activist on behalf of mi­grant and Indigenous communities and at-­risk youth. l o uis ho ck is professor emeritus in t he Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. His Ālms, videotapes, and media installations have been exhibited both internationally and nationally, most notably at the  Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Con­temporary Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in M exico City, and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980. nancy kelker is a professor of art history at ­Middle Tennessee State University. She has served as Latin American art curator at the San Antonio Museum of Art and as a cultural property con­sul­tant on antiquities smuggling in the United States, Canada, and Germany. She is the coauthor of Faking Ancient Mesoamerica and Faking the Ancient Andes (2010) and the forthcoming Art of Five Continents (2019). philip kennic o t t is the art and architecture critic of the Washington Post. In 2013 he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He was a Ānalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 (criticism) and 2000 (e ditorial writing). He is also a N ational Magazine Award Ānalist (2015) and an Emmy Award nominee (2006). He has served as classical ­music critic of the Detroit News, the St. Louis Post-­Dispatch, and the Washington Post (1999–2001) and was a contributing editor to the New Republic. jos h kun is Chair in Cross-­Cultural Communication and professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. A 2016 MacArthur Fellow, he is an author and editor of several books, including Audiotopia: ­Music, Race, and Amer­i­ca (2005); Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke University Press, 2012, co-­edited with Fiamma Montezemolo); Songs in the Key of Los Angeles (2013); The Tide Was Always High: The ­Music of Latin Amer­i­ca in Los Angeles (2017), and Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez (2018). a st a kuus inen is a se­nior lecturer in art education at the University of Eastern Finland. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of World Cultures at

504  ·  Co ntr ibu t o rs

the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation  is  titled “Shooting from the Wild Zone: A Study of the Chicano Art Photog­raphers Laura Aguilar, Celia Álvarez Muñoz, Delilah Montoya, and Kathy Vargas.” Her publications include “Ojo de la Diosa: Becoming Divine in Delilah Montoya’s Art Photography” in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies (2008) and “The Machine in the Desert: Decolonial History and El Limite” in Mediating Chicana/o Culture (2006), edited by Scott L. Baugh. gilber t “magu” sanchez l uj án (1940–2011)was an intellectual and cultural activist raised in East Los Angeles. He was a founding member of Los Four, and one of the Ārst Chicano artists to have their work exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Luján’s life and work was the subject of an exhibition titled Aztlán to Magulandia: Journey of Chicano Artist Gilbert “Magu” Luján in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA and is memorialized in his public art installation at the Hollywood and Vine Metro station in Hollywood, California. amali a mesa- ­bains is an artist, scholar, curator, and writer and holds a P h.D. in c linical psy­chol­ogy from the Wright Institute’s School of Clinical Psy­chol­ ogy. Mesa-­Bains expanded understandings of Latina/o artists’ references to spiritual practices through essays, articles, and her 1993 exhibition Ceremony of Spirit: Nature and Memory in Con­temporary Latino Art. Her work has been shown at institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris, and the Studio Museum in H arlem. In 1992, she was awarded a Di stinguished Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. dyl an miner is a Wiisaakodewinini (Métis) artist, activist, and scholar. He is director of American Indian and Indigenous studies and an associate professor at the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. His book  Creating Aztlán: Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding across Turtle Island was published in 2014. mal a q uí a s mo nt o ya is an influential Āgure in the Chicano graphic arts movement. A g radu­ate of University of California, Berkeley, he participated in t he Third World Liberation Front student strike of 1969 and was a founding member of the Mexican American Liberation Art Front (mal af ) with Manuel Hernandez, Esteban Villa, and René Yañez. Montoya served as cofounder and director of the Taller de Artes Grá-

Ācas in Oakland and was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland; and the University of California, Davis, where he retired in 2008. cho n no r iega is a p rofessor in t he  ucl a Department of Film, Tele­vi­sion, and Digital Media. He is the author of Shot in Amer­i­ca: Tele­vi­sion, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (2000) and editor of numerous books dealing with Latino media, per­for­mance, and visual art. His co-­curated exhibitions include Phantom Sightings: Art a­ fter the Chicano Movement, L.A. Xicano, Asco and Friends: Exiled Portraits, and Home—­So Differ­ent, So Appealing. He serves as consulting curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and director of the ucl a Chicano Studies Research Center. jos eph palis is an adjunct assistant professor and advisor in t he International Studies Program at the North Carolina State University. His areas of interest include cultural geography, Ālm geographies, migration, globalization, and the Philippines. His research explores how cinematic repre­sen­ta­tions reflect prevailing cultural norms, societal structures, ideologies, and identities. His publications have centered on the global economies of international Ālm festivals and the interface of diaspora and globalization on visual culture. l a ura e. p ér ez is professor in t he Department of Ethnic Studies and Chair of the Latinx Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Pérez curated uc Berkeley’s Ārst Latina/o Per­for­mance Art series, co-­ curated  Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas  (2009), and curated ­Labor+a(r)t+orio: Bay Area Latina@ Arts Now (2011). She is the author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities  (2007) and  Eros Ideologies:  Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial (2018). She is coediting with Dr. Ann Marie Leimer an anthology on the work of artist Consuelo Jimenez Underwood. peter pl a gens is an American art critic whose early writing focused on the emerging art scene in Southern California. In 1974 Plagens wrote Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast. From 1989 ­until 2003 Plagens was a se­nior writer and art critic for Newsweek. He writes about art for the Wall Street Journal and for Artforum magazine. ca ther ine  s. ramír ez is an associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a scholar of race, gender,

migration, and citizenship. Her current book proj­ect is Assimilation: An Alternative History; she is also the author of The ­Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009), and several essays on race, gender, and speculative Āction. mat the w r eill y is a lecturer in the Geography Department at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His areas of interest include urban geography, Cuba, and youth landscapes. Matthew’s research examines the transformation of public spaces in Havana and how dif­fer­ent groups and individuals claim public spaces to legitimate their right to the city. felici a r ice is an American book artist, typographer, letterpress printer, Āne art publisher, and educator. She collaborates with visual artists, performing artists, and writers to create book structures in which word and image meet and merge. She lectures and exhibits internationally, and her books can be found in collections from Cecil H. Green Library to the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Bodleian Library. Her imprint, Moving Parts Press, has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship, Elliston Book Award, Stiftung Buchkunst Schönste Bücher aus aller Welt Ehrendiplom, and grants from the nea, ca c , and the French Ministry of Culture. james t . r o ja s is an urban planner, community activist, and artist. Rojas is one of the few nationally recognized urban planners to examine U.S. Latino cultural influences on urban design and sustainability. Rojas has lectured and facilitated workshops at mit, Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, and numerous other colleges and universities. His research has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Dwell, Places, and numerous books. ter ezit a r omo is an art historian, a c urator, and a lecturer and affiliated faculty in the Chicana/o studies department at the University of California, Davis. She served as the chief curator at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco and Arts Director at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. Romo was the Arts Proj­ect Coordinator at the ucl a Chicano Studies Research Center, where she curated Art along the Hyphen: The Mexican-­American Generation at the Autry Museum for the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945–1980. Romo has published extensively

Co ntr ibu t o rs  ·  505

on Chicana/o art and is the author of the artist monograph Malaquias Montoya (2011). ralp h  r ugo ff has been director of the Hayward Gallery since May  2006. He has curated numerous solo exhibitions and group exhibitions, including Psycho Buildings: Artists Take On Architecture (2006); The Painting of Modern Life (2007), and The Infinite Mix (2016). Rugoff has published widely, including in Artforum, Artpresse, FlashArt, Frieze, Parkett, ­Grand Street, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Weekly, and a collection of essays, Circus Americanus (1995). He  has been appointed as the artistic director of La Biennale di Venezia 58th International Art Exhibition, which ­will be held in 2019. lezlie salk o witz- ­mo nt o ya is a ceramist, photographer, and educator based in Elmira, California, where she lives with her husband, Malaquías Montoya. She has or­ga­nized cross-­country traveling exhibitions of Montoya’s artwork, including PreMeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment and Globalization and War: The Aftermath. Salkowitz-­Montoya graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and received a teaching credential from the University of California, Davis. Most recently, she was featured in the exhibition and publication 51 Portraits of ­Women Artists by Kurt Edward Fishback. mar c os sÁnchez- ­t ranq uilino is an art historian and cultural analyst who has written about the relationships between Chicano/a art-­historical relevance and personal meaning such as in his 1991 ucl a thesis “Mi Casa No es Su Casa: Chicano Murals and Barrio Calligraphy as Systems of SigniĀcation at Estrada Courts.” His 2001 PaciĀca Gradu­ate Institute’s psy­chol­ogy thesis was titled “The Mestizo Head: Alchemical Image of the Chicano Movement.” While co-­curator at the Mexican Museum (San Francisco, California) during the Amer­ i­cas’ Quincentenary, he curated the exhibition The Chicano Codices: Encountering Art of the Amer­i­cas. cylen a simo nds is an in­de­pen­dent curator working with the politics of repre­sen­ta­tion and the repre­sen­ta­ tion of politics within con­temporary art. She has lectured in the Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths and the Social History of Art Department at University of Leeds. She writes for a va riety of publications on moving image artworks, international conditions of con­temporary art practice, and the repre­sen­ta­tion strategies of cultural difference.

506  ·  Co ntr ibu t o rs

eliz abe th sisc o is a con­temporary American photographer best known for her photo/text installations and collaborative public art proj­ects. Sisco’s work reveals the social cost of conditions in society, especially for immigrants in C alifornia. She has received international radio, tv , and newspaper coverage for her ­provocative proj­ects and has contributed to video works aired on public tele­vi­sion internationally and shown at Ālm festivals in t he U.S., Mexico, and Portugal. Her installations and photo­graphs have been shown in t he U.S., Mexico, and Eu­rope. She is the recipient of several National Endowment for the Arts grants. jo hn t a gg is suny Distinguished Professor of Art History at Binghamton University. His extensive writing and teaching examine  photography not as a self-­contained medium but as a co mplex apparatus, focusing also on the ways we construct histories of cultural technologies and visual regimes and on the theoretical debates that have transformed art history since the 1970s. His publications include  The Burden of Repre­sen­ta­tion: Essays on Photographies and Histories  (1988),  Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics, and the Discursive Field (1992), and The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (2009). r o ber t o tej ad a is a p oet, scholar, and literary translator. He is  the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he is faculty in t he  Creative Writing Program and Art History Department. He has published art  historical texts that address the visual culture of Mexico  and the United  States, including  National Camera:  Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009). He has also co-­curated exhibitions on Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Luis Gispert and served as program director of Latino Art Now! 2019 Houston. r ubén tr ejo (1937–2009) was an artist whose ­career spanned more than forty years and includes work in sculpture, painting, drawing, and mixed media. Trejo’s work has been collected by institutions such as the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture; the Hispanic Cultural Center in A lbuquerque, New Mexico; Notre Dame University; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1973, Trejo became a professor of art at Eastern Washington University and cofounded the university’s Chicano Education Program in 1987.

gabr iel a vald ivi a is an associate professor of geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research explores nature-­society interactions and geographies of natu­ral resources in Latin Amer­i­ca. Gabriela’s research interests include the relationship between territory, agriculture, and hegemony; identity and environment; and the po­liti­cal ecol­ogy of resource governance. She is currently at work on a proj­ect that examines everyday life in si tes of oil extraction and pro­cessing in Ec­ua­dor. t omá s ybar ra- ­f ra us t o has authored and edited numerous foundational texts on the subject of Chicana/o and Latina/o art and culture, including Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (2006); Velvet Barrios: Popu­lar Culture & Ch icana/o Sexualities (2003, co-­edited with Alicia Gaspar de

Alba); and Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals (1990, co-­edited with Amalia Mesa-­Bains and Shifra  M. Goldman). In 2007, the Mexican government bestowed the Order of the Aztec Ea­gle citing his life work in fostering cultural understanding between the United States and Mexico through the arts and humanities. vict o r z amud io- ­t a yl o r (1956–2013) was a curator, scholar, and Rocke­fel­ler Foundation Se­nior Associate Researcher at the National Museum of American Art and the American Art Archives in Washington, D.C. He was involved with multiple notable curatorial proj­ects, including Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art and The Road to Aztlán: Art from a Mythic Homeland, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, in 2001.

Co ntr ibu t o rs  ·  507

This page intentionally left blank

Index “ABC : Aztlán, the Borderlands, and Chicago” (Elizondo), 358 Abernathy, Ralph, 388 Abriendo Tierra, 171 Acevedo, Manuel, 428 Acosta, Scoli, 490, 492–93 Acosta, Zeta, 89 Across the Street exhibition, 464–65 Acuña, Rodolfo, 25, 288n7 ADAL , 428 Adams, Ansel, 137 Adelita complex, 166, 167f, 168 adelitas (Mexican ­women revolutionaries), 79 advertising: artists’ incorporation of, 28; graffiti art and ­influence of, 120–21; mediation of First and Third Worlds in, 221–23 aesthetic alternative: Chicana/o art as, 35–36, 50–52; ­exhibition politics and, 478–82 affirmative action, 51 African American Museum, 65 African Americans: MiChicana/o artists and, 388; science and technology and, 157 Afrofuturism, 157–58 agricultural workers, cultural production and, 394–95 AIDS epidemic, 196 ¡Alarma! (true crime magazine), 200, 294 ­album covers, by Chicana/o artists, 109 Alicia, Juana, 464 alienation, Chicana/o art linked to, 185–86 “Allá en el Rancho Grande” (song), 102 ALLGO organ­ization, 262n29 Almaraz, Carlos, 13–15, 23, 35–36; con­temporary Chicano art and, 65; East of the River exhibition and, 465; Los Angeles Bicentennial, 438–39; Los Four collective and, 61, 417–19; poster art by, 107, 110–11, 113; pre-­Columbian culture and, 128

Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the ­Great Lakes Region, 1917–1970, 378 Alpha Gallery, 420–22 altars: border art and, 342, 344; in Ceremony of Spirit exhibition, 460; rasquachismo and, 93–94. See also retablo tradition Alurista (Alberto Baltazar Urista), 26, 128, 337, 354–55 Alvarado, Rudolph Valier, 387 Alvarado, Sonya Yvette, 387 Alvarez, Laura, 222 Alvarez Muñoz, Celia, 79, 95, 134n33, 165–72, 424, 464 Amado, Jesse, 134n33, 428 Amazona’s Mirror, The (Mesa-­Bains), 226, 228 American Me (Ālm), 62, 120 American Me (Griffith), 118 American Sources of Modern Art exhibition, 126 American Tropical (Siqueiros), 269 America’s Finest? (collaborative proj­ect), 320, 321f AMEXCAN , 398 Amor indio (Helguera), 109 Amoxtli San Ce Tojuan (documentary), 381 Anchorage Museum of History and Art, 458 Ancient Art of the Andes exhibition, 126 Anderson, Benedict, 354 Anti–­Free Speech Ordinance, 320 Antorcha Guadalupana (Campos), 399–400 Anzaldúa, Gloria: on appropriation of Chicana/o art, 21–22; on arte de la frontera, 351; border consciousness and, 8, 385; Chicano identity and, 1; on nepantla, 336–38, 341–49, 399 appropriation, in Chicana/o art, 21 Aragon, Ray, 446 Arai, Tomie, 140 Arceo Frutos, René, 381, 462 Archaeology ­Table (Mesa-­Bains), 226 Archuleta-­Sagel, Teresa, 146, 157

Arco map, 451 Arenivar, Robert, 446, 446f, 447, 450 Arizmendi, Yareli, 402 Arizona, racial proĀling in, 335–36 Armand Hammer Museum (UCLA ), 458 Arnold, Robert, 346 Arroyo, Andrea, 68 Art+Auction exhibition, 477 Art and Revolution (Alfaro Siqueiros), 43 Arte Chicano, 382 arte de la frontera (border art): commodiĀcation of, 344–49; home space and, 351–70; place-­speciĀc ­examples, 362–64 Arte de los Barrios exhibition, 413 Artenstein, Isaac, 27 artesanias, 94 Artes Guadalupanos de Aztlán, 26 Artes Unidas, 388 Artforum magazine, 414, 428 “Artist as Revolutionary, The” (Almaraz), 15 artist collectives, emergence of, 105, 108–9 Art of the Other Mexico: Sources and Meanings exhibition, 462–63 art production, characteristics of, 47–49 Art Rebate (collaborative proj­ect), 319, 320f, 322–24 Art Space, 416 Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Singerman), 486–87 Asco collective: art and politics and, 292; critical analy­sis of, 428–29; Los Angeles Bicentennial and, 438; members of, 134n33; multidisciplinary collaborations, 27, 63–64; No-­ Movies by, 292–300; pachuca/pachuco culture and, 214; paper fashions from, 229–31; poster art and, 113; public art collaborations and, 268–69; rasquachismo and, 93, 97–98; street per­for­mances by, 296–98 Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 (2011),5 Asco Goes to the Universe (Ālm), 298 Ascozilla/Asshole Mural (Asco), 296–98, 297f “asphalt vendors,” 272 Assassination of Striking Mexican Worker (García), 49f assimilation, Chicana/o art as re­sis­tance to, 30–31, 51–52 Augé, Marc, 369 authenticity: Chicana/o photography and, 144–45; emphasis on ethnicity and, 185–86; in exhibitions of Chicana/o work, 462 autohistorias, border art and, 348–49 “auto vendors,” 272 Avalos, David: Asco group and, 134n33; on censorship, 314–18; Chicana/o art and, 21–22; Donkey Cart Altar by, 26–28; La Frontera/The Border exhibition and, 463–64; photography and, 137; posters by, 112; on public art, 269, 319–30; rasquachismo and, 93; santos (religious carvings) and, 162n59 avant-­garde, Asco group’s involvement with, 293–94 Avedon, Richard, 136–37

510 ·  Ind ex

Avila, Adam, 465 Ayres, Ann, 457 Aztec culture and iconography: in Chicana/o art, 177, 342; Chicano Park incorporation of, 355–57; curatorial politics and, 342–49; Mesa-­Bains’s use of, 228; in poster art, 112 Aztec: The World of Moctezuma exhibition, 336, 341–49 Aztlanahuac Proj­ect, 380–81 Aztlán homeland: Asco group and, 303n62; body ­consciousness and, 23, 25, 75, 177–81; border art and, 337, 351–54, 357–64; Chicano identity and, 1; Chicano Park proj­ect and, 353–57; cultural identity and, 23, 25, 75, 123; location of, 468n23; mexicanidad ideology and, 127–28; MiChicana/o art and, 375–82, 390–91; in photography, 246–47; poster art and, 104, 112; Xicano Progeny exhibition and, 461 Aztlán journal, 84, 382 Aztlán Multiples, 77–78, 113 Aztlán Rifa (Sanchez Luján) (silkscreen), 12f Baby/Baby (Estrada), 56 Baca, Elena, 146, 157 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 237–38, 244 Baca, Judith: on border art, 347; on Chicana/o identity, 1; domesticana art and, 129; East of the River exhibition and, 465; Mexican culture and work of, 462; murals and graffiti and, 283–84, 382, 437–38; on public art, 268–69, 304–12 Baca, Teodoro, 311–12 Bagley Housing Association (BHA ) gallery, 386–87 “Baile de Sólo Hombres,” police raid on, 199 Baldessari, John, 139 Ballard, J. G., 64 Ballet Folklorico de Aztlán (Folkloric Ballet of Aztlán), 355 Bammer, Angelika, 351 Bandura, Albert, 191–92 Barajas, Rafael, 348 Barnet-­Sánchez, Holly, 5, 381–82, 450 Barnett, Alan, 283–84 Barrera, Mario, 356 barrio calligraphy, 268, 284–87, 289n10, 291n31 barrio culture: body as symbol of, 241, 248n16; Chicana/o art and, 15–16, 32–34, 41–44; in East Los Angeles, 271–77; graffiti art and, 78, 118–22, 279–83; home space and, 355–57; mainstream institutions’ sanitization of, 436–43; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 195–206; MiChicana/o artists and, 384–87; murals and, 268, 281–83; in No-­Movies, 294–96, 298–300; pachucas/ pachucos and, 211–15; in poster art, 111; rasquachismo and, 85–89, 92–93 Barrio Murals/Murales del Barrio exhibition, 381, 383 Barthes, Roland, 245 Batuc, Alfredo de, 465 Bauch, Scott L., 5 Bean, Susan S., 232n5 Bejarano, Guillermo, 113

belonging, in MiChicana/o art, 389 Bemis, Raye, 414, 420–22 Benjamin, Walter, 128, 171–72, 245 Bennett, Tony, 473 Benson, Susan, 242 Berelowitz, Jo-­Anne, 336–38, 351–70, 416 Berger, Peter, 353–55 Berman, Sara-­Jo, 27 Bernal, Antonio, 165, 383 Bhabha, Homi K., 254, 353, 363–64, 476–78 Bibliography of Chicano/Latino Art and Culture in the Pacific West, 382 bicultural sensibility, 76, 85–89 Big Baby Balam (Cervántez) (watercolor), 2f bilingualism, barrio calligraphy and, 291n31 binational aesthetic: border consciousness and, 337–39; in Chicana/o art, 22 Bingham, Nick, 366 Birth of Our Art, The (González), 447, 447f Birth of the Jalapeño (Trejo), 101f, 426 Birth of the Museum, The (Bennett), 473 Bishop, Elva, 399 Black Panthers, 105 black power movement, Chicano movement and, 105–8 Black and White/Moratorium Mural, The (Herrón and Gronk), 282f Blade Runner, 62 Blair, Elizabeth, 434–35 Blasco, Francisco, 420–22 Blessings from the ­Little Flower (Martinez), 156 body: brown female body, race and sexuality and, 255–60, 260n2; Chicana/o art and exploration of, 7, 177–81; as garment, 219–20, 232n5; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 194–206; ornamentation, ­con­temporary Chicana artists and, 219–31 Bojórquez, Charles “Chaz,” 78, 117–22, 204, 459 Boltanski, Christian, 140 Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/ TAF ), 20, 27, 134n33, 337, 352; homelands vs. ­borderlands ­discourse and, 357–64; La Frontera/The Border ­exhibition and, 464 border consciousness: Anzaldúa’s discussion of, 336; Art of the Other Mexico exhibition and, 462–63; Aztlán homeland and, 357–64; BAW/TAF focus on, 359–64; in Campos’s painting, 396–401; in Chicana art, 258–60; Chicana/o art and, 8, 20–22; cultural identity and, 130; curatorial politics and, 477; home space and, 351–70; immigration politics and, 335–39; La Frontera/The Border exhibition and, 463–64; in Mexican photography, 166–72; in MiChicana/o art, 374–91; multidisciplinary collaborations and, 27–28; nepantla and, 336, 341–49; in North Carolina Chicana/o art, 395–400; pachuca/pachuco culture and, 214, 216; postborder art and, 337, 364–70; public art and, 319–30. See also arte de la frontera

Border Crossing series, 129 Border Door (Lou), 360–62, 361f, 368 Border Realities exhibition, 358, 360–62 Borges, Jorge Luis, 346 Born of Re­sis­tance: Cara a Cara Encounters with Chicana/o Visual Culture, 5 Borrando La Frontera (Erasing the border) (painting per­for­ mance), 336 Botello, David, 438, 444, 446f, 447, 450–51 Bourdieu, Pierre, 230, 232n2, 235n39 Box Bag (Gamboa), 230 Brenner, Anita, 168 Briggs, Charles, 149 Brody, Sherry, 198 Brookman, Philip, 14, 19–28, 354–55 Brooks, Romaine, 198 Brown, Sheldon, 365–66 Brown Berets, 105, 107, 189 “Brown Paper Report” (Casas), 187 Broyles-­González, Yolanda, 375 Bruce-­Novoa, Juan, 208–9 Bryan-­Wilson, Julia, 195 Buber, Martin, 248n18 Buitrón, Roberto C., 78, 141, 144, 461 Bullshitting at G (Ortega), 421 bultos, 147 Burden, Chris, 60 Burgin, Victor, 138, 257–58 Butler, Bill, 286 Butler, Judith, 219–20, 233n9, 235n34, 256 Butterscotch Twist (Gamboa), 230 Caca Roaches Have No Friends (per­for­mance art), 195–96, 199 caciquismo (lack of dedication), 186 Cactus Hearts/Barbed Wire Dreams: Media, Myths and Mexicans (López), 222 Cahill, Holger, 126 cajitas “box” art, 96, 344 calaveras (skeletons): in border art, 348; graffiti art and, 120; on poster art, 75, 106, 112 calendars (almenaques), 94, 109–10 Califas: An Exhibition of Chicano Artists in California, 436–39 California Arts Council, 442–43 California Biennial (2004), 64 Californio re­sis­tance movement, 109 calligraphy: “barrio calligraphy,” 268, 284–87, 289n10; ­graffiti art and, 118–22 Caló lexicon, 111, 118, 209–10, 289n16, 291n31, 291n34 Calvo, Luz, 180–81, 250–60 Camas Para Sueños (Beds for Dreaming) (Lomas Garza), 345f Campos, Cornelio, 338, 394–401; influences on, 401n6

Index  ·  511

Canclini, Nestor, 353 Cantos al Sexto Sol, 380–81 Cantú, Norma, 166 capilla, rasquachismo and, 93–94 Capirotada (Bread Pudding) exhibition, 89 Capistran, Juan, 62–64, 488 capitalism: artists’ economic survival and, 52, 466; public art and, 304–9; subversion of Chicana/o art by, 40–44, 50–52 Cárdenas, Gilberto (Gilbert), 382 Cardona, Ana, 383 Carlin, George, 189 carnalismo (neighborhood or group brotherhood), 286, 289n15 carpa theater tradition, 89, 91 Carr, Elston, 196 Carrasco, Barbara, 459, 464, 465 “carrier” vendors, 271–72 Carrillo, Eduardo, 436–37, 492 Casa Aztlán, 3 Casas, Melesio, 14, 30–31, 178, 183–92, 457 Casasola, Agustín Víctor, 23, 106, 165–66, 168 Casasola, Gustavo, 165–66, 168 Caso, Alfonso, 126 Castillo, Mario, 383 ­Castle Is Burning, The (Martinez), 479–82 castration anxiety, 256 Castro, Fidel, 45 Catholicism: Chicanafuturism and, 146–47; gender and sexuality and, 177–78; Mesa-­Bains Venus Envy series and, 225–28; Virgin of Guadalupe and, 250–51 Celebración de independencia de 1810(Cuellar), 109 “Celia Alvarez Muñoz: Civic Studies” (Tejada), 79 Celia 1, Celia 2, and Celia 3 (Tavera), 68 censorship: exhibition politics and, 474–82; of public art, 314–18 Centro Cultural de la Raza: BAW/TAF and, 358–64; border art and, 20, 354–57; Chicano civil rights movement and, 24, 108; exhibitions at, 415; La Frontera/The Border ­exhibition and, 463–64; multidisciplinary collaborations and, 27; poster art and, 112; public art and, 319 Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT ), 346, 366–67, 458 Centro de Arte Publico, 113 Centro de Artistas Chicanos/RCAF , 24, 108–10, 415 Centro Hispano (Durham, N.C.), 395 centros culturales (cultural centers): critical education in, 444–51; diffusion of art through, 50–52, 108; formation of, 37, 42–44; regional iconography of, 112 ­Century 21 (ERRE ), 366–67, 369 Ceremony of Spirit: Nature and Memory in Con­temporary Latino Art exhibition, 460 Cervántez, Yreina, 2f, 130, 180, 464 Cesaretti, Gusmano, 118, 120 Chagoya, Enrique, 130, 337, 402–5 Chaka (tagger), 488

512 ·  Ind ex

Chamberlin, Ann, 465 Charlot, Jean, 126–27 Chase-­Riboud, Barbara, 435 Chávez, César: artists’ support for, 103, 106, 177; murals and campaigns of, 172n1; UFW and, 22–23, 189 Chávez, Ernesto, 444 Chávez, Manuel, 106 Chavez, Roberto, 437 Chavoya, C. Ondine, 267–70, 292–301, 413–16, 492 Cheang, Shu Lea, 28 Che Guevara (García), 107 Chiang, Yun Chung, 120 Chicago, Judy, 198, 234n27 Chicana and Chicano Art: Protest Arte (Jackson), 5 Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Pérez), 5 Chicanafuturism, 78–79, 145–47, 157–59 Chicana lesbians, 203–4 Chicana/o art: aesthetic criteria and regional speciĀcities of, 3–4; alternative organ­izations for, 19–20; border consciousness and activism of, 336–39; Brookman’s ­discussion of, 19–28; California dominance in, 5; commodiĀcation of, 28, 100–103; community vs. art institutions and, 14–15, 19–20; con­temporary forces in, 130, 132; critical paradigms concerning, 16, 37–44; cultural identity and, 128–32; curatorial politics and, 3–4, 342–49, 470–82; current mainstream institution discourse on, 413–16; declining support for, 231; deĀnitions of, 13–14; early conceptual framework for, 6; East Los Angeles and, 271–77; farmworkers’ strikes and, 22–23; growth of, 5; intersectionality with dominant culture of, 4–5; “Latino” art vs., 6; Mexican and Indigenous aesthetic in, 6–7; MiChicana/o art and, 337–38, 374–91; myth and tradition and, 128; photography, 135–45; post-­movimiento era of, 66–71; pre-­Columbian past and, 124–32; as public art, 267–70; reformist vs. ­revolutionary perspectives in, 46; retro aspects of, 4­ 23–26; scholarly analy­sis of, 5; socioeconomic and ­po­liti­cal aspects of, 4; survival and consumption of, 49–52; tradition vs. modernity in, 123–32; Virgin of Guadalupe and, 250–60; as visual establishment of identity, 30–31. See also ­women (Chicana) artists Chicanarte exhibition, 197 Chicanismo, 123, 127–28, 372n34 Chicanismo en el Art exhibition, 197 Chicano & Latino exhibit, 475 Chicano-­Anglo art, emergence of, 39–44 “Chicano Art: A Saccadic Scanning” (Casas), 187 Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous (CACA ), 465 Chicano Art for Our Millennium: Collected Works from the Arizona State University Community (2004), 5 Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House (Gaspar de Alba), 4, 416 Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (CARA ) exhibition: border consciousness and, 347, 381–83;

con­temporary artists’ response to, 59–61; co-optation of artists and, 112–13, 414, 423–26; critical assessment of, 414, 423–26, 458–59; curatorial issues with, 460; Gonzalez’s commentary on, 484–93; mainstream framework for, 4, 475–76; marginalization of community and, 14 Chicano Blowouts, 293 Chicano/Chicana identity: deĀnition of, 1, 278; ideology of art and, 47, 49 Chicano Cinema (No-­Movie), 294, 295f Chicano Codices: Encountering Art of the Amer­i­cas, The, exhibition, 5, 459–60 Chicano movement: artists and, 23; early years of, 351–52; next-­generation commentary on, 58–65; poster art and, 105–8; rasquachismo and, 88–89. See also el movimiento “Chicano movimiento” art, 66 Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Saldívar), 379 Chicano National Liberation Youth Conference, 23, 25, 75, 104 Chicano Park (video), 356 Chicano Park proj­ect, 337, 354–57 Chicano Park Underwater Garden (Torres), 437 Chicano Student News, 293 Chicano Studies Research Center (UCLA ), 61 Chicano Visions: American Paint­ers on the Verge (2002), 5, 61–62, 64–65 Chicanx terminology, 5–6 Chile Chaps (Sandoval), 426 Chiles in Traction (Trejo), 93 Chili Dog (Arnold), 346 ChismeArte, 82, 128, 294 Cholo (Valadez), 111 cholo aesthetics, 54, 57; graffiti art and, 78, 118–22; ­maricónismo and, 204–5; in poster art, 111 Cholo Live (Fuentes), 215f Chong, Albert, 140 Cihuateotl (­Woman of Cihuatlampa) (Mesa-­Bains), 226, 234nn25–26 Cihuatlampa (place of heroic ­women), 225–28 Cinco de Mayo cele­brations, posters for, 109 Cisneros, Sandra, 255–57, 260 CitySpirit (Vargas & Moreno), 374–76, 375f, 382–83, 387–91 Citywide Mural Program, 448–51 civil rights: Chicano artists and, 24, 105; politics of exhibition and, 472. See el movimiento Class:C (van gallery), 64 class politics: Chicana/o art and, 15–16, 39–46, 51–52; clothing and ornamentation and, 219–31; Gamboa’s paper fashions and, 230–31; lack of artistic commitment to, 46; MiChicana/o art and, 375, 385; murals and graffiti and, 283–84, 288n8; popu­lar art and, 82–84; rasquachismo and, 85–89, 92–93 Clear Channel media conglomerate, 62 Cleaver, Eldridge, 293

Clemente Orozco, José: body awareness in work of, 178; border consciousness and work of, 401n6; critical pedagogy and, 449; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 199, 202; public art by, 165 Clifford, James, 20–21, 364 Clone on a Bicycle (Terrill), 203 “clone” portraiture, Terrill’s production of, 203 Clones Eating Taquitos (Terrill), 203 clothing: body awareness and, 180; in border art, 344; cultural alterity and, 232n2; as cultural reclamation, 179; dresses and body ornamentation in Chicana art and, 219–31; Gamboa’s paper fashions, 229–31; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 195–97, 199; in ­pachuca/ pachuco culture, 210–16; in poster art, 111; tribal affinity and, 101–2 Coatlicue (pre-­Columbian goddess): images of, 126, 130; ­women of color and, 222 Cockcroft, Eva, 381 Codex Expangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (collaborative proj­ect), 338–39, 402–5, 403f, 404f Cohen, Michael, 57 Cohrs, Lisa, 465 Coke, Edward, 352 Colebatch, H. K., 473–74 collage, López’s use of, 258–60 Colo, Papo, 68 colonialism: border consciousness and, 336; cultural appropriation in Chicana/o art and, 21; cultural identity and, 75–79; ideology of Chicana/o art and, 49; manifestos on Chicana/o art and, 14; MiChicana/o art and, 392n38; in New Mexico, 149–51; pre-­Columbian culture and, 125–26; recuperation from, in Chicana/o art, 6–7; repre­sen­ta­tion and, 243–45; Virgin of Guadalupe and re­sis­tance to, 250 Color Schemes (Cheang) (video installation), 28 Comanche ­people, 136–37, 160n26 comic-­book aesthetic, Casas’s use of, 189–92 communitas, Turner’s concept of, 248n18 community (communidad): artists’ survival and art consumption by, 49–52; Chicana/o art and role of, 14–15, 19–20, 39–44; Latina/o art and, 69–71; mainstream art institutions and, 470–82; murals and posters as tools for, 24, 42–44, 104, 109–15; public art and, 278–87, 288n6, 307–9, 318, 319–30 Compassionate ­Mother (Martinez), 155 Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA ), 108–9, 472 compromiso, Lomas Garza’s work and, 475 computer technology: Chicanafuturism and, 146–47, 157–59; in Cyber Arte exhibit, 152–55 Concilio de Arte Popu­lar, 128 Connors, Andrew, 5 Con Safo (C/S) collective, 13, 30–31, 178, 186–88, 192 consumption of art, Chicana/o artists’ survival and, 49–52 Con­temporary Chicano and Chicana Art: Artists, Works, Culture, and Education (2002), 5

Index  ·  513

convent, Chicana artists’ depictions of, 97f, 114, 225–26 co-­optation of Chicana/o art: capitalism and, 37–44; poster art and, 113–15; survival and art consumption and, 49–52 Corcoran Gallery of Art, 61 Cornell University Arts Quad controversy, 479–80 Cornfield, The (Valdéz & Puntigam), 374, 386–87 Cornish, Audie, 434 corporate funding, exhibition politics and, 473–80 corporeal tagging, maricón/malflora social body and, 205–6 Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (Ālm), 254–55 Cortez, Constance, 190, 420–22 Cosmic Tree, Vargas and Moreno’s CitySpirit, 389 cost of art materials: Chicana/o art production and, 47, 105–6; government support for, 108–9 Cotter, Holland, 69, 186 Covarrubias, Miguel, 126 cowboys, in Chicana/o photography, 141 Coyolxauhqui (Aztec goddess), 253, 342 Craft and Folk Art Museum (Los Angeles) (CAFAM ), 415, 436, 439–43 Cravey, Altha, 399 Creation of Adam (Michelangelo), 188, 258 Crimp, Douglas, 298 critical pedagogy: centros culturales and, 444–51; L.A. art schools, 486–87; national identity and, 456 cross-­border identity, Chicana/o art and, 8 cross-­pollination, in Chicana/o art, 21 Crusade for Justice, 23 Cruz, Celia, 68 Cuban artists, 92; influence on Chicano poster art of, 107–8 Cubism, 126 Cucaracha Press, 88 Cuellar, Rudy, 107, 109 cultural reclamation: class politics and, 46; murals and posters as expression of, 48–49, 105–15 cultural secession, Chicana/o art as, 31 cultural suppression, Chicana/o art as re­sis­tance to, 22, 37–44 Cumpián, Carlos, 420–22 Currin, John, 54 Curtis, Edward S., 136–37, 461 Cutting Through (Gamboa), 230 Cyber Arte exhibition, 146, 152–55 ¡Dale Gas! (Let’s go!) exhibition, 89 Daniel Saxon Gallery, 475 Danza de la Matachine III, IV, V, and VI (Martinez), 152–55 Davalos, Karen Mary, 383, 384, 386, 415–16, 444–51 Dávila, Arlene, 435 Davila, Juan, 348 Davis, Angela, 293 Davis-­Kimball, Jeanine, 235n33 Day of the Dead: Traditions and Transformations exhibition, 223

514 ·  Ind ex

Dear, Michael, 364–65, 370 Dear Ted (Sandoval), 197–98 death, in Montoya’s artwork, 248n20 De Certeau, Michel, 241–42 Decoy Gang War Victim (Ālm), 294, 295f, 296, 428 de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés, 96, 225 de la Loza, Sandra, 64–65 de la Rocha, Roberto (Beto), 61, 417–19 de Lauretis, Teresa, 255 del Río, Dolores, 96–97 demodernization, Chicano movement and, 355–57 demographic transition, Latin American art and, 69 Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso), 125 Denver Metropolitan State College Art Museum, 344 Denver Museum of Natu­ral History, 341 Der Wunderkammer: The Room of Miracles (Mesa-­Bains), 226 detournément, heteronormative discourse and, 178 Detroit Industry murals (Rivera), 388–90 Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA ), 126, 375, 388–89 “Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez” (Ramírez), 78–79 Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead festivals, 76–77, 96–97, 112, 245 Diaz, Alejandro, 134n33 Díaz, PorĀrio, 166–67 Diez, Aurelio, 420–22 Dif­fer­ent Light, A (bookstore), 203 difrasismo, in Chicana/o art, 4 digital technology: art and, 171–72, 258–60; mural creation and, 311–12 disturbance, art as, 35–36 diversity, mainstream politics of, 470–82 documentary gaze, Chicana/o photography and, 136–38 domesticana art, 76–77; pre-­Columbian culture and, 129–30; rasquachismo sensibility and, 93–98, 233n17 “ ‘Domesticana’: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquachismo” (Mesa-­Bains), 76–77 domestic workers: in Casas’s work, 190–91; in López’s art, 221–23; uniforms of, 219, 232n3 dominant culture: art style and technique and, 47–49; separation of Chicana/o art from, 37–44, 46–47 Dominguez, Salvador, 420–22 Donis, Alex, 465 Donkey Cart Altar (Avalos), 26, 315f ­Don’t Touch (Gamboa), 230 Dos Mundos print series (Pérez), 346 Double Agent Sirvienta [Servant], The, series (Alvarez), 222 Downs, Linda, 390 Down ­These Mean Streets (Thomas), 195 dresses, in con­temporary Chicana art, 219–31 Dressing ­Table poster (Valdez), 115 driveways, as public space, 276–77 Duardo, Richard, 111, 113–15 Duncan, Carol, 226

Durham, Jimmie, 484 Durón, Armando, 465 Duval ­Reese, Becky, 475–76 Dyer, Richard, 298 ea­gle iconography in Chicana/o art, 23, 106–7 East Los Angeles: Chicana/o artists’ identiĀcation with, 271–77; fences as social catalyst in, 275–76; La Yarda in, 274–75, 275f; space, power, and youth culture in, 278–87; vernacular of, 276–77 East Los Angeles School of Mexican American Fine Arts (TELASOMAFA ), 444–51 East Los Streetscapers, 459 East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous exhibition, 465–66 Eberhard, Jude, 27 economic imperialism: cost of art materials and, 47; subversion of Chicana/o art by, 40–44. See also capitalism economic survival, for Chicano artists, 4, 49–52, 466 educational system, Chicana/o art as re­sis­tance to, 39–44 Eisenstein, Sergei, 127 El Arte del Barrio, 40 “El Arte del Chicano: ‘The Spirit of the Experience’ ” ­(Sanchez Luján), 33f El Centro Cultural de Aztlán, 3 El Centro de Estudios Chicanos (Center for Chicano ­Studies), 14 El Centro de la Cruzada para la Justica, 3 El corazon del pueblo (The heart of the ­people) (Almaraz), 110–11 El Corrido de Happy Trails (Starring Pancho y Tonto) (Buitrón), 141 El Día de la Virgen (December 12), 112 El Diario de la Gente, 311 El Diario del Hogar, 199 Ele­ments of Navigation (Paniño), 140 El Grito de Rebelde (Garcia), 176f elitism, popu­lar art and, 82–84 Elizondo, Sergio, 358 El Limite installation (Alvarez Muñoz), 79, 166, 167f, 168–70, 168f, 171–72 El Malcriado (­union newspaper), 23, 62, 88 El Monumento de la Raza, 447 el movimiento (Chicano civil rights movement): Chicana/o art and, 183–92, 338, 423–26, 455–57; con­temporary Chicana/o artists’ reaction to, 66–71; land appropriation and, 22–23; manifestos from, 13–14; murals as tool of, 284–86; next-­generation commentary on, 58–65; pachuca/pachuco culture and, 211–16; photography and, 136; poster art and, 104–8; rasquachismo and, 88–89; Salazar’s death and, 135, 278, 288n2; strategies of, 444–51 El Paso Art Museum Association, 475 El Teatro Del Piojo, 88 Employment Agency (Mendoza), 378–80, 378f

“enacted environment,” 267–68, 271–77 Encuentro (López), 256–60 End of the Line, The (per­for­mance art), 27, 337, 359–60 Eng, David L., 256 Enlightenment series (Alvarez Muñoz), 166, 169–72 Enríque, Verónica, 24 errata exhibition (Goez Gallery), 449 ERRE , 337, 365–70 Escobedo, Mariana, 96 Espinos, Juan, 311 Estrada, Billy, 298 Estrada, Victor, 54–57 Estrada Courts public housing proj­ect, murals program at, 268, 279–84, 288n7, 446 ethnicity, clothing and ornamentation and, 220–31 Euro-­American art: avant-­garde and, 300; Chicano alienation from, 38; humor about, 103; Mesa-­Bains’s critique of, 226–28; modernism trope in, 423–26; pre-­ Columbian culture and, 124–25; Third World influences on, 49 “Exhibitions of Chicano Art: 1965 to the Pres­ent” (Quirarte), 457–58 Exit Art, 68–69 Experimental Silkscreen Atelier, 113–15 Exploding Coffee Cup (Gronk), 113 ex-­voto tradition, 129 familial sites, Chicana domesticana and, 93–98 Farm Workers Union. See United Farm Workers (UFW ) Favela, Ricardo, 23 Fehlau, Fred, 486–87 Felix, Charles “Cat,” 285f, 286–87, 446 feminism: body awareness and, 178–81; Chicanafuturist art and, 146–47, 157–59; Chicana/o art and exploration of, 7, 129–30; L.A. con­temporary art and, 198; psychoanalytic theory and, 235n31; rasquachismo and, 91–98; semiotics of ­women (Chicana) artists and, 250–60 “femmage,” 198 fences, as social catalyst, 275–76 Fernandez, Ana Teresa, 336 Fernandez, Christina, 78, 138–41, 145, 461, 465, 493 Fernandez, Maria Teresa, 336 Fierro de Bright, JoseĀna, 169 Fiesta de Colores (poster), 112 Fiesta de Maiz, in poster art, 112 Ālm production: alternative producers in, 50; cost of materials for, 47; pseudographic cinema, 292–301; public art and, 268 First Amendment rights: Chicana lesbian art and, 250–51; public art and, 317 First International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, 46 First World, power relations in, 221–23 Fleming, Juliet, 238

Index  ·  515

Flipover (Almaraz), 65 Flores, Juan, 69 Florescano, Enrique, 123 Flores Magón, Ricardo, 109 floricanto, 455 Floricanto en Aztlán (Alurista), 128 Flower Day (Rivera), 127 folk art: artists’ defense of, 440–43; Chicanafuturism and, 157–59; Chicana/o art as, 34; commodiĀcation of, 147, 149; cultural dilution of, 52, 147, 149, 160n12; masks in, 101–2; popu­lar art and, 82–84; Santa Barraza’s use of, 342; technology and, 146 food, as humor, 100–103 food trucks, 272 Ford, Gerald R., 279 Ford Foundation, 473 formal means, art style and technique and, 47–49 Foster, Hal, 478 Foster, Thomas, 158 fotonovela, 139, 293–94 Foucault, Michel, 238, 241, 253 found materials: in Cyber Arte exhibit, 152–55; maricón/ mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 195; in rasquachismo art, 86, 87f, 88–89, 92–93, 95–96 Fountain of Aloof (Ālm), 298 Framing Amer­i­ca: A Social History of American Art (Pohl), 8 Frankenstein, Alfred, 414 ­free trade model, immigration and, 338 Freud, Sigmund, 228, 234n29, 254, 256 Friedlander, Lee, 137–38 Frito Bandito imagery, in Casa’s work, 184–85 From the West: Chicano Native Photography exhibition, 5, 144–45, 461–62 Frontera series (Montoya), 346 Fronteras Norteñas, 380 Frontierland/Fronterilandia (Otiz-­Torres), 130 Fuentes, Carlos, 208 Fuentes, Juan, 215f ­Future Perfect (gallery), 113 Galería América, 383 Galería de la Raza, 3, 23, 108–10, 251, 358, 415, 437 “Gallo’s Body: Decoration and Damnation in the Life of a Chicano Gang Member” (Phillips), 241 Gamboa, Diane, 63, 180, 229–31, 425, 465 Gamboa, Harry, Jr.: Asco group and, 268, 292; CARA exhibit and, 485, 487–88; Chicano Codices exhibition and, 459; Chicano youth movement and, 293; class politics and work of, 16; collaborations of, 27, 63; East of the River exhibition and, 465; FBI surveillance of, 296; From the West exhibition and, 461–62; Helter Skelter exhibition and, 485, 487; No-­Movies and, 294–96; per­for­mance art and, 67; photography of, 78, 138–39, 141, 145; urban space in work of, 56

516 ·  Ind ex

Ganados del Valle community, 149, 151 Gandert, Miguel, 78, 136–38, 144, 461–62 Gandhi, Mahatma, 232n5 gang culture: in Gamboa’s photography, 141; graffiti art and, 78, 118–22, 278–87; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy, 200–201; murals and, 278–87; in No-­Movies, 294–96; “pinto” markers and, 180; placas and, 279–81, 280f; school territory and, 291n36 Garbage Pail Kids, 64 Garcia, Ricardo, 449 García, Rupert: Chicano movement and, 23; exhibitions of, 467n9; ideology in art of, 49–50, 176f; Mexican history in work of, 165, 462; popu­lar art and, 82–84, 437, 457; poster art by, 107–8, 113–14; pre-­Columbian motifs and work of, 124; rasquachismo and art of, 76 García Canclini, Néstor, 171 García Mendez, Javier, 399 Garibay, Ángel, 128 garment industry, paper fashions as response to, 229–31 Garza, Carmen Lomas, 336, 437 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 4–5, 416, 455–67 Gauguin, Paul, 125–26 Gavin, Robin Farwell, 153, 160n12 gay rights: Chicana/o art and, 178–79; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 194–206 gender: Chicana/o art and exploration of, 7, 177–81; domesticana art and, 93–94; dresses and body ornamentation and, 219–31; Gamboa’s paper fashions and, 230–31; humor in art about, 101–3; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 195–206; in Mexican photography, 166–72 German expressionist art, pre-­Columbian culture and, 126 Gerstler, Amy, 486 Getting Them Out of the Car (Valadez), 64–65 Getty Conservation Institute, 269 Getty Foundation, 308 Giger, H. R., 57 Gilroy, Paul, 157 Give Me Life (Los Niños del Mundo and Charles W. Felix), 284–86, 285f Gleaners, The (Millet), 190 globalization, millennial generation and, 68–71 goddesses, in Indigenous cultures, 235n32 Goez Art Gallery and Studio, 415, 444–51, 445f Goez Publishing Com­pany, 451 Goldman, Emma, 320 Goldman, Shifra M.: Arte Chicano and, 382; on body awareness, 180; on community and Chicana/o art, 14, 45–52; on graffiti, 283; Hernández and, 442–43; on identity and Chicana/o art, 130; on mainstream institutions’ Chicano art exhibits, 415; Murals of Aztlán review by, 436–39; on pre-­Columbian motifs, 389; on public art, 269; readers’ responses to, 440–41 Gomez, Gabriel, 196 Gomez, Ignacio, 179, 212–13, 446

Gómez, Marsha, 342, 344 Gómez-­Peña, Guillermo: border art of, 338–39, 352, 362–64; Codex Espangliensis and, 402–5; digital technology and, 157; intercultural communication and, 25–28, 89, 93, 157; La Frontera/The Border exhibition and, 464; rasquachismo and, 89, 93, 157 Gonzales, Jesse, 383 Gonzales, Patricia, 381 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 388 Gonzales-­Day, Ken, 492 González, Don Juan/Johnny D., 444–48, 446f, 450–51 González, Jennifer, 78, 135–45, 335–39, 416, 466 González, José Luis, 420–22, 444–51, 446f González, Joseph Julian, 157 Gonzalez, Luis C. (Louie-­the-­Foot), 109, 113–15 Gonzalez, Rita: Asco group and, 134n33; on Chicana/o art, 16, 381, 383–84, 416; cholo aesthetics and, 54; Los Angeles County Museum of Art and, 453n14; Los Four collective and, 61; on mainstream institutions, 416; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 200; per­for­mance art and, 67; on politics and art, 484–93; public art and, 270 Gonzalez, Rodolfo “Corky,” 23 Gore, Lesley, 298 Gore ­Family, The (Ālm), 298 Gorman, R. C., 346 Goss, John C., 196 Go Tell It series (Ybarra), 58, 59f Govenar, Alan, 242 Goya, Francisco, 15, 465 graffiti: as art, 117–22; by con­temporary Chicana/o artists, 63; gang culture and, 278–79; government reprisals against, 308–9; murals and, 279–86; youth culture and power and, 278–87 “Graffiti Is Art” (Bojórquez), 78 Gramsci, Antonio, 376 Grassroots Forum, 293 grassroots organ­izations, Chicano artists’ support for, 52 ­Great Wall of Los Angeles, The (Baca), 268–69, 305–9, 306f, 307f, 309n1 Griffin, Rick, 451 Grimm, Tracy, 381, 383 Grito de Aztlán Gallery, 415 Gronk: Across the Street exhibition and, 464; Asco group and, 268, 292; challenge to mainstream institutions and, 60, 62–64; Chicano Codices exhibition and, 459; Chicano youth movement and, 293; collaborative art and, 27; East of the River exhibition and, 465; exhibitions by, 467n9; Los Angeles Bicentennial and, 438; maricón/ mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 195; murals by, 282–83; No-­Movies and, 294–96, 298; paper fashions and, 229; poster art and, 113 Gross, Michael Joseph, 203 Grotto of the Virgins (Mesa-­Bains), 97f Grynsztejn, Madeleine, 168

Guadalupana society, 114 Guadalupe Posada, José: calaveras used by, 77, 112, 185; Chicano civil rights movement and, 23, 192n4; humor in work of, 100, 103; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy, 199–200, 202; poster art of, 106, 111–12, 165, 456; queer politics and, 178 “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess” (Cisneros), 255 Guadalupe Triptych (López), 253 Guadalupe Walking (López), 253 Guerrero Cruz, Dolores, 464 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 50–51, 107–8 Gustafson, Mark, 242 Gutiérrez, José Angel, 25 Guzmán, Juana, 462 Guzmán, Ralph, 24 Habell-­Pallán, Michelle, 385 Hall, Edward, 346 Hall, Stuart, 146, 214 Hanel, Jodi, 68 Haraway, Donna, 366 harem, Mesa-­Bains Venus Envy series and, 180, 225–26 Hasta la Victoria Siempre (Rostgaard), 107–8 Hazard Grande gang, 287 Healy, Wayne Alaniz, 438 Hebdige, Dick, 219 heim/heimat, German concept of, 352–53 Helguera, Jesús, 109 Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the ’90s exhibition, 56–57, 59–60, 484–93 Herbert F. Johnson Museum (Cornell), 479 heritage tourism, murals as platform for, 449–50 hermeneutic of suspicion, 246 Hernández, Ester: body awareness in work of, 180; ­Chicanafuturism and, 146; Chicana identity and, ­424–25; domesticana art and, 223–24; exhibitions by, 457, 460, 462; ofrendas in work of, 253; poster art and, 114 Hernandez, Manuel, 437 Hernández, Robb, 194–206 Hernández de Neikrug, Judithe Elena, 110, 415, 434, 438, 442–43 Hernandez Trujillo, Manuel, 23, 108 Herrera, Juan Filipe, 337–38, 406–9 Herrera-­Sobek, Maria, 396 Herrón, William F. (Willie): Asco group and, 27, 63, 292; Chicano youth movement and, 293; Goez gallery and, 446; murals by, 266, 268, 282–84, 290n28, 437–38 heteronormative discourse: detournément, 178; maricón/ mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 194–95 Hidalgo, ­Father Miguel, 109 Hide/Seek exhibition, 431 hip hop, cholo aesthetics and, 120 Hispanic Art in the United States exhibition, 61, 112

Index  ·  517

Historia gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana, 1900–1960 (Casasola), 165–66 history: in Chicana/o photography, 136; in poster art, 109 History of California calendar, 110 Hobsbawn, Eric, 352–53 Hock, Louis, 28, 269, 319–30 Hockney, David, 55 Hollywood cinema: No-­Movies compared with, 298–99; westerns, Chicana/o photography and, 141 Hombre Sin País (Montoya), 38f Homeless Mind, The (Berger), 355 home space: border consciousness and, 351–70; domesticana art and, 94–99; dystopic view of, 360; masculine concept of, 355; for MiChicana/os, 387–91; in postborder art, 364–70; theoretical background, 352–53 homo­sexuality, Chicana/o aesthetic of, 198–99 hooks, bell, 353 “Horizons on Display” program, 279–81 House Gone Wrong, A (installation), 360 Hubbard Richard Agency, 374 Huerta, Salomón, 54–56, 59, 60–61, 134n33, 465 ­Human Borders ­Water Station (Montoya), 428 humanism, 163n80 Humanscape 62: Brownies of the Southwest (Casas), 184f Humanscape 63: Show of Hands (Casas), 188, 189f Humanscape 65: New Horizons (Casas), 189–91 Humanscape 68: Kitchen Spanish (Casas), 190–91 Humanscape 70: Comic Whitewash (Casas), 191–92, 191f Humanscapes series (Casas), 184–92 humor, in Chicana/o art, 77, 100–103 Humphrey, Norman, 385 hybridity in Chicana/o art, 76–79; border consciousness and, 346–49; collage and, 258–60; humor and, 100–103; MiChicana/o art and, 376 hyperfeminization, in Valdez’s domesticana work, 98 hypermasculinity, maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy, 200–202 Hy­po­thet­i­cal?(Simpson), 483n19 I-­Ata-­Taco fraternity, 101 iconography: in domesticana art, 96–97; in posters, 104–15 Ida y Vuelta: Twelve New Mexican Artists exhibition, 238 identity: Art of the Other Mexico exhibition and erasure of, 462–63; Aztlán homeland and, 357–64; Casas’s exploration of, 185; Chicana/o art and importance of, 123–32, 456, 468n12; graffiti art and, 117–22; ideology of art and, 47, 49; pachuco/pachuca culture and, 208–16; pre-­Columbian culture and, 128–32; rasquachismo and, 85–89; Virgin of Guadalupe and Chicana identity, 254–60; visual arts as expression of, 30–31, 33f, 34, 104–15 Identity Surfing (Buitrón), 144f ideology of art, 47, 49

518 ·  Ind ex

If ­These Walls Could Speak (Alvarez Muñoz), 168–69 Illegals (rock band), 437 Imágenes de la Frontera, 346 Imaginary Mural of Los Angeles, The (Acosta), 490, 492–93 Immigrant ­Woman’s Dress (Hernández), 223, 224f, 228 immigration, Xicano Progeny exhibition and, 461 Immigration and Naturalization Ser­vice (INS ) Border Patrol, 21, 370 immigration politics: media focus on, 315–16; millennial generation of artists and, 68–71; public art and, 319–30 Immigration Reform and Control Act 1986, 370 In Charge (Gamboa), 230 Indian Art of the United States exhibition, 126 indigenismo: in Ceremony of Spirit exhibition, 460; Chicano Park proj­ect and, 355–57; poster art and, 111–12 Indigenous cultures: American Indian movement and, 105; Chicana/o art and, 21–22, 26, 37–44, 75–79; in Chicana/o photography, 141; Chicanismo and, 127–28; Chicano Codices exhibition and, 5, 459–60; goddesses in, 235n32; in Goez exhibits, 448; hybridity of Chicana/o art and, 78; influence on Euro-­American art of, 49; in mainstream institution exhibitions, 343–46; matachine ritual and, 154–55; Mexican photography and, 168; in MiChicana/o art, 389–91; modern art and, 124–25; nepantla and, 336, 341–49; photography and, 136–37; poster art images from, 107–8 Ingberman, Janet, 68 Ingres, J. A. D., 226 InSITE, 337, 352, 364–65, 367–68 Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue (IACD ), 311 institutional exclusion of Chicana/o art, 16, 39–44 intercultural communication, 25–26 internal colonization, cultural identity and, 75–79 international art market, Chicana/o art and, 61 International Center for the Arts of the Amer­i­cas (ICAA), 71n9 intersectionality: Chicana/o art and dominant culture, 4–6; North and South Amer­i­ca, 69–71 In the American West (Avedon), 136–37 In the Heat of the Night (Gamboa), 230 introjection, identity and, 254–55 “Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism: Chicano/a Art and the Pre-­Columbian Past” (Zamudio-­Taylor), 78 Irigaray, Luce, 246 Irwin, Robert McKee, 199 Jackson, Carlos Francisco, 5 jalapeño, as motif, 100–103 Jalapeño Impersonating a Sex Symbol, A (Trejo), 100 Jameson, Fredric, 238 Jantzen, Grace, 245–46 Jesus con la Cruz (Martinez), 155–56 Jiménez, Luis, 87, 124, 129, 462, 467n9

José Montoya’s Pachuco Art: A Historical Update exhibition, 111 Juarez, Roberto, 134n33 Julian Samora Research Institute, 382 Jung, Carl, 228 Juntas pero no revueltos, 69 Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California (2001), 5 Kahlo, Frida, 68, 96, 109, 388, 424 Kahn, David, 283 Katz, Alex, 457 Kelker, Nancy, 178, 183–92 Kelley, Jeff, 362 Kemp, Robert, 447 Kennicott, Philip, 414, 427–35 Ken’s Market mural, 286, 291n32 Kersels, Martin, 62 Kessler, Scott, 320 Kienholz, Ed, 64 Kirkwood, Carla, 320–21 kitsch, rasquachismo and, 91–93 Klor de Alva, Jorge, 23 Kohler, Carl, 220 Koons, Jeff, 28 Korda, Alberto, 108 K.O.S., 28 Kosiba-­Vargas, S. Zaneta, 296, 383 Kozloff, Max, 138, 144 Krauss, Rosalind, 483n19 Kronos Quartet, 64 Kubler, George, 149 Kun, Josh, 16, 58–65, 67 Kuusinen, Asta, 180, 237–47 La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), 22 La Antorcha Guadalupana relay run, 399–400 La Aparición de la Fama (Rosa-Ortiz), 68–69 La Brocha del Valle, 108, 110 Lacan, Jacques, 227–28, 255–56 La Casa de Unidad, 387 La Dualidad (Duality) (mural), 355 La Fountain-­Stokes, Lawrence, 206n1 La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience exhibition, 319, 326–27, 329–30, 463–64 La Grande Odalisque I (Ingres), 226 La Guadalupana installation (Montoya), 180, 237–38, 239f, 240f, 241–45 Laguna Gloria Art Museum, 464–65, 474 LA: Hot and Cool exhibition, 292, 301n2 La Jolla Museum of Con­temporary Art, 360 La Junta Museum, 310–12 Lalo Guerrero and his Trio Imperial, 210

La Memoria de Nuestra Terra (Baca), 269, 310–12, 312f, 313f land appropriation: Chicana/o art and, 22–23, 311–12; Chicano movement and, 177, 183–84 landscapes, multicultural concepts of, 305–9 language: Chicana/o art and role of, 25–26; graffiti and, 117–22; pachuca/pachuco culture and, 209; poster art and issues of, 105–6 La Ofrenda (Hernández), 114, 253 la periferia de la periferia, Latina/o art and, 70 La Plaza de la Raza, 487 L.A. Pop in the Sixties (Ayres), 457 La Prensa bilingual newspaper, 317, 317f La Raza, 293 La Raza Silkscreen Center/La Raza Graphics, 108–9, 112 La Raza Unida Party, 25, 107 Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o cuando los pericos mamen (The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When the Parakeets Suckle Their Young) (Veñegas), 88 Las Comadres collective, 372n46, 464 Las Escandolosas salon, 198 Latin American countries: costs of art materials in, 47; homo­sexuality in, 200; migration to U.S. from, 68; pre-­ Columbian culture and, 128 Latin American Spirit, The, exhibition, 112 Latina/o cultural proj­ect, 68–71 Latino Experience in Michigan (Moreno), 383 Latino Mural Re­nais­sance, 386 Latino Presence exhibition, 431–32 LA/TJ (Valdez) (screen print), 2f La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Xicanos (Hernández), 253 LAX : The Los Angeles Exhibition 1992, 485–86 La Yarda, as personal expression, 274–75, 275f Leal, Luis, 357, 363 Leçon des Tenebres (Boltanski), 140 Le Demon des Anges (Angels’ Demon), 61 Lefebvre, Henri, 378 Leffingwell, Ed, 486 Legorreta, Robert, 195–96 Leguna, Juanita, 348 Leo, John, 477 León-­Portilla, Miguel, 128 Lerner, Jesse, 130 Levinthal, David, 140–41 L ­Factor proj­ect, 68–69 Libre Comercio (Campos), 397–98, 397f Lichtenstein, Roy, 82 Limón, Leo, 464–65 limpias discipline, 94 Lippard, Lucy, 147 Lipsitz, George, 384 literacy issues, poster art and, 105–6 Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (Thompson), 8

Index  ·  519

Logan Heights community, Chicano artists and, 24 Lomas Garza, Carmen: border consciousness and, 344–45; domesticana art and, 95; exhibitions by, 457, 459, 462, 467n9; mainstream institutions and, 474–76; MiChicana/o art and, 377; monitos produced by, 474–75; paintings by, 74 Longo, Robert, 139 Loos, Adolf, 232n3 López, Alma, 146, 157, 180–81, 250–60; criticism of, 256–60, 261n13 López, Carlos, 382 López, Jennifer, 68–69 López, José Dolores, 154 López, Yolanda M.: body consciousness in work of, 179–80; border consciousness and work of, 344; Chicanafuturism and, 146; critical assessment of, 426; immigration and work of, 334; La Frontera/The Border exhibition and, 464; ornamentation in work of, 220–23; pre-­Columbian culture and work of, 129–30; semiotics and work of, 253 López Tijerina, Reies, 22, 177, 293, 388 Los Alamos National Laboratory, 146, 150–52 Los Alamos Study Group, 152 Los Angeles Barrio Calligraphy (Romotsky), 118 Los Angeles Bicentennial, 436–43 Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA), 490 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA ), 61–63, 414, 417–19, 449, 453n14 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD ), 25 Los Angeles Times, 16, 55, 293, 413–14 Los Codices Xeroxtlan, 437 Los Comanches (Gandert), 136–37 Los 41 Maricones (Guadalupe Posada), 199 “Los Desarraigados” (Cárdenas), 382 Los Four collective, 61, 414, 417–19, 438 los moscos (day laborers), 271–72 Los Repatriados (Mendoza), 337, 379–80, 380f Los Repatriados Committee, 380 Lost Childhood (Maradiaga), 115 Los Toltecas en Aztlán, 26, 354–55, 358 “Los Vendedores Ambulantes” (González), 157 lotería symbols, 256–60, 261n28 Lou, Richard, 360–62 lowrider artists: cholo aesthetics and, 57; graffiti art and, 120 Loza, Sandra de la, 487–89, 493 Lucero, Linda, 107 Lucie-­Smith, Edward, 234n27 Luis Maria Baca land grant, 311 Luján, Gilbert “Magu” Sanchez, 12–14, 32–34; East of the River exhibition and, 465; Los Four collective and, 61, 417–19, 418f; pre-­Columbian culture and, 128 Lukac, Jenni, 140 Lummis, Charles F., 149 Luna, James, 28, 139 Lupe & Sirena in Love (López), 256–60

520  ·  Ind ex

Madrid-­Barela, Arturo, 84, 208, 211 magueys (agave cactus), on poster art, 106 Mahmood, Saba, 246 Maid in the U.S.A. (Romero), 222 mainstream art institutions: ac­cep­tance of Chicano/a art in, 8, 22, 46–47, 60–65, 297–98, 458, 466–67; CARzA exhibition as entry into, 458–59; Con Safo’s challenge to, 186–92; curatorial politics and, 3–4, 342–49, 460, 470–82; current debate on Chicana/o art in, 413–16; funding politics and, 472–80; Gamboa and, 229; graffiti art and, 121–22; Latin American art and, 70; marginalization of Chicano art by, 37–44, 209, 441–43, 453n14; nepantla and, 341–49; placas in, 291n39; politics of exhibition, 470–82; popu­lar art and, 82–84; poster art and, 105, 112–15; pre-­Columbian past and, 124; review of Chicano exhibitions by, 455–67; vari­ous Chicana/o exhibitions in, 467n9. See also specific exhibitions malflora concept, 203–5 Maliqualim Simone, Timothy, 28 Malo (rock group), 109 malversasión, 178 Man and Machine (Rivera), 389 Man at the Crossroads (Rivera), 388, 390 Man (Being) Master of the Universe (Rivera), 390 manifesto, Chicana/o art as, 13–14, 35–36 Manrique, Jaime, 194 map exhibits, by Goez studios, 450–51 Maradiaga, Ralph, 107, 115, 437–39 Margaret S. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe (López), 220 mariachis (Mexican musicians), 271–72 Maria’s ­Great Expedition (Fernandez), 138–40 “Mariconcito” (Xavier), 196–97 maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy: deĀnitions of, 194–95, 206n1; gay rights and, 178, 194–206; per­for­mance art and, 195–97; police harassment and, 199; portraiture and, 197–206; Virgin of Guadalupe and, 257 Maricón series (Terrill/Sandoval), 179, 200–204, 201f, 202f, 204f Marin, Cheech, 61–62, 64–65, 466 mariposa (butterfly), in López’s work, 256–60 market forces: border art and, 341–49; Chicano art movement and, 50–52, 436–39; Latin American art and, 70 Martí, José, 385 Martínez, César, 456–57, 460, 462, 465 Martinez, Daniel Joseph, 62, 64, 134n33, 464–65, 479–80, 487 Martinez, Efrain, 420–22 Martínez, Emmanuel, 467n9 Martinez, Esperanza, 446 Martínez, Felix, 238, 242–45 Martinez, Marion C., 78–79, 146–59 Martínez, Raúl, 107 Martinez, Sue, 437 Maruska, Joseph, 465 Marx, Karl, 208

Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, 436 masculinity: Chicana/o art and exploration of, 7; concept of home and, 355; humor in art about, 101–3; pathologization of Latino cultures and, 243–44 masks: cosmetic use of, 102–3; cultural role of, 58, 75, 77; impersonation and, 101–3; primitivism and modern art and, 125 mass art, 82–84 matachine ritual, Cyber Arte exhibit and, 152–55 Mathey-­White, Pat, 382 Mayan iconography: in murals, 388–89; in poster art, 112 Mayer, Ralph, 439 McCaughan, Edward J., 199 McClelland, Joe, 190 McWilliams, Carey, 149, 468n27 Me, We (Amado), 428 MEChA (El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán), 25, 107 Mechicano Art Center, 24, 108, 110, 415 Mederos, René, 107 media coverage of Chicanos: immigration politics and, 315– 16, 359–60; murals movement and, 446–47; No-­Movies as response to, 296; public art and, 316–18, 324–30 Memory in Pro­gress: A Mother/Daughter Proj­ect (Arai), 140 Mendoza, Lydia, 375–76 Mendoza, Nora Chapa, 337–38, 375–81, 389 Men in the Cities (Longo), 139 Mérida, Carlos, 126–27 Mesa-­Bains, Amalia: on altar art, 247n3; Art of the Other Mexico exhibit and, 462; Ceremony of Spirit exhibition curated by, 460; clothing in art of, 180, 223–28, 234n24; community and art of, 19; domesticana art and, 76–77, 129, 223, 225–28; mainstream institutions and work of, 416, 425–26; photography and, 140; rasquachismo and, 91–98 mestizaje: in Chicana/o art, 4; curatorial politics and, 476–77; nepantla and, 336, 341–49; in pachuca/pachuco culture, 210–11 Mestizo culture: border consciousness and, 346–49; Chicana/o art and, 21, 58, 75; poster art and, 106 Metafísica: The Wall for Peace, 383 Metamorfosis (journal), 14 “Mexican American Casualties in Vietnam” (Guzmán), 24–25 Mexican American Liberation Art Front (MALAF ), 23, 37, 39, 108, 437 Mexican-­American War, cultural appropriation and, 21 Mexican American Youth Association (MAYA ) 354–55 Mexican American Youth Organ­ization (MAYO ), 25 Mexican Cultural Institute, 61 Mexican culture: Chicana/o art and, 15, 462–63; Indigenous ele­ments in, 468n27; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 199; photography in, 165–72; in poster art, 106, 109–15

Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (Chicago), 462–63 Mexican food, American conceptions of, 100–103 mexicanidad ideology, 78, 123–24; Aztlán, and Chicanismo and, 127–28; pre-­Columbian history and, 126–27; Virgin of Guadalupe and, 257–60 Mexican In­de­pen­dence (1810),109 Mexican Museum, 415–16 Mexican Revolution (1910): art and role of, 127; Chicano artists and, 456; photography and, 166, 168; poster art icons from, 106, 109; Virgin of Guadalupe and, 250 Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan (Alvarado), 387 Meza, Mundo, 195–96 Mi casa es tu casa (Brown), 365–66 Michals, Duane, 139 Michelangelo, 188, 258 MiChicana/o art, 337–38, 374–91; aesthetics of, 391n18; barrio culture and, 384–87; frontera canadiense and, 386; lack of recognition for, 381–84; Mendoza and, 375–81 Mictlantehcuhtli (God of Death), 185; in poster art, 112 Midwest Latino Arts Documentary Heritage Initiative, 382 mi­grant ­labor: Chicana/o art and, 8, 258–60; imaginaries and, 338, 395; media focus on, 315–16; MiChicana/o art and, 384–87; in North Carolina, 394–401; photography and, 169–70; in work of Alvarez Muñoz, 170–71. See also immigration politics Mi­grant Workers series (Mendoza), 378 Milagro Hubcap (Avalos), 93 military, minority dominance of, 24–25 millennial generation, Chicana/o artists in, 66–71 Miller, Robert, 60 Millet, Jean-­François, 190 mimicry: in Gamboa’s paper fashions, 229–31; performativity and, 235n34 Mi Nepantla (Cervántez), 130 Miner, Dylan, 337–38, 374–91 Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, The, 194–95, 259–60 Miró, Joan, 465 Mishima, Yukio, 420 Mission Cultural Center, 108 Mixed Feelings: Art and Culture in the Postborder Metropolis exhibition, 365, 368–70 Mixtec Codex Féjerváry Mayer, 389 mobility, pachuco/pachuca culture and, 208–16 modern art: Chicana/o artists’ re­sis­tance to, 423–26; pre-­Columbian culture and, 125–26; primitivism and, 124–25 Modotti, Tina, 127 Molina, Gloria, 61 Molloy, Sylvia, 200 Molotov Cocktail (Gronk), 113 Montañez Ortiz, Raphael, 428

Index  ·  521

Montoya, Delilah: Asco collective and, 428; body awareness in work of, 180–81; Chicano Codices exhibition and, 459; From the West exhibition and, 461–62; Indigenous cultures and work of, 137–38, 180–81; multiculturalism discourse and work of, 78; narrative in work of, 144; photography of, 237–47 Montoya, José, 22, 23, 26, 83–84, 93; pachuco culture and, 179, 211–12; poster art by, 105, 108, 111 Montoya, Malaquías, 2, 13–15, 37–45; Across the Street exhibition and, 464; on art and oppression, 442–43; border consciousness and work of, 336; exhibitions by, 436–39; poster art and, 104–5, 107–8, 114 Montoya, Villa José, 437 Moore, Henry, 125 Morelos, José María, 109 Moreno, Martín, 337, 374, 376, 382–84, 387–91 Moron, Jesus, 420–22 Mosquera, Gerardo, 92 ­Mother and Child (Gamboa), 230 Motherpeace (Vogel & Noble), 226 Mount Rushmore, South Dakota (Friedlander), 137–38 movidas, rasquachismo and, 86–89 Movimiento Artistico Chicano (MARCH ) exhibition, 383, 414–15, 420–22 Movimiento Artístico del Río Salado, 1, 3, 24, 416 Mr. Casper (Estrada), 57 mujercito movement, 200 Mulford, Marilyn, 356 multiculturalism discourse: Chicana/o artists and, 77–78, 458; co-optation of poster art and, 113–15; curatorial politics and, 478; graffiti and, 117–22; New Mexico tourism and, 151–52; public art and, 304–9 multidisciplinary collaborations, in Chicana/o art, 27–28 multimedia installation, by Chicana/o artists, 79 multiverse theory, 163n72 murals and muralism: artistic and po­liti­cal functions of, 24, 42–44, 104–15, 456–57; in Chicano Park proj­ect, 355–57; con­temporary trends in, 490, 492–93; in East Los Angeles, 272–73, 273f; Goez studios and, 444–51; graffiti and, 279–86; heritage tourism and, 449–50; Indigenous imagery in, 78; López’s digital murals, 251–52; mainstream institutions’ subversion of, 42–44, 421–22; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 195–206; mass audience for, 48–49; Mexican vs. Chicana/o comparisons, 124; in MiChicana/o art, 374–91; multicultural interpretations of, 307–8; on nonpublic walls, 50; painting as theater concept and, 27; in public space, 165, 268–70, 272–73, 273f; social developments and role of, 165–72; space, power, and youth culture, 278–87 Murals of Aztlán: The Street Paint­ers of East Los Angeles exhibition, 415, 436–43, 438f “Mural Wall” proj­ect, 447–51 Murray, Ursula R., 377, 387 Musée Denys-­Puech, 238

522 ·  Ind ex

Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City), 458 Museo Regional de Oaxaca, 458 museumism, 139 Museum of Con­temporary Art (San Diego), 60, 168, 319, 464 Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA ), 146, 180, 251 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA ), 124–26 ­music: public art and, 273–74; rasquachismo and, 92–93 MWI—­Many ­Women Involved (Kirkwood), 321 My Alamo (Order of the Alamo) (Vargas), 138, 140–41, 142f, 143f Mysterio Triste, 238 my­thol­ogy: New Mexico tourism and, 151–52; of pachuco/ pachuca culture, 209; pre-­Columbian culture and, 128 NAFTA , in Chicana/o art, 398, 402–5 Nahuatl language, 342 “nail text” installations, 77 Nanny, The (López), 179–80, 220–23, 222f narcocorrido aesthetics, 490 narrative, photography and, 136–40 Nasser, Michelle, 199 National Association of Latina/o Arts and Culture (NALAC ), 69, 231 National Chicano Moratorium, 25, 107, 188–89 National Endowment for the Arts, 442–43, 472 National Farm Workers Association, 22 nationalism, 254; anti-­immigration legislation and, 338–39; Aztlán and, 354; exhibition politics, 472–73; pachuca/pachuco culture and, 212, 214 National Museum of American Art, 458 National Museum of Mexican Art, 381, 383 National Public Radio, 414 Native Americans: alter-­Native aesthetic and, 461–62; American Indian Movement and, 105; in Chicana domestic art, 222–23; concepts of public space, 306–7; photography of, 136–37, 141 Navarro, Armando, 381 “Negotiated Frontiers: Con­temporary Chicano Photography” (González), 78 nepantla: border consciousness and, 336, 341–49; in Chicana/o art, 4 Nepantla (Santa Barraza), 343f Nepantla Triptych (Cervántez), 130 “New Chicano Movement, The” (Kun), 67 New Mexico: demographics of, 161n37; ejido (communal lands) in, 22; poco tiempo ideology in, 149–51; santos production in, 147, 149; tourism in, 151–52 New Mexico Museum of Art, 238, 244–45 New Mexico 2002 Vacation Guide, The, 151 New York Times, 433 NHI multievent proj­ect, 320 Nieblas, Richard, 198 Night Out, A (Gamboa), 230 Ñiko (Antonio Pérez), 107 Nine Clones and a Hula T-­Shirt (Terrill), 203

No-­Movies, 268, 292–301 Nopalitos para ti (Lomas Garza), 74f No Regrets (Soto & Osorio), 139 Noriega, Chon: on Chicana/o art, 6, 13–17; East of the River exhibition and, 465–66; From the West exhibition and, 461–62; on Goez studios, 448; on mainstream institutions, 60, 416; on No-­Movies, 294; on photography, 138; on post-­movimiento Chicana/o art, 66 Noriega, Ramses, 108, 437 North Carolina, Chicana/o art in, 394–401 nostalgia: Chicano movement and, 353–54; home space and, 352–53; pachuca/pachuco culture and, 212 nota roja Mexican print culture, 200 “Notes on an Aesthetic Alternative” (Almaraz), 36f Novak, Lorie, 140 nuclear waste, New Mexico sites for, 152 nuestra América, Martí’s concept of, 385 Nuestra Madre (López), 130, 131f nuestra madre fantasy, in Chicana art, 258–60 Nunn, Tey Mariana, 147, 416 O.C., The (bumper sticker), 64 Ochoa, Ruben, 60, 64, 67, 489–90 Ochoa, Victor, 112, 114, 165 O’Connor, Francis, 389 October Surprise exhibition, 487–89, 488f, 489f Off My Back (Gamboa), 230 ofrenda (offering/sacriĀce): body as, 244–45; Chicana artists’ depictions of, 97f, 114, 225–26; Montoya’s La Guadalupana as, 238–47 Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio, An (Mesa-­Bains), 97f, 425–26 Olguín, Ben, 238, 241, 244, 247n8 Olivares, Joel Suro, 447 Olmos, Edward James, 62, 342 “187 Reasons Why Mexicanos ­Can’t Cross the Border (Remix)” (Herrera), 338–39, 406–9 Operation Invisible Monument, 487–89, 488f, 489f Orange County Museum of Art, 64 Oratorio a la Vergencita (Martinez), 146–47, 148f, 154–55 Oriental calligraphy, graffiti art and, 120 Orientalism (Said), 227 “Ornament and Crime” (Loos), 232n3 ornamentation: in con­temporary Chicana art, 219–31; ­tattoos as, 237–38, 241–45 Orosco, Juanishi, 23 Orozco, Cynthia, 231 Orozco, Gabriel, 60, 103 Ortega, Marguerite, 420–22 Ortiz-­Torres, Rubén, 130 Osorio, Pepón, 139, 477 Other, in exhibitions of Chicana/o work, 462–63 Otis Art Institute, 62 Our Amer­i­ca: The Latino Presence in American Art exhibition, 6, 414, 427–35

Our Lady (López), 180–81, 251, 252f, 253–60 Our Lady of Controversy: Alma Lopez’s Irreverent Apparition (Gaspar de Alba), 5 Pachuco Art: A Historical Update exhibition, 212 pachuco/pachuca culture, 83f, 84, 111, 177, 179, 208–16, 247n1; glossary, 216; graffiti and, 291n31, 291n34 Pachuco series (Montoya), 83f PaciĀc Rim philosophies, graffiti and, 120 Packing a Can of Sardines (Souza), 169 Palis, Joseph, 394–401 Palmer, Larry, 480–81 Palm Springs Desert Museum, 458 Paniño, Adolfo, 140 Pan-­Latina/o identity, 386 panopticon, Foucault’s concept of, 238, 241 Parades, Américo, 462 “Para un recuerdo: Photography by Chicanas and Chicanos” (Buitrón and Vargas), 141 Parker, Roszika, 226 Past Lives, Fragments (Novak), 140 Patricia Correira gallery, 61 Paz, Octavio, 103, 209–10 Pedacito de mi corazón (A ­little piece of my heart) (Loma Garza retrospective), 475 pedestrianization, public art and, 274 Peluffo Linari, Gabriel, 104 Penitentes, 147, 149 ­people’s art, Chicana/o art as, 39–44 Pérez, Daniel Enrique, 194 Pérez, Emma, 253–55 Pérez, Irene, 336, 346 Pérez, Laura E., 5, 179–80, 219–31, 416 per­for­mance art: by Asco, 296–98; clothing and ornamentation and, 219–20; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 195–97; millennial generation and, 67–71; as public art, 320; rasquachismo and, 92–93; religious ritual and, 245–47 personal expression, La Yarda as, 274–75, 275f Phantom Sightings: Art ­after the Chicano Movement exhibition, 5, 270, 433 Phillips, Susan, 241, 244 “Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, The” (Crimp), 298 photography: body awareness and, 180; Chicana/o artists and, 78, 135–45; as Chicana/o history, 136; From the West exhibition, 461–62; Hollywood influence in, 140–41; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 197–206; in Mexico, 165–72; of Montoya, 237–47; textuality and, 138–40; visual culture and, 141–45 Picasso, Pablo, 125 Piedra, Jose, 481 Pile, Steve, 296–97 Pintores de Aztlán, 186 pinto tattoos, 180–81, 237–38, 239f, 240f, 241–45, 247n8

Index  ·  523

­Piper, Adrian, 435 Pittman, Lari, 55 placas (wall writings), 118–22, 280–84, 280f, 286, 289n14, 291n38, 487–93; cholo aesthetic and, 204–5; mainstream art institutions and, 291n39 place: borderlands vs. homelands discourse and, 359–64; in Chicana/o art, 64–65; public art and identity of, 267 Plagens, Peter, 414, 417–19 Plaza de Cultura y Artes, 61 Plaza de la Raza, 61 Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History, 487–89, 488f, 489f poco tiempo ideology, Chicana art and, 149–51 poetry: intercultural communication and, 25–26; posters and, 113; rasquachismo and, 92–93 Pohl, Francis, 8 “Points of Convergence: The Iconography of the Chicano Poster” (Romo), 77 police harassment, maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 199, 201 po­liti­cal activism: art education and, 484–93; Chicana/o art as tool for, 39–44, 395–401, 456–57; lack of, in East Los Angeles, 277; poster art as call for, 105–8 po­liti­cal cartoons, Chicano iconography in, 106 Pollack, Griselda, 226 pollero, 371n23 Pollock, Griselda, 94 Poor ­People’s Campaign, 388 popu­lar art (arte popu­lar), 76; Chicana/o artists and, 456–57; mass art and, 82–84 porches, as public space, 277 Por Dios y Oro (Bojórquez), 119f pornography, Cisneros’s discussion of, 255–56 Portillo, Lourdes, 254–55 Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe (López), 342 portraiture, maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 197–206 postborder art, 337; concept of home and, 364–70; emergence of, 337, 352 poster art, 113–15; artistic and po­liti­cal functions of, 24, 42–44, 104–15; by Chicana/o artists, 77–78; cultural reclamation through, 108–15; institutional re­sis­tance to, 421–22; MiChicana/o artists and, 384; politics and protest and, 105–8, 114–15; rasquachismo and, 94 power, in public space, 278–87 Prado, Reina, 416 Pratt, Mary Louise, 70 praxis theory, pinto aesthetic and, 238, 241 pre-­Columbian culture: Aztlán and Chicanismo and, 127–28; in Campos’s paintings, 396; in Casa’s ­paintings, 184–85; in Chicana art, 222–23; Chicana/o art and, ­123–32; history, Mexicanidad, and art in, 126–27; ­identity and, 128–32; myth and tradition and, 128; primitivism and modern art and, 125–26

524  ·  Ind ex

pre-­text, semiotics in Chicana art and, 257–60 Preziosi, Donald, 278 primitivism, 124–25 “Primitivism” in Twentieth ­Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern exhibition, 124–25 prison structures, Chicano images of, 55 Private Landscapes, Public Territories (Mesa-­Bains), 129 private space, domesticana art and, 94–98 progressive art, 423–26 Proj­ect Pie in de/Face, 63 propaganda, Chicana/o art as, 43–44 Proposition 187, 338–39, 461 props, public art and, 273–74 protests: Chicana/o artists and, 23–25; poster art as tool for, 105–8 psychoanalytic theory, feminist contributions to, 235n31 public art: censorship of, 314–18; Chicana/o art as, 7, 267–70, 319–30; Goez Studios and, 444–51; graffiti as, 118–22; multiculturalism and, 304–9; murals as, 272–73, 273f; props and, 273–74; public space and, 308–9; vernacular of East Los Angeles and, 276–77; Ybarra and, 63 public space: Asco group’s per­for­mances in, 296–98; fences as social catalyst in, 275–76; power and youth culture and, 278–87; socially conscious art in, 314–18 Pullido, Laura, 149 punk barrio existentialism: Chicana/o artists and, 63; in poster art, 111 Puntigam, James, 386 “pushcart vendors,” 272 queer politics: Chicana/o art and exploration of, 7, 178–81; maricón/mariconismo/mariconógraphy and, 195–206, 257; psychoanalytic theory and, 256; Virgin of Guadalupe and, 250–51, 258–60 Quetzalcoátl, 222, 388 Quill Pen Santero, 153 Quincentennary Jubilee, 459–60 Quirarte, Jacinto, 185, 456–58 Racial Castration (Eng), 256 racism: anti-­immigration legislation and, 338–39; Chicana/o art and, 42–44, 179–81; Chicano experiences with, 24–25; clothing and ornamentation and, 220–31; Gamboa’s paper fashions and, 230–31; in López’s work, 222–23; popu­lar art and, 82–84 Ramírez, Catherine S., 146–59 Ramirez, Chuck, 134n33 Ramirez, Marcos (ERRE ). See ERRE Ramirez, Richard (“The Night Stalker”), 64 Ramón, Carolina, 387 Ramona Gardens murals, 287 Ramos, Carmen, 432–35 ranflas (wall calligraphy), 34 Rangel, Marissa, 59

Rascón, Armando, 134n33, 461 rasquachismo (underdog aesthetic): aesthetics of, 426; Chicana feminism and, 91–98; in Chicana/o art, 4, 76, 85–89; collage and, 259–60; critical pedagogy and, 456; technology and, 157 “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility” (Ybarra-­Frausto), 76 Ray, Charles, 55, 60 Raya, Marcos, 388 Raza Art and Media Collective, 383 raza/la raza de bronce, as po­liti­cal identity, 39, 390 Realidad Norteña (Campos), 398–99 “Real-­Life Border Thriller” (Gómez-­Peña), 337, 363–64 Rechy, John, 194–95, 259–60 Recuerdos del Palomar (Memories of the palomar [ballroom]) (Montoya), 111 Red Emma Returns street per­for­mance, 320 Reed, John, 127 Rees, Ricardo, 222 Reichel-­Dolmatoff, Elizabeth, 216 Reilly, Matthew, 394–401 Reina de la Primavera (Hernández), 110f religion: gendered narratives of, 225–28; performativity and, 245–47 repression, co-optation as tool for, 51–52 Residentes Unidos, 279–80, 288n9 re­sis­tance: pachuca/pachuco culture and, 210–11; poster art and symbols of, 106; separatism vs., 47 Resistencia Bookstore, 238 Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino Art? (2012), 6 retablo tradition, 129, 147; in Ceremony of Spirit exhibition, 460; Chicana/o art and, 342, 344 Revelaciones/Revelations: Hispanic Art of Evanescence exhibition, 416, 479 Revolt of the Cockroach ­People, The (Acosta), 89 Reyes, Felipe, 186 Reyes, Miguel Angel, 465 Reyes Mesa, José, 450–51 Rhodes, Frank, 482 Rice, Felicia, 337, 402–5 Rios, Marco, 64 River (Estrada), 57 Rivera, Alex, 414, 430–35 Rivera, Diego: critical pedagogy and, 449; Detroit murals by, 375, 388–90; el movimiento and work of, 455; hybridity in work of, 103; pre-­Columbian culture in work of, 125–28; public art of, 26; Syndicate of Technical Workers, Paint­ers, and Sculptors and, 401n6 Road to Aztlán: Art from a Mythic Homeland, The (2001), 5 Robert Berman gallery, 61 Roberto Clemente Community Center, 386 Robleto, Dario, 134n33 Rodriguez, Artemio, 59 Rodriguez, Liz, 115

Rodriguez, Patricia, 95–96, 462 Rodríguez, Richard T., 200 Rodriguez, Roberto, 381 Rodríguez, Sylvia, 151, 154–55 Rojas, James, 267–68 Rollins, Tim, 28 Romano, Octavio, 211 Romero, Frank, 61–62, 417–19, 438, 464–65 Romero, Mary, 222, 232n3 Romo, Terezita, 75–79, 104–15, 416 Romotsky, Jerry and Sally, 118 Ronell, Avital, 476–77 Rosaldo, Renato, 173n19 Rosa-­Ortiz, Milton, 68–69 Rose Garcia, Camille, 60 Rosier, Martha, 137 Rostgaard, Alfredo, 107–8 Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF ): Barrio Art Program, 212; Chicano movement and, 23; poster art and, 112; rasquachismo and, 93 Rubin, William, 124–25 Rugoff, Ralph, 414, 423–26 Ruiz, Mondini, 134n33 rupture, avant-­garde princi­ple of, con­temporary Chicana/o artists and, 66–71 Saguaro (Gorman), 346 saints: in Chicana art, 146–47, 149; in Martinez’s work, 155–56 Salazar, Ruben, 1, 25, 135, 278, 288n2 Saldívar, Ramón, 379 Salinas, Mary, 465 Salinas, Raquel, 253 Salinas, Raúl, 237–38, 241, 248n16 Salkowitz-­Montoya, Lezlie, 13–15, 37–45 Salvador “El Chava,” 118 Samaniego, Manuel, 197 Sanchez, Jenea, 336 Sánchez-­Tranquilino, Marcos: body awareness and, 179–80; Chicano Codices exhibition and, 5, 459–60; MiChicana/o art and, 382; pachuca/pachuco culture and, 208–16; pinto tattoos and, 237, 247n12; public art and, 268, 278–87 San Diego Donkey Cart (Avalos), 269, 314–18 Sandoval, Chela, 376 Sandoval, Humberto, 301n1 Sandoval, Teddy, 197–206, 426 San Francisco Chronicle, 414 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 458 Santa Barraza, Contreras, 95, 129, 336, 342–44, 377, 456, 460, 462 Santa Teresa de Ávila, 96 santeros, 147, 149, 153–54 Santistevan, Carlos, 162n59 Santo Niño de Atocha (Martinez), 154–56

Index  ·  525

santos (religious carvings), 78–79, 146–47, 148f, 149, 153–55, 162n54, 162n59 Sarmations culture, 235n33 Sarup, Madan, 351 Schapiro, Miriam, 198 Schimmel, Paul, 485 Schmidt Camacho, Alicia 338 Schnorr, Michael, 27 Screamers, The (Duardo), 111 Secure Fence Act, 335 Sedeño, Pedro Romero, 258–59 Selena (pop star), 254–55; death of, 180–81 self-­deĀnition, Chicana/o art and, 20–21 self-­help aesthetic, murals as tool of, 284–86 Self Help Graphics & Art, 3, 60–61, 77–78, 108–9, 113–15, 415; Across the Street exhibition and, 464–65; art education and, 487 Sellars, Peter, 64 semiotics, Chicana artists and role of, 250–60 separatism: Chicana/o art and debate over, 46–47; re­sis­tance vs., 47 September 16 cele­brations, posters for, 109 Serrano, David, 465 Servirlas (Ochoa), 165 Sewing Box (Rodriguez), 96 sexuality: Chicana/o art and exploration of, 177–81; Virgin of Guadalupe and, 250–60 Sheehan, Michael J. (archbishop), 251 Sher, Bartlett, 320 Sherman, Cindy, 60, 139–40, 298 Sifuentes, Roberto, 157 Sí magazine, 230 Simonds, Cylena, 319–30 Singerman, Howard, 486–87 Siqueiros, David Alfaro: Asco collective and, 269; border consciousness in work of, 401n6; class politics and work of, 43; critical pedagogy and, 449; intercultural meanings and work of, 26; murals by, 443, 456; pre-­Columbian ele­ments in work of, 126–28; public art and, 307–8 sirena (mermaid), in López’s work, 256–60 Sisco, Elizabeth, 28, 269–70; on public art, 319–30 Sklar, Diedre, 154 Slanguage gallery/store/studio, 62, 489–90 Small, Deborah, 28, 320 small box tableaus, 96 Smith, Roberta, 476 Smithsonian Institution: Folklife Festival and, 446; Our Amer­i­ca: The Latino Presence in American Art exhibition, 6, 414, 427–29 Snow Queen (Gamboa), 425 Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC ), 269, 381, 416, 448–49 social realism, institutional disdain for, 420–22 Social Unwest (Gamboa), 138–39

526  ·  Ind ex

socioeconomic conditions: Chicana/o art and, 4; rasquachismo and, 85–89 Soja, Edward W., 296, 353 Sonido Slang proj­ect, 490 Sonneman, Eve, 139 Sontag, Susan, 85, 113 Sorell, Victor A., 5, 383, 463 Soto, Merián, 139 Southwest Chicano Art Center, 415 Southwest Pieta (Jiménez), 129 Souza, Al, 169 Soy Natu­ral (Estrada), 57 Spanish identity, New Mexico tourism’s promotion of, 151–52 Spanish Speaking ­People’s Congress, 169 “Spirit Glyphs: Reimagining Art and Artist in the Work of Chicana Tlamatinime” (Pérez), 155 spirituality, science and technology and, 155–58 Spray Paint (Asco group), 412f Stories Your ­Mother Never Told You (Alvarez Muñoz), 166 Story of Our Strug­gle, The, mural, 447 Strand, Paul, 127 Stranglers in the Night (Ālm), 298 street art: Chicana/o art as, 7; decontextualization of, 440–42 street social control, public art and, 286–87, 305–9 street vendors, 271–72, 305–9 Streetworks exhibition, 314 Street Writers (Cesaretti), 118, 120 Struth, Thomas, 138 style and technique, pressures of dominant culture on, 47–49 subalternity, in Chicana art, 258 Sublime proj­ect, 489–90, 491f success, co-optation of art and ideology of, 50–52 Summer Became an Endless Round of Parties Said the Clone (Terrill), 203 Summer 1985 exhibition, 301n2 Sun Mad (Hernández), 424–25, 425f Sunset Crash (Almaraz), 65 Sushi, Incorporated, 314 symbols: in Chicano poster art, 106–8; intercultural meanings of, 26 Syndicate of Technical Workers, Paint­ers, and Sculptors, 14–15, 43, 127, 401n6 Tacoma Art Museum, 458 Tagg, John, 179–80, 237, 247n1 Taller de GráĀca Popu­lar (Popu­lar Graphics Workshop), 106, 108, 114 talleres (workshops): diffusion of art through, 50–52; formation of, 37; poster art production and, 108 Tamayo, RuĀno 103 Tanguma, Leo, 399–400 taste, rasquachismo and, 85–89

tattoos: body awareness and, 180–81; Chicana artists’ use of, 219–31; in Chris­tian­ity, 248n17; cult of Virgin of Guadalupe and, 237–38, 239f, 240f, 241–45, 247n2; in prison, 247n8 “Tattoos, Abjection, and the Po­liti­cal Unconscious: ­Toward a Semiotics of the Pinto Visual Vernacular” (Olguín), 238 tatuteando, 238 Tavera, Xavier, 68 Taylor, Paul, 380 Teatro Campesino, 23, 46, 84, 89, 93, 165, 455 technology: art and, 47; Chicanafuturism and, 146–47, 157–59; Chicana/o exclusion from, 149–51; photography and, 171–72 Tejada, Roberto, 79, 165–72 Terrill, Joey, 178–79, 197–204, 201f, 202f; cholo writing and, 205; T-­shirt designs by, 203–6 Tex-­Mex culture, in Casas’s paintings, 192 textuality, photography and, 138–40 theater: Chicano civil rights and, 455; intercultural communication through, 26; painting as theater concept and, 27; rasquachismo and, 89, 92–93 Their Dogs Came with Them (Viramontes), 204 Third World: Chicana/o artists’ collaboration with, 41–44, 112; Chicano poster art and images from, 107–8; commodiĀcation of artists from, 28; Euro-­American art and influence of, 49; No-­Movies compared with, 294; popu­lar art and, 76, 82–84; power relations in, 221–23; pre-­ Columbian culture and, 128 Third World Student Strike (1968), 107 Thirteen (Estrada), 57 30 Americans exhibition, 431–32 30 Lesbian Photos (Terrill), 198, 200, 204 This ­Mother ­Ain’t for Sale (Gómez), 342 Thomas, Piri, 195 Thompson, Gordon, Jr., 314–16, 318 Thompson, Nato, 8 “Tierra o Muerte,” Chicana/o artists’ use of, 22 Tierra Wools, 151 Tinguely, Jean, 57 Tlaloc (God of Rain), in poster art, 112 Toilet of Venus, The (Velázquez), 226 Tonantzin: Chicana artists and symbol of, 130, 257; as poster icon, 112 Torres, Salvador Roberto (“Queso”), 354, 437 Torres-­García, Joaquín, 125 Tosco Corporation, 442–43 Toy an Horse (ERRE ), 337, 367–69 traditional images, Chicanafuturist art and, 146–57 Trangmar, Susan, 138 transitory monuments, 7 Trea­sures of Mexico from the Mexican National Museums, 449 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 21–22, 75, 183, 258, 335 Trejo, Rubén, 77, 93, 100–103, 426 Treviño, Jesús, 84, 269 Tuan, Yi-­Fu, 362

Tujunga Wash, murals on, 268–69 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 461 Turner, Victor, 248n18 Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art exhibition, 126 Two Generations, The (Chong), 140 UCLA-­S PARC Digital/Mural Lab, 312 Undocumented (Montoya) (silkscreen), 2f undocumented aliens: media focus on, 315–16; public art and, 319–30 United Farm Workers (UFW ), 22–23, 103; in Casas’s work, 189–90; organ­ization of, 51; poster art for, 106–8; Virgin of Guadalupe and, 250 Untitled (Back of Head) (Huerta), 56f Untitled (Montoya), 83f Untitled Film Still (Sherman), 139–40 Untitled Landscapes (Trangmar), 138 Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (1998), 5 urban life, Chicana/o art and, 15 urban space: Chicana/o art and exploration of, 7, 56–57, 78. See also private space U.S. Out of El (Yañez), 438

Valadez, John, 54, 62, 64–65, 111, 438, 462, 465 Valdés, Dennis, 374, 382, 384 Valdés, Luis, farmworker theater troupe and, 455 Valdez, Gina, 21–22 Valdez, Luis: Chicano movement and, 23; on intercultural meaning, 26; pachuco culture and, 84, 179, 211–12; rasquachismo and, 89, 93 Valdez, Patssi: Across the Street exhibition and, 464–65; Asco group and, 27, 268, 292; Ceremony of Spirit exhibition and, 460; Chicano youth movement and, 293; cholo aesthetics and, 54; con­temporary Chicana art and, 2, 62, 65; domesticana art and, 95, 97–98, 129; East of the River exhibition and, 465; No-­Movies and, 298 Valdéz, Vito, 386 Valdivia, Gabriela, 338, 394–401 Valle de Lágrimas (Sandoval), 200 Vallejo, Linda, 465 Van Alphen, Ernst, 197 vandalism, graffiti and, 289n13, 290n21 Vaquero (Jiménez), 87f Vargas, George, 337, 374, 376, 382–84, 386–91 Vargas, Kathy, 78, 138, 140–41, 145, 459, 461, 465 Vargas, Zaragosa, 383–85 Vargas Cervantes, Susana, 200 Varrio Nuevo Estrada (VNE ) (gang), 280–81, 284–87 Vasquez, Ray, 420–22 Vásquez, Tiburcio, 109 Vega, Salvador, 420–22 Velázquez, Diego, 226 Veñegas, Daniel, 88

Index  ·  527

Venus Envy Chapter I: Or, the First Holy Communion, ­Moments before the End (Mesa-­Bains), 223, 225–28, 234n19 Venus Envy Chapter II: The Harem and Other Enclosures (Mesa-­Bains), 225–28, 234n19 Venus Envy Chapter III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the ­Giant ­Women (Mesa-­Bains), 225–28, 227f Venus Envy series (Mesa-­Bains), 140, 180, 223, 225–28 Venus Resting (Giorgione), 226 Vestiture . . . ​of Branches (Mesa-­Bains), 226, 228 Vestiture . . . ​of Feathers (Mesa-­Bains), 226, 227f, 228 Vibration of a New Awakening (Moreno), 383–84 Victoriano Huerta rebellion, 166 Vietnam Campesino (Valdez), 26 Vietnam War protests: Chicana/o artists and, 23–25, 188–89, 293, 301n6; Chicano poster art and, 107–8 View from the East (de la Loza), 64 Vigil, James Diego, 286, 291n38 Villa, Esteban, 23, 108, 437 Villa, Francisco, 185; Chicana/o art and iconography of, 75, 106, 109; photo­graphs of, 165, 166, 168 Villa, Raúl Homero, 387, 390 Viramontes, Helena María, 204 Viramontes, Xavier, 106 Virgen de Guadalupe: Chicana artists and, 129–30, 247n2; Chicanafuturism and, 146–47; Chicana/o art and iconography of, 23, 58, 75; feminist semiotics and, 250–60; in Martinez’s work, 155–56; Montoya’s La Guadalupana installation and, 237–38, 239f, 240f, 241–45, 247n2; murals of East Los Angeles and, 272–73, 273f; nepantla and, 342–49; “original” image of, 261n7; as poster icon, 106, 109, 112, 114; santo tradition and, 154–55 Virgen de los Remedios, 129 Virgin Appears in the Maldita Vecindad, The (collaborative work), 399–400 Virgin of Montserrat, 228 visual arts: Chicano identity and, 30–31, 33f, 34; Chicano production of, 39–44; photography and, 141–45; rasquachismo in, 88–89, 93–98 Vogue (Ālm), 298 “voice giving,” artists’ program for, 309 Votive Shrine (Lukac), 140 Wallbangin’ (Phillips), 118 Walls/Muros (ERRE ), 368–70 Walls of East Lost Angeles, The, exhibition, 449 Wall That Cracked Open, The (Herrón), 266f, 284, 290n128 Warhol, Andy, 82, 100, 298–99, 302n49, 303n51, 457 Warrior for Gringostroika (Gómez-­Peña), 363–64 Washington Post, 414, 430–33 Weber, Max, 126 Weeks, William, 320 Weems, Carrie Mae, 139 Weird Al Yankovic, 64

528  ·  Ind ex

Welcome to Amer­i­ca’s Finest Tourist Plantation (collaborative proj­ect), 28f, 269, 320, 323–24, 328–30 West, Cornel, 26 Weston, Edward, 127, 137 Whatcha talkin’ ’bout (de la Loza), 65 “What Do We Mean When We Talk about ‘Latino’ Art?” (NPR program), 414, 434–35 When You Think of Mexico: Commercial Images of Mexicans (López), 222 “Which Came First?” Enlightenment #4 (Alvarez Muñoz), 424, 424f Whitney Museum Biennial Exhibition, 476–82 Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? (López), 334f Wight Gallery (UCLA ), 61 Wilderness (Avalos), 137 Wilding, Faith, 198 Wild Life (docudrama), 196 Wild West, The (Levinthal), 141 Wilson, Fred, 139 Wilson, Robert, 465 Wilson, William, 413–14 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 173n16 ­women (Chicana) artists: body awareness and, 178–81; Chicanafuturist art and, 146–47, 157–59; Chicana/o art and exploration of, 7, 129–30; dresses and body ornamentation and, 219–31; feminist semiotics and, 250–60; L.A. con­temporary art and, 198; rasquachismo and, 91–98; rehistoricization of art and, 96–97 ­Women’s Work Is Never Done series (López), 221–23 Wright, Christopher, 243 Wuthering Heights (Davila), 348 Xavier, Emanuel, 196–97 Xicano Progeny: Investigative Agents, Executive Council, and Other Representatives from the Sovereign State of Aztlán exhibition, 460–61 Xipe Totec (Aztec god), 208 Xiuhcoatl (Aztec serpent), 178, 185 Xochil Art and Culture Center, 416 Xolotl (Aztec god), 184–85 Yañez, René, 23, 437–39 Yau, John, 21 Ybarra, Mario, Jr., 58–60, 62–65, 67, 485–93 Ybarra-­Frausto, Tomás, 1; Arte Chicano and, 382; on “box” art, 96; on class politics and Chicana/o art, 16; on con­temporary Chicana/o artists, 59, 66–71; on cultural reclamation, 22, 108, 114; on indigenismo, 111–12; on multiculturalism, 130; popu­lar art and, 76; on pre-­Columbian motifs, 389; on rasquachismo, 76, 85–89, 91–93, 259–60, 426 Yepes, George, 438 youth culture: Chicano youth movement and, 293; public space, power, and, 278–87 Yuskavage, Lisa, 54

Zamudio-­Taylor, Victor, 78, 98, 123–32 Zapata, Emiliano: Chicana/o art and iconography of, 75, 106, 109; photo­graphs of, 165 Zapatista poster series (Montoya), 115 zarape (folk blanket), 202 Zermeño, Andrew, 23, 106

Zinn, Howard, 460 Zoot Suit (Ālm and play), 62, 84, 212 Zoot Suit (Gomez), 213f zootsuiters: graffiti art and, 118–22; pachuco culture and, 209–16, 218n26 Zorach, William, 126

Index  ·  529

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowl­edgment of Copyrights ch ap ter  1. “Looking for Alternatives: Notes on Chicano Art, 1960–1990” by Philip Brookman from Chicano Art: Re­sis­tance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castilo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­Bejarano, exhibition cata­log (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991), 181–93. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter  2. “Artist: A C ontingency F ­ actor” by Mel Casas in Brown Paper Report (San Antonio, TX: Con Safo Group, 1971). Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter  3. “El Arte del Chicano: ‘The Spirit of the Experience’ ” from Con/Safos 7 (1971): 11. Copyright © Estate of Gilbert Sanchez Luján. “El Arte del Chicano” was made available by the Magu Legacy Proj­ect in the interest of research and scholarship on Chicano arts and culture. For more information on Gilbert “Magu” Luján’s lasting legacy, please visit www​.­magulandia​.­org. ch ap ter  4​. ­ “Notes on an Aesthetic Alternative” by Carlos Almaraz is a manifesto printed on a Mechicano Art Center exhibition invitation (Los Angeles: Mechicano Art Center, 1973). Reprinted with permission from the author’s estate. ch ap ter 5. “A Critical Perspective on the State of Chicano Art” by Malaquías Montoya and Lezlie Salkowitz-­ Montoya from Metamorfosis 3, no.  1 (spring/summer 1980): 3–7. Courtesy of the authors. ch ap ter 6. “Response: Another Opinion on the State of Chicano Art” by Shifra M. Goldman from Metamorfosis: Northwest Chicano Magazine of Lit­er­a­ture Art and

Culture 4, no.  1 (1980/1981): 2–7. Reprinted with permission from the author’s estate. ch ap ter  7. “Post-­Chicano” by Rita Gonzalez from Poliéster 25 (spring/summer 1999): 40–47. The essay was originally submitted to Kurt Hollander, the editor of Poliéster magazine, ­under the title “The Afterlife of Chicano Aesthetics.” Hollander changed the title to “Post-­Chicano” in part to keep with the magazine’s ­house style. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter  8. “The New Chicano Movement” by Josh Kun from Los Angeles Times Magazine, January 9, 2005. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter  9. “Post-­movimiento: The Con­temporary (Re)Generation of Chicana/o Art” by Tomás Ybarra-­ Frausto from A Companion to Latina/o Studies, ed. Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 289–96. Copyright © 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., except for editorial material and organ­ization © 200 7 by Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo. The right of Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo to be identiĀed as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK C opyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ch ap ter 10. “The Politics of Popu­lar Art” by Rupert García from ChismeArte 2, no. 1 (summer 1978): 2–4. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter  11. “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility” by Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto from Chicano Aesthetics: Rasquachismo, exhibition cata­log (Phoenix, AZ: mars Artspace, 1989), 5–8. Courtesy of the author.

ch ap ter  12. “ ‘Domesticana’: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache” by Amalia Mesa-­Bains from Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 24, no. 2 (fall 1999): 155–67. Reprinted as “Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquachismo,” in Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Post-­contemporary Interventions), ed. Patricia Zavella, Gabriela F. Arredondo, Aida Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Najera-­Ramirez, and Stanley Fish (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 298–315. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter 13. “Chicano Humor in Art: For Whom the Taco Bell Tolls” by Rubén Trejo from From the Inside Out: Perspectives on Mexican and Mexican-­American Folk Art, exhibition cata­log (San Francisco, CA: Mexican Museum, 1989), 86–90. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the Mexican Museum. ch ap ter  14. “Points of Convergence: The Iconography of the Chicano Poster” by Tere Romo from Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California, exhibition cata­log (Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara / Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 91–115. Reprinted by permission of the University Art Museum. ch ap ter  15. “Graffiti Is Art: Any Drawn Line That Speaks about Identity, Dignity and Unity . . . ​That Line Is Art” by Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez from U.S. Latino Lit­er­a­tures and Cultures: Transnational Perspectives, ed. Francisco Lomelí and Karen Ikas (Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag, 2000), 6 1–70. Essay and painting reprinted by permission of the author. ch ap ter 16. “Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism: Chicano/a Art and the Pre-­Columbian Past” by Victor Zamudio-­Taylor from The Road to Aztlán: Art from a Mythic Homeland, exhibition cata­log (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001), 342–57. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter  17. “Negotiated Frontiers: Con­temporary Chicano Photography” by Jennifer  A. González from From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography, ed. Chon Noriega, exhibition cata­log (San Francisco, CA: Mexican Museum, 1995), 17–22. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Mexican Museum. ch ap ter  18. “Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez” by Catherine S. Ramírez from Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 29, no. 2 (spring 2002): 55–92. Courtesy of the author.

532 ·  Ackno wl ­e d gment o f Co pyr ight s

ch ap ter 19. “Civic Studies” by Roberto Tejada from Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 7 5–94. Copyright © C hicano Studies Research Center, University of California, Los Angeles. ch ap ter  20. “RedeĀning Amer­i­ca: The Civil Rights Movements” by Nancy Kelker from Mel Casas: Artist as Cultural Adjuster (Lascassas, TN: H ighship Press, 2014), 42–65. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter  21. “Drawing Offensive/Offensive Drawing: T ­ oward a Theory of Mariconógraphy” by Robb Hernández from mel us 39, no.  2 (summer 2014): 121–52. Copyright © Oxford University Press. Used by permission of Oxford University Press. ch ap ter  22. “The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide: Mobility, Identity, and Buenas Garras” by Marcos Sánchez-­ Tranquilino and John Tagg. This version of the essay was revised in 2015. The original essay was published in 1991 as “The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide: The Museum, Identity, and Buenas Garras,” in Chicano Art: Re­sistance and Affirmation, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-­B ejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991). The authors’ preferred version was published as “The Pachuco’s Flayed Hide” in John Tagg, Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics, and the Discursive Field (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Reproduced by permission of Palgrave Macmillan and University of Minnesota Press. ch ap ter  23. “Writing on the Social Body: Dresses and Body Ornamentation in C on­temporary Chicana Art” by Laura E. Pérez from Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st  ­Century, ed. Arturo  J. Aldama and Naómi H. Quiñonez (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 30–63. The images discussed ­here are posted online at vari­ous sources as well as in Laura E. Pérez’s book Chicana Art, from which this essay, in a bbreviated form, has been extracted. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter  24. “Ojo de la Diosa: Becoming Divine in Delilah Montoya’s Photography” by Asta Kuusinen from Aztlán: A J ournal of Chicano Studies 33, no.  1 (spring 2008): 33–61. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter  25. “Art Comes for the Archbishop: The Semiotics of Con­temporary Chicana Feminism and

the Work of Alma Lopez” by Luz Calvo from Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 5, no. 1 (2004): 201–24. Currently published by Duke University Press. Copyright © Luz Calvo. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter  26. “The Enacted Environment of East Los Angeles” by James  T. Rojas from Places: A Quarterly Journal of Environmental Design 8, no. 3 (spring 1993): 43–53.Reprinted by permission of Places and the author. ch ap ter 27. “Space, Power, and Youth Culture: Mexican American Graffiti and Chicano Murals in East Los Angeles, 1972–78” by Marcos Sánchez-­Tranquilino from Looking High and Low: Art and Cultural Identity, ed. Brenda Jo Bright and Liza Blackwell (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 55–88. © 1995 The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. ch ap ter  28. “Pseudographic Cinema: Asco’s No-­ Movies” by C. On dine Chavoya from Per­for­mance Research 3, no. 1 (1998): 1–14. Reprinted by permission of the Taylor & Francis Group, www​.­tandfonline​.­com, and the author. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group. ch ap ter 29. “Whose Monument Where? Public Art in a M any-­Cultured Society” by Judith  F. Baca from Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 131–38. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter  30. “La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra: Colorado” by Judith F. Baca from Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 30, no. 1 (spring 2005): 195–99. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter 31.“The Donkey Cart Caper: Some Thoughts on Socially Conscious Art in Anti-­social Public Space” by David Avalos from Community Murals Magazine: An International Visual Arts Magazine (Berkeley, CA) 11 (fall 1986): 14–15. Courtesy of the author. ch ap ter 32. “Public Audit: An Interview with Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos” by Cylena Simonds from Afterimage 22, n o.  1 (summer 1994): 8–11.See www​.­vsw​.­org​/­ai. Copyright © Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism and the Visual Studies Workshop. Reproduced by permission of Afterimage and the author. ch ap ter  33. “Border Arte: Nepantla, El Lugar de la Frontera” by Gloria Anzaldúa from La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Ex-

perience, ed. Kathryn Kanjo (San Diego, CA: C entro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Con­temporary Art, 1993), 107–14. Copyright © The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Literary Trust. Reprinted by permission of AnaLouise Keating. ch ap ter 34. “The Spaces of Home in Chicano and Latino Repre­sen­ta­tions of the San Diego–­Tijuana Borderlands” by Jo-­Anne Berelowitz from Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23, no. 3 (2005): 323–50. Reprinted by permission of and copyright © Pion Ltd. ch ap ter  35. “Straddling la otra frontera: Inserting MiChicana/o Visual Culture into Chicana/o Art History” by Dylan Miner from Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33, no. 1 (spring 2008): 89–122. Copyright © University of California Chicano Studies Research Center. Reprinted by permission of Chon Noriega and the author. ch ap ter  36. “Borders, Border-­Crossing, and Po­liti­ cal Art in North Carolina” by Gabriela Valdivia, Joseph Palis, and Matthew Reilly from “Carolina del Norte: Geographies of Latinization in t he South,” special issue, Southeastern Geographer 51, no. 2 (summer 2011): 287–306. Published by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. ch ap ter 37. Excerpts from Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol by Enrique Chagoya, Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, and Felicia Rice (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2001). Used by permission of the authors. ch ap ter  38. “187 R easons Why Mexicanos C ­ an’t Cross the Border (Remix)” by Juan Felipe Herrera from 187 Reasons Mexicanos ­Can’t Cross the Border, Undocuments, 1971–2007 (San Francisco, CA: Ci ty Lights Books, 2007), 29–35. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books. All rights reserved. ch ap ter  39. “Los Four” by Peter Plagens from Artforum 13, no. 1 (September 1974): 87–88. Copyright © Artforum. ch ap ter 40. “mar ch to an Aesthetic of Revolution” by Raye Bemis Mitchell from New Art Examiner (February 1977): 11. Republished with permission from the author. ch ap ter  41. “Resisting Modernism: Chicano Art: Retro Progressive or Progressive Retro?” by Ralph Rugoff from L.A. Weekly, October 5–­October 11,1990, 43–44. Republished with permission from the author.

Ackno wl e­ d gment o f Co pyr ight s  ·  533

ch ap ter  42. “ ‘Our Amer­i­ca’ at the Smithsonian” by Philip Kennicott from the Washington Post, October 25, 2013. Republished with permission from the Washington Post and the author.

ch ap ter  47. “Readers’ Forum Response to Judithe Hernandez’s Letter to the Editor” by Shifra  M. Goldman from Artweek 12, no. 25 (August 1, 1981): 16. Republished with permission from the author’s estate.

ch ap ter  43. “Alex Rivera, Philip Kennicott Debate Washington Post Review of ‘Our Amer­i­ca’ ” by Philip Kennicott from the Washington Post, November  1, 2013. Republished with permission from the Washington Post and the author.

ch ap ter 48. “ ‘All Roads Lead to East L.A.,’ Goez Art Studios and Gallery” by Karen Mary Davalos from L.A. Xicano, exhibition cata­log (Los Angeles, CA: ucl a Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011), 29–39. The printing featured in t his anthology is a m odiĀed version of the original. Republished with permission from Chon Noriega.

ch ap ter  44. “What Do We Mean When We Talk about ‘Latino Art’?” by Elizabeth Blair, Barbara Chase-­ Riboud, Audie Cornish, Arlene Dávila, Philip Kennicott, Carmen Ramos, and Alex Rivera, npr , November 25, 2013. Copyright © 2013 National Public Radio, Inc. The npr news report titled “What Do We Mean When We Talk about ‘Latino Art’?” by Elizabeth Blair was originally published on NPR​.­org on November 25, 2013, and is used with the permission of npr . Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited. ch ap ter  45. “Chicano Art: Looking Backward” by Shifra M. Goldman from Artweek 12, no. 22 (June 20, 1981): 3–4. Republished with permission from the author’s estate. ch ap ter 46. “Readers’ Forum Letter to the Editor in Response to Shifra Goldman’s Exhibition Review” by Judithe Elena Hernández de Neikrug from Artweek 12, no.  25 (August  1, 1981): 16. Republished with permission from the author.

534  ·  Ackno wl ­e d gment o f Co pyr ight s

ch ap ter  49. “From car a to ca ca : The Multiple Anatomies of Chicano/a Art at the Turn of the New ­Century” by Alicia Gaspar de A lba from Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 26, no. 1 (spring 2001): 205– 31. Republished with permission from the author and Chon Noriega. ch ap ter  50. “On Museum Row: Aesthetics and the Politics of Exhibition” by Chon Noriega from Daedalus 128, no. 3 (summer 1999): 57–81. Copyright © 1999 by the American Acad­emy of Arts and Sciences. Republished with permission from the author. ch ap ter  51. “Strangeways H ­ ere We Come” by Rita Gonzalez from Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California from the 90s to Now, ed. John C. Welchman, Southern California Consortium of Art Schools Symposium (Zu­rich: jrp Ringier, 2004), 87–104. Republished with permission from the author.

This page intentionally left blank

This page intentionally left blank