Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this essay, Alicia Gaspar de Alba reviews nine post-1990 exhibitions of Chicano art, all of which have sought to “materialize” Chicano/a from within the mainstream art museum, or as she calls it, the “master’s house.” The exhibitions [...]

Building upon scholar and cultural critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s theorization of rasquachismo as a set of aesthetic practices that adopt an oppositional stance to dominant culture and articulate a Chicano identity, Amalia Mesa-Bains—a cultural [...]

In this essay, Victor Zamudio-Taylor explores the valorization of Mexico’s pre-Columbian roots as a key element in the development of cultural identity within the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Inspired by the ideology of mexicanidad— [...]

In this essay, Ramón García explores the foundations and essential qualities of Chicano camp (rasquache) and its artistic and literary manifestations. García begins with a discussion of the walking murals of the Los Angeles conceptual art group, [...]

In this brief, bilingual artist statement Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons expresses her belief that art is “The transformation of ordinary things into a vision, a new dimension that wasn’t their original purpose.” Therefore, she explains that [...]

Mexican-American scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto defines the Mexican concept of rasquache [crummy] for both Chicano and non-Mexican readers and presents it (with some humor) for the conceptualization of a Chicano artistic sensibility. Defined as the [...]

This article by Los Angeles artist Harry Gamboa, Jr. deals with the changing sense of Chicano identity, both individually and collectively, and how this is reflected in Chicano art. Gamboa challenges widely accepted, negative stereotypes of Chicanos [...]

In this essay, curator and scholar Henry C. Estrada argues that despite the fact that Latinos are a heterogeneous cultural group, they share a history of colonialism, geographic displacement, internal exile, and racial discrimination. The experience [...]

“The Artists Respond: Art, Culture, Politics” is a transcript of artists’ responses to questions posed by Juan Sánchez, curator of the exhibition The Puerto Rican Equation: Puerto Rican Artists Ponder 100 Years Since the 1898 Invasion. Among [...]

José Luis Falconi discusses Nuyorican photographer Adal Maldonado’s series, Out of Focus Nuyoricans, as a metaphorical depiction of the mutable nature of Puerto Rican identity and nationhood. By choosing to portray his Puerto Rican subjects as [...]

Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri describes in this text the difficulty of classifying Puerto Ricans with standard racial and ethnic categories employed by United States government agencies. He commends Puerto Ricans for living lives that resist [...]

The work of Jorge Soto, an artist of Puerto Rican descent, is featured in the portfolio section of the first issue of Caribe magazine. He explains his drawings and images as incorporating symbols and meanings related to the general themes of being [...]

Written at a time when the United States’ English-only movement was expanding, this article examines the construct of Latino identity in its social, political and aesthetic dimensions, through the struggle over language. The authors discuss [...]

This booklet for the exhibition Confluencias: Leandro Soto and Raoul Deal contains three texts: an interview with the artists by Linda Corbin-Pardee, an essay by Gregory Jay, and a short text by Awam Amkpa entitled “The Story of Oggun.” Jay [...]

In this essay, Ron Kovatch explores how issues of relocation, assimilation, and identity are manifest in the group of sculptures by Raoul Deal presented in the installation Reinventing Jimmy Green. Inspired by his grandfather Eugenio Greco’s [...]

In this lecture, Raoul Deal reflects on his experiences living in Mexico between 1988 and 1998, on the history of art and education in Mexico, and the work of the workshop of El Tesoro de Tamulté in the state of Tabasco. Deal stresses Leandro Soto [...]

In this essay, Kaytie Johnson introduces the premise of an exhibition that examines new trends in contemporary art by a new generation of Latino artists. Using strategies of appropriation, they confront assumptions about “Chicano/a” and “Latino [...]

In this text, Dylan Miner revises the historiography of Chicano art by inserting the activities of Chicano artists active in Michigan (“MiChicano/a” artists) and the Midwest into established narratives of Chicano art and culture. Miner recounts [...]

This text sympathetically discusses Mexican immigrants in Chicago under several subsections. In the first section, “The New Home,” authors Robert C. Jones and Louis R. Wilson describe the lively and colorful street life of the neighborhood where [...]

Brazilian literary critic and essayist Afrânio Coutinho wrote this article in the late- 1960s. His article states since inception that to him the term “Latin American,” is at odds with the historical, social, cultural, literary, and artistic [...]

In this text, Antenor Orrego argues that nationalist culture should not be based on the traditional cultures of Peru, but rather on a totally new Pan-American sensibility. Orrego argues that a contemporary “Peruanismo literario” is a false idea [...]

In this chapter from América Latina en sus artes Jorge Alberto Manrique begins by describing the artistic movements of the 1920s and comparing this period to a giant hinge that moved backward to the nineteenth century and forward to the twentieth [...]

In this article published in the Parisian journal, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, (1948) renowned French historian Fernand Braudel responds to Luis Alberto Sánchez’s ¿Existe América Latina? Braudel considers Sánchez’s text (1945 [...]

In the series of questions asked for the survey for Revista de Avance, Alfonso Hernandez Cata is asked four questions that go in accordance with the larger theme of question of identity “Que debe ser el Arte Americano?” (What should be [...]

In this brief interview with Rufino Blanco Fombona in the Cuban magazine, Revista de Avance, he is presented with the 4 specific survey questions that support the larger theme question of identity, “Que debe ser el arte Americano?” (What should [...]

Puerto Rican historian Eugenio Fernández Méndez submits a “descriptive and literary review of how artists from different periods have viewed the history of Puerto Rico.” He remarks that it is important to be universal, but claims that one must [...]

Argentine critic Jorge Romero Brest remarks that he was not invited to participate in the symposium “El artista latinoamericano y su identidad” [The Latin American Artist and His Identity] held at the University of Texas en Austin in October 1975 [...]

This essay by art critic Laura Gil Fiallo posthumously explores the creation of imagery in Darío Suro’s art that captured the multi-dimensionality of Dominican and Caribbean art. She thus emphasizes the existential quality of Suro’s style, its [...]

In this bilingual catalogue essay, art historian Holly Barnet-Sanchez explores Chicana graphic art in California from the mid-1970s to the end of the millennium by discussing the unifying trends in Chicana art and the importance of—yet seldom [...]

In this bilingual essay, Chicana art historian and curator Tere Romo delineates three distinct periods of poster production, tracing the factors that shaped the development of iconography and visual styles, as well as the varying degrees to which [...]

In a continuation of an article published in Artes Visuales in 1978, Carla Stellweg provides an overview of issues relevant to Chicano art and the diverse approaches artists use to negotiate such conditions. She further outlines how early Chicano [...]

In this essay, curator and art historian Mari Carmen Ramírez argues that demographic trends and the emergence of multiculturalism have generated renewed debate about the conditions for representation and identity among marginalized groups. While [...]

Addressing the subject strictly from the perspective of his particular field of expertise, the Spanish historian Carlos Areán discusses the issue of identity. According to him, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America as a whole are facing an identity [...]

In an attempt at historical reconstruction, and due to the intense political situation in Venezuela (between 1974 and 1978), art critic Roberto Montero Castro attempts to detect the presence of “the Venezuelan identity” in certain artistic [...]

In this article, Narciso Debourg outlines the difficulties he faces as a young artist of Latin American descent the moment he tries to review, assimilate, or subscribe to any of the present trends he yearns to follow specifically within the European [...]

In his essay, Victor Zamudio-Taylor addresses the historic loss of cultural memory imposed on mestizos (mixed race people) by the dominant culture throughout the Americas since the time of the conquest by the Spanish and Portuguese. The loss of [...]

In this article, Gloria Anzaldúa explores what it means to be a Chicano/a border artist. Reflecting on mixed feelings about a trip to a museum exhibition of the Aztec world, she meditates on the tension between the Chicano/a desire to reconnect with [...]

This excerpt from Jacinto Quirarte’s book, Mexican American Artists, includes the introduction, chapters 4 through 8, and a short conclusion. In the introduction, the author explores Chicano identity and the unifying elements of Chicano art. While [...]

In this essay, curator Patricio Chávez discusses the sociopolitical and cultural conditions that led to the development of the 1993 exhibition entitled La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience. He addresses the [...]

In this curatorial statement, Patricio Chávez and Madeleine Grynsztejn, co-curators of the exhibition La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience (1993), describe the project as the “central manifestation” of the [...]

This article stresses the need to establish the parameters of Latin American art events and think about the criteria used to judge them. It also discusses a question that defines the idea of “regionality,” a concept that is closely associated [...]

In this article, the author Icleia Borsa Cattani discusses her opinion that a particular artistic process is an intrinsic aspect of modernity: repetition. She analyzes the portrayal of the human body in the works of Frida Kahlo, Ismael Nery, and [...]

In this essay, Annateresa Fabris addresses the issue of identity and its connections to the visual arts in Latin America. She refers to the concept of a “sense of place” in the development of the symbolic system that posits the idea of a “ [...]

In the introduction to their anthology of essays, María Amalia Bulhões and Maria Lúcia Kern explain their goal of assembling works by thinkers who suggested alternatives to the problem of territorializing art practices in Latin America. This [...]

In this article, Roberto Pontual ponders the concept of “discovery,” and discusses the development of a Latin American awareness that has been imposed from elsewhere. This external view establishes a sense of foreign domination that sees the [...]

In this text, celebrated intellectual Celso Furtado—the former minister of economics—contemplates the possibility of the conciliation of ideological and intellectual processes given the outdated social structure of Brazil. He argues that the “ [...]

The Argentine critic Marta Traba, who was based in Puerto Rico at the time of this article, evaluates the works presented on the occasion of the Primera Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano [1st San Juan Biennial of Latin American Graphic [...]

Jorge Glusberg, founder of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación [Center for Art and Communication] (CAyC in Buenos Aires), says that “there is no such thing as a Latin American art but there is a common set of challenges that creates an identity.” [...]

According to the Brazilian critic Mario Barata, cultural identity derives from qualities that go beyond natural phenomena; it is also the result of planning and the promotion of works of art produced by a particular country. Permanent status is thus [...]

Juan Acha, the Peruvian critic and historian who has lived in Mexico long time ago, claims that it is a mistake to see art criticism as an appendix to artistic expression. According to Acha, art criticism “should examine artistic reality and [...]