In this essay, Shifra Goldman defines Chicano art as the expression of the historical conditions of what she calls the “double-mestizaje” [double-intermingling] of Chicano experience. Beginning with a consideration of the unresolved question of the meaning of “Chicano identity,” she argues that, rather than seeking to trace its etymological roots, it is more useful to claim it as a positive, and politicized, expression of cultural identity. This cultural identity is based in a double-mestizaje whose breeding was created by the process of Spanish colonization, and by the experience of living in the Southwest United States, a territory considered by her as “conquered Mexico.” Like many other minority groups, Chicanos have resisted the homogenization mainstream U.S. culture seeks to impose on it, instead locating power and self-expression in its “syncretization” of popular U.S. and Mexican culture. Citing numerous Chicano artists, Goldman notes how they combine “brujas, curanderos” [witches and witch-doctors] and “skulls and calaveras” with “colonial churches, the ‘low-rider’ Chevy, motorcyles,” and even “American flags.” Adopting a broad variety of styles, Chicano artists produce work that addresses its community. Its main purpose, she argues, is communication in order to affirm a sense of Chicano community and experience. Ultimately, Goldman concludes, it is in the process of mixing that Chicano art and culture finds its social and aesthetic value.

The U.S. art historian, activist, and critic Shifra [Meyerovitz] Goldman (1926-2011) wrote the essay, “Chicano Art,” in 1974 when she was a professor at Santa Ana College. Reprinted in 1984 in Chicano Art History: A Book of Selected Readings, edited by Jacinto Quirate, in this essay Goldman argues that Chicano art’s value—both politic and aesthetic—lies in its mixing of both traditional Mexican culture, including calavaeras, curanderos, brujas, and cuentos [stories], with the popular culture of Chicano’s living in the Southwest United States, including the “low-rider’ Chevy,” gardens, billboards, beer cans, and American flags. Key to her argument are the concepts of mestizaje and “syncretization,” both of which resist the “melting-pot” theory of U.S. culture as a homogeneous mixing. Goldman locates Chicano artists’ resistance to colonialism in these two concepts. The Chicano’s “double-mestizaje” is the marker of the Indian’s subjection to colonialism, and of the seizing of Mexico by the United States (which constitutes much of the region of the Southwest U.S.). “Syncretization,” is the stance of “reconciled conflict” that Chicano artists assume by drawing on both traditional Mexican and popular U.S. culture to express a vital and compelling identity. Such a concept—as well as the idea that expressing identity is the most urgent task of minority artists—would gain considerable influence in debates about art and multiculturalism during the 1980s and early 1990s.