In this text, Amalia Mesa-Bains introduces an exhibition of Chicano art with an account of Chicano cultural history, and a description of how the works of art in the show relate to several themes. She organizes her account of Chicano cultural history around the themes of land, family, and the afterlife, explaining how each has contributed to contemporary Chicano identity. She argues that in all aspects, Chicano identity is rooted in traditions that encompass Mesoamerican, colonial, and early twentieth-century histories. In “Land,” Mesa-Bains explains how Chicanos adopted the Nauhatl word Aztlán to refer to the spiritual homeland of indigenous Mexicans that was believed to be located in current-day northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. The 1848 annexation of Mexican territories by the United States [California, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico; Texas (1845)], among other border conflicts, is a historical event Mesa-Bains cites as evidence of Chicanos’ long history as a geographically displaced people. In “Family,” she argues that because of this history of displacement, the family has been especially important to Chicano identity. But, the family is also a central point of tension, as Chicanas have attempted to challenge traditional values and refashion such traditional iconography as the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Llorona. Finally, in “The Afterlife,” Mesa-Bains argues, among other things, that Chicano identity has been influenced by the duality of life and death that is rooted in Mexican Catholicism and folk beliefs. She next stresses how these ideas appear as thematic sources for works in the exhibition. Mesa-Bains also points out, on a more abstract level, how Chicanos’ long history of resistance to dominant cultures, displacement, and political upheaval are expressed by many of the artists in the exhibition.

As an artist and critic, Amalia Mesa-Bains contributed to the historicization and theorization of Chicano art that occurred during the early 1990s. She wrote this introduction for the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Arte of the Other México: Sources and Meaning/Artes del otro México: Fuentes y significados, which was organized by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago in 1993 and featured the work of twenty Chicano artists including Carmen Lomas Garza, Esther Hernandez, Luis Jiménez, John Valdez. On one level, Mesa-Bains narrates a traditional cultural history of Chicanos with this text, while on another level, she proposes a post-structuralist way of understanding Chicano identity as something both fluid and grounded in history and tradition. Towards this purpose, she makes use of concepts such as mapping, difference, and subversion that helped post-colonial scholars theorize identity as openly problematic during the early 1990s. (Tomás Ybarra-Frausto and Homi Bhabha are among the theorists she cites.) So, while she argues that Chicano culture is based in traditional Mexican cultural sources like the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Malinche, and popular forms like ex-votos and altars, Mesa-Bains also argues that, in the process of deploying these forms as acts of resistance to dominant U.S. culture, Chicanos subvert and parody the meanings of these sources. Ybarra-Frausto’s concept of rasquachismo [crummy-ism], parody, and satire are essential, Mesa-Bains shows, to the earnest, politically motivated work Chicano artists have been producing in the United States since the 1960s.