As the curator of Another Life Up Inside Her Head (1995), an exhibition of seventeen emerging Chicana/Latina artists, Amalia Mesa-Bains considers the precedents for their work, as well as the contemporary contexts in which it has been produced. She points out that despite limited acknowledgement of Latino art within art school curricula and mainstream institutions, a number of artists (including Yolanda Lopez, Ester Hernandez, Barbara Carrasco and Patssi Valdez) have served as role models for younger generations. Mesa-Bains argues that the emerging artists in the exhibition address a shifting set of socio-historic circumstances that simultaneously connect them to and distinguish them from their predecessors: images of women in the media, the crisis of domestic violence, the intersection of race, class and gender, renewed student activism, family memory and experiences of migration and displacement. There are brief descriptions of works by each artist: Jannie Achecar, Pilar Aguero, Olivia Armas, Carolyn Castaño, Julia Colmenares, Elizabeth Gomez, Ana Fernandez, Erika Hannes, Christina Huizar, Sue Lopez, Vanessa Montiel, Rosa Perez, Monica Prabba Pilar, Rosa María Valdez, Conchita Villalba, and Lucia Villegas.

Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist and cultural critic, who wrote extensively on Chicano/Latino art.This essay was included in the catalogue for the group exhibition she curated at the Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco in 1995, year of its 25th anniversary. For several reasons, indeed, the exhibition was noteworthy. It was the second in a series of exhibitions that formed part of the (Re) Generation Project, an initiative with the goal of training the next generation of Latino artists, curators, archivists, educators, and arts administrators. It was the first to foreground the art of Chicana/Latinas and to situate it not only as part of the continuum from the Chicano Movement artists, but also to ascribe current Chicana/Latina art its own aesthetic heterogeneity and art historical space.