Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This art magazine article reviews the 10th Bienal de La Habana organized around the theme “Integration and Resistance in the Global Era.” It exhibits works in all media that explore the effects of globalization on economies, natural [...]

This document is a transcript of the contribution to a panel discussion by the art historian, Amalia Mesa-Bains, in which she addresses the ways in which the social circumstances experienced by Chicanos in the United States have influenced their [...]

In this document, Amalia Mesa-Bains details the development of the Galería de la Raza [Gallery of the People], an important San Francisco cultural institution established in 1970 in the midst of the Chicano Movement. Mesa-Bains describes the ways in [...]

This document is an essay by Amalia Mesa-Bains in which she argues in favor of developing a new critical language for the evaluation of Chicano and Latino art rooted in the formative experiences of the artists throughout the communities from which [...]

In this lecture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Puerto Rican-born artist Bibiana Suarez presents an overview of her work and considers the role of race and ethnicity in her art. She begins the lecture by explaining her ethnic background and [...]

In his essay, scholar and curator Chon Noriega explores the process of writing alternative histories through three case studies in Chicano visual arts. He presents each example as the result of an engagement with both identity politics and the [...]

This is a review by Domingo Nuño on Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s collection of performance texts, essays, poetry, and graphics, entitled The New World Border. Nuño considers the ways in which Gómez-Peña’s volume “deliberates on . . . changing [...]

In this article, members of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) respond to several misrepresentations of the group and factual errors about its genesis carried out by former member Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Citing quotes from [...]

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 [...]

In this essay, Michael Crockford discusses how the artistic practices of Yolanda Lopez combine feminism, activism, and community building. He observes that Lopez challenges indeed lowly depictions of Mexican-Americans in the United States by [...]

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 [...]

New World [Dis] Orders & Peripheral Strains: Specifying Cultural Dimensions in Latin American and Latino Studies is highly complex, largely due to its jargon laden dense text, but it is an indispensable and provocative document. Through words and [...]