Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In “The Pachuco and Other Extremes,” the Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat Octavio Paz grapples with the issues related to the search for the national identity in post-revolutionary Mexico and, more broadly, the existential relationship [...]

The Cuban-American artist Paul Sierra begins this lecture, delivered at the Terra Museum of Art in Chicago, by declaring that even though he has been asked to speak about the “sources of Hispanic Art,” he has decided to speak instead about [...]

In this introductory essay, French journalist Marcel Niedergang provides an overview of twentieth-century Latin American economic history. The author begins by situating Latin America within its geographic location, briefly touching on the cultures [...]

José A. Torres Martinó, a Puerto Rican artist, comments that in all countries made up of immigrants, when the immigrants are seen as a threatening social group, they are tagged with fairly uncomplimentary nicknames. However, the writer believes [...]

In this essay, Guillermo Gómez-Peña discusses a major paradigm shift by which North/South relations have become more central to the United States, and how immigration has redefined the culture of the country. He states that this has created a new [...]

In this profile of the Chicago artist Marcos Raya, Jeff Huebner describes the people, places, and situations that have shaped Raya’s life and influenced his work, as well as the trajectory by which he gained national recognition. Extensively [...]

Indeed, “Redefining Displacement”, an interdisciplinary and multicultural project in the visual and performance arts, explores how individuals and communities negotiate displacement through the arts. In this instance, what is at stake is the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In this essay the historian Augusto Mijares criticizes the positivist theory that blames the caudillismo [leadership of ‘caudillos’ or local strongmen] trend spawned by the wars of independence on the particular idiosyncrasy of our Latin American [...]

Curator Alejandro Anreus gives a close reading of an ongoing series by Juan Sánchez: “Rican/struction.” The title “Rican/struction” refers to a term that salsa musician Ray Barretto coined to describe processes utilized by Diasporic Puerto [...]

Victor Alejandro Sorell’s essay is a comprehensive study addressing more than one hundred twentieth-century Chicano and Mexican artists and collectives active between the 1960s and 1990s, including film and performance practitioners and activists, [...]

In this text, the artist Mirentxu Ganzaraín discusses the inadequacy of terminology in use in the United States to describe and categorize the art by artists whose ethnic backgrounds are other than normative ones. As a North American of Chilean and [...]

Appropriating headlines from South Florida newspapers, artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle makes a statement on immigration and the United States’ policies towards western hemisphere nations during the crucial period of 1979–1981, when increased [...]

In this text, artist Bibiana Suarez’s makes a personal statement about her experience as a self-imposed Puerto Rican exile in Chicago, her negotiations of living “on the edge of two cultures,” and her artistic exploration of feelings of loss, [...]

This catalogue documents a project created by the Chicago-based artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and twelve students in the Adult Education Program at the Emerson House Community Center in Chicago. Introductory text explains that this project was [...]