Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this 1981 transcript of an interview with Chicana muralist Judy Baca, artist Diane Neumaier discusses Baca’s artistic and political process as she reveals the steps involved in the implementation of a citywide mural project in Los [...]

This document is an essay by Jacinto Quirarte outlining key moments in the history of modern Mexican and Mexican-American art in the United States. It begins with a discussion of the Mexican School, detailing central figures, sociopolitical [...]

This document is an editorial page outlining the motivations for the creation of the magazine Tin-Tan. It cites its primary focus as addressing a critical absence in the print media of publications dedicated to the concerns of Mexican-Americans and [...]

This document is a transcript of a conference presentation given by Chicano artist and writer José Montoya. Referring to the title of the conference [Chicano Art: Resistance in Isolation "Aquí Estamos y no nos vamos" (1981)], Montoya proposes that [...]

Raquel Tibol wrote this statement introducing the exhibition Artistas Mexico Americanos de San Francisco, California [Mexican American Artists from San Francisco, California] held in Mexico in 1987. It begins by suggesting the existence of [...]

This document is a review by Alfred Frankenstein of The Fifth Sun: Contemporary/Traditional Chicano and Latino Art exhibition at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum in 1977. Frankenstein begins by describing the show, detailing the [...]

This document is a short essay by Art Hernandez describing what Chicano art is. It begins with a history of the early derogatory uses of the term “Chicano” and several descriptions of Chicano art that incorporate individual styles, art school [...]

This document involves a brief article published in the Los Angeles Times in late 1973 that reports on the early developments in Chicano muralism, focusing on the large-scale mural project at the Estrada Courts Housing Project in East L.A. It begins [...]

Written by César Augusto Martínez, one of the most active members of the Chicano art movement of the 1970s, “Arte Chicano” discusses the implications of the term “Chicano” (in Part One) and the status of Chicano art in the mainstream art [...]

“Brown Paper Report” is the manifesto of the Tejano [Texan-Chicano] San Antonio-based art collective Con Safo, written by artist Mel Casas in 1971. This short text presents the concepts of Chicano and “Brown Vision,” as well as the etymology [...]

In this 1986 essay, art historian Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino discusses Mexican poet Octavio Paz’s (mis)representation of 1940s Mexican-American subculture, including the zoot suits worn by Chicano people. The writer states that in his book [...]

In "Bits and Pieces: The Mexican American Folk Aesthetic," authors Suzanne Seriff and José Limón argue that a common aesthetic pervades all aspects of Mexican American culture including folk art, food, music, games, and rituals. Seriff and Limón [...]

This document is a partial transcript of a conversation between Chicano scholars Amalia Mesa-Bains and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto that took place at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, California, in October 1999, in which they discuss broad developments [...]

In this document, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto provides a brief overview of the conditions and events that precipitated the development of Chicano art, beginning with the origins of the Chicano political movement of the 1960s. He suggests that El Movimiento [...]

This document is a chapter from a book on “Hispana” and “Hispano” artists from the New Deal Era (1930s and ‘40s). In it, art historian and scholar Tey Marianna Nunn focuses on the lives and works of several artists working under the Works [...]

This document by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto is concerned with the practice of altar-making as a spiritual and cultural endeavor that blends influences from European, African, and indigenous American sources. Typically characterized as a kind of “folk [...]

This document is the transcript of an interview between arts writer Meredith Tromble and Chicana visual artist Amalia Mesa-Bains. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship awardee, Mesa-Bains talks about her motivations as an artist, and her particular [...]

This document is a statement by Carlos Almaraz in which it is outlined his approach to his own artistic practice as well as his ambitions for the creation of a broader program of social engagement on the part of Chicano artists. The document [...]

This review by Washington Post staff writer Paul Richard is of the 1988 group exhibition, Ceremony of Memory: Expressions in Spirituality among Contemporary Hispanic Artists, organized by the Washington Project for the Arts, in Washington, DC. [...]

This essay, written by art historian Tere Romo, traces the use of the image of La Malinche (Hernan Cortés’s translator and mistress) by Mexican and Chicana/o artists, beginning with the indigenous codices and continuing into contemporary art. She [...]

In this document, Professor Amelia Malagamba explores how Afro-Mexican icons and symbols, as well as sociopolitical issues in the African-American community, have been transformed into what she terms “cultural capital.” A “cultural capital”as [...]

In this document, Vernon Hunter presents a brief artist biography of New Mexican wood-carver Patrocinio Barela. Hunter discusses Barela’s early development as an artist, noting that he began his career making conventional carvings of saints before [...]

In this interview of art historian Tomás Ybarra-Frausto by professor Michael Dear, the latter asks a series of questions related to Ybarra-Frausto’s impressions and experiences of the Chicano cultural project since its development in the 1960s as [...]

This document is a transcript of a conference presentation given by art historian Shifra M. Goldman. In her talk, she defends the validity of contemporary Latin American and Chicano art as fields of study for art historians, criticizing detractors [...]

This document by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto details the founding of La Galería de la Raza in San Francisco Mission District in July 1970. Conceived as a space for the development and promotion of Chicana/o visual artists, the Galería also functioned as [...]

This document is an essay by Shifra M. Goldman in which she proposes that contemporary art criticism is in a state of crisis, a situation she attributes to the “problematics of modernism.” Goldman argues that art criticism’s internal turmoil is [...]

In this statement, Gilbert Sanchez Lujan, a founding member of the Los Angeles Chicano art collective Los Four, recounts his personal history as a Chicano artist and an advocate for Chicano art. He cites his curatorial practice in an exhibition of [...]

In this document, art historian and professor Margarita Nieto discusses the 1989 exhibition, Los Angeles Latino Artists, in which fifteen Los Angeles-based Latino artists reflect on the experience of the city in their production. She suggests that [...]

In this article, Raquel Tibol reviews the exhibition Artistas Mexico Americanos de San Francisco, California held at Loteria Nacional in Mexico City’s in 1987 and featuring the works of 29 Mexican-American artists, including Ray Patlan, Carmen [...]

In this essay, Luis Rodríguez argues for a continued redefinition of Chicano art based on a dialogue previously initiated in articles by Malaquías Montoya and Lezlie Salkowitz-Montoya and Shifra Goldman. Rodríguez remarks on the historical moment [...]

This is the second essay in a two-part series on the relationship of Chicano art to mainstream contemporary currents in the United States at the time of its publication (1982). Robert C. Buitrón argues against the notion that Chicano art is static [...]

This document is a brief article on the state of Chicano art at the time of its publication (1982). Robert C. Buitrón argues that Chicano art is inherently difficult to define, acknowledging the multiple and multifaceted historical and artistic [...]

In this text, Guillermo Gómez-Peña declares the new dominant U.S. culture “border culture,” and assesses how Latino culture has infiltrated U.S. culture writ large. U.S. culture has, he argues, become fundamentally multicultural, and the “ [...]

In this 1989 article published in the magazine/journal Newcity, art journalist and freelance writer, Jeff Huebner, explores the misconceptions of defining contemporary Latino art within the framework of an American art market. In his interviews of [...]

In this interview David Torrez discusses his devotion to the arts of his Mexican-American heritage, his involvement in founding organizations such as the Mexican Historical Society of Saginaw, Michigan, and his many artistic projects. Among these [...]

In this article, John Weber considers pioneering Chicano artist Ray Patlán’s work with teenagers creating a mural in a Latino neighborhood of Chicago during the summer of 1971. The youths were part of the Community Mural Project that, beginning in [...]

Mario Castillo, the distinguished Chicano/Mexican multimedia creator, writes in this artist statement that his work has always dealt with birth, life, death, and the afterlife, and that he has always tried to relate it to his Mexican heritage. He [...]

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 [...]

In this essay, Octavio Ignacio Romano argues that three main philosophical orientations shape contemporary Mexican American identity, and that their formation occurred in Mexico during the era of the Mexican Revolution. Romano identifies these [...]

In this document, Luis Valdez argues that as inheritors of a colonized consciousness, it is difficult for Chicano writers to articulate a cohesive cultural identity. He suggests that this difficulty can perhaps be negotiated through an embrace of the [...]

In this essay from 2004, historian Rick A. López argues that the Hull-House in Chicago played an important role in promoting a Mexican nationalist aesthetics among the Mexican migrant community that settled in the city in the 1920s. Behind the [...]

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 essay by Armando Rascón was included in the catalogue of the exhibition Xicano Progeny, curated by Rascón and held at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, CA in 1995. According to the author, one of the main objectives of Xicano Progeny was to [...]

This is a published letter sent to the Sunday arts editor of the Washington Post by Sally J. Andrade in response to a review by Paul Richard, from December 3, 1995, of the Carmen Lomas Garza exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum. After introducing [...]

This document is the program brochure for the 1979 Conferencia Plástica Chicana [Chicano Visual Arts Conference], which consists of an introduction, schedule, the presenters, listings, and credits. In the brief, bilingual introduction, the [...]

This essay by Jeanne D’Andrea serves as an introduction to the 1975 exhibition of the same name, Chicanismo en el arte. The author provides information on the organization of the juried exhibition, the art forms included, and short descriptions of [...]

In this document, Guisela Latorre examines the emergence of a Chicana muralist program that developed in response to the unequal treatment of women within national Chicano political and artistic movements, which often regarded their participation as [...]

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 document Shifra Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto outline an extensive model for the study of a social history of Chicano art, beginning with a consideration of the cultural theories of Ernesto Galarza and anthropologists Americo Paredes and [...]

In this essay, David R. Maciel explores the influence of Mexican visual production on Chicano art and the renewed concern of Chicano artists for Mexican history and cultural identity. Maciel begins by discussing the history of the link between Mexico [...]