This anthology provides an overview of the history and theory of Chicano/a art from the 1960s to the present, emphasizing the debates and vocabularies that have played key roles in its conceptualization. In Chicano and Chicana Art—which includes many of Chicano/a art's landmark and foundational texts and manifestos—artists, curators, and cultural critics trace the development of Chicano/a art from its early role in the Chicano civil rights movement to its mainstream acceptance in American art institutions. Throughout this teaching-oriented volume they address a number of themes, including the politics of border life, public art practices such as posters and murals, and feminist and queer artists' figurations of Chicano/a bodies. They also chart the multiple cultural and artistic influences—from American graffiti and Mexican pre-Columbian spirituality to pop art and modernism—that have informed Chicano/a art's practice. Contributors. Carlos Almaraz, David Avalos, Judith F. Baca, Raye Bemis, Jo-Anne Berelowitz, Elizabeth Blair, Chaz Bojóroquez, Philip Brookman, Mel Casas, C. Ondine Chavoya, Karen Mary Davalos, Rupert García, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Shifra Goldman, Jennifer A. González, Rita Gonzalez, Robb Hernández, Juan Felipe Herrera, Louis Hock, Nancy L. Kelker, Philip Kennicott, Josh Kun, Asta Kuusinen, Gilberto “Magu” Luján, Amelia Malagamba-Ansotegui, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Dylan Miner, Malaquias Montoya, Judithe Hernández de Neikrug, Chon Noriega, Joseph Palis, Laura Elisa Pérez, Peter Plagens, Catherine Ramírez, Matthew Reilly, James Rojas, Terezita Romo, Ralph Rugoff, Lezlie Salkowitz-Montoya, Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino, Cylena Simonds, Elizabeth Sisco, John Tagg, Roberto Tejada, Rubén Trejo, Gabriela Valdivia, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Victor Zamudio-Taylor

"This is the first book solely dedicated to the history, development, and present-day flowering of Chicana and Chicano visual arts. It offers readers an opportunity to understand and appreciate Chicana/o art from its beginnings in the 1960s, its relationship to the Chicana/o Movement, and its leading artists, themes, current directions, and cultural impact." "The visual arts have both reflected and created Chicano culture in the United States. For college students - and for all readers who want to learn more about this subject - this book is an ideal introduction to an art movement with a social conscience." --Book Jacket.

Chicano-Chicana Americana is a cultural history of Mexican Americans in film, television, and theater. Through biographical sketches of performers such as Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Robert Beltran, and Lupe Ontiveros, this work asserts Mexican Americans’ proper place in the national narratives of our collective imaginary. Conveying a multicentered, polycultural America, this book shows us intriguing performers in bit parts who steal the scene and redefine what it means to be American. Each biographical chapter analyzes an underappreciated actor, revealing their artistic contributions to U.S. common culture. Their long-shot careers tell a tale of players taking action with agency and fighting for screen time and equal opportunity despite disadvantages and differential treatment in Hollywood. These dynamic and complex individuals altered cinematic representations—and audience expectations—by surpassing stereotypes. The book explores American national character by showing how ethnic Mexicans attained social and cultural status through fair, open competition without a radical realignment of political or economic structures. Their creative achievements demanded dignity and earned respect. Anthony Macías argues that these performances demonstrated a pop culture pluralism that subtly changed mainstream America, transforming it from the mythological past of the Wild West to the speculative future of science fiction.

DIVThe first full-length survey of contemporary Chicana artists/div

In Biennial Boom, Paloma Checa-Gismero traces an archeology of contemporary art biennials to uncover the processes that prompted these exhibitions to become the global art world’s defining events at the end of the twentieth century. Returning to the early post-Cold War years, Checa-Gismero examines the early iterations of three well-known biennials at the borders of North Atlantic liberalism: the Bienal de La Habana, inSITE, and Manifesta. She draws on archival and oral history fieldwork in Cuba, Mexico, the US/Mexico borderlands, and the Netherlands, showing how these biennials reflected a post-Cold War optimism for a pacified world by which artistic and knowledge production would help mend social, political, and cultural divisions. Checa-Gismero argues that, in reflecting this optimism, biennials facilitated the conversion of subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms that were legible to a nascent cosmopolitan global elite—all under the pretense of cultural exchange. By outlining how early biennials set the basis for what is now recognized as “global contemporary art,” Checa-Gismero intervenes in previous accounts of the contemporary art world in order to better understand how it became the exclusionary, rarified institution of today.

"Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of longtime Bay Area artist Mesa-Bains. Presenting work from the entirety of her career for the first time, this exhibition, which features nearly 60 works in a range of media, including fourteen major installations, celebrates Mesa-Bains's important contributions to the field of contemporary art locally and globally. For over forty-five years, Mesa-Bains has worked to bring Chicana art into the broader American field of contemporary art through innovations of sacred forms such as altares (home altars), ofrendas (offerings to the dead), descansos (roadside resting places), and capillas (home yard shrines). She expanded her installations from domestic spaces to include laboratories, library forms, gardens, and landscapes, focusing attention on the politics of space to highlight colonial erasure of the preexisting and still-surviving cultural differences in colonized Indigenous and Mexican American communities. Many of these works offer a feminist perspective on the domestic life of immigrant and Mexican American women across different historical periods--most notably the four-part installation series Venus Envy, which was created over multiple decades and will be displayed in its entirety for the first time at BAMPFA. Standing at the juncture of cultural diversity, environmentally centered spirituality culled from ancestral non-Western worldviews, and intersectional feminism, Mesa-Bains has been heralded as one of the most prominent voices in feminist Chicanx art of her generation."--

A curated selection of key texts and artists' voices exploring US Latinx art and art history from the 1960s to the present. A Handbook of Latinx Art is the first anthology to explore the rich, deep, and often overlooked contributions that Latinx artists have made to art in the United States. Drawn from wide-ranging sources, this volume includes texts by artists, critics, and scholars from the 1960s to the present that reflect the diversity of the Latinx experience across the nation, from the West Coast and the Mexican border to New York, Miami, and the Midwest. The anthology features essential writings by Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, and Central American artists to highlight how visionaries of diverse immigrant groups negotiate issues of participation and belonging, material, style, and community in their own voices. These intersectional essays cut across region, gender, race, and class to lay out a complex emerging field that reckons with different histories, geographies, and political engagements and, ultimately, underscores the importance of Latinx artists to the history of American art.

Winner, Best Multiauthor Nonfiction Book, International Latino Book Awards, 2019 With contributions from a wide array of scholars and activists, including leading Chicana feminists from the period, this groundbreaking anthology is the first collection of scholarly essays and testimonios that focuses on Chicana organizing, activism, and leadership in the movement years. The essays in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activisim and Feminism in the Movement Era demonstrate how Chicanas enacted a new kind of politica at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and developed innovative concepts, tactics, and methodologies that in turn generated new theories, art forms, organizational spaces, and strategies of alliance. These are the technologies of resistance documented in Chicana Movidas, a volume that brings together critical biographies of Chicana activists and their bodies of work; essays that focus on understudied organizations, mobilizations, regions, and subjects; examinations of emergent Chicana archives and the politics of collection; and scholarly approaches that challenge the temporal, political, heteronormative, and spatial limits of established Chicano movement narratives. Charting the rise of a field of knowledge that crosses the boundaries of Chicano studies, feminist theory, and queer theory, Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activisim and Feminism in the Movement Era offers a transgenerational perspective on the intellectual and political legacies of early Chicana feminism.

Beginning in the 1970s Chicana and Chicano organizers turned to community radio broadcasting to educate, entertain, and uplift Mexican American listeners across the United States. In rural areas, radio emerged as the most effective medium for reaching relatively isolated communities such as migrant farmworkers. And in Washington’s Yakima Valley, where the media landscape was dominated by perspectives favorable to agribusiness, community radio for and about farmworkers became a life-sustaining tool. Feminista Frequencies unearths the remarkable history of one of the United States’ first full-time Spanish-language community radio stations, Radio KDNA, which began broadcasting in the Yakima Valley in 1979. Extensive interviews reveal the work of Chicana and Chicano producers, on-air announcers, station managers, technical directors, and listeners who contributed to the station’s success. Monica De La Torre weaves these oral histories together with a range of visual and audio artifacts, including radio programs, program guides, and photographs to situate KDNA within the larger network of Chicano community-based broadcasting and social movement activism. Feminista Frequencies highlights the development of a public broadcasting model that centered Chicana radio producers and documents the central role of women in developing this infrastructure in the Yakima Valley. De La Torre shows how KDNA revolutionized community radio programming, adding new depth to the history of the Chicano movement, women’s activism, and media histories.

The Mexican and Chicana/o residents of San Diego have a long, complicated, and rich history that has been largely ignored. This collection of essays shows how the Spanish-speaking people of this border city have created their own cultural spaces. Sensitive to issues of genderÑand paying special attention to political, economic, and cultural figures and eventsÑthe contributors explore what is unique about San DiegoÕs Mexican American history. In chronologically ordered chapters, scholars discuss how Mexican and Chicana/o people have resisted and accommodated the increasingly Anglo-oriented culture of the region. The bookÕs early chapters recount the historical origins of San Diego and its development through the mid-nineteenth century, describe the ÒAmerican colonizationÓ that followed, and include examples of Latino resistance that span the twentieth centuryÑfrom early workersÕ strikes to the United Farm Workers movement of the 1960s. Later chapters trace the Chicana/o Movement in the community and in the arts; the struggle against the gentrification of the barrio; and the growth of community organizing (especially around immigrantsÕ rights) from the perspective of a community organizer. To tell this sweeping story, the contributors use a variety of approaches. Testimonios retell individual lives, ethnographies relate the stories of communities, and historical narratives uncover what has previously been ignored or discounted. The result is a unique portrait of a marginalized population that has played an important but neglected role in the development of a major American border city.