IV.1.4 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1061662
Exhibiting an indefatigable fighting spirit, the writings of Shifra M. Goldman (1926–2011) excel at the social history of art. This document exemplifies her approach applied to Chicano art, a cause that she championed beginning in the late 1960s. Written during the heyday of the Chicano movement, this essay by the Los Angeles-based American critic and art historian represents an early attempt to define Chicano art from a sensitive outsider’s perspective. Chicano art, for Goldman—best known for her work on the politics and policies of Latin American and Latino art exhibition, collection, and study in the United States—is indeed a complex, bilingual visual expression embedded somewhere between Mexican and American cultures. She originally published the essay at Santa Ana College (Santa Ana, CA) in 1974, and it was later included in Chicano Art History: A Book of Selected Readings [Jacinto Quirarte, ed., (San Antonio: Research Center for the Arts and Humanities/University of Texas, San Antonio, 1984), 83–84], from which this transcription was made.
REFLECTED IN ALL LITERATURE dealing with “Chicano Art” is the nagging controversy (not to be resolved here by any means) concerning what constitutes Chicano art and, by extension, just what is a Chicano. Various definitions have been offered: some say the term Chicano comes from a contraction of “Chihuahua” (a state in northern Mexico) and “Tejano” (Texan) adopted by Mexican residents of Texas; others say it is a shortened term for Mexicans in the United States. Perhaps the most accurate definition is sociological rather than etymological: “. . . the word Chicano, in the past a pejorative and class-bound adjective, has now become the root idea of a new cultural identity for our people . . . [it] signals a rebirth of pride and confidence.”1
Historically the Chicano is a product of double-Mestizaje [intermingling]. The original Mestizo (fusion of indio-español-negro) resulted from a violent collision of cultures in sixteenth-century Mexico, and their interpenetration. The modern Mestizo, living in an area he considers “conquered Mexico” (the southwest United States), encountered a further collision with the Anglo-industrial-technical-complex, urbanized in cities and sprawling over the land in great agribusinesses. Out of this was born the bilingual, bicultural Chicano who has not yet come to total terms with either Mestizaje or Chicanizaje.2
What is Chicano art? It is the final realization, in graphic form, that the human ingredients in the famous “melting pot” of the U.S. have failed to melt; that the total homogenization foreseen in the early twentieth century has not taken place. The blended, de-culturalized All-American did not materialize and it has been belatedly recognized that such a process was perhaps neither possible nor desirable. By most evidence, not only have Chicano, Black and Asian Americans of the last decade shown few signs of homogenization, albeit they have repudiated the prospect as an impoverishment of their own rich heritages. What has actually taken place might be called “syncretization”—defined by Webster as “the reconciliation of conflicting beliefs; the process of growth through coalescence of different forms,”—with its implicit proposition that conflicting contraries are held in a state of suspension which may, under certain circumstances, dissolve and fly apart.
This sense of reconciled conflict informs Chicano thought and art. “I paint,” says Malaquias Montoya, “because of my daily confrontations with life.”3 [And he reinforces:] “I was made to feel ashamed of the positive things I thought I had—cuentos, brujas, curanderos, fantastic folklore that I identified with. The symbols that we knew were forced back so we had to create new ones.”4 Esteban Villa and Gilbert Luján also reflect the spirit of confrontation. “Primero,” says Villa, “I want to say that I paint and draw as a Chicano. All my observations on life are definitely seen and felt as a Chicano.”5 [He also adds:] “And what we are trying to do. . . through our art, is to bring it to their attention, that we do exist, that we are here and not only do we exist but we also have a culture of our own.”6 Says Luján, in turn: “People have been unable to accept that Chicano Art is a reflection of the entire Chicano experience, because they have projected certain stereotyped notions into the concept, and in so doing, denied it intrinsic value and validity.”7
Chicano visual imagery also reflects its Mestizaje. Chicano culture, Chicano art, seems to be like a merger of that “Que viene de México (which comes from-México) and contemporary American society—a kind of marriage of the two.”8 We find commingled, like a visual bilingualism, pyramids, skulls and calaveras, the Virgin of Guadalupe, eagles and jaguars, feathered serpents, masks, La Llorona [The Weeping Lady], blazing suns, colonial churches, the “low rider” Chevy, motorcycles, frame houses and gardens, billboards, drive-in movies, freeways, Vietnam, striking farm-workers, beer cans, and American flags. Styles vary widely, from the Indigenismo of pre-Columbian forms to Pop Art artifacts to Mexican mural social-realism to total abstraction. Correspondingly we may find a philosophical stance that ranges from Individualism to Pan-Americanism to Internationalism according to the expressive needs, intellectual construction, and temperament of the individual artist.
In spite of the seeming heterogeneity of Chicano art there seems to be a preponderance of work that addresses itself to communication—a goal that has been partially lost to sight in the esoterica of mainstream U.S. art. A sense of community, of affirmation, of protest, of idealism, of concern with the human condition—whether in the barrio or in the world—makes itself manifest in the work of many artists and affects not only the content of their art, but its graphic artists are dedicated to reaching a mass audience by painting on outside walls or creating duplicate silk-screens, woodcuts and lithographs. In the words of Charles Alma-raz, “He [the Chicano artist] must make an art that is cheap, simple, but alive and relevant; an art for gente [people] who can’t afford art—like a corrido (popular song). Let us make an art that is not for us, not for museums, not for posterity, and certainly not for art’s sake, but for mankind.”9
Because “syncretism” is not a passive, but a dynamic process of growth, the panorama of Chicano art has a great sense of vitality and energy. Sometimes a particular work may seem unpolished or a statement uncertain. It should be recalled that Chicano art, as an entity, is going through the birth process; it has a sense of “becoming” rather than “being.” Like Chicano society, the Chicano artist has not yet come to total terms with his Chicanizaje and is still groping between his Indian heritage and European artistic education for a new synthesis and a new symbolism that precisely defines and gives shape and expression to a unique life experience. Whatever is viable, new and human in the arts comes through the same door.
1
Manifesto from “El Plan de Santa Barbara,” La Raza 1, no. 1 (May 1970).
2
Raymond V. Padilla, “Freireismo and Chicanizaje,” EI Grito. A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought (Berkeley, CA: Quinto Sol Publications) (Summer 1973).
3
El Grito, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring 1969).
4
Lucy Tapia, “Montoya and the Art of Survival,” La Voz del Pueblo (June 1972). Editor’s translation: short-stories, witches, folk healer.—Ed.
5
El Grito (Spring 1969).
6
Quoted by Jacinto Quirarte, Mexican American Artists (Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 1973), 135.
7
Gilbert Luján, “El arte de Chicano,” Con Safos no. 7 (Winter 1971): 11.
8
Esteban Villa, quoted by Jacinto Quirarte (1973).
9
“Notes on an Aesthetic Alternative,” personal manifesto (1973).