VI.1.6 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 847115
In this seminal text, U.S.-born cultural critic and scholar of Chicano art Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (born 1938) outlines the development of Chicano art since the 1960s. In his view, Chicano art is closely connected to and reflective of El Movimiento—the parallel Chicano political project—whose first critical task was to repudiate readings of Mexican Americans as mere receptors rather than broad generators of culture. His text situates the iconography, styles, and media of Chicano artistic production as an extension of a larger, ongoing project integrating multiple aesthetic traditions that have shaped Chicano art and have kept it from becoming a monolith. Ybarra-Frausto introduces his notion of the underdog aesthetics of rasquachismo (underdog-ism); popular among los de abajo (the lower classes or the underdogs), rasquache implies an adaptable framework that transfers the aesthetics of everyday Chicano culture to the visual arts. This text is a reworking of the author’s unpublished manuscript “Califas: California Chicano Art and Its Social Background” (1986–88). Sections have been excerpted in Chicano Expressions: A New View in American Art [(New York: INTAR Latin American Gallery, 1986)] and The Mural Primer [(Venice, CA: Social and Public Resource Center, 1987)]. The passages presented here are from a version published in 1995 [Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art,” Gerardo Mosquera, ed., Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (London, and Cambridge, MA: The Institute of International Visual Arts and MIT Press, 1995), 168–82].
BORN IN THE TUMULTUOUS DECADE OF THE 1960s, Chicano art has been closely aligned with the political goals of Chicano struggles for self-determination. As an aesthetic credo, Chicano art seeks to link lived reality to the imagination. Going against mainstream cultural traditions of art as escape and commodity, Chicano art intends that viewers respond both to the aesthetic object and to the social reality reflected in it. A prevalent attitude towards the art object is that it should provide aesthetic pleasure while also serving to educate and edify. In its various modalities Chicano art is envisioned as a model for freedom, a call to both conscience and consciousness.1
Although struggles for social, political and economic equality have been a central tenet of Chicano history since 1848, the efforts to unionize California farm workers launched by Cesar Chavez in 1965 signaled a national mobilization, known as La Causa [The Cause], among people of Mexican descent in the USA. The Chicano movement, or El Movimiento, was an ideological project closely aligned with the tactics, formulations and beliefs of the civil-rights movement; the rise of Black Power; the political agenda of the New Left; the onset of an international student movement; and liberation struggles throughout the Third World. In retrospect, the Chicano movement was extremely heterogeneous, cutting across social class and regional and generational groupings.
Impelled by this mass political movement, Chicano artists, activists and intellectuals united to articulate the goals of a collective cultural project that would meld social practice and cultural production. A primary aim of this project was to surmount strategies of containment by struggling to achieve self-determination on both the social and aesthetic planes. It was the Chicano movement— through various political fronts such as the farm workers’ cause in California, urban civil-rights activities, the rural land grant uprisings in New Mexico, the student and anti-war movements on college campuses, the labor struggles of workers without documentation, and the rise of feminism—that gave cogency to the cultural project.
Artists were integrated into the various political fronts of El Movimiento in unprecedented numbers and in significant ways. They organized, wrote the poems and songs of struggle, coined and printed the slogans, created the symbols, danced the ancient rituals and painted ardent images that fortified and deepened understanding of the social issues being debated in Chicano communities.
An urgent first task was to repudiate external visions and destroy entrenched literary and visual representations that focused on Mexican Americans as receptors rather than active generators of culture. For the creative artist—whether painter dancer, musician or writer—this meant appropriation of his or her own self. The novelist Tomas Rivera further defines the enterprise: “The invention of us by ourselves is in actuality an extension of our will. Thus, as the Chicano invents himself he is complementing his will. Another complement. This is of great importance because these lives are trying to find form. This development is becoming a unifying consciousness. The thoughts of the Chicano are beginning to constantly gyrate over his own life, over his own development, over his identity, and as such over his own conservation. Chicano literature has a triple mission: to represent and to conserve that aspect of life that the Mexican American holds as his own and at the same time destroy the invention by others of his own life. That is—struggle, conservation, and invention.”2
This triad of conservation, struggle, and invention became a theme of Chicano literature. It served also as a core assumption in the production of energetic new forms of visual culture.
Sustained polemics by artists’ groups throughout the country established the forms and content of Chicano art. Though few collective manifestos were issued, aesthetic guidelines can be gleaned from artists’ statements, community newspaper accounts and oral interviews. Typical of this florescence of socially engaged artistic consciousness was the formation of the Mala Efe group (Mexican American Liberation Art Front) in the San Francisco Bay area. The artist Esteban Villa recalls: “It was for this reason that in around 1968. . . the era of the Grape Boycott [the Delano Grape Strike] and the Third World Strike3 [January 1969] in Berkeley [that we] would meet regularly to discuss the role and function of the artist in El Movimiento. At first our group was composed mainly of painters and we would bring our work and criticize it. Discussions were heated, especially the polemics on the form and content of revolutionary art and the relevance of murals and graphic art. Posters and other forms of graphics were especially discussed since many of us were creating cartelones [posters] as organizing tools for the various Chicano mitotes [spontaneous ‘happenings’] in the Bay Area. . . . Our group kept growing and soon included local poets and intellectuals like Octavio Romano. In March of 1969 we decided to hold an exhibition in a big old frame house on 24th Street here in Oakland. The spacious but slightly rasquache [underdog] house had been christened ‘La Causa.’ The exhibition was called Nuevos Simbolos for La Nueva Raza [New Symbols for the New Race] and attempted to visually project images of ‘el hombre nuevo’: the Chicano who had emerged from the decolonization process. Opening night was a todo dar [fun] with viejitos, wainitos and batos de la calle [old people, drunkards, and vagrants] walking in, checking it out and staying to rap. Algunos poetas locales [some local poets] read their work and there was music and plática muy sabrosa [good conversation]. We all sensed the beginning of an artistic rebirth: un nuevo arte del pueblo.”4
This “new art of the people” was to be created from shared experience and based on communal art traditions. Necessarily, a first step was to investigate and give authority to authentic expressive forms arising within the heterogeneous Chicano community. In opposition to the hierarchical dominant culture, which implicitly made a distinction between “fine art” and “folk art,” attempts were made to eradicate boundaries and integrate categories. An initial recognition was that the practices of daily life and the lived environment should be primary constituent elements of the new aesthetic. In the everyday life of the barrio art objects are embedded in a network of cultural sites, activities and events. “The way folk art fits into this cultural constellation reveals time-tested aesthetic practices for accomplishing goals in social, religious and economic life. And these practices are ongoing; they do not point to an absolute standard or set of truths.”5 Inside the home, in the yard, and on the street corner—throughout the barrio environment—a visual culture of accumulation and bold display is enunciated. Handcrafted and store-bought items from the popular culture of Mexico and the mass culture of the USA mix freely and exuberantly in a milieu of inventive appropriation and re-contextualization. The barrio environment is shaped in ways that express the community’s sense of itself, the aesthetic display projecting a sort of visual biculturalism.
As communal customs, rituals and traditions were appropriated by Movimiento artists, they yielded boundless sources of imagery. The aim was not simply to reclaim vernacular traditions but to reinterpret them in ways useful to the social urgency of the period.
. . .
Beyond grounding themselves in vernacular art forms Movimiento artists found strength from, and recovered meaning sedimented in, consistent group stances such as rasquachismo.6 Rasquachismo is neither an idea nor a style, but more of a pervasive attitude or taste. Very generally, rasquachismo is an underdog perspective—a view from los de abajo [the lower classes or the underdogs]. It is a stance rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability, yet ever mindful of aesthetics.
In an environment in which things are always on the verge of coming apart (the car, the job, the toilet), lives are held together with spit, grit and movidas. Movidas are whatever coping strategies one uses to gain time, to make options, to retain hope. Rasquachismo is a compendium of all the movidas deployed in immediate, day-to-day living. Resilience and resourcefulness spring from making do with what is at hand (hacer rendir las cosas). This utilization of available resources makes for syncretism, juxtaposition and integration. Rasquachismo is thus a sensibility attuned to mixtures and confluence; communion is preferred over purity. Pulling through and making do are not guarantors of security, so things that are rasquache possess an ephemeral quality, a sense of temporality and impermanence—here today and gone tomorrow. While things might be created using whatever is at hand, attention is always given to nuances and details; appearance and form have precedence over function.
In the realm of taste, to be rasquache is to be unfettered and unrestrained, to favor the elaborate over the simple, the flamboyant over the severe. Bright colors (chillantes) are preferred to somber, high intensity to low, the shimmering and sparkling over the muted and subdued. The rasquache inclination piles pattern on pattern, filling all available space with bold display. Ornamentation and elaboration prevail and are joined with a delight in texture and sensuous surfaces. A work of art may be rasquache in multiple and complex ways. It can be sincere and pay homage to the sensibility by restating its premises, i.e. the underdog world view actualized through language and behavior as in the dramatic presentation La Carpa de los Rasquaches by Luis Valdez. Another strategy is for the artwork to evoke a rasquache sensibility through self-conscious manipulation of materials or iconography. One thinks of the combination of found materials and the use of satiric wit in the sculptures of Ruben Trejo, or the manipulation of rasquache artifacts, codes and sensibilities from both sides of the border in the performance pieces of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Many Chicano artists continue to investigate and interpret facets of rasquachismo as a conceptual lifestyle or aesthetic strategy.
The initial phase of the Chicano cultural project (circa the mid 1960s) was seminal in validating emancipatory communal practices and codifying the symbols and images that would be forcefully deployed in adversarial counter-representations. By that time visual artists had been well integrated into the various political fronts of El Movimiento, within which they were gestating a Chicano art movement that would be national in scope and develop outside the dominant museum, gallery and arts-publication circuit. Fluid and tendentious, the art produced by this movement underscored public connection instead of private cognition.
Artists continued to evolve un arte del pueblo that, inscribed in many areas of agitation, aimed to close the gap between radical politics and community-based cultural practices. The rural farm workers’ cause and the urban student movement are prime examples of this rapprochement.
La Causa—the farm workers’ struggle—was a grassroots uprising that provided the infinitely complex human essence necessary for creating a true people’s art. One of the early purveyors of campesino expression was the newspaper El Malcriado [The Ill-Bred]. Established primarily as a tool for organizing, the periodical soon came to function as a vehicle that promoted unity by stressing a sense of class-consciousness while building cultural and political awareness. In artistic terms El Malcriado lived up to its name by focusing on art forms outside the “high-art” canon, such as caricature and cartoons. The pervasive aesthetic norm was rasquachismo: a bawdy, irreverent, satiric and ironic world view.
In California, among the first expressions of this rasquache art were the political drawings of Andy Zermano, which were reproduced in El Malcriado from 1965 on. With trenchant wit Zermano created Don Sotaco [Mr. Shorty], a symbolic representation of the underdog. Don Sotaco is the archetypal rasquache, the dirt-poor but cunning individual who derides authority and outsmarts officialdom. In his cuttingly satirical cartoons Zermano created vivid vignettes that are a potent expression of campesinos’ plight. His drawings clearly point out the inequalities existing in the world of el patrón [the boss] and the agricultural worker. To a great extent these graphic illustrations of social relations did much to awaken consciousness. With antecedents in the Mexican graphic tradition of José Guadalupe Posada and José Clemente Orozco, the vivid imagery of Andy Zermano is a striking example of art created for a cause. . . .
Simultaneously with the cultural expression of the farm workers’ cause, a highly vocal and visible Chicano student movement emerged during the mid 1960s. Related to the worldwide radicalization of youth and inspired by international liberation movements—especially the Cuban Revolution, the Black Power movement and varied domestic struggles—the Chicano student movement developed strategies to overcome entrenched patterns of mis-education. Institutionalized racism was targeted as a key problem, and cultural affirmation functioned as an important basis for political organization.
Chicano culture was affirmed as a creative hybrid reality synthesizing elements from Mexican culture and the social dynamics of life in the USA. Scholars such as Octavio Romano published important essays debunking orthodox views of Chicano life as monolithic and ahistorical; Chicano culture, contrary to these official notions, was celebrated as dynamic, historical, and anchored in working-class consciousness.
Within the student movement art was assigned a key role as a main-tainer of human communication and as a powerful medium that could rouse consciousness. Remaining outside the official cultural apparatus, the student groups originated alternative circuits for disseminating an outpouring of artistic production. As in the nineteenth century, when Spanish-language newspapers became major outlets for cultural expression in the South West, contemporary newspapers functioned as purveyors of cultural polemics and new representations. Although varying in emphasis and quality, most student-movement periodicals shared a conscious focus on the visual arts as essential ingredients in the formation of Chicano pride and identity. For many readers it was their first encounter with the works of the Mexican muralists, the graphic mastery of José Guadalupe Posada, the Taller de Grafica Popular, and reproductions of pre-Columbian artifacts. Equally important, Movimiento newspapers such as Bronze, El Machete, El Popo, Chicanismo and numerous others published interviews with local Chicano artists while encouraging and reproducing their work.
Knowledge of the Hispanic-Native American art forms of the Southwest came from neither academic nor scholarly sources, but rather from elements within the movement such as El Grito del Norte, a newspaper issued from Española, New Mexico, launched in 1968. This journal had a grassroots orientation and placed emphasis on preserving the culture of the rural agrarian class. Often its articles included photographic essays focusing on local artisans or documenting traditional ways of life in the isolated pueblitos of northern New Mexico. Cleofas Vigil, a practicing santero [carver of saints] from the region, travelled widely, speaking to groups of artists. The carvers Patrocinio Barela, Celso Gallegos, and Jorge Lopez—all master santeros whose works were collected, documented and exhibited by Anglo patrons during the first part of the century—gained renewed influence within the budding associations of Chicano artists. Old and tattered exhibition catalogues, newspaper clippings, and barely legible magazine articles that documented their work were examined and passed from hand to hand to be eagerly scrutinized and savored. Primarily through oral tradition and the informal sharing of visual documentation Chicano artists became aware of a major ancestral folk art tradition. And aside from the Movimiento press, literary and scholarly journals such as El Grito and Revista Chicana Riqueña often published portfolios of artists’ works. All these alternative forces inserted art into life, propagating enabling visions of Chicano experience.
Asserting that Chicano art had a basic aim—to document, denounce, and delight—individual artists and artists’ groups resisted the formulation of a restricted aesthetic program to be followed uniformly. The Chicano community was heterogeneous, and the art forms it inspired were equally varied. Although representational modes became dominant, some artists opted for abstract and more personal expression. Artists in this group felt that internal and subjective views of reality were significant, and that formal and technical methods of presentation should remain varied.
By the early 1970s Chicano artists had banded together to create networks of information, mutual support systems and alternative art circuits. Regional artists’ groups such as the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) in Sacramento; the Raza Art and Media Collective in Ann Arbor, Michigan; the Movimiento Artistico Chicano (MARCH) in Chicago; the Con Safos group in San Antonio, Texas; and many others, persisted in the vital task of creating art forms that strengthened the will and fortified the cultural identity of the community.
With both militant and protective strategies, Chicano arts organizations developed and shared their art within a broad community context. They brought aesthetic pleasure to the sort of working people who walk or take the bus to work in the factories or in the service sector of the urban metropolis. In its collective character, in its sustained efforts to change the mode of participation between artists and their public, and, above all, as a vehicle for sensitizing communities to a pluralistic rather than a monolithic aesthetic, the Chicano alternative art circuit played a central and commanding role in nurturing a visual sensibility in the barrio. . . .
The barrio mural movement is perhaps the most powerful and enduring legacy of the Chicano art movement nationwide. Created and nurtured by the humanist ideals of Chicano struggles for self-determination, murals functioned as a pictorial reflection of the social drama. Reaching back to the goals and dicta of the Mexican muralists—especially the pronouncements of David Alfaro Siqueiros—in the mid 1960s Chicano artists called for an art that was public, monumental, and accessible to the common people. As in Mexico, the generative force of Chicano muralism was a mass social movement but the artists as a whole did not have the same kind of formal training as the Mexican muralists, and they fostered mural programs through an alternative circuit independent of official sanction and patronage.
For their pictorial dialogue, muralists used themes, motifs, and iconography that gave ideological direction and visual coherence to the mural programs. In the main the artistic vocabulary centered on the indigenous heritage (especially the Aztec and Mayan past); the Mexican Revolution and its epic heroes and heroines; renderings of both historical and contemporary Chicano social activism; and depictions of everyday life in the barrio. Internationalism entered this vocabulary via iconographic references to liberation struggles in Vietnam, Africa and Latin America, and motifs from cultures in those areas. The muralists’ efforts were persistently directed towards documentation and denunciation.
Finding a visual language adequate to depict the epic sweep of the Chicano movement was not simple. Some murals became stymied, offering romantic archaicizing views of indigenous culture, depicting Chicano life uncritically and portraying cultural and historical events without a clear political analysis. Successful mural programs, however, were highly significant in reclaiming history. As the community read the visual chronicles it internalized an awareness of the past and activated strategies for the future. Apart from its aesthetic content, muralism was important in actualizing a communal approach to the production and dissemination of art. Brigades of artists and residents worked with a director who solicited community input during the various stages of producing the mural. Through such collaborative actions, murals became a large-scale, comprehensive public education system in the barrio.
In retrospect it can be affirmed that Chicano art in the 1960s and 1970s encompassed both a political position and an aesthetic one. That art underscored a consciousness that helped define and shape fluid and integrative forms of visual culture. Artists functioned as visual educators, with the important task of refining and transmitting through plastic expression the ideology of a community striving for self-determination. A Chicano national consciousness was asserted by a revival in all the arts. Aesthetic guidelines were not officially promulgated but arose within the actual arena of political practice. As opposed to mainstream art movements, where critical perspectives remain at the level of the work (art about itself and for itself), the Chicano art movement sought to extend meaning beyond the aesthetic object to include transformation of the material environment as well as of consciousness.
The late 1970s and the 1980s marked a dynamically complex juncture for the Chicano cultural project. Many of its postulates and aims have come to fruition during this time. Three of these aims are:
1) The creation of a core of visual signs, a bank of symbols and images that encode the deep structures of Chicano experience. Drawing from this core of commonly understood iconography, artists can create counter-representations that challenge the imposed “master narrative” [grand récit] of elite art practice.
2) The maintenance of alternative art structures, spaces and forms. For more than two decades Chicano arts organizations have persisted in the arduous task of creating a responsive working-class audience for art. A principal goal of these efforts has been to make art accessible, to dispel its rarefied, elitist aura and especially to reclaim art from its commodity status with the ideal of returning it to a critical role within the social practices of daily living.
3) The continuation of mural programs. Although there has been a diminution in the number of public art forms such as murals and posters, what has been produced since 1975 is of deeper political complexity and superior aesthetic quality.
According to the muralist Judith Baca: “Later works such as The Great Wall of Los Angeles developed a new genre of murals which have close alliance with conceptual performance in that the overall mural is only one part of an overall plan to affect social change. Muralists such as ASCO (a performance group) began to use themselves as the art form, dressing themselves like murals and stepping down off walls to perform. Experiments with portable murals and new social content continue. There is a shift of interest from the process to the product. While fewer murals are being painted, they are of higher quality and the forms of image-making continue to be viewed as an educational process.”7
Such accomplishments are especially praiseworthy in that they transpired during a period of intense change in Chicano communities. The utopian buoyancy that sustained a national Chicano art movement has eroded. As the groundswell of collective political action has dispersed, as more Chicanos enter the professional class and are affected by the social mobility implied by that, and as public art forms have diminished in frequency, tracings of a new agenda of struggle have surfaced.
Given demographic data indicating that the number of people of Latin American descent in the USA is growing, and given sociological data indicating that Spanish-speaking groups remain definitely “other” for several generations, new cultural undercurrents among Chicanos call for an awareness of America as a continent and not a country. In the new typology an emergent axis of influence might lead from Los Angeles to Mexico City, then from there, to Bogotá, Lima, Buenos Aires, Managua, Barcelona, and back to the barrio. For artists, such new political and aesthetic filiations expand the field with hallucinatory possibilities. As the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña points out: “The strength and originality of Chicano-Latino contemporary art in the USA lies partially in the fact that it is often bicultural, bilingual and/or bi-conceptual. The fact that artists are able to go back and forth between two different landscapes of symbols, values, structures and styles, and/or operate within a ‘third landscape’ that encompasses both.”8
To-ing and fro-ing between numerous aesthetic repertoires and venues including mainstream galleries, museums and collections as well as alternative infrastructures created by El Movimiento, Chicano artists question and subvert totalizing notions of cultural coherence, wholeness and fixity. Contemporary revisions of identity and culture affirm that both concepts are open-ended and offer the possibility of making and remaking oneself from within a living, changing tradition.
In contemporary Chicano art no artistic current is dominant. Figuration and abstraction, political art and self-referential art, art of process, performance and video all have adherents and advocates. The thread of unity is a sense of vitality and continual maturation. The mainstream art circuit continues to uphold rigid and stereotypical notions in its primitivistic and folkloristic categorizations of “ethnic art.” This is an elite perspective that blithely relegates highly trained artists to a nether region in which Chicano art is inscribed in an imagined world that is a perpetual fiesta of bright colors and folk idioms—a world in which social content is interpreted as a cultural form unconnected to political and social sensibilities.
For the denizens of the arts establishment Chicano art is uneasily accommodated within two viewpoints. It can be welcomed and celebrated under the rubric of pluralism, a classification that permissively allows a sort of supermarket-like array of choices among styles, techniques and contents. While stemming from a democratic impulse to validate and recognize diversity, pluralism serves also to commodify art, disarm alternative representations and deflect antagonisms. Impertinent and out-of-bounds ethnic visions are embraced as energetic new vistas to be rapidly processed and incorporated into peripheral spaces within the arts circuit, then promptly discarded in the yearly cycle of new models. What remains in place as eternal and canonical are the consecrated idioms of Euro-centered art. Seen from another perspective, the power structure of mainstream art journals, critics, galleries and museums selectively chooses and validates what it projects, desires, and imposes as constituent elements of various alternative artistic discourses. In the case of “Hispanic” art, this selective incorporation often foregrounds artwork deemed “colorful,” “folkloric,” “decorative,” and untainted by overt political content. While these elements might be present in the artistic production of “Hispanic” artists, they do not necessarily cohere into consistent and defining stylistic features.
Belonging to a wealth of class-based and regional traditions, Chicanos in the USA have activated complex mechanisms of cultural negotiation, a dynamic process of analysis and the exchange of options between cultures. In an interconnected world system traditions are lost and found, and angles of vision accommodate forms and styles from First and Third World modernist traditions as well as from evolving signifying practices in the barrio. What is vigorously defended is a choice of alternatives.
In the visual arts this process of cultural negotiation occurs in different ways. At the level of iconography and symbolism, for example, the Chicano artist often creates a personal visual vocabulary freely blending and juxtaposing symbols and images culled from African American, Native American, European and Mestizo cultural sources. Resonating with the power ascribed to the symbols within each culture, the new combination emerges dense with multifarious meaning. Beyond symbols, artistic styles and art-historical movements are continually appropriated and recombined in a constant and richly nuanced interchange. Current Chicano art can be seen as a visual narration of cultural negotiation.
At present in the USA, entrenched systems of control and domination affirm and uphold distinctions between “us” and “them,” Dichotomies such as white/non-white, English-speaking/Spanish-speaking, the haves/the have-nots etc. persist and are based on social reality. We should not dissemble about this fact, but neither should we maintain vicious and permanent divisions or permit dogmatic closure. My own sense of the dialectic is that in the current struggle within the Chicano community for cultural maintenance and parity, there are two dominant strategies vying for ascendancy. On the one hand, there is an attempt to fracture the mainstream consensus with a defiant “otherness.” Impertinent representations counter the homogenizing desires, investments and projections of the dominant culture and express what is manifestly different. On the other hand, there is the recognition of new interconnections and filiations, especially with other Latino groups in the USA. Confronting the dominant culture leads to recognition that Anglos’ visions of Chicanos and Chicanos’ visions of themselves support and to an extent reflect each other.
Rather than flowing from a monolithic aesthetic, Chicano art forms arise from tactical, strategic and positional necessities. What Carlos Monsiváis has called “la cultura de la necesidad” [the culture of necessity] leads to fluid multi-vocal exchanges among shifting cultural traditions. Two consistent objectives of Chicano art have been to undermine imposed models of representation and to interrogate systems of aesthetic discourse, disclosing them as neither natural nor secure but conventional and historically determined.
Chicano art and artists belong within a multiplicity of aesthetic traditions, both popular and elite. Their task is to recode themselves and move beyond dichotomies in a fluid process of cultural negotiation. This negotiation usually reflects cultural change, variation by gender and region, and tensions with and among classes and groups of people, such as Mexican nationals or other ethnic minorities in the USA. In the dynamism of such a contemporary social reality, interests are culturally mediated, replaced and created through what is collectively valued and worth struggling for. The task continues and remains open.
1
My analysis parallels ideas in James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).
2
Tomas Rivera, Into the Labyrinth: The Chicano in Literature (Edinburg, TX: Pan American University, 1971).
3
The Third World Strike led by the UC Berkeley Third World Liberation Front in 1969 led to the creation of the university’s Ethnic Studies Department.—Ed.
4
Esteban Villa, taped interview in 1979, in possession of the author.
5
Kay Turner and Pat Jasper “La Causa, La Calle y La Esquina: A Look at Art Among Us,” in Art Among Us: Mexican American Folk Art of San Antonio (San Antonio, TX: San Antonio Museum Association, 1986).
6
See the catalogue Jesús Helguera, El Calendario Como Arte (Mexico City: Subsecretaría de Cultura/Programa Cultural de Las Fronteras, 1987).
7
Judith Baca, “Murals/Public Art,” in Chicano Expressions, (1986): 37.
8
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “A New Artistic Continent,” High Performance 9, no.3 (1986), 27.