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The Iconography of Chicano Self-Determination: Race, Ethnicity, and Class
Abstract
In several cities in the Southwest and Midwest with sizable enclaves of Chicanos, there are to be found considerable numbers of images that have become leitmotifs of Chicano art. In their ubiquity, these motifs demonstrate that the Chicano phase of Mexican-American art (from 1965 to the 1980s) was nationally dispersed, shared certain common philosophies, and established a network that promoted a hitherto nonexistent cohesion. In other words, it was a movement, not just an individual assembly of Mexican-descent artists. In what follows, Chicano art is examined as statements of a conquered and oppressed people countering oppression and determining their own destiny, though not all the producers of these images necessarily saw their production in the political way they are framed below. Examples have been chosen specifically to show how, in response to exploitation, artists have taken an affirmative stance celebrating race, ethnicity, and class.
... However, although the lines may be fine, they are of great importance. Nationality exists by virtue of birth in a particular place or country and is concrete enough not to be questioned (Goldman, 1990). More specifically, a national group is considered when it is politically independent belonging to a sovereign state or nation (Goldman, 1990). ...
... Nationality exists by virtue of birth in a particular place or country and is concrete enough not to be questioned (Goldman, 1990). More specifically, a national group is considered when it is politically independent belonging to a sovereign state or nation (Goldman, 1990). Ethnicity, however, is not an individual construct but the residue of societal processes that may have taken generations to evolve (Goldman, 1990). ...
... More specifically, a national group is considered when it is politically independent belonging to a sovereign state or nation (Goldman, 1990). Ethnicity, however, is not an individual construct but the residue of societal processes that may have taken generations to evolve (Goldman, 1990). What is important about ethnicity is that is that it must be consciously maintained especially as it is immersed in a dominant national culture that threatens to overwhelm it (acculturate or completely assimilate), while simultaneously being separated by years or generations from its national source (Goldman, 1990). ...
An accurate account of U.S. history is that of imperialism and colonization that includes the systematic extermination of indigenous populations, development of capitalism supported by slavery, and the exploitation of labor of oppressed populations, all supported by racist ideologies and practices. These ideologies and practices have been perpetuated and continue to plague the current state of colonized peoples. History has perpetuated itself and colonized peoples remain in a state of siege in which identities have been lost and cultures, traditions, and knowledge appropriated—all contributing to the loss of peace and balance within our lives and communities. This has been my journey in discovering culture and self-determination and reclaiming my identity. In doing so, I explain identity as a process of action and self-reflection that contributes to the discovery of self-healing, peace and balance within our individual selves. This enables us to embark on the lifelong commitment to the struggle for true liberation of our oppressed communities and revolutionary change within the corrupt political, economic, and social structures that maintain our oppression. Artwork, community activism and dance reveal themselves as essential practices that contribute to the discovery of identity and healing processes which Identity(why caps) are the backbone to being able to make this commitment and “walk in beauty.”
... They signaled the cooptation of a traditionally radical art form that had been prev alent in the surrounding neighborhoods for over a decade prior to the 1984 Games (Schrank, 2009;Coffey, 2012). Whereas murals once acted as a form of visual articulation and contestation for some of the most marginalized communities making claims to space (Goldman, 1990;Latorre, 2008;Rosette, 2009), the expressed intent of the Olympic murals was to show that 'art is not a form of propaganda but an instrument of truth, an opportunity to put aside differences and rejoice in being alive. [They] seek neither to preach nor to dictate a hierarchy of taste' (Fitzpatrick, 1984: 248). ...
Drawing on the examples of the neo-Zapatista movement and the pro-immigrant marches of 2006, this article analyzes images of Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican national hero intricately tied to postrevolution nation rebuilding, as used within transnational movements that "de/territorialize" his image. At the same time that people in these movements have felt the negative effects of globalization, they have also benefited from certain recent technological developments associated with globalization, especially "technoscapes" and "mediascapes" that have launched the "local" discourse of Revolutionary nationalism across borders and onto the world stage through a variety of national and international (cyber)spaces, creating transnational heterotopias or "other spaces" for cultural and political expression that transgress national boundaries. Analyzing examples of Zapata imagery from the post-revolutionary era (1920s-1930s) against the neo-Zapatista movement of the 1990s and 2000s and the 2006 migrant protests in the United States, the paper explores the ways in which the formation of transnational "imagined communities" can destabilize traditional concepts of the nation-state.
In lowriding culture, the ride is many things—both physical and intellectual. Embraced by both Xicano and other Indigenous youth, lowriding takes something very ordinary—a car or bike—and transforms it and claims it. Using the idea that lowriding is an Indigenous way of being in the world, artist and historian Dylan A. T. Miner discusses the multiple roles that Aztlán has played at various moments in time, from the pre-Cuauhtemoc codices through both Spanish and American colonial regimes, past the Chicano Movement and into the present day. Across this “migration story,” Miner challenges notions of mestizaje and asserts Aztlán, as visualized by Xicano artists, as a form of Indigenous sovereignty. Throughout this book, Miner employs Indigenous and Native American methodologies to show that Chicano art needs to be understood in the context of Indigenous history, anticolonial struggle, and Native American studies. Miner pays particular attention to art outside the U.S. Southwest and includes discussions of work by Nora Chapa Mendoza, Gilbert “Magú” Luján, Santa Barraza, Malaquías Montoya, Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl, Favianna Rodríguez, and Dignidad Rebelde, which includes Melanie Cervantes and Jesús Barraza. With sixteen pages of color images, this book will be crucial to those interested in art history, anthropology, philosophy, and Chicano and Native American studies. Creating Aztlán interrogates the historic and important role that Aztlán plays in Chicano and Indigenous art and culture.
This article examines the Latino occupational tradition of adorning workplaces with murals featuring ludic, sentimental, and religious iconography. It explores the emergent and recurrent meanings of this collectively shared symbolism as it relates to humor, group remembrance, the expression of visual piety, vandalism, and municipal regulation. In particular, it focuses on how these artistic forms inspire the expression, negotiation, and renewal of individual and group identity through social interactions. Copyright
Each spring during the 1960s and 1970s, a quarter million farm workers left Texas to travel across the nation, from the Midwest to California, to harvest America's agricultural products. During this migration of people, labor, and ideas, Tejanos established settlements in nearly all the places they traveled to for work, influencing concepts of Mexican Americanism in Texas, California, Wisconsin, Michigan, and elsewhere. InThe Tejano Diaspora, Marc Simon Rodriguez examines how Chicano political and social movements developed at both ends of the migratory labor network that flowed between Crystal City, Texas, and Wisconsin during this period. Rodriguez argues that translocal Mexican American activism gained ground as young people, activists, and politicians united across the migrant stream. Crystal City, well known as a flash point of 1960s-era Mexican Americanism, was a classic migrant sending community, with over 80 percent of the population migrating each year in pursuit of farm work. Wisconsin, which had a long tradition of progressive labor politics, provided a testing ground for activism and ideas for young movement leaders. By providing a view of the Chicano movement beyond the Southwest, Rodriguez reveals an emergent ethnic identity, discovers an overlooked youth movement, and interrogates the meanings of American citizenship. © 2011 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
I suppose people will use [maricón] in jest. But I don’t know if that makes it any less offensive. . . People will say many things in private. People swear. But there is a difference when you display it.
On September 15, 2012, Toronto Blue Jays shortstop Yunel Escobar took to the diamond of Rogers Centre armed with all the accoutrements of a professional baseball player facing off against his team’s adversaries, the Boston Red Sox: oiled glove in hand, sunglasses to deflect the intrusive stadium lighting, and eye black to withstand the sun’s glare. However, inside the covered stadium dome there would be no interfering sunlight, no meddlesome reflective surfaces, and no need to evade natural elements impinging on his sight. Escobar entered the arena facing throngs of spectators, teammates, and sports journalists bearing a brash message written in the greasy smudging beneath his eyes. It read: “Tú ere[h] maricón [You are a faggot]” (see Figure 1).
His face inscribed with a defamatory Spanish slur, Escobar became the subject of intense scrutiny for what some defended as a “joke” in poor taste. Social media sports bloggers picked up Escobar’s photograph and circulated it widely. Many mainstream news outlets questioned the premeditated nature of the act and whether the anti-gay pictorial statement merited punishment. Major League Baseball investigated and finally suspended the shortstop for three games. At a poorly organized press conference, Escobar apologized and yet explained that maricón in his native Cuba could not be accurately translated into English—that it was a “word without meaning” (qtd. in Duque). He explained that the statement was aimless, harmless, and directed at no one in particular. His defense of cultural mistranslation was puzzling; he struggled to clarify its ordinary use among Cubans as a culturally specific turn of phrase that was nevertheless empty of historical, social, or political significance. In the eyes of Escobar, maricón meant nothing.
Yet his bodily articulation said otherwise. His facial self-inscription in the visual field marks slippage in body, image, and text. His visibility is contingent upon a dialectic of the hypermasculine macho and its oppositional other, the abject maricón. Thus, in order to read Escobar’s machista virility, the public had to rely upon a repertoire of unseen images removed from the baseball arena and beyond the bounds of the athlete’s photocomposition. His portrait, resonating with broader sports imagery of athletic heroism, redirects our vision to the blind spot of this image, to that “blind field” in Roland Barthes’s assessment where our “partial vision” (57) grasps at that which exists beyond the photo frame, “triggered” (55) by the punctum—Escobar’s hailing of the invisible figure of the faggot. This raises the question: if he is not a maricón, then who is?
Tom Szczerbowski, photograph of Yunel Escobar (2012), photograph. Image courtesy: Getty Images.
In this essay, I interrogate the “archival sight” of two competing though interrelated image archives of heteronormative Latinidad and Eurocentric gay male visual culture. Drawing on what José Esteban Muñoz calls “race myopias/queer blind spots” (Disidentifications 8), in which queer of color subject positions confront and disidentify with shortsighted exclusions in race and sexuality identity discourse, separating one from the other, I call attention to the partial vision engendered by image archives granting racial and sexualized subjects exclusive visibility, yet reinforcing queer racialized blindness. It is necessary to develop a disidentifying visual analytic to read through these manifold blind spots and discern how, in this case, maricón abjection is contested and reclaimed through oppositional rereadings and image productions. The result is a cultural theory of maricón iconography, which I term maricónography.
Embracing the hybrid linguistic nature of Latina/o transcultural and transborder subjectivities through the conjoining of maricón and iconography, maricónography is a shared sensibility and subversive line of image production that empowers culturally distinct ways of being and seeing maricónes. Through recognizing the offensive hostility inlaid with this term, mariconographic visuality answers with an equally combative, unapologetic, and flamboyant set of tactics in self-, social, and collective display...
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