Publisher: Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum.
As an artist and critic, Amalia Mesa-Bains contributed to the historicization and theorization of Chicano art that occurred during the early 1990s. She wrote this introduction for the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Art of the Other México: Sources and Meaning/Artes del otro México: Fuentes y significados, which was organized by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago in 1993 and featured the work of twenty Chicano artists including Carmen Lomas Garza, Esther Hernandez, Luis Jiménez, John Valadez. On one level, Mesa-Bains narrates a traditional cultural history of Chicanos with this text, while on another level, she proposes a post-structuralist way of understanding Chicano identity as something both fluid and grounded in history and tradition. Towards this purpose, she makes use of concepts such as mapping, difference, and subversion that helped post-colonial scholars theorize identity as openly problematic during the early 1990s. (Tomás Ybarra-Frausto and Homi Bhabha are among the theorists she cites.) So, while she argues that Chicano culture is based in traditional Mexican cultural sources like the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Malinche, and popular forms like ex-votos and altars, Mesa-Bains also argues that, in the process of deploying these forms as acts of resistance to dominant U.S. culture, Chicanos subvert and parody the meanings of these sources. Ybarra-Frausto’s concept of rasquachismo, parody, and satire are essential, Mesa-Bains shows, to the earnest, politically motivated work Chicano artists have been producing in the United States since the 1960s.
