The Chicano/a Photographic: Art as Social Practice in the Chicano Movement

While photography within the Chicano movement functioned as a tool of counternarrative or self-representation, California-based Chicano/a artists during this period also mobilized a photographic impulse across media. The concept of the Chicano photographic proposes that the practices, circulation, and idea of photography functioned in this context as inspiration for artwork in other media, as an archive of vernacular expression, as a conceptual device, and as documentation of process-based works. By examining four key practices or concepts in early Chicana/o cultural production—the alternative press, muralism, rasquachismo, and artists associated with the group Asco—this essay argues that the multidimensional mobilization of photography was central to the participatory and community-based foundations of early Chicano/a art. Approaching practices as being simultaneously visual and social in nature holds implications for the analysis of Chicana/o artwork and for its relationship to art history.