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14 qr 5 HemisphericGenealogiesofthe NewWorldBaroque Early Modern New World Baroque and Diasporic Baroques in Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Art and Culture During the early years of the Cold War, big American cars functioned like the Baroque Cathedrals of the Counter-Reformation. . . . Today, lowrider cars combine and exacerbate old and modern Baroque sensibilities , transforming American cars into sexualized moving altars of the American dream gone amok. —Rubén Ortiz Torres, “Cathedrals on Wheels” Hip-hop might be a contemporary Baroque. . . . Think about it: the jewelry, the shiny clothing, the elaborately painted fingernails, all of the gold and platinum—it is fundamentally about excess and about an appetite for Baroqueness. —Luis Gispert, in Luis Gispert: Loud Image Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes’s novel La frontera de cristal (1995; The Crystal Frontier), which is set on the U.S.-Mexico border, begins with the impressions of a young, aristocratic criolla from Mexico City on her first visit to the border region of northern Mexico.1 Prepared by her Blue Guide tour book, which tells her that “there is absolutely nothing of interest ” (Crystal Frontier 3) to be found in el norte, Michelina indeed sees nothing but the absence of the elite Hispanic architecture of the Mexican capital she calls her home: “She could see nothing. Her gaze was captured by a mirage: the distant river and, beyond it, golden domes, glass towers, highway cloverleafs like huge stone bows. But that was on the other side of the crystal frontier. Over here, below—the guidebook was right—there was nothing” (4). A study in contrasts, Fuentes’s novel highlights (to the point of stereotype) familiar differences between the United States’ and Mexico’s adjacent border region, on the one hand—modern, wealthy, and successful , but cultureless, faceless, and without history—and the “deep” Mexico 244 Hemispheric Genealogies of the New World Baroque further south, on the other—poorer and less developed, but rich in national identity and cultural heritage. El norte’s deficiency is summed up in an architectural image. The emblems of modernity and progress, the glass towers of modern U.S. skyscrapers, are contrasted with the colonial baroque cathedrals of central Mexico, the monuments of the New World baroque. In Tamaulipas, Michelina observes, “the Baroque came this far, to the very edge of the desert—to this point and no farther” (9). This chapter aims to prove Michelina (and, by extension, her real-world counterparts among baroque scholars) wrong. For the baroque has indeed traveled far into North America, migrating north from Latin America and the Caribbean. It has entered the United States through the cultural memories and aesthetic sensibilities of migrants from Mexico, Cuba, and other Latin American countries, who imported the Catholic baroque into alien territory, the domain of Anglo-American Protestantism. But where in the nation founded by Protestants who built churches with bare white walls does the ornate Latino neobaroque manifest itself? As this chapter will establish, a neobaroque sensibility is present across contemporary U.S. Latino/a art. More generally, it permeates U.S. Latino/a popular visual culture, underpinning folk art phenomena such as Mexican American folk shrines, including home altars and yard shrines, as well as Chicano lowrider culture. The Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsivaís and the Chicano scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto have identified baroque currents in twentieth-century Mexican popular arts and handicrafts (artesanías) and Chicano vernacular styles (rasquachismo), respectively.2 The art historian Lynette M. F. Bosch affirms that Cuban American exiles have trafficked the Latin American baroque across the Straits of Florida, thereby expanding “the permeable borders of Barroquismo.”3 I propose to deepen these scholars’ insights into a diasporic Latino baroque sensibility now visible in the United States more than ever. It is found especially in Mexican and Mexican American folk arts favoring flamboyant display, gaudy colors, and delirious ornamentation, which, according to Monsivaís, “recall the Churrigueresque’s ultraelaborate church facades and altarpieces” (182). Expanding the frame of analysis from ethnic and national to pan-Latino and hemispheric scales, this chapter discusses popular baroques in U.S. Latino/a visual culture and art by placing them within their proper context, the genealogy of the New World baroque. It presents a transhistorical and transhemispheric exhibit in the form of a triptych, juxtaposing the historical New World baroque with close readings of two sets of contemporary U.S. Latino baroques: first, the flamboyant folk baroque manifested in Chicano lowriders, as well as the lowrider-oriented videos of the...

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