Borderlands Critical Subjectivity in Recent Chicana Art

Graphic expressions of gender politics can be found in the most recent efforts of Chicana artist groups such as L.A. Coyotas, Mujeres de Maíz, and Las Comadres Artistas. While many of these artists' prints and posters illustrate shared experiences of racial and gendered oppression, their mutual emphasis on women's bodies—veiled, masked, shrouded, or denuded—makes this body of work distinctive. The works' focus on the surface of bodies is meant to particularize the effects of hegemonic powers as they literally wear their difference on their persons. The artists' work represents the forging of an activist consciousness rooted in the lived cultural experiences of marginalized people. As border region artists, they work to re-member their bodies and to depict assertive active subjects reclaiming personal and public terrains.

Turbulent public spaces and the changing social context of living Latino, Mexican American, and Chicano realities within the major border state of California include, in the words of Chicana scholar Antonia Darder, "social marginalization, exploitation, cultural invasion, powerlessness, systemic violence... and the experience of having been driven out of the dominant political spaces and relegated to a subordinate position." ¹ The ongoing political and artistic activism of Chicanos throughout the past four decades has been waged in the face of overwhelming social inequities in education, labor practices, and political representation. Recent studies on race relations indicate that throughout most of U.S. history, subordinate cultures have received little political legitimacy in governmental structures and in cultural discourses. The authors of one major study find, "However democratic the United States may have been in other respects, with respect to racial and cultural minorities it may be characterized as having been to varying degrees despotic for much of its history." ²

Claiming Spaces

The Chicana artistic groups discussed in this essay have formed specifically in order to educate and activate themselves and other women on methods of overcoming systemic structures of oppression. They struggle against cultural imperialism, racism, and sexism. As they become politically organized, these women use art as a means of making visible what they have come to call the strategies of cultural imperialism. In the words of one of the artists, Patricia Valencia, "We make visible the tactics that disempower us: the usurpation of natural resources and land, the destruction of economic and agricultural self-sufficiency, the irrelevant and foreign educational environments, the interference with generational transmission of spiritual knowledge, the devaluing of language, of labor, of women and of youth." ³ Community and social justice constitutes the thesis of their art.

For example, community justice concerns are well represented in Yolanda Lopez's Woman's Work is Never Done: Dolores Huerta , 1995 (fig. 1). The poster commemorates the efforts of Delores Huerta, cofounder and first vice president of The United Farms Workers Union (UFW), and the efforts of other female laborers to organize in protest against unsafe working conditions and unjust wages in California's abundant agricultural regions. Huerta's work with the self-help group known as the Community Service Organization represents a legacy of Latina/Chicana social activism that reaches back to the 1950s. Yolanda Lopez's art pictures a class of women at risk for being marginalized, women who because of their migrant-labor status are relegated to a borderlands means of existence. Fearful of detection by immigration authorities, the women are forced to maintain a nearly-invisible profile while working in the United States. This profile of seclusion allows U.S. agricultural industries to benefit from migrant labor while dishonoring wage, labor, and health laws.

In Yolanda Lopez's print, female agricultural workers wear heavy veils, gloves, and masks in a futile effort to protect their bodies from harsh and even lethal chemicals used in agriculture. The shrouds render these women anonymous. The risk is that we, the viewers, read the images of these women as unidentifiable, insignificant, or as nonentities. However, in the background of the...