Locating A Transborder Archive of Queer Chicana Feminist and Mexican Lesbian Feminist Art

Queer US Chicana and Latina activists are members of the transborder lesbian feminist publics that have collectively articulated and debated lesbian feminist political frameworks in Latin America since the 1980s. Art-based encuentros are particularly productive sites of transborder dialogue among US Latina and Latin American lesbian feminists. These encuentros enable exciting collaborations and cross-fertilizations in the realm of activism and art. This article examines two series—Lupe and Sirena in Love (1999) by the queer Chicana feminist artist Alma López, and La Virgen de las Panochas (2010) by the Mexico City-based lesbian feminist art collective Las Sucias—as a means to trace aesthetic and political dialogues that emerge from transborder lesbian feminist encuentros. The artworks paired in this analysis register an important resonance between queer Chicana feminist and Mexican lesbian feminist visual and performative strategies through their appropriation, and most significantly, their queering of a transborder archive of politicized Virgin of Guadalupe art. I suggest that by queering the transborder archive of revolutionary vírgenes that I have identified, Alma López and Las Sucias situate themselves within and against the borders of Mexican and Chicana/o social movement rhetorical dialogues, while grounding their feminist aesthetics in a genealogy of transborder feminist art.