The Heart of the Mission: Latino Arts and Politics in San Francisco by Cary Cordova (review)

Cary Cordova’s book The Heart of the Mission: Latino Arts and Politics in San Francisco showcases the evolution of the Chicano arts community in San Francisco, California, in the 1940s and 1950s into the epicenter of Latino cultural production and political mobilization from the 1960s to the present. To do this, it presents the artists who imbued el mestizaje into their work for the purpose of reclaiming their multiethnic heritage and inspiring resistance to European and North American hegemony. The text also tells a compelling story. By the late 1960s, the Latino struggle for visibility in the Mission District became inextricably linked to the civil rights movement in the US and also to the student movements and popular liberation movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. During the 1980s, cultural production by Latinos critiqued US intervention in place likes Nicaragua and El Salvador. Beginning in the 1990s, Latino artists pushed back against the invasion of the Mission District by the internet companies and the predominantly white professionals in their employ. In this way, the book presents the Mission District as a local revolutionary community that engages hemispheric issues.

The “new, local aesthetic” (1) that emerged in the Mission District was as profoundly diverse as the artists who created it. Luis Cervantes fused “Mexican American and Pre-Colombian cosmology, philosophy and concepts” (59) into his mandala paintings. In her poster art and portraits, Yolanda López reconfigured the form, figure, and shape of the Virgen of Guadalupe. The iconic serigraph produced by Ester Hernández exposed the unjust distribution of the burdens and benefits of a global capitalist single market economy. In their murals, a cooperative of female painters challenged patriarchal norms that marginalize women and devalue their cultural production. The book boasts many other Latino artists whose work communicates their outright refusals to submit to dominant cultural practices.

The Heart of the Mission: Latino Arts and Politics in San Francisco makes good on its promise to demonstrate “a pan-Latino identity among diverse cultures” that unites Latino artists and activists in their struggle for social justice. Additionally, it elaborates the “transnational solidarities and cross-cultural convergences” that undergird artistic production and political mobilization by Latinos in the Mission District (65). The text, like the art that is celebrated in it, challenges dominant epistemological frameworks that are rooted in the logics of white settler colonialism.

It also exhibits an impressive collection of cultural celebrations and Día de Muertos figures prominently among them. Emerging in the 1970s in San Francisco, California, Día de Muertos showcases art that preserves the past and indicts the present. The altar, or ofrenda, remembers the loss not just of loved ones but also of history, culture, and identity as a consequence of colonialism. By the 1980s, artists represented the disease and death brought on by the AIDS epidemic and the loss of life and liberty as a consequence of US intervention in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Every year, Día de Muertos celebrates the shared history and ethnic identity among Latinos. The public parades and performances are meant to be viewed as radical enunciations of power and biting repudiations of Eurocentric norms that govern mourning practices. As the book demonstrates, memory and mourning operate in tandem during the yearly celebration. When the living, collectively and publicly, call forth the dead and the disappeared, they also call for accountability from responsible agents.

Storytelling is the heart and soul of Cordova’s painstaking research. She interviews more than thirty-five Latino artists and activists. Also, she listens to recordings and reads transcriptions of oral histories stored in the collections of the Smithsonian Institute’s Archives of American Art, among others (6). Then, she seamlessly weaves these personal accounts of identity formation, artistic production, and political mobilization into the historical fabric of the text. Her work not only makes the Latino artists and activists in the...