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Introduction 1. Goldman, “How, Why, Where, and When,” 23. 2. Bonfil Batalla, Utopía y revolución, 13. 3. Native American scholar Angela Cavender Wilson often uses the word indigenous as a marker of legitimate native identity because it implies that the person defined by the concept has a symbiotic and inherent connection to the land. Wilson, “Reclaiming Our Humanity,” 85. Other writers, like Ward Churchill, define indigenous communities as those groups of peoples or nations that originally inhabited a particular territory prior to the arrival or invasion of what he calls “settlerstates .” Under this definition, European populations such as the Irish and the Welsh in Britain and the Basques in Spain can be regarded as indigenous groups who have struggled against overpowering nation-states. Churchill, Struggle for the Land, 372. 4. See Anzaldúa, “La Herencia de Coatlicue,” 63–73. 5. Storey, Introduction to Cultural Theory, 3. 6. During the nineteenth century, paintings and sculptures depicting Aztec history and its heroes rendered in a classical style saturated the salons of Mexico City’s Academia San Carlos. Moreover, during the Reforma period of this nation, portraits of Zapotec president Benito Juárez and his criolla wife were utilized to encourage national unity by Notes promoting mestizaje. For more Juárez imagery and other Indigenist imagery in nineteenth-century Mexico, see Widdifield, Embodiment of the National. 7. Scheben, “Indigenismo y modernismo,” 115. 8. Castillo, “Postmodern Indigenism,” 36. 9. The idea that art can construct its spectators was inspired in this text by Emily Hicks’s assertion in 1993 that writing constructs its readers. Hicks, “Textual Migration,” 18. 10. The relationship between art and sociopolitical accountability is one that Native American and Chicana/o artists have repeatedly supported and upheld throughout their careers. For example, Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva has stated that accountability comes with the territory of being an artist and being in possession of an indigenous identity: “A Native filmmaker has . . . the accountability built onto him. The white man doesn’t have that. . . . That’s where we’re at as Indian filmmakers.” Quoted in Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics, 1. 11. The subfield of connoisseurship in art history has often operated jointly with modern art discourses in building up the importance of the artist. The Grove Dictionary of Art, published periodically by Oxford University Press, defines connoisseurship as a technique of attribution that “involves the evaluation, distinction and appreciation of the work’s quality and, above all, the ability to determine the time and place of its execution and, as far as possible, the identity of the artist.” “Connoisseurship,” Grove Art Online (Oxford University Press, http://www.groveart.com, accessed 6 June 2004). In the absence of a signature or appropriate archival material revealing the name of an artist for any given artwork, a connoisseur may step in and examine formal elements such as the shape of a brushstroke or the way a face is rendered in order to detect a particular artist’s “hand.” When connoisseurs determine that a work of art was indeed the creation of a famous artist, the historical and monetary value of that piece changes dramatically. In these cases, authorship of an artwork supersedes any intrinsic artistic value the work might have, thus also contributing to the growing commodification of art in the current market system. 12. Ybarra-Frausto, “Arte Chicano,” 56. 13. Bonfil Batalla, Utopía y revolución, 33. 14. Justice, “Seeing (and Reading) Red,” 109. 15. Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics, 32. 16. Caso, Indigenismo, 21. Published during a time when the nationalist project of the Revolution was under public scrutiny and serious criticism, this book can be regarded as a defense of the failed Indigenist projects led by the Mexican government. For example, when addressing the lack of federal attention paid to certain indigenous communities, Caso argued that Indians generally “live in the mountains or in inaccessible places,” 22; my translation. 17. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 56. 18. During an interview, Chicana artist Yolanda López told me that her grandparents crossed the border between Mexico and the United States in 1918 and that they lost five children to malnutrition and dysentery in the process. It was not until the civil rights era, however, that she realized that millions of Mexican Americans shared that common experience and that her grandparents’ ordeal was part of a larger mass migration of Mexicans escaping the instability of the revolutionary period. Though painful, this realization gave many Chicanas/os a sense of solidarity with one another and allowed...

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