Chicana art

This essay examines the grassroots feminist zine Flor y Canto, published by the East LA Chicana collective Mujeres de Maíz (MdM). This submission-based publication consists of poetry and visual art by women of color. Often associated with third wave feminism, feminist zines are credited for being the vehicle of expression for third wave feminist thought. Although Flor y Canto presents many of the characteristics common in feminist zines, MdM also draws on a Chicana feminist epistemology grounded in Indigenous worldviews to denounce the gender status quo. MdM adopts a politicized spirituality influenced by Mesoamerican conceptions of art and poetry that understands these art forms as healing, transformative, and connected to the divine. This essay argues that MdM employs this framework in their zine to make a larger critique of patriarchy and gender violence. They interrupt Western notions of art and use an Indigenous spiritual epistemology to redefine art and artists. Using the altar as a framework, this essay analyzes the poetry and art in Flor y Canto as an offering on an altar to illustrate how Chicanas deploy their artivism to speak against gender violence and ultimately heal from this trauma.

El Munduo Zurdo 6, Edited by Sara A. Ramírez, Larissa M. Mercado-López,  and Sonia Saldívar-Hull

Gloria Anzaldúa asserts, “Border art is an art that supersedes the pictorial. It depicts both the soul of the artist and the soul of the Pueblo. It deals with who tells the stories and what stories and histories are told” (“Border Arte” 62). Anzaldúa calls this form of visual narrative “autohistoria,” a form that goes beyond the traditional self-portrait or autobiography to tell the artist’s personal story and includes their cultural history (62). By analyzing the work of nepantleros and nepantleras currently living, working, and creating in the borderlands, I highlight Anzaldúa’s theory in praxis, where artists live in “the locus of resistance, of rupture, of implosion and explosion,” where through their work, borderland artists “[put] together fragments and [create new assemblages]” of the realties they live in (49). At the center of this essay is borderland nepantlera Celeste De Luna, whose haunting images of anchor babies, detention centers, check points, and Aztec deities speak directly to Anzaldúa’s nepantla theory as a threshold of transformation. The border as a “historical and metaphorical site” is an occupied site where border artists strive to decolonize space through their art (63), and thus, De Luna’s work is a prime example of the ways in which nepantleras decolonize narratives, stirring political consciousness. Through her recognition of the systems at play that change the trajectory of her work and her family’s life, De Luna’s work is an autohistoria that demonstrates a refusal to remain silent about a shifting social political landscape that implicates all of those living in and trapped within the borderlands.