The text pays no attention to museums in Mexico or cross-border art institutions, and only glances at other museums of Latino, Mexican, or Mexican-American art in the United States, including those in New York City, Long Beach, and San Francisco. But it is only one such institution among many.
This is a wonderful institution, and the two chapters which Davalos devotes to it say some interesting things about it in relation to its audiences, local history, and the life stories of two curators who founded the museum. Unfortunately, Davalos does not enter into dialogue with the Mexican cultural critics and anthropologists - Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Nestor García Canclini, and Carlos Monsiváis above all - who might have complicated this analysis by pointing to how ideologies of mestizaje have worked in Mexican cultural institutions to support nationalist projects.ĭespite its title, this book rests on a narrow empirical base, describing in depth a single Mexican-American museum, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago. So for her, mestizaje is a libratory force. But Davalos has her own definition she understands mestizaje as a set of "representational practices" in which artists, museums, and audiences (among others) refuse to locate themselves on one or another side of the border but make claims on both, producing "mestiza/o cultures are porous and flexible" rather than rigidly nationalistic (p. Mestizaje as it is generally used, then, meant making the nation into a (metaphorical) family under the fatherly guidance of the ruling party. In post-Revolutionary Mexico, mestizaje has implied the flattening out of ethnic (especially indigenous) identities into a mestizo Raza Cósmica. (She does not even mention its descendent, "Queer Studies," for example.) Instead, this book contributes to Chicano/Chicana Studies through its use of mestizaje. Radical/lesbian Chicana feminism, as a theory, is not new - it could be traced back at least as far as Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years (1983)-and Davalos is more interested in applying the theory than in modifying or updating it. Davalos argues that postmodernism does not apply to Mexican-American realities, since people of Mexican descent living in the United States have lived with unfixed subject positions long before post-modernists began valorizing such multiplicity here, I think, she reads a chronology into a set of theories which has stubbornly resisted such ordering. Thus her theory resembles the postmodernist understanding of identity as unfixed, yet in its multiplicity, the locus of resistance to hegemonic states/transnational capitalism/sexism and heterosexism. from which to understand the world and articulate the self" (p. This version of feminism encourages her to "investigate new subject positions. She sees in the work of artists such as Laura Aguilar and Ester Hernández eloquent expressions of female subjectivity and desire, specifically from a Chicana viewpoint and the theoretical position she takes enables her to explain how these artworks express this point and why it matters. 10) as a stance from which she questions other positions within Chicano studies, especially those she refers to as nationalist. Karen Mary Davalos defines "radical/lesbian Chicana feminism" (p. This book applies theories of Chicano Studies to visual art, and especially to museums.
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