ART AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Cultural Politics in Mexico and AztlánBy EDWARD J. MCCAUGHAN

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5168-9

Contents

List of Illustrations…………………………………………xiPreface. “The Heart Has Its Reasons”……………………………xxiAcknowledgments………………………………………………1One. SIGNS OF THE TIMES……………………………………….20Two. SIGNS OF CITIZENSHIP……………………………………..57Three. SIGNS OF (BE)LONGING AND EXCLUSION……………………….101Four. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF STYLE………………………………..135Five. CREATIVE SPACES…………………………………………152Six. CREATIVE POWER…………………………………………..167Postscript. OF LEGACIES AND THE AROMA OF POPCORN…………………171Notes……………………………………………………….179References…………………………………………………..197

Chapter One

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Artists helped shape the politics and identities of an international generation of social movement activists forged in the protests of 1968 that shook cities across the globe, from Paris, Prague, and Tokyo to Mexico City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Art and Social Movements offers a comparative analysis of the role of visual artists in three such arenas of struggle: in Mexico City, the student movement of 1968 and a closely associated network of activist art collectives; in Oaxaca, a political and cultural struggle rooted in the region’s Zapotec communities; and in California, the Chicano civil rights movement. Working within these movements, artists helped to attribute new meaning to social phenomena as varied as class, race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and power.

More consciously than other activists, artists are intensely engaged in processes of representation and signification. In the following pages I describe the ways in which movement- affiliated artists helped to create visual languages and spaces through which people could imagine and perform new collective identities and new forms of meaningful citizenship. Much of the visual discourses created by Mexican and Chicano artists between the 1960s and 1990s remains vital today in social movements demanding fuller democratic rights and social justice for working people, women, ethnic communities, immigrants, and sexual minorities throughout Mexico and the United States.

ARTISTS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

This book’s focus on the work of activist artists coincides with more recent theoretical and empirical developments in the literature on social movements and cultural studies. In the mid-1990s, Alberto Melucci (1996, 68) noted “a renewed interest in cultural analysis which corresponds to a shift towards new questions about how people make sense of their world, how they relate to texts, practices, and artifacts rendering these cultural products meaningful to them.” Visual arts produced in the context of social movements are the texts and artifacts explored here. I agree with Lo, Bettinger, and Fan’s (2006, 78) assessment that “art’s ability to express the shared, yet contentious, understandings of objects and actions make it the vehicle of social movements and social conflict.” Such observations are part of a paradigm shift in studies of social movements that influenced my ideas about the potential political significance of activist art. The move was away from previously dominant theories of ideology, organization, and resource mobilization and toward the new social movements perspective on the centrality of collective identity formation, a cultural process involving the construction of meaning (Johnston et al. 1994).

An anthology edited by Sonia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (1998) was especially useful in conceptualizing the centrality of cultural dynamics of representation and signification as they interact with sociopolitical processes in the context of Latin America: “Social movements not only have sometimes succeeded in translating their agendas into public policies and in expanding the boundaries of institutional politics but also, significantly, have struggled to resignify the very meanings of received notions of citizenship, political representation and participation, and, as a consequence, of democracy itself” (2). Not all scholars of social movements agree with this approach. Wickham-Crowley and Eckstein (2010), for example, take issue with Alvarez et al.’s focus on cultural politics and meaning, and they dispute the relevance of “Birmingham-style Cultural Studies, à la Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams,” which they regard as having “a fatal predilection for conflating culture with power” (11–12). In their eagerness to reassert the importance of structural theories, Wickham-Crowley and Eckstein mischaracterize the framework offered by Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar. To insist on the importance of the cultural dimensions of social movements—such as struggles over discourse and the meanings attributed to social phenomena—is hardly a call to ignore the structural contexts in which such struggles are carried out. On the contrary, the challenge for scholars is to fully understand and explain the significance of cultural politics that are inevitably enmeshed in specific structural and historical contexts. Whittier (2002, 290), for example, argues for an approach that includes “serious consideration of structure (movement organizations, communities, and fields), strategies and collective action (challenges, protest events), and meaning (collective identities and discourse).” In my own analysis elaborated below, I contend that the political importance of the visual discourses produced by movement artists only becomes apparent when read against prevailing social structures, regimes of accumulation, and systems of representation.

Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar (1998, 7) understand that “culture is political because meanings are constitutive of processes that, implicitly or explicitly, seek to redefine social power. That is, when movements deploy alternative conceptions of woman, nature, race, economy, democracy, or citizenship that unsettle dominant cultural meanings, they enact a cultural politics.” Their observations made me think more consciously about the ways in which visual discourses produced by artists contribute to unsettling those dominant constructions. I was reminded of a powerful graphic by Adolfo Mexiac created for the 1968 Mexican student movement: a man’s mouth had been chained and padlocked. That graphic, widely reproduced and circulated in Mexico and the United States at the time, undermined the image being promoted by the Mexican and U.S. governments of Mexico as a model of stable democracy, development, and modernization. I also thought of the Chicana artist Yolanda López’s classic self-portrait in 1978 as a defiant, athletic Virgin of Guadalupe, which challenged patriarchal notions of Chicana and Mexican womanhood. As Amalia Mesa-Bains (1991b, 132) has observed, the work of Chicana artists “does not simply reflect ideology, it constructs ideology.”

In a similar vein, Janet Wolff (1990, 1) begins to get at the relationship between art, cultural politics, and the feminist movement when she writes: “Art, literature and film do not simply represent given gender identities, or reproduce already existing ideologies of femininity. Rather they participate in the very construction of those identities…. Culture is a crucial arena for the contestation of the social arrangements of gender. Cultural politics, then, is not an optional extra—a respectable engagement in one of the more pleasant sectors of political action. It is a vital enterprise, located at the heart of the complex order which (re)produces sexual divisions in society.” I agree with Wolff’s formulation, but she does not elaborate on the relationship of feminist artists to the movement itself, something I try to do in this book.

Another useful framework for thinking about art, social movements, and collective identity formation is provided by Stuart Hall’s analysis of contemporary Caribbean and black British cinemas. Similar to Wolff’s and MesaBains’s respective analyses of feminist and Chicana art, Hall ([1990] 2001, 571) reads this cinema “not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects.” Hall begins with the important premise that “we should think … of identity as ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation” (560). He then contrasts this to a more essentialist conception of collective identity, evident in many anti- colonial struggles, that is expressed in terms of “the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people,’ with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning” (561). As an example of the latter, Hall cites the “Negritude” poetry of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor.

While recognizing, as did Frantz Fanon ([1963] 1968), the political importance of ethnic pride representations to mid-twentieth-century anticolonial resistance, Hall sees in the contemporary cinema of the black diaspora representations of more fluid, shifting, hybrid identities. Reflecting the social reality of diaspora in an era of economic and cultural globalization, the cinematic representations that interest Hall ([1990] 2001, 562) are those that recognize that, “as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’; or rather—since history has intervened—’what we have become.'” Hall’s analysis provides a framework for thinking about the significance of the Zapotec artist Francisco Toledo’s work, which never devolves into the folkloric representations of Mexico’s indigenous communities that characterize some Mexican and Chicano movement art. Instead Toledo’s years in Paris combine with his roots in Oaxaca’s Zapotec communities to produce images that help constitute an evolving, hybrid ethnic identity. From her reading of Stuart Hall, Roberta Garner (2001, 559) concludes that “social movements do not mobilize support bases according to demographic characteristics; they create support bases by their practices of framing and defining identities.” That is a process, I argue, in which art making is central.

An example of how activist artists help to frame and define identities is provided by Sánchez-Tranquilino’s (1995) case study of a project in the 1970s to paint “Chicano” murals on East Los Angeles walls once marked by “Mexican American youth gang” graffiti. Sánchez-Tranquilino attempts to “shed light on one aspect of negotiating Chicano cultural survival, not only through the politics of what constitutes ‘art’ but also through an examination of how identity is constructed as part of the process of making artistic form and content ‘readable’ in a particular context” (56). He reads the graffiti and the murals as “two signifying systems in which social value is produced in and through their constructed meanings as an integral part of the process of developing the painter’s/viewer’s subjectivity or identity” (65). By contrasting these two distinct “signifying systems,” the author begins to reveal the role of artists in shaping and projecting the then emerging politicized identity of those who saw themselves as part of the Chicano movement.

Other scholars have written about the role of art and artists in processes of ethnic or racial identity formation and nation building, but relatively few of them frame their work within a social movements perspective. Jordan and Weedon (1995), for example, discuss at length the cultural politics of racial and ethnic identity in contemporary Britain. They offer many useful insights into the ways in which art, like “all signifying practices,” involves “relations of authority and power” and how, “for many Asian and Afro-Caribbean artists and intellectuals in Britain, whether immigrants or British-born, a key issue is that of establishing an identity that engages with both their communities of origin … and the dominant ‘White’ cultural mainstream” (440, 454). But Jordan and Weedon’s analysis of the relationship between artists of color and the dominant culture is not informed, at least not explicitly, by new social movements perspectives on such processes. Bright and Bakewell (1995, 5) attempt to “bring together discussions of aesthetics and anthropology in order to emphasize the social processes and problems of cultural identity negotiated through works of art.” But, like Jordan and Weedon’s book, this edited volume is not particularly concerned with the role of social movements or social movement-affiliated artists in those processes. The one exception in Bright and Bakewell’s anthology is Sánchez-Tranquilino’s insightful essay. Another study that looks explicitly at art in the context of social movements is Bruce Campbell’s (2003) book on contemporary Mexican muralism, a particularly sophisticated effort to understand the role of art within complex processes of social change. Campbell describes and explains the changing conditions and modalities of contemporary Mexican mural production, including new forms such as graffiti art and mantas (mobile images on cloth), but he is primarily concerned with what the new mural practices can tell us about the dynamics of public space, discourse, state power, and civil societal movements.

In Art and Social Movements I examine the role of artists and art in Mexican and Chicano social movements by integrating insights from poststructuralist perspectives on the cultural politics of representation and signifying processes into an understanding of social movements that remains grounded in the specificity of historical contexts and political economy. The research flows from the premise that art associated with social movements helped to constitute, not simply reflect, the dramatic social and political changes experienced by Mexican and Chicano communities during the twentieth century. The social power of activist artists emanates from their ability to provoke movement constituents and other publics to see, think, imagine, and even feel in meaningfully new ways. “It is the way art simultaneously engages our imaginations, emotions, bodies and intellects,” argues Amy Mullin (2000, 128), “that makes it uniquely suited to affect us more deeply than other, more purely intellectual, ways of conveying these ideas.” The Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (2002, 542) argued that creative acts, including art making, allow one “to link inner reflection and vision—the mental, emotional, instinctive, imaginal, spiritual, and the subtle bodily awareness—with social, political action and lived experiences to generate subversive knowledges.”

FROM JUCHITÁN TO AZTLÁN: THE CASE STUDIES

Beginning in the mid-1960s a variety of new social movements emerged in Mexico and in Aztlán—the ancient, mythical Mexican homeland, as some Chicanos reimagined the U.S. Southwest. This study focuses on three contemporaneous social movement constellations in which visual artists played a central role. Although each is characterized by its own particular dynamics, reflecting distinctive local histories, cultures, and conditions, I view all three as part of what Immanuel Wallerstein (1989, 431) has called “the revolution of 1968″—”one of the great formative events in the history of our modern world-system, the kind we call watershed events.” These movements illustrate several of Wallerstein’s theses about the significance of the rebellions of 1968: they involved protest against U.S. hegemony in the world, a critique of the ineffectiveness of “old Left” movements, countercultural sensibilities, an emphasis on the centrality of “minority” groups and women, and a questioning of the “fundamental strategy of social transformation.” Several of Wallerstein’s “queries” about the lessons of 1968 also arise in my examination of the movements based in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and California: How effective, ultimately, are institutional expressions of formal political power in the pursuit of antisystemic social change? Do alternative forms of social power offer greater counterhegemonic potential? What is the balance between material and spiritual well-being in our utopian imaginaries?

(Continues…)

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