Common Ground: Chicana/o Aerosol Art and Cultural Translation in LA

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Victor Hugo Viesca, an Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at California State University, Los Angeles will speak on the cultural practices of contemporary aerosol artists in Greater East Los Angeles rewrite urban space according to a renewed Chicana/o sensibility. Although Chicano/a culture speaks to the shared experiences, institutions, and practices of Mexican Americans as a distinct ethnic community, other expressions of cultural affiliation are also at play. Interethnic identification and unity through culture rather than nationality or color are integral components of a new Chicana/o sensibility being forged by contemporary aerosol artists in the city.

Like the visual artists of the Chicano Mural Movement of the 1970s, locally renowned graffiti artists/muralists such as Nuke, Chose, Zender, and their young apprentices, transform the walls of the city into spaces of homage for Mexican revolutionary heroes and indigenous ancestors and into broadsides against the exploitation of immigrant workers and the violence of gang warfare. But the productions of Chicana/o aerosol artists also produce a new vision of Los Angeles as a place of multiracial unity and collective struggle. While these new cultural formations contain significant historical ties to the aesthetics and politics of Mexican muralists such Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros, they are also constructed out of the dialogues the artists have with their present urban environment, with other ethnic groups, and with other popular cultural forms.

Neither assimilationist nor separatist, contemporary Chicana/o aerosol art affirms its cultural heritage and history of place in Los Angeles while creatively engaging in and adapting to the diversity of communities and cultural forms that make up this multicultural metropolis. In mapping out both the historical continuities and the dynamics of cultural translation at play in Chicana/o aerosol art in Los Angeles we may be able to discern the complicated imagery that speaks about—and back to—the city.

Event Sponsor
UH EWC International Cultural Studies Program, California State University, Los Angeles

More Information
Kalawaia Moore, 944-7243, culture@hawaii.edu, http://www2.hawaii.edu/~culture

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