enclaves in Miami and New Jersey, or the growing number of people migrating to the United States from Central America? Much like “Latin American,” “Latina/o” is not always a category used by those it purports to identify. People are far more likely to see themselves as Chicano, Puerto Rican, or Dominican and to feel a sense of shared culture with these narrower categories.
Moreover, how we might define the relationship between “Latina/o” and “Latin American”? This connection is sometimes fraught, even antagonistic (thus Mexican poet Octavio Paz's rejection of the Mexican‐American “pachuco,” the long‐standing rivalry between Cubans and Cuban‐Americans, or the increasing militarization of the US‐Mexico border); at other times, the concept of Latin America has served Latina/o communities as a means of constructing an identity and a cultural imaginary both for diasporic populations and for long‐standing citizens and residents of the United States (recall, for instance, the Chicana/o homeland of “Aztlán”; Miami, a mixture of peoples from all corners of the hemisphere, designated the unofficial capital of Latin America; or New York City as it rivals Puerto Rico itself as the place Nuyoricans call home).
If these ideas are unstable and shifting entities, then appending “art” to them only adds a further layer of complication. For decades, critics, scholars, and artists have debated whether such categories, which necessarily impose restrictions and norms onto deeply heterogeneous bodies of work, are meaningful or productive. “There is no such thing as Latin American Art,” asserted curator and art critic José Gómez Sicre in 1990. There is, rather, “art made by Latin Americans, which begins in the nineteenth century. Before this we have pre‐Columbian and colonial art.”1 Gómez Sicre's doubts have been echoed many times over, perhaps even more vociferously in the twenty‐first century, where globalization has put increasing pressure on the boundaries demarcated by area studies. The Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera has recently cast doubts on the possibilities of the category “Latin American art” to do little more than cast its producers as derivative or exoticized in the global art world.
Yet these categories have persisted, in part because they have served as a strategic platform from which to articulate crucial commonalities in the face of European and mainstream US art practices. Rita Eder, for example, argued in 1979 that “Latin America” remained a crucial category insofar as it allowed artists and theorists to create and work within their own frames of reference for “understanding, placing, scorning or applauding” art from the region, rather than relying on those frameworks originating in Paris and New York (Eder 2012, p. 684). Even the critic Marta Traba, who had written vociferously against collective categories' imposition on individual artistic freedom in the 1950s, eventually came to see them as crucial tools for cultivating a “culture of resistance” against US cultural imperialism (Traba 2012, p. 751).
This book, as a collective effort encompassing a range of voices, does not subscribe to any single answer to these questions. Yet despite the difficulties inherent in defining “Latina/o” and “Latin American” along with their respective artistic productions, it proposes that something meaningful is produced in the collective study of the region and its diasporas. Inquiry into these terms, for instance, provides new insights into how we might define those grand categories: “modern” and “contemporary” art and what their various meanings are in shifting contexts. The coincidences and divergences that the reader encounters between standard ways of demarcating periods in the histories of Euro‐American modern and contemporary art and the divisions within this book point to the fact that Latin American art can neither be collapsed with, nor fully separated from other histories of modernism or from global histories of the twentieth century in general. For example, 1945 stands as perhaps the most central division in the history of Euro‐US modernism, and it appears here as well. We see the sharp shift in the postwar world, in which the wartime devastation of Europe resulted in a concentration on the Americas as a site of renewed utopian energies on all fronts, whether economic, political, social, or aesthetic. But other divisions are equally important. For example, 1910 and 1959 mark the two most important revolutionary moments in twentieth‐century Latin America. The new modes of popular, revolutionary art that followed in the wake of the Mexican Revolution and Cuba's anti‐imperialist and utopic project became sources of inspiration that would echo throughout the Americas, providing inspiration for artists far beyond the contexts of these battles.
This distinct periodization leads to the questions: What is the time of the modern? Of the contemporary? Making these inquiries from the point of view of Latin America allows us not only to elucidate conditions within the region but also to clarify the historical underpinnings of a Western modernity long presented as “universal” in conventional scholarship. “When was Latin America modern?” query historians Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart (2007), plumbing an ongoing debate over the region's often contradictory mix of premodern, modern, and postmodern socioeconomic, political, and cultural forms. In his important 1995 essay “Modernity after Postmodernity,” anthropologist Néstor García Canclini argues that conventional linear temporalities, which view postmodernity as replacing modernity (and modernity as replacing the traditional), are undone when considered from the perspective of Latin America. “Rarely,” he writes, “did modernization replace the traditional or the ancient,” resulting in a modernity characterized by a “multi‐temporal heterogeneity” generated out of the “contradictions between modernism and modernization” endured by the region. In concert with Brazilian scholar, Roberto Schwarz, García Canclini notes the challenges but also the effervescent dynamism of cultural responses to this situation. Cultural production becomes “an intellectual exercise” aimed at “absorbing the conflictive structure of society, its dependence on foreign models and the [transformative utopian] projects to change it,” producing “some of our greatest literature” and art (García Canclini 1995, pp. 28, 30).
In bringing these new studies of key artists, movements, and critics together, our aim is not to chart a new definition of Latin American or Latina/o art but rather to propose that, collectively, they can help us rethink our understanding of the relationship of modernism and modernity and asymmetries of power and visibility in an increasingly global art world.
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This book, divided into five chronologically organized parts and a final one dedicated to methodological approaches and debates, charts major movements, critics, and approaches in Latin American and Latina/o art since 1910. These divisions are meant to demarcate major shifts in how art was positioned with regard to questions of national and ethnic identity, cosmopolitan modernisms and international art circuits, revolutionary movements, development, Cold War politics, and globalization.
Thus the book's first part, for example, addresses redefinitions of national identities and the confrontation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, as well as their paradoxical fusion. Addressing, among other topics, the artistic flourishing across medium in postrevolutionary Mexico, the Havana vanguardia, and José Carlos Mariátegui's conception of the relation of aesthetics and politics, these chapters collectively examine the meaning of the nation as both a cultural and political space and efforts to forge national identity as an anti‐imperial, and even revolutionary, force. These pressures around defining the nation – who belonged to it and its potential as a source of both differentiation and comparison – deeply affected the development of the avant‐garde art movements that emerged in major urban centers of the region. It can be argued that these various avant‐garde groups, although largely independent, were united by what Argentine‐Colombian critic Marta Traba defined as “a national art of emergency (third world) against a national art of essences and synthesis (developed countries). A national art of emergency not only states an ontological problem, but also addresses practical functions and is not very far from being a form of activism” (Traba 1979, p. 45). Also raised here is an issue that will reappear throughout later sections: the tension between aesthetic experimentation and social agendas, especially with regard to the representation of indigenous peoples and the descendants of enslaved Africans. Essays throughout the volume investigate the conflictive agendas around definitions of indigenous art – who gets to name it as such and what frameworks are used to specify it; its symbolic, functional, economic and aesthetic