LACMA

44 NOTES Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the "American Art in a Global Context" symposium at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on September 28, 2006, at the University of Chicago on January 26, 2007, and at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles, on March 18, 2007. I am grateful for the engaged and thoughtful feedback at these talks. Special thanks to Kathleen McHugh, Kate Mondloch, Terezita Romo, and Jennifer Flores Sternad for their close readings and extensive comments on earlier drafts, and to Miriam Hansen and Bruce Robertson for our conversations on this topic. Finally, I want to thank my cocurators, Howard Fox and Rita Gonzalez, for their endless support and insights during the more than three years we worked on this exhibition, as well as Nola Butler, Thomas Frick, Piper Severance, and Paul Wehby for their work on the catalogue, and especially Sara Cody for all her efforts to make this essay "even betterer." 1. "Gronk: No Movie Maker," reprinted in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., ed. Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 48. 2. "Orphans of Modernism," reprinted in ibid., 221. 3. I use the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed., 1996. The 4th ed. (2000) adds a longer usage note for Chicano that provides a history for the term, although it continues to imply a usage problem, and recommends that "outsiders" use Mexican American. Likewise, the usage note for Hispanic now discusses the distinctions between Hispanic and Latino. 4. See, for example, Rita Gonzalez's survey of index citations for nearly one hundred established Latino and Latina artists ("Undocumented History: A Survey of Index Citations for Latino and Latina Artists," CSRC Research Report no. 2, August 2003). Shifra M. Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto provide an extensive listing of citations, mostly from commu- nity-based publications during the Chicano movement, in Arte Chicano: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of Chicano Art, 1965–1981 (Berkeley: Chicano Studies Publication Unit/University of California, 1985). 5. See the exhibition catalogue and essays in Cheech Marin, Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge (New York: Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown and Co., 2002). 6. Luis Valdez used a similar strategy with his play (1978) and film (1981) Zoot Suit, presenting it as "An American Classic." 7. See Chon A. Noriega, 'Waas Sappening?' Narrative Structure and Iconography in Born in East L.A.," Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 14 (1995): 107–28. 8. On the Cheech and Chong films, see Christine List, Chicano Images: Refiguring Ethnicity in Mainstream Film (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996). 9. The collector-driven exhibition has been the subject of much debate, mostly critical, but here one must make two distinc- tions from the typical characterization of such exhibitions: one, the presence of the non-white collector; and, two, the resulting exhibition as an alliance between the non-white collector's celebrity and corporate sponsorship (rather than as a direct expression of the collector's own wealth and corporate branding). See my "Collectors Who Happen to Be...," in East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous (Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2000) and "The Chicano Collection," in Cheech Marin Presents—The Chicano Collection/La Colleción Chicana: Fine Art Prints by Modern Multiples (Los Angeles: Modern Multiples, 2005). The American Heritage Dictionary offers a final meaning for verge that Cheech-the-comedian would also appreciate: "The male organ of copulation in certain invertebrates." 10. On the politics of exhibition for Chicano art, see Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master's House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998) and "From CARA to CACA: The Multiple Antinomies of Chicano/a Art at the Turn of the New Century," Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 26, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 205–31; Chon A. Noriega, "On Museum Row: Aesthetics and the Politics of Exhibition," Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 128, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 57–81; and Karen Mary Davalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001) and The Mexican Museum of San Francisco (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2007). 11. The major writers who first opened up the field of Chicano art history include Ramón Favela, Shifra Goldman, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Victor Sorell, Jacinto Quirarte, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. 12. See his collected writings in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., ed. Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 13. Rupert Garcia and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, "Turning it Around: A Conversation between Rupert Garcia and Guillermo Gómez-Peña," in Aspects of Resistance: Rupert Garcia (New York: Alternative Museum, 1993). 14. See Beth Rosenblum, "Tres Mujeres: Three Generations: The Early Works of Yolanda López," Chicano Art Magazine no. 3 (Winter 2007). 15. Pinochet's military dictatorship "disappeared" thousands of people and remained in power until 1990. 16. See Malaquias Montoya, Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment/Recent Works by Malaquias Montoya (Notre Dame, IN: Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, 2004). 17. See Max Benavidez, Gronk (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2007), chap. 2. 18. From "Gronk: No Movie Maker" (interview in collaboration with Willie Herrón), Urban Exile, 47. 19. Urban Exile, 365–66. The eleven-minute Super 8 film of "Cruel Profit" (no longer extant) was shot on January 16 and 17, 1975, and later included in the LACMA juried exhibition Chicanismo en el Arte (May 6–25, 1975). The story "Cruel Profit" was originally published in Grito del Sol (1975) and R.A.M. Collective 2, no. 1 (June 1, 1977). 20. See Rita Gonzalez, "Strangeways Here We Come," in Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California from the '90s to Now, ed. John C. Welchman (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2005). Both groups name themselves by conjoining references to the "uncul- tured" and to systems for generating meaning or knowl- edge: Slanguage, through its pun on slang and language, and the Pocho Research Society by juxtaposing pocho (a Mexican American who is badly educated or ignorant of his/her Mexican heritage) with organized research. 21. The Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History, "Guerrilla Historians Hit L.A. with (un)Official Historical Markers" (press release, May 4, 2002). 22. The phrase absence palpable is from Rita Gonzalez, Ramon García, and C. Ondine Chavoya, "A.L.A.R.M.A.'s Manifest(o) Destiny" Wide Angle 20, no. 3 (1998), 79. 23. Romo has also produced a series of manifestos (often as offset prints) that take a similar approach within the arts. 24. Here I am thinking about Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA) and Hispanic Art in the U.S. (cultural politics versus art market), or even Phantom Sightings and Chicano Visions (conceptual versus realist). See Quirarte's review of Chicano art exhibitions up to the late 1980s in Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: UCLA Wight Art Gallery, 1991), and Gaspar de Alba's "From CARA to CACA." 25. Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), chap. 3. 26. Ibid., 51, 56.

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