LACMA

1990 Berkeley, California After a museum curator calls asking to include their work in a show on underground zines, Esteban Zul and Lalo Alcaraz decide to actually create their underground zine, which until then had been a conceptual prank. Using a page from Lalo's sketchbook for the cover art, and printed at a local copy shop, the satirical Pocho magazine is born. Future issues would include the Everything's Going to Be All-Riot issue, covering the L.A. riots, a serial comic series called Chicanos with Guns, and frequent, twisted rework- ings of Family Circus cartoons, depicting the cute white kids of the popular comic strip as Nazis, dominatrixes, and Ku Klux Klan members. DECEMBER 18, 1989 Hollywood, California The Simpsons debuts on the Fox television network. Time magazine will later call this animated satire of Middle American values "the best TV show of the century." The next day, knock-off Bart Sanchez figurines appear for sale on the streets of Tijuana. Simpson creator Matt Groening later pens an episode in which Krusty the Klown promises to take the Simpson family to the "happiest place on earth." "Disneyland?" Bart asks. "No," Krusty answers, "Tijuana." 1988 Compton, California California rap group NWA release Straight Outta Compton and forever change the iconic, East Coast hip-hop style of Adidas track suits, Kangol hats, and large golden chains to the more cholo style of Pendleton shirts, baggy khaki trousers, bandannas, and tattoos in Old English fonts. Two years later Arturo Molina, better known as Kid Frost, releases the classic hip-hop album Hispanic Causing Panic, featuring the single "La Raza." In the widely played accompanying music video, Chicano nationalism goes MTV as lowriders, bigotes, gang signs, dickies, the Aztec calendar, and other barrio signifiers are beamed into suburban gringo dens from Orange County to Long Island. 1991 Boston, Massachusetts The exhibition The Bleeding Heart, organized by Eliza- beth Sussman and Olivier Debroise for the Institute of Contemporary Art, focuses on Mexican and Chicano art that explicitly critiques nationalistic and religious iconog- raphy. The ironic components of those works are lost on the new generation of Mexican artists and critics, who see such work as retrograde and folkloric. Although "neo- Mexicanist" work would be accused of being an exotic export for the age of NAFTA—and Chicano work would continue to be stereotyped—it is actually the more internationalist Mexican art of the 1990s that turns out to be the ultimate global export. 1991 Valencia, California Monique Prieto reacts against the conceptual dogma at California Institute of the Arts and begins to paint. With her organic, computer-sketched abstractions created with flat, bright colors, she paves the way for Laura Owens and Ingrid Callame. She is the first of the "California Girls," starting a trend that transformed painting, at least in Southern California.

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