Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory

Tatiana Reinoza

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Reclaiming the Americas

Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory

Tatiana Reinoza

Language: English

Published/Copyright: 2023

Published by

View more publications by University of Texas Press

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This book is in the series

Latinx: The Future Is Now

About this book

2023 Outstanding Book Award, National Association for Ethnic Studies
2024 Finalist, Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association
2024 Best Arts Book, Empowering Latino Futures’ International Latino Book Awards
2025 Ewell L. Newman Book Award, American Historical Print Collectors Society

How Latinx artists around the US adopted the medium of printmaking to reclaim the lands of the Americas.

Printmakers have conspired, historically, to illustrate the maps created by European colonizers that were used to chart and claim their expanding territories. Over the last three decades, Latinx artists and print studios have reclaimed this printed art form for their own spatial discourse. This book examines the limited editions produced at four art studios around the US that span everything from sly critiques of Manifest Destiny to printed portraits of Dreamers in Texas.

Reclaiming the Americas is the visual history of Latinx printmaking in the US. Tatiana Reinoza employs a pan-ethnic comparative model for this interdisciplinary study of graphic art, drawing on art history, Latinx studies, and geography in her discussions. The book contests printmaking’s historical complicity in the logics of colonization and restores the art form and the lands it once illustrated to the Indigenous, migrant, mestiza/o, and Afro-descendant people of the Americas.

Author / Editor information

Tatiana Reinoza is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Notre Dame.

Reviews

Reclaiming the Americas is exactly the book that is needed now as art history, art museums, and interdisciplinary scholarship "discover" Latinx art but rarely engage with the artwork itself, let alone the artists. Tatiana Reinoza turns to Latinx printmaking as a case study for a different approach, one that begins with the artists. In looking closely at artworks that critique the medium’s complicity in colonial and cognitive mapping, Reinoza challenges a simple resistance paradigm. The result is a complex genealogy for Latinx printmaking (and art) that is at once local, regional, national, transnational, and utterly heterogeneous in its affiliations, participants, and practices.

— Chon Noriega, UCLA, co-author of Home—So Different, So Appealing

In this much-anticipated book Reinoza delivers the first art historical study of Latinx printmaking, one of the most significant yet unrecognized mediums in Latinx art. This necessary volume centers printmaking workshops as the key site of Latinx identity-making that they are, while offering a deep analysis of printmakers' aesthetic innovations in American art. This is a foundational study that will inspire students of art history and cultural studies across the Americas.

— Arlene Dávila, NYU, author of Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics

In Reclaiming the Americas, Tatiana Reinoza argues that decolonizing Latinx artists reclaimed printmaking from its original association with mapmaking and the associated “spatial logics of colonization” linked to charting and space-claiming. In an act of singular scholarly curation, Reinoza identifies four organizing approaches, or “territorialities,” in the work of printmakers in the US Southwest and along both its coasts, to home in on unifying decolonial gestures borne of shared training and to illuminate the value of “Latinx art” as a category of analysis. Reclaiming the Americas is a masterful book, deeply researched and written with clarity, on contemporary printmaking and specifically Latinx printmaking, and it is sure to impact scholars, readers, and teachers of art history as well as American and cultural studies more broadly.

— Leticia Alvarado, Brown University, author of Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production

[A] pioneering book…[Reinoza] offers an interdisciplinary approach to Latinx printmaking from a decolonized perspective that debunks Eurocentric conventions of cartography and geography and reinscribes the art form of printmaking to the peoples of the Americas.

— CHOICE

Images used in print media, as [Reclaiming the Americas] demonstrates, continue to be open to new creative applications, routes of circulation, and trajectories of analysis. . . . While Latinx studies has moved beyond simplistic celebrations of resistance in art and visual culture, we now live in an era in which scholars and artists of previous generations who fail to meet the standards of presentism are susceptible to swift dismissal. The field of Latinx art and visual culture—and Latinx studies more broadly—needs this degree of nuance implemented by Reinoza.

— Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture

A border-crossing and interdisciplinary feat...The book’s greatest strength lies in the author’s recognition that theseworks, although decolonial efforts, are still haunted by the afterlives of coloniality.

— Aztlan

[This book] exemplifies and models Latinx culture making...Reinoza's both/and approach enables an appreciation of the evolving efforts of Latinx artists to imagine the Americas differently and more ethically within ongoing conditions of coloniality.

— Panorama

The author unpacks [her subject] with nuance, sensitivity, and rigor...She uses the historical weaponization of printmaking for colonial ends as a means to process the ways in which Latinx artists approach...inherited conventions of territory...Reinoza impresses with her scholarly prowess...[and] her book is a game-changer.

— The Art Bulletin

Topics

Arts Arts, general

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	1
Chapter one Native Territorialities: Ricardo Duff y’s Border Pop and the Indigenous Uncanny Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	29
Chapter two Embodied Territorialities: Enrique Chagoya and Alberto Ríos Disrupting the Western Cartographic Gaze Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	73
Chapter three Mestiza Territorialities: Sandra Fernández’s Migrant Justice and the Movable Border Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	113
Chapter four Aqueous Territorialities: The Dominican York Proyecto Gráfica’s Island Dwellers and Water Boundaries Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	151
Conclusion Revolution on Display Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	191
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	211
Appendix Latinx Printmaking Workshops and Collectives in the US Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	216
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	220
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	243
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed	259

Publishing information

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

eBook published on:

April 18, 2023

eBook ISBN:

9781477326916

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

Main content:

248

Other:

29 color illus.

https://doi.org/10.7560/326893

eBook ISBN: 9781477326916

Keywords for this book

geography; immigration; Latinx art; printmaking; East LA; East Harlem; Chicano art; visual culture; Latinidad; anti-immigrant; Dream Act; Dreamers; cartography; counter-mapping; geopolitics; Dominican identiy; Puerto Rican identity; printmakers; cultural production; latinx graphics

Audience(s) for this book

Professional and scholarly;

Reclaiming the Americas

Overview

About this book

Author / Editor information

Reviews

Topics

Table of contents

Bibliographic data