Abstract
Using ethnographic information and archival research, the essay investigates the meaning of Chicana art collections. It uses two connotations of Chicana art collectors: the Mexican American woman who acquires art and the person whose collection emphasizes art by Chicanas. Drawing on Latino and US third-world feminist studies, the essay finds that private collectors fill the vacancy created by local and federal museums and establish a public repository of Chicana art and culture. Chicana art collectors have less in common with the scholarly image of the collector and more in common with US third-world feminist activists who generate movements for social change. It argues that collections of art enact a poetics of love and rescue for Mexican-origin communities in the United States.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Interview 13 August, 2003. Decolonial and feminist ethnography does not purposefully transform research participants into anonymous speaking subjects. In general, it aims to correct the history of colonizing practices that announce the scholar but leave unnamed the people on whose lives the scholar depends. A greater priority, however, is how participants want to be represented. Most of the collectors with whom I spoke requested anonymity and therefore, fictive names are used in those cases. Since Gilberto Cardenas and Joe Diaz and their acquisitionshave entered the public record, they are named. Pseudonyms are used for the other 10 informants, all of whom are women. Ironically, this ethic undermines the feminist charge against silence in the archives.
This article is part of a larger project on Chicana/o museum culture. “Museum culture” refers to the five major functions of the public museum – exhibition, collection, interpretation, preservation, and education – but which occur inside and outside of the public museum, and indeed are not dependent upon it. The larger project addresses how artists and collectors define Chicana/o art.
According to Sybil Venegas (2006), Rosa Covarrubias is a Chicana art collector. Born in Los Angeles, California in 1895 and a graduate of Manual Arts High School, Covarrubias was an avid collector with her partner Miguel, with whom she lived in Mexico since the 1920s.
The three art auctions organized by Gary Keller at Arizona State University have an uneven track record. A symposium in 2005 on the east coast for Latino art appraisers resulted in very little attention to Chicana/o art, and Latino/a art in general, although Latin American masters generated significant buzz. Additional research is required, but I suggest that the majority of Chicana/o art does not enter the resale market.
Interview 14 May, 2004.
The work of Michel Foucault (1970) and Walter Benjamin (1969) enjoy wide circulation, and are certainly foundational to these questions, but my own intellectual genealogy began with the postmodern turn in cultural anthropology and the decolonial critiques of cultural anthropology made by Native, Chicana/o, African American, and US third-world feminist scholars that anticipated the postmodern questions of authority by exploring the production of knowledge and social injustice in the United States. See Davalos (1998).
As Pearce notes, the activities of women fall outside of the narrow definitions of collecting (1992, 60–61). She documents that most scholars do not problematize the social construction of gender and rely on pseudo-psychoanalysis to interpret the motivations, meanings, and actions of women and men collectors (cf. Baekeland, 1994). Naomi Schor criticizes Jean Baudrillard for assuming that the collector is “unquestionably male” and specifically heterosexual (1994, 257).
I am grateful to Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz for sharing this example with me. For her analysis of Sotero's ordeal, see Urquijo-Ruiz (2004). For discussions of the social image of Chicanas see Baca Zinn (1982); González (2003); and Hurtado (1998). For a brilliant challenge to 19th century images of Spanish-Mexican women, see Deena J. González (1999).
9 Belk (1995), Belk et al. (1998) and Baekeland (1981) argue that the image of a noble benefactor is used to rationalize and assuage the guilt of the “self-indulgent” collector (Belk, 1995, 81). Their interpretation of the collector as savior is based on a psychological analysis and somewhat condescending tone, from which I depart, that constructs objects as neutral. It cannot account for objects that are neglected from society, in this case art history, museums, and galleries, because of social signifiers such as race and gender and therefore have little hope for future inclusion unless notions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation are reconfigured. For an excellent analysis of collecting and sexuality see Camille and Rifkin (2001).
Miller's position also challenges our myth of the noble savage as the authentically non-materialistic human and its opposite – the inauthentic, superficial, consumer of the so-called first world. While I cannot comfortably let go of the latter myth due to the material inequalities between the United States and Latin America, the centrality of commodity fetishism that generates billions of dollars of debt, or the tax breaks available to people who purchase a Hummer, I find his argument compelling.
A new collecting group was forming as I completed the research for this article. Chicano Art Federation is a group of five professionals who live in the Los Angeles area and “have come together for the purposes of preserving and fostering the Chicano art culture.” They hold over 80 original works of art and are expanding their collections (Interview 7 June, 2006 with Ramon Ramírez).
At least two dissertations on the exhibition and the collector are forthcoming. The exhibition has served as a catalyst for symposia on Latino art, assessment, valuation, and auctions in New York and Arizona. Marin has been repeatedly invoked as the guardian or savior of Chicano arts institutions.
Interview 8 February, 2004.
Interview 2 May, 2003.
“Familia” is used figuratively to refer to the extended family network.
Interview 26 February, 2006.
Interview 26 February, 2006.
Interview 21 July, 2005.
Statement made at a public presentation and repeated during interviews in 2002 and 2005.
Interview 13 August, 2003.
University of California, Santa Barbara since 1998 and UCLA since 2001.
Paraphrase from interview 13 May, 2004.
Interview 13 August, 2003.
Paraphrase from interview 13 May, 2004.
Interview 8 February, 2004.
Interview 8 February, 2004.
This sensibility causes me some trepidation since I identify the research as an investigation of “collecting.” Nevertheless, I use the word in order to speak with an audience in museum studies, art history, and consumer studies.
Davíd Carrasco refers to these events as “Aztec moments” in which “we realize que los indios de México, los aztecas, los toltecas y los mayas are part of historias, who we are” (2003, 175). His also occurred in a museum.
Kenneth Goings (1994) suggests that African American collectors of black memorabilia describe a similar disidentification with images of Sambo or Aunt Jemima. See also Les Payne (1998).
Interview 13 August, 2003, emphasis added.
These are the words used to describe collections of curiosities, c. 1550–1750. See Pomian (1990, 95).
13 October, 2001, emphasis in original presentation at Social and Public Art Resource Center, Venice, California.
Scholars of collecting use the term “rescue” for items valued at one time by society. Discussions of “rescue” are not applied to collectors who gather objects not valued in the past or present. These people are typically classified as “pack rats” or “obsessive.” See Belk (1995) and Pearce (1995).
Interview 13 August, 2003.
These are the last names of lenders to “Carmen Lomas Garza: Pedacito de Corazon,” Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas, 1991.
Formerly the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum.
The exceptions are Carlos Almaraz, Rupert García, Luis Jiménez, Patssi Valdez, Carmen Lomas Garza, and John Valadez, who have entered collections in “big museums,” such as the Smithsonian Institution. They are present because of a “power shift in local government and museum governance within minority-dominant cities since the late 1980s” (Noriega, 1999, 65) and because of the ingenuity and foresight of curators, such as Andrew Connors and Helen Lucero. At the same time, the “power shift” has not kept pace with the demography and history of the United States, as Rita González (2003) indicates with her research on Latino/a art holdings.
Interview 13 August, 2003.
As a professor, I frequently wear suits and academic regalia made to invent me like a man. The right haircut has made it difficult for some strangers to determine my sex, and they frequently refer to me as “mister.”
References
Alarcón, Norma . 1998. Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of “The” Native Woman. In Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo, 371–382. Berkeley: Third Woman Press.
Alarcón, Norma . 1988. Making “Familia” From Scratch: Split Subjectivities in the Work of Helena Maria Viramontes and Cherrie Moraga. In Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, eds. María. Herrera-Sobek and Helena Maria Viramontes, 147–159. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press.
Anzaldúa, Gloria . 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Books.
Anzaldúa, Gloria . 1998. Chicana Artists: Exploring Nepantla, en Lugar de la Frontera. In The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society, eds. Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres, 163–169. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Arvizu, Steven F ed. 1978. Special Issue: Chicano Perspectives on Decolonizing Anthropology. Grito del Sol: A Chicano Quarterly 3 (1).
Baca Zinn, Maxine . 1982. Mexican-American Women in the Social Sciences. Signs 8 (2): 259–272.
Baekeland, Frederick . 1994. Psychological Aspects of Art Collecting. In Interpreting Objects and Collections, ed. Susan M. Pearce, 205–219. New York: Routledge.
Baudrillard, Jean . 1994. The System of Collecting. In The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 7–24. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Behar, Ruth and Deborah A. Gordon, eds. 1995. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Belk, Russell W . 1994. Collectors and Collecting. In Interpreting Objects and Collections, ed. Susan M. Pearce, 317–326. London: Routledge.
Belk, Russell W . 1995. Collecting in a Consumer Society. London: Routledge.
Belk, Russell W ., Melanie Wallendorf, John Sherry, Morris Holbrook and Scott Roberts . 1998. Collectors and Collecting. In Advances in Consumer Research, ed. Michael Houston, 548–553. Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research.
Benjamin, Walter . 1969. Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 60–61. New York: Schocken Books.
Camille, Michael . 2001. Editor's Introduction. Art History 24 (2): 163–168.
Camille, Michael and Adrian Rifkin, eds. 2001. Other Objects of Desire: Collectors and Collecting Queerly. Oxford: Blackwell.
Carrasco, Davíd . 2003. Aztec Moments and Chicano Cosmovision: Aztlan Recalled to Life. In Moctezuma's Mexico: Vision of the Aztec World, eds. Davíd Carrasco and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, 175–198. Boulder: University of Colorado.
Chabram, Angie . 1990. Chicana/o Studies as Oppositional Ethnography. Cultural Studies. Special Issue on Chicana/o Cultural Representations 4 (3): 228–247.
Davalos, Karen Mary . 1998. Chicana/o Studies and Anthropology: The Dialogue that Never Was. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 23 (2): 13–46.
Davalos, Karen Mary . 2001. Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Day, Jane S . 1992. Aztec: The World of Moctezuma. Denver: Denver Museum of Natural History and Roberts Rinehard Publishers.
de Certeau, M . 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Dilworth, Leah, ed. 2003. Acts of Possession: Collecting in America. New Brunswisk: Rutgers University Press.
Driskell, David C . 2001. The Other Side of Color: African American Art in the Collection of Camille O. and William H. Cosby Jr. San Francisco: Pomegranate.
Domínguez, Virginia R . 2000. For a Politics of Love and Rescue. Cultural Anthropology 15 (3): 361–393.
Du Bois, W.E.B . 1969. The Souls of Black Folks. New York: New American Library.
Duncan, Carol . 1991. Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Politics and Poetics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 88–103. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Duncan, Carol . 1995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge.
Elsner, John and Roger Cardinal, eds. 1994. The Cultures of Collecting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Errington, Shelly . 1998. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fabian, Ann . 2003. The Curious Cabinet of Dr. Morton. In Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, ed. Leah Dilworth, 112–137. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Flores, William V . and Rina Benmayor, eds. 1997. Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights. Boston: Beacon Press.
Foucault, Michel . 1970. The Order of Things. London: Travistock Publications.
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia . 1998. Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master's House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Goings, Kenneth . 1994. Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
González, Jennifer A . 1995. Negotiated Frontiers. In From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography, ed. Mexican Museum, 17–22. San Francisco: The Mexican Museum.
González, Deena J . 1999. Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
González, Rita . 2003. Archiving the Latino Arts Before It Is Too Late. Latino Policy and Issues Brief 6: 1–4.
Gregory, Steven . 1996. Race, Rubbish, and Resistance: Empowering Difference in Community Politics. In Race, eds. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek, 366–391. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Gruber Garvey, Ellen . 2003. Dreaming in Commerce: Advertising Trade Card Scrapbooks. In Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, ed. Leah Dilworth, 66–87. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Harrison, Faye V . 1991. Anthropology as an Agent of Transformation: Introductory Comments and Queries. In Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Toward an Anthropology for Liberation, ed. Faye V. Harrison, 1–14. Washington, DC: Association of Black Anthropologists and American Anthropology Association.
hooks, bell . 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.
Hurtado, Aída . 1998. The Politics of Sexuality in the Gender Subordination of Chicanas. In Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo, 383–428. Berkeley: Third Woman Press.
Kastner, Carolyn . 2003. Collecting Mr. Ayer's Narrative. In Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, ed. Leah Dilworth, 138–162. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Knox, Sara . 2003. The Serial Killer as Collector. In Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, ed. Leah Dilworth, 286–302. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Leyva, Yolanda Chávez . 1998. Listening to the Silences in Latina/Chicana Lesbian History. In Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo, 429–434. Berkeley: Third Woman Press.
Lipsitz, George . 2001. Not Just Another Social Movement: Poster Art and the Movimiento Chicano. In Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Art in California, ed. Chon A. Noriega, 71–89. Santa Barbara: University Art Museum.
Loving, Charles R. 2006. Foreward. In Caras Vemos, Corazones No Sabemos: Faces Seen, Hearts Unknown, The Human Landscape of Mexican Migration, ed. Amelia Malagamba-Ansótegui, 2–3. South Bend: Snite Museum, University of Notre Dame.
Menchaca, Martha . 1993. Chicano Indianism: A Historical Account of Racial Repression in the United States. American Ethnologist 20 (3): 583–603.
Menchaca, Martha . 1995. The Mexican Outsiders: A Community History of Marginalization and Discrimination in California. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Miller, Daniel . 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Miller, Daniel . 1995. Consumption as the Vanguard of History. In Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, ed. Daniel Miller, 1–57. London and New York: Routledge.
Miranda, Anita . 2002. Woman as Collector. Artlines: Quarterly Newsletter of Women's Caucus for Art Vol. 2.
Moraga, Cherríe . 1983. Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios. Boston: South End Press.
Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.
Muesterberger, Werner . 1994. Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban . 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Noriega, Chon A . 1995. “Many Wests.” In From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography, ed. Mexican Museum, 9–16. San Francisco: The Mexican Museum.
Noriega, Chon A . 1999. On Museum Row: Aesthetics and the Politics of Exhibition. Daedalus 128 (3): 57–81.
Noriega, Chon A . 2000. Collectors Who Happen to Be. In East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous, ed. Chon A. Noriega, 8–16. Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Museum of Art.
Payne, Les . 1998. Tracking his Quarry with an Unwavering Will. International Review of African American Art 14 (4): 27–29.
Pearce, Susan M . 1992. Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Pearce, Susan M, ed. 1994. Interpreting Objects and Collections. New York: Routledge.
Pearce, Susan M . 1995. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. New York: Routledge.
Pearce, Susan and Alexandra Bounia . 2000. Introduction. In The Collector's Voice: Critical Readings in the Practice of Collecting, ed. Susan Pearce and Alexandra Bounia, xiii–xx. Burlington: Ashgate.
Pérez, Emma . 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pineda-Madrid, Nancy . 2002. Notes Toward a Chicana Feminist Epistemology (and Why It Is Important for Latina Feminist Theologies). In A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology, eds. María Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado and Jeanette Rodríguez, 241–266. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Pomian, Krzysztof . 1990. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800. Translated by E. Wiles-Portier. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Price, Sally . 1989. Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Rodríguez, Jeanette . 1994. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Rony, Fatimah Tobing . 1996. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sandoval, Chela . 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Vol. 18, Theory out of Bounds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Schor, Naomi . 1994. Collecting Paris. In The Culturers of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 252–274. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai . 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Smithsonian Institution Task Force on Latino Issues. 1994. Willful Neglect: The Smithsonian Institution and US Latinos. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Stewart, Susan . 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Urquijo-Ruiz, Rita E . 2004. Alicia Sotero Vásquez: Police brutality against an undocumented Mexican woman. Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social 4 (1): 62–84.
Venegas, Sybil . 2006. The Chicana as Tehuana: Rosa Covarrubias and the Making of Frida Kahlo. Unpublished Paper.
Zavella, Patricia . 1993. The Politics of Race and Gender: Organizing Chicana Cannery Workers in Northern California. In Chicana Critical Issues, eds. Norma Alarcón, Rafaela Castro, Deena González, Margarita Melville, Emma Pérez, Beatríz Pesquera, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell, Christine Sierra and Patricia Zavella 127–153. Berkeley, Third Woman Press.
Acknowledgements
Several colleagues and friends have offered critical support for this paper. Karen Brodkin and Maggie Hunter read earlier versions; Chon Noriega has been constant in his support as I muck around in Chicana/o arts; Deena J. González continues to push my thinking about Chicana feminism; and Connie Cortez and Ellen Saco Fernandez kindly held my hands in the unfamiliar territory of art history. The international audience of Miradas Cruzadas/Dual Visions: Pintoras chicanas y mexicanas in Oaxaca, Mexico (31 October, 2001) encouraged me to consider consumption. I am most grateful to the participants of the 2005 MALCS Writing Workshop, Mariela Nuñez-Janes, Adriana P. Nieto, Marivel T. Danielson, and Rosa Furumoto who provided extensive comments and suggestions. Their willingness to read an earlier version helped it reach publication. This research was financially supported in part by the Institute of American Cultures and the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA as well as Loyola Marymount University Summer Grants.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Davalos, K. A Poetics of Love and Rescue in the Collection of Chicana/o Art. Lat Stud 5, 76–103 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600241
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600241