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2 /
Green Aztlán: Environmentalism
and the Chicano/a Visual Arts
On April 22, 1970, millions of people gathered in cities and towns across
the United States for what turned out to be one of the largest political
mobilizations in the nation’s history.1 That first Earth Day made environmentalism a focal point of American political discourse. Individuals
who once had only a passing concern about ecology began to change
their everyday behaviors. Richard Nixon, ordinarily no friend of federal
regulation, established the Environmental Protection Agency. Congress
quickly approved major pieces of legislation, including the Clean Air
Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. Four decades later, Earth
Day has become a sort of unofficial national holiday. Even the profithungry corporations that were the major targets of activist anger in 1970
have gotten in on the act, inventing catchy slogans and manufacturing
environmentally-themed merchandise in order to stay ahead of public
opinion.2
Arturo Sandoval, a Chicano from New Mexico, was one of the principal organizers of the historic event. He makes an appearance in Robert
Stone’s television documentary Earth Days (2009), which shows Sandoval
seated in front of a “We Are the People of Aztlán” poster at the mobilization’s P Street headquarters in Washington, D.C.3 Conventional wisdom
often sees environmentalism as a “white thing” comprised of boutique
shopping, organic cooking, wilderness escapes, and other racially coded
activities. It even gets represented occasionally as a twenty-first-century
update to the colonial nineteenth-century “white man’s burden.” The
reality of environmentalism, though, is considerably more complex than
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green aztlán / 87
this. One recent study indicates that when asked about specific environmental problems, Latinos/as are more concerned about ecological issues
than non-Hispanic whites.4 Other studies have found considerable concern among African Americans as well.5
Environmental awareness among racial minorities is not new. Prior
to European invasion, indigenous peoples in New England made use
of complex crop rotation systems that gave the land time to replenish,
and they performed controlled burns to generate nutrient-rich soil. As
William Cronon explains, Indians occasionally overtaxed the land, but
they were not the squanderers that colonizers made them out to be. Historians have located an environmentalism that emerged during slavery,
in which forced labor on the land gave blacks a keener knowledge of
the land and a greater respect for its power than was found among their
white oppressors. The Spanish-speaking Hispanos of New Mexico’s Rio
Chama Valley developed a pastoral commons and an acequía (aqueduct)
system that prevented the overuse of land and water. Though overlooked,
these histories form a foundation for the contemporary environmental
justice movement.6 They also subvert any notion that racial minorities
have a less sophisticated relationship to the environment than whites.
Devon Peña, Laura Pulido, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Alejandro Lugo, and Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
and Andrew Hageman, among others, have written insightfully on the
connections between Mexican American activism and environmental
politics.7 However, little attention has been paid to the complex relationship between the Chicano civil rights movement and the modern environmentalist movement, even though they appeared on the public stage
simultaneously. Like their peers, Mexican Americans in the 1960s and
1970s were growing increasingly concerned about the impact of industrialization on the nonhuman natural world. Their concern was evident
in many places: in speeches made on college campuses and at rallies; in
the pages of pamphlets and newspapers; on buttons, signs, and other
ephemera; and in a range of artistic works. Chicano/a progressives felt
alienated, though, by mainstream environmentalism’s sharp philosophical distinction between human and nonhuman need. They were repelled
also by a popular “zero population growth” movement that frequently
blamed poor people of color for ecological problems created by overconsuming elites.
Arturo Sandoval and other Mexican American activists faced a
dilemma. If they joined leading organizations like the Sierra Club or
Greenpeace, they would likely find themselves surrounded by people
Ontiveros, Randy J.. In the Spirit of a New People : The Cultural Politics of the Chicano Movement, New York
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88 / green aztlán
who were largely ignorant about Chicano/a politics, and who often
misrepresented the impact of immigration on the United States. But if
they ignored environmental issues, they did a disservice to themselves
and to their communities. Their response was to formulate a distinctive Chicano/a environmentalism, one that drew on Mexican American
traditions and that joined ecological concerns with social concerns. The
indigenous mythology of Aztlán proved especially important. For many,
this imagined space of national belonging symbolized an appealing
alternative to the perceived greed and wastefulness of “gringo” society.8
Cultural production played an essential role in constructing this
emergent environmental politics. In part because Chicanos/as lacked
meaningful representation in education, media, and government, they
turned to the arts in order to recover examples of Mexican American
conservation, and to imagine an alternative environmentalism built on
equal concern for human and nonhuman life. Fiction, poetry, nonfiction
prose, theater, music, and even dance were all made part of this project,
but the visual arts were especially important, as cultural activists understood that problems of perception are at the root of the ecological crisis
brought on by industrialization. Individuals and societies only tolerate
environmental destruction when they cannot see how the commodities
they consume get made, and when they cannot picture the consequences
of their consumption. Chicano/a environmental art challenges viewers
to see how their world is made, and at what cost. It also invites them to
envision other, more thriving worlds.
Juana Alicia, Alfredo Arreguín, Judith F. Baca, Daniel Desiga, Rupert
Garcia, Ester Hernandez, Carmen Lomas Garza, Delilah Montoya,
Camille Rose Garcia, and Jesse Treviño are just a few of the visual artists who have contributed to the making of this Green aesthetic within
Chicano/a art. Some works in this tradition situate ecological themes
in the background. Carlos Almaraz’s celebrated painting West Coast
Crash (1982) is first and foremost a meditation on human mortality, but
it also prompts the viewer to consider the impact that automobile culture
has had on the landscapes of the United States. There are many works,
though, that have an explicit focus on the relation between humans and
nonhumans in nature. The mixed-media creations of Texan painter Santa
Barraza are a particularly powerful example of how Mexican American
artists have used visual media to challenge prevailing opinion about
environmentalism and its meanings for minority communities. During
the 1960s and 1970s, Barraza participated in the Chicano movement and
was shaped by its progressive ideals and its rich historical imagination.
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green aztlán / 89
She remains committed to Chicano/a art and politics, and she has created a portfolio that captures Chicano/a environmentalism’s union of
social and ecological concern. Given the increased economic and political vulnerability of minorities in the United States, and in view of the
declining health of global ecosystems everywhere, the vision Barraza
communicates of a more inclusive and a more engaged environmentalism remains as urgent today as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
Copyright © 2013. New York University Press. All rights reserved.
Environmental History and Chicano/a Politics
Many people think of environmentalism as a contemporary movement born of modern science. However, evidence suggests that humans
have long worried about the impact of their actions on the nonhuman
world around them. Historian Richard Grove says a conservationist ethic
can be located in the classical writings of Theophrastus, a Greek botanist
and philosopher who feared that humans were destabilizing the climate.9
According to Grove, this concern intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when scientists for the British East India Company
and the French Compagnie des Indes started measuring the impact of
deforestation on ecosystems in the Indian Ocean, the South Pacific, and
the Indian subcontinent. Often drawing on indigenous knowledge about
the local environs, colonial naturalists such as Pierre Poivre developed
conservation practices that safeguarded the long-term interests of their
employers. They also laid the foundations for modern environmentalist thought. Their writings about the island of Mauritius and the forests
outside of Calcutta shaped Romantic conceptions of nature as an Edenic
space in need of protection from the dangers of human activity.
Romanticism’s rigorous epistemological divide between humanity
and nature was brought to American shores by European colonizers
and their descendants. Thomas Jefferson studied colonial naturalists
such as Pierre Poivre and incorporated their philosophy into his vision
of the American landscape, which for him was untainted by the moral
and material pollution of the “Old World.”10 Conservationists George
Perkins Marsh, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold were even more influential. Their gendered discourse of a beautiful but vulnerable wilderness that needed protection from the technological force of “mankind”
became a dominant mode of thinking about the environment, particularly in the postwar decades, when the atomic bomb made imaginable
the complete annihilation of nature. Environmentalism spread in the
1960s and 1970s not only because of new scientific data, but also because
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90 / green aztlán
Green rhetoric promised “organic” experience in a consumer world that
increasingly seemed artificial and lethal. Even our vocabulary changed.
The word “environmentalist” was once a technical term that referred
to behavioralists. During the 1970s, it entered the English lexicon as a
political label.11
Mexican Americans, like their peers, were concerned about the toll
that industrialization was taking on global ecologies. On April 22, 1970,
some three hundred Chicanos/as assembled in the Barelas neighborhood of Albuquerque to observe Earth Day. Protesters called for stronger protections against pollution and waste. But unlike most rallies,
the New Mexico event made explicit connections between racism and
environmental degradation. In comments that were aired nationally
that evening on a CBS Earth Day special, Arturo Sandoval declared:
“We are going to make people understand that the kind of things that
causes air pollution and water pollution are the same kind of things that
cause racism, that cause poverty, that cause hunger in this country.” The
crowd then marched forward with cries of “¡Unidos Venceremos!” (We
will triumph!) and “¡Viva la Raza!” (Long live the people!). Bob Schieffer
reported that “an undercurrent of cynicism” was apparent that day. Participants struggled to reconcile the American public’s sudden support
for environmental regulations with their growing hostility toward civil
rights and labor rights. Program anchor Walter Cronkite was more blunt.
He claimed that “although some Negroes did take part, Negro leadership was conspicuously absent. Black militants and campus radicals have
criticized the environmental campaign, calling it a white, middle-class
diversion from the issues of Vietnam and race.”12
Cronkite was right in his description of the fissures that divided
racial minorities and mainstream environmentalism in the postwar
decades. Many white progressives abandoned civil rights activism in
the late 1960s. Some had done so because they felt marginalized by
militants in SNCC and other organizations. Others were burned out,
or they were captivated by the mystical New Age rhetoric that permeated the environmentalist movement. Activist Hunter Gitlin says of
Earth Day that “at that point I ceased to be an antiwar activist and
became an environmentalist.”13 The late 1960s was a crossroads moment
when progressive activists could have linked ecological devastation to
social injustice as part of a coordinated campaign for a more livable,
less profit-obsessed world. Some did, but not enough. Instead the civil
rights movement was undermined by white flight, and the environmentalist movement was weakened by its own myopia. Many Mexican
Ontiveros, Randy J.. In the Spirit of a New People : The Cultural Politics of the Chicano Movement, New York
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green aztlán / 91
Americans and other racial minorities felt reluctant to join organizations that defended nonhuman life but ignored threats—ecological and
otherwise—to humans.
The reality is that while environmentalism claims to speak for all of
humanity, in practice it has been rooted in the politics of race and power.
John Muir, a patron saint among U.S. conservationists, has long been
celebrated for his efforts to protect the American wilderness from the
destructive forces of industrialization. Muir’s successful campaign to
preserve the Yosemite Valley was impressive, but his motivations were
not. When Muir trekked through California’s Sierra Nevada range during the 1870s, he carried with him “contemporary fears and attitudes
about race that led him to conclude that not everyone belonged in his
beloved mountain cathedrals.”14 Muir adopted a paternalistic attitude
toward the region’s Spanish-speaking and Chinese residents, and at
times he was downright hostile toward the “mostly ugly, and some of
them altogether hideous” Indians, whom he believed had “no right place
in the landscape.”15 Muir argued for white guardianship of the land,
championing the U.S. Army’s occupation of Yosemite as a deterrent
against Indian degradation, and naively ignoring the long-term damage that scientific control and mass tourism would do to the continent’s
majestic wilderness.16
During the 1960s and 1970s, these “hidden attachments to race”17 were
most evident in the faddish campaign for “zero population growth.” The
United States was in the midst of the largest population boom in its history, and concern about world numbers was growing. On July 18, 1969,
Richard Nixon submitted an influential statement to Congress describing overpopulation as “one of the most serious challenges to human
destiny in the last third of this century.”18 In true Washington fashion,
Nixon called for a commission to study the problem. Newspapers, magazines, and television programs ran sensational reports with headlines
that read “Fighting to Save the Earth from Man,” or “Population: Boom
or Doom?”19 Earth Day organizers made overpopulation one of their central concerns. Stephanie Mills, the radical activist who became famous
for a 1969 commencement address entitled “The Future Is a Cruel Hoax,”
renewed her call for restricted reproduction.20 On Fifth Avenue in New
York, crowds chanted “Stop at Two.”21 Republican Senator Bob Packwood
said he would “consider it a mark of progress if we achieve a zero population growth rate.”22 Packwood complained that he had few allies in Congress, but he had many supporters in the general public. Like the shag
haircut and the miniskirt, zero population growth had become trendy.
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The man largely responsible for this trend was Paul Ehrlich. The Stanford biologist had become a minor celebrity with the publication of the
1968 best seller The Population Bomb, which opens with this apocalyptic passage: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the
world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going
to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”23
Time would disprove Ehrlich’s predictions, but his arresting prose, his
zeal, and his scientific credentials quickly established him as the country’s leading authority on global demography. The Population Bomb sold
more than 2 million copies.24 Ehrlich made multiple appearances on The
Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and he became a fixture on the college
lecture circuit and at Earth Day events.
Ehrlich, Kenneth Watt, and other scientists warning of an overpopulation crisis were received as objective authorities. However, their arguments relied on the unscientific residues of colonial prejudice, as did
the rhetoric of many in the zero population growth movement. In his
introduction to The Population Bomb, Ehrlich explains how he became
aware of the coming disaster. His family was riding through Delhi
“one stinking hot night” in the summer of 1966 when he encountered
“people thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People
defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.”25 Ehrlich was terrified. He says that
although he had “understood the population explosion intellectually for
a long time,” only in India did he experience “the feel of overpopulation.”26 These lines reflect more than the earnest fears of a husband and
father. Indians have long had to endure the human exploitation and ecological degradation caused by British rule. Ehrlich was a cosmopolitan,
but the opening of The Population Bomb reads as a metropole’s first real
encounter with global inequality.
In 1979, Ehrlich turned his attentions to the Rio Grande when he
warned that “nothing resembling the present American way of life
can persist if the Mexican population continues to increase as it has
for the last 20 years and the border between the United States and
Mexico remains open.”27 Ehrlich’s tone was more measured than the
worst xenophobes of his day, and unlike most in the anti-immigrant
movement, he criticized American overconsumption. But his framing
of Mexicanness as an emergent threat to the American landscape was
a repackaging of the nineteenth-century rhetoric of U.S. expansion.
In 1840, Richard Henry Dana’s best-selling Two Years Before the Mast
described California’s Mexican population as “an idle, thriftless people”
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green aztlán / 93
whose “character” kept them from properly tending the land.28 Similar
arguments were made about Hispanos of New Mexico. The explorer
and naturalist Josiah Gregg wrote in Commerce of the Prairies that the
people of New Mexico “grope their way in darkness and in ignorance.”29
Rhetoric of this sort laid the groundwork for American invasion in 1846
and created the enduring perception that Mexicans threaten the purity
of American soil.
Inasmuch as it is defined by overconsumption and underregulation,
“the American way of life” mentioned by Ehrlich is a far greater threat
to national and international ecologies than Mexican migration. The
only just response to the ongoing political tragedy at the U.S.-Mexico
border is demilitarization and a recognition of the human right to a living wage, but instead of asking readers to expand their sense of moral
obligation, Ehrlich directed them to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a reactionary organization that uses slanted history
and distorted numbers to embellish its nativism.30 Mexican Americans
heard the racial undertones of the zero population growth movement
and recognized them for what they were. Speaking to students at Arizona State University on October 14, 1970, the Crusade for Justice leader
Corky Gonzales said that “they come around and they tell us . . . these
abstract things. . . . They say, ‘You have a problem: birth control. You
better control all your kids ’cause that’s your economic problem.”31 For
Gonzales, the rhetoric of overpopulation was a ruse. He described it
as an effort by elites to suppress political opposition, and he urged his
audience to remain militant: “they say, don’t have any more children
there ’cause they may turn out like that revolutionary [Brazilian radical
Carlos Marighella] we had to kill last year. . . . The Mexicano, the Chicano . . . will no longer stand back and wait in line.” Gonzales wanted
blame placed where blame was due.
Activists could not embrace a movement with such clear racial animus. But neither could they ignore the mounting scientific evidence of
environmental deterioration, or miss its impact on their own communities. They therefore began to develop a distinctive Chicano/a environmentalism that looked to Mexican cultures in America as sources of
inspiration and guidance in building an alternative, healthier modernity.
The feminist activist Enriqueta Vasquez’s editorials in the influential
periodical El Grito del Norte illustrate the dimensions of this emergent
environmentalism. Published regularly between 1968 and 1972, her column “¡Despierten Hermanos!” (Wake up, brothers and sisters) tackled
a range of issues affecting Chicano/a communities, including welfare
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94 / green aztlán
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rights, cultural preservation, housing discrimination, and educational
opportunity.
Vasquez was clearly influenced by Earth Day preparations. The January 17, 1970, article “Smog and Money Politics” echoed popular concern about air pollution and called for better public transportation and
cleaner cars. But while environmentalists either ignored Chicanos/as or
viewed them with suspicion, Vasquez addressed Mexican Americans as
vital constituents in the Green movement. She contrasted the peopleoriented values of “Raza” culture with the profit-oriented values of dominant U.S. society, arguing that “when we look at the smog situation . . . it
looks to me like humans are beginning to die because of POLITICS and
MONEY. See why we say Tío Sam [Uncle Sam] is a DOLLAR culture?”32
The effects of this “dollar culture” were all too apparent in New Mexico,
where Vasquez lived and where El Grito del Norte was published. The
state and federal government has a long history of seizing land from New
Mexican Indian and Hispano communities in the name of conservation,
only to then lease or sell that same land to nuclear, tourist, and mining
interests.33
Vasquez expressed concern that “the only thing that Tío Sam will listen to anymore is violence and demonstration.”34 Experience made her
pessimistic about the state’s willingness to remedy environmental damage, but she was optimistic about the power of grassroots organizing. In
a November 15, 1969, column, she envisioned the creation of independent
and sustainable communities based on Chicano/a traditions and feminist values:
Let’s say that a co-op of about six such families would buy about
ten acres of land. . . . Once these families get themselves built-in,
they could begin to think about planting and growing crops to feed
themselves and learn from the land. And this is the beauty of the
whole thing, in that they would be cultivating themselves and also
be teaching the young ones how to relate to the earth. These women
could actually build a satisfying home life for themselves and their
families. They could work and play together with the children and
they could study together and learn about nature, crops, and life
in general. There would be a deep spiritual relationship and bond
there.35
Vasquez had received welfare benefits when she lived in Colorado with
her two children.36 She knew firsthand how working-class women
become ensnared in cycles of poverty, but she also saw how antiracist,
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green aztlán / 95
antisexist activism could improve people’s lives. Some might argue that
Vasquez was being naïve in imagining a cooperative alternative to the
isolated postwar nuclear family. The 1960s certainly had its share of utopian experiments that began as dreams and ended as nightmares, but
Vasquez’s plan was no youthful pipe dream. In 1968, she and her new
husband, Bill Longeaux y Vasquez, purchased an adobe house in New
Mexico’s Sangre de Christo Mountains and began teaching at the Vincent Ranch.37 The Longeaux y Vasquez home was not a cooperative in
the purest sense, but it served as a popular retreat for movement activists, and it cemented Vasquez’s lifelong commitment to sustainability as
a Chicano/a ethic.
Vasquez lived in close proximity to a hippie counterculture that saw
the “Land of Enchantment” as an escape from the regimentation of dominant American society. The relationship between Mexican Americans
in New Mexico and los hippies was complex. Members of the counterculture, most of them white, were sympathetic to the Hispano/a struggle for
land rights, decent jobs, and cultural protection. Hippies studied the history of indigenous and Hispanic communities in New Mexico, and they
were largely supportive of Chicano/a political campaigns, including successful efforts to bring the radical theater collective El Teatro Campesino
to Taos in the summer of 1970. For their part, Hispanos/as and Chicanos/
as sympathized with the counterculture’s critique of dominant society.
Some were even curious about counterculture lifestyles. Diana Valdez,
a native New Mexican, “dated a few gringos” while in college, though it
meant being criticized by some in her community.38 A handful of young
Chicanos/as attended experimental schools such as the Taos Learning
Center. But there was tension between the groups as well. Locals resented
the fact that hippies were driving up real-estate prices and making it
harder for Hispanos to own heritage lands. Many residents had a “liveand-let-live” attitude toward countercultural lifestyles, but conservative
members of northern New Mexican communities took offense at hippie
sexual libertinism and drug use. These tensions occasionally devolved
into harassment and violence, as John Nichols depicts in his 1974 novel
The Milagro Beanfield War.
Progressive Chicanos/as shared the hippie hatred of America’s
“plastic culture,” but they looked elsewhere for alternatives. Vasquez
insisted in one of her editorials that unlike the hippies, “we [Mexican
Americans] have a good way of life already. We know the land well. It
is ours.”39 Her claim that “We know the land well” is an invocation of
Aztlán, a prominent movement myth and a cornerstone of Vasquez’s
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96 / green aztlán
Chicano/a environmentalism. According to indigenous legend, this
“land of the white heron” was home to the Aztecs until an ecological
crisis forced them into exile. Tribal prophets instructed the people to
migrate south and to establish a new nation when they encountered a
snake-eating eagle perched upon a cactus. They made Tenochtitlán the
capital of Mexico, which still has on its flag el aguila y la serpiente (the
eagle and the serpent). Some versions of the myth claim the descendants of the Aztecs will return to their northern homeland during el
quinto sol, a period of “the fifth sun” when the natural order will be
restored.
No one can say with certainty how much of this legend is fact and
how much is fiction. That doesn’t matter, though, because Aztlán’s power
as a political tool has less to do with historical accuracy than with cultural resonance. Mary Pat Brady claims the Aztec legend has been part
of a tradition of folk resistance among Mexican-identified communities
in the United States since at least the 1870s.40 In 1962, Native American
scholar Jack Forbes introduced this mythology to new audiences in a
mimeograph entitled “The Mexican Heritage of Aztlán (the Southwest)
to 1821.” The document claimed that “the heritage of Anáhuac [a rough
synonym of Aztlán], in its indigenous, Hispano-Mexican, modern Mexican, or Mexican-American manifestations, is a living part of the past,
the present, and the future of the United States.”41 According to historian
John Chávez, Forbes’s publication circulated informally during the 1960s
among Chicano/a activists, who found in Aztlán a compelling counternarrative to Eurocentric histories of the United States.42 At the 1969
Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, the poet Alurista appropriated
the Aztec myth in the preamble to his manifesto “El plan espiritual de
Aztlán” (The spiritual plan of Aztlán):
In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud
historical heritage but also of the brutal “Gringo” invasion of our
territories: We, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlan, from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming
the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our
people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power,
our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.43
Commentators have described Alurista’s reading of “El plan espiritual
de Aztlán” at the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference as a foundational moment of cultural nationalism. His phrase “in the spirit of a new
people” was indeed a novel expression of a communal sensibility that
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green aztlán / 97
had long existed among Mexicans in the United States. Alurista’s poem
transformed Aztlán into a leading trope of the Chicano movement.
“El plan espiritual de Aztlán” makes a powerful link between the
human domain of Chicano/a politics and the larger natural order of
the universe when it declares that Chicanos/as are a “people of the sun”
who are “reclaiming the land of their birth.” Later he urges his audience
to reject the artificial “gringo dollar value system” with its “economic
slavery, political exploitation, ethnic and cultural psychological destruction, and denial of civil and human rights.”44 He proposes instead the
adoption of “cultural background and values which ignore materialism and embrace humanism” and which “sustain an economic base for
healthy growth and development.”45 The word “sustain” has become an
important part of the environmentalist lexicon. Cultural nationalism
has undergone significant revision since Alurista’s performance in 1969,
but “El plan espiritual de Aztlán” remains relevant because it outlines a
model of sustainability that united social justice and environmental protection through an emphasis on labor. Lee Bebout explains that “‘El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán’ . . . argued that the land belongs to those who work
it, drawing upon and reinforcing the notion of an organic connection to
the land as well as the working-class nature of the Chicano struggle.”46
Free-market economies rest on the ability of private industries to produce profits by depreciating labor and by shifting social and ecological
costs to the public. Alurista envisions an alternative economy built on
the recognition of a shared moral obligation to “our lands” and to “those
who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops.” He calls this
alternative Aztlán, and he imagines it a place governed not by profit margins and efficiencies, but by “the process of love and brotherhood.”47
Feminist commentators have long argued that cultural nationalist rhetoric tends to valorize manhood and to devalue women and
their contributions to the movement.48 With its conspicuous silence on
women’s issues and its idealization of the “love for our brothers” that
“makes us a people,” Alurista’s manifesto reflects this masculinist orientation. However, Enriqueta Vasquez’s writings prove that nationalism
is not in and of itself antifeminist. Her version of cultural nationalism
incorporated feminist principles, forming what Dionne Espinoza calls
a distinctive “feminist nationalism.”49 Vasquez was able to use the myth
of Aztlán as inspiration for a more humane and more sustainable way
of life. Her November 1969 column “La Santa Tierra” (The holy land)
put it succinctly: “We are the Mestizo nation of Aztlán, the nation of
mixed blood. . . . We cannot go the Gringo way. We choose; we go the
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98 / green aztlán
way of the land; the way of the earth; the way of the water; the way of
the wind; the way of AZTLÁN.”50 Neither Vasquez nor Alurista used the
word “environmentalist” to describe their philosophy because the word
was encumbered by the racism of overpopulation rhetoric and by mainstream environmentalism’s neglect of social issues. Both writers, though,
wanted to make issues of ecology a part of the Chicano movement. Their
appropriation of Aztlán was a step in that direction.
Several grassroots environmental initiatives accompanied these
intellectual efforts, the most prominent being the United Farm Workers’ antipesticide campaign. At the end of 1967, the UFW found itself
facing a crisis. The huelga (strike) had been under way for more than
two years, workers were broke, and the growers were showing little sign
of surrender. A new strategy was needed, so UFW leaders decided in
January 1968 to broaden public support by making pesticides a central
issue in their campaign.51 César Chávez, Ester Hernandez, Jessica Govea,
Corky Gonzales, and Juana Alicia all knew firsthand the health risks of
pesticides such as DDT, since they had worked in the fields as children.
The UFW began to draw parallels between an increase in food-related
epidemics and the abuse of farmworkers, arguing that both were caused
by a greedy insistence on profits over people. Chávez made this case on
national television, while other members fanned out to grocery stores
from Los Angeles to New York and distributed pamphlets that warned
consumers of a correlation between contaminated grapes and specific
health risks, including birth defects and cancer.
The tactic was a success. Bumper stickers with the slogan “No Grapes”
appeared on cars across the country. By 1969, negative publicity and
declining sales forced grape producers such as Perelli-Mineti and Sons to
sign contracts mandating better wages, regular breaks, and limitations
on how and where pesticides should be applied.52 Farmworker wages continued to climb well into the 1970s, reaching their historic peak in 1978.53
The UFW’s antipesticide campaign showed activists that environmental
issues could be used to strengthen rather than distract from civil rights
efforts. It also got members of the public thinking (many for the first
time) about how their food is made, and at what cost to them, to workers,
and to ecosystems. The farmworker strike is widely acknowledged as a
major moment in U.S. labor history. It deserves recognition as a major
moment in environmental history as well.
The land-rights activism of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal
Land Grant Alliance) was another instance of an emergent Chicano/a
environmentalism. In 1963, former Pentecostal preacher Reies López
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green aztlán / 99
Tijerina founded this pivotal movement organization after moving to
northern New Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande Valley from his native Texas.54
The Hispanos who lived in the rural region formed a close-knit community. They were inheritors of a long tradition of resistance to domination,
one that included the midnight fence-cutting raids of the secretive Gorras Blancas (White Caps) society during the 1880s and 1890s. Nearly all
Hispanos faced extreme poverty, and many told detailed stories of lands
stolen from their ancestors by violence and by shady legal maneuvers
following the Mexican-American War. As one sheepherder told Peter
Nabokov, they carry the feeling of injustice “in their hearts, even if they
don’t say anything.”55 Tijerina immersed himself in the land-rights struggle. He became a student of New Mexican history, Latin American politics, and international law. He even lived for a time in Mexico City, where
he combed library archives for information on the political intrigue surrounding the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.56
The Alianza was fueled by collective energy, but Tijerina’s intellect
and his stirring speeches made him a compelling spokesperson. He
published in local newspapers, gave regular radio addresses on KABQ
in Albuquerque, and traveled to college campuses, churches, and union
halls across the country.57 The land-grant cause became a focal point of
the movement as activists embraced the struggle in New Mexico as a
symbol of the historical injustices done to Chicanos/as throughout the
United States. On October 15, 1966, more than three hundred aliancistas
occupied a small section of the Kit Carson National Forest. They claimed
sovereignty on behalf of the people of San Joaquín del Río de Chama, a
land-grant community established under Spanish law in 1806. When two
park rangers confronted the group, members arrested the officers, convicted them of trespass before a mock court, and released them with fines
and suspended sentences. The occupation of the Echo Ampitheater came
to a bloodless end on October 24, but tensions in the region remained
high. Rumors circulated of an imminent Cuba-inspired revolution. On
June 5, 1967, the dramatic story of the Alianza movement reached its climax. A small group of approximately twenty armed men came to the
county courthouse in Tierra Amarilla and attempted a citizen’s arrest of
district attorney Alfonso Sánchez, who had issued warrants for Alianza
leadership. Details of the ensuing shootout are hazy, but by its end two
officers were injured, one of them critically.
The Alianza never fully recovered from the tragic events at Tierra
Amarilla. The target of a massive police and National Guard manhunt
in the Rio Sangre de Christo Mountains, Tijerina was captured on June
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100 / green aztlán
9. In one of the movement’s most dramatic legal cases, Tijerina acted as
his own counsel before a state court and was declared “not guilty” on
capital charges that included kidnapping, unlawful assault on a jail, and
unlawful imprisonment. The sympathetic jury seemingly accepted the
argument that aliancistas were acting in self-defense. Tijerina was not
so fortunate in federal court, however. On November 11, 1967, the leader
was convicted on two charges of assault related to the Echo Ampitheater occupation. Tijerina spent more than three years in prison and was
barred from any further association with the Alianza. The organization’s
infrastructure survived into the 1980s, but it eventually collapsed under
the weight of years of infighting and government harassment.58
The Alianza won no major political victories, and its efforts to reclaim
lands stolen by the federal government were quixotic. The organization
is a case study in what can go wrong when social movements resort to
violence, but it also reveals the danger of hasty judgments about success
and failure in the political realm. The Alianza strengthened alliances
between Mexican Americans and American Indians, especially in New
Mexico, where relations between the two populations historically ran
hot and cold. Aliancistas supported the Taos Pueblo’s successful efforts
to reclaim Blue Lake from the federal government, and the Pueblos in
return backed Hispano demands for greater cultural and legal protections.59 The land-rights struggle forged cross-regional connections. César
Chávez and Corky Gonzales had different ideological orientations, but
both activists supported the Alianza. Though committed to nonviolence, Chávez wrote a public letter of solidarity, and Gonzalez and other
Crusade for Justice members gave logistical and financial support while
Tijerina was in jail.60 Their support mirrored the sentiment of most
Chicanos/as.
The Alianza campaign also played an important role in the formation of Chicano/a environmentalism. For decades, forest managers and
preservationists described Hispanos as a threat to the perceived wilds of
northern New Mexico. As geographer Jake Kosek explains, their “notions
of forest protection and care became bound up with a colonial racial
prejudice; rangers’ views of Hispanos as backward, uneducated, and lazy
resurfaced in their estimation of Hispano land use practices.”61 Conservationists and land managers have claimed that subsistence logging and
sheep grazing endangers the region’s delicate ecosystem, and they have
persuaded the state and federal government to enact strict regulations on
Hispano land use.62 There are rare instances when particular individuals or communities have exhausted water, grass, or timber resources.
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green aztlán / 101
Hispanos, though, have generally balanced the countervailing pressures
of consumption and conservation, which is not surprising given their
long tenure in the arid region. Ironically, the very forces that claim to be
preserving New Mexico’s wilderness are the ones destroying it. In the
name of conservation, they have made the region into a recreation destination for the wealthy, a corporate timber factory, and a nuclear research
facility. Hispanos were and are still keenly aware of this irony. As Peter
Nabokov elegantly puts it: “When they [Hispanos] are forbidden to cut
stove wood but witness large logging firms move into ancestral lands,
they become frustrated. . . . [T]hey still carry the memory, difficult for
an Anglo to understand, that this land was a Spanish pueblo’s holding,
never to be sold, always to be enjoyed and to yield communally.”63 In
contrast to mainstream environmentalism, the Alianza did not fetishize
the New Mexican landscape. Instead they used their cultural heritage as
a resource for confronting state and corporate power and for building a
grassroots environmental justice movement.
There were other less high-profile environmental initiatives in the
movement. The Crusade for Justice founded a boarding school at New
Mexico’s Vincent Ranch, famous in Chicano/a history as the location of
the film Salt of the Earth (1954). Designed as an alternative to the impoverished schools of Denver barrios, Escuela Tlatelolco taught Chicano/a
history and culture alongside more traditional subjects. It also gave
urban youth the chance to hike and to ranch and to see a world beyond
the barrio.64 As mentioned above, many Mexican Americans participated in the first Earth Day. Mexican Americans also participated in the
1976 “Working for Environmental and Economic Justice and Jobs” conference that was organized by the University of Michigan and the United
Auto Workers. According to historian Bunyan Bryant, the event marked
the first occasion when the phrase “environmental justice” was used to
describe integration of civil rights activism and environmentalism.65
As in other areas, the arts became a vital forum for creating and communicating an environmentalist agenda within the Chicano movement.
Cultural producers used painting and illustration, literature, music,
dance, theater, and other media as tools for articulating Chicano/a
environmentalism. These artists wanted to get Mexican Americans and
other raza communities thinking differently about nature, to see concern for nature as part of their cultural heritage. They wanted to push
back on the belief among whites that minorities were less concerned
about environmental issues. Above all, Chicano/a artists wanted audiences of all backgrounds to reconsider the faulty divide between civil
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102 / green aztlán
rights and environmental responsibilities, between the natural and the
human, between what is given and what is possible. As we will see in the
next section, the work of movement artists such as Santa Barraza offers
a compelling example of how creative expression can be mobilized in
progressive campaigns for a more sustainable world.
Copyright © 2013. New York University Press. All rights reserved.
Visualizing Nature: The Environmentalist Aesthetic
of Santa Barraza
Cultural expression was more than ornamentation for the Chicano
movement. During the 1960s and 1970s, literature, the visual arts, theater, dance, music, and other artistic forms did vital political work. They
attracted new participants to the cause; they created common symbols
for people of different regional, class, and linguistic backgrounds; they
inspired; they entertained; they helped recover neglected cultural traditions; they served as catalysts for debate; and they educated outsiders
about the rich history of Mexicans in the United States. Less appreciated,
and less understood, is the fact that the arts were also important in the
early making of a distinctive Chicano/a environmentalism.
Consider Corky Gonzales’s epic verse Yo soy Joaquín, which was first
published independently by the Crusade for Justice in 1967, and two
years later was published by the mainstream house Bantam Books. The
poem tells the story of a mythical hero who, when the reader first meets
him, is “lost in a world of confusion / caught up in the whirl of a gringo
society.”66 He draws strength, though, as he recalls his people’s history.
By the end of the poem, the protagonist can proudly announce:
I am the masses of my people and
I refuse to be absorbed.
I am Joaquín.
The odds are great
but my spirit is strong,
my faith unbreakable,
my blood is pure.67
This much-anthologized work is often cited as an exemplar of Chicano/a
nationalist ideology. Typically unnoticed, though, is the way in which
the poem appeals to nationalist feeling through a rhetoric of ecology.
The narrative is built around a stark contrast between the death-dealing, unnatural “Anglo” world and the life-giving, natural world of his
raza, or “people.” The narrator laments:
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green aztlán / 103
Yes,
I have come a long way to nowhere,
unwillingly dragged by that
monstrous, technical,
industrial giant called
Progress
And Anglo success. . . .
Copyright © 2013. New York University Press. All rights reserved.
The 1972 Bantam edition has two black-and-white photographs accompanying this page. The first photo shows a Chicana worker looking
tiredly at the camera as she leans on the sorting machine at an onion factory in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The second photo shows a man with an
impersonal expression cutting garments at a warehouse in Culver City,
California. The layout suggests that like the speaker of the poem, these
two Chicanos/as have been alienated both from their cultural heritage
and from the earth by “a foreign people” that:
frowned upon our way of life
and took what they could use.
Our art,
our literature,
our music, they ignored—
so they left the real things of value
and grabbed at their own destruction
by their greed and avarice.
They overlooked that cleansing fountain of
nature and brotherhood
which is Joaquín.
Mainstream environmentalism tends to separate ecological problems
from social injustice, even though both have what the poem calls “greed
and avarice” as their source. Gonzales’s description of Joaquín as a
“fountain of nature and brotherhood” is a poetic attempt to reunite these
concerns. By the end of the poem, the hero symbolizes for the reader
an individual’s restored relationship to culture, to humanity, and to the
broader natural world. The poem has flaws. The speaker relies on a masculinist vocabulary to describe this restoration, saying that “I must fight
/ and win this struggle / for my sons.”68 Also, the poem’s romanticizing of
a cultural union with nature keeps it from giving readers a more practical vision of what a Chicano/a environmentalism might look like. But
the poem is notable as an influential attempt at using cultural expression
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104 / green aztlán
to lay the foundations of an environmentalist thought within progressive
Mexican American politics.
Daniel Valdez attempted something similar in “América de los indios”
(America of the Indians), a song that appeared on his 1974 album Mestizo
(A&M Records). The song, performed in Spanish, opens with an apocalyptic image of nature laid waste by an unknown force: “Surcando el cielo
de América / Sangre de viento avanzando, forma de fuego en la noche
/ En ruina de allí” (Crossing the skies of America, / Blood of advancing wind, shape of fire in the night / From there in ruin). The music
accelerates from this stanza’s slow, lonely rhythm dominated by guitar,
flute, and drum, toward a fast-tempo orchestral sound. The mestizos of
the American hemisphere seem to be rising up, transforming death into
life as they work the land: “Manos de bronce en la tierra / Flor de sudor
van sembrando, Esperanzas de los pobres / Nacen aquí” (Bronze-colored
hands in the earth / They are sowing the flower of perspiration / The
hopes of the poor / Are born here). The symbolist lyrics of “Américo de
los indios” end with the verbal image of a revolution that will mend the
severed bond between human and nonhuman life: “Sangre y fusil y la
tierra, / Gritando revolución, / Ya van bajando los pueblos / Hacia la liberación” (Blood and rifle and earth / Shouting ‘Revolution’ / The peoples
[of America] are moving down toward liberation).69 Valdez’s lyric draws
upon the anticolonial rhetoric of nineteenth-century Latin America. It
also shows the influence of the Third World solidarity movement. There
is a naïve romanticism in the song’s handling of the indigenous, but it
does show an admirable desire to join the Chicano movement with the
historical struggle against the social and ecological destructiveness of
unrestrained capitalism in the Western Hemisphere.
These works by Gonzales and Valdez were two of the many attempts
during the 1960s and 1970s to rethink the relationship between nature
and society through creative expression. The visual arts, though, is where
we find some of the most compelling examples of a nascent environmentalist aesthetic in the Chicano movement. There is good reason why. In a
society dominated by the image, the visual arts capture and keep viewer
attention better than most other forms of expression. Also, the visual arts
directly address the optic dimension of ecological devastation. Because
the production of commodities so frequently relies on the exploitation
of laborers and on the exhaustion of natural resources, modern economies obscure the conditions in which goods are made. The visual arts are
powerful precisely because they get viewers to see aspects of the world
that otherwise go unseen. Chicano/a artists have consistently used this
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green aztlán / 105
power to focus viewer attention on the hidden costs of capitalism, and
also to envision healthier models of human interaction with the natural
worlds of which they are a part.
There are two different—though at times overlapping—strands
within the tradition of Chicano/a environmentalist art. The confrontational approach challenges a pervasive vision of postwar abundance
by confronting viewers with stark images of the social and ecological
destructiveness of American consumerism. Ester Hernandez’s iconoclastic image Sun Mad (1982) is among the best examples of this style.
Born and raised in central California, Hernandez worked in the fields
alongside her farmworker parents when she was a child. As a teenager,
she got involved in the UFW strike and began a lifelong career in progressive Chicano/a politics and art. Her Sun Mad image is a stinging
parody of the famous red-bonneted woman who appears on packaging
for the Sun-Maid Growers of California. Hernandez uses the bold red,
yellow, and white palette of the original, but she replaces the face of the
original model, Lorraine Collet Peterson, with a skeleton dressed in the
same long braid and scarlet hat. Beneath a basket of yellowed grapes and
the distinctive block lettering of the pun “Sun Mad Raisins” is the phrase
“Unnaturally Grown with Insecticides, Miticides, Herbicides, and Fungicides.” The image is jarring. The happy feeling of recognition that
comes with seeing a childhood brand is quickly replaced by an unsettling confusion. Hernandez’s parody forces viewers to think about the
relationship between the pleasant pastoral imagery of food marketing
and the ugly realities of agricultural production. Not all viewers who
see Sun Mad will change their opinion about farm labor or about agrochemicals. But it is impossible to ever look at the original in quite the
same way.
The second strand of environmentalist Chicano/a art was an affirmative approach that looked to Mexican American histories and cultures
as sources of inspiration for more sustainable and more just lifeways.
Hernandez’s Mis Madres (1986) typifies this approach. The screenprint
shows a satellite image of Earth in the left palm of an indigenous elderwoman who looks directly at the viewer. In putting these two “mothers” together, Hernandez critiques the widespread perception of native
peoples as premodern and passive. Daniel Desiga’s 1976 Campesino is
another example. This oil-on-canvas image depicts a male farmworker
bent forward at the waist, his face hidden beneath a wide-brim hat, his
hands working a row of crops with the hated short-handle hoe. Growers
see farmworkers as barely more than a tool in the agricultural assembly
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106 / green aztlán
line, but Desiga’s work emphasizes the man’s humanity. Blood courses
through the veins of the campesino’s powerful forearms; his golden sunlike shirt radiates warmth against a cool blue backdrop; and the small
tattoos between each thumb and pointer finger hint at a life beyond the
fields. Sky, soil, and humanity unite visually, showing the worker’s right
and responsibility to the land. The image critiques what intellectual
historian C. B. Macpherson calls “possessive individualism,” a doctrine
of capitalist modernity that equates personhood with property rights.70
Campesino endorses instead a model of personhood in which the dignity
of the individual comes from human creativity and community, the latter made manifest in the spectator’s recognition of the farmworker. As
in Yo soy Joaquín, there is a measure of romance inherent in Desiga’s
imagining. But this romance served as a counterpoint to the agriculture industry’s denigration of the farmworker, and also as a corrective to
the zero population growth movement’s consistent representation of the
migrant as a pollutant.
Movement artists turned to indigenous themes in creating an environmentalist art as part of the sweeping reappraisal during the 1960s and
1970s of the relationship between Chicanos/as and Native Americans.
Under Spanish and Mexican rule of what is today the American Southwest, Indians were conquered and forced into servitude by ranchers,
miners, soldiers, and clergy. They occupied the lowest rungs of a racial
hierarchy made apparent in the seventeeth-century Spanish casta paintings, which taxonomized an array of skin colors according to caste.71 In
the early twentieth century, José Vasconcelos and other Mexican intellectual elites attempted to remake the indio into a symbol of cultural independence from Europe, but their efforts were not aimed at improving
the lives of the nation’s native peoples. Chicano/a activists wanted more
substantive alliances with Native Americans. They publicly supported
the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1970, and American Indian
activists in turn endorsed the UFW’s boycott of grocery giant Safeway.
In 1971, Indian and Chicano/a leaders fought governmental resistance
to establish Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University (DQU) in Davis,
California. DQU won accreditation in 1977, and it served as California’s
only tribal college until its closure in 2005.72 The most dramatic story
line involving these two groups happened in the events surrounding the
June 26, 1975, federal siege in South Dakota. While living in Seattle in
the early 1970s, Lakota activist Leonard Peltier found support among
Mexican Americans in the local struggle to restore Indian control of
Fort Lawton. When Peltier and his colleagues were forced into hiding
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green aztlán / 107
following the deaths of Agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler during
the raid on the American Indian encampment at Wounded Knee, they
were given shelter in Colorado by members of the Crusade for Justice.
Peltier, sometimes mistaken for a Chicano when his hair was short, was
later aided in his escape from Lompoc Prison by Bobby Garcia, a Chicano from New Mexico. Peltier had feared that prison authorities were
planning to kill him.73
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo argues that the Chicano/a indigenism of the Chicano movement ignored the complexity of contemporary
native politics. She also contends that indigenism ironically condemned
Indians to a vanishing past.74 She is right to emphasize the risks of cultural borrowing, but Mexican American activists were generally aware
of these risks, and they took steps to avoid stereotype and condescension. Enriqueta Vasquez once believed that Aztlán deserved recognition
as a sovereign Chicano/a nation. In an October 1969 editorial, she wrote:
“We, the Raza, must wake up to Aztlán. We must know that as Aztlán
we seek freedom—culturally, socially, economically and politically. That
is our goal, we must live it, we must awaken.”75 Only one month later,
Vasquez traveled to San Francisco to show her solidarity with the American Indian activists who had taken control of Alcatraz Island. She left
California with a greater appreciation for prior indigenous claims to the
land. As historian Lorena Oropeza says of Vasquez: “Native American
activists at the gathering ‘felt threatened’ by talk of Aztlán and ‘had a
hard time grasping’ [the concept]. . . . [Vasquez] rejected the idea that
Mexican Americans should seek sole physical possession of any part of
the present-day U.S. Southwest in favor of the idea that Chicanos and
Chicanas needed to nurture their sense of cultural and spiritual belonging to the land.”76 Vasquez’s respect for native sovereignty was widespread among Mexican American activists.
Visual artists played a particularly important role in exploring
the possibilities and the limits of indigenous themes in progressive
Chicano/a politics. Santa Barraza, Emanuel Martinez, Juana Alicia,
Daniel Desiga, Yolanda Lopez, Enrique Chagoya, Judy Baca, and Carmen Lomas Garza (to name only a few) made extensive use of native
imagery to challenge the Eurocentrism of the art world and also to envision other modes of relating to humanity and to the larger natural world.
These artists worked across a range of visual media, but most famous are
the indigenous murals that were created on public spaces throughout
the United States, and especially in the Southwest. San Diego’s Chicano
Park, for example, was created in the 1970s by the community leaders
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108 / green aztlán
of Barrio Logan after a protracted permit struggle with city and state
officials. The pillars of the Coronado Bridge above the park were painted
with a range of indigenous motifs, including the sacred heart, Aztec and
Mayan deities, and the ollin, a symbol of movement. The gender politics
surrounding the use of indigenous motifs in Chicano/a mural art is complex: some murals presented viewers with a narrowly male-oriented and
heterosexual image of the past, while others offered a more egalitarian
vision. These contradictions around sexuality and gender in public art
are evidence of the fact that efforts to imagine a Chicano/a environmentalism were always bound up with debates about family, economy, and
custom.
Chicana artist Santa Barraza’s portfolio deserves special attention, as
hers is an especially compelling example of how Chicano/a visual arts
rethink the relationship between humans and the ecologies to which
they belong. Barraza was born on April 7, 1951, in Kingsville, a South
Texas town whose economy is dominated by the famous—and for many
Mexicans, infamous—King Ranch. Barraza came from a workingclass family. Her grandparents were sharecroppers and railroad hands,
and her parents, Frances and Joaquín, owned a small car repair shop.
Barraza took art classes from an admired teacher at H. M. King High
School, where she served as art editor for the school’s literary magazine.
After enrolling at Texas A&I University (now Texas A&M–Kingsville),
she decided to make the visual arts her vocation. During her freshman
year, a professor introduced her to pre-Colombian art and to the work
of the Mexican muralists. Inspired, Barraza transferred to the University of Texas at Austin to get her BFA and MFA degrees. While there,
she enrolled in Jacinto Quirarte’s Chicano/a art history class and was
introduced to his groundbreaking Mexican-American Art in manuscript
form. She joined Los Quemados (The Burnt-Out), a radical art collective
that included Carmen Lomas Garza, César Martínez, and Jose Treviño,
and later she cofounded a feminist art collective called Mujeres Artistas
del Suroeste (Women Artists of the Southwest, or MAS). Barraza left
Texas in 1985, first to Pennsylvania for teaching positions at La Roche
College and Penn State, and then in 1993 to the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1997, Barraza returned to Kingsville, where she teaches studio art to
new generations of working-class students at her hometown university.
As with all great artists, Barraza’s work has evolved over the past
several decades. Her artistic vision, though, remains rooted in the cultural and political values she developed during the 1960s and 1970s. In
1969, Barraza got involved in progressive activism on the Texas A&I
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campus. Pedro Rodriguez had recently been hired as the university’s
first Chicano/a art professor, and many students—including the accomplished artists Amado Peña and José Rivera—were challenging artistic
conventions and exploring their cultural heritage. José Angel Gutiérrez
was then a graduate student in political science at Kingsville, and he
joined with Carlos Guerra and others to form a local chapter of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO).77 MAYO was one of the
movement’s most visible and, arguably, most successful organizations.
It formed in 1967 out of a barroom study group led by Mario Compean,
Willie Velásquez, Juan Patlán, Ignacio Pérez, and Gutiérrez. Seemingly
overnight, it transformed into an energetic movement-within-a-movement, eventually becoming the organizational backbone of La Raza
Unida, the Chicano/a third-party campaign. Barraza joined MAYO.
Though hers was not an especially political family, she had grown up
with whispered stories of ancestors robbed of their land and driven into
poverty by corrupt Anglos. MAYO’s message of self-determination and
cultural pride resonated with her.
Barraza was from a borderlands region rich with Mexican American history, but she and her school-age peers knew little of it because
it had been erased by decades of colonial revisionism. She recovered
some of this heritage in college, using her art as a way of making it her
own. Her 1973 pencil drawing Soldaderas shows three women soldiers
standing beside Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary whose
battle cry “Tierra y Libertad” (land and liberty) was frequently quoted
by Chicano/a activists. As Edward J. McCaughan notes, allusions to the
art and politics of the Mexican Revolution were a key strategy for challenging the disempowering ideals of assimilationism that dominated
U.S. culture.78 Barraza’s vivid interpretation of this wartime scene meditates on the many unseen roles that women play in political struggles,
and on their unseen sacrifices. The pencil drawing Los Migrantes, also
from 1972, reproduces a close-up portrait by WPA photographer Russell Lee of a weary but proud migrant man and his young child. These
two images differ notably in their execution. The play on light and dark
is more intense in Los Migrantes, while Soldaderas is more exact in its
lines. Both images, though, manage to reconstruct a transnational and
cross-ethnic political genealogy for Chicano/a activism at a time when
Mexican American history was hidden.
The late Shifra Goldman describes Barraza’s work from the late 1960s
and the early 1970s as the first of three phases in the artist’s career. At
the time, Barraza was completing her bachelor’s degree, working as a
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figure 2.1. Los Migrantes (1972) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of Texas A&M
University Press.
graphic designer, and raising her young daughter Andrea. Goldman says
the artwork of this first period “finds its best voice in tonality and drama,
in the powerful use of black and white with forceful and diagonal composition, in the limitation of subject to one or several figures delineated
on the plain surface.”79 The works have an experimental feeling to them.
Barraza was clearly focused on technique: perfecting her use of shading, controlling line, and developing a sense of scale. She also was trying
out different subjects. Images such as Los Migrantes focused explicitly on
history and politics. Others dwelt on familial and individual concerns.
Regrettably, very little of this early work is available today. According to
Barraza, it was stolen from her in the early 1980s by a prominent scholar
and art collector.
Goldman calls Barraza’s second period, which lasted through the
1980s, a more “introspective” period, with a “general ‘loosening’ of form,
a greater expressionist tendency, and a more open application of color.”80
It is tempting to describe this shift in Barraza’s style as a movement away
from the political commitments of earlier decades. While this narrative
aligns with the common misperception of the 1980s as a time of retreat
among progressive artists and activists, it does not do justice to the complex evolution of Barraza’s portfolio. Nor does it explain what happened
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green aztlán / 111
to Chicano/a culture and politics at a time of conservative ascendancy.
Barraza’s said in a 1983 statement: “My artwork has been influenced by
the Chicano movement of the late sixties and early seventies, my culture,
historical background, the modern Mexican muralists, and shamanism.
At the beginning of my creative endeavor, I created art about my physical experiences and struggle for my raza (people). Today I utilize images
from the unconscious, working intrinsically to convey a personal, indiscernible, and emotional experience.”81 This shift toward the personal
does not signal apathy or narcissism, as commentators such as Armando
Navarro have suggested. What it does signal is a tactical shift. In the early
part of the 1970s, progressive Chicano/a art was dominated by public art,
especially posters and murals. Women found it difficult to break into
this world, as it required a highly specialized technique, physical capacities for which few women had been trained, and a willingness to endure
harrassment from passersby.82 Artists such as Judy Baca pursued public
art anyway, but they met considerable resistance. Feminist organizing
throughout the 1970s created new opportunities for women artists in
Latino/a galleries, in feminist and local galleries, and at colleges and universities. Goldman notes that these venues fostered work that was more
intimate in scale and theme. The art, though, was no less political in its
vision.83 As Barraza eloquently says of her entire career: “My artwork
is about resistance, de-colonization, self-definition, self-empowerment,
and survival.”84 She has been successful because she has allowed her art
to evolve, even as she remains committed to the principles of equality
and freedom that guided Chicano/a activism during the 1960s and 1970s.
The key to understanding the arc of Santa Barraza’s career is the great
feminist saying that “the personal is political” because for her, the border
between public and private is a porous one. When she was a child, Barraza
was influenced by her mother’s strength and intellect, and also by stories
of survival among the women of earlier generations in her family. These
influences recur in her work, as do the influences of feminist art. During
the late 1970s, Barraza saw Judy Chicago’s groundbreaking installation
Dinner Table. The place settings that Chicago reserved at her enormous
meal for the neglected women of literary and art history allowed Barraza
to claim a tradition for herself at a time when most female artists struggled to get recognition from gallery owners, mentors, critics, museums,
and peers. African American portraitist Lorna Simpson helped Barraza
develop a “subversive” visual style that empowered viewers—especially
women of color—to respect their bodies and to see themselves as participants in a proud history of survival.85 Frida Kahlo was another important
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inspiration. In college, Barraza had studied the Mexican muralists Diego
Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros, incorporating their keen historical imagination and their intense color schemes
into her work. It was Kahlo, though, who most influenced Barraza’s use
of the human figure as a vehicle for expressing complex themes of history, memory, mortality, beauty, and nature. Images such as Yo como
Canuta (1982) show the influence of Kahlo on Barraza’s style, while also
testifying to the border-crossing impulse of Chicana and Mexican feminist art. When Barraza encountered her work in the 1970s, Kahlo was
relatively unknown in the United States. The 1979 exhibition Homenaje a
Frida Kahlo/Homage to Frida Kahlo—which had been organized by Barraza’s friend and fellow Kingsville native Carmen Lomas Garza—helped
popularize the life and art of the celebrated Mexican painter.
Barraza’s Renacimiento/Rebirth (1980) illustrates the cultural politics
at work in her evolution as an artist. Done on paper, the 55" x 59" pastel
image shows at center a woman in her twenties or thirties crouched in
prayer to the left of a steel crib. She is dressed casually, wearing slipon shoes, blue jeans, and a plaid, untucked collared shirt. Inside the
crib—where a mattress and child should be—are a rose-colored cross
of the Christian religion and a deep-green maguey plant of indigenous
Nahuatl belief. In the foreground, buried in the earth beneath the crib,
lies an infant whose umbilical cord connects it with the plant above it.
The copper-skinned bust of the Virgin of Guadalupe hovers in the background, and behind her, tall grasses seem to blow against a strip of blueand-red night sky. Shades of green tie these different elements together to
form an image that feels somber and yet hopeful, questioning but quietly
resolute. The critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto notes that the image is Barraza’s “first image of the Guadalupana and the first piece ‘getting back
into color’ after a prolonged period of experimentation with a strictly
black-and-white palette.” He calls Renacimiento/Rebirth “a tour de force,
a multilayered visual interpretation of cultural syncretism.”86
Ybarra-Frausto’s use of the word “syncretism” is apt. Like many
Chicano/a artists and thinkers of the past several decades, Barraza
blends Christian and indigenous symbols as a critique of Eurocentric
narratives of world history. Renacimiento/Rebirth is also remarkable
in that it combines feminist and environmentalist ethics to confront
models of femininity that revolve around consumerism and passivity. Feminist commentators have noted that during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the processes of industrialization in western
Europe and North America caused a hardening of gender roles. Men
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figure 2.2. Renacimiento/Rebirth (1980) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of Texas
A&M University Press.
were increasingly socialized as the force behind mass-produced factory
goods. Women, in turn, became consumers. Their job—in principle, if
not always in fact—was to purchase commodities in a rapidly growing
marketplace, and to provide emotional, sexual, and physical support to
the laboring man. Issues of gender and sexuality became tangled up with
ecology in new and difficult ways. The needs of the permanent-growth
economy led to the commodification and exploitation of natural ecosystems, often gendered as female (for example, “Mother Earth”). Women
were likewise subordinated to the production process, first as sexual
commodities, and second as engines of consumer demand. The masculininst notion of dominion over nature ran parallel to the notion of
dominion over women.
Renacimiento/Rebirth draws a radically different picture of womanhood. It also gives viewers an alternative imagining of the relationship
between people and the broader natural world. The woman we see in the
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114 / green aztlán
middle ground of the image is engaged in traditionally feminine activities. She prays and keeps watch over the body of her child. The small
white cross inside the crib establishes a parallel between the grieving
mother on the left and the dark-skinned mother of Christ in the background, transforming the image into a kind of Pietà. The maguey cactus
and the cross point to themes of death and of regeneration. Native to
southern Texas and northern Mexico, the maguey was revered by the
Aztecs. According to Barraza, the plant symbolizes the tribe’s “mythicoreligious concept of the central force of life and death.”87 Her allusion to
Christian and indigenous tradition positions women as makers and sustainers of life, and also as guardians of human memory. Renacimiento/
Rebirth serves as a powerful counterpoint to the unserious images of
girlhood and womanhood that dominate the contemporary visual
landscape. To her credit, Barraza does not indulge in the melodrama
of femininity as self-sacrifice, for while there is tragedy in this image,
it exists alongside a formidable will to survive. Nor does Barraza make
her subject a slave to tradition. The woman’s modern clothing confirms
Ybarra-Frausto’s observation that for Barraza, “renacimiento is a process
that embraces both tradition and change.”88
The effort in this work to challenge consumer-oriented and masculinist ideas of womanhood is coupled with a reimagining of how
humans inhabit their natural environments. Patriarchal societies are
built upon a libidinal economy that encourages sexual desire in men
and punishes sexual desire in women. Women are thus made available
to men in a way that men are not available to women. Within modern
industrialized societies, nonhuman nature is similarly perceived as
available for exploitation. Mountains, wilderness, deserts, and mysterious oceans are often romanticized, even fetishized, but always within
a worldview that places people at a remove from the natural world “out
there.” Renacimiento/Rebirth envisions humans as part of nature. The
umbilical cord joining the infant child and the maguey plant serves
as a metaphor of human agency within the ecosystems we occupy. In
return, “the earth is shown as both womb (engendering vegetation) and
tomb.”89 The cross, the maguey plant, and the skull necklace worn by
la Virgen testify to the unique power of the human imagination. For
Barraza, though, this power is not a license for exploitation. She suggests instead the need to use human creativity as the basis of an ethic
of care. The maguey cactus at the center of the image thus represents
for her an idealized “symbol of the incarnation of the forces of nature
and humanity.”90
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Barraza’s fascination with indigenous cultures past and present has
expanded since the 1980s, as has her commitment to a feminist-inflected
Chicano/a environmentalism. In 1990, Barraza traveled to Mexico City
and immersed herself in religious iconography and colonial history. In
1993, she lived for three months in Oaxaca, where she set up a private studio and interacted with local artists.91 Barraza was already familiar with
Mexican art and history. She had studied these areas in college and in
graduate school, and after her formal training, she and other members of
the MAS collective had organized the 1979 Conferencia Plástica Chicana,
a groundbreaking art conference in Austin that brought Mexican artists
and art historians together with emerging Chicano/a cultural producers.
Her pilgrimages to Mexico, though, transformed her. She did more adaptions of the retablo, a Christian devotional genre that included the exvoto, a visual record of a miraculous event, and the santo, a depiction of a
holy person.92 Barraza had explored Christian themes and imagery since
her early days as an artist, but her time in Mexico gave those explorations
renewed intensity. It also expanded her interest in indigenous themes
and inspired feminist revisions of Aztec, Mayan, Mixtec, and Zapotec
mythologies. Oaxaca has been a center of indigenous rights activism in
Mexico. According to Edward J. McCaughan, this political and cultural
tradition has energized the Left in Mexico and challenged the nation’s
entrenched racism.93 Barraza’s travels had a dramatic impact on her style.
Her lines became much sharper than in earlier periods. Goldman writes
that “by the 1990s, control . . . was maintained through tighter drawing,
more finished edges and surfaces, and the use of repeated decorative patterns in geometric arrangements.”94 Perspective in her images became
more two-dimensional, evidence of the influence of the retablo tradition
and, even more, of the codices used by native peoples to record their history and culture. Barraza increasingly used oils, enamels, and acrylics,
and she began to choose colors associated with aspects of hemispheric
history, including earthen hues borrowed from Mayan texts, and yellows, blues, and reds drawn from “mestizo style” architecture in the city
of Puebla.95 The enormous visual power of Barraza’s images from the last
two decades comes in large part from their combination of bright color,
sharp line, and extraordinary imagery.
The oil-and-enamel painting Retablo of Mestizaje Codex (1991) illustrates the complex interplay of ecology, politics, and aesthetics in Barraza’s portfolio. The top-left quadrant of the image shows a woman cradling an infant in her arms. The woman is wrapped in a red shawl and
wearing her black hair pulled back, and her lower body is obscured by
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figure 2.3. Retablo of Mestizaje Codex (1991) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of
the artist.
a maguey plant with olive-green and blood-red leaves. A snake crawls
along the ground behind her. The night sky at her back contains stars
and pictures related to indigenous history and myth: a shell and a rabbit,
both symbols of female fertility; a cross in front of a double-headed horse
and rider, alluding to the conquest; a bird; a yellow sunburst referencing
“the eye of god”; a bow-like ollin, symbol of the energy immanent in the
universe; and the outline of a deity. Ten pairs of blue-and-yellow boxes
comprise the rest of the painting, arranged in an “L” shape around the
woman, each one containing symbols from indigenous codices.
As in Renacimiento/Rebirth, the image is dominated by the maguey,
which visually births the mother and child and protects them. In Aztec
society, the maguey plant was the site of ritual sacrifice. Blood spilled by
the victims was perceived as an offering to Huitzilopochtli, the sun-war
god who guarded the Aztecs and gave them life.96 The red on each leaf
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green aztlán / 117
references death and the green life, making the plant an allegory of the
biological cycles that are inherent in nature. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto says
that the maguey is “an ancient symbol of regeneration” that is “related to
the notion of sustainability.”97 It is jarring to see a historic instrument of
cruelty associated with life and survival. Barraza, though, is aware of the
contradictions implicit in her appropriation of indigenous history. By
bringing Aztec iconography into the modern space of studio and gallery,
she honors her mestiza past on her own terms. She also prompts viewers to ask questions about their own relationship to nature, time, and
community.
Renacimiento/Rebirth and Retablo of Mestizaje Codex are alike in that
they see mothering and motherhood as a potential source of empowerment for women. But while 1970s-era cultural feminism and its emphasis on the reproductive power of the female body remains an important
intellectual touchstone for Barraza, her vision of progressive feminist
politics is not reductively biological. The mixed-media image Coatlicue
(1986) shows this expansiveness. Mexican anthropologist Miguel LeónPortilla’s Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl
Mind (1963) was an influential text in the Chicano movement. According
to León-Portilla, Coatlicue was the earthen deity of Nahuatl religion, the
“embodiment in stone of the ideas of a supreme cosmic being who generates and sustains the universe.”98 Barraza’s piece has at center a reproduction of the deity’s stone statue at the National Museum of Anthropology
in Mexico City. In the foreground of the image is a maguey plant, and
above the deity’s head is a traditional rendering of the Catholic virgin.
Barraza notes in her commentary on this image that the deity “wears a
skirt of woven rattlesnakes and a collar of sacrificed hearts and hands.
Androgynous in character, she has breasts and a penis, the latter represented by a serpent between her legs. . . . Duality is embodied in her.”99
In Coatlicue, Barraza refuses the strict division of labor that puts women
in charge of the home and men in charge of work and government. The
ability to create and sustain human life is one source of women’s power
in Barraza’s imagination, but so is the ability to create art in the public sphere. Coatlicue also embraces sexual diversity as a central part of
progressive Chicano/a politics. Her image is a counter to the stubbornly
heteronormative iconography that Richard T. Rodríguez deconstructs in
his commentary on movement film, murals, and street publications.100
Emma Tenayuca Codex is another illustration of Barraza’s expansive
environmental aesthetic. Completed in 1993, the acrylic features a portrait of one of the major figures of Mexican American history. Emma
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118 / green aztlán
figure 2.4. Emma Tenayuca Codex (1993) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of the
artist.
Tenayuca (whom I discuss again in chapter 4) was born in 1916 to migrant
parents and was raised in San Antonio’s working-class westside barrio. A
precocious girl who loved reading, she was influenced by such authors as
Émile Zola, Charles Darwin, and Charles Beard. She also drew inspiration from her grandfather’s progressive politics, and from the political
energies that circulated in Milam Park, a historically vital Chicano/a
public sphere. In 1936, as part of what Alicia Camacho Schmidt calls
a “transborder social movement,” Emma Tenayuca and her colleague
María Solís Sager traveled to Mexico City for union training from the
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green aztlán / 119
Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (Mexican Worker’s Confederation).101 She joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA)
in 1937, and in 1938 she led approximately seven thousand workers in
a strike against sweatshop conditions in San Antonio’s pecan-shelling
industry. Tenayuca was hated by city leaders but beloved by workers, who
admired her considerable powers of public speaking and her courage in
the face of police violence. Success in San Antonio helped make Tenayuca an important part of the multiethnic Popular Front movement. In
1937, she collaborated with Harlem activist Frances Duty as members of
the National Executive Committee of the Workers’ Alliance. In 1938, she
ran for Congress with the Texas Communist Party, sharing a ticket with
the Anglo gubernatorial candidate (and her husband) Homer Brooks,
and African American candidate Cecil B. Robinet for lieutenant governor. Stalin’s signing of the 1939 Soviet-German Nonagression Pact led
to Tenayuca’s resignation from the Communist Party in 1946, but she
remained committed to progressive politics throughout her life.102
Tenayuca has been a consistent source of inspiration for Chicano/a
artists and activists. Américo Paredes used her as the model for the character “Chonita” in his short story “The Hammon and the Beans,” written in the 1930s and published by Arte Público Press in 1994.103 Barraza’s
Emma Tenayuca Codex likewise pays artistic tribute to this underappreciated figure in American labor history. A bust of the smiling Tenayuca
is positioned in the foreground of the image in three-quarter profile. She
wears a bright-yellow blouse with prints of the ollin symbol, and she is
cradled by the red-and-green leaves of the maguey. Beneath the maguey
is an ornamental pink strip with blue diamonds that echoes the visual
style of the Nahuatl codices. The night sky above Tenuyuca’s head glows
bright from the moon, giving the earth around her a mesmerizing turquoise cast. In the distance, a thin horizontal line of mountains divides
the canvas into the 5:8 to 3:8 “golden section” idealized by Renaissance
artists as “a divine proportion with mystical properties.”104 The top-left
quadrant has the painting’s most surprising element. A waxing crescent
moon the same color as Tenayuca’s shirt is suspended in midair behind
the labor leader. Seated on it, eyes closed in seeming meditation, is a
youthful representation of the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui.
Like Coatlicue, Emma Tenayuca Codex adapts native iconography to
give viewers an expanded vision of sex and gender roles within Mexican
American communities. In traditional Nahuatl mythology, the animal
Coyolxauhqui holds in her arms represents biological reproduction.
Barraza, though, composes the image in a way that emphasizes other
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120 / green aztlán
forms of female creativity. She emphasizes Tenayuca’s leadership skills
by painting her in a scale and a pose that recalls the time-honored busts
of history’s “Great Men.” The ollin symbol on the activist’s shirt emphasizes her energy and magnetism, while also highlighting the blend of
tradition and innovation at work in the Chicano movement. Women’s
lives are typically narrated through their domestic relations. Emma
Tenayuca Codex stresses that Tenayuca’s significance to Chicano/a history comes not from her private life as wife, mother, or daughter, but
rather from her public role as organizer, author, speaker, and educator.
In 1995, Barraza spent five intense weeks producing art at California’s
Villa Montalvo retreat with Chilean American artist Liliana Wilson,
Mexican artist Cristina Luna, Chiapan playwright Isabel Juárez Espinosa, and Chicana writer and artist Gloria Anzaldúa. The workshop was
called “Entre Americas: El Taller Nepantla.” While there, Anzaldúa cast
the Aztec legend of Coyolxuahqui’s death at the hands of her war-god
brother Huitzilopochtli as an allegory of artistic mestizaje (mixture),
a process by which the artist transforms the violence of the past into
“a new state of consciousness” where traditions can be “re-interpreted
and re-membered.” Emma Tenayuca Codex had been painted two years
earlier, but Anzaldúa’s commentary gave Barraza a new lens for thinking about her work. She used the image to call viewer attention to the
political and artistic contributions that women have made throughout
Chicano/a history.
The artistic and political dimensions of the piece are rooted in the
social and geographic particularities of the Texas landscape that Tenayuca (like Barraza) called home. Not everyone appreciates the desert
ecology visible in Emma Tenayuca Codex. Its combination of high temperatures, low water supply, and austere and sometimes threatening flora
and fauna make it an unappealing place to many people, especially when
juxtaposed with the alpine geographies of mountain, forest, and stream
that are traditionally romanticized by environmentalists. Barraza’s
painting is an invitation for viewers to see the beauty of this landscape,
which for her includes the beauty of its human inhabitants. The image
has several elements: Tenayuca in the foreground, Coyolxuahqui with
moon and cacti in the middle ground, and sky and mountains in the
background. These elements are united visually by Barraza’s distinctive
approach to depth and perspective. Shifra Goldman refers to the “pseudonaïve style” of Barraza’s third period as “one in which the composition
primarily features frontal figures within a flattened landscape, rendered
in unmodulated horizontal planes of brilliant color.” She compares it
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to “the paintings of Gauguin, but with a much different color scheme,”
and notes that “depth is suggested only by Renaissance-like scale and
overlap.”105 Goldman is somewhat critical of this style, but the flattening
serves a specific political and environmental purpose. Emma Tenayuca
Codex aims to represent what the Nahua called the tonal, or spirit, of
a place.106 For Barraza, this means not only the physical attributes of a
particular landscape, but also the symbiotic relationship between and
among living and nonliving things.
The two-dimensionality of Barraza’s canvasses represents a sophisticated critique of the ideological framework that surrounds European
high art. The roots of this framework are in ancient Greece, where the
“morally puritanical” philosophy of the fifth century BCE produced an
aesthetic based on the “overt recognition of a close and desirable connection between visual appearances and images.107 During the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, the “discovery” of this classical style by the tastemakers of early modern Europe led to a dramatic shift in style. The twodimensional look of Byzantine devotional art was replaced by a painterly
naturalism108 that emphasized the physical world. Increasingly, the aim
of the artist was to re-create nature through the use of three-dimensional
perspective, mathematical scaling, precise lines, dramatic shading, and
sophisticated coloration, with a premium placed on the ability to reproduce the human form through detailed musculature and expressive
countenances. Impressionism, symbolism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, and other modern movements have challenged the Renaissance ideal of verisimilitude, but for most audiences, the ability to create
images that mirror nature remains the mark of artistic genius.
The skillfulness and beauty of paintings by David, Michaelangelo,
Titian, Holbein, and other famous names in this tradition is undeniable.
The ideological legacy of European high art is less admirable, though.
Naturalist images position themselves to viewers as unmediated depictions of a particular place and time, but the act of representing nature—
and, simultaneously, the place of humans in nature—is always embedded in a larger constellation of social, political, and, material realities.
Art historian John Berger argues that the oil-painting tradition is inseparable from the principles and practices of capitalism, which emerged
at roughly the same moment in history. Still lifes of sumptuous objects,
seductive renderings of nude women, elegant self-portraits, and stunning
landscapes were hung on the walls of the wealthy, flattering them with
vivid reminders of all they did—or could—possess. Oil was the perfect
medium for this cultural work because it has a “special ability to render
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122 / green aztlán
the tangibility, the texture, the luster, the solidity of what it depicts.” Art
“celebrated a new kind of wealth—which was dynamic and which found
its sanction in the supreme buying power of money.”109 Of course, contemporary viewers rarely look at paintings from the perspective of an
aristocrat surveying his fortune. They approach paintings more often as
secular pilgrims in the museum, where paintings are displayed with a
hushed reverence elsewhere reserved for the sacred. Government funding, corporate sponsorship, and private donors have made art accessible
to the masses, stripping the art industry of some of its elitism. Yet the
perspective of the aristocrat is still implied in the way we are trained
to look at the world beyond ourselves. Whether rich or poor, male or
female, white or nonwhite, the visual culture of capitalism encourages us
to look at all of nature as something that can be bought or sold. As Berger
pointedly puts it: “Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to
social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.”110
Like all modern artists, Barraza has been influenced by the oil painting tradition. As Goldman observes, Barraza occasionally uses “Renaissance-like scale and overlap” to introduce a limited sense of depth. In
Retablo of Mestizaje Codex, the body of the mother has no volume, but
because the woman is painted on top of the snake, there is some dimensionality. The effect is a subtle trick of the eye: if you look quickly at the
image it seems one-dimensional, but if you focus for a moment on the
top-left quadrant, it starts to look three-dimensional. The Renaissance
tradition also influences Barraza’s sophisticated use of light and dark. In
Emma Tenayuca Codex, the labor leader’s face is lit from the front and
right, bestowing on her a saintly quality that subtly recalls the works of
Caravaggio and Rembrandt.
Barraza’s appropriation of European high art exemplifies the inventiveness of Chicano/a art, which frequently uses dominant traditions to
challenge dominant ideologies. The more significant influences on her
art, though, are the retablo and the codex, two genres deeply rooted in
the history and politics of the Americas. For Barraza, the retablo tradition represents a decolonizing “mestizo style” of art.111 Religious leaders
from Spain brought the medium to the “New World” during the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries in the hope of expanding Catholicism at a time
when Protestants were attacking its authority. The retablo gradually
became a syncretic folk art that combined European, indigenous, and
African elements. Barraza values this tradition for its artistic mestizaje,
or mixture. For example, her painting Black Madonna shows a beautiful
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green aztlán / 123
coffee-colored woman standing against the backdrop of a modern city
skyline. Here the retablo form expands viewer sensitivity to the diversity
of Chicano/a communities. The black Madonna—a prominent religious
icon in Latin America and among U.S. Latinos/as—is descended from Isis,
the African goddess.112 By painting this figure in the indigenous clothing
and symbols of the Americas, Barraza offers a gesture of solidarity with
black freedom struggles around the globe, and references the overlooked
history of African Americans in Aztlán, including the fugitive slaves who
sometimes found refuge in Mexican American homes as they fled south
across the border. This is one reason the retablo is important to Barraza.
It is also important because its affirmation of the sacred in everyday life
offers a view of history from below. European high art typically aims
for monumentality in its scale and execution. Its preferred subjects are
world-changing figures, nobility, sublime landscapes, or major historical
moments. The retablos, though, and the ex-votos in particular, are modest
in their design. Usually they are painted by amateurs on a two-dimensional plane divided into two regions: a pictoral area depicts the wondrous
event, and a smaller text area tells the story of what happened.113 For the
marginalized subjects who create them, the images serve as repositories of
feeling, and also as testimonies of survival in a difficult world.
Barraza notes that the look of the ex-voto was strongly influenced
by the codex, a native form that is central to her environmentalist aesthetic. The codices were sacred manuscripts that recorded the myths and
iconography of indigenous religions throughout Mexico and Central
America. In Nahuatl society, they were produced by tlacuilos, or scribes,
who painted on the folded bark of a wild fig tree called the amate.114 Fearful and contemptuous of native traditions, early Spanish colonizers set
the documents on fire in what must have been a dramatic and traumatizing moment of humiliation for the indigenous witnesses. Fortunately,
a handful survived. By the 1540s, only two decades after Hernan Cortés’s capture of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, a new wave of religious
colonizers had grown frustrated with the slow pace of Christianization.
Members of the priestly class began interviewing the dwindling number
of tribal elders who had survived the conquest in the hopes of better
understanding—and eradicating—indigenous beliefs. These chronicles, assembled by such figures as Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, form
the foundation of modern knowledge about pre-Colombian societies,
including the form and function of the codices.
Both the retablo and the codex are painted in a “naïve style” with “flat
planes and shallow space.” They are characterized by their “bold design,”
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figure 2.5. Black Madonna (1991–92) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of the
artist.
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green aztlán / 125
their intense coloration, and their “unencumbered” backgrounds.115 The
influence of these hemispheric American genres on Barraza’s portfolio is
particularly noticeable in the artist’s third phrase. Like the retablo and
the codex, her work has crisp lines, two-dimensional perspective, and a
kind of weightlessness.116 Barraza’s stylistic choices represent a sophisticated visual argument about the relationship between humanity and
nature, one that is consistent with the principles of the Chicano/a environmentalism that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. The naturalism
of the oil tradition rests ironically on a rigid ideological divide between
humanity and nature. Its dramatic use of chiaroscuro (light and dark)
gave density to the human form. This technique, along with a highly
refined use of three-dimensional perspective and a careful attention to
anatomy, extracted human subjects from their ecology and rendered
nature a lifeless background. The ideological effect was a reinforcing of
capitalism’s market-driven individualism and the propagation of the
idea that nature was a mere commodity to be exploited, rather than a
resource to be shared. This is not to say that the distinction between
the human and nonhuman was entirely the product of oil painting, or
even that it first appeared during the early modern period. The idea that
human beings are at a remove from nature is found (among other places)
in the Bible, which includes the divine command that humans “fill the
earth and have dominion . . . over every living thing.” However, the oil
painting tradition sharpened this false distinction between humanity
and nature at a crucial crossroads in world history. By doing so, it participated in the emergence of a global market system in which everything becomes a commodity that can be bought and sold. The fact that
modern advertising is premised on the oil painting tradition only serves
to reinforce and expand this ideology.117
A different kind of naturalism operates in Barraza’s work. Her art
shows a rich awareness of what makes humans unique: the sophisticated
use of symbols and signs; the capacity for self-reflection through art
and reason; and a deliberative approach to organizing social life, among
other things. For Barraza, though, these aspects of human existence—
like humans themselves—do not exist apart from nature. She anchors
her belief in indigenous philosophy, saying that “respect for the earth
and maintaining a balance between the physical and the spiritual worlds
were the bases of the religious and philosophical world views of our
indigenous ancestors.”118 Barraza’s strategic use of dimension affirms this
balance. Her canvases draw on the principles of European high art to
create a feeling of dynamism, but the shallow field of vision emphasizes
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126 / green aztlán
a proximate relationship between the human subject and her surroundings. The result is what artist and commentator Amalia Mesa-Bains calls
“an instructive gaze” found in the work of many Chicana artists.119 Barraza’s images invite viewers to pause from the hurried pace of life in late
capitalism, to reflect on what they value most, and to consider how those
values connect them to the human and nonhuman worlds they inhabit.
In other words, they prompt viewers to imagine an alternative modernity
erected on human cooperation with nature, rather than exploitation.
The painting Nepantla (1995) is an ideal place to end a discussion of
Barraza’s successful career. Arguably her masterpiece, the image blends
Barraza’s commitment to social justice, to environmental awareness, and
to cultural engagement. An indigenous woman occupies the foreground
of the image, her back to the viewer but her face turned to her right at a
three-quarter profile. The deep brown of her neck and cheek set off the
intense blues, yellows, reds, and greens of her clothing, which bears the
image of the Virgen de Guadalupe superimposed on the silhouette of the
United Farm Worker eagle. Native plants of the Americas grow around
her: two magueys, one at her feet and one in front of her; a prickly pear
cactus to her left; and to her right, a lily with two white flowers and their
yellow stamens. Neatly plowed fields move horizontally across the middle
ground of the image, and tall mountains rise in the background beneath
pillowy white clouds and a deep blue sky. The separate elements of the
canvas are united through a dramatic foreshortening, so that “humanity,
and nature are merged into one unit.”120
Barraza interprets Nepantla as a visual meditation on “border crossing and migration.” The context for the painting is important. She produced it in 1995 while in Saratoga, California, for the “Entre Americas”
workshop. At the time, the “Golden State” was aflame with anti-immigrant and anti-Latino/a sentiment. A year prior, Republican governor
Pete Wilson won a hard reelection fight against Democratic candidate
Kathleen Brown by running on a racially charged platform that called
for more militarized borders and a draconian criminal justice system.
Voters had also recently passed Proposition 187, which was given the
Orwellian name of the “Save Our State” initiative.121 Proposition 187
demanded that state and local law enforcement check the immigration
status of persons accused of crimes; it refused public benefits to anyone
who lacked proper identification; and it called for educators to verify the
immigration status of schoolchildren and their parents. Federal courts
later ruled that Proposition 187 was an unconstitutional violation of federal authority over immigration. However, the law became a template
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figure 2.6. Nepantla (1995) by Santa Barraza. Courtesy of the artist.
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128 / green aztlán
for harsher legislation in the twenty-first century, including Arizona’s
Senate Bill 1070 (2010) and Alabama’s House Bill 56 (2011).
Nepantla is a powerful rejoinder to the conservative movement’s
xenophobic representation of migrants as freeloaders and degenerates.
During his reelection campaign, Pete Wilson approved a thirty-second
television ad that showed a black-and-white aerial view of dark bodies
running across the San Diego border. A baritone voice-over warned
spectators still feeling the effects of a 1992 recession that “they keep
coming. . . . [T]he federal government won’t stop them at the border,
yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them.”122 Wilson’s ad trafficked in an anti-Mexican and anti-Latino/a discourse that runs deep
in U.S. cultural history, from Richard Henry Dana’s nineteenth-century
vilifying of the californios, to paranoia in the 1910s about the spillover
effects of the Mexican Revolution, to the sensational media coverage of
the Cuban Mariel boatlift in 1980. Nepantla confronts this discourse by
humanizing the migrant subject. According to Barraza, “the composition narrates the journey of many immigrants and migrants adjusting themselves for survival as they venture into unknown territory.”123
By positioning viewers at the woman’s back, Barraza prompts them to
see migration from her point of view. Viewers are encouraged to feel
the emotions of fear, hope, sadness, and even anger that accompany
the forced migrations. The woman is not a tragic figure, though. She
is certainly not the pathological subject seen in Wilson’s campaign ad.
A growing number of migrants from Mexico and Central America are
Chiapans, Mixtecs, Tabascans, and other indigenous peoples who do not
speak Spanish, or who speak it as a second language.124 The native symbology on the woman’s costume honors the sophisticated worlds from
which these migrants come, and also testifies to the adaptive skills of
migrants around the globe. The eagle at the center of the image does
two things. It affirms the principle at the core of the UFW’s antipesticide
campaign and of Chicano/a environmentalism more broadly, namely
the idea that environmental protection and social justice are inseparable
goals. It also gestures toward the continued power and promise of the
Chicano movement.
Artists—and particularly women artists—are sometimes accused
of naïveté when they reference indigenous myth and imagery. Among
Chicano/a cultural producers, Gloria Anzaldúa has been the most
prominent target of this criticism. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Mestiza, her 1987 collection of poetry and prose nonfiction, borrowed
from Nahuatl and Mayan traditions a creative protest of the homophobic
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green aztlán / 129
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and racist policies of the Reagan administration. The success of the book
was a milestone in movement politics and in queer history, but it also
made Anzaldúa a target of misinformed criticism. In a 1991 essay, political pundit David Rieff dismissed Anzaldúa as a kind of “professional
Aztec,” saying that Borderlands/La Frontera clings to “monolithic views
of consciousness” that free-market capitalism has rendered obsolete.125
Her nationalist thinking, like the thinking of Luis Valdez (whom he also
mentions), is “completely self-absorbed,” and “missing . . . any broadening notion of class, let alone economics.”126 Anzaldúa answered Rieff by
turning his pejorative phrase “the new tribalism” into an affirmation of
a post-NAFTA progressive politics focused on the intersections of class
and race. However, this affirmation was not really a departure from
movement politics, since (as Anzaldúa knew) Chicano/a cultural nationalists were always keenly aware of the interdependence of race and class
in American social life. Anzaldúa was not naïve in her literary explorations of native traditions. What is naïve, though, is thinking that the
indigenous no longer holds meaning in the modern world, or believing
that the free-market system has erased the racial categories that organized capitalism in the first place.
Like her late friend and colleague Anzaldúa, Barraza makes complex
use of native traditions and histories. As Laura Pérez says of the artistic
tradition to which both of these women belong:
Chicana art is hardly nostalgic or reproductive of racialist essentialisms, as some fear. It is part of a broader attempt to interrupt
unbridled capitalism and imperialist visions of reality. . . . The
politics of the spiritual for many Chicana/os is linked to a politics
of memory . . . not as politically paralyzing nostalgia for the irretrievable past but as a reimagining and thus, as a reformulation
of beliefs and practices. It is more precisely a politics of the will to
remember: to maintain in one’s consciousness, to recall, and to (re)
integrate a spiritual worldview about the interconnectedness of
life.127
“Reimagining” is the perfect word to describe Barraza’s images. Their
dramatic coloration, creative use of space, and expert draught work pull
viewers in, which in itself is no small accomplishment at a time when
there is so much competition for eyes. Even more powerful is her ability
to get viewers to ask questions of the art and of the world: What is the
time and place of this scene? Who am I looking at? What do these symbols represent? Where does this image come from? The paintings have a
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130 / green aztlán
defamiliarizing effect on viewers, whatever their background. If only for
a moment, they make the familiar seem strange, and the strange seem
familiar. They allow us, if only for a moment, to picture the world other
than it is, to reimagine it, as Pérez says.
Barraza’s longevity as an artist testifies to the vitality of Chicano/a
cultural production across a timespan when progressive art is often said
to be in decline. Her style has changed a great deal, as have the personal
and political circumstances around her art, but there remains at the core
of her portfolio a commitment to the democratic values that guided the
Chicano movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Her art points to the
broader directions of progressive Chicano/a politics. Some believe that
the social movements of the postwar decades have lost their relevance.
The 1960s in particular are reduced to fashion, or dismissed as youthful
idealism. Barraza’s artistry gives viewers a picture of the environmental
ethic that was part of movement politics. Unlike mainstream environmentalism, which tends to draw a bright line between society and nature,
Chicano/a environmentalism sees social injustice and environmental
damage as part of the same structures of inequality and indifference.
This ethic has guided a number of important political projects during
the last thirty years, including the Mothers of East Los Angeles campaign during the 1980s against the construction of a toxic-waste incinerator in the barrio; the work of Ganados del Valle, a cooperative that
preserves sustainable agriculture and creates economic opportunities for
Hispanos in northern New Mexico; and the efforts of the Austin-based
Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice to expand
immigrant rights. Campaigns like these show how the Chicano movement has evolved, just as Santa Barraza’s imaginative world illustrates
the evolution of Chicano/a art.
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