This dissertation investigates a collection of innovative and unorthodox paintings that aggrandized the role of the Virgin Mary. These works were inspired by a seventeenth-century biography of the Virgin written by the Spanish mystic Sor Mar�a de �greda (1602–1665). Sor Mar�a argued that the Madonna was Christ and God’s equal, queen of wisdom, and co-redeemer of the world—shocking claims that provoked debate in Europe and the Americas. In the Viceroyalty of New Spain, artists embraced Sor Mar�a’s dramatic valorization of Mary by creating distinctive images that elevated the Virgin’s stature, altering canonical sacred subjects including the Immaculate Conception, Annunciation, Last Supper, Flagellation, and Assumption. By examining instances of colonial painting departing from orthodoxy, this project underscores how New Spanish artists were at the forefront of iconographic developments that transformed sacred art rather than the recipients of pictorial traditions inherited from Europe. Moreover, the thesis promises to reveal the fundamental role of female authors and subjects in colonial art first by highlighting how a woman’s visions inspired these pictorial changes and second by analyzing the exceptional importance of the Madonna in Mexican Catholicism beyond the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Omar Pimienta’s political art action Consulado M�vil simultaneously serves as an analogy, an allegory, a symbol, and an accusation that authenticates undocumented bodies, giving a voice to immigrant narratives while problematizing naturalization and citizenship. Citizenship is more complex than a dichotomous ideology that creates two groups of individuals who live in direct opposition, those with the legal privilege to partake in the social contract of a nation and those not allowed to do so legally. This analysis takes as a point of departure Mexican scholarship that has foregrounded and previously outlined arte acci�n. By migrating this scholarly concept from Mexico and juxtaposing it to U.S. mainstream society’s understanding of performance, this study conceptually mirrors the journeys of countless brown immigrants. This study methodologically braids autoethnography, critical race theory (C.R.T., LatCrit, and UndocuCrit), and curatorial dialogues that transcend testimonios and interviews as data gathering methodologies to best understand how Political Art Action outlines the aesthetics of undocumentedness. Pimienta’s work scrutinizes the legal process by which people naturalize issuing Pasaportes Libres. Analyzed in the following pages are Pimienta’s Colonia Libertad (which translates roughly to freedom colony), Ciudadan�a Libre, Consulado M�vil, Lady Liberty, and Pasaporte Libre, each an intricate fragment of a more extensive political art action that endures within a neoliberal state that cannibalizes the immigrant community for economic profit, By scrutinizing bureaucratic naturalization and citizenship as a social construct, Consulado M�vil allows each Ciudadano Libre to claim a conciencia hist�rica.

This dissertation investigates the thirty-seven entries in the Descripci�n Geogr�fico-Moral de la Di�cesis de Goathemala (DGM) that correspond to present-day El Salvador and the R�o Lempa basin. Each of these entries is a description of a parish in the diocese and includes census data, ethnographic reflections, and watercolor aerial views that operate as maps for each parish. Informed by the latest advancements in decolonial methodologies and critical race studies, I offer the first art historical reading of these aerial views and contextualize them among other Spanish colonial cartographical technologies. I situate the DGM’s images among contemporaneous cartographical production to show that this was the most ambitious visualization of Central America yet attempted. In addition, I evaluate Cortes y Larraz’s subjectivity in America –– imagined in the early modern period as the “New World” –– to understand biases in the historical record that affect even census data. In contrast to previous scholarship, which has taken much of Cortes y Larraz’s census at face value, I offer a more nuanced view of eighteenth-century racial politics that included a complex set of negotiations between church officials, colonial administrators, and inhabitants of color. I show that the racial diversity in the R�o Lempa basin was far too complicated for eighteenth-century information technologies to properly record. Consequently, works such as the DGM accelerated and promoted mestizaje.

In 2006, then-President Felipe Calder�n declared war on drug cartels in Mexico, and subsequently, an estimated 150,000 or more people have been killed as a result of the ongoing violence. Since the 1994 passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, unknown numbers of women have been murdered, often victims of torture and sexual violence, around the border city of Ju�rez. As early as the 1960s, leftists were being “disappeared” and tortured by a repressive government and police force in Mexico City. Contemporary artists in Mexico have responded to this pervasive violence against the body with an increasingly symbolic language, bearing witness to tragedy on behalf of victims whose voices have been silenced. “Body Traces: Art against Violence in Contemporary Mexico” traces this history of the disappearing body in contemporary Mexican performance, street and land art, focusing on strategies that I call “invisibility tactics,” which include the privileging of traces of the body over its actual presence and substituting either objects or the artist’s own body as indexical references to absent bodies. Further, female artists in particular create work centered on themes of ritual

cleansing and washing as a redemptive action to heal the pain of these absent bodies. My dissertation maps out this tendency for the artist’s body or its symbolic substitutions to do the work of suffering. Utilizing case studies, I examine the work of Nayla Altamirano, Artemio, Enrique Ježik, Teresa Margolles, Lorena Wolffer, and the 1970s “los grupos” movement, among others. In an attempt to, like the artists, bear witness to violence on the collective social body, I argue that, through the ghostly presence that highlights the body’s absence, the trauma of physical violence is rendered most legible. “Body Traces” represents an important contribution to the field of Mexican art history. My project addresses a critical absence in existing scholarship, situating contemporary Mexican performance art within its larger political narrative, and beyond the documentation of hereto understudied artworks, includes some of the first close readings of some of these works. Furthermore, by placing these actions within a theoretical framework that privileges the influence of local antecedents, my work rewrites the history of Mexican performance art from a Latin American perspective.

This is the first comprehensive study of the mural La Dualidad (The Duality) designed by Chicano artist Guillermo “Yermo” Aranda in collaboration with Los Toltecas en Aztl�n located inside El Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego, California. The thesis conducts a visual analysis of La Dualidad (The Duality), and discusses the changes in design from 1970 to the current version finished in 1984. By reading it in dialogue with the Mexican muralist Rufino Tamayo’s Dualidad (Duality) mural of 1964, as an example of an earlier mural that visualized the Mesoamerican concept of “duality” through the depiction of the Aztec gods Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, I propose that the San Diego mural presents the distinct qualities of Chicano muralism. Most notably, La Dualidad (The Duality) re-conceptualizes the concept of “duality” in a future-forward visual interpretation that incorporates what I term a “syncretic-continuum” of ideas, philosophies, and symbolism from Amerindian, Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicano/a cultures. By utilizing a “Xicana futurist lens,” I observe a future-conscious perspective that envisioned the forthcoming generations of Chicanos and Chicanas as active protagonists and creators in a dynamic and technologically advanced American society. This study is the first to theorize futurism and “Chicanafuturism” to conduct a social art historical in-depth reading of Chicano murals.

Martine Gutierrez (b. Apr. 16, 1989, Berkeley, CA) is a Guatemalan American artist, a trans woman of Indigenous Maya descent, and the cover girl of artworks that pass as advertisements. At the age of thirty-four, her billboards, bus shelter ads, and fashion magazine spreads have caught the attention of major media outlets. Often branded as a “Latinx artist,” it is striking that the media never discusses Gutierrez in relation to other Latina/x artists. In this paper, I situate Gutierrez within a lineage of Latina/x and Chicana/x artist-activists, such as Ester Hern�ndez (b. 1944, Dinuba, CA) and Patssi Valdez (b. 1951, East Los Angeles, CA). I draw on cultural theorists, such as Sianne Ngai and Chela Sandoval, to consider how Gutierrez’s glamorous adaptations of mass media form part of an ongoing liberatory practice, one that uses art to combat the idealization of whiteness, critique gender norms, and call out systemic racism.

The posters analyzed in this project map out a Chicana/o-Central American solidarity nexus with important implications for imaging solidarity in our contemporary moment during which we are witnessing an increased dehumanization of Central Americans at the hands of multiple nation states. I conceptualize this as “a genealogy of solidarity” and offer it as both the object explored and an approach for complicating a linear Chicana/o art historiography. This historiography has discursively defined poster production in a progressive, linear trend moving from highly politicized content during the 1960s to a decrease in overtly political imagery in our contemporary moment. As I argue and elaborate, this has the inadvertent consequence of not recognizing historical moments of Chicana/o/x visual solidarity with Central America(ans). As such, this project offers the following contributions. By returning to the archive and analyzing poster creation across multiple generations of artists, this project contributes to existing scholarship on Chicana/o political posters by drawing out the mentorship relationships between artists and offers an alternative history of political poster production that does not cease in 1975. Secondly, a genealogy of solidarity helps tracks the lasting legacy of Chicana/o political poster production from the 1970s and into our contemporary moment. It documents a longer history of solidarity between Chicana/o communities and Central Americans made possible by the Third World politics prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area. I conclude by noting the potential importance of centros, print studios, and workshops as crucial sites for understanding the connections between artists’ generations and set out the conceptual parameters for what I term a “popular art consciousness” present in the San Francisco Bay Area. This project rests and makes its contributions at the interface between Chicana/o Studies and Central American Studies.

This dissertation project identifies the anti-colonial and anti-racist traditions that Black and Brown Angelenos have created, specifically the artworks expressing cultural pride and solidarity with each other. While other scholars have looked at Black and Latina/o/x Los Angeles together, few have looked at the trends and traditions within visual culture and art history. This particular intervention is historical, but also builds from the contemporary moment we live in, where underpaid school teachers have been striking en masse, where women are proclaiming #TimesUp, where Black Lives Matter is ushering perhaps the largest social movement in U.S. history, and still, the movement continues to grow all over the world. Furthermore, this dissertation has been informed by the COVID-19 crisis, which deeply and disproportionately impacts housing, employment, health outcomes and many other factors for people of color, especially Native Peoples, African Americans and Latinx folks in the U.S. As a way to reframe this political moment of pandemics, social injustice, and consciousness raising, I freedom dream through Afro-Latinx Futurism, a concept I offer that empowers Black, Latinx and Afro-Latinx people to center pleasure, rest, and joy as a visual practice in the arts and an important expression of liberation. Together, this project will forge a new history of the past by offering analysis of artworks, but also, moments when people lived, fought and created together. In some cases, I will highlight works of art that were not exactly made together, or directly in conversation with the other, but still work within a constellation of struggle against US imperialism and white supremacy. I have conducted participatory observation fieldwork, interviews, investigated archives, made maps via Emoji Mapping and Social Explorer; I offer visual and historical analysis to demonstrate the social realities that Black and Brown creative communities have forged for the past 237 years in what is now Los Angeles.

My dissertation, “Textual Poch@s in the Transpacific Borderlands: Chicana/o/x Art beyond Aztlán,” is the first in-depth study of connections between Asians, Asian Americans, and U.S. Latinas/os/xs in the visual arts. Drawing from the fields of Chicana/o/x art, cultural studies, fandom studies, and literary criticism, I present readers with the concept of the textual poch@. A textual poch@ is, in essence, an individual whose varied cultural tastes may or may not correlate with the dominant narratives and ideals of the racial/ethnic group they belong to or identify with. Nevertheless, a textual poch@ makes sense of their identity by creating cultural productions that are influenced by, but not beholden to, their racial/ethnic group’s expectations.

I use the textual poch@ framework to situate three different understudied artists who identity as Chicana/o/x, Japanese American, and Japanese —Rio Yañez (b. 1980), Shizu Saldamando (b. 1978), and Kazuya “Night tha Funksta” Naito (b. 1984)— to discuss how they each contribute to understandings of relational ethnic studies. Relational ethnic studies is a field concerned with how the presence and interaction with other communities of color affect the development of identity, history, and culture of non-white, ethnic and racial groups. This approach acknowledges that communities of color do not exist in separatist bubbles, nor is their identity formation only influenced by understandings of whiteness. Merging the textual poch@ framework with relational ethnic studies, this dissertation ultimately argues that the visual arts can help inform the re-envisioning of relational ethnic studies, Chicana/o/x art, and transnational understandings of Chicanas/os/xs in an effort to build new coalitional networks.