Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory

by Tatiana Reinoza

University of Texas Press, 2023
Paper: 978-1-4773-2690-9 | eISBN: 978-1-4773-2691-6
Library of Congress Classification NE539.3.H57R45 2023
Dewey Decimal Classification 769.97308968

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC

ABOUT THIS BOOK

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

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

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

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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

REVIEWS

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

— Chon Noriega

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

— Arlene Dávila

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

— Leticia Alvarado

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1. Native Territorialities: Ricardo Duffy’s Border Pop and the Indigenous Uncanny
Chapter 2. Embodied Territorialities: Enrique Chagoya and Alberto Ríos Disrupting the Western Cartographic Gaze
Chapter 3. Mestiza Territorialities: Sandra Fernández’s Migrant Justice and the Movable Border
Chapter 4. Aqueous Territorialities: The Dominican York Proyecto Gráfica’s Island Dwellers and Water Boundaries
Conclusion. Revolution on Display
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Printmaking Workshops
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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