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geographies of their imagination with the external social reality of their communities.  The sub-cultures and lifestyles of cholos (urban youths), and pintos (prisoners) were also viewed as generators of specific art forms.  Pañuelitos (ballpoint or pen and ink decorated handkerchiefs) and tatuajes (India ink tatoos made with improvised needles) exemplify prison expression while placas (spray painting gang calligraphy) and lowriders (customized and stylized automobiles) were recognized as legitimate products of cholo sensibility.

Groups like the Royal Chicano Air Force (R.C.A.F.) in Sacramento, California, the Raza Art and Media Collective of Ann Arbor, the Movimiento Artistico Chicano (MARCH) in Chicago, the Con Safos Groups in San Antonio, and many  other initiated and sustained an alternative art circuit.  With militant and provocative strategies, Chicano arts organizations developed and shared their art within a broad community context.  They brought aesthetic pleasure to the sort of working people who walk or take the bus to work in the factories or in the service sectors of the urban metropolis.  In their collective character, in their sustained efforts to change the mode of participation between artists and their public, and above all as vehicles for sensitizing their communities to a pluralistic rather than a monolithic aesthetic, the Chicano alternative art circuit played a central and commanding role in nurturing a visual sensibility in the barrio.  Chicano arts organizations affirmed the premise that the genesis and genius of art arise and are sustained from its human source.

A New Art of the People

United by the shared intention of using art as part of the struggle to achieve new and more credible human values, Chicano artists by the 1970s had become producers of visual education.  Posters, murals, easel paintings and new forms of barrio ceremonies all served to establish a code of visual signification that was meaningful, popularly understood and validated.  Sustained polemics gave impetus to art forms employing a visual vocabulary focusing on for major aspects: the indigenous heritage — especially the Aztec and Mayan past, the Mexican revolution with its heroes and ideals, renderings of Chicano social activism in the past and present and depictions of scenes and personages of everyday life in the barrio.

By the mid 1970s artists were well integrated within the various political fronts of "El Movimiento."  They had banded together to create networks of information, mutual support systems and alternative art circuits.  Regional artists groups throughout the country were united in formulating a new Chicano culture based on the ideals of Chicanismo (the sum total of historical patterns of resistance derived from cultural values of survival which formed the base of struggles towards self-determination.)

Community mobilizations continued with new issues such as a mass anti-deportation movement, the fight for bilingual, bicultural education, and sustained efforts to develop electoral options focused on the undiminished needs of the Chicano community for adequate housing, decent jobs and competent health care.

Integrally related to the human concerns of their local neighborhoods, artists persisted in the vital task of creating art forms that strengthened the will and fortitude the cultural identity of the community.  Poster and mural artists made powerful and enduring contributions as they fostered and evolved innumerable mural projects and graphic collectives.  They searched for a visual language that was clear, emotionally charged and easily understood.  The pantheon of heroes depicted ranged from Quetzalcoatl to Che Guevara.  Styles varied widely although there is a persistent emphasis on documentation and denunciation.

In retrospect, it can be affirmed that Chicano art in the 1960s and 70s encompassed both a political position and an aesthetic on.  That art understood a consciousness that helped define and shape fluid and integrative forms of visual culture.  Artists functioned as visual educators with the important task of refining and transmitting through plastic expression the ideology of a community striving for self-determination.

A Chicano national consciousness was asserted by a revival in all the arts.  Aesthetic guidelines were not officially promulgated but arose within the actual arena of political practice.  As opposed to mainline art movements where a critical perspective remains at the level of the work (art about itself and for itself), the Chicano Art Movement sought to extend meaning beyond the aesthetic object and the medium to include transformation of the material environment as well as the consciousness.

The demographic and social realities of the 1980s situate Chicano artists  within a spectrum of possibilities for the development and distribution of their artistic production.  A growing number of young artists are studying in college art departments and art schools, assimilating current art trends

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and exhibiting in mainstream galleries and museums.  Others continue a community thrust working with barrio galerías, maintaining regional centros de artistas and developing networks of support and information for alternative art structures on a national level.

The emergence of an international interest in the art of Mexican Americans signals new vistas for cultural exchange and dissemination.  Symposia, seminars, conferences and exhibitions of Chicano art have been held in Havana, Mexico City and other Latin American capitals.  European art centers are also awakening to the vital infusion of creative talent within the Hispanic communities in the United States.

No single artistic current is dominant in the early 1980s.  Figuration and abstraction, political art and self-referential art, art of process, performance and video all have adherents and advocates.  The thread of unity is a sense of vitality and continual maturation.

For some of us Chicano art mirrors familiar and recognizable terrain, for others it offers new vistas from unfamiliar sensibilities.  For all of us Chicano art provides paradigms that widen our cultural horizons.

—Tomas Ybarra-Fausto

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