Mexican American Art Since 1848: A New Open-source Digital Search Tool

As Arlene Dávila observes, structural and social hierarchies “sanction ignorance” about Latinx art, which has resulted in neglect and erasure in the nation’s museums and galleries but also within libraries and archives (Latinx Art, 52). This pervasive lack of knowledge supports not only the conflation of all US Latinx populations—everyone is undocumented, Spanish-speaking, and on and on—it also flattens the artistic diversity across and within US Latinx communities, particularly the nation’s second largest ethnic group, Mexican Americans. Unfortunately, conventions in art history and Chicana/o/x studies obscure the wide range of stylistic, thematic, and conceptual practices within bi-cultural and multilingual contexts. Art attributed to Mexican-heritage creatives prior to 1960 is rarely studied and often forced into contemporary paradigms of representation, resistance, and affirmation rather than explored as a facet of its own social context. Artistic invisibility, moreover, directly and indirectly feeds the racial biases against Mexican Americans, who are stereotyped as criminals, uneducated workers, welfare-cheats, hypersexual, and foreigners. 

Working with a team of software developers, scholars, curators, librarians and archivists, Constance Cortez (UTRGV) and I are addressing the invisibility and lack of access to Mexican American art through the creation of a post-custodial portal, Mexican American Art Since 1848. This online search tool provides visual access to Mexican American art and primary documentation through online unification of geographically disperse records held at different institutions. As such, it illuminates how Mexican American artists simultaneously continue to lay claim to influences from Spain, Mexico, and the indigenous populations of North America and embrace the pre-modern, modern, and postmodern eras. Designed as a post-custodial, digital “archive,” Mexican American Art Since 1848 challenges the siloing, knowledge extraction, and stockpiling methods inherited from colonialism and Western approaches to knowledge accumulation. It does so by sending users back to the original institutions that care for the material and digital records. Furthermore, the portal privileges epistemological frameworks of Mexican American communities through culturally informed descriptors that remediate Eurocentric coding which obscure this art, history, and culture.

In the portal’s first iteration, art and related textual and visual materials are harvested from three existing, open-source digital libraries (Calisphere, The Portal to Texas History, and the Digital Public Library of America) and two museums (the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a repository of documents digitized and made accessible by the International Center for Art of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston). These five collections allow for a variety of art and related records with emphasis on the Southwest, the traditional core of Mexican American communities, and with some attention to the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. However, the portal’s first iteration was not the end game. 

The team launched the portal with these mainstream sources as proof-of-concept for our stakeholder community museums, which house the nation’s largest and most comprehensive collections of Mexican American art. The second iteration will compile information from arts institutions whose missions value and center Mexican American art: The National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), the National Hispanic Cultural Center (Albuquerque), and Mexic-Arte Museum (Austin). A compilation of art and related documents from these three stakeholder museums will significantly transform the portal and how educators, students, and curators think about Mexican American art, the term on which our National Advisory Council agreed could account for change across time and space. Furthermore, the council proposed an inclusive notion of “Mexican America” that does not rely on citizenship. The second iteration of the portal will include nearly 33,000 new records in all visual media. We are eager to provide a national platform for our stakeholders’ combined six decades of leadership in the exhibition, collection, preservation, and interpretation of Mexican American art—in all of its nuanced complexity. Eventually, we will collaborate with private stewards, such as artists, artist estates, and collectors, to include visual art not yet housed by an institution. Mexican American Art Since 1848 will increasingly showcase the diversity of art created by and about this dispossessed, intersectional, and resilient population.

The search tool is part of Rhizomes: Mexican American Art Since 1848, an ecosystem of four interrelated public, digital projects designed to transform access and knowledge about Mexican American art, culture, and history. The metaphor of rhizomatic roots spoke to the collaborative, reciprocal, and redistributive methods we employ with each component of the initiative. The Rhizomes Initiative consists of the following and the visual graphic illustrates the components:

  1. An Institutional Map which locates collections of Mexican American art and primary documents.

  2. The search tool, Mexican American Art Since 1848.

  3. A forthcoming nationally, historically, and aesthetically comprehensive digital edition on artists’ lives and works.  

  4. A forthcoming database of K-16 curriculum that shares “ready-to-teach” lesson plans searchable by subject and learning outcomes.

The Rhizomes Initiative is informed by concepts of intersectionality and the decolonial imaginary, as proposed by Chicana, Latina, Black, and/or Indigenous feminist scholars, specifically the redistributive methods designed to challenge knowledge production and distribution. We respond to the historically fraught relationships between Mexican American communities and scholars who have benefited from information but not shared research findings. We instead emphasize accountability to communities upon which our research depends, meaningful reciprocal and redistributive relationships with community partners, and shared intellectual control among stakeholders. We confront the myth of cataloging and coding neutrality and avoid the imposed authority of standard vocabularies by valuing the culturally-informed descriptors generated by our stakeholder museums and users who are encouraged to “tag” records. We are seeking solutions that allow stakeholders to uniquely digitize and describe nominated materials, rather than asserting standards for digitization and terminology in the portal. 

When we set out to build Mexican American Art Since 1848, we envisioned a user-friendly portal for translingual, Mexican-heritage, and intersectional audiences, especially students, educators, and curators curious about this material. This inclusive vision is not the same as the 21st century neoliberal claim “all are welcome here”—the phrase for status quo structures that privilege whiteness and heteropatriarchy while appearing to add new perspectives and people without changing the institutions that created such segregation and discrimination in the first place. Rather, we are building from the ground up a portal that centers Mexican American students, people of the borderlands, and multilingual users. The obstacles of invisibility and inaccessibility are more challenging to resolve because the tools we use further erase the cultural knowledge and wealth we wish to amplify. We also wanted to historicize art, challenging the dominant methods in art history that privilege formal description over social context. For this reason, the portal includes related documents, such as interviews, critical reviews, and curatorial and artist statements. It also includes visual records that inform or stimulate Mexican American artistry.

The major challenge for a digital compiler invested in culturally informed knowledge is the Eurocentric conventions for cataloging. Our qualitative research found that content-experts use culturally informed nomenclature to locate, describe, and contextualize Mexican American art. One anecdote about piñatas demonstrates the importance of culturally informed terms to improve discovery. Here’s the story we tell: “Piñata” has long been part of the English-language lexicon, and many people know that it is an object filled with treats. It is deliberately broken to acquire the treats during a game in which participants are blindfolded and swing a bat or stick at the hanging piñata. However, standard cataloging at many museums consigns the object as “vessel,” thereby making a piñata invisible to those unfamiliar with such cataloging vocabulary. Yet, would the Metropolitan Museum of Art swing a stick at their “vessels”? And, it gets worse: many museum cataloging systems use the Greek word, amfora, for jar, vase or vessel, which further complicates the visibility of the piñata. We want to describe a piñata as a piñata, and within the portal we plan to enhance or reconcile the metadata used by conventional cataloguers. Our enhancement will mitigate cultural erasure and improve access to art and culture historically marginalized.  

As such, we lean into critical archiving, Chicana feminist praxis for memory and sharing, and Indigenous archiving that centers “relationships, not records” (Kimberly Christen 2018). While a piñata is easily defined, aesthetic concepts such as rasquache, punkero, mestizaje, tortilla art, domesticana, and borderlands depend upon the intersections, complexities, and ambiguities illuminated by Chicana feminist theory, decolonial thought, and critical ethnic studies. It is extremely difficult to select a single definition for the over 100 culturally informed terms we have identified. Doing so requires us to disregard the feminist and decolonial imaginaries that led to the challenge of European epistemologies responsible for obscuring Mexican American art in the first place. Therefore, we must question metadata registries and other standard-setting bodies that require definitive statements about the cultural terms we have identified.

Mexican American Art Since 1848 increases access to a rich array of artistic forms and related documents, and more work is ahead of us. We join with other public digital initiatives that challenge institutions of higher learning by locating control within groups dispossessed of social authority and cultural capital. By supporting voices outside of higher education, we see a fundamental shift in art history and American studies. This diffuse and nonhierarchical approach can transform the meaning of “America” and “art” and propose new horizons in American art history. 

Mexican American Art Since 1848 can be accessed online by clicking here.


Karen Mary Davalos is Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has published widely on Chicana/o art, spirituality, and museums. Among her distinctions in the field, she is the only scholar to have written two books on Chicana/o museums, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (2001) and The Mexican Museum of San Francisco Papers, 1971-2006 (2010), the Silver Medal winner of the International Latino Book Award for Best Reference Book in English. Her research and teaching interests in Chicana feminist scholarship, spirituality, art, exhibition practices, and oral history are reflected in her book, Yolanda M. López (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), the recipient of two book awards: 2010 Honorable Mention from the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies and 2009 Honorable Mention from International Latino Book Awards (Nonfiction, Arts–Books in English). She serves on the Board of Directors of Self Help Graphics and Art, and she is currently assisting in the capital campaign for this legendary Chicana/o—Latina/o arts organization. Her latest book, Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata since the Sixties (NYU Press, 2017), is informed by life history interviews with eighteen artists, a decade of ethnographic research in southern California, and archival research examining fifty years of Chicana/o art in Los Angeles since 1963.

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