Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán

Art and Social Movements offers a comparative, cross-border analysis of the role of visual artists in three social movements from the late 1960s through the early 1990s: the 1968 student movement and related activist art collectives in Mexico City, a Zapotec indigenous struggle in Oaxaca, and the Chicano movement in California. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, Edward J. McCaughan explores how artists helped to shape the identities and visions of a generation of Mexican and Chicano activists by creating new visual discourses.McCaughan argues that the social power of activist artists emanates from their ability to provoke people to see, think, and act in innovative ways. Artists, he claims, help to create visual languages and spaces through which activists can imagine and perform new collective identities and forms of meaningful citizenship. The artists' work that he discusses remains vital today-in movements demanding fuller democratic rights and social justice for working people, women, ethnic communities, immigrants, and sexual minorities throughout Mexico and the United States. Integrating insights from scholarship on the cultural politics of representation with structural analyses of specific historical contexts, McCaughan expands our understanding of social movements.

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: United States, 1 March 2012

Format: Paperback / softback, 232 pages

Other Information: Illustrated

Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.5 x 1.5 centimeters (0.32 kg)

Writer: McCaughan, Edward J.

Promotional Information

This is a study of artist/activists and their participation in social movements in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and California. McCaughan places the three movements within their own local histories, cultures, and conditions, but also links them to the 1968 rebellions that were going on across the world, all of which had in common protests against U.S. imperialism, a critique of "old left" movements, an emphasis on minority groups, and a questioning of the process of social transformation.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Preface. "The Heart Has Its Reasons" xi
Acknowledgments xxi
1. Signs of the Times 1
2. Signs of Citizenship 20
3. Signs of (Be)Longing and Exclusion 57
4. The Significance of Style 101
5. Creative Spaces 135
6. Creative Power 152
Postscript. Of Legacies and the Aroma of Popcorn 167
Notes 171
References 179
Index 197

About the Author

Edward J. McCaughan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at San Francisco State University. His books include Reinventing Revolution: The Renovation of Left Discourse in Cuba and Mexico.

Reviews

"Art and Social Movements lives up to its title, for only when the art and culture of social movements are explored along with their politics, do we begin to have a vital and comprehensive sense of the emotions and creativity involved. The sad, violent and arbitrary border between Latin America and Latino USA too often ignores the history of collaboration and influence each side of that fictitious line has given the other. Edward J. McCaughan, through personal experience and exhaustive research, sets the record straight!" Margaret Randall, author of When I Look Into the Mirror and See You and To Change the World: My Years in Cuba "Art and Social Movements makes a powerful statement about the continued vitality of - and need for - the creative arts in radical political movements. By effectively synthesizing grounded analysis of grassroots politics with deft theoretical explanations of artistic genres, Edward McCaughan provides what I believe is the most significant empirically grounded study of cultural politics in Latin America since the anthology Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures, which was published in 1998." Howard Campbell, author of Mexican Memoir: A Personal Account of Anthropology and Radical Politics in Oaxaca