Book Review: Chicana/o Remix by Karen Mary Davalos

Chicana/o art has been “monolithically defined” in the art history of the Americas. And even when shown to be what it has always already been—“complex, polyvocal, multireferential, and yet historically contingent,” it has largely been ignored in the mainstream of the discipline, by Americanists and Latin Americanists alike (26). So writes Karen Mary Davalos, whose Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata since the Sixties aims to disabuse the discipline of structures that consistently conceive of “nonwhite artists as separate and inherently distinct,” and that frame their artistic production through frameworks of assimilation or difference (15). Her objectives are more than achieved in this wide-ranging study, in which Davalos liberates Chicana/o art from...