Review: Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde, by Robb Hernández

Robb Hernández’s Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde is a much-needed publication on queer Chicanx art and artists in Southern California during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a study of loss, memory, and memorialization in the wake of the AIDS crisis. With three case-study chapters focusing on Edmundo “Mundo” Meza, Teddy Sandoval, and Joey Terrill, respectively, Hernández’s book is an intervention into the dominant historical narratives of Chicanx art and the heteronormativity of Chicano nationalism, as well as the discursive whiteness of art and AIDS activism. Tracing the artists’ works through their lives, and in the case of Meza and Sandoval, the lives of the objects beyond those of the artists, the author reconstructs the fragments, shatterings, and detritus of their oeuvres to analyze the many ways that AIDS impacted and devastated queer...