I write this editorial introduction to the first issue of the seventh volume of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture as national elections across the world in 2024 provide a vision of the state of global politics for at least the next four years, if not much longer. Elections in Venezuela, El Salvador, Mexico, the United States, England, France, South Africa, India, Taiwan, and many more “could change the world.”1 Many of these elections share a common adversary; the migrant, the foreigner, and the outsider serve as the bogeyman onto which all the problems of the nation can be blamed. In the United States, the country where I reside, undocumented migrants are cast as criminals and as part of an “invasion” occurring at the southern border.
In 2024 the largest portion of people attempting to enter the United States were from Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, and Colombia.2 Despite the extremely dangerous journey across land and water and the risk of human exploitation, parts of the US populace accuse these migrants of seeking to take advantage of US laws and policies. And yet all the reasons for their emigration point to the racism and inequality that stem from colonial systems that constituted these nations and continued post independence, and in the present day, a history of US intervention and contemporary neoliberalism.
Interdisciplinary in their media of study—installation, film, public sculpture, digital media, and painting—the scholarly essays featured in this issue shed light on these histories of political instability resulting from colonization and neocolonialism, beginning with Irina R. Troconis’s “Pepe López’s Crisálida: Memory, Materiality, and Loss in the Venezuelan Diaspora,” which reflects on the liminal moment right before migrants leave their home country or, as she writes, “when ‘home’ is about to become a ‘house.’” Reflecting on this essay against the backdrop of hateful rhetoric against the migrant, the analysis of López’s work reminds us of the complex and layered feelings of fear, loss, and hope in leaving home under conditions that seem irreversible. As The New York Times reported, a Maduro victory in the July 2024 elections was going to cause more Venezuelans to flee a country that has already seen more than seven million people migrate globally.3 Troconis centers migrants and their experiences, feelings, and subjectivity in making the devastating decision to emigrate, in and against a false narrative of a facile abuse of borders.
In his art, López expresses the poignancy of migration through his use of quotidian objects and their ability to contain and radiate memory. Troconis selects Crisálida as the centerpiece of her essay, an installation in which López wrapped hundreds of personal objects with plastic, to make an argument for the transformative potential of living in diaspora. I want to focus on the sense of animism granted these daily objects as a common thread among the scholarly essays, which all reconsider the nonhuman as a decolonial approach to art history. Troconis references Jane Bennett’s concept of “vibrant matter,” defined as “thing-power,” to describe how the things that surround us express personal and national identity. A feeling of belonging can occur even in displacement—and thus beyond geographical borders—through the recognition of, for example, crates of Polar beer and other objects included in the installation, as carriers of memories. Troconis identifies Crisálida as an act of magic: the plastic container results in the uselessness of the objects and turns them into things, or vibrant matter, and invitations to remember.
Magic, or more specifically, magical realism, becomes the knot to unravel in Monique Roelofs and Norman S. Holland’s “The Role of the Aesthetic in Decolonial Critique: Claudia Llosa, The Milk of Sorrow/La teta asustada.” In Latin American literature and art, magical realism has been most closely associated with the boom of the 1980s. It lost favor among critics who believed it had calcified into stereotypes about the region. One of the most well-known examples in art history is Mari Carmen Ramírez’s call for curators in North America to move beyond the survey format that conceptualized Latin American art as primitive, fantastic, and the Other to Western modernism.4 Roelofs and Holland find value in returning to the term magical realism in their analysis of the Peruvian film La teta asustada, specifically reading for how aesthetics deconstructs the binary between modernity and indigeneity and models decolonial agency through the film’s protagonist.
The film follows Fausta as she attempts to bury her mother in her hometown. The action moves from the informal settlements outside Lima to the ocean, where Fausta recognizes her mother’s internal migration. Roelofs and Holland effectively synthesize how the interdependent systems of the Catholic Church, the military, and racism shaped Peruvian society from colonization to the ongoing conflicts between the state and the Shining Path that resulted in the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands and the denigration of Indigenous ways of life. Along with paying attention to the appearance of bodily fluids throughout the film, the authors highlight the way visual culture, like reproductions of the Virgin or a TV cartoon and objects from interior design such as a sofa and pool, demarcates social hierarchies and cultural belonging. In contrast to Troconis’s reading of the objects in López’s work, Roelofs and Holland recognize the way cultural objects can both alienate and unite in their structuring of the social order, yet they also conclude their reading of the film by privileging figures who can decode, play with, and rearrange images. They make a case for “aesthetic agency as a strategy of critical reading and bodily address.”
Julia M. Medina demonstrates this aesthetic agency in her essay, “Replanting Imageries of Resistance in Visual Culture: From Human to Vegetal Agency in Nicaragua,” which shifts across multiple registers of visual culture, from state-installed public “trees” that function as lights, to actual plants as forms of resistance, and on to digital media including Facebook and viral videos, as well as monuments and political cartoons. Medina assembles this array of images to argue for how “plant being” counters the Nicaraguan state’s recent (re)turn to authoritarianism, its attempts to impose a public landscape of fake trees as surveillance, and a broader and longer history of extractivism and deforestation, thus making a case for how the visual order of the state can be read for the ways it manifests power and control. Plant being or “plant thinking,” by contrast, proposes an imaginary beyond the humanist, or as Medina writes, “it coexist with other beings.” This invitation to a decentralized form of resistance counters the history of the Enlightenment and its models of living constituted by colonization and its exploitation of humans and nature as the path of “progress.”
Marta Sánchez-Salvà examines this exact tension in her essay, “Vitalismo teosófico indoamericano en la pintura de Salarrué,” which analyzes the artworks of the Salvadoran artist and author to argue against a simplistic reading of the paintings of Indigenous people with closed eyes as racist. In the past these artworks have been criticized as stereotypical portrayals of Indigenous people as lazy and thus at odds with the progress and development at the heart of the colonization and Enlightenment project. Sánchez-Salvà instead revisits the writings of Salarrué to consider how the artist, in fact, takes issue with the modernizing ideology of rationalism since it has come at the cost of spiritual-philosophical regeneration. The author reads the paintings—the figures, their facial expressions and nonhuman attributes—as physical manifestations of various belief systems from Mesoamerican nahualli and theosophy to Bergsonian vitalism, beliefs that decenter humanist frameworks in favor of a continuum between human and nonhuman.
The authors in this issue challenge the reader to reject the humanist, rationalist, and colonizing organization of society that was marked not just by a division between man and the natural world but by a belief in the superiority of man and the boundless exploitation of and profit from the nonhuman. Together the texts argue for how this model of power has led to continual political crises, migration and displacement, discrimination against Indigenous peoples and their worldviews, and loss of biodiversity across Latin America. Art therefore proposes a future imaginary in which the disordering of the traditional hierarchy between man and the nonhuman world can resist power through a collective being with others.
Notes
“25 Elections in 2024 that Could Change the World,” AP News, https://apnews.com/25-elections-in-2024-that-could-change-the-world.
Will Freeman, Steven Holmes, and Sabine Baumgartner, “Why Six Countries Account for Most Migrants at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Council on Foreign Relations, July 9, 2024, https://www.cfr.org/article/why-six-countries-account-most-migrants-us-mexico-border.
Julie Turkewitz, “Losing Hope, Venezuelans Vow to Leave Their Country if Maduro Wins,” New York Times, July 18, 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/07/18/world/americas/venezuela-migration-election.html.
Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Beyond ‘the Fantastic’: Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of Latin American Art,” in Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 229–46.