Latinx Art: A Conversation With Arlene Dávila
David Antonio Cruz, soletthemeatasylumpink, 2016. (Image courtesy of the artist)
By Frederick Luis Aldama
Award winning scholar, mind-blowing NYU professor, and Tsunamic force of arts activism, Arlene Dávila is a Flash-like dynamo of energy that’s saving the world one Latinx at a time. Since the publication of her first book in 1997, Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico Arlene’s been on a rip-roaring tear, overturning those staid and static ways of understanding ethnoracialized social and political economic existence for Latinxs in all variety of spaces: urban, émigré, national, televisual industrial, and museum curatorial. Arlene asks the hard questions, not only of the way media industries across the Americas package Latinxs in safe-consumable and denigrative ways, but also the internalized colonial mentalities that rip apart our Latinx communities along gender, sexuality, and race lines.
Arlene’s path led from her studies at Tufts (BA) and an MA in Anthropology and Museum Studies at NYU to a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from CUNY then becoming a professor of Anthropology, American Studies, Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. Her scholarship knows no bounds, leaving no stone unturned: Latinos Inc.: Marketing and the Making of a People. Updated Edition with a New Preface (2001; 2012); Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos and the Neoliberal City (2004); Culture Works: Space, Value and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas (2012); El Mall: The Spatial and Class Politics of Shopping Malls in Latin America (2016); as well as coeditor of Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York (2001) and Contemporary Latin@ Media: Production, Circulation and Politics (2014). With the recent publication of Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics (2020), Arlene Dávila returns to and greatly expands on her early work excavating and troubling ethnoracialized museumscapes in the Americas.
In all of her work, Arlene listens carefully to the pulses that beat within industry, communal, and familial spaces. She wakes us to issues as well as offers pro-active solutions. Here and in her founding and directing of the The Latinx Project we see clearly how that line between the academy and the community is, well, a line drawn in sand. Arlene is our 21st-century Latinx scholar-activist superhero. I had the great honor of learning from Arlene during this recent interview.
Frederick Luis Aldama: Arlene, you just published Latinx Art. Of course, this doesn’t come out of thin air. You’ve been on this scholarly activist/artivist path for a while. Why choose to research and write on issues of race, gender, and space, media art and pop culture, especially in and around Latinx communities, identities, and experiences?
Arlene Dávila: I think I’ve been writing the Latinx Art book forever. It goes back to the issue of how capitalism works, how culture is shaped after capitalism, and the importance of foregrounding the analysis of the corporate political economies of culture as we think about culture as a domain of politics and representation. It’s also attentive to the knowledge of the power of culture and activism of our Latinx communities.
I’ve always been very intrigued about how Latinidades are deployed and to really excavate who’s included in those representations. I should mention that I started writing and researching this topic at the height of the excitement around the so-called “Latin Boom” in the 1990s—when J-Lo and Ricky Martin exploded onto the scene. It was a fruitful space to explore the potentialities of that kind of boom and boosterisDavid Antonio Cruz, soletthemeatasylumpink, 2016. (Image courtesy of the artist)m of Latinidad, and to center the interest of corporate media in shaping these cultural spaces.
FLA: There was a lot to celebrate just as there is today, but with our eyes-wide-open to how the bigger powers operate to package and profit from a corporate branded and contained Latinidad.
AD: Absolutely, and with this the whitewashing and sanitizing of Latinx representations. Today’s younger generations are moving against a Latinidad as a whitewashed project by foregrounding Afro-Latinidades and Latinx heterogeneity. I'm very excited about this moment.
FLA: The energy of new gen Latinx scholars and creators that are coming up is so exciting, Arlene. Can you talk about the through-message of Latinx Art: to erase the line drawn in the sand that has separated creators and community from scholars.
AD: As you know well with your work on Latinx comics creators, it’s so important also to not only theorize cultural phenomena, but to also understand and appreciate issues faced by the cultural workers: equity, access, inclusion, and recognition. Earlier I mentioned that I’ve been doing the same book over and over because I focus on issues of labor within capitalism.
FLA: Before you were an academic, you worked in the world of museums, witnessing first-hand the discrepancies and discriminations of Latinxs within these largely white, privileged spaces.
AD: It’s been disheartening to see how non-white artists are not recognized. They’re not seen. Latinx Art was informed both by how marginalized our artists are and by the artivist movement. The Latinx Art Forum, for instance, seeks to carve spaces in otherwise white dominated fields like Art History that aren’t inclusive of Latinx artists and art historians. And, there’s the important work of Teresita Fernandez—her art graces the cover of Latinx Art—who organized the Ford Foundation sponsored Latinx Futures conference, making visible East and West Latinx artists.
FLA: You trained as a cultural anthropologist.
AD: My training in anthropology led me to ask questions about the role that the art marketplace and aesthetic industry plays in the marginalization of Latinx art. Ultimately, the issue of representation is an issue of equity in the culture industries. That’s why Latinx Art examines the artist and the markets—and challenges the way that cultural industries don’t benefit artists of color. The book challenges those structures, policies, and ways of thinking that racialize and exclude.
FLA: There’s a regionalist snobbery in the museum world, Arlene. I think readily of all the incredible museums and cultural institutions across the U.S. that support Latinx creators: El Museo del Barrio, Mission Center for Creative Arts, La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, the Miami Hispanic Cultural Arts Center and Pérez Art Museum, among many others. However, they continue to be seen as niche and lesser-thans to the Whitneys and Guggenheims.
AD: In the contemporary art marketplace, the dominant voices are the experiences of white and international artists. There’s a lack of validation in the mainstream for the voices and experiences of artists of color artists.
FLA: You resoundingly alert us to the fact that even within our Latinx cultural institutions, we need to enact inclusive practices, especially with our Indigenous and Afro-Latinx brothers and sisters.
AD: It’s fascinating to see how many of the young generation of artists were creating and doing work that was so unapologetically embracing of their Indigenous and Afro-Latinidades within popular and vernacular culture; they are producing really politicized and beautiful work that affirms and embraces different epistemologies of value.
But also I was very interested in highlighting the diasporican connection and the importance of diaspora creation. When I started this research, there was a lot of debate about who is Latinx. Do you have to be born and raised in the United States to be considered Latinx? How do you begin to highlight who is Latino and who is Latin American? The conversation itself reproduces fabricated notions of authenticity.
To delve into this question of Latinx, I turned my attention to the incredible divide between Puerto Rican and diasporican artists. I wanted to focus analytical attention the relationship between the artists in the diaspora those on the island. Given the back and forth movement, I was amazed that that such a division exists. Many Latinxs are transnational migrants. Many have connections with home countries, speak the language, have national privilege, have light-skin. Many others do not have that national privilege, whether or not they were born and raised in the States or whether they were recent migrants who don’t have that ability to migrate.
Juan Sánchez, Lindo colores (Rayos gamma), 2002. (Image courtesy of the artist)
Juan Sánchez, Lindo colores (Rayos gamma), 2002. (Image courtesy of the artist)
FLA: We are so very varied in our Latinoness, I wonder sometimes about the generative capacity of the category itself.
AD: It’s why we need the category “Latinx art” to really recognize those political, antiracist artists who are not recognized by their own countries and who are racialized and marginalized in the context of the United States.
FLA: When U.S. art marketplaces do see Latin American artists, it’s usually the elite artists.
AD: They’re upper class artists with a more Eurcentric disposition who come to do work in the US. It’s very rare that we see disenfranchised Indigenous Latin Americans coming to study in U.S. universities and cultural institutions. So as a result you do have this distinction between Latin American artists that tend to follow more Eurocentric and Anglocentric genres and those artists from our Latinx communities who usually get pushback about their work being too narrow and community based.
FLA: Were there any surprises during the researching and interviewing that you did in the writing of Latinx Art?
AD: We all know that the art world is a whitewashed space, but I didn’t expect it to be so much so. From galleries in New York to those in Miami, everybody in power was a white person. From owners and dealers, there is this color blindness. The art players in cities with large populations of Black and Latinx people were totally unaware of the demographic realities of the places that they live.
I was also surprised at how everybody assumed I was talking about Latin American artists. In the art world, nobody knew what Latinx was. Nobody knew what Latino/Latina was. They immediately assumed Latin American artists who were born, raised, and lived in Latin America. I had to spell it out, as if teaching Latino Studies 101. How could they even begin to imagine Latinx art if the people in the industry didn’t know that Latinx artists exist?
Then there was the surprise at how openly people in the industry admit their ignorance openly and reproduce the stereotypes: Latinx art as ghetto art. Of course, we know well the stereotypes. What was surprising was how devoid of diversity and how they didn’t think anything was wrong about their lack of knowledge and their ignorance.
FLA: Why does it matter to you that we bring your insights about Latinx art into our classrooms?
AD: First, culture and medias are a huge industry in our society. Images matter. They shape our world. They shape our worldview. Second, Latinxs need to be part of the conversation that shapes its images, and that shapes narratives. I think that that’s kind of central. I try to instill in the students how this is not something that’s out there, but something they could have access to or become involved in—as scholars as well as social activists in the context of these industries.
More generally, I want to guide them to become anti-racist in and through solidarity politics. A lot of the research in Ethnic Studies has traditionally been divided: Asian Americans, African American, Latinx and the media. We need to be doing more race and the media.
FLA: Today, we continue to see the deliberate erasure and whitewashing of the very varied ways that we exist as Latinxs, with mestizo and African ancestry.
AD: You don’t see Black and Brown Latinx people, period. We see this with the colorism in our community and Spanish language media that fetishizes a light-Latin look and deliberately absents Black and Indigenous Latinx people. We see this not only in terms of the media, but also museums, exhibitions, and academia.
We’re in the midst of a reckoning—and not only in the context of mainstream society that excludes us, but also our responsibility as scholars and creators to change that. We have a lot of homework to do in our own community.
FLA: Arlene, what did you make of Shakira and J-Lo’s performance during the Super Bowl LIV’s half-time?
AD: Unfortunately, here again we see how capital reproduces a certain type of Latinx: the almost blonde, goldish tones of Shakira and J. Lo who come to represent us. And, instead of creating a space for a politics of solidarity with all people of color and foremost Black people, it divides us.
One of the great things about the Black Lives Matter movement is its forcing all of us to really confront the importance of centering anti-Blackness as the foundational element of racism in this country, including in our Latinx community. We need to be working with our African American community. It’s not only about Latinx representation and inclusion. It’s about people of color inclusion. Centering Black representation everywhere will lead to a richer representation of Latinxs.
FLA: As founder and director of The Latinx Project, what are its aims and goals?
AD: It was embarrassing that there was not a space at NYU for Latinx Studies. We had the Major and many famous Latinx faculty, but no institutional space for Latinx studies. This had huge consequences. We didn’t have any funding for any programming. I knew that it was my responsibility to create this space. I had the opportunity. It was informed by decades of clamoring and in conversations.
Because I was doing the Latinx Art book, I knew that it was important to begin with exhibitions. I didn’t want NYU to be part of the same problem that I was writing about: the lack of institutional spaces to showcase Latinx artists. Today, we have done four exhibitions and are able to support three artists in residence.
FLA: It’s amazing what you and your team have achieved with the founding of The Latinx Project at NYU.
AD: The Latinx Project is a result of the incredible contributions and hard work of the artists, faculty board, and ouroutstanding staff. It’s exciting that the team is growing and that a lot of the team comes from our community. Nobody who’s working with us is an administrator per se. They’re all activists, artists, or cultural entrepreneurs.
FLA: As we wrap this up, where is the heartbeat to Latinx Cultural Studies today?
AD: The younger generations, the anti-racist thinking of our Afro-Latinx community, conversations challenging gender binaries, and thinking about new epistemologies. We are at a moment in the digital world and public humanities where we can finally fulfill the mission and the visions of Latinx Studies from the late 1960s and 1970s. The connection with communities nowadays is made so much easier and facilitated by social media and by digital publications and resources, facilitating greater accessibility to our work. We live in a world where research can be more accessible to communities, and also seeing how new generations are becoming so savvy about being on Twitter, talking to each other, creating alternative communities.
In a way I feel that so many of the conversations around disciplines and conferences are so passé. Young generations that are not only writing books, they are creating websites and thinking about exhibitions—translating and producing research for our communities. We need to continue to create spaces for creators and for all of us to be able to talk to each other. Our research is not only about research and getting tenure. It’s about ensuring that it’s accessible.
FLA: Social media and digital spaces can be such a powerful tool for the dissemination of knowledge and creation. Thank you, Arlene.
AD: Thank you so much.