Visualizing Latinx (Hi)Stories
Saturday, February 24, 2024 - Sunday, April 21, 2024
What does it mean to visualize Latinx histories and stories? In Fall 2023, undergraduate students enrolled in “Latinx US History” blended historical knowledge with contemporary studies and lived experiences to answer this question via creative practices. This installation of their work balances individual Latinx stories with collective Latinx histories from the Caribbean, Latin America, and the US. Contributors worked individually and collectively to illustrate the connections between past, present, and future while attending to the (trans)national aspects of Latinx history. By using “Latinx,” students followed the example of Afro-Indigenous (Zapotec) poet Alan Pelaez Lopez who treats the “X” as a wound that “represents the exact inarticulation of the Latin American experience.” This installation views the “X” in Latinx as a space of possibility, a canvas upon which to explore diverse perspectives, experiences, celebrations, and critiques of latinidad.
Here you will find themes of anti-blackness, displacement, migration, memory, labor, (il)legality, imperialism, transnationalism, and placemaking. For example, Franco, Urban, Maza, Hanson, Ortiz, and Venegas each bring our attention to the central role that oral history and familial memory play in passing down stories about migration and transnational lived experiences. Oral histories and interviews animate the works by Bonilla, Black, Olivo, and Reyes, with each piece showcasing individual or collective aspects of Latinx everyday life across the US. Contreras, Gamez, Flores Orlenas, and Rosas Verdines take varying approaches to depicting the realities of Latinx labor in the US South, including here in Georgia. And Barrios, Hibbeln, and Zavarro take us from the local to the hemispheric, with each paying attention to the transnational realities that have shaped migrants’ experiences with imperialism and displacement.
Through these various mediums and thematic approaches, the curators reject a monolithic understanding of Latinx identity and history. Rather, these pieces show how Latinx (hi)stories can be best understood as an in-progress mosaic that has been and continues to be shaped by everyday processes and people across the Americas.
This installation was made possible by the visionary students enrolled in Professor Yami Rodriguez’s Fall 2023 “Latinx US History” course who worked in collaboration with Carlos Museum staff.
Read the individual artists' statements describing their works here.
Here you will find themes of anti-blackness, displacement, migration, memory, labor, (il)legality, imperialism, transnationalism, and placemaking. For example, Franco, Urban, Maza, Hanson, Ortiz, and Venegas each bring our attention to the central role that oral history and familial memory play in passing down stories about migration and transnational lived experiences. Oral histories and interviews animate the works by Bonilla, Black, Olivo, and Reyes, with each piece showcasing individual or collective aspects of Latinx everyday life across the US. Contreras, Gamez, Flores Orlenas, and Rosas Verdines take varying approaches to depicting the realities of Latinx labor in the US South, including here in Georgia. And Barrios, Hibbeln, and Zavarro take us from the local to the hemispheric, with each paying attention to the transnational realities that have shaped migrants’ experiences with imperialism and displacement.
Through these various mediums and thematic approaches, the curators reject a monolithic understanding of Latinx identity and history. Rather, these pieces show how Latinx (hi)stories can be best understood as an in-progress mosaic that has been and continues to be shaped by everyday processes and people across the Americas.
This installation was made possible by the visionary students enrolled in Professor Yami Rodriguez’s Fall 2023 “Latinx US History” course who worked in collaboration with Carlos Museum staff.
Read the individual artists' statements describing their works here.
