Shine Bright like a Migrant Julio Salgado's Digital Art and Its Use of Joteria
2016; Volume: 42; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-641X
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoThe digital art of undocuqueer movement activist Julio Salgado cannot be studied through a single-issue lens; doing so would elide the ways that queer Chicanas/os have attempted to imagine a politics that explores the intersections between queemess, migration, nationalism, gender, and race. Joteria, derived from the Spanish word joto, a derogatory term meaning queer or faggot, has come to signify a collective queer Latino identity. Queer Chicanos reclaimed the terms joto and joteria in a similar way to how activists re-politicized the term in the 1960s. this article, I conceptualize a analytics that is informed by Chicana feminisms, queer of color critique, and Chicana/o studies to create a queer Chicana/o optic to analyze the art of Julio Salgado. Scholars of Chicana/o art have used a myriad of lenses to study the artistic contributions of Chicanas/os. For instance, Alicia Gaspar de Alba has employed Western feminism, Chicana feminisms, and cultural studies to explore Chicana and Chicano visual art in her study of the CARA Exhibition (Gaspar de Alba 1998). Moreover, Laura Perez has used spirituality studies and Chicana feminisms to document the spiritual and aesthetic altarities that Chicana art embodies (Perez 2007, 6-7). Perez treats Chicana art as a set of cultural texts that document Chicanas' experiences with racialization, gender, and sexual exploitation. Expanding on Perez's idea of using art as a cultural text, I wonder how queer Chicana/o visual culture like that of Julio Salgado can be used to document queer Chicana/o subjectivity. I highlight the digital prints of self-identified undocuqueer artivist Julio Salgado because his artwork challenges me to develop what I am conceptualizing as a analytics. Salgado's prints portray the quotidian experience of navigating life as an undocumented, queer, Chicana/o, and feminist migrant in the United States. A analytics becomes a useful tool to understand the constant shifting of power and its impact on identity formation, especially for those who identify as undocuqueer. I begin this article with a personal anecdote explaining how I came across Julio Salgado's digital art and what motivated me to conceptualize as an analytics to capture the complexity of his work. Logging into Facebook is part of my daily routine to catch up with events. One particular day, I scrolled down the potpourri of posts and stumbled upon an image that haunted me for the rest of the day. Julio Salgado's digital print titled In the Wise Words of Jay-Z became a catalyst that launched the inquiry presented in this article. Salgado's print is a two-dimensional image depicting a young brown man wearing a light blue T-shirt and dark blue jeans standing in front of a red sea of anonymous nativist protesters holding picket signs that read: What part of illegal don't you understand? and Go back home illegals! (see Figure 1). To me, Salgado's image captures the xenophobic Zeitgeist of present-day Arizona, where SB-1070 seems to dictate everyday life. (1) I connected to Salgado's digital image because of my recent move to Tucson, Arizona from Southern California and the explicit racism I encountered in the public sphere of the Old Pueblo. My attachment to Salgado's image was twofold: On the one hand, the image was a tangible representation that validated my experiences of blatant racism in Tucson; on the other, it portrayed a form of quotidian resistance to oppression. The title of the digital print borrows from rapper Jay-Z's song, Dirt Off Your Shoulder, which narrates how black urban populations perform nonviolent acts of resistance in the public sphere against oppression by the state apparatus, such as the constant police surveillance of urban black dwellers through racial profiling. The logic behind Jay-Z's song is that if one does not brush the metaphoric dirt off one's shoulder, said dirt will accumulate and weigh one down. …
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