This lithograph of a boy at work was designed in the late 1930s by the Mexican American artist Ramón Contreras (1919-1940). Mexican-born, he grew up in San Bernardino, a major agricultural town east of Los Angeles. His career was tragically short. Before he died of cancer at the age of 21, Contreras became the youngest artist ever invited to the Golden Gate International Exposition, and traveled to Mexico to meet the famed muralist Diego Rivera. Contreras came of age during the Great Depression (1930s), a period of economic crisis for all Americans and for people around the globe. Much of the art produced during these difficult years reflects a political and aesthetic vision–to document and ennoble the lives of ordinary working people. Here, Contreras presents us with an idealized image of a confident young man in motion. Identifiably Mexican with his serape draped over one shoulder, the boy drawn by Contreras triumphantly at the center of the frame is perhaps a fruit vendor. He is probably not a fruit picker–note the non-Californian bananas arrayed with other warm-weather fruits in his basket. This lithograph was printed in about 1950 by Lynton Kistler–it is one of the 2,700 prints by this prominent Los Angeles printer that are housed in the Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History.
overall: 40.1 cm x 28.6 cm; 15 13/16 in x 11 1/4 in
Object Name:
print
Object Type:
Aquatint
Place made:
Mexico
Associated Place:
Mexico
Date made:
ca 1925
Associated Date:
20th century
Subject:
Art
Cultures & Communities
Latino
Immigration
Mexican America
ID Number:
GA*14183
Catalog number:
14183
Accession number:
92987
Description:
This aquatint, titled Market Plaza by Geoge O. "Pop" Hart, was printed about 1925, a period of peak migration for workers streaming to the United States seeking opportunity in the United States and escape from the chaos of the Mexican Revolution (1910 1921). Many of the married men settled in the United States and brought their wives and families—from 1900 to 1932, the Mexican-born population of the United States grew from 103,000 to over 1,400,000. Other Mexican workers returned to their homes in Jalisco, Guanajuato, or Michoacán, and came north periodically in search of seasonal or temporary work. Replacing recently banned workers from Asia, these men provided cheap labor for the newly irrigated cotton fields of Texas and Arizona, the copper mines of Utah, the fruit processing plants of California, and the railroads that connected all points in between. An abundance of factory jobs also increasingly attracted Mexican migrants to cities like Chicago and Milwaukee. But many of these hard-earned economic opportunities in the United States came to an end during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Mexican workers in areas like California had to compete with economic refugees from across the country. Many were targets of discrimination and anti-immigrant violence. Thousands of American citizens were among the 500,000 men, women, and children forcibly and suddenly moved to Mexico on buses and trains from Texas and California during the Great Depression. This print is one of a series of images created by American artists traveling in Mexico.
overall: 42.6 cm x 32.2 cm; 16 3/4 in x 12 11/16 in
Object Name:
print
Object Type:
Lithograph
Place made:
United States: Colorado, Colorado Springs
Mexico
Date made:
1948
Subject:
Art
Cultures & Communities
Food Culture
Latino
Work
Immigration
Native Americans
Mexican America
ID Number:
GA*23377
Catalog number:
23377
Accession number:
299563
Description:
The French-born artist Jean Charlot spent his early career during the 1920s in Mexico City. His 1948 lithograph depicts a scene from the domestic life of a Mexican indigenous woman, a favorite theme of the artist. Household work—without the aid of most, if any, electrical appliances—was a full-time job for many working-class and poor Mexican women, north and south of the border, well into the 20th century. Food preparation was especially labor-intensive. Corn had to be processed, wood gathered, and water fetched, in the midst of child rearing and other household duties. This was the daily fare of most women, who rarely worked outside the home after marriage. Mexican American women who found work in cities like El Paso in the early 20th century were either single or widowed. Many worked as domestic servants, others in industrial laundries or textile mills. Like today, some women turned to their kitchens to earn a living, making meager profits selling prepared food on the street to Mexican American workers and Mexican migrants.
overall: 20 7/16 in x 5 5/8 in x 2 1/2 in; 51.91125 cm x 14.2875 cm x 6.35 cm
Object Name:
knife
Date made:
ca 1963
Subject:
Agriculture
Work
Latino
Artifact Walls exhibit
Credit Line:
Gift of Isaias Sanchez
ID Number:
2007.0107.01
Accession number:
2007.0107
Catalog number:
2007.0107.01
Description:
This is a curved metal knife used by Isaias Sanchez to cut palm fronds and dates from date trees. Isaias Sanchez used this knife in California when he was brought in from Mexico under a Federal temporary guest worker program commonly known as the Bracero Program. More then 2 million guest workers were brought in between 1942 and 1964 under this program. Workers were used mainly in agricultural fields, orchards, and cotton fields. U.S. growers wanted a source of cheap, efficient, and temporary labor. American farm workers and union officials were worried about loss of jobs, lower wages, poor working conditions, and lack of representation. Communities on both sides of the border experienced periods of economic prosperity as workers spent money or sent money home. This program had a direct impact on immigration and labor policy but more importantly on the formation of thriving Mexican American communities here in the U.S.
Title (Spanish): "Un Calendario Curioso para 1879"
Physical Description:
ink (overall material)
paper (overall material)
Object Name:
pamphlet
Place made:
Mexico
Location where used:
Mexico
Subject:
Food Culture
Popular Culture
Latino
Printing
Cultures & Communities
Family & Social Life
Mexican America
ID Number:
CL*300959.14
Catalog number:
300959.14
Accession number:
300959
Description:
Titled Un Calendario Curioso para 1879, this almanac was printed in Mexico at the beginning of the Porfiriato—the period between 1876 and 1911 dominated by the presidency of Porfirio Díaz. This was a period of intense foreign investment in Mexico. U.S. corporations were especially active in Mexico's mining industry, which was now connected to the United States by an ever-expanding web of railroads. While many fortunes were made during this era of peace and economic growth, the boom did not trickle down to the rural poor or the urban working classes. Many small farmers and indigenous communities lost their fields to powerful landlords and plantation owners. The middle and upper classes also grew disgruntled as the political elite stifled the country's democracy in the name of progress. This almanac offers a window into the everyday lives of Mexicans living in the late 1800s. In addition to a year-long forecast, it includes a timeline of world and Mexican history, highlighting dates such Noah's flood and the execution of Emperor Maximilian. A section at the end offers an elaborate list of recipes selected by "people of good taste" for "people of all classes."
This scene of the Toluca market was depicted by Alan Crane in 1946. Housed in the Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History, it is one of a series of lithographs of Mexican landscapes and genre scenes he printed during the 1940s. The growth of the tourist industry, rebounding after WWII, created a market for images of an idyllic Mexico—peaceful, scenic, and premodern. The elements of everyday life shown here—the densely packed stands of the ceramics vendors, the pulquería (a cantina that serves pulque, the fermented juice of the maguey plant), and the traditional dress of the marketeers—were as foreign to the urbanized Mexican American youth in Los Angeles, El Paso, and San Antonio as they were to American tourists seeking a memento of "Old Mexico." The generations of youths who grew up in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were fundamental in negotiating the language, aesthetics, and political vision that would constitute the contemporary culture of Mexican Americans. These young men and women, many of whom were war veterans as well as industrial and agricultural workers, created empowering images of Mexican Americans as they defined new roles for themselves as activists during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
overall: 147 cm x 155 cm x 127 cm; 57 7/8 in x 61 in x 50 in
Object Name:
dress
Place made:
Mexico
Date made:
1960s
Subject:
Popular Entertainment
Costume
Latino
Education
Music
Mexican America
ID Number:
2001.0130.01
Accession number:
2001.0130
Catalog number:
2001.0130.01
Description:
Mariachis, groups comprised of vocalists, trumpeters, violinists, and various bass and guitar players, are today considered Mexico's traditional musical ensemble. Originally from the state of Jalisco, mariachi music transformed itself from a regional to a national music between the 1930s and 1950s. Its accompanying attire is the fancy charro costume for men and the china poblana dress (like the one pictured here) for women. The thriving song, music, and dance culture surrounding mariachi today is the product of pioneering work by Mexican American educators and performers in the early 1960s. Mariachi instruction programs have since grown in popularity across Mexican American communities, with student mariachi ensembles beginning to perform as early as elementary or middle school. But Mexican American musical traditions began much earlier than the mariachi movement—they include styles as diverse as the choir music of the California missions and the corridos and ballads of San Antonio's Rosita Fernández (1925 1997). This china poblana dress, made in the 1960s, belonged to Fernández who, though performing a wide repertoire of Mexican song styles, is most identified with música norteña, rather than mariachi. Her sixty-year career as a local radio, TV, and theater star garnered her the title, "San Antonio's First Lady of Song."
overall: 31.9 cm x 40.8 cm; 12 9/16 in x 16 1/16 in
Object Name:
print
Object Type:
Lithograph
Place made:
Mexico
Date made:
1943
Subject:
Latino
Country Scenes
Cultures & Communities
Art
Mexican America
ID Number:
GA*23830
Catalog number:
23830
Accession number:
306563
Description:
With the lucrative growth of tourism in 20th century, stereotypical and processed images of Mexico have often been marketed to the American imagination. In them, "South of the Border" becomes a sunny pre-modern place of vacations, trinkets, and convenient lawlessness. But contrasting and complex images of Mexico have pervaded the American imagination since well before the Civil War. Mexico, itself defined by cultural and racial exchange, has historically represented a starkly different social order to most Americans. A country with cheap land and labor and bountiful mineral and agricultural resources offered economic opportunities to many Americans, from white financiers and mercenaries to black oil workers and baseball players. Mexico was also a refuge for many American artists, of Mexican descent or otherwise, who imagined Mexico in different ways. Some artists sought inspiration from its ancient history, and others came looking for a pristine and exotic landscape. This lithograph, titled Mariposas at Patyenaro was drawn by Alan Crane in 1943. It depicts the picturesque, butterfly-shaped nets of Mexican fisherman paddling their canoes on a lake. Alan Horton Crane (1901–1969) was a Brooklyn-born illustrator best known for his landscapes and genre scenes of life in Mexico and New England. Similar prints by Crane showing scenes of idyllic Mexico are housed in the Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History.
overall: 9 in x 4 3/4 in x 4 15/16 in; 22.86 cm x 12.065 cm x 12.5001 cm
Object Name:
spur
Place made:
Mexico
Date made:
1840 - 1860
Subject:
Horseback Riding
Western Wear
Horses
Latino
Agriculture
Clothing & Accessories
Cultures & Communities
Mexican America
Credit Line:
Gift of J.G. Develing
ID Number:
CL*004841
Catalog number:
4841
Accession number:
2007.0144
Description:
This spur, worn over a riding boot, was made in Mexico in the mid-1800s. Rubbed against the animal's side, spurs are one of the instruments that riders use to direct horses. The spikes on this spur are set on a small wheel called a rowel, making this a rowel spur. Horses and good riding equipment, such as spurs, saddles, stirrups, and leather coverings, played a fundamental role in the European conquest, exploration, and settlement of wide areas of North America. Much of the technique and craftsmanship of riding culture that was found in the American West among both Native Americans and later U.S. settlers was introduced by the Spanish in Mexico within the first century of colonization (1500s). During this period, huge herds of cattle and sheep (both newly introduced species, like horses) flooded the dry grasslands of northern Mexico and were tended by men who would later be called vaqueros—cowboys. The ranching culture that they developed, as well as the ecological destruction that grazing produced, stretched from Texas to California. This economy of raising livestock on the open range was embraced by settlers coming overland from the American East along routes like the Santa Fe, Old Spanish, and Gila trails. To this day, ranching remains a vital economic and cultural force in both the American West and northern Mexico.
overall: 43 cm x 32.5 cm; 16 15/16 in x 12 13/16 in
Object Name:
print
Object Type:
Lithograph
Place made:
United States: California, Los Angeles
Mexico
Date made:
1951
Associated Date:
1951
Subject:
Cultures & Communities
Art
Latino
Immigration
Prejudice
Mexican America
ID Number:
1978.0650.0968
Accession number:
1978.0650
Catalog number:
1978.0650.0968
78.0650.0968
Description:
For centuries in both Mexico and the United States, racism has organized society and regulated the work and aspirations of Europeans, Africans, Native peoples, and their mixed descendants. Though inhabiting segregated spaces, Mexican American communities expanded by the 1960s, stretching from the Yakima Valley of Washington to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, and into the Midwest, particularly Chicago. The people living in these towns and cities represented a mix of multigenerational U.S. citizens, new residents, and temporary Mexican workers. While their experiences varied, all these communities were shaped by a legacy of discrimination in school, housing, and employment. Economic exploitation, in the form of race-based wages and substandard working conditions, particularly in fields, mines, and factories, were their daily realities. Despite the participation of Mexican American soldiers in all major U.S. conflicts since the Civil War, and the contribution of Mexican workers to the American agricultural and mining economy (and the vast economy of the West generally), the citizenship and human rights of their communities were contested and continue to be today. This lithograph, titled Goodbye Wetback, was designed by artist B. Barrios and printed by Lynton Kistler in 1951 in Los Angeles. It depicts a rural Mexican family confronting, with a mix of fear and stoicism, the racist encounter implied in the title. Kistler printed the work of many artists, some of whom specifically depicted Latino, Native American, and East Asian subjects. Over 2,700 of his prints are housed in the Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History.
ADD MORE SUBJECTS LIKE LATINO, IMMIGRATION, PREJUDICE
Mexican Americans have served in U.S. armed forces since the Civil War. But it was the generation of Mexican Americans returning from World War II who mobilized their communities and changed the political landscape of the West. Laying the groundwork for the Chicano movement of the 1960s, organizations like the American G.I. Forum began advocating on behalf of Hispanic veterans who were denied the educational, health care, housing, and other rights guaranteed by the G.I. Bill. Often working in concert with the League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and other Latino civil rights organizations, the Texas-based G.I. Forum soon engaged in broader social battles over school desegregation and voter registration rights. Today, the G.I. Forum is a nationally recognized source of scholarships among Mexican American students. This paño, titled Valor, the Spanish word for courage, commemorates the Korean War Medal of Honor winner Rodolfo Hernández. Paños are an art form created traditionally by Chicano prisoners on white handkerchiefs. Often mailed as gifts to friends and families, the images on paños remember loved ones, depict important memories, and tell stories about the dark side of life, as well as redemption. The maker of this paño is unknown.
overall: 58.2 cm x 73.5 cm; 22 29/32 in x 28 15/16 in
Object Name:
print
Object Type:
Lithograph
Place made:
United States: California, Los Angeles
Mexico
Date made:
1956
Subject:
Cultures & Communities
Art
Latino
Work
Food Culture
Mexican America
ID Number:
GA*23355.05
Catalog number:
23355.05
Accession number:
299563
Description:
The Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History houses an extensive series of prints by archeologist and artist Jean Charlot (1898–1979), and prominent Los Angeles printer Lynton Kistler (1897–1993). Charlot, the French-born artist of this print, spent his early career during the 1920s in Mexico City. As an assistant to the socialist painter Diego Rivera, he studied muralism, a Mexican artistic movement that was revived throughout Latino communities in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. This lithograph, titled Work and Rest contrasts the labor of an indigenous woman, grinding corn on a metate, with the slumber of her baby. Printed by Lynton Kistler in Los Angeles in 1956, it presents an image of a Mexican woman living outside the industrial age. This notion of "Old Mexico" unblemished by modernity appealed to many artists concerned in the early 20th century with the mechanization and materialism of American culture. It was also a vision that was packaged as an exotic getaway for many American tourists. It is worth contrasting the quaint appeal of an indigenous woman laboring over her tortillas with the actual industrialization of the tortilla industry. By 1956, this woman would likely have bought her tortillas in small stacks from the local tortillería, saving about six hours of processing, grinding, and cooking tortilla flour.
As this paño humorously titled Orale ese vato (Spanish for roughly, right on, man) shows, one characteristic of Chicano art is that it avidly consumes and reconfigures both American and Mexican pop culture with its own slang, looks, and attitude. A paño is a hand-drawn handkerchief traditionally designed by Chicano prisoners. Like a letter that retells memories of both good and bad times, paños are often mailed as gifts to friends and loved ones. Valued as a vibrant popular art that overlaps with muralism, tattoo design, graffiti, and auto airbrushing, paños and their makers are receiving increased exposure for their visual storytelling abilities. An illustrator and a muralist known for depicting Chicano themes, Walter Baca (1947-1993) designed this paño in New Mexico in 1992.
silk-screened (overall production method/technique)
Measurements:
average spatial: 11 in x 8 1/2 in; 27.94 cm x 21.59 cm
Object Name:
sign, protest
Place Made:
United States: New Mexico, Tierra Amarilla, Tierra Amarilla area
Date made:
1967
Subject:
Civil Rights Movement
Government, Politics, and Reform
Latino
West
Cultures & Communities
Bandito
Mexican America
Event:
Land Protest Movement Led by Tijerina
ID Number:
1990.0654.01
Catalog number:
1990.0654.01
Accession number:
1990.0654
Description:
Following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the annexation of Texas, the land claims of many Mexican families were not respected, either by the new English-speaking settlers or by the U.S. government. Dispossession from family- and community-owned lands dealt a severe economic blow to the livelihood of generations of Mexican Americans. The issue of land evokes especially bitter memories in New Mexico. In 1967, the year this poster was made with the slogan Tierra o Muerte, meaning Land or Death, a Hispanic land rights organization called La Alianza, led by Reies López Tijerina, raided the Rio Arriba County courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. In addition to reclaiming land from the government of New Mexico, the goals of the raid were to free imprisoned Alianza members and to arrest the district attorney who was prosecuting them as communists and outside agitators. The raid on the courthouse was ultimately unsuccessful and Tijerina served time in a federal prison. Although seen by some as a divisive figure, Reies López Tijerina was as recognizable as Cesar Chavez to many Chicano activists of the late 1960s. Mirroring similar political tensions in the African American community, Chicano civil rights activists were torn between leaders such as Chavez, who advocated nonviolence, and leaders like Tijerina, whose political strategy was decidedly more militant.
Pancho Villa is one of the most recognizable leaders of the Mexico Revolution. This civil war, which lasted from 1910-1921, was fought to curb U.S. corporate interests and to redistribute agricultural lands, especially for indigenous communities. It was a social revolution that reasserted popular culture and the value of "Mexican-ness." It was also a prolonged, violent conflict that spread death and hunger throughout Mexico, spurring migrants north, mostly into El Paso, Los Angeles, and other historically Mexican U.S. cities. With them came ideas, images, and language for organizing laborers and the rural poor. These ideas and images percolated in the popular culture of Mexican Americans and reappear in the art and activism of Chicanos in the 1960s and 1970s. On the back of this candle depicting Villa are prayers written in English and Spanish asking him to grant the petitioner some of the insight and prowess that enshrined this bandit, social revolutionary, and media star in the mythology of modern Mexico.
The Teatro Campesino was founded by Luis Valdez in 1965 to energize the political message of the United Farmer Workers of America using song, music, and drama. Modern, bicultural, and socially aware, the street theater of the Teatro Campesino is a touchstone of Chicano art. At first taking their performances to the fields, Teatro Campesino actors and writers used the language and stories of working men and women to advance the civil rights of Mexican Americans and to celebrate and reengage with their history and popular traditions. Like many Chicano art forms, the Teatro Campesino uses imagery that bends time to combine critiques of contemporary life with visual references to modern, colonial, and pre-Hispanic Mexican symbols. This poster for the Teatro Campesino appropriates the artwork of Mexico's most famous printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), who is best known for his humorous depictions of skeletons engaged in the love and conflict of daily life.
Title (Spanish): El Último Momento del Emperador Maximiliano
Graphic artist:
Babbage, T.
Publisher:
Magazine of Art
Physical Description:
paper (overall material)
ink (overall material)
Measurements:
overall: 17.7 cm x 24 cm; 6 15/16 in x 9 7/16 in
Object Name:
sheet
sheet (paper)
Object Type:
relief
Place Made:
United States: New York
United Kingdom: England, London
Date made:
ca 1890
Subject:
Cultures & Communities
Art
Latino
Cinco de Mayo
France
Mexican America
ID Number:
1996.0197.350
Catalog number:
1996.0197.350
Accession number:
1996.0197
Description:
This relief print from The Magazine of Art dramatically illustrates the final moments before the execution of the Mexican Emperor Maximilian I in 1867. An Austrian noble by birth, Maximilian was installed by Napoleon III of France. French forces had invaded Mexico in 1862, after President Benito Juárez suspended payments on its foreign debt. Despite a major victory by Mexican forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, the French seized control of large sections of Mexico, including the capital. Maximilian was initially supported by Mexican conservatives in a backlash against the changes instituted by the Mexican War of Reform (1857–1861). However, once on the throne, his support of a free press, open universities, land reform, and other progressive ideas of the day proved to be out of step with his conservative constituency and the Catholic Church. Menaced by the government of the United States, victorious after its own civil war, and the rising success of Mexican nationalist forces, the French withdrew their military support of Maximilian, the last emperor of Mexico. This historic image is one of 45,000 artistic and commercials prints housed in the Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History.
From doo-wop and country blues, to polka and hip-hop, Tejano music is made by borderland musicians forced to understand the value of cultural exchange. Performing a fusion of cumbia, pop, and contemporary Tejano music, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez (1971–1995) was a young star whose rise and hard-won fame in the United States and Latin American markets was cut short at age 23, when she was murdered by a business manager fired for stealing. Selena was a commercial success in ways unimaginable for her more rootsy predecessors like Flaco Jiménez, Freddy Fender, or Little Joe. This outfit, with its leather boots, tight pants, a satin bustier, and a motorcycle jacket, is an example of Selena's idiosyncratic style, wavering between sexy rebel and Mexican American good girl. Hailing from Lake Jackson, Texas, Selena was born into a family of musicians. Because she grew up speaking English, she had to learn to sing Spanish phonetically on her early albums that targeted the Spanish-speaking market. Ironically, her "cross-over" material for English-language radio was not released until the end of her career, shortly after her tragic death. Selena, who spent her childhood in her family's band entertaining crowds at weddings, restaurants, fairs, and other modest venues along the U.S.-Mexico border, remains enshrined in the memory of many as one of the greatest stars of Tejano music.
