Other Looks: Chicana/o Responses to US Magazine Aesthetics

Abstract

Abstract I argue that Chicana/o artists and activists working in the second half of the twentieth century engaged with the visual culture of US mass picture magazines such as Life because they identified it as a crucial site of struggle even as they recognized the increasing significance of other mass media. Examining pages from Life throughout the years, I show how Henry Luce’s magazine used derogatory depictions of racialized subjects to sell a particular notion of readerly belonging to a white middle-class audience. I find traces of distinct activist and artistic responses to this biased visual culture in the pages of Chicano Movement periodicals such as La Raza, in a Time spread on author Carlos Castaneda, and in the collaboration of two Chicano avant-gardists, Teddy Sandoval and Gronk. Each of these practices, I argue, provide different perspectives on the degree to which the social imaginary and protocols of the magazine medium availed the formation of minoritarian counter-discourses. While the mass picture magazine has faded from prominence, becoming a mere shadow of what it once was, the visual culture that emerged from its glossy pages still haunts our present. As a result, the activist and artistic interventions discussed in this essay provide us with important models for rethinking contemporary efforts to transform the racial logics of the mass cultural sphere.