Family Tensions

Abstract

Arlene Dávila’s Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics concludes with a “Noncomprehensive List of Artists Everyone Should Know,” which includes some 150 contemporary Latinx practitioners (177–88). Elizabeth Ferrer’s Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History is structured like a list throughout, with loosely chronological chapters that proceed photographer by photographer (many of whom are also artists) like an exhibition catalog. The books share eighteen names in common, as well as the same presupposition that many are unfamiliar to the reader. As Ferrer notes, “I have striven to include as many historic photographers as possible to help fill gaps in our understanding of the scope of contributions made by Latinx individuals to the medium” (xii). For both Ferrer and Dávila, Latinx art and photography are challenged not merely by restricted access—to museums, art markets, canons, and even “Latin American art” itself—but by amnesia as well. Ferrer provides an accessible introductory resource to Latinx history and culture as refracted through a particular medium and its proponents. Dávila has crafted something else entirely; Latinx Art is only nominally art history. An anthropologist by training, her research is premised on “interviews with artists, curators, gallerists, and other stakeholders of the contemporary art circuit” whose perspectives are interwoven with Dávila’s own excoriation of the pre-COVID-19 art world for its exclusion and “whitewashing” of Latinx artists (2). The subfield of Latinx art history thus arrives with its own debates in full swing. Both books necessarily reflect on terminology and define the vexed ethnoracial category “Latinx,” which first trended on Google in 2004 as a nonbinary iteration of “Latina” or “Latino.”1 The latter were originally short for latinoamericana/o (Latin American), but Ferrer, following the term’s conventional usage, defines “a Latinx person as one who resides in the United States and whose family roots can be traced to a Spanish-speaking country in the Americas”(ix). She does so to eschew,