Diálogo

In the last twenty years, the fields of modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art—both in the United States and abroad—have undergone significant systemic transformations. Endless cycles of "discovery" and "rediscovery," as well as the vortex trap of fabricating fixed (or, at a minimum, stable) categorizations are apparently behind us.¹ Instead, Latin American and Latino art are benefiting from a more solid and long lasting foundation based on the conformation of an activated network of exchange where the archive and research-driven scholarship are privileged.² With the surging conception of the archive as a political body—a notion that was first enunciated by Jacques Derrida in the mid-1990s—the map of contemporary art entered into its present period of permanent re-drawing and expansion through de-hierarchized (or unconstrained) modes of inquiry. As Derrida wrote in the paradigmatic text "Archive Fever" of 1995: "the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of […] memory. There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside."³ In stressing their irrevocable connection to actuality—to the outside—Derrida highlighted the potential of archives as sites of agency for underrepresented groups, including Latin America and its Latino Diaspora in the United States. His fundamental premise was, therefore, a timely decree for us. And his mantra—"there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory"—a call to arms. As he stressed: "Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation."⁴ Derrida understood the archive as a compounded body where place, documents, and (historical) authority converged. Certainly, as has been argued, his tripartite conception (taken from the Greek conception of arkhē) transcended any physical limits; embodying the characteristics of "a metaphor capacious enough to encompass the whole of modern information technology, its storage, retrieval and communication."⁵

In the activated phase of discursive production that is well under way, the archive and the direct engagement with contemporary artists via interviews and oral histories further propel the Latin American and Latino art fields of inquiry into larger orbits of existence, and onto paths of research and amplified knowledge. Even though disciplinary boundaries are closely watched (if not always maintained), shifts in scholarship are oftentimes finding these fields as the two sides of the same Janus-faced construct. In the context of North American academia, we ask: Is it problematic then, to locate the established field of Latin American art in a parallel trajectory to the emergent Latino art history despite evident convergences in geographic source of study and producers? Are these types of categorizations and taxonomies still valid under a new global call for expanded modernisms? Moreover, how do we consider the more fluid identities of artists who hail from Latin America but whose stage is in fact not only Latin America, or the United States, but the world?

At times intersecting, the fields of Latin American and Latino art have been the focus of attention even well before they were constituted, in the 1940s and in the 1970s respectively, within North American academia.⁶ Of course, their contours have touched and significantly overlapped as the result of inevitable global processes of migration, transnational circulation, and changing configurations in the expanding new geographies of contemporary art history. A deeper engagement with the constitutive elements, notions, and conditions for these fields have finally began to take a more definite shape. Thanks, in large part, to an international imperative demanding control over the archive—both in its construction as well as in its enunciation—and the resulting material growth of new means for writing art history at the local, regional, and global levels. In both the U.S. and internationally, self-endowed departments of Latin American art and Latino curatorial positions at museums, professorships and lectureships at universities, and the philanthropic role of foundations have been [End Page 3] instrumental in establishing the museum/university...