A Fruitful Future
Cover of Intervenxions Vol. 3. Juana Valdés. Redbone Colored China Rags, 2017. Bone china. Photograph by Zachary Balber.
The following essay originally appeared in Intervenxions Vol. 3. Learn more here.
10,000—that’s how many media jobs could disappear in 2024. Writers in journalism and criticism are living through ever-increasing precarity, as established media companies lay off hundreds of people. To protect their rights and livelihoods, many media workers have begun to pursue unionization. As one former Los Angeles Times reporter said, the layoffs at the California publication “decimated” a large contingent of unionized workers belonging to underrepresented groups.
Whether these dismissals are punitive or not, workers, especially from minoritized backgrounds, feel the reverberations of a rapidly changing field. And so do the audiences who hope to see their stories reflected in the mainstream media. Without these crucial voices, we will likely see a decrease in content about us, especially coverage that reflects our full humanity. While it’s not necessary to belong to a community to write about it effectively, there’s a certain care that writers from these groups hold. They understand what is at stake.
We can take this specific moment in time as an example. As Palestinian scholars, poets, and journalists in Gaza bravely document the ongoing genocide at the hands of Israel, propped up by U.S. funding, we recognize the value of their work and the risks they face. The multimedia work of authors like Mohammed el-Kurd, Bisan Owda, and Refaat Alareer, for example, informs a global public about the true nature of the devastation and highlights the power imbalance. This is in contrast to the U.S. media. As The Intercept reports, outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post presented a one-sided view in favor of Israel. Media is key to expanding worldviews and plays a role in providing more complex representations of our collective societies.
Beyond uplifting outlooks that get buried, ensuring a plurality of voices in writing creates value, including deserved recognition, documentation, and additions to the archive for future research and scholars. Without them, we cannot inform the broader populace about the riches of Latinx art, culture, and history.
At Intervenxions, we pay special attention to the gaps and try to fill in those spaces. The work we do is possible because of organizations like the Henry Luce Foundation, which supports our printed volume, as well as Ford Foundation, Critical Minded, and the Mellon Foundation, which allow us to pay our contributors at this crucial moment of disinvestment. And we also wouldn’t be able to make an impact without our collaborators, to whom we are deeply grateful for their perspectives. They deliver thought-provoking art criticism and coverage of disregarded moments in history.
To properly document our communities and elevate the discourse surrounding art, culture, and politics takes a collective effort. We know we aren’t alone in this sometimes seemingly endless expanse. We are honored to be able to build on the historical legacy of alternative media outlets, grassroots journalism, and social activism that peaked during the Civil Rights era and is now more necessary than ever. And as people unionize, organize, and build new grassroots models, we look forward to seeing what’s possible.
This volume is our latest entry point to continue these conversations. Within these pages, you will find stories that frame history through the viewpoints of those left by the wayside by hegemonic narratives, that tap into people power, and showcase the value of our contributions.
That is why we designated Juana Valdés’s work on the cover. In her 30-year career, the influential Cuban artist has had one comprehensive solo museum exhibition. Unfortunately, there is no accompanying catalog, despite the gravity of her work. In our age of neoliberal austerity, institutions are often unable to produce exhibition catalogs although they are important for posterity, serving as crucial testimonial. Our goal is to rectify the institutional omissions and acknowledge artists while they are alive, recognizing their inherent value because they deserve to get—and collect—their flowers.
Ephemera
Often disregarded and undervalued, ephemera—essentially, fragments—can illuminate hidden details that bring nuance to the past. Particles we amass over time, ephemera can reveal more about us and how we engage with the world around us than official ledgers or documentation. Ephemera captures the margins or what one might otherwise consider tangential to the main affair. It is precisely this off-center viewpoint that allows us to render our memories in detail and share them with others, materializing embodiment and lived experience piece by piece.
The work of Amalia Mesa-Bains reminds us that the everyday items we gather over time tell profound stories about our multifaceted identities. The objects in the vanity (which to a non-discerning eye, might seem like clutter) remind us of the detritus of daily life, or the accumulation of objects that are meaningful carriers of time, place, culture, and family. Opulence and ornamentation are not just decorative, but rather, informative—generating a specific Domesticana perspective that reflects the gendered work of memory keepers in familial structures.
Familial structures can also coalesce around shared communal architectures and public space and we can look toward casitas as an example. They are also ephemeral, in that many no longer exist, decimated by the velocity of urban planning, real estate, and other violent opportunistic interests. Instead, casitas are vestiges of a specific moment in time, representing horizontal, community-driven efforts to reclaim space for the greater public good. The documentation of these spontaneous, grassroots, often temporary structures serves as a testament to the tenacity of Puerto Ricans in New York City across decades.
Documentary itself can serve as an ephemeral archive, and that is certainly the case for ¡Fenomenal! which captured the spirit and radical creative expression that emerged from the Rompeforma festival. Gathering multidisciplinary artists in Puerto Rico during a pivotal moment in the late 20th century, Rompeforma was a fleeting, collaborative, experimental project that imagined an artistic ecosystem rid of elitism and convention. Instead, through material preserved through dedicated video footage, Rompeforma has inspired countless artists for generations to come.
Finally, we return once again to New York City, where a sonic, aesthetic movement has unified and mobilized a Venezuelan diasporic community. Through the percussive grounding of Afro-Venezuelan sounds, Tambor y Caña creates spaces of gathering, where brief, passing moments (like concerts, events, and other get-togethers) connect people to one another, leaving room for the complexities of experience and strengthening diasporic bonds. Highlighting undervalued histories of instrumentation, this sonic movement is an active practice in cultural continuity over time.
Truth
They say history comes from the perspectives of winners, essentially those who hold all the power. However, their narratives have little regard for the people most affected, those who do not fall within the patriarchal, Eurocentric, and hegemonic frameworks that prop up capitalism and colonialism.
As a result, our stories—told from our points of view—are barely footnotes in history books, thereby minimizing the extent of violence and oppression caused by the powers that be.
History can be ugly. And only with a full picture of what happened can we avoid repeating these dark moments. Only with all the viewpoints can we understand who we are in the present. In this section, we present an alternate framing—one that goes directly against the established status quo—to discuss our truths.
We start in Puerto Rico, an island continuously ravaged by colonialism. As the rich attempt to price out and displace the people of Puerto Rico, we see an echo of another group’s fight for home. As U.S.-backed Israel wreaks havoc in Palestine, it attempts to rewrite history. It also provides a model that other nefarious entities can emulate in Puerto Rico and beyond.
In the name of Empire, there are no limits. Nuevomexicanos know this better than most. In the 1940s, as the United States created and tested its nuclear weapons, it forcefully evicted people from their homes. Some didn’t experience displacement, but their lives were still upended. Since then, the government hasn’t properly rectified the violence it enacted on innocent bystanders, even as they and their families still feel the effects today.
But while governments like the U.S. can inflict horrors on communities and other countries without punishment, it pushes the idea that the carceral system is the only solution to crime. As these institutions become towering figures in our backyards, they shape the neighborhoods in which they exist. In Chicago, Cook County Jail was an inescapable force in Little Village—one that artist Maria Gaspar started thinking about critically in childhood. When one part came down, it allowed her to envision new realities.
The tearing down of Cook County Jail proves that just because something is a certain way doesn’t mean it needs to remain that way in the future. Just because we have set borders or identifiers doesn’t mean these are the best options for us. Alan Pelaez Lopez’s anthology, When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent, is an exploration of Black Latinidades without the explicitness of borders, eesisting falling into identity traps.
Together, these four stories prove their truths don’t have to be our truths.
Flight
The phoenix sets itself on fire and a new phoenix takes flight from the ashes. Much like this mythical creature, we, too, can move toward rebirth and first flight. It is the work of artists, writers, and other cultural practitioners to assess the documents of our collective present, reconfigure them, or otherwise distill them into new languages and forms, preparing for the inevitable departure of said document as it makes its way into the world. This is a radical gesture of careful remixing and experimentation that takes something at face value, flips it, and amplifies all the reverberations of that action, generating new life from the ashes.
Embodying this ethos, we can look toward a community model like Self Help Graphics, which has served the needs of artists in and outside Los Angeles for over half a century. This influential printmaking studio and community arts organization has championed the work of under-recognized artists who are not celebrated in the mainstream art world and galvanized the radical spirit of a collaborative artistic community. Following a just model that prioritizes the needs and contributions of artists, Self Help Graphics tries to build parameters for equity in a vastly inequitable field.
It’s not just the art world; publishing could also benefit from new frameworks. Imagine an expansive world in which creative producers in the comic book industry are diverse and encompass those who the industry has historically excluded from editorial decision-making, despite massively shaping the industry through their contributions in illustration, coloring, or story development. Giving diverse creators recognition for their efforts as well as trusting their visions ensures a more robust, authentic, and interesting future for Latinx comics.
But we don’t need to wait for permission to reach new heights. The work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons is proof of that. The artist imagines radical possibilities for selfhood and self-determination, prioritizing creative experimentation as well as truthful expression related to spiritual belief. Working across photography, drawing, video, and installation, Campos-Pons illuminates linkages between temporal zones, bridging past and future, while pointing to important familial lineages, how they intersect with historical moments, and how they manifest pictorially, serving as markers for “transnational and transgenerational Black women’s survival.”
Returning once again to another foundational artist who similarly echoes Campos Pons’s celebration of transnational Black women’s survival, Juana Valdés graces the cover of this volume as well as this final section. For over 30 years, the artist has challenged the pervasive whiteness of the art historical canon, pointing to other transnational flows and hidden histories. Her works rewrite these glaring omissions using the language of minimalism, undermining the imposed authority and validity of the white male artists that usually fall within that genre. Despite these radical artistic gestures, Valdés is an artist who still deserves further study. We feel honored to feature her most recent solo exhibition and hope that others will pick up those in the future.