An Art for Both My Peoples: Visual Cultures of Black and Brown Unity Available to Purchase

This chapter traces how the circulation of intercultural images spoke to the changing demographics of Los Angeles between 1992 and 2008, producing new relationships and voicing new ideas about the seemingly discrete and separate categories of Mexican and Black. During this time, visual artists created alternatives to the idea of an inevitable antagonism between Black and Brown. Via murals and photographs, in both museum and street settings, artists developed allegorical imagery to demonstrate historic commonalities, interpersonal collaborations, and political possibilities. Attempts to find a visual commonality between ethnic Mexican and Black North Americans during the 1990s and early 2000s took place amid an upsurge of activity by people of African descent in Mexico. Photography became a key element of a new political subjectivity and became part of the broader depiction of connections between ethnic Mexican and Black people.