Queer Xicana Indígena cultural production: Remembering through oral and visual storytelling

Abstract

This article traces oral and visual stories of queer Xicana Indigena artists to address colonial forms of epistemic violence or missing memory. Queer Xicana Indigenas enact forms of remembering through their art to regain cultural and ancestral memory and story. Often times, it is through collaboration and ceremony across generations and with sacred elements that the stories are formed and hidden histories are unearthed. This article demonstrates how art and cultural production can be a form of decolonization. By focusing on the vision of transformation of queer Indigenous artists and cultural producers, I demonstrate how they construct decolonized knowledge that simultaneously reconceptualizes the past, present, and future for Xican@s and Latin@s. Significantly, the historical memory constructed by these cultural producers offer critiques of U.S. and transnational systems of domination that are ultimately expressed in their writing, sculptures, films, and spiritual practices. For example, the art analyzed here, particularly Gina Aparicio’s clay sculptures, offers a direct avenue to examine the conflated history of heteropatriarchy, nationalism, and settler colonialism through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the subsequent re-colonizing of the land.

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