Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the construction of identity, place, and politics as articulated through murals produced by Zapotec artists in Los Angeles, CA as a way of understanding intersecting histories of Indigenous migration, urban displacement, interracial community formation, and hip-hop culture.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, and visual and cultural analysis, this paper examines the construction of identity, place, and politics as articulated through murals produced by Zapotec artists in Los Angeles, CA. This talk uses Arjun Appadurai's notion of "migrant archives" to show how both the content and location of the murals speak to the intersecting histories of Indigenous migration, urban displacement, interracial community formation, and hip-hop culture. Using these artistic interventions as an entry point, this paper hopes to add to how we think about transnational migration, relational racial formation, and cultural production by decentering the economy and state and centering young artists as makers of space, place, and collective identities.

If young people are present in social science research on transnational migration between the U.S. and Mexico at all, they are often framed as being responsible for "negative social remittances" such as pathological, anti-social behavior learned in U.S. inner-cities. This paper pushes back against these criminalizing tropes of Mexican youth and U.S. minority-majority cities by reframing them as cultural producers and sites of cultural exchange and mutual recognition, respectively. This paper asks, how do murals change how people experience and interact with urban space? Can murals foster mutual recognition across social difference? Does the cooptation of street art and murals by corporate advertisers dampen the impact of community murals for passersby? How are murals received across generation and racial/ethnic difference?