Copyright by Ana Isabel Fernández de Alba 2021 The Dissertation Committee for Ana Isabel Fernández de Alba Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: Scales of Seeing: Art, Los Angeles, PST:LA/LA Committee: Laura Gutiérrez, Co-Supervisor Cary Cordova, Co-Supervisor Steven D. Hoelscher George Flaherty Scales of Seeing: Art, Los Angeles, PST:LA/LA by Ana Isabel Fernández de Alba Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2021 Dedication For Juan Pablo and Ema. Acknowledgements This dissertation began as a vague possibility in summer 2017, in Mexico City, when Laura Gutiérrez first mentioned that I should look into Pacific Standard Time:LA/LA—see if I found something there. I was lost and she wanted to help. It ends now, in 2021, with me back in Mexico—in Lagos de Moreno, my hometown—after living in Los Angeles for three years. In the middle, life happened: COVID-19 and a baby girl named Ema came almost in tandem, the former in March and the latter in April 2020. I want to thank everyone that made it possible for me to finish this project. First, Laura Gutiérrez and Cary Cordova, my co-supervisors and mentors. I am incredibly lucky to have met Laura early in my career as a graduate student and, a little afterwards, Cary. Their generosity has kept me on this track, and their teaching, scholarship, and mentorship have been fundamental in sparking my intellectual curiosity. Laura, thank you for giving me a dissertation project, a title, and—long ago—a Visual Cultural Studies reading list that would forever change me. Cary, thank you for taking me under your wing, for your scrupulous and thoughtful feedback, and for your unwavering support. My deepest gratitude goes to both of you for ensuring that I could become a mother while working on this dissertation, during a more than convoluted 2020. Also, your administrative work has made it possible for me to navigate—and overcome—the many academic and bureaucratic challenges that every international student faces in a U.S. institutional setting. UT Austin has been especially worthy because of you. v I also want to thank Steven Hoelscher—for his willingness to hear me, for accommodating my needs in the early stages of this process, and for agreeing to be part of this committee—and George Flaherty, also for serving on this committee and for helping me begin my research in Los Angeles by inviting me to join his class in a visit to the Hammer Museum, upon the launching of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. This visit resulted in my eventual auditing the course “Latin America on Display in LA: From Preparation to Praxis,” taught by Jennifer Josten. Her class opened up a world of possibilities for me, actually becoming my introduction to a world (art, Los Angeles) that was completely unknown to me. Thank you, Jennifer, for making a space for me and for taking the time to listen to what I wanted to do then with this project. To everyone at the American Studies Department at UT Austin, thank you— especially Janet Davis, Randy Lewis, Anneleise Azúa, José Centeno-Meléndez, Nick Bloom, Natalie Zelt, and Violet Cantú. I also want to thank everyone—past and present—at the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Department, especially Karma Chávez, for trusting my project. Julie Minich and C.J. Alvarez, thank you. My sincere thanks also to Luis Guevara, Katy Buchanan, Natasha Saldaña, Alberto Gonzalez, who always worked to make things easier for me and who always made me feel at home in Austin. My thanks to Lalitha Gopalan, for her friendship and bright intellect. My thanks to Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, who prepared me for a doctoral program. vi A former CONACYT fellow, my sincere gratitude goes to the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Conacyt). There would simply be no dissertation without their four-year financial support. A former IUPLR-Mellon Program, my sincere gratitude as well to everyone there, particularly María de los Angeles Torres, for welcoming us (fellows) in Chicago. Jennifer Boles, for taking care of absolutely everything; Albert Laguna, for his humor and insights about the job market; and, most especially, Olga Herrera, whose enthusiasm for my project and constant encouragement pushed me to continue writing. Finally, my cohort: Carlos, Leigh-Anna, Isis, and José Angel, thank you, thank you: for reading rough drafts, writing thoughtful comments, and sending good spirits. I could have not finished this dissertation without the financial and emotional support I received from the whole IUPLR-Mellon Program crew. In Los Angeles, I want to thank everyone who sat with me—or in front of a screen—for this project: Maureen Moore, Cosijoesa Cernas, Darío Canul, David Evans Frantz, Sybil Venegas, Chon Noriega, Armando Durón, Karen Mary Davalos, Idurre Alonso, Carmina Escobar. Their insights about Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA and their personal experiences while collaborating with the Getty were instrumental for this dissertation. I could not have done it without their taking the time to talk with me. I also want to thank Luciano Piazza and Robb Hernández. My gratitude as well to the staff at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, particularly Loni Shibuyama, for allowing me to look into Jack Vargas Papers even when they were still not classified. vii My UT friends have made this dissertation possible by hearing me rant, making me laugh, and assuring me there’s light at the end of the tunnel: Joey Russo, Alejandro Flores, Julie Conquest, Cristóbal Jácome—I love you all dearly. To my Los Angeles friend, book advisor, and neighbor, Scott Weaver—I thank him for all the reading recommendations and for his gallery’s terrace. All my thanks go to Alisha and Mireya for not letting me go insane in the Spring 2020—there are no words to thank you. In Mexico, I thank Tere Sánchez and Ale Arreola, for taking interest in my project when it seemed like I would drop it. Theirs was the last push I needed. Thanks to my mother, for taking care of Ema in these last stages of writing. And for being there, always. Thanks to my parents-in-law for taking care of Ema and for cooking—thank you for wanting to help. My gratitude to my sister-in-law, Gaby, for hosting me in Houston, driving me to the LAN! conference, and coming with me to see a show—Axis Mundo—that I don’t think she would have otherwise seen. Thanks to Jesús, for pushing me—always—to study, to read, to write. Thanks to my dad. And Juan Pablo and Ema, whom I simply do not know how to thank. This dissertation is for them, and it seems like they have written it with me—they’ve heard most words in it (Ema unwillingly, I suppose) and have also felt the struggle that each page has represented. My conversations with Juan Pablo shaped so much of what is here, and his taking care of everything in the past three months have made it possible for me to sit and write. I want to imagine that in thinking together about this dissertation we carved a space for us in Los Angeles. viii Abstract Scales of Seeing: Art, Los Angeles, PST:LA/LA Ana Isabel Fernández de Alba, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2021 Co-Supervisor: Laura Gutiérrez, Cary Cordova Co-Supervisor This dissertation explores the relationship between art, representation, and Los Angeles by way of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA—the 2017 Getty-led arts and culture initiative that explored the artistic relationship between Los Angeles and Latin America. Foregrounding four of its more than seventy art exhibitions, I specifically examine how Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in LA, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano LA, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 unburied stories that are integral to both Los Angeles and Latin America’s past and present. While different in the genres, time periods and artists they featured, these shows shared concerns on migration, identity, the body, and visibility. In doing so, they underscored the under-acknowledged role that marginal artists play in questioning what Los Angeles is, who belongs to it, and how it will continue to be represented. Thus, I particularly engage my case studies as visual narratives that fracture the ways in which the city has come to be imagined by the predominantly white networks of representation, as well as by a racist and sexist art historical canon that has obliterated entire artistic communities. By shedding light on these shows’ contributions—via analyses of their curatorial strategies and close readings of the artworks in display—I document their ix relevance in combating the erasure of memory, which is ultimately the erasure of the city’s so-called minorities. For this, I ground my study in Visual Cultural Studies, Latina/o/x Studies and American Studies, which together broadly comprise feminist theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, museum studies, urban studies, among others. Additionally, my dissertation demonstrates how Latina/o/x and Latin American curators, artists and researchers alike work to find the cracks through which change can percolate in institutional settings closely tied to corporate interests and urban development. Ultimately, my aim in foregrounding these shows as recuperative practices is to illuminate how art—even when staged within the context of contemporary mega- exhibitions and top-down initiatives—demands the creation of a new historiography.