THE VISUAL ARTS of LINDA VALLEJO: Indigenous Spirituality, Indigenist Sensibility, and Emplacement
THE VISUAL ARTS OF LINDA VALLEJO: Indigenous Spirituality, Indigenist Sensibility, and Emplacement Karen Mary Davalos Analyzing nearly forty years of art by Linda Vallejo, this article argues that her indigenist sensibility and indigenous spirituality create the aesthetics of disruption and continuity. In turn this entwined aesthetics generates emplacement, a praxis that resists or remedies the injuries of colonialism, patriarchy, and other systems of oppression that displace and disavow indigenous, Mexican, and Chicana/o populations in the Americas. Her visual art fits squarely within the trajectory of Chicana feminist decolonial practice, particularly in its empowerment of indigenous communities, Mexicans, and Chicana/os in the hemisphere. Key Words: Emplacement, hemispheric studies, aesthetic practice, spiritual mestizaje, decolonial imaginary, indigenous epistemology. Born in Los Angeles and raised by three generations of Mexican- heritage women, Linda Vallejo creates an oeuvre that is easy to understand as feminist and indigenist. Ancestral women, including three great-grandmothers, grandmothers, her mother, and several great aunts, were the artist’s first sources of feminist and indigenous knowledge. Vallejo describes one great- grandmother as “una indígena” because she was short, had dark skin, and wore trenzas and huaraches; she was also very strong, even fierce, having worked in the fields as she migrated north (Vallejo 2013).1 The appellation indicates the way in which Vallejo understands knowledge and subjectivity as emerging from material conditions, social forces, and affect, rather than biology. Vallejo is also a world traveler. Because of her father’s military service, she visited “all the major museums of Europe, many of them as a very young girl” (Vallejo 2013).
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