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A few awkward questions @ ‘Latino cotidiano’ show

By hola | Published April 12, 2013 | 2 Comments

Spanish government’s photo show inspires a diversity of opinions

Photo by Gihan Tubbeh courtesy of the Spanish embassy. All rights reserved.

Last week the Spanish embassy opened a new photography exhibition that aims to reframe society’s portrait of the U.S. Hispanic world.

Curator Claudi Carreras says he didn’t set out to capture the full spectrum of experience since that would be impossible. Rather, he sought to deploy “the visual force” of photography to challenge certain stereotypes: Latino, as construction worker, maid, devout Christian, for instance.

“It’s the vision of 12 photographers who are reformulating the image of the Latino,” he says, “—that the Latin world is not that simple.”

Views range from Southwestern cowfolk to a Florida telenovela star and lots of other urban sophisticates. But the show, titled “Latino/US Cotidiano,” covers geography of the mental variety, as well. A series by Katrina Marcelle d’Autremont has the intimacy of a personal travel log. There’s also the camp of Dulce Pinzón immigrants-as-superheros series featured at the Art Museum of the Americas last year.

by Karen Miranda courtesy of the Spanish embassy. All rights reserved.

The travelling show opened April 4 at the Residence of the Former Ambassadors of Spain on 16th St. Northwest and again in Los Angeles last Sunday. It goes to Miami later this year, says Guillermo Corral Van Damme, the Spanish Embassy’s cultural counselor.

Corral, who came up with the idea of the exhibition, and Carreras, a prominent Spanish curator based in Brazil, say they aren’t trying to draw conclusions or make definitive statements about the ambiguous and often contentious topic of Latino identity.

Given Spain’s painful history with the New World, however, the exhibition has prompted a few awkward questions about motives and whether the Spanish government is an appropriate sponsor of a major exhibition about Latinos.

Ranald Woodaman, director of exhibitions and public programs at the Latino Smithsonian Center, called the show “problematic” after a April 3 event to launch the companion photo book.

Photo by Sol Aramendi courtesy of the Spanish embassy. All rights reserved.

“In the United States, Latino artists have been working across media and languages documenting, questioning and reinterpreting their communities’ histories and images for decades,” Woodaman wrote in a follow up email to Hola Cultura. But he also suggested the exhibition could prompt more “cultural dialogues” and lead to better understanding among “Spanish, Latin American and Latino artists.”

There are more than 50 million people of Hispanic descent living in the United States, the country’s largest and fastest growing minority group with an estimated $1 trillion in collective purchasing power annually. Among those counted as Hispanic by the U.S. Census Bureau are people of Spanish descent, though the question of whether Spaniards are Latinos is more complicated.

“The Spanish feel like part of this great community,” Corral says. “This exhibition offers a perspective of Latinos seen by Latinos.”

“At the end of the day, cultures are derived from their base, from their language and their culture,” he says, “and the base (of the Latino identity) is Spanish.”

For others, however, language is just one of the essential ingredients in latinidad.

“Beyond language, it’s about origin and a relationship with the state that’s been about oppression and a fight for equal rights,” says Angharad N. Valdivia, a professor at the University of Illinois. “Within the U.S. Latino community there’s a fairly strong feeling that the Spanish are the colonizing power.”

Even though the conquest of Latin American took place half a millennia ago and Spain’s colonial power waned in the 18th century, it’s a legacy that, for many, remains intertwined with the region’s entrenched social problems such as corruption, discrimination and weak rule of law.

But just like the diversity of ancestries, dialects and sazones that fit inside Latinez (to channel Quique Avilés), there are plenty of opinions too.

Felix Sanchez, who took on the Kennedy Center Honors program over its lack of diversity last year, says he’s been encouraged by official Spanish efforts to reach out to its worldwide Diaspora.

“We are the fruit of their world, like it our not,” says Sanchez, the chairman for the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts. And while, he says, the memory of the Spanish Conquest of Latin America “doesn’t quite go away that easily, Spain and the Crown have worked very hard to embrace the community wherever they find it.”

“This is a positive moment,” Sanchez says. “It’s a celebration of its cultural Diaspora.”

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LATINO/US Cotidiano exhibition and photobook includes the following artists Carlos Alvárez Montero, Sol Aramendi, Katrina Marcelle d’Autremont, Calé, Ricardo Cases, Livia Corona, Héctor Mata, Karen Miranda, Dulce Pinzón, Susana Raab, Stefan Ruiz, and Gihan Tubbeh.

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