Chicana political visionaries : a review of political art, cultural resistance and Chicana aesthetics

This paper presents a literature review on Chicana artists throughout history. It is an effort to situate Chicana artists as political visionaries, capable of conveying new visions for the future in their strategic disruption of the distribution of the sensible.
Chicana art has been widely studied in the past two decades as a body of work that is both based in cultural formation, spirituality and a feminist critique of the Chicano Movement from 1968-1975. In this review of the literature, I will explore Chicana art in its role as political inspiration and a mapping of resistance to white elite power structures. Therefore, my focus in this work will be to analyze resistance and visual art, as well as the relationship between Chicanas and visual art. In this sample, I will canvas some of the work written on the historical processes that shaped Chicana/o identity, the Chicano/a movement and the early Chicana critique of that movement. This will simultaneously incorporate references to the artistic expression of the movement that has continued to shape cultural and political production in the Mexican American and affiliated academic communities for the last forty years.