Sometimes, there are many ideas packed into in a name.

An example of this is the Museum of Anthropology at UBC’s newest show, Xicanx: Dreamers + Changemakers / Soñadores + creadores del cambio.

For the uninitiated, Xicanx is a gender-neutral, intersectional, and anticolonial term for people of Latin American ancestry in the United States. It emerged in the 2010s as a more inclusive descriptor than Chicano or Chicana, which refer to men and women of Mexican ancestry in the United States who proudly embrace their heritage.

The cocurator of the exhibition, Greta de León, tells the Straight over Zoom from Lisbon, Portugal, that the Chicano movement was deeply involved in the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s. It rejected cultural assimilation into the dominant white culture, often relying on art to promote ideas to the community.

“When you think about the civil-rights movement in United States history, you think about the African Americans and the Black movement, which I think is incredibly relevant and important,” de Léon says. “But there have been other movements as well that have created this democracy—tapestry—of a country. So I think it’s important to recognize those stories.”

Exhibition cocurator Jill Baird is the MOA’s curator of education. The show includes works of 33 Xicanx artists offering a range of perspectives from the traditional to the revolutionary.

When the Straight asks de Léon if there’s a Xicanx version of painter Frida Kahlo, she pauses for a moment before replying, “Judy Baca”.

A Los Angeles–based muralist, painter, monument builder, and scholar, Baca has centred her practice around giving a voice to the marginalized.

One of her works in the exhibition, Tres Marias, shows her dressed up as a pachuca or chola (a young woman belonging to Mexican-American urban subculture), puffing on a Marlboro.

“It’s part of a series of photographs of her kind of embodying this character—this very, very strong woman,” de Léon says. “That’s a really nice piece.”

Another artist featured in the exhibition is Alfred J. Quiroz, whose Muneefist Destiny depicts American expansionism through the eyes of the colonizers. It shows a map of the United States festooned with messages and images reflecting the widely held 19th-century belief in America that the country would encompass much of the continent.

It began with the Louisiana Purchase, doubling U.S. territory in 1803. Next, Spanish Florida came under U.S. control in 1819. Texas was annexed in 1845, and three years later, all or parts of California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming joined the U.S. in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. That followed a war with Mexico.

But the art in this exhibition does not only focus on the past. It also features Roberto Jose Gonzalez’s No Hate No Fear, which depicts a series of skeletons.

“He did this after the huge [2019] massacre in the Walmart in El Paso,” de Léon states. “And the killer just basically said, ‘I’m interested in killing all these Mexicans.’ ”

According to de Léon, the community embraced many artforms in the 1960s and 1970s. These included printmaking using wood blocks or linoleum in a “very Mexican style”.

Revolutionary posada paintings were also popular, she adds, because they could be distributed as flyers. Then there was the street art, including large murals, as well as music and theatre, which were all deployed to highlight inequality and promote change.

In this regard, these activists were relying on some of the same techniques used to galvanize support for the Mexican Revolution much earlier in the 20th century.

“Visual art and music was really the key to spread the word,” de Léon says.

She points out that at that time, some Xicanx only spoke Spanish, whereas others spoke English. Art crossed language barriers, mobilizing the community, whether it was for farmworkers’ rights or for voter registration.

“I think art has been very, very underestimated in politics in general in the States,” de Léon says.

De Léon notes that John F. Kennedy was the first U.S. presidential candidate to conduct serious outreach, with his team campaigning in the community in Spanish. His brother, Robert F. Kennedy, took it to a new level when he was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. His campaign relied on art as part of its goal of winning over Mexican Americans. RFK ultimately won the California Democratic Party primary before being gunned down later that night.

The other part of the MOA’s title, “Dreamers + Changemakers”, pays homage to artists’ role in advancing the community’s interests. The Dreamers are those who arrived in the United States as children and who received deferrals from deportation from former U.S. president Barack Obama under the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. In 2014, Obama expanded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to cover undocumented immigrants in 2014.

However, his successor, Donald Trump, rescinded that. That meant hundreds of thousands of young adults would become eligible for deportation. Many of them campaigned for the Democratic Party in the 2020 elections, again using art as part of their outreach. More recently, President Joe Biden has directed federal agencies to “preserve and fortify” DACA.

De Léon is also executive director of the Americas Research Network, an alliance of universities and museums founded by the Smithsonian Institution to promote more collaboration in the humanities. Xicanx: Dreamers + Changemakers / Soñadores + creadores del cambio was developed in that spirit.

“The whole idea is to create projects and initiatives to distribute knowledge and get to know each other,” de Léon says.