El pueblo chicano con el pueblo centroamericano [The Chicano People with the Central American People]

Many Chicanx artists draw from the rich visual reservoir of Mexico and Central American countries as a way of negotiating their lives and artistic practice in the United States and maintaining a link to their ancestral and community heritage. Yreina Cervántez’s print features well-known figures and motifs: Augusto César Sandino, Che Guevara, Quetzalcoatl, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Indigenous people. Cervántez transforms these visual icons, lending them new meanings in the context of the struggle for social justice that took place in Central America during the 1980s. What seems at first like a dense collage reveals a clever logic: the viewer is positioned as if inside a car, looking out at a series of Chicanx murals painted along the freeway in support of the Nicaraguan Sandinista rebels fighting Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorial regime.