Wide view of UMMA’s Irving Stenn Jr. Family Gallery, host of the La Raza Art and Media Collective, 1975 to Today exhibit. Photo by Elizabeth Smith.
La Raza Art and Media Collective, 1975 to Today, a new exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), highlights creative Latinx students and faculty who have influenced the campus for decades but whose presence is too often overlooked.
The La Raza Arts and Media Collective (RAMC) was a student group from 1975 to 1977, formed by Ana Cardona, Michael J. Garcia, Jesse Gonzales, Julio Perazza, George Vargas, S. Zaneta Kosiba Vargas, and Zaragosa Vargas. RAMC organized cultural gatherings and art exhibits, and between 1976-1977, the group also produced a journal of Latinx essays, poetry, and art.
RAMC grew out of the late ’60s Latinx political movement. Allied with other student groups, RAMC advocated for Latinx and Chicanx students, combating discrimination and stereotypes while building community. But as La Raza members started to move on from college, the group disbanded and became memory-holed to a certain degree even as other Latinx groups emerged.
“I think being a Latino student organization at a primarily white institution [presents] visibility challenges and the sense of community,” said Victoria Vezaldenos, a California native and co-president of the Latine graduate student group Puentes. “I think that depends on where your academic home is; some departments have more racial diversity than others. That is why Puentes was founded.”
U-M has 51,225 students this school year according to the university, and about 9.1% are Hispanic or Latino/Latina, in a state that is 6%.
“We’ve only been around since 2019, and I think that shows the absence of these spaces until it was created very recently,” Vezaldenos said. “Since we’ve established ourselves, we’ve become more aware of the lack of visibility on campus. I think it’s really compelling, and almost a political choice for UMMA to make such a stance. You wouldn’t expect them to make choices to highlight a specific ethnic or cultural history so publicly. That is new from my experience.”
“We are an interdisciplinary organization, so this collaboration [with UMMA] means a lot to us in the ways that we can extend the knowledge to all for the community members, and also for those in the arts to see this representation is also really powerful,” said Viviana Velez Negron, a Puerto Rican student and Puentes’ other co-president.
Michelle Inez Hinojosa and an assistant install her work The Ribbons, the Future at UMMA for the La Raza exhibit. Photo by Drew Saunders.
Michelle Inez Hinojosa, a 2023 master of fine arts graduate at U-M, said she was “a little bit aware [of La Raza],” before she arrived from Texas even though she shares a similar philosophy as the group: “I wanted to imbue specifically my work with an understanding of the history of Latino art—and La Raza Art and Media. But I didn’t understand the breadth of their work until I got involved in the show.”
Hinojosa is one of three artists who created new works for the show. Her window installation, The Ribbons, the Future, can be seen from outside UMMA through the glass wall of the Irving Stenn Jr. Family Gallery, where La Raza Art and Media Collective, 1975 to Today is located.
Seen from the inside, The Ribbons, the Future acts like a light catcher, with the blues, greens, pinks, and other colors brightening the room. The series consists of long, transparent film strips that evoke Aztec fiber-art patterns, and Hinojosa said the ribbons represent the intergenerational stories being told in the room, from La Raza to her work to the new generation of U-M students. But since we can see through the ribbons, Hinojosa also wants viewers to look beyond the room and into the future outside.
George Vargas works on his mural at UMMA for the La Raza exhibit. Photo by Drew Saunders.
George Vargas, a scholar of Chicanx art, was deeply involved with La Raza while earning three degrees at U-M; he contributed a mural to the UMMA exhibit. Compared to those in other ethnic groups, the Latinx story of migration to Michigan is less widely discussed, but you can get a good gist of it through Vargas’ work, which tells his family’s migration from Mexico to Michigan: “Azlan del Norte is the title, and it is semi-autobiographical,” Vargas said.
A re-creation of a painting he made years ago, Vargas’ mural represents the cycles of migration between Mexico and the Great Lakes region throughout the ages. The stylized map documents Vargas family’s journey as part of the Great Migration from Texas to the city of Adrian, where he mostly grew up. It also shows the jobs his father had as a sharecropper, then a factory worker. There’s also a child in the middle of the Mitten, representing the future for kids from all backgrounds, surrounded by stylized figures from Latino history and culture. The serpents on either side represent Michigan and Mexico.
George Vargas’ mural for UMMA’s La Raza exhibit. Photo by Christopher Porter.
“The mural super-emphasizes movement and migration, not only of Mexicans, but other indigenous people,” Vargas said. “Even today the migration continues from the people from the south and north, going back and forth, for various reasons.”
U-M Stamps professor Nicole Marroquin is teaching two courses connected to the exhibit: “[The] students are doing research into La Raza Arts and Media Collective and adjacent archival material, and then producing small zines in support of the exhibition,” which are also on display.
Marroquin’s artistic contribution to the exhibit comes through poster prints and wallpapers that incorporate archived images from the Bentley Library archives of former RAMC members to, according to UMMA, “recover and re-present the histories of Black and brown youth and women’s leadership in the struggle for justice.”
The black-and-white wallpaper features 1970s photos, illustrations, and text from various sources, and it’s also used as a wraparound on the display cases showing pages from the magazine. Curator Félix Zamora-Gómez said the wallpaper uses “a combination of materials from [the] La Raza Collective journal, but also from members’ personal archives and what the Bentley had … and also materials from other fellow publications [outside of Ann Arbor] created at the time.”
Nicole Marroquin’s unnamed sculpture at UMMA’s La Raza exhibit. She also created the wallpaper using images from the La Raza archives and other contemporary sources. Photo by Christopher Porter.
Marroquin also created an unnamed sculpture showing a woman’s head with yellow hair, her hands grasping a snake wrapped around her neck. The artist also created three colorful silkscreened posters based on RAMC events; the posters and sculpture are hanging atop the monochrome wallpaper.
Pages from the La Raza journal at UMMA’s exhibition. Photo by Elizabeth Smith.
At the heart of UMMA’s La Raza exhibit are the journals, whose appearance was influenced heavily by a then-newer technology: the photocopy machine. RAMC created original collage art for the journal as well as printing drawings, photos, poetry, prose, commentary, and other works by its members.
Early journal entries published hyperspecific analyses and critiques about life for Latino and Chicano students at the time. But what Zamora-Gómez found interesting is that while this “multicultural and multilingual” self-expression and critique of unfair practices was text-heavy, the journals quickly transitioned into more visual pieces to gain a wider audience.
Zamora-Gómez explained that “by the third or fourth issue, the members of the collective realized that they could have a stronger impact, or the same impact, leaning toward more of a visual aesthetic. The journals were very visual—photocopies, or even letters from other collectives—so you can see a little bit more of an avant-garde approach and the network they were creating at that time.”
The entrance to the La Raza exhibit with art from the group members and their contemporaries. Photo by Christopher Porter.
The hallway leading to the Irving Stenn Jr. Family Gallery has more artwork from RAMC members and artists active around the same time, along with a TV showing a 16mm film created by Julio Perazza and Jesse Gonzales in 1975 showing Latino student life at U-M.
“In the hallway, you’ll find archival material housed in the same [Bentley] archive as the journal, but they’re not part of the journal. They are basically a contextualization of what visitors of the show will see in the gallery … materials created around the same time as the journals by artists and members of the collective [showcasing] what was happening right before and after the journals,” Zamora-Gómez said.
The show’s message is “to really make clear that Chicano and Latino communities were already part of the campus in the ’70s and before,” Zamora-Gómez said. “It’s been associated with the West Coast [but] those communities existed here at the time. … It shows what the U of M looked like back in the ‘70s, how politically active the students were back then, and offers a much more diverse vision of campus than what we, what I, visualize of the times.”
Drew Saunders grew up in Whitmore Lake and fell in love with A2 when he started going for karate lessons downtown at Keith Haffner’s. Studying journalism at Eastern Michigan University, he began freelancing in 2013 with the Ann Arbor Observer, and then so many other publications. He obtained a Master of Science degree in the field from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2019. In addition to writing for Pulp, Saunders specializes in business and environmental journalism.
“La Raza Art and Media Collective, 1975 to Today” runs through July 20 at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, 525 South State Street, Ann Arbor. Visit umma.umich.edu for more info. Attendance at the gallery is free. Guided tours are available every Sunday; sign up here.