"Tatiana Reinoza examines how geography, immigration, and art all converged as deepening interests for Latinx graphic artists, specifically those working in different forms of printmaking. By highlighting the work of four artists, based out of four distinct studios in East LA, Tempe, Austin, and East Harlem, she is able to uncover how their work these past three decades has transcended the more defined lines of scholarship that focus on specific ethnic groups (Chicano, Puerto Rican, etc.). She makes a case for how spatial projects allow for a more collective critique of anti-immigrant discourse, visualize immigrant lives, and articulate the ways in which printmaking has been historically complicit in the colonizing of the Americas"--
2023 Outstanding Book Award , National Association for Ethnic Studies
Finalist — 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association
2024 Winner — Best Arts Book, Empowering Latino Futures’ International Latino Book Awards
How Latinx artists around the US adopted the medium of printmaking to reclaim the lands of the Americas.
Printmakers have conspired, historically, to illustrate the maps created by European colonizers that were used to chart and claim their expanding territories. Over the last three decades, Latinx artists and print studios have reclaimed this printed art form for their own spatial discourse. This book examines the limited editions produced at four art studios around the US that span everything from sly critiques of Manifest Destiny to printed portraits of Dreamers in Texas.
Reclaiming the Americas is the visual history of Latinx printmaking in the US. Tatiana Reinoza employs a pan-ethnic comparative model for this interdisciplinary study of graphic art, drawing on art history, Latinx studies, and geography in her discussions. The book contests printmaking’s historical complicity in the logics of colonization and restores the art form and the lands it once illustrated to the Indigenous, migrant, mestiza/o, and Afro-descendant people of the Americas.
How Latinx artists around the US adopted the medium of printmaking to reclaim the lands of the Americas.