Veteranas and Rucas: Guadalupe Rosales’s Chicanx Archive

Founded and maintained by visual artist Guadalupe Rosales, Veteranas and Rucas (@veteranas_and_rucas) is an ambitious digital Instagram archive that is at once an activist project and art object. Veteranas and Rucas began as a virtual space for Rosales to share her collection of photographs from her life in East Los Angeles during the 1990s, but has morphed into a huge crowdsourced space where fans of her Instagram account can submit personal photographs of their lives in Southern California. As an archive, Veteranas and Rucas disrupts colonial archival practices that are exclusionary, racist, and favor Western narratives by bringing marginalized bodies to fore. The digital archive both increases Chicanx visibility outside of the Los Angeles Chicanx context and celebrates Chicanx culture with the account’s more than 200,000 followers. Images are collected and annotated by Rosales and the Chicanx community; this is as an act of cultural affirmation and reclamation that returns agency to the subjects displayed in the photographs. Such a practice is an activist archival intervention that sets the terms for how Chicanx history is told and remembered. As a growing, community-driven receptacle for Chicanx memory, history, and knowledge, Veteranas and Rucas relies on communal nostalgia to temporally disrupt socio-economic “progress,” marked by the building of freeways and gentrification, which has displaced, dispersed, and erased Chicanx communities in Los Angeles. This is because nostalgia has the power to arrest time and bring previously or momentarily forgotten times and spaces to the fore.