We Are Our Future Ancestors: Exploring Speculative Histories and Futures

Chicago’s Mexican, Mexican American, and Latinx youth and women are nearly absent from the archives, and—not coincidentally—Latinx women are underrepresented in leadership positions in the cultural institutions that could turn the tides. Rather than waiting for institutions to change on their own, artists, independent scholars, and community cultural workers must engage in collecting, preserving, recovering, and generating our own archives. This presentation will look at two approaches:

1) Fighting as Form: an overview of the work of transnational lesbian artist, activist, photojournalist, and documentary photographer Diana Solis. Primarily photographing between 1970–90, her pictures present a rich and previously unseen view of Mexican life in Chicago. She documented feminist organizing and community building in the United States and Mexico, including the formative years of Mujeres Latinas en Accion, Latino Youth, Chicago Pride, and Encuentro Femenil.

2) Future Communities: How do young people understand themselves in context or imagine their ideas and cultural production relative to that of people who came before them when this history is largely absent? How do they know what comes next when they do not know what happened in the past? Young artists were asked to envision radical histories and imagine speculative futures using collage, performances, and public interventions. What opportunities arise when we regard the community as our text and people as our archive?