In this special episode of the MUSED: LA 2 HOU podcast, host and producer Melissa Richardson Banks interviews photographer Luis C. Garza with Charlene Villaseñor Black, Ph.D. who is Chair and Professor of Art History in UCLA's César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, the editor of "Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies" and the founding editor-in-chief of "Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture" (LALVC, UC Press). She publishes topics related to Chicanx studies, contemporary Latinx art, and the early modern Iberian world. 

What is decolonial love? Villaseñor Black shares that "decolonial love is a love for community and for ourselves that breaks free from coloniality, that is, the ways in which European social order, racial hierarchies, and imposed ways of knowing live on and structure our world today."

Villaseñor Black states that "decolonial love manifested in Garza’s photographs and, indeed, in the work of other Chicana/o/x artists and cultural workers from the beginning of the movement to the present day. By documenting the Mexican American experience of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Garza’s images fought against biased media representation and oppressive policing tactics. By presenting the truth of the Chicano experience and by his dignified representations of our community, Garza’s photographs articulated decolonial love as they helped us visualize more just futures. This commitment to future action is central to activism and activist art."

Some of Garza's most famous photographs documented activism during the Chicano movement. However, for the exhibition, curator Armando Durón strategically paired Garza’s photographs to encourage viewers to make new connections with his more well-known images. While his couplings were often formal in nature, they fostered comparisons across differing subject matter. Scenes of protests, taking place in various locales -- from Los Angeles to New York to Uzbekistan and Budapest -- made clear the global nature of political unrest in the early 1970s

While the interview was recorded on January 21, 2023, it is a timeless conversation about Garza and the images that he took while documenting the Chicano civil rights movement, the World Peace Conference in Hungary, and the women’s movement in New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

"The Other Side of Memory: Photographs by Luis C. Garza" is now touring nationally:

• Loveland Museum, Colorado Jun 22–Sep 1, 2024
• Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts at College of the Desert, Apr–May 3, 2023
• Riverside Art Museum, Oct 22, 2022–Mar 19, 2023

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Check out more in-depth articles, stories, and photographs by Melissa Richardson Banks at www.melissarichardsonbanks.com. Learn more about CauseConnect at www.causeconnect.net.

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