The Travels of Chicana Photography: Nancy de los Santos's Disruptive Visualities

Chicana film producer Nancy de los Santos (Selena, Bronze Screen) has been a steady if relatively under-acknowledged presence in the world of Latina/o cinema since the 1990s. What is not generally known is that she began life... [ view full abstract ]

Chicana film producer Nancy de los Santos (Selena, Bronze Screen) has been a steady if relatively under-acknowledged presence in the world of Latina/o cinema since the 1990s. What is not generally known is that she began life as a photographer. In hundreds of stirring and aesthetically sophisticated photographs taken over the course of the 1970s, De los Santos documented the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements in Chicago, farmworker struggles and student strikes in Texas, and the first ever International Women’s Conference in Mexico City (1975). She also made a series of short films (from a moody modern-day Llorona narrative short, to an impressionistic documentary on the community-building labors of Latinas in Chicago) that together present a unique—Chicana feminist—visual language. De los Santos’s oeuvre, along with that of other largely unrecognized Chicana photographers (like Cynd Honesto, Anna Nieto Gomez, Maria Varela) suggests that photography was a key medium through which Chicanas articulated a feminist perspective on history, culture, and community in the 1970s. Though less celebrated than their male counterparts, Chicana photographers shared their particular vision of movement politics in a wide array of visual formats including slideshows, photoessays, posters, and hundreds of photographs that appeared, mostly uncredited, in movement newspapers. In this paper I will offer the first critical examination of Nancy de los Santos’s photography and short films of the 1970s and 1980s. My analysis will center on how these multi-media works deploy disruptive Chicana visualities and ironic narrative strategies to illuminate the gendered contradictions of the Chicano movement even as they document key events and figures of the period. I will also discuss how her narrative optic disrupts conventional understandings of Chicano photography and film aesthetics in the movement years.

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