Historiographers of the Invisible and Guerrilla Memorials in L.A.

This paper examines the Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History, a semi- fictionalized historical society and guerrilla art collective in Los Angeles that was founded by Chicana artist Sandra de la Loza in 2002.... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines the Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History, a semi- fictionalized historical society and guerrilla art collective in Los Angeles that was founded by Chicana artist Sandra de la Loza in 2002. The Research Society’s work combines literary production, conceptualist visual art, practices of memorialization, and site-specific urban interventions, appearing not only in books and museums, but also throughout the urban landscape of Los Angeles. I suggest that theirs is a paradisciplinary art practice, insofar as it not only moves between multiple arts disciplines, but also passes beyond both the disciplinary limits and generic forms traditionally assigned to art and the aesthetic. Namely, this is the seen in the way the Research Society grapples with research questions pertaining to historiography taken up by postcolonial scholars today.

In this paper I argue that the Research Society’s artistic-literary work throws light on the systemic invisibilization of working class Latina/os in dominant histories and cultural imaginaries of Los Angeles, while also making visible the way these subjects are placed and displaced in the city. The histories the Research Society commemorates are “invisible” because they pertain to pasts excluded from hegemonic representations of Los Angeles and the U.S. Southwest, and because they pertain to subjects whose worldviews, practices, and places in the city are continually under erasure. In their work and in my analysis, invisibility and erasure are not only conditions of representation; these concepts also index territorial displacement, material destruction, and the epistemic violence of imperialism. I argue that the Research Society evinces both constructivist and deconstructionist tendencies in their creation of ephemeral, poetic, unofficial monuments to Los Angeles’s invisible subjects and erased pasts. Through my analysis of their practice of guerrilla memorialization I theorize a rasquache historiographic practice. Building on the concept of rasquachismo as it has been theorized by Chicano/a thinkers, I suggest that the Research Society’s rasquache historiography challenges social relations of intellectual production and critiques universalist ideologies via its alignment with subaltern particularities. Ultimately this allows for more capacious imaginings of subaltern commonalities and resistant collectivities that are not contingent upon identification with a singularized identity.

This paper gives particular attention to the Research Society’s project Echoes in the Echo (2006-2007), a series of counter-historical plaques that featured prose and poetry by queer Chicano/a Angelenos. These were installed at the former sites of bars and nightclubs that were previously frequented by queer working class Latina/os, but that have since been shuttered on account of the gentrification of downtown Los Angeles and Echo Park. Through my close readings of the texts appearing on the Research Society’s plaques, I argue that their sensorial language and erotic evocations are inextricably tied up with their cultural politics. These texts underscore a common vulnerability to capital that cuts across otherwise compartmentalized practices and identities of the working class neighborhood and ultimately broaden the possibilities of who and what should be defended.