Reclaiming the Americas

Reclaiming the Americas is exactly the book that is needed now as art history, art museums, and interdisciplinary scholarship "discover" Latinx art but rarely engage with the artwork itself, let alone the artists. Tatiana Reinoza turns to Latinx printmaking as a case study for a different approach, one that begins with the artists. In looking closely at artworks that critique the medium’s complicity in colonial and cognitive mapping, Reinoza challenges a simple resistance paradigm. The result is a complex genealogy for Latinx printmaking (and art) that is at once local, regional, national, transnational, and utterly heterogeneous in its affiliations, participants, and practices.

— Chon Noriega, UCLA, co-author of Home—So Different, So Appealing

In this much-anticipated book Reinoza delivers the first art historical study of Latinx printmaking, one of the most significant yet unrecognized mediums in Latinx art. This necessary volume centers printmaking workshops as the key site of Latinx identity-making that they are, while offering a deep analysis of printmakers' aesthetic innovations in American art. This is a foundational study that will inspire  students of art history and cultural studies across the Americas.

— Arlene Dávila, NYU, author of Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics

In Reclaiming the Americas, Tatiana Reinoza argues that decolonizing Latinx artists reclaimed printmaking from its original association with mapmaking and the associated “spatial logics of colonization” linked to charting and space-claiming. In an act of singular scholarly curation, Reinoza identifies four organizing approaches, or “territorialities,” in the work of printmakers in the US Southwest and along both its coasts, to home in on unifying decolonial gestures borne of shared training and to illuminate the value of “Latinx art” as a category of analysis. Reclaiming the Americas is a masterful book, deeply researched and written with clarity, on contemporary printmaking and specifically Latinx printmaking, and it is sure to impact scholars, readers, and teachers of art history as well as American and cultural studies more broadly.

— Leticia Alvarado, Brown University, author of Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production

[A] pioneering book…[Reinoza] offers an interdisciplinary approach to Latinx printmaking from a decolonized perspective that debunks Eurocentric conventions of cartography and geography and reinscribes the art form of printmaking to the peoples of the Americas.

— CHOICE

Images used in print media, as [Reclaiming the Americas] demonstrates, continue to be open to new creative applications, routes of circulation, and trajectories of analysis. . . . While Latinx studies has moved beyond simplistic celebrations of resistance in art and visual culture, we now live in an era in which scholars and artists of previous generations who fail to meet the standards of presentism are susceptible to swift dismissal. The field of Latinx art and visual culture—and Latinx studies more broadly—needs this degree of nuance implemented by Reinoza.

— Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture

A border-crossing and interdisciplinary feat...The book’s greatest strength lies in the author’s recognition that theseworks, although decolonial efforts, are still haunted by the afterlives of coloniality.

— Aztlan